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arirang's review
5.0
Elle voulait porter la paix dans les pays qui avaient connu la guerre. Elle pensait, disait-elle, faire régner l’harmonie par sa seule présence en robe de mariée. Ce n’est pas la grâce ou la bêtise de son intention qui m’a intéressée, c’est qu’elle ait voulu, par son geste, réparer quelque chose de démesuré et qu’elle n’y soit pas arrivée. Une robe blanche suffit-elle à racheter les souffrances du monde? Sans doute pas plus que les mots ne peuvent rendre justice à une mère en larmes.
She wanted to bring peace to countries that had known war. She said she thought she could do that simply by wearing a wedding dress. I wasn't interested in the grace or foolishness of her intentions; what interested me was that she hoped this gesture would be enough to mend something that was so out of proportion with it - and that she did not make it. Can a white dress ever be enough to make amends for the world's torments? Probably no more than words can ever be enough to do justice to a weeping mother.
La Robe Blanche by Nathalie Léger has been translated by Natasha Lehrer as The White Dress, and edited and published by Cecile Menon of the wonderful publisher Les Fugitives. It forms part of a trilogy of related works with:
'L'exposition' (2008), translated by Amanda DeMarco as 'Exposition' (Les Fugitives 2019):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2853406544?
'Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden' (2012), translated by Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon as Suite for Barbara Loden (Les Fugitives 2015):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2743791815
'La Robe Blanche' (2018), translated by Natasha Lehrer as 'The White Dress' (Les Fugitives 2020)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3077054693
As with the first two books, this is an experimental novel in the form of a mixture of auto-fiction, biography and art essay.
The White Dress is inspired by the real-life story of Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippa_Bacca and https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/theater/19peac.html).
She and fellow artist Silvia Morro departed from Milan on 8 March 2008, wearing wedding dresses, in an artistic performance and peace mission they called "Brides on Tour". As explained by the foundation that supported them they planned on (google translation of the original Italian): “hitchhiking through the Mediterranean countries devastated by recent wars, with the aim of bringing them a message of peace, hope and solidarity, through the journey itself and a series of rituals / performances of great symbolic value.”
En route, Pippa Bacca stopped to wash the feet of midwifes at each stop:
Silvia Morro later explained (interview at https://web.archive.org/web/20120306022637/http://bridesontour.fotoup.net/tappe/27/spose-in-viaggio-intervista-a-silvia-moro google translation)
The two had aimed to reach Israel, and end their journey by ceremonially washing the wedding dresses, but having travelled through Slovenia, Bosnia, Bulgaria and Serbia, their journey ended in Turkey, where Pippa was abducted by one driver, raped and murdered. One of her rules for the journey was that she wouldn’t refuse an offer of a lift; she told a journalist en route ”it’s a way of showing trust to your fellow human beings. To prove that when you show trust you receive nothing but goodness.”
The novel opens with an image of a tapestry hanging in the author/narrator’s family home, itself inspired by the 2nd panel of Boticelli’s Nastagio degli Onesti, an image that combines both the vision of a women in a white dress being pursued and killed, but also reminds the narrator of the undercurrents of menace in her family home.
As the novel tells us, when Pippa Bacca’s murder was announced, the tall, crazy poet Alda Merini who called herself “the poet of shame” wrote:
(as translated by the author into French):
Robe blanche
pour aller épouser ta mort
qui est aussi la nôtre.
Tu t’es vêtue de blanc
Et puisque ton âme m’écoute
Je voudrais te dire que la mort
N’a pas le visage de la violence
Mais qu’elle est le soupir d’une mère
Qui viendrait te chercher au berceau
D’une main légère.
Je ne sais que te dire
Moi je ne crois pas
A la bonté des gens
J’ai déjà vécu tant de douleurs
Mais c’est comme si je voyais mon âme
Vêtue pour les noces
Qui s’échappe du monde pour ne pas crier.
(as translated by the translator into English) :
White dress
to go forth and wed your death
which is also ours.
You wore white
and because your soul is listening to me
I wanted to tell you that death
does not have a violent face
it is the sigh of a mother
who has come to pick you up from your cradle
with a light hand.
I don't know what to tell you
I don’t believe
In the goodness of people
I have already experienced so much pain
But it's as though I see my own soul
dressed for the wedding
escaping the world in order not to shout
The text intertwines two competing claims on the narrator’s intention.
