Submission Page 2

  Then that stopped, too. I’d left Myriam at the end of September, now it was already mid-April, the academic year was coming to an end, and still I hadn’t replaced her. Although I had been made a full professor, and so had reached a sort of end point in my academic career, I didn’t think the two facts were connected. By contrast, it was just after things ended with Myriam that I saw Aurélie, and Sandra, and there I did feel a connection – a disturbing, unpleasant, uncomfortable connection. Because as I looked back over the years, I had to admit that my exes and I were much closer than we realised. Our episodic sexual relations, pursued with no hope of any lasting attachment, had left us disillusioned in similar ways. Unlike them, I had no one to talk to about these things, since intimacy isn’t something men talk about. They may talk about politics, literature, stocks or sports, depending on the man, but about their love lives they keep silent, even to their dying breath.

  Had I fallen prey, in middle age, to a kind of andropause? It wouldn’t have surprised me. To find out for sure I decided to spend my evenings on YouPorn, which over the years had grown into a sort of porn encyclopedia. The results were immediate and extremely reassuring. YouPorn catered to the fantasies of normal men all over the world, and within minutes it became clear that I was an utterly normal man. This was not something I took for granted. After all, I’d devoted years of my life to the study of a man who was often considered a kind of Decadent, whose sexuality was therefore not entirely clear. At any rate, the experiment put my mind at rest. Some of the videos were superb (shot by a crew from Los Angeles, complete with a lighting designer, cameramen and cinematographer), some were wretched but ‘vintage’ (German amateurs), and all were based on the same few crowd-pleasing scenarios. In one of the most common, some man (young? old? both versions existed) had been foolish enough to let his penis curl up for a nap in his pants or boxers. Two young women, of varying race, would alert him to the oversight and, this accomplished, would stop at nothing until they liberated his organ from its temporary abode. They’d coax it out with the sluttiest kind of badinage, all in a spirit of friendship and feminine complicity. The penis would pass from one mouth to the other, tongues crossing paths like restless flocks of swallows in the sombre skies above the Seine-et-Marne when they prepare to leave Europe for their winter migration. The man, destroyed at the moment of his assumption, would utter a few weak words: appallingly weak in the French films (‘Oh putain!’ ‘Oh putain je jouis!’: more or less what you’d expect from a nation of regicides), more beautiful and intense from those true believers the Americans (‘Oh my God!’ ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’), like an injunction not to neglect God’s gifts (blow jobs, roast chicken). At any rate I got a hard-on, too, sitting in front of my twenty-seven-inch iMac, and all was well.

  Once I was made a professor, my reduced course load meant I could get all my teaching done on Wednesdays. From eight to ten, I had Nineteenth-Century Literature with the second years, while Steve taught the same class to the first years in the lecture hall next door. From eleven to one, I taught an upper-level class on the Decadents and Symbolists. Then, from three to six, I led a seminar where I answered questions from the doctoral students.

  I liked to catch the metro a little after seven to give myself the illusion that I was one of the ‘early risers’ of France, the workers and tradesmen. I was the only one who enjoyed this fantasy, clearly, because when I gave my lecture, at eight, the hall was almost completely empty except for a small knot of chillingly serious Chinese women who rarely spoke to one another, let alone anyone else. The moment they walked in, they turned on their smartphones so they could record my entire lecture. This didn’t stop them from taking notes in their large spiral notebooks. They never interrupted, they never asked any questions, and the two hours were over before I knew it. Coming out of the class I’d see Steve, who would have had a similar showing, only in his case the Chinese students were replaced by veiled North Africans, all just as serious and inscrutable. He’d almost always invite me for a drink – usually mint tea in the Paris Mosque, a few blocks from the university. I didn’t like mint tea, or the Paris Mosque, and I didn’t much like Steve, but still I went. I think he was grateful for my company, because he wasn’t really respected by his colleagues. In fact, it was an open question how he’d been named a senior lecturer when he’d never published in an important journal, or even a minor one, and when all he’d written was a vague dissertation on Rimbaud, a sham topic if ever there was one, as Marie-Françoise Tanneur had explained to me. She was another colleague, an authority on Balzac. Millions of dissertations were written on Rimbaud, in every university in France, the francophone countries and beyond. Rimbaud was the world’s most beaten-to-death subject, with the possible exception of Flaubert, so all a person had to do was look for two or three old dissertations from provincial universities and basically mix them together. Who could check? No one had the resources or the desire to sift through hundreds of millions of turgid, overwritten pages on the voyant by a bunch of colourless drones. The advancement of Steve’s career at the university, according to Marie-Françoise, was due entirely to the fact that he was eating Big Delouze’s pussy. This seemed possible, albeit surprising. With her broad shoulders, her grey crew cut and her courses in ‘gender studies’, Chantal Delouze, the president of Paris III, had always struck me as a dyed-in-the-wool lesbian, but I could have been wrong, or maybe she bore a hatred towards men that expressed itself in fantasies of domination. Maybe forcing Steve, with his pretty, vapid little face and his long silken curls, to kneel down between her chunky thighs brought her to new and hitherto unknown heights of ecstasy. True or false, I couldn’t get the image out of my head that morning, on the terrace of the tea room of the Paris Mosque, as I watched him suck on his repulsive apple-scented hookah.

