Pierre Michon: The Origin of the World

But Michon also knows, as do visitors to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, that in 1866, late in his career, Gustave Courbet painted for a foreign patron a composition with the same imposing title, The Origin of the World . The painting appears to illustrate Michon’s epigraph for his novel, taken from the Russian novelist Andrei Platonov: “The Earth slept naked and tormented like a mother whose bedcovers have slipped away.” Courbet’s nearly life-size painting offers a fully detailed close-up view, cut off at thighs and breasts, of a beautifully formed nude woman lying supine with legs spread. Such a depiction of sexual parts is utterly literal and in no way brutal. Because one sees no facial expression and no gesture, the picture can strike one as either natural and affectless or as brazenly lascivious.

Michon’s narrative, never affectless, is increasingly laced with real and incipient ruthlessness, malevolence, and violence. Only after the eruption of violence releasing the “black honey” of Yvonne’s blood does Michon draw down over his suffering characters the veil of sleep. Courbet implied that the origin of the world lies in the sheer copiousness of sexuality uncomplicated by darker impulses; Michon’s short fable obliges us to recognize, within and beyond sexual fantasy, strains of cruelty directed toward beauty, suggestions of dominance and violence closely associated with pleasure. The core of Michon’s universe is as dark and implacable as the caverns of Lascaux. His narrative skill consists in laying out before us haunted landscapes and high-relief characters who unheroically yet steadily push back against the blackness. They acknowledge cruelty and resist it. Not a glimmer of Rousseau’s optimism appears in Michon’s writing. He works with the uncompromising perspective of Swift — and of Faulkner — confronting evil.

Have we, then, two generations after Camus, and one generation after the minimalist tactics of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “new novel,” come upon a major new French writer? Perhaps. But Michon is unwilling or unable to take himself seriously enough to put together a full show — say, 200 pages of continuous narrative. His first, longest, and most autobiographical novel, Vies minuscules (1984), assembles convincing family portraits and a string of disastrous situations. They do not, however, redeem the book’s hackneyed theme: the trials of a young writer in search of his vocation. The author remains fascinated by Mallarmé’s image of the blank page taunting the paralyzed poet. Michon’s brief no-nonsense book on Rimbaud favors another autobiographical theme: the phantom influence of an absent father. One can find Michon’s finest work in the five semi-legendary stories about painters published in English as Masters and Servants . These oblique treatments of Watteau, Goya, Van Gogh, and others radiate a true magic.

The Origin of the World , Michon’s second book to be translated into English, contains much of the same magic in the form of a novel brought vividly to life and then left suspended in the suggestiveness of its sometimes subterranean setting. We shall, I am sure, be hearing more from Michon, not only because he has a remarkable and devoted American translator, Wyatt Mason, who confers on the books full citizenship in English, but also because the pressure of imagination that sustains Michon’s writing has not flagged. That imagination draws its force in great part from a sense of the past, particularly the past embedded in the mountains, plateaus, rivers, and caves of the French landscape. With Michon among us, history will not soon disappear.

PIERRE MICHON was born in Creuse, France, in 1945. His first work of fiction was published in 1984, and since that time his reputation as one of the foremost contemporary French writers has become well established. He has won many prizes, including the Prix France Culture for his first book, Small Lives; the Prix Louis Guilloux for the French edition of The Origin of the World; and the Prix de la Ville de Paris in 1996 for his body of work. He has also received the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française for his novel The Eleven , the Grand Prix Société des gens de lettres de France (SGDL) for Lifetime Achievement in 2004, and the Prix Décembre (2002) and Petrarca-Preis (2010).

WYATT MASON, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper’s , has translated writing by Pierre Michon, Éric Chevillard, Michel de Montaigne, and Arthur Rimbaud. He teaches at Bard College.

ROGER SHATTUCK (1923–2005) was one of America’s preeminent critics, an authority on French letters whose first book, The Banquet Years (1955), on the birth of the avant-garde in France at the turn of the century, has never gone out of print. A frequent writer on French literature for the New York Review of Books , Shattuck won the National Book Award in 1977 for Marcel Proust .