“Why,” asks the protagonist halfway through Marie NDiaye’s latest novel, Vengeance is Mine, “did everything have to be so twisted, frustrating, unnameable?” (134). It’s a question that the reader of this dark psychological fiction shares. Maître Susane—a protagonist whose identity is inextricable from her profession as a lawyer, signaled by the honorific Maître (literally “master”)—is a woman struggling to name her own experience. From the first page, the Maître is confused about the fundamentals of her life, and so are we: a man who enters her office, Gilles Principaux, reminds her of a boy she knew once, whom she associates with the “happiest moment of her life” (25). But she is not sure, first, whether Gilles Principaux is that boy, and second, what even happened on that day. By the time she is asking the reader why everything must be so convoluted, she has doubled back on her own story, wondering whether what happened between her and Principaux was not a romantic and intellectual awakening but rather a sexual assault that her conscious mind has labored to suppress.
Maître Susane’s interrogation into her memory is as urgent as it is futile: she needs to know whether to pursue the “vengeance” of the book’s title, a vengeance that she imagines might be authorized by “a justice far higher than society’s justice… and also her waking self’s justice, which, doubting, delaying, made her forget any thought of punishing the boy who might have been named Gilles Principaux” (169). Her pursuit of justice through self-knowledge is, as befits her profession, lawyerly. Maître Susane occupies a mental space that a character in one of NDiaye’s short stories memorably describes as the “courtroom of the conscience” (“tribunal de ma conscience”).[1]
“Conscience,” in French as in English, has connotations both of prescribed notions of morality and of consciousness, awareness of oneself.[2] NDiaye’s fiction often explores this figure of mind by following a single character’s thoughts in a close third person as she puts herself on trial before imagined interlocutors. Thus, in Vengeance is Mine, translated into English last year by Jordan Stump, Maître Susane “prepare[s] to mount an ardent defense,” “defend[s] her memories,” and imagines herself “making the case for her own innocence in a hypothetical trial” (34, 82, 167). At the same time, she acknowledges that she is “pleading the case incompetently” because she is not sure “who [she is] actually pleading for”—if there even is a single, inviolable self to defend (33).
Amidst this mental trial and existential crisis, Maître Susane is preparing for an actual trial. NDiaye adds yet another twist by making Gilles the Maître’s client. He has come to the Maître to seek her assistance in defending his wife, Marlyne Principaux, who has been arrested after drowning the couple’s three children in the bathtub. This horrific crime imported from Medea to modern-day France compels the Maître’s professional and personal fascination, and together, the “Principaux”—whose name literally translates to the “Principals”—occupy a central place in Maître Susane’s sinuous dialogue between self and soul.[3]
Yet while the protagonist is obsessed with the Principaux and their crimes, the novel slyly takes a more expansive view, devoting just as much attention to Maître Susane’s housekeeper, Sharon, an undocumented immigrant from Mauritius. Maître Susane employs Sharon in the unnecessary labor of cleaning her (already immaculate) house while working pro bono to prepare Sharon’s residency case. The Maître sees herself (as she imagines telling her friends) as a benevolent liberal, performing “an act of militancy” to “further a cause” (9). Yet sometimes, she wishes she could forget about Sharon entirely: “[…] That insignificant woman now occupied a place in her thoughts as substantial as Marlyne Principaux’s” (145). How dare she.
In fact, despite her presumed insignificance in the eyes of Maître Susane and her invisibility (as an undocumented immigrant) in the eyes of the law, Sharon is central to Vengeance is Mine, allocated just as much space in the narrative as any of the “principals.” Looking through Maître Susane’s eyes, we glimpse only dark flashes of Sharon’s agency and complexity, like silhouettes against the spotlight that Maître Susane turns on her own thoughts and feelings. NDiaye gives us asymmetrical access to the characters’ thoughts, however, to expose the asymmetry of power in their relationship and the logic that sustains it. Ultimately, she not only refuses to corroborate the myth of Sharon’s insignificance, but turns our attention to Sharon’s elusive agency, which Maître Susane fails to comprehend.
