On a Sentence from "Speak / Stop"
Noémi Lefebvre starts by setting out her menu, and it’s a hearty one. Although it is less than obvious where we should start, which element is meant as the main course, and what will round it off as our coffee and dessert. She opens:
“—You can’t address us in just any tone
—You have to choose the right tone
—Your tone isn’t always the toniest
—Nor in the best taste, either
—We’re quite familiar with the customs in wealthy circles where there’s a fine line when it comes to good taste
—For we like the arts and we do have taste
—At least a kind of taste
—We have taste but aren’t so sure of it
—We aren’t at that level of ease that allows easy circulation among easier circles”
The key terms of her argument are all here: tone, taste, ease and class. They chime and half-rhyme; we can be in no doubt that they’re a family of flashpoints. And from this straight-shooting opening, cards on the table, Lefebvre allows her conversation to circle outwards, to gain depth and diversion, meanders and layers. We follow her through: Proust, the social-climbers of his salons, the social anxieties of his readers and those who can’t admit they aren’t his readers. Through distinctions of tone in conversation: the fine, the decent, the borderline, the in-decent, and the odious. Through cultivation-signalling by means of accumulation and flaunting of tools, the more specific the better: expensive cars, tomato-slicers, fish plates, snail tongs, sugar tongs, and that very familiar contemporary device of brand-dropping, which has so outstripped human name-dropping in our times. From here, we follow Lefebvre all the way out to country life versus urban affluence, the naturalness of wilderness versus the sediment of culture, shored up by all the tools made only for particular tasks and the gradations of tone made specifically for indicating precisely which class your inferiors belong to.
Lefebvre’s approach to this circling out is precise. It is pursued through line after line of voice responding to voice, each picking up the statement of the last and developing it through one further step. As a conversation between peers and ostensibly addressed to or about someone else who is present and not quite a peer, the dialogue is at pains to sound laconic, even incidental, but is actually shot through with anxieties, the speakers constantly seeking approval and reassurance. As Lefebvre writes in Stop, “Speak is really the occasion of an antistrategy, involving not only writing in the field but also paying attention to cowslips in the garden . . . A cowslip . . . has a power we might call the insolence of silence or the unsettling vision. What would happen if we were to stop over some lousy flower? Should we be letting all our institutions go hang?”
For me, this is one of the hearts of the matter. I understand her antistrategy to be one of style, and so a producer of her book’s taste, by which I mean, ultimately, how it feels in your mouth. Rather than only write ‘in the field’, thus risking pontification or lecturing her readers, or instead only achieving old-fashioned description, Lefebvre also pursues her ideas through this process of constant questioning and constant reframing. Shorn of person and relationship markers, her voices exist to demand more, to worry at, to refine, to reject, to review, to circle out from and return to all the questions they are driven to ask. Each line is also, though, one more attempt to pause and look at a flower. And, mostly without end punctuation, each hangs in the air, only to be overlaid, though not overwritten, to be complemented by the next. The result is a cascade of views, of slightly varied angles on a flower, or, if you prefer to visualize it the other way up, it’s a step well of social tensions and assertions.
The word “taste” appears ten times in the first three pages of Speak, but then only thrice afterwards and much later on, in Stop. My contention is that Lefebvre’s essay in taste needs this well-flagged launching into the ocean of her ideas but once off the rollers, doesn’t require the explicit reference back to them. Rather, she delves deeper into her favored choppy waters.
How, for example, does her tentative debate on morbidity and cuteness strike you? “We’re haunted by dark memories . . . We live in fear of our pathologies . . . We dread hospitalization,” but these shared deep fears resolve into admissions of weeping over petty arguments, over dying fish and cute chicks. The very human and profound fear of death and sense of its omnipresence are undermined by our soft spot for everything weak or infantile. Wouldn’t it have been in better taste to take the debate in the other direction, exploring our propensity to value cuteness and then widening it out to sit within our shared fear of death? But Lefebvre’s speakers take the distasteful route, the one that touches on, then shies from the big questions, to take refuge in the cute cushions of bourgeois living.
In a similar pattern, the speakers raise the problem of war in conflict zones around the world, in Yemen and the DRC, and admit their sense of culpability – only to frame that guilt in the shape of an alexandrine. This, the classical meter of French epic poetry – to quote the voices, ‘is ridiculous – and we know it’ – but this acknowledgment doesn’t undo the effect of touching on but then shying away from the big, challenging questions and responsibilities of our times. The alexandrine at just this juncture is in very poor taste indeed.
Speak does have, I should say, a setting, if nothing to add up really to a plot. The scene is of speakers brought together over the division of property in an inherited house. They are making an inventory of its contents and working out who will inherit what. They might be siblings or cousins, some horizontal relationship of this sort. It’s exactly the kind of banal but unavoidable requirement in life that forces a focus on the minutiae, the details, the accessories we accumulate, while also amplifying the beat of the drum beneath it all, asking what it’s all about, really. Our speakers get very hung up on the silver spoons, and especially the teaspoons, for the silver dining set is both class and wealth wrapped up in one, but it’s also embarrassingly trifling. They can’t help arguing over them but then each trying to walk away, bad taste in mouth, wishing they weren’t debating the import of teaspoons, seriously.
The good and bad taste of the teaspoons, their elegance, utility and solid noble metal along with the ugliness of wanting and arguing over them, becomes a microcosmic mirror for Lefebvre to hold up to some of the biggest challenges to society.
“—We don’t feel like fighting over teaspoons
—Screw the spoons, fuck’s sake
—There are more important issues, you know
—Such as global warming
—Which we’re aware of
—We couldn’t help that because it’s too hot
—The heat makes itself felt, unlike the science and our understanding
—We’ve ignored the scientific studies
—It has to be said they went over our heads
—For a good while we went on living as before
—Guilt-tripping
—Because we are responsible
—Even if it’s not our fault”
It’s a familiar queasiness that Lefebvre dramatizes here, and I found my role as translator lay largely in preserving and highlighting the familiarity of the arguments in her language. The minor swearing had to be ordinary stress relief, nothing more creative. That slack but common, journalistic word “issues” stands in, as almost always at the moment, for problems, challenges, big problems, if we’re honest. The contradictions stick out everywhere, only highlighted through their juxtaposition: we can assume responsibility while still claiming that we, personally aren’t the guilty ones, in the same phrasing we all used as children. The tongue recoils but the voices go on. At least they do go on—perhaps the only way to resolve or diminish the off flavor of our times and our talk is to keep on talking and seeking better resolutions.
So the speakers go on, and the taste builds into something more complex. This isn’t poetry or theatre, but it has a feel in the mouth that both those forms can also offer: it’s a stacking, slightly wobbling complexity, a real-life balancing of ugliness with striving for something better. In fact it’s the shape of something very real—it’s conversation—only held between speakers without definitions. This is the way conversation, talk that exchanges and interacts, tastes in the mouth. This is the taste of something very ancient, served in a form made bespoke for our times.