- Her research into Bacca’s ultimately doomed project and her attempts to understand its mixture of the profound and the naïve, simultaneously significant and trivial in her gesture;
- Her relationship with her mother, who want the narrator to help her achieve retrospective justice against her estranger husband, the narrator’s father, by telling her story. Despite him being the adulterer in the relationship, he successfully and humiliatingly sued her for divorce, and gained custody, on the grounds of her inadequacies as a wife (the court apparently finding thatthe wife’s multiple shortcomings regarding her obligations arising from the marriage that were of a kind that explains and even excuses adultery)
Léger draws on historical performance artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramovic and Marie-Ange Guilleminot, the oral testimonies of Svetlana Alexievich (a key inspiration for her mother, who tell's her, towards the novel's end that, like those in Alexievich's books, you’ve given me back my living voice) and, in the following passage, which feels key to the link between the twin themes, the novels and poems of Balzac, Conrad, Claudel, Mallarme, Joyce and WG Sebald:
A single word stands out and falls: 'crushing'. It has no prosodic beauty, but it immediately evokes what I am after. The word holds within in all the tears, but without drowning in them, it's not sentimental, it stands beyond the rapacious shrine of existence, beyond generalisation, and it holds in its perpertual grammatical present my mother's loneliness, like that of Blanche de Mortsauf, Lord Jim's silence, Prouhèze parting from Rodrigue, the day Gretta learns of the death of Michael Furey, the broken words of Mallarmé grieving the death of his son, Jacques Austerlitz's reunion with his past (Jacquot, Jacquot, is it really you?), the naïve impulse of this young women in her white dress. 'Something profoundly shocking or upsetting that affects greviously,' according to the dictionary. Something - aside from moralistic preaching or a roll of the dice - that calls for reflection.
A review that does the book more justice than I can:
https://theartsdesk.com/books/nathalie-l%C3%A9ger-white-dress-review-%E2%80%93-masterfully-introverted
A moving and powerful piece and when considered together with its companion novels, a masterpiece. 5 stars, awarded for the trilogy as a whole.
She wanted to bring peace to countries that had known war. She said she thought she could do that simply by wearing a wedding dress. I wasn't interested in the grace or foolishness of her intentions; what interested me was that she hoped this gesture would be enough to mend something that was so out of proportion with it - and that she did not make it. Can a white dress ever be enough to make amends for the world's torments? Probably no more than words can ever be enough to do justice to a weeping mother.
La Robe Blanche by Nathalie Léger has been translated by Natasha Lehrer as The White Dress, and edited and published by Cecile Menon of the wonderful publisher Les Fugitives. It forms part of a trilogy of related works with:
'L'exposition' (2008), translated by Amanda DeMarco as 'Exposition' (Les Fugitives 2019):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2853406544?
'Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden' (2012), translated by Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon as Suite for Barbara Loden (Les Fugitives 2015):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2743791815
'La Robe Blanche' (2018), translated by Natasha Lehrer as 'The White Dress' (Les Fugitives 2020)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3077054693
As with the first two books, this is an experimental novel in the form of a mixture of auto-fiction, biography and art essay.
The White Dress is inspired by the real-life story of Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippa_Bacca and https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/theater/19peac.html).
She and fellow artist Silvia Morro departed from Milan on 8 March 2008, wearing wedding dresses, in an artistic performance and peace mission they called "Brides on Tour". As explained by the foundation that supported them they planned on (google translation of the original Italian): “hitchhiking through the Mediterranean countries devastated by recent wars, with the aim of bringing them a message of peace, hope and solidarity, through the journey itself and a series of rituals / performances of great symbolic value.”
En route, Pippa Bacca stopped to wash the feet of midwifes at each stop:
Silvia Morro later explained (interview at https://web.archive.org/web/20120306022637/http://bridesontour.fotoup.net/tappe/27/spose-in-viaggio-intervista-a-silvia-moro google translation)
Pippa identified as a key point of her artistic research a highly symbolic gesture: washing the feet of midwives to honour the oldest profession in the world, which makes birth possible.
By recording their voices, she invited them to explain what birth, the life to which they themselves contributed every day with their profession, meant to them. A meeting and a peaceful confrontation that almost always also brought out their fears, their joys and their feelings at the moment when they became mothers in turn.
Sometimes midwives were contacted directly by Pippa, other times by the same families who were hosting us.