NDiaye’s subtle but powerful treatment of immigration, challenging reductive conceptions of difference, is typical of her work and of how she narrates her own personal history in relation to it. Born in France to a white mother and a Senegalese father who cut off contact and returned to his home country, NDiaye is quick to point out that her story does not conform to established narratives about the immigrant experience. Raised in a predominantly white community in the Parisian suburb Bourg-la-Reine, she came to believe that there was “no place for Africa in [her] life.[4] But the book for which she is best known—Three Strong Women, which won France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 2009—tells the interlocking stories of three characters whose lives are shaped, in idiosyncratic ways, by their Franco-African identities and immigration histories. In the final vignette, a Senegalese woman compelled by isolation, rejection, and poverty to attempt illegal immigration to France offers a forceful and explicit defense of her own particularity: “[…] she’d always been conscious of her uniqueness and aware… that she, Khady Demba, was strictly irreplaceable… [that] she was indivisible and precious and could only ever be herself.”[5]
Khady Demba finds resilience in imagining herself in the third person as a unified entity bound to a proper name: as, in other words, a fictional character, at once typical and singular.[6] But in other contexts, NDiaye shows us, character can also be wielded to dehumanize and oppress. NDiaye’s recent collaboration with the director Alice Diop and the editor Amrita David on the script for the 2022 film St. Omer expresses her resistance to characterological singularity. The film is another Medea story, a fictionalized retelling of the 2016 trial in which Fabienne Kabou, a French Senegalese immigrant, was convicted of drowning her fifteen-month-old daughter.[7] As the scholar and critic Francey Russell has convincingly argued, St. Omer thematizes the legal system’s doomed preoccupation with constructing a narrative of the accused person’s character—with character being what the philosopher Michel Foucault called the “supplemental material” generated by the modern state’s “penal machine.”[8] Indeed, as Russell points out, for Foucault, the central question that the modern legal system seeks to answer is not “What have you done?” but “Who are you?” Thus, when a defendant—like the fictionalized Kabou, renamed Laurence Coly in the film—refuses to cooperate in constructing her character, often claiming not to know why she acted as she did, the system breaks down. In Foucault’s terms: “the machinery jams, the gears seize up. Why? Because the accused remains silent.”[9]
Foucault establishes, and St. Omer confirms, that the accused can resist the state by refusing to speak. In Vengeance is Mine, NDiaye extends Foucault’s critique of the state’s preoccupation with legal character to the reader’s preoccupation with literary character, suggesting that the machinery—of the state and of the novel—can jam not only when a person remains silent but also when she says too much. As a lawyer, Maître Susane is overwhelmed by the disclosures of her clients, whom she repeatedly interviews, and she ends her summation (and the book) by insisting on the impossibility of establishing a person’s character with certainty: “Who is [Gilles Principaux] then? We think we know now, but still we wonder: Could I be mistaken?” (224). The same might be said of our relationship as readers with Maître Susane: the more she confesses, the less we know with confidence.
Sharon, however, remains silent in the manner of Foucault’s criminal who resists the state. Maître Susane interprets her silence as a threat, and attempts to ventriloquize her “mute, serene, imperturbable” housekeeper in her thoughts (9). When she pulls Sharon in for a hug, she feels Sharon’s heart beating “softly, almost imperceptibly”—barely able to make a sound. Overwriting this faint inscription of personhood, Maître Susane imagines filling Sharon’s body with her own “savage heart… her own fervor and revolt” (10). The image evokes but subverts the stereotype of the “savage” colonial subject, reminding us of the geopolitical and racial otherness inscribed in the relationship between the Frenchwoman and the Mauritian immigrant. It is an otherness the Maître cannot tolerate. She imagines her unspoken thoughts flowing into Sharon’s mind like “eggs in a spawning bed,” permitting a “bond” to form between Sharon’s “unknowable emotions” and her own (11). In other words, she longs to penetrate Sharon’s interiority, not to know her but to domesticate her, hatching her own thoughts like salmon inside Sharon’s brain.
