Life Form

by Amélie Nothomb

  When I have the courage to look at myself naked in a mirror, I force myself to go beyond the horror my reflection inspires and I think, “This is me. I am both what I am and what I do. No one else can boast of such an accomplishment. But did I really do this all on my own? How can it be?”

  The last I heard, you were working on your sixty-fifth manuscript. Your books aren’t long, fair enough. Still, when you look at your sixty-five books you must think, the way I do, that it is simply unbelievable that you produced all that all on your own. Particularly as you aren’t done yet, you’ll go on writing.

  I hope you don’t think I’m completely nuts or bad-mannered.

  Sincerely,

  Melvin Mapple

  I confess that I was touched by what he wrote about my op-ed piece in the New York Times. “Vanitas vanitatum sed omnia vanitas.” As for the rest, even though I did understand what he was trying to say, I felt faintly uncomfortable at the thought that he was likening my ink and paper children to his mound of flesh. Every ounce of pride in me wanted to protest that when I write, it is in a state of asceticism and hunger, I have to reach the depths of my reserves of strength to achieve this supreme act, and putting on weight, even in such daunting proportions, cannot be as trying.

  But I could not possibly answer him in such an unfriendly way. I preferred to take his words at face value:

  Paris, April 21, 2009

  Dear Melvin Mapple,

  I am now working on my sixty-sixth manuscript and I was struck by how pertinent your comparison is. On reading your letter, I thought about the avant-garde movement in contemporary art known as body art.

  I knew a young art student who decided for her dissertation to transform the anorexia she was experiencing at the time into a work of art: she patiently photographed her shrinking body in her bathroom mirror, kept track of how much she lost every day, recorded the figures alongside the clumps of hair she collected, wrote down the date her period stopped, and so on. Her dissertation, which needed no commentary, was presented in the form of a syllabus entitled “My Anorexia,” and it contained only photographs, dates, a weight log, and clumps of hair, right until the end which in her case, was not death, but page 100, since that was the maximum number of pages allowed. She had barely enough strength to defend her dissertation before her professors, who gave her the highest mark. Then she was admitted to a clinic. At present she is doing much better and I would not rule out the possibility that her academic endeavor had a great deal to do with it. Anorexics need to know that their suffering is acknowledged, not condemned. The young woman had found a very ingenious way to do this while resolving the ever thorny problem of the dissertation.

  Mutatis mutandis, you could follow her example. I don’t know if you’ve been photographing your weight gain, but it’s not too late to start. Keep a record of the figures and all the physical and mental symptoms, how it evolves. You must surely have some photographs from the days when you were thin, which you could use for the beginning of your notebook. You will go on putting on weight, so you can take ever more impressive photographs. Make sure you emphasize those parts of your body your corpulence seems to favor. But don’t neglect the underprivileged areas for all that, such as your feet, which may not have swollen as much as your belly or your arms, but your shoe size must have gone up all the same.

  You see, Melvin, you were right: your obesity is your oeuvre. You are surfing a wave of artistic modernity. You must do something about it right away because the thing that is fascinating about what you’re doing is not just the result, it’s also the process. To make sure the big shots of the body art world recognize you as one of their own, perhaps you should also keep a record of everything you eat. In the case of the young anorexic girl, that was a far simpler chapter: every day, nothing. In your case, it may well prove tedious. Don’t lose heart. Think of your work, which, as an artist, is your sole raison d’être.

  Best wishes,

  Amélie Nothomb

  At the time I mailed this letter I could not say what my precise state of mind was. I would have been incapable of saying exactly how much of my letter was cordial sincerity and how much was irony. Melvin Mapple had earned my respect and sympathy, but I had the same problem with him that I have with one hundred percent of the other creatures on earth, human or otherwise: the barrier. You meet someone, in person or in writing. The first stage consists in acknowledging that the other person exists: at times this is a moment of wonder. In that instant you are like Robinson Crusoe and Friday on the beach on the island, you gaze at each other, stupefied, delighted that there can be another person in this world who is both other and close to you at the same time. Your existence seems all the more intense in the knowledge that the other person is aware of it, and you feel a wave of enthusiasm for this providential individual who is there to respond to you. You attribute a fabulous name to this creature: friend, lover, comrade, host, colleague—depending. It is an idyll. The alternation between identity and otherness (“That’s just like me! That’s just the opposite of me!”) leaves you in a daze, a childlike rapture. You are so intoxicated that you cannot see the danger that lies just ahead.

  And suddenly, the other is there, behind the door. You sober up all at once, you don’t know how to tell him that he wasn’t invited. It’s not that you don’t like him anymore, it’s that you like him when he is other, that is, someone who is not you. And now this other is trying to get closer, as if he wanted to assimilate you or be assimilated by you.

  You know you are going to have to spell things out. There are various ways to go about this, explicitly or implicitly. Whatever the case, it is a rough passage. Over two-thirds of relationships fail to make it. Instead there is hostility, misunderstanding, silence, sometimes hatred. Bad faith presides over these failures, alleging that if the friendship had been sincere, there would have been no problem. That’s not true. This crisis is inevitable. Even if you genuinely adore the other person, you’re not prepared to have them move in with you.

