Autopsy of a War

Thomas Thérèse

Description

AUTOPSY OF A WAR intertwines two stories informed by loss and resilience. The first narrative stages an American scholar who intends to spend a sabbatical semester in Nice, France, to work on a novel; the pandemic and the eight-week lockdown of Spring 2020 give her plans an unexpected turn and shape. The second narrative — conducted in the fashion of French writer Georges Perec’s Je me souviens — tells the story of a young French teenager who moves to the United States after her parents and her older brother are killed in a car crash. Both women struggle with the existential and psychological issues raised by their exilic journeys to surrender familiar landmarks and navigate unchartered seas.

Sujets

• Sciences humaines
• Philosophie et théologie
• Sciences humaines et sociales
• Lutte
• Fiction
• Psychologie
• Littérature

Informations

• Publié par: publibook
• Date de parution: 21 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782342350197
• Langue: English

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Couverture
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ISBN numérique : 978-2-34235-018-0

© Publibook, 2021
“Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home,
Wherever that may be?”
Elizabeth Bishop , Questions of Travel.
















For Fran ç oise-Hélène and Augustin-Charles
Prologue
She remembers when her sabbatical in Europe took an abrupt hit and when life on the planet was completely upset, and when death became a daily topic. When the world was turned upside down by a pandemic that hijacked life and turned daily existence into a reality so different from the existence they had all known that it seemed to be anchored in a nightmare rather than their waking reality. Death in the post-humanist world was transformed into the cruel gods of Antiquity, coming under the guise of an invisible yet pervasive agent. A collective ambush. And assault.
It had started far away, but like a tsunami wave. Growing in the wide sea, unseen and unnoticed. Swelling in the comfort of the distance and space. And then the water receded, briefly. Like normalcy taking a last breath. And then the surge of the water came. Crashing, flooding, spreading. Changing and affecting the landscape beyond recognition. Smashing and snatching everything out of its proper place, order and function. Time was squeezed out of its routine, rough and bruising. Even the fast-paced world could no longer keep pace with the new rhythm imposed by the spread of the virus. Life was twisted and thwarted each day, engaged in a relentless struggle with death as new figures and tolls were taxing human resistance and hope.
A collective tragedy in three acts: inaction, reaction and pro-action. At first, testimony and reporting could not dislodge political power and arrogance. Soon enough, however, the tiny virus imposed an ineluctable agenda and an inevitable pedagogy; through its radical but absolute simplicity and its deadly implementation, it would turn the quandaries of the twenty-first century into a mockery. Whither AI and robots when a virus can still wipe out humanity and bring it to a halt within a day? And remind humans that they have bodies, too.
She remembers deciding to keep a journal in an attempt to hold time still. To translate the erratic moments and emotions into the stability of language. And usher them, perhaps, into the shell of words, and the frame of paragraphs. A daily attempt at sanity in an inner world now dominated by fear and panic. Collective and individual. A way to exert agency in the midst of entrapment. An appropriation of the epic facts, an inversion of the formulaic catastrophe.
First, she would revisit the unhappy tidings and then start collecting the fragments of these fated days into a narrative. A story, perhaps, if she is lucky.
She would read the current moment as a parable of the failure of the assumptions encapsulated in the notion of “progress.”
Her diary would be written from the safe vantage point of the third person.
A story carefully poised at the intersection of the single and the generic.
She would conduct the anatomy of the bubble that popped so brutally, with the violence and swiftness and devastating aftermath of a great earthquake. The “big one”, except that it came into the world under an uncanny guise: a pandemic, renamed “war”, a medical riddle and an economic conundrum. This History-old human catastrophe soon took up an apocalyptic turn, catching up with fictional treatments of pandemics so far confined to cinema or literature. Reality, once again, was catching up with fiction. A 9/11 script of a different scale. Twin towers collapsing all over the world. Firemen battling the disaster. Humans de-faced by masks, again.
This time, will the dust ever settle?
She decided to give the main protagonist a name – in an attempt, perhaps, to conjure it out of ignorance, fear or denial.
To unmask it out of its ubiquitous invisibility and ungraspable presence.
To try to establish a truce with it long enough to talk about it, register its move, and record its behavior. And its impact.
A distancing device of sort. Maybe. Time would tell.
To name it so that terror does not paralyze her.
A name so as to remember that under the guise of normalcy something might lurk.
