Lost and Wanted(90)
“I’m specifically interested in Choderlos de Laclos.”
“Really! I never tire of him myself. I’m teaching Dangerous Liaisons through the SorbonneX program. A surprising number of people are interested in studying literature digitally.”
The office was interior, not large, with an oaken desk and bookshelf, a green banker’s lamp. There were a few family photographs: one of him and his wife on a hiking trail, Pope with a wooden walking stick, and another that might have been his son, in the ocean holding a small child. On the facing wall was a framed pencil drawing of a man in seventeenth-or eighteenth-century dress.
“Is that him?”
Pope glanced up. “Oh—that’s Rousseau. Laclos’s contemporary, and one of the earliest critics of modernity. Rousseau saw the problem from the beginning. He says that the ancients talked about morals and virtue, while all we talk about is business and money. This was in reference to his own time—can you imagine what he’d think of ours?”
“No.”
“Laclos was in many ways a more practical man, an army general and a military engineer. He perfected Vauban’s geometric fortifications—those might interest you, a pattern of intersecting fractals—and so they sent him to fortify the ?le d’Aix. He was there for a year, but it was never attacked. He was bored, and so he came up with Dangerous Liaisons—the only novel he ever wrote.”
“There was a production of the play when I was an undergraduate here.”
“It’s a perennial favorite. I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon, but I have a quarrel with almost all of the adaptations, stage or film. It’s an impossible book to dramatize, precisely because of how brilliantly Laclos structures it—I’m talking about the letters, of course. He absolutely refuses to let us know what the characters really think, because we have only their written words. Performing it on the stage or the screen, you lose that moral ambiguity.”
“My friend might have said that that’s the actor’s job. She played Madame de Merteuil.”
“I don’t know much about acting,” Pope said. “But it seems to me that the actor would have to know his, or her, character’s motivation. I’m not sure that Laclos intends them to be knowable in that way. What are we supposed to make of the ending? Valmont is killed, or perhaps allows himself to be killed, by Danceny. Merteuil suffers smallpox and loses her beauty, a great part of her capital. But she escapes to Amsterdam with a box of valuable jewels, whereas Cécile is shut up in a convent, and Tourvel dies there.”
I thought: He doesn’t recognize me.
“Tourvel is the only purely moral character, in spite of her transgression with Valmont. She’s the only one who loves unreservedly, against her own self-interest, and we see what happens to her. I found that the book baffled my undergraduates—when I was teaching undergraduates. It’s astonishing for someone of my generation to see how uncritically young people today believe in romantic love. They’ve exploded gender, race, class, all the old shibboleths. But for some reason love is unassailable.”
“You don’t believe in it.”
Pope sighed. “I’m saying that the ambiguity in Laclos serves a purpose, namely to respond to Aristotle’s question about tragedy. Why do we enjoy watching Antigone, or Hamlet for that matter? What do we get out of entering into other people’s suffering in art, when we often avoid it in life?”
“But what’s his answer?”
“He won’t answer it. And that’s the genius of this novel, because he rejects the notion that either the characters’ pain or their romantic passions can be used to illustrate the author’s ideas. It’s disconcerting for us, because we expect a novel to possess some sort of underlying moral structure. What Laclos suggests—and this is just my opinion—is that you would have to step outside of conventional society in order to negate some of the power relations that corrupt love. To achieve reciprocity between men and women. Even more than Rousseau, Laclos was a feminist; he left a long, unfinished essay at his death about the position of women in society. Incidentally, he himself had a long, happy marriage—none of the intrigues he writes about in Les Liaisons.”
“That’s interesting,” I admitted. What had I thought it would be like? I would come in here and find a sad old man, accuse him of a twenty-year-old offense, and inspire—what? Some kind of remorse or repentance?
“My friend loved the play,” I said. “I don’t think it baffled her.”
“Your friend who played Merteuil?” Pope asked.
“In ’92, our senior year. Her name was Charlotte Boyce.”
He didn’t catch his breath, or sit down, or make any other sort of dramatic gesture. It was only that his attention was suddenly fully engaged.
“That’s it,” he said. “At the memorial. I thought I recognized you, but out of context…”
“She was my best friend.”
“Ah. I’m very sorry.”
“You and I met here once before, when Charlie and I were undergraduates.”
“That would’ve been a different office, around the corner,” Pope said. “I appreciated what you said about her.”
“It was just one story.”
“An illustrative one. Je suis mon ouvrage.”