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Authors: Jean-Pierre Martinet
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He died on January 18, 1993, at his mother's home at the age of forty-nine, hemiplegic. Apart from his friends, the literary world received news of his death with seeming indifference; no articles appeared. Silence to the end.
The High Life , like its protagonist, is a distinctly diminutive entry in Martinet's oeuvre; yet it is also his most perfect work, and one of the finest literary depictions to be found of the figure of the sympathetic monster. First published in the May 1979 issue of Subjectif (the last of three stories he would contribute to the respected journal), alongside translations of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski, The High Life now figures in his bibliography as a stand-alone work. The grotesque tragedy of Adolphe Marlaud is the tale of a would-be Bartleby, a marginal character making his way among the residue of an ugly chapter in French history. His fate is in a sense formulated by the story's language as much as by the history laying over it, and the narrative structures itself upon the unspoken implications of his own name, and the horrors he hears echoed in that of rue Froidevaux on which he lives. (Literally, the street name offers something of a "cold value," but "vaux" evokes "veaux" [calves or veal] and visions of a slaughterhouse for our protagonist.) The history Paris has incorporated into its streets and monuments, and the statues and squares of such figures as Ludovic Trarieux or Georges Lamarque that surround Marlaud's stifling delimited world, only drive him more firmly and blindly inward.
The historical trauma behind the story of Adolphe Marlaud is very French, very shameful, and a scar on the collective psyche. Marlaud's despair, his self-adopted philosophy of doing as little as possible in order to suffer as little as possible, the cold comfort he takes in a metaphysical void, his tragic brush with a grotesque form of humanity in the guise of an obese concierge, and finally, his unsettling attempt to ignore all of it—all this, however, is uncomfortably universal.
The street addresses literature has bequeathed to us are few: Leopold Bloom's residence at 7 Eccles Street, or Sherlock Holmes's more widely known study at 221B Baker Street . Even the most casual reader knows the street number of Holmes's residence— that unofficial front door to the mystery story—and can identify it as the ground zero of ratiocination. The High Life is not London's Baker Street, however; and ratiocination is a quality that finds but a disturbed and distorted home in Martinet's somber, desperate vision. This is 47 rue Froidevaux, in Paris: where the twentieth century came to die.
Notes
1 I draw most of my information on Martinet from the introductions and afterwards to the republications of his works by Alfred Eibel, Raphael Sorin, Eric Dussert, and Julia Curie], as well as the recently published second issue of Caphamaihn from Editions Finitude, which is devoted to Martinet's correspondence with Eibel.
2 The French edition of The High Life was brought back into print by the estimable Editions de l'Arbre Vengeur in 2006; the equally estimable Editions Finitude has recently republished Martinet's first two hefty novels, and a slim pairing of two other short stories. See "Works by Martinet" in this volume.
3 Citations are from pages 191,144, and 224, respectively, of Editions Finitude's 2010 reissue of the novel.
4 Eibel provides valuable background to Martinet's life and work in an interview with Florent Georgesco in La Revue litteraire no. 36 (autumn 2008).
AND MADAME C. THEN TURNED TO ME, SHE TOLD ME SHE WAS AFRAID OF SUFFOCATING TO DEATH HERE, IN THIS TINY LODGE, WHERE SHE BARELY HAD ROOM TO BREATHE, AMONG HER GREEN PLANTS AND COLOR PHOTOS OF LUIS MARIANO, SHE COULD NO LONGER GET PAST THE THIRD FLOOR WHEN SHE BROUGHT UP THE MAIL NOW, SHE FELT LIKE SHE WAS DESCENDING INTO THE CELLAR, BEING ATTACKED BY RATS, WADING ABOUT IN THE HUMIDITY, PROBABLY MY HEART, SHE REPEATED TO ME SADLY, PASSING
The High Life , like its protagonist, is a distinctly diminutive entry in Martinet's oeuvre; yet it is also his most perfect work, and one of the finest literary depictions to be found of the figure of the sympathetic monster. First published in the May 1979 issue of Subjectif (the last of three stories he would contribute to the respected journal), alongside translations of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski, The High Life now figures in his bibliography as a stand-alone work. The grotesque tragedy of Adolphe Marlaud is the tale of a would-be Bartleby, a marginal character making his way among the residue of an ugly chapter in French history. His fate is in a sense formulated by the story's language as much as by the history laying over it, and the narrative structures itself upon the unspoken implications of his own name, and the horrors he hears echoed in that of rue Froidevaux on which he lives. (Literally, the street name offers something of a "cold value," but "vaux" evokes "veaux" [calves or veal] and visions of a slaughterhouse for our protagonist.) The history Paris has incorporated into its streets and monuments, and the statues and squares of such figures as Ludovic Trarieux or Georges Lamarque that surround Marlaud's stifling delimited world, only drive him more firmly and blindly inward.
The historical trauma behind the story of Adolphe Marlaud is very French, very shameful, and a scar on the collective psyche. Marlaud's despair, his self-adopted philosophy of doing as little as possible in order to suffer as little as possible, the cold comfort he takes in a metaphysical void, his tragic brush with a grotesque form of humanity in the guise of an obese concierge, and finally, his unsettling attempt to ignore all of it—all this, however, is uncomfortably universal.
The street addresses literature has bequeathed to us are few: Leopold Bloom's residence at 7 Eccles Street, or Sherlock Holmes's more widely known study at 221B Baker Street . Even the most casual reader knows the street number of Holmes's residence— that unofficial front door to the mystery story—and can identify it as the ground zero of ratiocination. The High Life is not London's Baker Street, however; and ratiocination is a quality that finds but a disturbed and distorted home in Martinet's somber, desperate vision. This is 47 rue Froidevaux, in Paris: where the twentieth century came to die.
Notes
1 I draw most of my information on Martinet from the introductions and afterwards to the republications of his works by Alfred Eibel, Raphael Sorin, Eric Dussert, and Julia Curie], as well as the recently published second issue of Caphamaihn from Editions Finitude, which is devoted to Martinet's correspondence with Eibel.
2 The French edition of The High Life was brought back into print by the estimable Editions de l'Arbre Vengeur in 2006; the equally estimable Editions Finitude has recently republished Martinet's first two hefty novels, and a slim pairing of two other short stories. See "Works by Martinet" in this volume.
3 Citations are from pages 191,144, and 224, respectively, of Editions Finitude's 2010 reissue of the novel.
4 Eibel provides valuable background to Martinet's life and work in an interview with Florent Georgesco in La Revue litteraire no. 36 (autumn 2008).
AND MADAME C. THEN TURNED TO ME, SHE TOLD ME SHE WAS AFRAID OF SUFFOCATING TO DEATH HERE, IN THIS TINY LODGE, WHERE SHE BARELY HAD ROOM TO BREATHE, AMONG HER GREEN PLANTS AND COLOR PHOTOS OF LUIS MARIANO, SHE COULD NO LONGER GET PAST THE THIRD FLOOR WHEN SHE BROUGHT UP THE MAIL NOW, SHE FELT LIKE SHE WAS DESCENDING INTO THE CELLAR, BEING ATTACKED BY RATS, WADING ABOUT IN THE HUMIDITY, PROBABLY MY HEART, SHE REPEATED TO ME SADLY, PASSING
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