Blogging The Reef: Givré

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And now we move onto book two and with that move a whole lot of things happen. For example, we move from Paris to a country Chateau called Givré. If you know how to pronounce "je" in French, the G here is pronounced the same way as the J in "je", a sort of sliding sound instead of a hard one. In any case, gee-vray. I'll get to what it means below.

What is really quite astounding is that almost the entire rest of the novel takes place at this big country house. We started with a very modern story set on trains and in hotels and theatres in the big city and now it's like the rest of the story is trying very hard to be a classic English novel only set in a French Chateau. Sort of like an Ann Radcliffe novel.

The other big shift is that we get another consciousness. Until now we have experienced everything through George Darrow's eyes. From now on we will alternate between Anna Leath's viewpoint and his. No other character gets a perspective.

There is one odd little transitional phase right at the beginning, however, where we are neither inside George nor Anna's consciousness but get straight third person narration. It's worth reading at some length:

The light of the October afternoon lay on an old high-roofed house which enclosed in its long expanse of brick and yellowish stone the breadth of a grassy court filled with the shadow and sound of limes.

From the escutcheoned piers at the entrance of the court a level drive, also shaded by limes, extended to a white- barred gate beyond which an equally level avenue of grass, cut through a wood, dwindled to a blue-green blur against a sky banked with still white slopes of cloud.

In the court, half-way between house and drive, a lady stood. She held a parasol above her head, and looked now at the house-front, with its double flight of steps meeting before a glazed door under sculptured trophies, now down the drive toward the grassy cutting through the wood. Her air was less of expectancy than of contemplation: she seemed not so much to be watching for any one, or listening for an approaching sound, as letting the whole aspect of the place sink into her while she held herself open to its influence. Yet it was no less apparent that the scene was not new to her. There was no eagerness of investigation in her survey: she seemed rather to be looking about her with eyes to which, for some intimate inward reason, details long since familiar had suddenly acquired an unwonted freshness.

If you were to reprint this novel leaving out all of book one I don't think anyone would notice. That reads like the beginning of a novel and not like the opening of a book two. Neither the house nor the lady are named.

The key word here is "unwonted", which is to say the lady was looking at the house in an unaccustomed way, seeing it in a way she had not seen it before.

And then, Wharton pulls an amazing little trick on us in the very next paragraph.

This was in fact the exact sensation of which Mrs. Leath was conscious as she came forth from the house and descended into the sunlit court. She had come to meet her step-son, who was likely to be returning at that hour from an afternoon's shooting in one of the more distant plantations, and she carried in her hand the letter which had sent her in search of him; but with her first step out of the house all thought of him had been effaced by another series of impressions.

And that tends to slide right by. We don't stop and think, isn't it amazing that our impressions of the scene correspond exactly to what this lady, now that we know a little more about her, was also experiencing. And we are now firmly on Mrs. Leath's side as a consequence. And that is the way Wharton wants it. We have been introduced to Darrow and we know some dirt on him. Now we don't get introduced to Anna Leath so much as we get pulled into so that we identify with her.

Or are we subject to the same illusions?

Here is what the illusions feels like:

The possibilities which the place had then represented were still vividly present to her. The mere phrase "a French chateau" had called up to her youthful fancy a throng of romantic associations, poetic, pictorial and emotional; and the serene face of the old house seated in its park among the poplar-bordered meadows of middle France, had seemed, on her first sight of it, to hold out to her a fate as noble and dignified as its own mien.

And here is what it feels like to see past it:

Though she could still call up that phase of feeling it had long since passed, and the house had for a time become to her the very symbol of narrowness and monotony.  Then, with the passing of years, it had gradually acquired a less inimical character, had become, not again a castle of dreams, evoker of fair images and romantic legend, but the shell of a life slowly adjusted to its dwelling: the place one came back to, the place where one had one's duties, one's habits and one's books, the place one would naturally live in till one died: a dull house, an inconvenient house, of which one knew all the defects, the shabbinesses, the discomforts, but to which one was so used that one could hardly, after so long a time, think one's self away from it without suffering a certain loss of identity.

If we pay attention, however, we will see that Anna Leath is a repeat offender in this regard. Her entire entire life has been spent trying to get beyond the illusions and get at real "life". That word "life" has incredible weight for her. She uses it as if it was loaded with special power the way many people use "love" and then have to pile adjectives such as "real" in front of it because the rest of us are not paying a profound enough reverence at the sound of it.

And, if we are willing to be just a tiny bit critical, we might also note that she has a history of failure. And it was precisely her desire to escape from one trap that led her to leap into another. To put it bluntly, is she seeing life anew or just turning the same illusions around again in her imagination?

If we don't like that question, we could just read her as a typical chick lit heroine whose life is a mess but we are on her side always as she tries to turn it around and we'll hope that George ill make a transition as wonderful as that Mr. Darcy did and that all will turn out wonderfully. That is what Anna Leath is hoping:

In Mrs. Leath's hand was the letter which had opened her eyes to these things, and a smile rose to her lips at the mere feeling of the paper between her fingers. The thrill it sent through her gave a keener edge to every sense. She felt, saw, breathed the shining world as though a thin impenetrable veil had suddenly been removed from it.

Just such a veil, she now perceived, had always hung between herself and life. It had been like the stage gauze which gives an illusive air of reality to the painted scene behind it, yet proves it, after all, to be no more than a painted scene.

So let's get back to Givré. The word comes from "givre" (notice there is no accent on the E in the basic form) which means frost. As with English, the word operates both as a noun and as a verb as in "to frost". "Givré" is the past participle of the verb: frosted.

And when something is covered with frost it is veiled.

So here is the question, does Anna Leath really understand the full consequences of removing the veil. Is the veil we see in form of life we see at Givré like real life only through a veil or are veils a condition of the kind of life that takes place there? Or, more broadly, is some sort of veil essential to any form of life?

I don't want to suggest I know the answer to those questions. And even if I did there is no reason anyone else should take me as an authority. But I think it is the question we need to be asking ourselves as we read this book.