The essay below, the extremely brief one beginning here, explores the peasants European literature presents. Being precise: peasants twice, exactly. The novels discussed herein – one remains unnameable, we are identifying the novel’s character alone (namely Emerence), the other, called Ennemonde – depict these figures’ otherness. They are the feudal remainders, wise because they are outside, entrancing because they are elsewhere, elsewhen. The essay summarized: Ennemonde figures nature, becomes outside modernity. Her character resists certain narrative genres. Emerence symbolises something else. Fate, Modernity, they merge. Progress never abolishes feudal vestiges.

Emerence et Ennemonde figure alterity. The alterity they figure does not, however, entertain the incommunicable. They strike the reader because they are intelligible. They are strangeness never
alien.

Let’s recount the elements these novels possess. Ennemonde, the frenchman’s novel, details Ennemonde’s life. Ennemonde’s character, her literal size, towers over others. She eclipses the other French peasants, whose woeful existence she dominates. Ennemonde the queen, rules over the countryside miserable. She raises her children. She murders her lover. She seduces Clef-des-Coeurs, whose neck resembles sausage. Ennemonde represents the object Jean’s novels centre consistently: the otherworldly peasant. Yet Ennemonde rules over them. The distance here reflects another distance. Ennemonde enters nature, seamlessly merging. The trees’ ethics? Ennemonde’s. Nature remains outside. Ennemonde the inhumane, Ennemonde the river.

Emerence too, albeit differently. The figure whose voice defines the novel? Never Emerence’s. Instead: New Rengum Ungarie bourgeois. Manners maketh the person. Emerence lowers herself, her attitude. Yet her personality towers above the bourgeois storyteller. The power Emerence displayed here, the power eccentric, means little when encountering the power ideological; form-of-life versus mere life. Creaturely Emerence crushed. Yet the outcome here resembles ancient power, the fates formerly worshipped. Fate rules even modernity. The old re-enters the new. Emerence’s fate: disappearance. The threshold crossed entwines the elements.

The revelation above troubles anyone reading Ennemonde. Ennemonde: heroic. The sweet bitters modernity emits prove incapable; they never produce integration. Ennemonde – the novel – possesses zero tragedy. Jean’s novel possesses zero fate. Nature never produces tragedy, hence nature’s ambivalence. Never malevolence, never benevolence. Those terms reek, emitting scents humane. Neither evil nor ethics the forest possesses.

Emerence appears eternal. The novel states the fact she served the previous tenant. Ancientness becomes untimeliness. Yet Emerence’s death closes the novel. Her demise the feudal’s demise. They are the same. The great secret her home possesses? Death takes eons. Her home hides decay. Emerence represents feudalism steady decline. Disappearance doesn’t happen instantaneously. Disappearance happens piecemeal. Disappearance becomes decay, decay become shames, embarrassment defines the end.

Emerence’s temperament befuddles the novel’s heroine. The heroine: her essence bourgeois, her depiction lèse-majesté-socialiste. Emerence refuse the new world order. Ennemonde: nature versus ethics. Emerence: ethics doubles, the double proves unresolvable.

Elsewhere Althusser theorises ‘overdetermination’. The key: something remains, the previous remerges. The complex whole proves unhistoricisable. The case considered here? Modernity erases the ancient. Modernity keeps fate. The left behind refuse eradication. Emerence’s fate suggests eradication. Staged like tragedy, the novel refuses itself. The double proves irresolvable. Fate remains, tragedy remains, the ancient remains, Modernity progresses. Ennemonde resists fate yet restages nature, becomes inferior storytelling. The multiple proves inescapable. Tendency never becomes determination.

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Duncan Stuart is an Australian writer living in New York City. His writings have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Overland, The Critical Flame and The Cleveland Review of Books. Find him on twitter @DuncanAStuart