13474: Corbett: Review of Jacques Alexis' IN THE FLICKER OF AN EYELID

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

>From Bob Corbett:  This review may be found in a much nicer format on my
web site at:

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/alexis-flicker.html

But, here is the review in a more straight text format:

----------------

IN THE FLICKER OF AN EYELID
By Jacques Stephen Alexis
(translated from the French: LESPACE DUN CILLEMENT by Edwidge Danticat and
Carrol F. Coates)
227 pages
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002 (originally published
in 1959).
ISBN # 0-8139-2138-4.


Two sets of comments of Bob Corbett
October 2002


[I have divided my comments into two separate parts. When I arrived at the
end of the novel I noted a relatively long section of commentary with a
1983 letter from Alexis daughter, Florence, and further commentary by
Edwidge Danticat and Carrol Coates.

I like to write my comments from the text itself, believing strongly that
any literary work should stand on its own; the text alone. This doesnt
mean that I dont read the commentaries of other and learn from them, I do.
But in my first encounter with a piece of literature I prefer to clarify
my own thoughts about it and only after than to engage critics who may
teach me more, disappoint me, or help me to confirm my own reading.

Thus I wrote the first set of comments below after I finished the novel,
but before I read the material from Florence Alexis and Danticat and
Coates.

After finishing this first set of comments I went back to the book and
read what these others had written about the novel, and then I wrote a
second set of comments engaging their views.]

FIRST SET OF COMMENTS: BASED ON READING ALEXIS TEXT ITSELF.

This is an intensely erotic love story of two Cubans living in Haiti; a
prostitute who believes her life is hopeless and without the possibility
of change, and a macho labor organizer / mechanic who has a sensibility
toward his lover that is rare and enlightened. The story gripped me and
moved me deeply yet left me both sad and exhilarated. It is not the
typical happily-ever-aftering love story of boy gets girl after a
struggle. But it is a story of profoundly deep love, astonishing passion
and a challenging sense of the importance of individual development taking
precedence over the love of the couple.

The story seems to be much more as well  the love story being obviously an
allegory of other things, though I was never quite as sure as to what the
allegorical tale was. Its there, and bits and pieces shine through, yet
the allegory seems to me overshadowed by the love story itself.

Even as much as the story, I loved the writing. It is creative and
brilliant. There are 7 chapters. Each of the first five chapters
approaches the lovers from the perspective of a single sense. The sixth
chapter is called the sixth sense, but I found that title a bit ambiguous
since it didnt mean sixth sense in any sense I tend to know. The final
chapter is a short coda.

In chapter one  sight, the opening paragraphs has the main character,
Cuban prostitute La Nina in bed with a marine having animalistic sex.
Images of a pig rooting around in the ground, a horse mounting a mare. I
was reminded of a scene in the movie Klute in which Jane Fonda plays a
prostitute and has her trick on top of her and she is moaning in passion,
but looking at her watch behind his back. In Klute the scene is played for
laughs, though cynical laughs. Alexis on the other hand writes this scene
with images that simply disgust us. After she dismisses the marine she
wanders out in from of her bordello, The Sensation Bar, contemplating how
to get out of her profession, disgusted with herself and her life.

Across the street there is a man watching her, just staring, walking up
and down. She feels his eyes, and feels a magnetism she doesnt quite
understand. The same is true for El Caucho (the rubber man), the other
main character. He is not staring at her magnificent face and body, but
her feet and neck. But he is drawn in a way he cant understand.

Eventually he sits at the bar and she is a table talking with marines, her
back to him. He only watches her in the mirror. She knows his eyes are on
her. He cant stop watching her and when the mirror fails him he even holds
up his glass to see her in its reflection. The writing is amazingly
sensual. No one word passes between the two yet a strong erotic attraction
even magnetism has occurred. But this is not in the sense of love at first
sight as it tends to appear in fiction which is visually rooted in lust.
El Caucho is not particularly handsome in the least, and what draws him to
La Nina is not her magnificent beauty which draws him. Something much
different is going on  a deep attraction of souls, as though reaching out
beyond the two of them from depths which we can only imagine.

