The Right Words

THE SUBJECT OF The Words To Say It the story of midlife crisis and resolution--is, on one level; as old as writing itself. Although Marie Cardinal's novelized versions of this story is sometimes marred by predictable writing, her occasional fine passages and unique perspective mark the other side of the psychoanalytic coach--as patient not doctor--make this an unusual and worthwhile novel.

When first published in France as Les Mots Pour Le Dire in 1975, the book eluded next classification, wandering through bookstores and across best-seller lists first as fiction, then as documentary. The book's most recent wanderings have taken it across the Atlantic, where a new English translation dubs itself an "autobiographical novel." Cardinal's story is a blend of fact and fiction which sets the past in an imaginary framework, elevating the specific details of an individual life to a universal level.

The narrator begins in medias res: At 30 she is already in the grip of the "Thing," a mental and physical illness which creates irrational anxiety and fear in the mind, continuous bleeding and a racing pulse in the body. Cardinal plays the analyst here, setting in order the critical phases of her narrator's treatment, creating a series of dramatic episodes which take the reader through the patient's alternating confusion and revelation until the chaos of madness is resolved.

At the base of the narrator's insanity liex her relationship with her mother. As a young girl the narrator discovered that she was an unwanted child and that her mother had tried to prevent her birth by inducing an abortion. The laws of accepted behavior repressed the guilt and violent anger this realization aroused, dividing the girl's mind and setting her natural emotions at odds with the dictates of strict moral and social codes. Repression begun at home found reinforcement in Roman Catholicism, petit bourgeois convention, and French society as a whole. Slowly, painfully, an older reflecting narrator comes to terms with her past; only in middle age can she begin to shake off the constrictions of family, religion, and class.

Writers as famous as Dante have recounted similar stories, as Bruno Bettelheim points out in his preface to the novel. But Cardinal seems to care more about recounting her experience honestly than about casting it in polished prose. She writes in the tradition of popular fiction, and as concerned as she is with escaping middle class convention the falls into cliches and literary devices more often found in drugstores than bookstores. Overwriting and the over-repetition of rhetorical questions and exclamations at particularly important moments inevitably makes these scenes less effective. Ironically, exaggerated descriptions only serve as a reminder that we are reading a novel.

An unusual number of images fill the novel's pages but many are unnecessary or overdone, Frequently Cardinal produces paragraphs of subtle, suggestive prose only to ruin the effect by making an all-too obvious cooperation at the end. We don't need to be told. For it stance, that the narrator's character traits are "like wild horses putting my carriage," a metaphor which has been better stated since Pla to first used it to describe the human mind. One of the more dramatic images which dominates the beginning of the novel is that of blood, which flows continuously from the narrator's uterus for no apparent reason. "Cardinal at first uses this image very successfully to suggest that the blood flows from a wound civilization imposed on her as an unformed child, But in the and she ever plays this image hitting the reader over the head with the idea. She seems to write best when she tries least.

HOWEVER, the occasional beautifully-writes package and Cardinal's more striking images ultimately lift The Words To Say It above the level of most popular fiction. Translator Patrician Goodheart carefully reproduces the rhythm and atmosphere of the French. Particularly notable are the many passages evoking the life and color of colonial Algeria, where Cardinal lived as a child.

The opening paragraphs of the book showcase Cardinal's sense of nuance and suggestion at its best. In this passage she hints at many of the themes in her story without making blunt statements or obvious comparisons:

The little cul-de-sae was badly paved, full of humps and holes, bordered by narrow, partly ruined sidewalks. It worked its way like a finger between private houses of one or two stores, pressing one against the other. The little street stopped at iron gates overgrown with scraggly vines.

The windows revealed no sign of life within...There were not the extremes of poverty or wealth here, only the petite bourgeoisie, hiding their valuables, their woolen socks even, in chinks, behind toothless shutters, rusted gutters, decrepit walls, the plaster flaking off in scales. Yet the windows were barred and the doors were solid.

The simple description sets up an atmosphere of repression and degeneration. The list of decaying physical objects and the emphasis on what lies hidden behind the gates, doors, and windows of these ruined buildings convey the mediocrity and frustration middle class life has imposed on the narrator much more effectively than the most elaborate metaphor could.

And the experience Marie Cardinal relates in her novel is valuable independent of her prose style. This is one of the new accounts of psychoanalysis written from the patient's perspective. What is more, Cardinal has not related the exact events and facts of her life: she has presented selected aspects of her analysis on a more general level. The Words to Say It is a universal story of self-discovery, relevant to all who have parents and the embarrassing memories of growing up.