There are few books that have generated a deep impact in the depths of my heart, such as the poetic novel: Blesse, ronce noire, by the writer Claude Louis–Combet.
Today I write in this very personal way because I can find no other way to express myself than with the admiration that I have developed after encountering this dark, poetic and silent novel. Beyond the controversial themes of the book, the way in which the poet describes the love relationship, carnal passion and eroticism. For Axel Gasquet, Louis–Combet’s work comments:
His stories […] present sexual transgression as an elementary fact, from which emerges the halo of naturalness with which the taboo is violated.[1]
Blesse, ronce noire, is inspired by the incestuous relationship between the poet Georg Trackl and his sister, with whom, shortly before the battle of Grodek during the First World War, he mentions the final phrase that gives the book its name:
“I was sitting in silence, in an abandoned tavern, under blackened rafters, alone with my wine; a radiant corpse leaning over a shadowy form; at my feet, a dead lamb. Out of the putrid blue rose the livid figure of my sister, and thus spoke her bloody mouth: Blesse, ronce noire.” [2]
With this epigraph, the novel begins an adventure that will be scandalous for the reader: the discovery of an incestuous sexuality, generated by a secret, distant, silent passion, but contemplative, coming from a childhood reminiscence that will remain until the end of his days. As the author describes it in the first childhood stage of the two brothers playing on a mountain. Autumn 1897:
“Then, when the light was dying by burying itself in the immediate earth, on his sister’s breast. He could feel, through the palm, all the hidden murmur of life and the throbbing fullness of the secret. She stayed like that for the duration of a sigh, and then she started on the dress, which she pulled up over her hips. Her face reflected the seriousness of her soul, an attentive and receptive soul.”[3]
Claude Louis–Combet gives a voice to silence, a sacred meaning to love, creates an emptiness which was not even there, a fear, and possibly; a feeling of horror at the inevitable factor that represents solitude, sinking us little by little into this novel that pays tribute to silence.
Being participants and accomplices in these actions, we will see them grow throughout the story from 1897 to 1917, during the reading we will never find a dialogue between the characters; only memories, narrations that explain to us what is happening and from time to time a couple of letters in which they express their love.
It is already 1905 and they both grow up and are now in such an absence that the sister—now a teenager—misses her brother all the time, and vice versa. The author masterfully reveals to us the changes a woman undergoes in adolescence and the love passion she developed for her brother from the most “tender” childhood:
“The moon’s blood is preparing to spill for the first time and the young woman wants to see it flow from her sex. She has promised her brother. She has written to him: It will happen at night and I will stay awake. If you were at home, you would come to my side and attend the birth of the little fountain; you, my beloved; you, my poet; you would stay by my side, as if you were the great Brentano leaning over the stigmata of Anne Catherine.”[4]
[…]
“My dear brother, I know that I shall have no lover but you, and I believe that, though you have all the women at your disposal, you shall have no lover but me. You have gone, but you have not left me. You are still here. You look at me. Look at me again. I would like you to look at me all my life.”[5]
One of the notable characteristics of the novel is the way in which religious aspects are dealt with, divinised in the style of Saint Teresa: “I die, because I do not die”. Where “the pleasures of the flesh”—the name by which the sexual act would be known in Christian times—are transgressed, by Claude Louis–Combet’s literary language, the body—directly related to the Christian notion of evilness—is sin:
“In the moments when death seemed more attractive to him than pleasure, he needed to write to his sister, and not as to the real girl she was, far from him, but as to his own feminine soul outside of time. And he would tell her that he desired only her and that for that reason no woman could bring him to the fullness of the senses to which he aspired and that, since it was a matter of sinning, they should step forward.”[6]
For Louis–Combet, silence comes from the flesh, for the same reason that the sentence and the word are written through and with the body. The written word, which in its secretion breaks the sacrilege of silence.[7]
“I exist only in order not to exist anymore. Take me and I will no longer have a face to see you, neither a before nor an after, so I will be when you are.”[8]
[…]
“The world was a product of sin, and it was a sin a greater sin to want to add more, by so doing, to the very unfolding of history, to our exile far from the land of innocence.”[9]
Later in the book there is a hallucination of baptism, which has served since its inception as a way of being reborn free of original sin. But again: with the intention of transgressing it; from childhood they know that the origin of their passion carried with it a perverse and evil charge, according to the older brother in describing his sister as: “she who brings darkness.”[10]
In Foucault’s study in his book History of sexuality 4. The Confessions of the Flesh. He speaks of this symbolic and sacred character around baptism:
“When we die, we stop sinning. Thus death, an instrument of punishment, ends up becoming, when it is associated with resurrection, an instrument of salvation: condemnation becomes a benefit; both things are in our favour: death is the end of sins and resurrection is the reappearance of nature. In effect baptism constitutes something like a reversal of the meaning of death: a death which puts sin and death to death, and which, in that character, therefore, must be ardently desired.”[11]
Something we will see reflected in one of the thoughts of the elder brother, who, finding himself far from his sister, describes to us the spiritual character of his love:
“The truth was of a spiritual order, […] only sin, the more–than–mortal sin, the sin of blood, could confirm it. Man had to know the flesh of the being who was closest to him in spirit, the flesh of the Double, the flesh of the Shadow. That two beings should be the Same for each other: they must necessarily love each other, enjoy together beyond all ordinary enjoyment, because they did evil not through banal fornication, but in the tearing of the principle and the foundation.”[12]
Silence houses the bodies to be possessed by the desire. Drunkenness, poetry and meaninglessness, unconditionally nourish the forbidden passion of incest, both coming from a religious family, nourish and bring God into existence through negation, accepting themselves as the One for the Other, knowing that one cannot live without the Other:
“Then could be reborn, in the depths of memory, parading in procession towards the absorbing emptiness of the page, the images of the angel, of the night, of the shepherd, of the garden, of the stranger, of the wayfarer, of the orphan… figures of sin and death destined to fix, in the gaze of the sister, the portrait of the brother, that photograph which reigned in her mirror and whose impenetrable face would eventually be illuminated by the incandescence of the words.”[13]
[1] Axel Gasquet. La heredad del silencio: Escritores franceses heterodoxos. Universidad Veracruzana. 2008. pág 79.
[2] Claude Louis–Combet. Hiere, negra espina. Editorial Periférica. España. 2019. pág. 5
[3] Ibídem. pág. 19
[4] Ibídem. pág. 23
[5] Ibídem. pág. 24
[6] Ibídem. pág. 35
[7] Axel Gasquet. La heredad del silencio… Op.cit. págs 80 y 90
[8] Claude Louis–Combet. Hiere, negra espina. Op.cit. pág. 32
[9]Ibídem. pág.42
[10] Ibídem. pág.10
[11] Michel Foucault. Historia de la sexualidad 4. Los placeres de la carne. Siglo veintiuno. México 2019. págs 94 y 94.
[12] Claude Louis–Combet. Hiere, negra espina. Op.cit. pág. 47
[13] Ibídem. pág. 49
