Suspicious to the Core (1 / three)

A(l)one & Multitudes

Based on Dr. Trinh’s claim, “There was nothing medically wrong with Célestine Arosteguy. Nothing beyond the normal complaints of a woman of her age” (48), and absence of medical tests, investigation, and findings that would support the reported disease, it is reasonable to take into consideration the possibility that, as suggested by Dr. Trinh, the cleaning lady’s-- maintenance woman’s, the Russian Madame Tretikov’s--interpretation,  which went viral throughout the internet, was a misplaced perception of the philosophical understanding of humans being sentenced to death (50), terminally ill (49), by virtue of being mortal--not due to a certain condition, such as brain tumor, as the lady put it.

Célestine’s complaints about having the left breast heavily bugged coincide with her increasing involvement with a young guy named Romme Vertegaal and, therefore, Aristide’s observations of her changing body, transformations of their relationships, and the attempts to establish a new kind of connectivity in the midst of buggy circumstances overshadowing genuine passion. The key to the disentanglement of infested knots is subtly hidden in his meek statement, hesitantly acknowledging, ”There’s a basic life force that expresses itself even in me” (135), and strangely coinciding with Nathan’s disillusionment, a sobering insight reconstituting the boundaries of / to nearly unleashed desire for mesmerizing sickness:

Dunja, I’m not a sadist. I’m not a bondage freak. It really brought me down to see you getting cut up … When you recover from this, when you’ve healed completely, you’ll still be incredibly attractive to me. I mean, your disease and your treatment are not what make you sexy and beautiful. (56)

Doubtfully, Dunja could understand that his rejection was not of the same kind as that of her former Slovenian boyfriend, who simply could not cope with the hardship his partner was experiencing. The centripetal force of blindness, not infrequently featured by the characters in this novel, is rendered conspicuous in Aristide’s disarmingly simple remark. When Naomi joins him in Tokyo, she inquires about his loneliness there, to which he replies:”I was lonely in Paris” (133). When Naomi wonders whether the situation was the same after Célestine died (if she did, which would be contrary to some statements presented in the novel), he utters:”Now I’m…alone. It’s different” (133).

Aristide portrays the connection between himself and his partner against the notions of loneliness, isolation (133), and that’s perhaps the weirdness that could be ascribed to the nature of Nathan’s and Naomi’s--despite seeming intensity--potentially an aloofness/vapidity/vacuity drenched relationship.

Void, threatening to devour remnants of the potential for recuperation, seems to be filled with proliferation of hypostatized vocabularies. Complicity in their perpetuation and, hence, ever expanding worlds of dissociated emotional-mental packages, fragmented fabricated experiences of self and environment, kaleidoscopic imagery rolling through semipermeable cleavages of a communicational tunnel, is devised by a tripartite collaboration on behalf of Aristide, Célestine, and Dr. Molnár. Himself a photographer with a proclivity for arts, Zoltán Molnár enthusiastically encourages Aristide’s taking on a role of surgeon in a bizarre scientific-artistic collaboration, within which he would perform on Célestine medical mutilation by removing her breast.

Whether it is a symbolic commentary on the fetishization of motherness remains a question. Whether the trope “mother Naomi” (37) becomes a metaphorical magic wand in the hand of Dunja, who by decree refutes decades of familial, freudian agonizing fantasy --“[d]oesn’t count,” she says (45) -- is an interesting idea to ponder. How all these components of the narrative reveal a devastating detachment in Naomi’s and Nathan’s relationship --“[e]lectronics stores in airports had become their neighborhood hang-outs” (12-13) -- is significant. How the dots can be connected to further illuminate their mistrust toward engaging commitment -- Naomi’s thoughts are colored with marxist critique of consumerism and commodity while she is performing fellatio on Nathan (61), whereas Nathan’s  are saturated with a six breast fantasy, combining Dunja’s, Célestine’s, and Naiomi’s within a single act of copulating with Naomi during their brief reunion in Amsterdam (62-63) -- is indicative.

Indicative of what? To this question various utterances appear as candidates for answers. One of them might be conjured up based on Aristide’s lyrically shaded testimonial about solitude. It can also be elucidated from the point of view spotlighting a sense of dislocation, as Nathan’s situation is portrayed: “His reality had been displaced by Naomi’s” (283). Confined to unrestricted mobility. Restlessness by blindness to the distinction between bondage and bonding. Distrustful of a possibility to be deprived of the right to…alienation? Comfortable in the safety of aloofness in the guise of the boundaries ensuring integrity? Well…as McKenzie Wark puts it laconically in The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), “We don’t buy it” (1). One rather chooses the possibility of vibrant responses to such pellets of mimicry, such knotty entanglement : the capacity to discern and sustain the distinction between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity.