La balance des blancs by Jacques Henric

Abstract

La structure du livre est à la mesure du sujet, puisque le texte, à l’image de ses personnages qui luttent contre l’ouragan, semble profiter du chaos polyphonique qu’il adopte comme contrainte pour entreprendre de dépasser l’éclatement . Le tout résulte en un chant cohérent et fort. La force de ce texte est de faire alterner des paragraphes appartenant aux fils narratifs distincts en maintenant l’intérêt des lecteurs pour chaque histoire sans que le dispositif textuel devienne trop lourd ou trop contraignant. California State University, San Marcos Marion Geiger HENRIC, JACQUES. La balance des blancs. Paris: Seuil, 2011. ISBN 978-2-02-104511-6. Pp. 232. 17 a. This story, resembling in turn a confession, a meditation, an essay, might best be described as an epic of the personal. It opens on 18 June 2007 as its author recovers from an operation he has just undergone. The date is an apt one, because what Jacques Henric offers here is a tale of resistance. In this case the invader is cancer, and more particularly prostate cancer, a disease that poses a special threat to this individual in view of his reputation as a ladies’ man. Henric takes it as an excellent omen that his surgeon should bear the name of one of his most cherished heroes, Casanova; moreover that figure (the Venetian memoirist, not the Parisian doctor) strides through these pages with authority, serving as the patron saint of the narrator’s postoperative progress. Henric sketches that progress in very considerable detail, sending back regular dispatches from the front, as it were. Different readers will react to that narrative strategy in different ways. We may be glad to learn, for example, that “Une demi-érection est de toute évidence un signe encourageant” (41), or we may feel that we have been given a bit too much information. When with admirable tact Dr. Casanova advises him that he will need a very patient, resourceful partner in order to return to full sexual activity, Henric coyly lets it be known that his life companion is Catherine Millet. Visibly relieved, his doctor predicts a quick and entire recovery. Indeed Henric muses at one point that a close rereading of La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. might itself suffice to set him back on the path to potency. Lest it be imagined that the narrator restricts himself to the domain of the crudely physical, it should be noted that Henric spends a great deal of time fretting about the image of himself that he has constructed over the years, “ma glorieuse image de porte-phallus” (88), and what is to become of it. Whether it engages the concrete or the abstract however, the fundamental rule of this narration is a simple one, and easily articulated: “Le totem Phallus toujours à la fête!” (157). Perhaps Henric eventually senses that his reader has become tired of such a feast, or perhaps he has found his own attention wandering; in any case his reflections occasionally do turn to other things, and in those moments his tale is of more general interest. He invokes Tintoretto painting Susanna and the Elders, for instance, and attempts to articulate the artist’s thoughts, as well as those of Giulietta, his model and mistress, and even those of Susanna herself. Ranging more broadly and calling upon literary figures from Dante to Cervantes to Montaigne, Pascal, Hölderlin, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, Pessoa, Guyotat, 988 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 and Sollers, and upon philosophers like Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Marx, Henric reveals himself as a creature of the book. It becomes gradually clear, too, that his real obsession is the approach of old age and death. He broods over poets’ duels, literary suicides, the assassinations of writers, political violence, and the execution of traitors, or of people unjustly accused of treason. He dreams of the Orient and of Africa—most especially of Africa, “le continent noir de la sexualité féminine” (208). There, Henric’s encounter with a young woman named Lisa will facilitate his convalescence in ways that he might not have predicted. As he photographs her again and again, the blackness of her skin calls into...