  It would be an illusion to believe that an epistolary exchange could protect you from such a pitfall. It cannot. Other people can move in and impose themselves in so many ways. I’ve lost count of how many correspondents have eventually told me that they were just like me, that they were writers just like me. Melvin Mapple had found a very particular manner of assimilating himself to me.

  People are like countries. It’s wonderful that there are so many of them, and that a perpetual continental drift allows you to meet all these new islands. But if the plate tectonics leave the unknown territory against your shore, hostility instantly arises. There are only two solutions: war or diplomacy.

  I tend to favor the latter. However, I did not know whether my last letter to Melvin had been diplomatic or not; my need to send it had prevailed. His reaction would inform me as to the nature of my message.

  Diplomatic letter is a pleonasm. The etymology of “diplomat” is the ancient Greek word diploma, “paper folded in two,” in other words, a letter. Diplomacy began with correspondence. A letter can indeed be a way of saying things pleasantly. Whence a historical contamination of both practices: a diplomat often writes a great number of missives, and the epistolary genre often adopts diplomatic mannerisms.

  More than any other form of writing, a letter is addressed to a reader. I began to wait for my reader’s response with diffuse anxiety. Oddly enough, it wasn’t impatience. The absence of a letter would have been the appropriate reaction.

  Tired of my life in France, I went to Belgium to rest for a week. For seven days I enjoyed an unbelievable luxury: epistolary absolute zero. Correspondence is no different from anything else: an excess is as unbearable as a shortage. I’ve had more than my fair share of both extremes. I think I still prefer excess, but the fact remains that it’s very trying. A shortage of mail, which was my fate during my long adolescence, makes you feel like you’ve been given the cold shoulder, you’ve b
een rejected, you are plague-stricken. Excess propels you into a pond full of piranhas who are all trying to take a big bite out of you. The happy medium, which must be very pleasant, is terra incognita to me.

  The only solution I could find to this deadlock was to flee. The upside of this situation is that you experience happiness of a sort with which very few people are acquainted: the joy of receiving no epistles, the headiness of not having to write any.

  It is a very particular form of exultation, where a demonic little voice never stops murmuring in your head, “You are not in the process of opening an envelope that weighs a ton, you are not in the process of writing out the words ‘Dear Thingummy,’ you are not catching up on your correspondence . . . ” This refrain of internal whispering multiplies your pleasure fifteen-fold.

  But all good things come to an end. On April 29 I took the train back to Paris and on April 30 I was back at my desk. It was covered with a pile of envelopes of varying sizes.

  I took a deep breath and sat down. To confront the enemy I have a method: I begin by sorting. I separate the unknown senders from the known ones, then further sort the ones I’m looking forward to reading into a pile on the left, and the ones that look like they might be tedious on the right. As always, this latter group is boundless. It is a law of nature, even if I repeat myself: the desired letter is short, the undesirable one is voluminous. This is true for every level of desire: a refined dish will not spill over the plate, vintage wines are served parsimoniously, exquisite creatures are slender, and a tête-à-tête is the encounter you anticipate most eagerly.

  This rule is so deep-rooted that it is pointless trying to influence it. How many times have I suggested to those correspondents of mine who are likable enough but seriously verbose not to send me more than one two-sided page? How many times have I explained to them that this is how they will appear in their best light?

  After two or three letters where, very kindly, they do honor my wish, there come the inexorable additions: a simple postcard to start with, then an extra page, and finally the same old sandwich-letters that turn an envelope into a hopeless picnic wrapper. Format, like clothes, makes the man; it would seem it can’t be helped.

  Nor is there anything I can do, as long as my preference lies the way of simple letters rather than epistolary choucroute garnie. So I begin with these ones, skimming through the contents to determine whether I can read them without vomiting. I save the letters deserving of the name for last—the brief missives, in other words. It is the policy of dessert.

  That April 30, as I was doing my sorting, I recognized an envelope from Iraq. It’s not that I had forgotten about Melvin Mapple, but for one week he had no longer been front and center in my mind. I felt the mixture of joy and despondency which he now aroused in me. Faithful to my technique, I began by opening all the envelopes with a pair of scissors. It took me an hour. I read the American soldier’s letter first of all:

  Baghdad, April 26, 2009

  Dear Amélie Nothomb,

  Thank you for your letter, which filled me with enthusiasm. You’ve done more than just understand me, you’ve given me a brilliant idea. What a pity I didn’t write to you as soon as I got to Baghdad! I would have been taking pictures of my weight gain right from the start, and my obesity notebook would have been even more spectacular. But you’re right, it’s never too late, and I have a few photos of the days when I weighed a hundred and twenty pounds, then a hundred and eighty, so it will give an impression of progression all the same. Thanks to you, now when I weigh myself in the morning I am filled with joy: not a day goes by where I haven’t put on weight. Of course there are good days and bad days: sometimes I only put on a quarter of a pound, but other times I gain two whole pounds in twenty-four hours and that is truly gratifying.

