We’ve been warned and admonished for centuries about our vengeful impulses which, the old-timers say, not only come to no good but are self-defeating. “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves,” said Confucius. Catholic canon law regards the mere daydream of revenge as a venal sin – better to “turn thy right cheek.” Even Milton’s Satan knows better. “Revenge at first though sweet / Bitter ere long back on itself recoils.” Nevertheless, revenge has its endorsers. Nietzsche found it downright salutary; in Human, All Too Human he insists, “If our honor has suffered through our adversary, revenge can restore it … By revenge we prove that we are not afraid of him.”
If, for most humans, the wish for revenge never finds its active form, writers have famously channeled it into get-even narratives. The unnamed voice of Michel Layaz’s novel My Mother’s Tears may or may not be that of a writer, but words are his métier. The source of his hurt and grievance is his mother who inspires an animus so absolute that “I had ears only for the sound of her steps retreating from the room.” In the run-time of the story, he has returned to the scene of the crimes; mother is dead and the apartment must be cleaned and emptied. But his text piles up with totemic objects, mother’s steps resound, and her malign shadow lingers in the doorway.
The catalog of telling objects begins with a wind-up toy car. He recalls, “With the stealth of an assassin, I approached the sofa on all fours and placed the racecar, wound up tight, on my mother’s hair. She shot to her feet but could not, despite her quick reaction, untangle the car’s key as it dragged her hair, twisted, rolled and sucked it deep inside the mechanism.” Then, “in a voice full of contempt that tramples all remorse,” she hands him a pair of scissors and commands, “Cut.” A series of other evoked objects comprise the pith of My Mother’s Tears – a toppled statue (“I despised my clumsiness”), a fishing rod (“I knew that no fish would ever come nibble”), a diving board (“the consequences of this jump into the water assailed me”), model airplanes (“not a single one flew”), a swing (“Nowhere else could I have found or regained this state of abandon”) and several others.
But the penultimate object is a photograph taken “a few minutes after my birth.” The mother is in tears. She had apparently applied make-up and lipstick “with no concern for what had just left her womb.” It had been said that she had produced “a terrible flood” of tears at that moment, smudging the cosmetics, “staining her honor, giving her for a moment a mad woman’s face.” The photo appears several times in the narrative, tossed into and rescued from the trash can.
The fluid intensity of the narrative, rendered expertly by Tess Lewis, draws one deeply into his side of the story. When he says his “tendency to give weight to details has persisted in me,” one may take this remark as a validation of his sharp eye and keen memory – or as a benighted understatement. And that’s the key to Layaz’s shrewd design and the gratifications of this novel. Is our narrator freed or trapped by his narrative? Has his “honor” been restored, as Nietzsche promised, or has he dug his own grave and jumped in alive?
He is boundlessly articulate when it comes to tallying up the hurts, slights, and humiliations. But what of this talent for words? Is it a purely admirable capability, or is it compromised by its narrow, slanted focus? Layaz subtly tempts our speculation. In between the longer sections on shameful incidents, the speaker addresses an unnamed lover who has made a demand: “You tell me you won’t let me take you into my arms until you’ve heard what I have to say.” But there may be a deeper motivation to speak. He recalls his mother’s study, “A square room filled with books … my mother would have killed us if we’d dared set foot in that room … Out of carelessness or malice, my mother sometimes left the door to her temple ajar and I often saw her sitting in the armchair … as if a book could seize my mother and carry her off to a world created just for her, a world closed to me, one I admired and envied.”
Is our speaker’s narrative designed to “seize” the mother with its perfectly bitter aesthetics – or is it, “out of carelessness or malice,” intended to taunt her, beyond her poisonous reach? Perhaps both? Do his stories of injury clarify his psyche – or is he describing “a world closed to me,” ever unfathomable? His mother, he says, regarded him as a “vaguely parasitical element.” How does he want to be perceived by his lover and by the reader?
When the ghost of his father appears to Hamlet, a vision of revenge commences. The psychologist Adam Phillips says, “Revenge is second nature, virtually a reflex, when something we value is violated. And yet Hamlet makes us think about our resistance to revenge, about what can happen in the interim between the exhilarating certainty of the prospect and its execution. Indeed, one of the things that Hamlet might make us wonder about is whether revenge is what we take when we don’t want to know what has been done to us. We take revenge when there is something — many things – that we don’t want to think about.” In My Mother’s Tears, the “calm violence” of the mother is an absolute condition; there is no backstory to her behavior, no analysis or even a hunch about her own challenges. There is only her monumental affect. What does the son not want to know about her and about himself?
But if he were a blindly aggrieved character, the texture of My Mother’s Tears would be ruined. To his lover he says, “If you knew how many masks I wear to please you. If you recognized all my false smiles, all my false words. If you were aware of it all, you’d be alarmed and you’d leave me … I don’t disappear. I conceal myself.” Is there a difference between what he tells her and what he’s telling us? And if there is, aren’t we being asked to see through? Isn’t he fishing for resonances with our own childhoods?
Louise Glück has noted that revenge fantasies stoked her early wish to become a poet. If her “adversaries” didn’t yet recognize her talents, she would make them see, she would get even one day. These fantasies “were not simply balm. They were also fuel. They fed an existing desire to write poetry, transforming that desire into urgent ambition.” She says that now those “immutable enemies” have receded into the past, “my fascination with this subject is more pragmatic and anxious: how to supply those energies that were, all my life, fed by the passion for revenge.”
Layaz’s narrator wriggles within the grip of the past – but he is its creator and release from its hold may not be his most ardent aim. If he gives up this story, he gives up his mother. If she is the product of some hidden emotional cataclysm, at least he can imagine himself as the vital source of her affliction, and as such a thing, he may resemble and be tied to her forever. And after all, his story is so fascinating.
[Published on July 17, 2019 by Seagull Books, 120 pages, $21.50 hardcover]
- Born in 1963 in the Swiss town of Fribourg, Michel Layaz won the Swiss Literature Prize in 2017 for his novel Louis Soutter, probablement. My Mother’s Tears was published in 2003 and is his first novel translated for anglophones.
- Remarks by Adam Phillips and Louise Glück are quoted from “A Symposium on Revenge,” The Threepenny Review, fall 2013.