Commentary |

on Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo by Philippe Lançon, translated from the French by Steven Rendall

In “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” (1855), Victorian poet Matthew Arnold writes that he is “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.” The lines refer to his spiritual and intellectual crisis recollected in tranquility at the monastery of the Carthusian religious order near Grenoble. They recount his feelings of being displaced, of needing to “possess [his] soul again.”

The essence of those thoughts could just as readily be applied to 51-year old Philippe Lançon’s state of mind before and after January 7, 2015. He deftly explores the details in his painfully graphic memoir, Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo, winner of the Prix Femina, the Prix Du Roman-News, and the Prix Des Prix Litteraires.

It is a brilliantly conceived and adeptly executed reflection on Lançon’s traumatic experience after two Islamic extremists attacked the offices of the Parisian satiric weekly to which he contributed cultural observations. Twelve of his colleagues were murdered; eleven others, injured. The lower third of his face was shot off, leaving a gaping hole below his upper lip.

Lançon could easily have written an angry polemic. Instead, he contemplates his recovery and reeducation from a lost life to a new one to be found. Along the way, he comments on literature, music, painting, philosophy, and the theater.

A perfectly chosen opening chapter sets the tone and theme, for the book.  Set at a theater, the scene provides the framework and a motif for Lancon’s reconstructed remembrance. On the evening of January 6, Shakespeare is the only thing on his mind. He recognizes that the playwright is “always an excellent guide when one has to move forward in an ambiguous, bloody fog. [He] gives shape to what has no meaning and in so doing gives meaning to what has been undergone, experienced.”  As a favor to a longtime friend, he attends a production of Twelfth Night with her. Little does he know that she will be the last person with whom he “shared a moment of pleasure and insouciance.” Or that he will have his own epiphanal experience as a result of the next day’s actual twelfth night.

Nor is he aware of how important the twin imagery of the play will be in his near future. He recognizes that his friend bears a distinctly “twin-like” appearance to his divorced wife. When the twins in the play, Viola and Sebastian, wash up separately on an “unfamiliar shore,” each thinking the other dead, he sees them as “solitary orphans, survivors.” He confuses one with the other, “no longer knowing who was who, and consequently what [he] was witnessing.” For him, the “happy ending” that Shakespeare supplies for the comedy is all “magic, absurdity, feelings and surprising reversals” with the moral of the tale supplied by a clown.  Ironically, he notes that at some points the stage was filled with “white hospital beds.”

In retrospect, an email from this friend regards the evening as “suspended between two worlds [that] now seem to be parallel.” Even though they were seated side by side, she feels tied to the “good side of life” while he has “slipped into horror.”  She is not sure if those worlds “will be able to meet again someday.” Lançon is certain that “[t]hey won’t, neither in life nor in this book.” Their abiding friendship connected by a bridge of words and meetings has been destroyed.  She was once a “reassuring, comfortable echo of a past life,” but now there is a “hole in the middle … big enough that neither of [them] can rejoin the other in the zone constituted by habits, improvisations [and] continuity.”  In 2016, when she suggests they see a revival of the play, he refuses to visit the “antechamber of a mausoleum,” and vows to see Twelfth Night again only after he has “forgotten it.”

In later chapters, Lancon succumbs to a variety of incarnations of twins — all of whom represent two sides of himself. He is sometimes the practicing journalist, sometimes the child overwhelmed with events from his past. He sometimes identifies with patients dying in hospital rooms near his. Most significantly, he creates an alter-personality, Monsieur Tarbes, a pseudonym he uses to guide him through his reeducation after he “regains consciousness of the metamorphosed body in the living world that surrounds him.”

A group of early chapters — “The Meeting,” “The Attack,” “Among the Dead,” and “The Awakening” — provide a vivid, comprehensive description of the time leading up to the attack and just before his hospital stays (at La Pitie-Salpetriere and Les Invalides). In “The Meeting,” a fateful coincidence puts Lançon in the wrong place at the wrong time. Along with writing for Charlie Hebdo, he also has been a freelance journalist for Liberation.  He could choose to go to one office or the other. He picks Charlie Hebdo’s. He characterizes the weekly as one that would take “the most abject or ridiculous point of view and turn it inside out by absurdity, in a great burst of laughter, and with the worst taste possible.” By 2015, it was also a paper that was “no longer important.” There had been a previous arson attack on it in 2011.

