Human existence is a cheek. It is an insolence that we are mortal; or at least that we know. That there is suffering, that there is jealousy, that one is abandoned or that one is leaving. That some will get their success while others have to wrest it from the world. The French writer Violette Leduc was one of those who didn’t get anything. She fought for three years with “Thérèse and Isabelle”, the first part of her novel “Ravages”.
In it she told the love story of two boarding school students in a way that lesbian love had never been told before. Her goal was “to reproduce the feelings of physical love as precisely, as minutely as possible.” The result shocked not only her publishers in 1954, but even Simone de Beauvoir, whom she had encouraged.
“Some of the sites are excellent, there are places where they can write, but it’s impossible to get it published. It’s a story about lesbian sexuality that’s as straightforward as Genet,” she explained to Nelson Algren. It was not until 2000 that “Thérèse et Isabelle” was published uncensored in France, and this German translation of the uncensored version will only appear in 2021 at Aufbau Verlag. In the 1967 edition of Piper Leduc’s story was 98 pages long, in the edition of Aufbau it (without an afterword) was 159 pages.
The style is intense, as if it should be a physical experience in itself
Not only the length, but also the translation of Sina de Malafosse differs significantly from that of her predecessor Nickolaus Klocke – with Klocke the lovers still sift together when they pounced on each other in a school toilet. The lovers are – the title suggests – Thérèse and Isabelle, two students. They meet in the hallways of their boarding school, their sleeping alcoves, or, as Thérèse calls it, graves.
“Washed and combed, lying perfectly in our beds, we presented ourselves to the guard. Some students gave her sweets, held her up with flat flattery, while Isabelle withdrew to her grave.” Thérèse and Isabelle hate each other until they spend their first secret night together. “Isabelle caressed my hips. My touched body became touch, my caressed hips radiated into my intoxicated legs, into my soft calves. My stomach was tenderly tortured.”
The style is intense. As if Leduc were trying to build a physical experience out of the words. Sometimes it’s easier to feel what she’s talking about than to understand it. The result is explicit, close and intoxicating, but at the same time also avant-garde pulp. Who has a special comedy that you are never quite sure whether it is intentional or involuntary. Once Thérèse is offended because her lover fell asleep before she could come (Another cheek.) Another time she complains about Isabel’s vulva: “She spread her thighs. ‘If you don’t want to, say so.’ I sank into her gender, which I would have wished for easier. I would have loved to sew it up everywhere. “
Violette Leduc: Thérèse and Isabelle. Novel. Translated from the French by Sina de Malafosse. Structure Verlag, Berlin 2021. 169 pages, 20 euros.
Sober particles of reality from everyday school life are also woven into the manic poetry, which repeatedly grounds the narrative and ties it back to an outside world. But the intermediate scenes are also reminiscent of a feverish dream, that absolute dissolution of boundaries that you can sometimes share with another person. Who scrapes the line to madness, is almost unbearable. In Leduc’s prose, the entire world is made up of desire in language. Language, on the other hand, is kneaded as if it were to become a body. This opposing poetic movement shapes the entire text.
But sex, too, is never idealized, although she sometimes poetizes it to the extreme. It is always an exhausting, exhausting affair. Unsurprisingly, Leduc’s contemporaries found this disturbing. “A good third of this book is of tremendous and detailed profanity – which will cause us trouble with the judiciary. (…) Publication in this condition would cause a scandal,” as their publishers at Gallimard put it.
Beauvoir consoled Leduc in a letter: “I am indignant about their prudishness, their lack of courage. Sartre too. Don’t let yourself be broken. You have to fight back and we will help you. There are other publishers than Gallimard …” Leduc the abbreviated version that was finally published seemed like an amputation. She suffered physically and mentally. It took decades, not years, for “Thérèse und Isabelle” to appear in its original form. But even today it is a highly unusual book that captivates with its daring and peculiarities.