  As usual, his conversation revolved around academic appointments and promotions. I never heard him willingly talk about anything else. That morning he was nattering on about a new appointment, a twenty-five-year-old lecturer who’d done his dissertation on Léon Bloy and who, according to Steve, had ‘nativist connections’. I lit a cigarette, playing for time as I tried to think why Steve would give a fuck. For a moment I thought his inner man of the left had been roused, then I reasoned with myself: his inner man of the left was fast asleep, and nothing less than a political shift in the leadership of the French university system could ever rouse him. It must be a sign, he said, especially since they just promoted Amar Rezki, who worked on early-twentieth-century anti-Semitic writers. Plus, he insisted, the Conference of University Presidents had recently joined a boycott against academic exchanges with Israeli scholars, which had begun with a group of English universities …

  As he turned his attention to his hookah, which had got stopped up, I stole a glance at my watch. It was only ten thirty, I could hardly pretend to be late for my next class. Then a topic of conversation occurred to me: there had been more talk lately about a project, first proposed four or five years ago, to create a replica of the Sorbonne in Dubai (or was it Bahrain? Qatar? I always got them mixed up). Oxford had a similar plan in the works. Clearly the antiquity of our two universities had caught some petro-monarch’s eye. If the project went through, there’d be real financial opportunities for a young lecturer like Steve. Had he considered throwing his hat into the ring with a little anti-Zionist agitation? And did he think there might be anything in it for me?

  I shot Steve a probing glance. The kid wasn’t very bright, he was easy to rattle, and this had the desired effect. ‘As a Bloy scholar,’ he stammered, ‘you must know a lot about this nativist, anti-Semitic, um …’ I sighed, exhausted. Bloy wasn’t an anti-Semite, and I wasn’t a Bloy scholar. Bloy had come up, naturally, in the course of my research on Huysmans, and I’d compared their use of language in my one published work, Vertigos of Coining – no doubt the summit of my intellectual achievements. At any rate, it had been well-reviewed in Poetics and Romanticism, and probably accounted for my being made a professor. In fact, many
of the strange words used by Huysmans were not coinages but rare borrowings, specific to certain trades or regional dialects. My thesis was that Huysmans never stopped being a Naturalist, that he took pains to incorporate the real speech of ordinary people into his work, and that, in a sense, he remained the same socialist who had attended Zola’s soirees in Medan as a young man. Even as he grew to despise the left, he maintained his old aversion to capitalism, money and anything having to do with bourgeois values. He was the very type of a Christian Naturalist, whereas Bloy, desperate for commercial and social success, used his incessant neologisms to call attention to himself, to set himself up as a persecuted spiritual luminary misunderstood by the common run of men. Having assumed the role of mystico-elitist in the literary world of his day, Bloy never stopped marvelling at his own failure, or at the indifference with which society, quite reasonably, greeted his imprecations. He was, Huysmans wrote, ‘an unfortunate man, whose pride is truly diabolical and whose hatred knows no bounds’. From the beginning Bloy struck me as the prototype of the bad Catholic, who truly exalts in his faith and zeal only when he’s convinced that the people around him are going to hell. And yet when I wrote my dissertation I’d been in touch with various left-wing Catholic-royalist circles who worshipped Bloy and Bernanos, and who were always trying to interest me in some manuscript letter or other, until I realised they had nothing to offer, absolutely nothing – no document that I couldn’t easily find for myself in the usual scholarly collections.

  ‘You’re definitely on to something … Reread Drumont,’ I told Steve, just to make him happy, and he gazed at me with the obedient, naive eyes of an opportunistic child. When I reached my classroom – today I planned to discuss Jean Lorrain – there were three guys in their twenties, two of them Arab, one of them black, standing in the doorway. They weren’t armed, not that day. They stood there calmly. Nothing about them was overtly menacing. All the same, they were blocking the entrance. I had to say something. I stopped and faced them. They had to be under orders to avoid provocation and to treat the teachers with respect. At least I hoped so.

