Absalom’s Hair

1.

Telling proceeds by way of details; it does not lift itself from them, but buries itself in them and can only be known by way of them: I like this thought so much, which is to say, the way it imposes itself upon me and allows me to experience its necessity that I cannot help repeat it. This repetition becomes the telling about telling that passes for reflection on literature at this blog.

2.

At the heart of Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden is the telling of an event that happened long ago, to the grandmother who has the same name as Lily, the woman around whom this book turns. A meeting in a hotel garden with a young man, a violin student at a conservatory who, though engaged, continued to write to the young woman the grandmother was. Lily, in the present, may have found that hotel garden in Sienna; she went to Italy to find it. There, she meets Ben, who wants to know what it means to her, the hotel garden. In the end, the story is revealed to him: the young violinist was murdered by the Nazis, along with his family. They never met again, the grandmother and the young man. There was no affair. Just the meeting in the hotel garden and after that, the murder.

Running through the novel is a meditation on Absalom, the spoilt son of David who came to desire his father’s kingdom. It was whispered to him by a flattering advisor that he was the Messiah, that kinghood had been prophesised for him and glory awaited him. Thus was the indulged Absalom tempted; thus was he led towards his destiny. Absalom, known for his beauty – every year he cut his long, luxuriant hair and showed it off to impress the people – died when, as he rode with his army, his hair was caught in the branches of an oak. The Bible says he hung between heaven and earth while his horse kept going. Then he was killed as he hung by three thrown spears. So are his pride and vanity rewarded; so does his rebellion lead to his ignominious death.

– Do you know what the rabbis say about Absalom?, she asked him.

– The rabbis?

Absalom gloried in his hair – therefore he was hanged by his hair, she said.

And then later:

– I wonder if it’s really like that, she said.

– Like what?

– He gloried in his hair so he was hanged by his hair.

– You mean …?

– If life has a pattern like that. And, if it does, whether we can ever grasp what the pattern is when we’re in the middle of it.

A pattern? What does this mean? That there is a secret event that determines the course of your life.

– Do you think Absalom understood? she asked him. At the end? In the wood?

He looked up at her again. She was still staring straight at him.

–  I don’t think he did, she said. I think he was tired and frightened and everything happened too fast.

Did Absalom understand the fittingness of the means of his death? He did not; his story becomes clear only for us who hear his story. Its fittingness becomes clear in the telling, as the Rabbis observe. So too may we miss the appointment that would have revealed to us what for our whole lives we sought.

3.

What does Ben, the stranger she meets in Italy mean for her, for Lily? Why does she feel the need to speak to him? He is a stranger, but he is interested, receptive. Perhaps there is an attraction between them. So she speaks and he listens. She speaks, and he wants to hear more. Soon the whole story is told. Perhaps she has discovered something too, by that telling.

Later, when they are back from Italy, she agrees to meet Ben in London. To start an affair? – We know she has gone back to her lover. There is no affair, no melodrama. Once again, there is a conversation. Once again, it concerns Absalom and the hotel garden.

– He had his hair, she said. No one else had hair like that.

– I had a look at that passage, he says. With a father like that what else could he do?

– ‘He chose to act as he did, she says. He chose to do that with his hair.

Ben wants to excuse Absalom because his father spoilt him. Lily disagrees. It was Absalom’s choice to weigh his hair every time it was cut, revelling in its glory, she says. With that choice, she says, he set his destiny in motion even if he would never understand it. But we understand, as readers of the Bible and of the Rabbis. Perhaps the lesson is that we have to take account of the choices we have made and of the destiny upon which they set us.

Then they turn to the event at the centre of the novel.

– But that past, he says. What you told me about it. It has nothing to do with you, does it? It was just an episode in your grandmother’s life. It may not even have happened as she told it.

– It doesn’t matter, she says. That day was a turning point for her. And for me.

– But it didn’t change anything.

– It did for me, she says.

Perhaps the encounter in the hotel garden was the event that has set Lily’s course. Lily, who bears the same name as her grandmother. Lily who flew to Italy to search for a hotel garden. Perhaps what she is trying to understand is the meaning of that ‘choice’ which occurred two years before her mother was born. A choice which has set her destiny in motion.

How hard it is for her to understand what this might mean! We find her struggling to understand as she speaks to Ben. As she tells Ben of an event that as it were caught her up even though it happened before she was born. That implicated her in its unfolding, and will now, in another way, implicate Ben.

And then:

– Not just that day as she told it, she says. But everything that happened afterwards.

– You mean his death?

– Everything, she says.

The life of the young man who met her grandmother was ‘snuffed out’, she says. ‘[I]t’s the silence that’s so frightening’. For his part, Ben says he cannot admire a man who’s engaged and still writes to the grandmother. What kind of man is he? Then Lily changes the direction of the conversation.

– Anyway, she says, when something like that happens it makes you think not just about your own past but about that of Jews as a whole.

He presses her – surely she doesn’t mean just the Jews. But she does, this Jewess. Just the Jews. To think of humanity as a whole is too abstract to her.

Now I think I understand the relationship between the discussion of Absalom and the encounter in the hotel garden. Lily was one born after the Holocaust. But it implicates her as a Jew. It is experienced as such in terms of the death of the young man who talked with her grandmother in a hotel garden. It is in those terms that the horror of what happened is given to her to experience. That catastrophe.

4.

How does that event implicate Ben, as a non-Jew? And me, as a non-Jewish reader? I won’t answer this question directly. This instead:

Once, I think, I would have found In a Hotel Garden disappointing: the event in question, when it is told, does not awaken the heightened language of poetry. It is not Celan. But then what is told is related at several removes from those to whom it happened and told by people who inhabit our present – not just Lily and Ben, but Ben’s friends. The event ripples outwards. It is known only by these ripples.

Perhaps the recounting of the event falls uniquely to prose, to literary prose. It must reach us by presenting itself in the experience of those like us. Such is not a domestication of the event, but something like its commentary. One that sets the event against the mundane, and lets speak, in their tension, the prose of the world in which the outside presses towards us.

To tell is not your gift, but one that is given to you. The same with reading. You are elected to write or to read; your freedom comes afterwards, and even then it is haunted. You are chosen, and only the other chosen will know you as such. Your rendezvous with a book is an event as secret as that Lily tries to describe. It has slipped into your past, a past that cannot be made present.

Henceforward, you will be joined to what as though turns you inside out like a glove. To be implicated in telling, caught by it, is to be exposed, opened, at your heart, to a wound that cannot heal. A wound that is also an opening, that raw place you will never be able to bring to speech.

The French philosophy of the last fifty years knows it as the a priori. It reveals itself by its traces, being reawoken in this case by what you are told by other books.

Perhaps, reading, you find yourself wanting to write of what you read just as I am doing now, this calm Tuesday morning, to tell it again at as yet one further remove.

But of what do I speak? Of the event of literature or that of the Holocaust? How might they be thought together?