Maleficium

One rarely expects a novella published in the 2000s to read like it was published in the 1890s, but so Martine Desjardins' Maleficium (2009; trans. 2012) does.  By that, I don't mean that the novel is necessarily pastiching late-nineteenth century French or English style, which would be a dangerous judgment call to make in any case about a translation.  But to me, at least, the novel exudes Decadence, of a sort that Joris-Karl Huysmans or Oscar Wilde would immediately recognize: the erotically-charged obsessions with exotic objects, the aestheticization of sin, the subordination of the natural world to human artistry, the omnipresence of yet blasphemies against Catholicism.  The campy, kitschy quality of the novel's "horrors," though, which often tip right over into black comedy, come straight out of the early Gothics of William Beckford and Horace Walpole (seriously, dangerous ear wax?); in many ways, Maleficium descends straight from the so-called "Oriental Tale," which influenced Beckford's Vathek.  

In good Gothic form, Maleficium (an allusion to the Malleus Maleficarum) is a found manuscript, the supposed memoirs of a Catholic priest named Jerome Savoie.  But Savoie has nothing to say in his own voice; instead, he hovers just off the page, recording the confessions of seven men and one woman (and thereby violating the seal of the confessional, which prefigures all the violations to follow).  Here, the magical number seven evokes the Seven Deadly Sins, all of which manifest themselves in each confession.  Although the precise nature of the sin and its punishment changes each time, the confessions--prose dramatic monologues, as it were--fall into virtually identical shapes.  Each time, a Canadian man goes abroad to India, the Middle East, or Africa, searching for some exotic thing (a perfect soap, a rare insect) which he hopes to bring back home in order to achieve fame and fortune.  Each time, the man encounters a young woman, her face disfigured by what appears to be a hare lip, whose allure he finds both irresistible and slightly puzzling.  His brief acquaintance with her always skirts on the edge of or tips over into sexual violation, but a terrible retribution inevitably follows--losing a nose, developing agonizingly sensitive skin, succumbing to permanent vertigo.  And this punishment always destroys, or at least subverts, the man's public, professional life (the doctor's discolored skin puts off patients; the spice dealer loses his sense of smell).  In the final tale, however, the young woman herself appears, representing herself as a would-be Scheherazade whose story-telling, far from preserving her life, has inadvertently replicated itself in the most perverse of ways.

Although I suggested that this novella has some affinities with Decadence, the confessional plots all borrow heavily from Catholic traditions going back to the Middle Ages: miracle tales, implicit or explicit deals with the devil, martyrdom.  The unnamed woman, inaccessible herself until the final tale, is repeatedly associated with the demonic, especially in her perverse crossing of orthodox iconography with outright blasphemy.  In the first tale, for example, she appears as a virgin who repeatedly develops miraculous stigmata and casts the speaker as Doubting Thomas (15), yet she speaks with a "hissing voice" (11) and boasts that she has "'one more stigma'" than Christ (14).  Later, she crops up as a missionary with a pair of glasses purchased in Damascus, but pokes fun at the narrator by twisting the parable of the Prodigal Son ("'Don't tell me you've lost your way again, and are waiting to be found'" [82]).  And as a botanist's assistant obsessed with gardens and roses, she sprouts hair "like a brambly, bushy thicket" (98) that turns out to be a "crown of thorns" (105)--or, as she keeps insisting, "prickles."   Several of the men profess themselves shocked at her outright heretical opinions, yet their sinful natures drive them straight into her clutches.   In a novella that is actually quite short on female characters, she plays the role of woman-the-temptress, and physical contact with her turns out to be figuratively emasculating; the greed for possession that drives all the men concentrates itself on a female body that violently repels the touch it seems to invite.  When the collector of Persian carpets "thrust[s] my fingers  into her curls," he finds that "the shooting pain of a thousand needles stabbed my palms" (105): the penetrating male finds himself agonizingly penetrated in return.  (About the only thing this novel is missing is a vagina dentata.)

And in a sense, the woman's confession is about how men transform femininity into the embodiment of evil.  (It's in some ways analogous to Michele Roberts' novel Impossible Saints, which decomposes the female saint's life into a series of increasingly violent assaults against women's bodies.)  Like Jane Eyre, the young woman finds herself an unwanted orphan, tossed into a household filled entirely with hostile boys and a father who "'can suffer no feminine presence in this house'" (126).  The father's wife, it turns out, has been injustly incarcerated  in an insane asylum; the interchangeable and alphabetically-named sons are startled to find that "'girls cry'" (128).  The young woman, who yearns for books, becomes obsessed with a random geography textbook, and soon discovers that her newfound cousins have never heard of storytelling.  Their home implicitly casts the world of science and fact as masculine, fiction and make-believe as the banished feminine; significantly, the father's forbidden library contains biological specimens, the natural world reduced to mere objects, which the young woman nevertheless responds to in terms of their "form and color" (132).  Enter Scheherezade, weaving stories each night out of her cousins' suggestions and the geography text.  Here, the Biblical analogies both begin to proliferate and to lose their coherence, for this interplay of masculine "fact" and feminine "fiction" produces what this confession casts as a new Fall.  The young woman's exoticizing play with far-off lands suddenly returns in the boys' discovery that they, too, can tell stories--but about the locals, "irremediably blacken[ing] the reputation of honest merchants, generous elders and virtuous mothers" (134).  The joyous pleasures of feminine make-believe give birth to masculine lies.  Although our storyteller takes the blame, where does it actually belong: with the girl's innocent play, or with the boys' perverted use of imagination for power? Her hare lip, which turns out to be inflicted by the father as an "osculum infame," intended to mark her out forever as one who speaks with a "forked tongue" (138), initially marks the victory of man's lies (and the revolting additional punishment that follows establishes the origins of all the sexual overtones in the preceding confessions).  Yet it also suggests that the real Fall of this world predated her arrival: she is brutalized precisely because her storytelling remained in the Edenic domain of pure play, while her revelation of the imagination's infinite possibilities was warped and perverted by men already obsessed with worldly conquest and domination. 

One common narrative of the Fall, then, gives way to another reading, a kind of unfortunate fall after the Fall.  Revising the cousins' narratives, which literalized her own stories, she claims that "[t]hey hunted me down, and each time inflicted new torments upon me" (138).  Her initial violation returns in their attempts to appropriate her very self, to erase her identity as the object of their assaults, and to imagine plots in which "they assume the victim's role" (139).  But this reading seems to be as distorted as those of her cousins--certainly, the confessions we hear cast the young woman as the second coming of Satan, but they also narrate (if only via dramatic irony) the sins that brought them low in the first place.  The difficulty here is that she has hitherto existed solely as the deadly focus of her cousins' tales, and those tales mesh ever-so-nicely with Jerome Savoie's own sinfulness as a "voyeur of the ear" (139).  Interrupting the flow of masculine narratives, but still forced to recite for a masculine author, the young woman cannot escape the fallen world of man's lust; even when speaking, she remains entrapped.  And her image of herself, as a "demon of vengeance, the sum of their calumnies" (139), makes her evil the embodiment of man's fallen storytelling, his lies.  Everyone, including Jerome Savoie, exists in this damned, bitter world, in which the Edenic imagination turns into one more machine of violence.  The only escape, the demon suggests, may be to enter a world where no more stories can be heard (and Savoie, too, comes in for his appropriate punishment).  But Savoie writes down the confessions that were supposed to remain forever silent, a matter between the penitent, the priest, and God, threatening the reader with "the stain of these depraved communications" (x).  Yet weren't we reading the confessions for the "stain," the pleasure in another's evil? And wouldn't we, perhaps, be rather bored if no evil were to be found?