... having been breathed out

Wednesday again! How the weeks go by.

In the spirit of actually finishing some things and reducing my number of active projects, I did finish three books this week. Unfortunately two of those I also started this week, so my running total is only reduced by one. But I'm working on it!

I'm very glad I returned to Constance Backhouse's Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada 1900-1950, because despite the late date of the main incident under discussion (1946), the chapter on Viola Desmond's challenge to racial segregation in a Nova Scotia movie theatre ended up being both fascinating and also useful for my research purposes (I excerpted this chapter heavily: anyone interested can see these three entries.) Because Backhouse went back far enough to discuss Desmond's family of origin, there was actually quite a bit of era-appropriate discussion, and some notes specifically on cultural attitudes toward white/Black intermarriage, which is relevant.

This chapter is one more data point in the picture of early-20th-century Canadian racism as operating on a polite and unofficial, but very much present, register, which is of a piece with (for example) the practices of the WWI-era Canadian military toward non-white men who wanted to enlist: while never officially banned from service, they were generally politely turned away by individual recruiting officers. This premium on politeness was (and is) sometimes taken to bizarre extents, like the newspaper commentary on the 1930 Oakville, Ontario Ku Klux Klan raid on the home of mixed-race couple Ira Johnson and Isabel Jones, in which newspaper commentators congratulated the 75 masked and hooded Klansmen for their lack of violence, and opined that if the US Klan conducted itself as politely as the Canadian Klan, there would be no moral problem with the organization. Similarly, many observers in 1946 seemed to have felt that Viola Desmond was the one acting out of turn by rudely pointing out that she'd been treated in a discriminatory manner by the Roseland Theatre. Parallels to modern "cultures of niceness" in organizations and movements are easy to draw.

Switching gears: I had a couple of short works that were about to be forcibly returned to the library, so I took a few of days to read each one. Shortly after starting Anne Serre's The Governesses (trans. Mark Hutchinson), I described it to greywash as "possibly the French-est thing I've ever read": by which I meant, I suppose, extremely mannered, stylish, sexual, and surreal. If you have ever watched Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad and thought to yourself, "If only this film could be rendered in book form, but starring three sexually voracious governesses walking the grounds hand-in-hand in yellow dresses, collectively seducing strangers at the gates and planning parties that never happen, surrounded by a horde of small boys perpetually rolling hoops along the gravel paths—and also, if the execution could be WAY more heterosexual than that summary makes it sound," then you, my friend, are in luck. My tone gives the impression that I didn't like this novel, which isn't true; I did enjoy it, but it's very much The Thing That It Is, to an extent that I sometimes found pretty amusing. I think by and large, either you're going to want to read a chilly, sexually-explicit modern French fairy tale or you're not; but here's a taste of Serre's neat surrealism for those who may be undecided:

The festivities always begin in the same fashion. For the first few evenings, the governesses shut themselves up in their rooms, where they have fits of the vapors and palpitations and break out in hives. On one occasion—though only once, it's true—their fainting fits occurred in the hallway and on the stairs. Monsieur Austeur came rushing over, then went to fetch smelling salts, while his wife Julie stood there, clutching her pale arms at the sight of the governesses stretched out lifeless at her feet. Generally speaking, however, things pass off more smoothly. The governesses blush and flutter their eyelashes at dinner, overturn a soup tureen, burst into tears, and run up to their rooms. At this point Madame Austeur starts humming a sentimental air and darting knowing glances at Monsieur Austeur. "It's high time they were married, high time they were married," croons Monsieur Austeur, wickedly. And the two spouses exchange smiles like model parents over their daughters' first flushes of adolescence.

But let's follow the governesses more closely. After all, they're not sixteen anymore. And they don't dream much as a rule. So what's all this playacting about?

What, indeed? What indeed.

I had a hard time categorizing the other book whose library return date was coming up: Han Kang's The White Book (trans. Deborah Smith). I read her Man Booker-winning The Vegetarian a few years back, and it provoked in me a strong and pretty critical reaction, but it was definitely striking enough that I was interested to hear she was coming out with something new. Compared to The Vegetarian, The White Book is less novel and more a sort of memoir-poetry hybrid. It follows the motif of white (in Korean culture, the color of both funerals and weddings, as well, crucially, as swaddling clothes) through a series of short autobiographical scenes that mull over the death of Han's older sister at the age of only two hours, as well as the emotional and existential ramifications of that death for Han's own life. Staying for some time in a city implied to be Warsaw, she imagines an alternate reality in which her sister, and not herself, is wandering the snowy streets, observing the progressive whitening of the city. These semi-imaginary wanderings branch out into other meditations on whiteness, death, and life.

Han's prose is beautiful, understated and meditative, and the effect of the repeated white/death motif, approached from many different angles, is similar to rubbing a smooth stone in one's pocket. Any resolution is reached via a being-with, rather than a going-through, the issues posed; and that's reflected in the structure as well as the content.

I excerpted three short scenes here, and a slightly longer chapterlet here (I hid this second one from people's reading pages because of the content warnings at the top of the page; do note them), but this book is extremely excerptible, so here's another little pairing:

White bone

She was once X-rayed to try to determine the cause of the pain that afflicted her. The skeleton in the Roentgen ray, gray-white bones in a gunmetal sea. It startled her to see it like that: something with the solid materiality of stone, steadfast inside the human body.

A long time before that, around puberty, she had become fascinated by the names of the various bones. Anklebone and knee bone. Collarbone and rib. Breastbone and clavicle, another name for the collarbone. That human beings are also constructed of something other than flesh and muscle seemed to her like a strange stroke of luck.


Sand

And she frequently forgot,
That her body (all our bodies) is a house of sand.
That it had shattered and is shattering still.
Slipping stubbornly through fingers.