Eva Figes first came to American attention through a feminist tome entitled Patriarchal Attitudes (1970), but she has also produced, in addition to other nonfiction such as Tragedy and Social Evolution (1976), an impressive array of fiction, most recently the novel Waking (1982). In Light, she takes on a novelistic assignment that is supposed to be fatal: the treatment of artistic endeavor other than writing. One of the cherished truisms of modern narrative is that works of fiction come to grief when a musician, painter, or sculptor is the subject. The exceptions to this rule, however, should give pause to those who proclaim it. Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947; Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend, 1948) is a classic refutation of the principle; Light bids fair, in its more modest way, to be another.
The obstacles would appear quite steep at the outset. To enter the consciousness of Claude Monet, one of the least analytical, least self-conscious, and least verbal of major modern artists, would clearly require extraordinary powers of invention, not to say distortion. Surely the intense examination of the psyche that informs Waking would be inappropriate here, and it is not used. Instead, in a spirit very much in keeping with that of Monet’s work, the novella seeks the outer world with all the pagan gusto of its principal character. The title, in one sense, does announce the subject of the book, and its dappled prose renders that shifting light which it traces in all of its divagations and quirks. Many of the passages devoted to landscapes and shifting shadows recall the chapter from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) entitled “Time Passes”; the house and grounds of Giverny almost become characters in this text.
“Almost” is the operative word here. Figes realizes that the setting alone cannot be the protagonist, and she begins to sketch out very rapidly the interactions within the Monet ménage. She emphasizes the activities of ancillary figures in the household (such as Monet’s common-law wife, Alice, and her daughters, Marthe and Germaine), partly for tactical, partly for strategic reasons. The tactical reason stems from Monet’s role as the commonsensical, placid sensualist who believes that things “are, and ought to be, simple,” and the consequent need to look elsewhere for human complexity. The strategic reason involves a subversion of the reader’s expectations. Instead of providing a guided tour of the Great Man, Figes focuses upon those in the shadows who thanklessly make his sunlit existence as pleasant as possible. There is, at least potentially, a political feature to this shifting of focus. (Particularly curious for this theorist of patriarchy, by the way, is the gerrymandered nature of this patriarch’s clan. Monet is not married to the woman of the house, nor has he fathered either of the daughters remaining at home. Nevertheless, as the narrative establishes, his word is still law.) Also, the way the narrative gradually opens out into the household in general, at first emerging as if part of the natural landscape, is one of the chief pleasures of the text.
The culmination of this social treatment occurs in chapter 7, where Octave Mirbeau, a journalist and friend of Monet, visits for lunch. Here one sees the Monet clan truly en famille; every modulation in collective mood and every mutual adjustment of demeanor and interaction is noted with precision. Mirbeau himself is admirably rendered as well: a forward-looking, anticlerical fop with a journalist’s eye for rhetorical theatrics. Some readers will be reminded of Monsieur Homais in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Characteristically, Mirbeau twits the Monets for retaining servants yet is unhesitating in being served by them himself. Like so many public men, Mirbeau seems passionate about almost every topic but finally only as a matter of rhetoric; his proclaimed concern has about it a certain weightlessness, an air of self-promotion.
One of those present at the lunch—served, significantly, on the veranda, that intermediate point between inside and outdoors—is Alice’s granddaughter, Lily, the member of the household who, at nursery-school age, has most in common with Monet. The story provides many clues to their affinity. Both are in love with the outdoors, and with light itself. Among the most vivid passages in the narrative is the sequence in chapter 5 concerning Lily’s attempts, ultimately successful, to blow a large, complete bubble from her clay pipe. When finally the bubble evolves, “round, iridescent, and perfect,” it holds only for a moment—“enough for Lily,” however: “Memory holds the shining bubble, bright with the newborn glory of the world.”
What becomes apparent, to elaborate the crucial link between Lily and Monet, is that the project of Monet’s Impressionism, as Figes presents it, is precisely to render a moment, as is always said—but in so doing to defeat the onward rush of time; somehow to hold the bubble, bright with the world’s newborn glory. The early chapters involving Monet and his helper Auguste in the lily pond—which to the painter is like “sitting in the middle of an aquamarine bubble”—make this clear. It is not one moment in time, after all, that is Monet’s quarry: It is the repetition of that moment over many occurrences. The layerings of the paintings, then, accrete as a similar quality of light strikes the same setting over a period of time. The resulting “impression” is in fact more like a palimpsest of numerous inscriptions, the rough equivalent in painting to what in narrative is called an “iterative event.” (One very famous iterative event in fiction opens Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: “For a long time I used to go to bed early,” reads the first sentence, followed by a description of moments within these varying experiences of going to bed—but as if they had all been part of one continuous process. The use of “would”—“I would often,” “It would happen that,” and so on—signifies the iterative event.) Why is this detail of layering so significant for Monet’s philosophy as well as his technique? The reason is that this layering process points to the implicit belief in cyclical time which informs Monet’s work and which is in sharp contrast to the outlook of his wife, and perhaps of the text itself.
