Review by Tara Cheesman
The Feminist Press / September 2022 / 128 pp
The best story in Barbara Molinard's book Panics, and the one which establishes the thematic thread binding all the others together into a cohesive collection, is the author's own, which Marguerite Duras explains in the book’s preface. We only know what we've been told: Duras convinced Molinard to publish Panics. Before Panics, the idiosyncratic writer destroyed all her work in a compulsive cycle of creation & destruction. Duras explains Molinard’s mania thus: "EVERYTHING BARBARA MOLINARD HAS WRITTEN HAS BEEN TORN TO SHREDS."
The texts that follow were also torn to shreds. They were put back together, torn up again, put back together again. How many times? Even she doesn’t know. As many times as NECESSARY, which is to say until she was in agony, until meaning was plunged back into the absolute night of its source, the mother of suffering.
In Duras’s distinctively capitalized narration, the enemy must be "OBEYED," texts are "WITHHELD" & "RELINQUISHED." This framing has feminist overtones, and it both compels and concerns regarding the role Duras played in these stories finding publication. If she is telling the truth (always a legitimate concern with Duras), and if the stories paint an accurate picture of their author, then Molinard may have struggled with her mental health. Like the collages of outsider artist Henry Darger, Molinard's work leaves the reader with the uncomfortable feeling they've wandered into the domain of an unsettled soul. Duras’s endorsement may be the reason the public can read these thirteen stories, but it has also created a context for reading them. We know very little about Molinard’s life other than the years of her life: born 1921, died 1986. Yet, even before we read the first story, we understand that she suffered. Duras’s emphasis implies that Molinard’s suffering was essential to the artistic process. I cannot imagine a contemporary female writer’s work being framed in this same way.
Molinard’s characters are constantly moving, traveling toward objectives they seldom reach, and frequently losing body parts in the process. In The Severed Hand, the protagonist, Hector, goes in search of his friend Alfred after having his hand amputated. He finds Alfred at the bottom of a seemingly bottomless pit shelling beans. An enormous baby appears, and Alfred encourages Hector to return it to its parents. But once he reaches the surface, Hector loses the baby (which briefly reappears later, riding a horse). Hector continues his journey, culminating in a vicious fight and a family dinner. Afterward, he decides to go back to help Alfred shell beans.
Compare this to The Meeting, where a man called “X”, following instructions from voices only he hears, travels by bus to an unnamed town to attend a meeting with a stranger. Upon disembarking, X sets out on foot. He experiences a smorgasbord of horrors. After walking for months, he discovers a narrow pipe descending into a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, he sees "a woman, her body naked and seemingly ravaged by worms… dragging a young child behind her, also naked." Rats attack X, but he sees the house where he is supposed to meet the Stranger. A bright light emanates from the windows. He knocks on the door, and a whirlwind sucks him in. Molinard describes in explicit physical detail everything he experiences.
Panics doesn't entirely work as a collection. The stories can be divided into those describing an individual experiencing an actual mental break and those presenting surreal descents into mania. They are reminiscent of Beckett's Waiting for Godot and the work of the artist M.C. Escher. Separately, the stories are oddities. But grouped, the situations are similar, like reading multiple drafts of the same story. Many characters find themselves caught in endless loops. For instance, a woman waits for a train that never arrives. She returns to a hotel and wanders the labyrinthine hallways only to return, in the end, to the bench at the station (Come). Another woman spends the day walking to nonexistent appointments, punctuating her day with trips to the airport. She goes to sleep that night, thinking of the pretend tasks to fill the next day (The Plane from Santa Rosa). A genderless patient has body parts and facial features (the nose and ears) removed by a doctor and nurses. They are then sent out into the cold --armless, naked-- and told, "You are a free man" (I Am Alone and It's Night).