During the “little more than two minutes” of “The Attack,” after “everything ordinary disappeared,” there is a deafening silence, as if he is “already the oblivion [he] shall be” (a quote attributed to Jorge Luis Borges). Suddenly, he feels he is “Among the Dead,” primarily because, in order to save himself, he played dead. At the moment of the shooting, shock divides him in two, one the person who seems dead, one the person who seems alive. Lying on the floor, hearing only silence, seeing only blood, and lying in his own pool of blood, he feels himself “levitate blindly and endlessly … no longer fully understanding the person [he] had been.” He is “floating in a universe that was both infinitely precise and distant.” His two worlds create a self who isn’t quite dead and one who senses the “solitude of being alive.”

Soon enough, during “The Awakening” at La Pitie-Salpetriere, he learns not only that his chin and the right half of his lower lip missing, leaving a “crater of torn, hanging flesh,” but there is a severe knife wound on his left hand between his index and middle fingers.

For much of the narrative, hospitals and multiple surgeries are Lançon’s new life. As he learns “The Grammar of the Hospital Room” in one chapter, the book becomes an immersive experience for the reader. In the manner of 19thcentury novels, he often addresses the “dear reader” directly.  He devises a new vocabulary after the fashion of George Orwell’s Newspeak in 1984. His floating state in the first hospital room is called being “deadalive.”  The best reflex to that feeling is “yesno.” His discomfort could be “feeljaw,” “feelnose,” “feelhand,” or a combo of “feelall.”

As he navigates “The World Below,” a world of tunnels and corridors that lead to a series of operating rooms, he senses he is in a universe where the “’sick man is abandoned by the healthy one, but the healthy man is also abandoned by the sick one.’” For him, hell is “the eternal return of a fictive sensation.” When the journalist within him comes to the aid of the wounded man, he finds himself observing that double person “from within and from above.” This perception is most acute when he details the delicate fibula transplant operation that will reconstruct his face. After two months of intensive care, he arrives at the delicate moment when “the patient regains consciousness of the metamorphosed body in the living world that surrounds him.” Lançon imagines returning to his old apartment, redoing it more quickly than his face has been restored.  He designs new bookshelves to give “a second life to [his] thousands of books that twenty years of shambles had devoured.”

That library gave him succor and sustenance during his recovery. Besides Shakespeare, he depended upon Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. They are his “three deforming, informing mirrors.” Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is the most obvious touchstone. But Lançon’s recovered memories are not just of things past or time remembered. In fact, for him, “Time lost was struggling against time interrupted.” In search of his “distant memory,” he is also in search of “images of the person [he’d] been.” Thoughts of his childhood, incidents with grandparents bump up against his medical encounters. Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Letters to Milena fill in other gaps, along with references to Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Arthur Koestler, Edith Wharton. Even more prominent is an ongoing discussion of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (published on January 7, 2015), which imagines a future French Islamic state and becomes a talking point at that eventful meeting and after.

After literature, music and painting play significant roles in Lancon’s education and recovery — Bach’s The Well-tempered Clavier, The Goldberg Variations, and The Art of the Fugue resonate throughout the memoir.  Bach becomes “like morphine [and] relieved [him].” Goya, El Greco, and Velasquez become his artistic triumvirate when “painting took precedence over literature in the physical thrust toward life.”  Visiting a touring exhibit of Velasquez at the Grand Palais, Lançon later writes a review for Liberation, concluding with a description of a “majestic riderless horse,” in the background a body of a man (“a hero or a god — or simply a man”) who calls up for him the idea of the “power everyone thinks he has over his life when the sun is not setting on it.”

Fear follows him from his old life into the new. In an “Epilogue,” Lançon describes being uneasy when he sits next to an Arab man in the metro. He had already chastened himself, learning to look away when other passengers stare, to “be present but absent.” He feels threatened again by a “worrisome encounter” with another young Arab man on the underground. Twin thoughts of shame and fear shiver through him. He suffers a “detachment of consciousness,” a kind of PTSD attack that returns him to that room at Charlie Hebdo’s offices. To allude to another line from Shakespeare, it is a “brave new world / That has such people in it.”

There isn’t a single misstep in the book. Lançon keeps a firm hand on his story — whether he’s writing about himself or about secondary individuals — family, friends, colleagues, lovers, nurses, doctors, even President Francois Hollande who visits him at Les Invalides. He makes the personal universal.  Without diminishing the rallying cry for freedom of the press declared in“Je Suis Charlie,” when the “dear reader” finishes the book, it would not be presumptuous to affirm, for freedom of expression, for freedom of the self, “Je Suis Philippe Lançon.”

 

[Published on November 12, 2019 by Europa Editions, 473 pages, $28.00 hardcover]

Contributor
Robert Allen Papinchak

Robert Allen Papinchak has reviewed for The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Chicago Tribune, The Millions, Publishers Weekly and others. He is the author of Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction. His article ‘Transcendence of Time:  Memory And Imagination in the Writings of Nabokov’ appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review.

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