  ‘I’m a professor here. My class is about to start,’ I said in a firm tone, addressing the group. It was the black guy who answered, with a broad smile: ‘No problem, monsieur, we’re just here to visit our sisters …’ and he tilted his head reassuringly towards the classroom. The only sisters he could mean were two North African girls seated together in the back left row, both in black burkas, their eyes protected by mesh. They looked pretty irreproachable to me. ‘Well, there you have them,’ I said, with bonhomie. Then I insisted: ‘Now you can go.’ ‘No problem, monsieur,’ he said, with an even broader smile, then he turned on his heel, followed by the other two, neither of whom had said a word. He took three steps, then turned again. ‘Peace be with you, monsieur,’ he said with a small bow. ‘That went well,’ I told myself, closing the classroom door. ‘This time.’ I don’t know just what I’d expected. Supposedly, teachers had been attacked in Mulhouse, Strasbourg, Aix-Marseille and Saint-Denis, but I had never met a colleague who’d been attacked, and I didn’t believe the rumours. According to Steve, an agreement had been struck between the young Salafists and the administration. All of a sudden, two years ago, the hoodlums and dealers had all vanished from the neighbourhood. Supposedly that was the proof. Had this agreement included a clause banning Jewish organisations from campus? Again, there was nothing to substantiate the rumour, but the fact was that, as of last autumn, the Jewish Students Union had no representatives on any Paris campus, while the youth division of the Muslim Brotherhood had opened new branches, here and there, across the city.

  On my way out of class (what did those two virgins in burkas care about that revolting queen, that self-proclaimed analist, Jean Lorrain? did their fathers realise what they were reading in the name of literature?), I bumped into Marie-Françoise, who proposed lunch. Clearly, it was going to be a social day.

  I liked the old bag. She was funny, she was an insatiable gossip, and she’d been at the university long enough, and spent enough time on the right committees, to have better information than anyone would ever entrust to the likes of Steve. She led us to a Moroccan restaurant in the rue Monge. Clearly, it would be a halal day, too.

  She got going as soon as the waiter brought our food. Big Delouze was on the way out. The National Council of Universities had been in session since June, and it looked as though they’d choose Robert Rediger to replace her.

  Glancing down into my lamb-and-artichoke tagine, I raised my eyebrows. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s huge. And it’s not just talk – I have it on good authority.’

  I excused myself, and in the men’s room I slipped out my smartphone. You really can find anything on the Internet nowadays. A two-minute search revealed that Robert Rediger was famously pro-Palestinian, and that he’d helped orchestrate the boycott against the Israelis. I washed my hands carefully and went back to the table.

  My heart sank: my tagine was already getting cold. ‘Won’t they wait for the elections?’ I asked, after I’d had a bite. This struck me as a sensible question.

  ‘The elections? The elections? What have the elections got to do with it?’ Not so sensible after all, I guessed.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s just, in three weeks we might have a new president …’

  ‘Please, that’s all settled. It will be just like 2017, the National Front will make it into the run-offs and the left will be voted back in. I don’t see why the council should fart around waiting for the elections.’

  ‘But there’s the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re an unknown quantity. If they got twenty per cent, it would be a symbolic benchmark, and could change the balance of power …’ I was talking utter bullshit, of course. Ninety-nine per cent of the Muslim Brotherhood would throw their votes to the Socialists. In any case, it wouldn’t affect the results at all, but that phrase the balance of power always sounds impressive in conversation, as if you’d been reading Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I was also rather pleased with symbolic benchmark. In any case, Marie-Françoise nodded as if I’d just expressed an idea, and she launched into a long disquisition on the possible consequences, for the university leadership, if the Muslim Brotherhood was voted in. Her combinatory intelligence was fully engaged, but I wasn’t really listening any more. I watched the hypotheses flicker across her sharp old features. You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe, or start collecting model aeroplanes.

  My afternoon seminar was exhausting. Doctoral students tended to be exhausting. For them it was all just starting to mean something, and for me nothing mattered except which Indian dinner I’d microwave (Chicken Biryani? Chicken Tikka Masala? Chicken Rogan Josh?) while I watched the political talk shows on France 2.

  That night the National Front candidate was on. She proclaimed her love of France (‘But which France?’ asked a centre-left pundit, lamely), and I wondered whether my love life was really and truly over. I couldn’t make up my mind. I spent much of the evening trying to decide whether to call Myriam. I had a feeling she wasn’t seeing anyone new. I’d run into her a few times at the university and she had given me a look that one might describe as intense, but the truth was she always looked intense, even when she was choosing a conditioner. I couldn’t get my hopes up. Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was, inarguably withering away.

  ‘Happy are those who are satisfied by life, who amuse themselves, who are content.’ So begins the article Maupassant published in Gil Blas on À rebours. In general, literary history has been hard on Naturalism. Huysmans was celebrated for having thrown off its yoke, and yet Maupassant’s article is much deeper and more sensitive than the article by Bloy that appeared at the same time in Le chat noir. Even Zola’s objections make sense, on re
reading: it is true that, psychologically, Jean des Esseintes remains unchanged from the first page to the last; that nothing happens, or can happen, in the book; that it has, in a sense, no plot. It is also true that there was no way for Huysmans to take À rebours any further than he did. His masterpiece was a dead end – but isn’t that true of any masterpiece? After a book like that, Huysmans had no choice but to part ways with Naturalism. This is all that Zola notices. Maupassant, the greater artist, grasped that it was a masterpiece. I laid out these ideas in a short article for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies, which, for the several days it took me to write it, was much more engaging than the electoral campaign, but did nothing to keep me from thinking about Myriam.