In this collection of five short stories by Hélène Lenoir – which make far from easy reading – there's a short but oddly immensely revealing sentence towards the end of the final story: 'La vie, la vraie, grouille autour de ce qui est tu' ('Real life swarms around the unspoken.') I think my English translation of the sentence is reasonable, although there are several problems here, the first being that although 'unspoken' translates 'tu' (the past participle of the verb taire, meaning to be silent, tu here means more than that: it refers to the intense complications of that swarming real life, not just to the fact that nothing is said. Taire is not just about being silent, it is about witholding information that could disturb, be harmful, hugely disruptive. 'Unspoken' is also a participial adjective, and only very rarely used as a noun: 'the unspoken' (apart from as the name of a game) is rarely used in English, although the French noun 'non-dit' is common. A 'non-dit' usually belongs to that category of words which dangle, swarm around the unspoken, never really said. I'm convinced that there is no proper English translation of 'non-dit', not even as 'the unspoken', and yet this is very often what Hélène Lenoir's work is about.
In the final short story here, 'L'Infidèle (lit. 'The Unfaithful Man') we don't even know that the nameless man is in fact unfaithful to the woman, but she is obsessed with it, seems a little crazy over it, but then many of Lenoir's characters are a little crazy. The man is actually going to Switzerland on a business trip, but moving away from the bed she mumbles 'Retourne voir tes putes' ('Go back to your tarts!'). And she's said it, she's given voice to a non-dit! This is an utterance of seismic proportions, she waits for ages for the effect, an absurd cold blade because to her knowledge he's never used a prostitute, and anyway he makes no reaction. Maybe the sentence was never heard so remains in effect 'non-dit', and the woman's internal monologue debates that this is a good thing, he's not heard the earth-shattering sentence, but on the other hand maybe if he had heard then a cataclysmic row would have been, er, therapeutic, finalising?
There are a number of non-dits in this and the other stories, then: the title story 'L'Entracte', 'Les Étrangères', 'Les Escarpins Rouges', and 'Le Verger' being the others. But also present in most if not all of the stories are preoccupations of the main characters with questions of sex, identity, ideas of flight, but most of all the stifling power of other people, particularly the family (remember Le Magot de Momm). The word L'Entracte (meaning intermission or interval: the man and woman of the eponymous story meet during a classical concert) can be used for all the stories because they happen at a crisis point in a person's life, when the character has to make an important (perhaps vital) life decision. I can fully understand why people love Hélène Lenoir's books, but feel a bit sorry for those who like a quick read, those who are impatient with the (often multiple) internal monologues of her characters.
My Hélène Lenoir posts:
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Hélène Lenoir: Entracte
Hélène Lenoir: Son nom d'avant
Hélène Lenoir: Le Magot de Momm
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