The power of Alexis writing carries on in the second chapter smell. Alexi
sets up a set of opposites. La Nina is a manic-depressive and the
experience of sight has left her in a manic state. He on the other hand is
in an unusual low. His friend and revolutionary, Jesus Menendez has been
assassinated in Cuba. El Caucho is slumped at the bar in near despair. He
is unconscious of the world of Haiti, but La Nina has slipped up behind
him, standing silently by she smells him. She thinks him to be a gourmand
from his food smells including the pungent peppery smell of the sesame
that spices the little cassava cakes you dunk in the sweet, boiling-hot
coffee in the early morning. She identifies him as a Cuban by his tobacco,
a mechanic by the oil and sweat that drift from his body. She knows hes
adapted to Haiti from the odor of the rum hes now sipping, differing from
other rum by its rainbow-hued bubbles  subtle, sensuous, radiant,
memorable. Yet hints of last nights kleren (rot-gut rum) waffed up from
him and she knows him to be a man of the people. The smell of his hair
identifies him as many who travels  an aroma of far away lands, perhaps
even Venezuela.

El Caucho, even in his despair, or perhaps because of it  becomes aware of
the smells around him in The Sensation Bar. The general smell is
disgusting to him  the smell of stale semen and the reek of prostitution
itself. Yet a strange relaxing odor emanates through from El Nina herself,
an odor that inspires peace and sylvan images.

Again, as reader I was left trembling with the erotic power of this
situation. Nearly every page of the more than 100 pages of these two
chapters are about these two and their attraction, yet they have not
exchanged a word or touched, just seen and smelled. The power of Alexis
prose is mesmerizing. I tried to imagine turning this novel into a film,
and this chapter on smell seemed to me the one that would be hardest. Oh
yes, the characters could talk of the smells in some sort of inner
dialogue, just as Alexis has written of it, but somehow he makes me smell
the smells themselves.

El Nina is deeply troubled. Her own image is that She's only a whore, a
girl who, with her vagina, earns the money she needs to continue her
vegetative life during her old age. But everything is disrupted. She is
troubled by El Caucho, wishing to be El Nina in a literal sense  an
innocent child, not understanding why she cares about him. She figures she
can exorcise him by taking him to bed and exhausting the two of them in
sex. She will do this without money changing hands, and she will be free
of this troubling and never before experienced connection and care.

She goes to the bar, approaches him, prepared to ask him to make love to
her, but she is stunned by smelling the odor of her man. She is utterly
confused and distraught, and races away. He is equally stunned that he
smells her clearly as something beyond the whole and smells her innocence.
La Nina takes refuge in the room of La Rubia, a bi-sexual woman who tries
to comfort her sexually. But La Nina has never had an orgasm or even
sexual arousal with any man or woman and is terrified by El Caucho since
she begins to sense arousal.

The single sense onslaught continues in sound, with each having a single
cry to utter. She: Down with the Jwif. He: The repeated cry : Let me
through. It is Holy Week of 1948 in the red light district of
Port-au-Prince and the Jwif (the Jew) is a papier-mch figure. It is there
to be beaten and La Nina leads the cry of Down with the Jwif. The total
frustration and rejection of all things negative were in La Ninas cry.
While it was bitter, a rejection of evils, her voice was also a sob, a
pained humanity. El Caucho, on the other hand, is pushing his way toward
the bar of The Sensation crying Let me through repeatedly. He is finally
given a rum and coke. She recognizes in his voice his power, Cubanness,
command of Creole accent; his general mastery. Further, a hint of
recognition begins to built, his calling out, his rolled r reveals him as
from Oriente in Cuba, her own birth place.

El Caucho is a mechanic, but only for necessary money to live. He is a
revolutionary and labor organizer. His aim is to be part of the revolution
he sees sweeping the Caribbean creating, eventually, a unified Caribbean
under Cuban leadership. He is strong, tough and self assured, yet
frightened as to whats happening between him and La Nina since he cant
imagine being burdened by love.

La Ninas problems are more debilitating to any love affair. Alexis tells
us:

	Up to now she has lived by one basic principle, by the pre-conceived idea
	that her entire life world proceed in linear fashion according to a scheme
	established by some crazy god. She has seen her life from the exterior,
	proceeding in a straight line, and she has defined it as nothing more than
	the norms of the pleasure profession or the collective image of all the
	little Caribbean whores: a difficult apprenticeship, admission to a
	seraglio, the struggle for notoriety and glory, the days of fame, and then
	the slow decline until finally, according to whatever the individual has
	managed to put aside, the final days in the gutter, the role of the
	procuress, or a sad and nostalgic little retirement. In the harshness of
	facts, that is so, but seen from an individual perspective, is life the
	same thing for each woman?

La Nina tends to think this is so, yet her senses have overwhelmed her in
regard to El Caucho and she realizes that only if her real self --
Eglantina Corvarrubias from Oriente in Cuba can manage to kill La Nina,
can she ever love and have a life of home and joy.

Finally in touch they express their love. Again the writing is sensuous
and erotic, yet less sexually explicit in the chapter on touch than on the
other senses. In a slow moving chapter they:

they dance
they lay in bed fondling for hours.
they remember vaguely their mutual time in Oriente in youth.
they make love and she finally climaxes, and does so over and over and
over.

