That’s a Bit Much

Voyage Around My Room. Xavier de Maistre. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. New Directions, 2016. 244 pp. $14.95 (paper).

In 1790 Xavier de Maistre was put under house arrest for the offense
of dueling. His sentence was forty-two days. As I enter my third month
of social distancing (at the time of this writing), I suspect that many of
us would prefer to be stuck at home for something so roguish. Still,
I’m grateful that de Maistre documented his period of confinement in
the swift, playful memoir Voyage Around My Room (1794), which was
reissued four years ago by New Directions in a translation by Stephen
Sartarelli, along with its sequel, Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room
(1825), and an essay called “The Leper of the City of Aosta” (1811), all
collected in a single volume.

For a reader not especially well versed in the fluid geography of
Europe in the late eighteenth century, a few of the details can feel a
bit forbidding (“Siri: What’s a Savoyard?” “Siri: What’s a duchy?”), but
since the book takes place almost entirely inside one person’s head,
time and place are not essential factors.

The epigraph for the New Directions edition is an approving
quotation from de Maistre’s contemporary Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
(I’m tempted, anachronistically, to call it a blurb): “One derives both
pleasure and benefit from more than a few of [de Maistre’s] naïve and
subtle judgments.” Naïve and subtle is exactly right. On the surface,
you have modest proposals, blurted admissions, willful digressions, and
rueful self-deprecation—the comedy of the self regarding the self. But
sit with those naïve judgments for a moment, and they start to make a
skewed kind of sense. I’d count among de Maistre’s unofficial heirs
Kafka (the playful side), Robert Walser, Paul Beatty, and Lydia Davis—
writers so conscientiously sincere it scans as irony, or writers who use
irony as a trapdoor to reach levels of sincerity that would otherwise be
inaccessible. Part of the pleasure of this sort of writing is that it’s often
impossible to say which.

In practice, de Maistre’s voyage around his room is really a
voyage around his mind; the work is concerned first and foremost with
thought and the movement of thought. The furniture and objects in his
room serve as the moorings from which his thoughts set out, charting
increasingly wayward and surprising paths. “Heading north from my
armchair,” he might begin, “we discover my bed, which sits at the back
of the room and creates a most agreeable perspective.” Then we’re off,
drifting through a sensory description of waking up in the morning,
pausing briefly at a confession of his tendency to linger under the covers,
before passing through a brief sexual fantasy en route to a series
of meditations on the joys and pains of childbirth, the bed as the site
of hopes and dreams, and the merciful oblivion of sleep, until, finally,
we arrive at a series of images: “It is a cradle decked with flowers;—it
is love’s throne;—it is a sepulcher.” Actually, the pleasure of this voyage
is that we never end up quite arriving anywhere but are free to drift
continuously between contradictory sensations and ideas.

To the extent that de Maistre is capable of getting systematic, the
concept at the heart of the original Voyage is his “system of the soul
and the beast.” De Maistre differentiates this from the classical dichotomy
of body and soul, arguing that “the real culprit” is not the unthinking
body but rather “the beast, that sentient being utterly distinct from
the soul, that veritable individual that has his own separate existence,
tastes, inclinations and will.” The beast is the one who goes on reading uncomprehendingly to the bottom of the page even after the soul has
stopped paying attention, or who stupidly reaches for the tongs that
have been resting on embers, or who turns up at the door of Madame
de Hautcastel when the soul had intended to walk to the Court. (“I
shall leave it to the reader to imagine what would have happened had
I let my beast enter, alone, the house of so lovely a lady.”)

As he travels, de Maistre occasionally hovers around some definite
judgment. The art of painting is superior to music, in his view, though
all the paintings on his walls pale in comparison to the mirror, which
is, “for all those who look at it, a perfect image to which none can take
exception.” But inevitably, his course of thought gets mired, again
and again, in ambivalence and contradiction. Against his view on the
superiority of art, he remembers an argument Madame de Hautcastel
advanced about music’s more universal appeal, and ends up at sixes and
sevens. “Alas!” he concludes, “if all writers of disquisitions acted in good
faith, all their efforts would end this way.—For when beginning the
investigation of a question, one usually assumes a dogmatic tone, . . .
but discussion elicits objection,—and all ends up in doubt.”

De Maistre’s older brother, Joseph, a reactionary philosopher who
was better known than Xavier in their own time, and to whom Richard
Howard, in his compact introduction to this volume, attributes
“the roots of French fascism” (!), apparently counseled Xavier against
publishing his sequel to the voyage because, “according to the Spanish
proverb, Part II is always bad.” I’m happy to report that’s not the
case here. Though de Maistre cuts his travel time from forty-two days
down to a mere four hours, the Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room
is every bit as fun. In it, he develops a system for composing verse that
involves banging his head against the low, sloping ceiling, then dangles
perilously out his window to observe, alternately, a pretty neighbor on a
nearby balcony and the starry sky. And the waywardness of his thought
continues to yield surprises. In one memorable passage, a meditation
on the hour of midnight leads unexpectedly to a confrontation with the
mystery of death: “I am not superstitious, but . . . I have a premonition
that, if I were to die, it would be at midnight.—So I, too, shall die one
day? What! I, die? . . . I have some difficulty believing this: because
others, of course, die, nothing could be more natural; we see it every day,
we see them pass away, we grow accustomed to it: but to die oneself!
to die personally!—that’s a bit much.” Of course, this is a sentiment
that’s been expressed before, but there’s something mesmerizing about
the way the passage plays out as a Punch-and-Judy show, a shadowboxing
argument with the self that ends on an understated note of willful
skepticism—“that’s a bit much.”

Given the continuity between the Voyage and the Nocturnal Expedition,
I expected “The Leper of the City of Aosta” to feel a bit tacked on,
but it too deals, quite naturally, with the theme of isolation. And here,
de Maistre encounters a figure who is not living a solitary existence
as a slap on the wrist for engaging in an “affair of honor,” or to satisfy
his own imaginative whims, but rather, in order to protect others from the
specter of contagion. The bulk of the essay is structured as a dialogue,
and “the soldier” (a stand-in for de Maistre) supposes that he and the
leper must be kindred spirits: “Indeed, I often choose to be alone; our
ideas are perhaps more similar than you think.” But over the course of
their conversation it becomes clear that the leper’s solitude is different
not just in degree from the soldier’s but in kind.

In the springtime, the leper says, he finds himself drawn out of
doors, feeling “a strange desire and a confused feeling of great happiness
that could be mine to enjoy, were it not refused me.” Wandering
the countryside, he tries to partake in the season of renewal and
blossoming while maintaining a careful social distance: “I avoid being seen
by the very same people whom I am burning to meet; and from the top
of the hill, hidden amidst the brush like a wild beast, I turn my eyes
upon the city of Aosta.”

This beast is of quite a different species from de Maistre’s own,
with its absent-minded blunders and untamed appetites. Perhaps it’s
a glimpse of what de Maistre, in his voyages, has merely been playing
at. Even as the soldier, in de Maistre’s telling, comes off conspicuously
well (he’s the first person who’s been bold and compassionate enough
to offer the leper his hand), one senses that de Maistre has arrived at
an unbreachable gap in his comprehension of true isolation. Which
is not to say the opposite shore is without its own small consolations.
As the leper tells him, “There is also, at the final limit of misfortune,
a joy that the common run of men cannot know, and which will seem
to you rather odd: the joy of existing and breathing.”

Perhaps that’s not a joy that seems so odd today.

Read more from Issue 17.2.