Before meeting Pippa some of them were perplexed, almost suspicious, because they did not understand the meaning of washing their feet. As if by magic, however, when they arrived in front of Pippa it was as if something was taking in them: I saw them sit in total confidence, entrust their feet to the hands of my partner, answer the questions, get excited, sometimes giving her some completely surprising answers
The two had aimed to reach Israel, and end their journey by ceremonially washing the wedding dresses, but having travelled through Slovenia, Bosnia, Bulgaria and Serbia, their journey ended in Turkey, where Pippa was abducted by one driver, raped and murdered. One of her rules for the journey was that she wouldn’t refuse an offer of a lift; she told a journalist en route ”it’s a way of showing trust to your fellow human beings. To prove that when you show trust you receive nothing but goodness.”
The novel opens with an image of a tapestry hanging in the author/narrator’s family home, itself inspired by the 2nd panel of Boticelli’s Nastagio degli Onesti, an image that combines both the vision of a women in a white dress being pursued and killed, but also reminds the narrator of the undercurrents of menace in her family home.
As the novel tells us, when Pippa Bacca’s murder was announced, the tall, crazy poet Alda Merini who called herself “the poet of shame” wrote:
(as translated by the author into French):
Robe blanche
pour aller épouser ta mort
qui est aussi la nôtre.
Tu t’es vêtue de blanc
Et puisque ton âme m’écoute
Je voudrais te dire que la mort
N’a pas le visage de la violence
Mais qu’elle est le soupir d’une mère
Qui viendrait te chercher au berceau
D’une main légère.
Je ne sais que te dire
Moi je ne crois pas
A la bonté des gens
J’ai déjà vécu tant de douleurs
Mais c’est comme si je voyais mon âme
Vêtue pour les noces
Qui s’échappe du monde pour ne pas crier.
(as translated by the translator into English) :
White dress
to go forth and wed your death
which is also ours.
You wore white
and because your soul is listening to me
I wanted to tell you that death
does not have a violent face
it is the sigh of a mother
who has come to pick you up from your cradle
with a light hand.
I don't know what to tell you
I don’t believe
In the goodness of people
I have already experienced so much pain
But it's as though I see my own soul
dressed for the wedding
escaping the world in order not to shout
The text intertwines two competing claims on the narrator’s intention.
- Her research into Bacca’s ultimately doomed project and her attempts to understand its mixture of the profound and the naïve, simultaneously significant and trivial in her gesture;
- Her relationship with her mother, who want the narrator to help her achieve retrospective justice against her estranger husband, the narrator’s father, by telling her story. Despite him being the adulterer in the relationship, he successfully and humiliatingly sued her for divorce, and gained custody, on the grounds of her inadequacies as a wife (the court apparently finding thatthe wife’s multiple shortcomings regarding her obligations arising from the marriage that were of a kind that explains and even excuses adultery)
Léger draws on historical performance artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramovic and Marie-Ange Guilleminot, the oral testimonies of Svetlana Alexievich (a key inspiration for her mother, who tell's her, towards the novel's end that, like those in Alexievich's books, you’ve given me back my living voice) and, in the following passage, which feels key to the link between the twin themes, the novels and poems of Balzac, Conrad, Claudel, Mallarme, Joyce and WG Sebald:
A single word stands out and falls: 'crushing'. It has no prosodic beauty, but it immediately evokes what I am after. The word holds within in all the tears, but without drowning in them, it's not sentimental, it stands beyond the rapacious shrine of existence, beyond generalisation, and it holds in its perpertual grammatical present my mother's loneliness, like that of Blanche de Mortsauf, Lord Jim's silence, Prouhèze parting from Rodrigue, the day Gretta learns of the death of Michael Furey, the broken words of Mallarmé grieving the death of his son, Jacques Austerlitz's reunion with his past (Jacquot, Jacquot, is it really you?), the naïve impulse of this young women in her white dress. 'Something profoundly shocking or upsetting that affects greviously,' according to the dictionary. Something - aside from moralistic preaching or a roll of the dice - that calls for reflection.
A review that does the book more justice than I can:
https://theartsdesk.com/books/nathalie-l%C3%A9ger-white-dress-review-%E2%80%93-masterfully-introverted
A moving and powerful piece and when considered together with its companion novels, a masterpiece. 5 stars, awarded for the trilogy as a whole.
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