A name as a call to be vigilante. And proceed with care:
Sphingix.
The sphinx of their contemporary twenty-first Thebes.
A War Journal
Month 1 (November)
She lands in Nice, France, from NYC on the first day of the month. The day of the Celebration of All Saints. Tomorrow will be the commemoration of the Dead. But the two holidays are often collapsed into one.
A day of remembrance and anamnesis.
Some omen.
Or not.
Her very first time in France. She feels excited but also apprehensive. Will she feel welcome?
November light, soft and gentle. The taxi ride from the airport on the Promenade holds so many possibilities and promises. A delight even as she feels jetlagged, and disoriented: a flaneur in the margins assessing the lay of a land that will soon become her turf.
Settling in the rented apartment. A sea view. A balcony with plants and cacti.
A felicitous start.
She will meet with her French pen friend Georgette the next day. They have known each other since high school, her extended stay in Nice will be an opportunity to reconnect. Georgette has a sophrology practice.
On the daily news, some early signs of an epochal change. Like some white noise. Or an inconvenient truth that can still be brushed aside. Like early wrinkles on a face that can be felt even if staying away from the mirror deceives the face into thinking that it is still without blemishes. They are relegated to absence, or non-existence, unless they are touched into existence, and presence.
The political drama around the impeachment. The end of some world, an early warning taking place on a side stage.
And reports about caged children and jailed parents at the border.
She careens between disgust and outrage, feeling helpless as she witnesses the demise of a certain ideal of Americanness, and the betrayal of its most cherished principles.
We hold these truths to be self-evident…
… While miles away, the beginning of something is happening.
But the world does not know yet. And the country where it all starts does not either.
Early warnings will go unnoticed or are censored.
The weather gives cause for concern. Torrential storms result in floods, and some deaths, too. In Nice, on November 23, the war siren resonates, ordering people to stay home. Theaters and shops and restaurants are closed. She had tickets for the Met live performance of Akhnaten but stays home to heed the warning. She can hear ambulances going by and heavy drops of water shattering the flowers on the balcony, pounding on the sidewalk.
From her window, she sees the curtain of rain, the flush of water down the sidewalks, the trees swaying and bending. A Dante-like landscape inspiring awe and wonder. She can hardly make out the other buildings across the street. A cocoon of sort, a shelter in place.
Thanksgiving and the holiday season have become ineluctable and unavoidable priorities. No time for a spoiler. Retrospectively, it will appear the relative quiet of the moment that precedes a storm. Like when the water recedes before the wave hits, leaving more space for other things to appear in sight – temporarily. Until they are flushed away and become part of the general chaos.
Thanksgiving in Nice is a quiet affair. On the D-Day, she does Face Time with her sister Ariana who is a single mother, lives and works as psychiatrist in Washington DC; Ariana and her daughter Hannah are the only remaining close relatives she has; her parents both passed away the year before. The idea of the sabbatical abroad was to take a break from home. To keep a safe distance between her and memories. Between her and absence. The gap opened by distance a hopeful bridge between the past and the future, while the present is doing the construction work.
There is still a lot to be thankful for. She has just finished a twenty-one-day online meditation journey. It is about bringing abundance into your life. Devising strategies to train your mind to experience joy that cannot be wiped away, and contentment even in the dire circumstances that life inevitably brings your way. Sooner rather than later.
News back home is dominated by the crisis at the border: children in cages and adults in prison cells. The virus of hatred has infected the American experience.
A weekend in San Remo, Italy, with a fellow expatriate, Michael, her neighbor. He has been in Nice for five years, having traded the cold winters of Minnesota for the warm sun of the Riviera. Retired early from a software business after his wife died of cancer, he has tried to reconstruct his life around the beauty and gentle climate of the Riviera. They decide against taking the highway. They would turn the drive into an exercise in observation and contemplation.
Crossing the border between France and Italy at Menton feels like child play. The road follows the shore, a series of tiny villages welcomes them, and entices them with the promise of luscious food by the sea. San Remo and its graceful trees, its flower beds, its elegant hotels. Their lodging is comfortable enough, a small apartment in the midst of town, tucked away between two tiny streets, church bells pealing in the distance. The market is a feast for the eyes, a noisy and lively crowd pressing against them as they find their way to the beach. They have lunch by the sea, and coffee on comfortable chairs. Elegant waiters take their or