In the short chapter of the sixth sense they stay in bed making love the
entire day, and the full recollection is realized that they knew each
other as children in Oriente. All the while, that entire day of Good
Friday she wonders: Can Eglantina kill La Nina? She finally accepts their
love and agrees to leave with him after his work.

------------------------
CAUTION: SPOILER FOLLOWS:

If you are likely to read this book anytime soon, then dont read the next
section. I will mark the end of the spoiler, but critical plot information
comes here that shouldnt be known if you are to read the novel itself. The
rest of the review follows this short section.

After agreeing to leave with her, her prostitute friend La Rubia commits
suicide out of the hopelessness of her situation and La Nina realizes that
as good, loving, gentle, kind and caring as El Caucho is, she cannot just
melt into his life, allowing herself to leave her prostitution and enter
into his protective care. She must first become her own person. She must,
on her own kill La Nina and emerge as who she was at 12 before she entered
into prostitution, creating La Nina. She must emerge as Eglantina
Corvarrubias. She goes off to do so, knowing that when and if she can do
this, she will return to find Ralph Gutierrez (El Caucho), and settle into
this joyous love of her life. Then this novel ends!

Looking ahead to a critical section, but necessary to treat this here in
the spoiler section, I was just astonished at what a contemporary feminist
novel this is. After detailing the traditional path of woman, in the image
of the prostitute, La Nina comes to realize that only by emerging as her
own woman, first having created and defined herself as a person, can she
enter into an equal, and thus truly loving relationship with this good
man. I was quite surprised to discover that in the critical commentary of
others this theme is simply ignored. I think it may be the most important
message of the whole novel.

END OF THE SPOILER.

==========================

As I mentioned earlier, the love story dominates the novel. However, it is
fairly clear from the character of El Caucho, that more is going on. In
some vague way there is a parallel of the love story between La Nina and
El Caucho  created characters of the real persons of Eglantina
Corvarrubias and Ralph Gutierrez. He is about politics and the creation of
the real Caribbean in place of the prostitute one which currently exists.
Ralph is constantly thinking of Cuba and the Caribbean and the political
movements afoot. Yet it was never terribly clear to me just how this
parallelism worked, or, more critically, why he would sully such an
incredible and deeply moving love story with such an ambiguous allegory.

SECOND SET OF COMMENTS: AFTER READING THE AFTERWORDS BY ALEXIS DAUGHTER
(1983) AND THE COMMENTS OF EDWIDGE DANTICAT AND CARROL COATES.
There is much rich information in the touching (if a bit pretentious)
letter that Florence Alexis writes to her fathers memory in 1983. We do
learn there that this was the first volume of an intended four volume
work, in which the union of the two main characters would be further
explored. It is ambiguous from her letter, however, as to whether or not
an unpublished manuscript left by Alexis was a completed novel or just
excerpts.

However, I was disappointed in the letter since it focused almost
exclusively on the larger issue of the (alleged) allegorical nature of the
novel and focuses on the larger Caribbean issues. I had just finished
reading one of the most sensuous and erotic novels of my whole life and am
treated then to a political treatise which, while not at all unbelievable
as Alexis intention, was clearly secondary to what was given to the
reader. Relatively little was commented up concerning the power of that
one-to-one love story.

I suspect that for Florence Alexis as well as Danticat and Coates (who
echo this in the background information of the last section since it is
nearly 100% about the politics of the time), that somehow they value a
political treatise as more important that a mere love story. I guess I
tend to find the complexity of the two-person human love relationship to
be one of the most critically important features of human existence, and
when I am treated (as I was) in this novel to a brilliantly conceived and
breathtakingly executed story of mysterious and powerful love, I was taken
aback to see that incredible story nearly ignored.

The allegory is there. No doubt. But the focus of this novel is the
personal love story of two people. The power of the writing is not in its
allegorical content, but in the tension and eroticism of the growing love;
in the desperation of La Nina to overcome her status as a prostitute and
self-hating woman and feel worthy and hopeful to bring this love to
long-term fruition. I trembled and lost my breath several times over the
power of that story, and noted, with a bit of boredom if not impatience,
the somewhat heavy handed pointers to some sort of political allegory. The
passion of the writing on that love affair is as powerful as any love
story Ive ever read.

Danticat and Coates provide a beautiful English reading copy of this
story. Since I dont read French I cant comment on the accuracy of it, but
I would think that Jacques Alexis would be proud of the loving, erotic,
flowing and power language into which they have rendered his work.

Bob Corbett corbetre@webster.edu