These stories are performative and formulaically grotesque, and they carry the prejudice and implication of female hysteria. Originally published in the 1960s, they haven't entirely held up against the passage of time. They aren't as developed as the stories of, say, Samantha Schweblin, whose work has the same open plotting. Or those of Yoko Ogawa, who also incorporates light body horror and surreal touches. Barbara Molinard's strength is her ability to evoke our collective nightmares: being naked, losing a limb, being lost, and being unable to reach safety or love. Hers (and ours) are dreams in which others act with unexplained malevolence while we struggle towards something we'll never attain. But, while Molinard may be drawing inspiration from dreams, she isn’t recounting them. Most of the stories are written in the third person and take place in real time.
The final piece in this collection is the most telling. We are told this is the only piece in the collection about a real-life event. The Vault is a conversation between Molinard and Duras, as transcribed by Duras. It is also an expression of Duras's fascination with her protégé. Molinard had wanted to spend three days and three nights in a tomb, the vault of the title, located beneath a "Temple of Love" somewhere in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. She made a list of what she wanted to bring: "candles, two or three bottles of Badoit, a bottle of red wine, warm clothes, salami, bread, and of course a sleeping bag." When prompted, she admits she had forgotten books. "That should have been the most important thing." She planned to enter the vault on WEDNESDAY (again, Duras' capitalization), but on Tuesday night, her husband came home and informed her he'd spoken to the doctor. "The doctor had told him it would be very bad for him and for the children if I went to the vault." So she doesn't go, and that night, she begins to suffer physical pains. She goes to doctor, who tells her the pains are a form of healing, they will get worse, and that she is lucky. Molinard watches his lips move but doesn't hear what he's saying. Later, she draws a parallel between the mystery pains she experienced and the discomfort she would have felt if she'd slept on the floor of the vault. She explains that death is the only surprise "because there are absolutely none in life."
Perhaps Molinard's story affords us a glimpse of the psychological effects when a woman’s free agency is taken away. It wasn't until 1965 that French women gained the right to work outside the home without their husband's permission or to open a bank account in their name. Five years later, women were allowed to make legal decisions concerning their children; before that, the responsibility belonged solely to the father. And it took the French courts until 1990 to authorize the prosecution of spouses for rape and sexual assault. Women's rights in the United States followed a similar timeline.
In one of her stories, Molinard's protagonist is offered a penthouse by the owner's son. They are encouraged to construct a ladder to reach it. The ladder is never long enough. They spend months working to build this ladder, and when they finally succeed, they place it against the wall of the skyscraper and begin their ascent. The father and son stand at the bottom. Molinard writes:
I was about to climb through the window and enter the apartment, of which I could see nothing beyond the encompassing darkness, when, brusquely, I felt the ladder detach from the wall. Frightened, I looked down. The old man, his two hands gripping the sides, was pulling it toward him. Once it was vertical, he held it steady in that position for an excessive amount of time, which caused me great discomfort. Screaming with all my might, I demanded that the old man put the ladder back in position. I implored him, begged him. He did nothing. With each of my requests he shook the ladder and laughed like a madman.
Duras is not the only woman who has worked hard to find an audience for this writer. In 2018 Emma Ramadan wrote a few brief paragraphs about Molinard's Panics (Viens in the original French) for the Asian American Writer's Workshop website. Ramadan writes that Viens had gone out of print and that she hopes one day the writer's "work will resurface, this time in English." In another interview she mentions working on the translation, between other projects and without a commission, because she feels it's important that Molinard not be forgotten. Ramadan made Molinard’s rediscovery possible, translating the work evocatively into English and finding a publisher.
Yet, despite her dedication to this writer, what Ramadan wrote in 2018 remains unchanged. "Not much is known today of Barbara Molinard." We are left with the stories as they were originally published, bookended by Duras’s commentary and interpretation. And, without the facts, we can only project what we believe (or what Duras believes) about Molinard's life onto the little we know. It's not fair. Which isn't the same as saying it's not true.
Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, 2018 & 2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge, and member of The National Book Critics Circle longlist reading committee for the inaugural 2022 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, CrimeReads, Guernica, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Mystery Tribune and other online publications. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @booksexyreview & Instagram @taracheesman.