water body

I’m hopeless, I’m a mess. I need to reach the stage where I’m sufficiently obsessed that it calls to me first thing and won’t let me go. I do get there, eventually, but it takes a long time, and with a first draft and everything murky – I have the feel of a shape in mud, which I’m trying to pull up – I would rather do almost anything than write. It tends to be very good for household tasks.

Lewis has surveyed a landscape taken by convention as settled and found it destabilized, at least here and there, by uneven and unreliable information.

When I described these accounts to the filmmaker Olivier Assayas, a close friend of Denis’s, he laughed. “There’s a certain form of chaos in the way she works,” he said. “When you make movies, it’s always disturbing how confident everyone involved is that they know how things should be done. And you have to constantly remind them, No, you don’t know how it’s done, I don’t know how it’s done, nobody knows how it’s done. You create chaos as a way of destabilizing the surroundings that could bring you to make something that would otherwise be conventional.”

Claire Denis was eight weeks old when she and her mother moved from Paris to Cameroon, where her father was serving as a French colonial administrator. In the course of the next thirteen years, the family expanded to include several more children, and lived in territories that would become Mali, Djibouti, and Burkina Faso. Denis’s parents supported decolonization, and she is adamant that “Chocolat” is not autobiographical. “My parents would certainly not have had someone serve them meals. I wasn’t raised like that,” she told me. “I was raised in a world that probably never actually existed, the world my parents hoped for . . . where there was no separation between people. I was raised in a dreamland.” Denis was at times the only white child in her class. “It was very embarrassing,” she said. “Not because I was white, but because I was not black.”

Meanwhile, most of us in the New Narrative group were coming from queer and/or working-class backgrounds, and we needed a self, however unstable or provisional, in the stories we needed to tell, which resembled and engaged the social realities we inhabited. There’s a phrase from Fredric Jameson—by way of Althusser and Lévi-Strauss—that I found helpful. “Narrative,” he writes, is the “imaginary resolution of a real contradiction.” Althusser said something similar about ideology, Lévi-Strauss said it of myth. I felt the same could be said about the self. That gave me a way in—not to banish the self but to recognize it as collaborative, porous, an “imaginary resolution.” We were trying to mix different registers, to bring together lyric, essay, close-ups, wide shots. We were drawn to anything that led away from the middle distance.

It had not been a good couple of weeks, there in the dead of winter, and my anger at all of it boiled up in me when Addie began telling us something involving a lover, a story she clearly believed to be tragic and exciting, with herself at center stage, but that was, to me, and probably to Ellie, only dull and sordid.

“I will be making an ethical mistake if I take myself to have the kind of grasp of a person that fiction makes available to me in my engagements with imaginary people… No human being will be knowable in the way that any literary character worth repeated readings is knowable.”

Nothing here is solved or softened by the making of love. Rather, the effect of all the lusting is to hammer people further into unwisdom and despair. It’s the unhappiest film I’ve watched in a long while, steeped in Freudian pessimism—that is to say, you can meet the demands of the libido, in full, but don’t expect your world not to fall apart. Once satisfaction is guaranteed, so is chaos.

You know, the real world, this so-called world, is just something you put up with like everybody else. I’m in my element when I’m a little bit out of this world: then I’m in the real world – I’m on the beam. Because when I’m falling, I’m doing alright. When I’m slipping, I say, ‘Hey, this is interesting.’ It’s when I’m standing upright that bothers me… As a matter of fact, I’m really slipping most of the time. I’m like a slipping glimpser.

“You shouldn’t need four years of study of Lacan and Deleuze and Adorno and whoever to understand art,” Kline told me. “I want to create an art that’s accessible to the FedEx delivery worker or a doctor who doesn’t have that specific education but is interested in the society they live in.”

Some of Garner’s prejudices are less conscious than others, but I suspect she understands perfectly well that narrative truth—what Elena Ferrante calls “authenticity” (as distinct from mere verisimilitude)—proceeds from a kind of dangerous honesty that is not always conscious but is, rather, half disclosed, imperfectly controlled. 

In her reply to the critics of “The First Stone,” she describes “eros” as “the quick spirit that moves between people—quick as in the distinction between ‘the quick and the dead.’ It’s the moving force that won’t be subdued by habit or law.”