It is true that Monet no longer believes, as in his youth, in the solidity of the world and the consequent irrelevance of the light that envelops it. In her review of Light, Joyce Carol Oates has made much of this conversion of Monet to the realization, as Figes puts it, that “light and those things it illuminates are both transubstantial, both tenuous.” Oates also highlights Figes’ literary ancestry regarding this particular version of the substance-accident problem, citing in her review Virginia Woolf’s famous 1919 definition of life as “a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” The conversion to Impressionism, however, leaves Monet still a pagan of sorts, a man who still believes that stasis can be effected and time frozen in its tracks. The only difference is that instead of thinking that objects in themselves can endure, he substitutes for that faith the conviction that moments, impressions, or sensations—apart from the objects that may be responsible for them—can indeed repeat themselves. It may be that “each day is a new beginning” where “the miracle of creation was recreated,” but what the sun’s light re-creates is reassuringly like what it destroyed in disappearing the night before. In embodying successive layered moments on one canvas, experienced by the spectator in one stroke, Monet gives shape to his belief in cyclical time.
Contrasted to her husband throughout the text, Monet’s wife, Alice, partakes as much of penumbra and secrecy as Monet does of sunlight and expansiveness. From the first chapter, where Monet bounds out-of-doors while his wife broods crankily in her separate bedroom, the two seem to inhabit different “planes of being,” as Oates would have it. In mourning for her dead daughter Suzanne, Alice continually wears black—a color of which Monet distinctly disapproves, both for his own paintings and elsewhere. To Alice, by way of distinction, the sunlight is what is “cruel, an affront”—presumably to her personal suffering. She frets about God’s punishments, while Monet obviously has little interest in the subject of God in the first place, let alone His punishment. Figes loads Alice down with night, death, and silence to the point where she becomes a more unpleasant character than may have been intended. The reader cringes a little when Alice hovers into view, knowing that bitterness and morbidezza are in the offing. For all of that, Alice does provide the narrative with a suitable counterweight to Monet; her value goes beyond that of merely being the shadow that gives Monet’s sunny disposition its chiaroscuro.
Whereas in Monet’s world, lost moments can be retrieved and experienced once more, time’s onrush somehow stayed; in Alice’s world, one can only cling dumbly to memory, to the lost past, knowing that to hold the past in mind is to hold its loss in mind as well. Monet resurrects his past, and Alice lovingly entombs hers. For example, in chapter 2 she visits Suzanne’s grave and stays there so long that she loses “all sense of time.” In chapter 6, Monet experiences a similar sensation—indeed, it is again called “losing all sense of time”—but for him it is a present incident (Lily coming up the garden path) that evokes a buried memory of another child of his and so breathes new life into that memory for a moment. He says to himself that “if continuity is anything, it is in this ... an echo of something.” In line with his faith that the past can recur and does recur, he calls forth ghosts from the past, both in the above-mentioned passage in chapter 6 and at one point in the veranda-lunch scene. Monet’s paintings thus become the visual record of his immersion in the outside world, but also of a curious faith in the ability of that world, combined with human memory, to re-create past moments—to produce, in a way, iterative events. Alice does not see in the ever-changing world of flux the chance to relive any past experiences: She sees change as that brutal force which bears away all that she cherishes, and she hates it.
One interesting result of this difference between husband and wife is that while Monet paints, Alice writes. She addresses her journal entry to Suzanne, and indeed she can “almost hear the swish of her gown” as she does so. This writing is her way of getting the dead to return to life (“Nothing is lost,” she thinks briefly and delusively.) The paradox, however, that paralyzes her is that the dead can only be revivified as absences, and she feels “absurd, speaking to the dead.” This circumstance—and Alice is the only figure shown writing in this novel—emblematizes the larger question of the novel itself, which as a narrative holds a relation to the past very similar to Alice’s. Unlike a painting, which is an experience of sensation in itself and has artistic value as that—therefore laying claim to a more direct access to what it presents—a narrative presents past events as past events. They are recounted, but in the past tense, and discursively rather than through sensual rendering. In its resurrection of the past as past, as something to be mourned, the narrative may be closer to Alice’s world, where loss is genuinely and finally loss, than to Monet’s, where echoes of past moments somehow impart a continuity not in the things themselves.
Despite the fact that Claude Monet is the subject of this novella, it contains a gentle, even oblique subversion of the implicit assumptions of the Impressionist aesthetic. For Monet, flux was really only the means that would yield the repetition of moments, the cyclical reality that ensures finally that the past will indeed be prologue. The mourning Alice, and the visiting abbé who visits the Monets and silently reflects on a similar motif of time’s irreversibility, both suspect a gloomier truth: What is lost survives, if at all, not in the world but in one’s tenacious mind alone, and, in recalling what time has borne away, one inevitably also recalls the fact of its loss as well.
The structure of the narrative may at first mislead in this respect. By concerning itself with the events of one day, it might seem to be alluding to the globe’s ceaseless rotation on its axis, producing an identical reality tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, whether for good or ill. As the story progresses, however, the reminders of time’s inevitable course thicken: the many references to the technological changes that compromise Giverny’s Edenic serenity, the final word from Monet permanently dashing Germaine’s hopes for marriage, and so on. Above all, there is the lyric and bleakly lovely chapter 12, after the sun has set at last on the Monet estate in Giverny. This final chapter, which evokes both the later progressive blindness of Monet himself and the Great War which brutally altered the face of France and of Europe, suddenly reminds the reader that he has been passing among people whose lives and whose way of life, however much these have been altered imaginatively by Figes, were nevertheless once very much present and now are not. It reminds the reader, finally, of the destructive power of irreversible time, in spite of the closing image of Monet keeping faith with his lily pond: Figes suggests that sometimes when the sun sets on something, it sets for good.