  There was no need for you to feel awkward suggesting I keep track of everything I eat. Now I go to dinner with my notebook and you cannot imagine how much fun it is writing everything down. My buddies are in on the project and they help me, which is pretty useful, because you always forget some little thing like peanuts or a bag of chips. This artistic project is our project, and I’m not just my own work of art, I’m also my buddies’ work of art. They encourage me to eat, they take my picture. I was dreading they might steal the idea and start their own notebooks devoted to their obesity, but I was wrong, they’re not the least bit tempted. They don’t have any aesthetic sense, but they’re prepared to support mine. My nickname is Body Art. I love it.

  I didn’t hide the fact that it was your idea, and they were impressed. Who else but you could have come up with such an idea? Not only did it have to be a writer, it had to be this writer. You know, I’ve read a lot in my life, and I’ve gotten to know, so to speak, quite a few authors, by reading their complete works, and I can assure you: this is definitely an Amélie Nothomb sort of idea.

  I really appreciate it. Thanks to your last letter, you’ve helped me find a meaning in life. It seems to me that ought to be the goal of every writer. You deserve to practice this fine profession. When I told you that my obesity was my life’s work, I thought you were going to make fun of me. Well, not only did you not make fun of me, you gave me the means to fulfill my dream and share it with others. Without the notebook you advised me to keep, how could I have explained to other people what I was doing?

  It’s all the more important, given the fact that my art has a political significance. My obesity is anything but gratuitous, because it has carved my commitment into my body: to make the entire world see the unprecedented horror of this war. Obesity has become eloquent: my own expanse reflects the scale of human destruction on either side. It also speaks of how unlikely it would be for me to return to a semblance of normality: just suppose it were even possible to lose over two hundred pounds, it would take ages, and untold effort. And how does a guy like me look after he’s melted away? His skin will be flaccid and hanging like an old man’s. Not to mention the inevitable relapses, because you can never recover from such a serious addiction.

  Every modern war leaves indelible marks wherever it goes; of all the lasting damage caused by the war in Iraq, obesity, I think, will be the most emblematic. Human fat will be for George W. Bush what napalm was for Johnson.

  It’s not that justice will be done. But at least the accusation will be heard. There’s no better way than through a work of art. When we get home it will be easy for me and my buddies to get the attention of the media and, who knows, maybe even some gallery owners. So it’s important not to lose weight. Which is just as well, because we have no intention of losing any.

  Sincerely,

  Melvin Mapple

  This letter plunged me into deep dismay. I was embarrassed by the opening: I always feel uneasy when someone praises me or thanks me effusively if I haven’t deserved it. And while, to be sure, I hadn’t intended to be cynical in my previous letter, I recalled that it was ironical all the same. Plainly, the soldier had failed to grasp this. I squirmed.

  It got worse after that. The thing is, he truly believed in his artistic project. All I had done was tell him what the anorexic young woman had accomplished: it was a true story, but it was nothing more than a final dissertation. Melvin Mapple, however, never seemed to doubt for one moment his status as a work of art, and what was worse, its imminent success. “It will be easy for me and my buddies to get the attention of the media”—I felt like asking him what made him so sure—“and, who knows, maybe even some gallery owners”—my poor Melvin, what sort of world was he living in?! My heart sank at the sight of his unwavering optimism, so typical of those who just do not know.

  And finally, the last straw: his resolution not to lose weight. I was providing that gang of obese soldiers with the pretext they needed to wall themselves up in their fat. They would die from it. And it would be my fault.

  I reread the letter. Mapple was out of his mind. “Human fat will be for George W. Bush what napalm was
for Johnson”: it was blatantly obvious that such a comparison was both inappropriate and indecent. The soldiers and their fat were a matter for the Americans only, and would disappear with them, whereas napalm had been dumped upon an occupied country and would go on for a long time poisoning the existence of the civilian population.

  Melvin might call himself an artist, but I had not known how to provide him with one essential artistic quality: doubt. An artist who does not doubt is as obnoxious as the lady’s man who instantly assumes he’s in occupied territory. Behind every work of art lies the enormous pretension of exhibiting one’s vision of the world. If such obvious arrogance is not counterbalanced by the tribulations of doubt, all that remains is a monster who is to art what a fanatic is to faith.

  It must be said in my defense that although the Mapple case might defy comparison, it was not unusual for people to send me samples of their work: a page of writing, a drawing, a CD. When I had the time, I would reply and tell them very simply what I thought. You can always find a way to be sincere without being disagreeable. But this was his own body that Melvin had submitted to me. How could I find the necessary detachment to express myself on the subject?

  I was not refuting the essence of what I had written to him. No, the rub was that now the soldier was expecting his art to receive public recognition.

  I decided to be pragmatic and downplay the situation. After all, Melvin Mapple was not the first aspiring artist to come face-to-face with the harsh reality of the art market. If he felt like trying his luck, who was I to dissuade him? There was no reason I should take his future disappointment so much to heart. Given the present state of affairs, he would be in Baghdad for a long while still, and he would surely not be crazy enough to go trying his luck with Iraqi gallery owners. And there would be plenty of time to worry about his project once he was back in the States, assuming he didn’t give up on it in the meantime. Feeling somewhat calmer, I wrote: