An Appointment With Oblivion

On Barbara Molinard's Panics

Panics by Barbara Molinard (translated by Emma Ramadan) is published by The Feminist Press.

To describe any writing as an assault dares the reader to continue, mocks them for any hesitation. But assault is what the stories within Barbara Molinard’s Panics are. No doubt other reviews have emphasised the Marguerite Duras preface: the curious, if not outright bizarre practice that Molinard had of destroying her work. This was not destruction in order to rebuild, but to destroy as permanent erasure; an attempt to obliterate. That she repeated the process does not suggest an authorial vanity, as we are wont to see in interviews today, but appears to be—as corroborated by Duras—a genuine death wish in terms of writing. If not for Duras, we would not have Panics. If not for Panics, we would not be acquainted with another star in the strange constellation that is the desire for oblivion.

Déjà vu presents immediately from the first story, “The Plane from Santa Rosa”. It is brisk and business-like, the unnamed female protagonist flustered in her organised yet chaotic day, going from airline counter to clothing shops to apartment, the whole time anxious over the titular arrival. Her emotions are plotted like her travel calculations: the first stop is concern, but further down, they become alarm, a visceral dread that results in obsessive, repetitive behaviour. Trying on and rejecting multitudes of dresses and furs with a continued watch-like precision, there is a sense of urgency without purpose despite our knowing there is; a mechanical doll wound up so tightly that damage is inevitable. Throughout, Emma Ramadan’s translation conveys the increasing sense of time running out, the importance of a date to be kept clutched in the palm in order for there to be no escaping it.

Men . . . children . . . women . . . children . . . women . . . a hoop . . . a kite—the plane! Suddenly frantic, the woman jumped up from the bench, crossed the road, took the street to the right, to the left, straight, this street, that street. Now she was almost running, so afraid of being late. 7:30 p.m.! Would she ever arrive? Three floors, the key in the lock, the room.

The aforementioned déjà vu is because there is an uncanny kinship to Muriel Spark’s Lise from The Driver’s Seat as well as the unnamed woman from Violette Leduc’s The Lady and the Little Fox Fur (tr. Derek Coltman). Both also exist within that constellation, where the day is closed tight, fixed, while keeping from the reader its ultimate aim. That aim is nothingness, or oblivion—rushing towards destruction and the unknown, the things one simultaneously has no control over and yet the illusion of control. At the end of the story, Molinard’s character is finally at the airport, on time, waiting for no one in relief while knowing she must occupy herself similarly the next day and the next; just as Leduc’s on-the-verge-of-homeless protagonist, in the street, imagines herself as part of the active mass, despite her invisibility, “she would have given her life and her death for another’s breath that close”; just as Spark’s Lise realises the completion of her pre-arranged murder: “… she screams, evidently perceiving how final is finality.” The reckoning of the day becomes an eternal hell.

The solidarity of psychological loneliness connects and permeates the stories in Panics. It is a loneliness that in no way can be mistaken for solitude. It is not about the contentment of distance as much as it is the masochistic requirement of the insertion of a non-existent self into the world of others which makes no sense, but follows a certain logic nevertheless. In “The Severed Hand” a world now governed by open cruelty is expressed by Hector’s surreal journey from a pharmacist—where his unexplained swollen hand is sawn off—to his friend’s house, by way of lost time, witnessing his brother’s public flagellation, mother’s self-mutilation, and other tests which suggest not so much a standard literary narrative to the reader as a viewer closely examining a medieval triptych of a saint’s allegorical trials. The specificity of Molinard’s ability to obliquely define the character’s desire for oblivion is impossible not to connect to her own proclivity in regard to writing. Duras notes that Molinard would reference herself as divided: Barbara the writer, and the “enemy”—the destroyer. Whatever it was she sought to remove in writing or the self comes back with a vengeance in her stories, the fury of an unconscious demanding remembrance, visibility.

In “Come”, yet another unnamed protagonist keeps a journal of their travels to an unknown country to meet someone who may or may not be a lover, or, what could be an account of madness; madness here being not a perjorative but an everyday state of being in Panics. All of Molinard’s stories inhabit a claustrophobic duality: the possible external world and the probable internal. If they recall Leduc and Spark at times, at others they conjure Duras’s The Malady of Death (tr. Barbara Bray), with its existential exploration of two strangers in a room, or the nightmare of being stranded in a city of no known language as in Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole (tr. George Szirtes): where desire, communication and their dark mirror-images exchange places with and without the consent of the character. The patient of “Taxi” rides through their unconscious, vaguely aware of what lies without, but once again, unable to control it, while Ramadan’s translation sweats with the anxiety of a body realising it is in thrall to the unconscious.

Rearview gaze fixed on me. Frozen with fear. Just say nothing. Bald head, iron-band-neck-rigid-and-dry. Abrupt memory. Immense room: bare white walls. Where? When? How long?

It may be a temptation to compare Molinard to a writer of atypical behaviour such as Fleur Jaeggy. But Jaeggy could be described in the best way as a false note: an otherwise “normal”, if at times baroque or austere, atmosphere becomes tainted with a single flaw or feeling that “ruins” it. While Molinard achieves something like this in “The Plane from Santa Rosa”, the stories of Panics mostly choose to stand on no ceremony with the reader, instead insisting on an uncomfortable proximity. Her signature mise-en-scène is the specific nightmare of the sleeper attempting to escape, who find themselves in the midst of a situation without the preamble of explanation. Characters are tasked, trialled, and tortured in their paths through her stories, often with endings that make clear there is neither respite nor satisfactory conclusion.

The idea of grappling with no closure is not unfamiliar in psychology: a patient, unable to cope with a particular emotional situation often finds themselves replaying it on loop, looking for an ending that does not exist, bar a brutal one; a severing. Molinard reflects this in “The Father’s Apartment”, where the protagonist, gifted a magnificent penthouse high in a skyscraper situated in a forest (a dream-like scenario), has no way of reaching it other than to toil at making a ladder from the surrounding trees. They are watched by the son and, at times, the almost feral father, but when the time comes to ascend the ladder, are pulled down by both. An impossible task which, appropriate to dreams, ends in nothing, but unlike therapy, removes the character from their situation, placing them instead in an equally nightmarish and permanent limbo.

… I fell into the void as the old man burst into laughter.

I don’t know where I am. The sun is gone. I’m walking along a path I can’t see. The silence is absolute.

Continuing the theme of psychological assessment, Molinard’s own drawings are scattered throughout the book, echoing the nightmare situations of her characters as well as recalling her own “enemy”. Black scrawls and abstractions, while attempting to say something, remain a language of one known only to Molinard herself. The reader finds themselves examining them as a form of divination, as if something within holds the key to the stories that come before and after. But they are one and the same: the sinister and mundane aspects of the unconscious that are still somehow familiar and comforting, the dust of a strange constellation that all of us are formed of.

Tomoé Hill’s writing has been featured in places such as Vestoj, MAP Magazine, Socrates on the Beach, Exacting Clam, The London Magazine, and Music & Literature, as well as the anthologies We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books) and Azimuth (Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University). Her book Songs for Olympia, a response to The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat by Michel Leiris will be published in 2023 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Twitter @CuriosoTheGreat.