Novel Extracts

Abstract

Novel Extracts Peter Whitehead Nora and ... (1990)1 Nora and ... was Whitehead's first published novel. It is a Paris-set narrative that unfolds against the backdrop of the 1968 student riots. Within this violent and libidinal context, the repressed research scientist Raymond Faulkner meets the feline and impassioned ex-student Nora, who we learn is working to complete one of her father's psychoanalytic case studies. Much of the novel circulates around the textual and sexual dynamics generated by this archive project. However, Whitehead also places emphasis on the practice and ritual of protest. In particular, as is reflected in the following extracts, he often returns to and develops upon imagery initially explored in Benefit of the Doubt. From Chapter 1 It wasn't easy to reach even the Boulevard St. Michel, but finally he found a small side-street he could slip through, and was quite startled to find himself close behind a group of students hastily building a barricade. A couple of cars had been thrust together and were being covered with splintered advertising material, torn from nearby walls and a Tabac kiosk. He recognised a fragment of the life-size poster for Les Folies-Bergère. It was strange to see the pink stockings and white frilly knickers kicking up over the bonnet of a Renault Quatre, as if the luscious creature was enjoying a quick bang before things got worse. Two students nearby were frantically using scaffold poles to dig near the trees, loosening the cobblestones. Why had he not expected the confrontation to be so passionate? He was astonished he'd so successfully blocked the images from his mind, preferring the easy way out, to think the [End Page 871] French were as usual blowing something up out of all proportion. He was clearly quite immune to such images, to imagining such violent anarchy actually on the streets. Not now, here, today, Paris, 1968. Where had all this energy come from so suddenly? He reached the main Boulevard in time to see another phalanx of police advancing up the street behind riot shields, and he nervously slipped into a doorway to hide and keep out of trouble. Further down the street were rows of armoured police cars looking like tanks behind the advancing police. A wave of students stormed down the main boulevard towards them, throwing what ever they could lay their hands on. The police advanced steadily and the students were forced back, but this clearly didn't matter to them—gaining ground was irrelevant—it was the ecstasy of the thrusting and screaming and hurling that mattered and after every retreat they thrust forward again, until more students came sweeping down the street from behind as if from nowhere and Raymond couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the pitched battle between the uniformed police and the scruffy people's army of students. But he felt nauseated suddenly, when something seemed to click in his mind and he was able to stop looking, and see, to know that the blows were real blows, and the staggering students were really being brutally beaten. He looked round, deciding he must escape, and saw he was hiding near an emergency exit door of the Luxembourg Cinema. He couldn't understand why the cinema seemed to be still open. He didn't know the violence had only spilled over from the university precincts into the neighbouring streets earlier that evening. He crept round towards the foyer and was amazed to see the woman in the ticket-booth calmly looking out from behind her window, knitting. Maybe she had left her glasses at home. He wondered what she must be thinking—obviously it was a film about one of those wars that people never stopped making films about. He asked her what film was showing, to make conversation. Apart from being over eighty and clearly almost blind, she was definitely confused: "A nouvelle-vague film. La Benéfice du Doute!" When he asked for more details, she said it was a play by Wilhelm Shakerspierre about the Vietnam war. Curious to learn more about the Bard's remarkable, hitherto undocumented divinatory powers, Raymond looked for a...