Words&Dirt

Very few philosophical novels hold universal appeal, and this one doesn’t break the mold. I truly enjoyed Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, but wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. The story follows two women living in close proximity: Renée, the middle-aged concierge of a French apartment building, and Paloma, the precocious and suicidal daughter of two well-off tenants. Despite their superficial differences, both protagonists are obsessed with philosophy and art, and experience intense alienation from a world they feel will never accept them.

Barbery provides first-person narration for both characters, and we quickly learn that these women are existential worry-warts who’d rather muse about death and insoluble philosophical problems than leave the house and do something useful. Certain readers will find this premise delightful, while for others it will prove insufferable (a lukewarm reaction is least likely). Here’s an example of a passage that, depending on the reader, will induce either delighted chuckles or serious eye-rolling:

Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn––and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.

So, let us drink a cup of tea. (91)

This is characteristic of the book’s general tone, which is internal and angsty in the extreme. But Barbery also knows how to poke fun at her own pretensions, and does so with refreshing regularity. Despite the moodiness and relative lack of plot development, there are countless moments of insight, beauty, and comedy awaiting those willing to traverse this dense psychological terrain. Without a doubt, The Elegance of the Hedgehog is one of the most quotable books I’ve ever read (kudos to translator Alison Anderson).

Renée and Paloma are perhaps best understood as kindred spirits who’ve completely failed to recognize one another. Addressing the problem of intersubjectivity in general, Paloma provides a useful way to frame this predicament:

We never look beyond our assumptions and, what’s worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don’t recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors…when people walk by the concierge [Renée], all they see is a void, because she is not from their world.

As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone. (144-5)

In order for Paloma and Renée to “truly meet” each other, they need to confront the “permanent mirrors” that prevent them from connecting with the outside world. Paloma is disgusted with her bourgeois family and their frivolous materialism masked in socialist ideology, while Renée fears her “betters” will learn of her cultural vitality and mock her for having pretensions beyond her station in life. Whether these hangups are entirely legitimate is less important than the crippling effects they exert. Because they find it easier to seek refuge in thought and art, Renée and Paloma struggle to entertain the possibility that there are people in the world with whom they could meaningfully connect, or even learn to love:

At times like this, all the romantic, political, intellectual, metaphysical and moral beliefs that years of instruction and education have tried to inculcate in us seem to be foundering on the altar of our true nature, and society, a territorial field mined with powerful charges of hierarchy, is sinking into the nothingness of Meaning. Exeunt rich and poor, thinkers, researchers, decision-makers, slaves, the good and the evil, the creative and the conscientious, trade unionists and individualists, progressives and conservatives; all have become primitive hominoids whose nudging and posturing, mannerisms and finery, language and codes are all located on the genetic map of an average primate, and all add up to no more than this: hold your rank, or die.

At times like this you desperately need Art. You seek to reconnect with your spiritual illusions, and you wish fervently that something might rescue you from your biological destiny, so that all poetry and grandeur will not be cast out from the world.

Thus, to withdraw as far as you can from the jousting and combat that are the appanages of our warrior species, you…place upon this sorry theater the seal of Art and its greatest treasures. (97-8)

The sunlight needed to thaw these barriers comes by way of a Japanese gentleman named Ozu, who moves into the apartment building after a long-time tenant’s death. Ozu is refined and discerning, but not arrogant or insincere, and shares Renée’s interests to an uncanny degree. He is kind to Paloma and engages her in a way that makes her feel truly seen; their relationship is the first hint that Paloma might grow out of her adolescent fantasies of suicide. Ozu is not an assertive masculine force determined to bring these women into the open, but rather a playful anomaly whose unaffected manner and genuine curiosity create spaces in which their true selves can stand forth. He doesn’t cut a path, but cracks a door, inviting.

As one might expect, The Elegance of the Hedgehog has a bittersweet ending. The final pages are stirring, leaving the reader with much to contemplate about time, art, beauty and death. For me, it came together in a peculiar way.

I feel sometimes that humans are like letters traveling in envelopes. We do not know the sender, nor the destination, nor can we unfold and spread our contents out for full inspection. We traverse preset routes and, if all goes well, we get to where we’re going, even if we don’t know the significance of getting there. Within each of us is a kind of message, which may be benign, malignant, glorious, melancholy, or whatever mixture of adjectives. Only at the very end, when some great force pulls us from confinement and reveals our secret, do we get a true glimpse of what was inside all along.

The difference is that a letter is not concerned with itself, cannot ponder its possibilities or fret about timeliness of delivery. If it could, it might be as conflicted and full of trepidation as we are. So, how to think about this journey, if we must? Paloma has a suggestion:

We stayed there a few more minutes, listening to the music…There’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. (325)

We are far better acquainted with the “never” than the “always.” The never is death––our natural state. The always is the illusion of life, its fleeting efforts to scrawl a record of existence before high tide. But we do receive moments, as Paloma says, where the facts of existence and nonexistence become a kind of coexistence, with both states blended together, inseparable. We get little glimpses of reality, and call them beauty.

Rating: 9/10