Sharon, however, refuses to be controlled, and at the limits of Maître Susane’s consciousness, pursues a project of resistance—indeed, of “vengeance” in Biblical terms. Maître Susane seeks one kind of vengeance, legal retribution. Sharon pursues another, in the form of God’s injunction to kill thine enemy with kindness: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head” (Romans 12:19-20).[10] Sharon, the Maître’s supposed dependent, becomes the cook, cleaner, and babysitter at the center of the household, torturing the Maître with the efficiency and indispensability of her care. Sharon goes out of her way to prepare beautifully plated, elaborate, expensive meals that give the Maître “a good case of the creeps” as well as terrible indigestion (78). These painful feasts are, perhaps, a just punishment for a woman who would rather see Sharon’s beautiful plates as “endowed with a soul” than acknowledge Sharon’s own humanity (79).
Moreover, even as Maître Susane becomes dependent on Sharon, Sharon refuses to depend on Maître Susane, cleaning for other employers during the hours when she is supposed to be working for the Maître. One of her clients is even named Madame Principaux (no relation to Gilles and Marlyne), suggesting that the Maître’s “principals” are not at the center of Sharon’s universe. Sharon refuses to hand over the only document that Maître Susane requires to complete her residency paperwork, denying the Maître the fulfillment of her good deed. And Sharon never professes sincere gratitude, alternating between ironic volubility and impassive silence. “Every evening my first prayer goes not to God but to Me Susane,” she exaggerates, causing the Maître an agony of embarrassment (145).[11] At other times, she is so quiet that the Maître thinks Sharon “had privately put [Maître] Susane on trial [and] had found her guilty” (92).
Guilty of what? In a final twist, it turns out that Maître Susane, just as much as the Principaux, is on trial in this novel. And her crime is not so different from theirs as it might appear. Marlyne murders her children because she refuses to accept their alterity, to see them as anything but characters in a tragedy in which she is confined to the double role of the perfect mother/infanticidal monster. Similarly, Maître Susane cannot accept that Sharon has a particular self (or selves) that defy easy characterization; she alternates between generalizing Sharon as an “undocumented Mauritian” and seeing Sharon as an extension of herself, a woman “exactly like” her (10, 14).
NDiaye tips her hand when Marlyne, in a monologue, recalls overhearing the voice of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas at the precise moment when she drowns her children in the bathtub: “But I was listening to a show about philosophy on France Culture but they were talking about Levinas but they quoted him: ‘The face is what forbids us to…’ But I liked the sentence but I still remember it” (172). Some readers might recognize this radio program as “An Ethical and Metaphyiscal Relation on the Face,” a popular ten-part interview between Levinas and Philippe Némo first aired in 1981 and frequently rebroadcast, most recently in 2021.[12] They might also recall the end of the sentence, a central tenet of the Levinasian ethics of nonviolence which Marlyne professes to remember but fails to quote: “The face is what forbids us to kill”.[13]
By “face,” as he explains elsewhere in the same interview, Levinas means something beyond physical characteristics like eye color, nose shape, skin color, and also beyond “character” in a legal or literary sense, beyond defined roles like “professor at the Sorbonne, a Supreme Court justice, son of so-and-so, everything that is in one’s passport.”[14] For Levinas, it is this kind of “face,” the “face” as an expression of irreducible particularity, that compels us to do no harm to others—not to kill—even when we feel threatened by difference.
It is precisely this ethical compulsion of the “face” that Maître Susane fails to recognize, and that perhaps elicits her dim awareness of guilt even as she insists (to herself) she is innocent. “Why,” she wonders plaintively, “could [Sharon] not judge [her] with a compassionate eye?…. Me Susane had never done wrong” (177). So she thinks, but everything she’s said to herself in this novel can and should be used against her. She has mistaken Sharon’s silence for simplicity, denied her the complex consciousness she so obsessively explores in herself. She may testify to us that Sharon is “insignificant,” but all the evidence suggests that Sharon’s consciousness is just as rich, as manifold, and as irreducibly particular as her lawyer’s, even if it remains unknown to her and to us.
Vengeance is Mine is an ambitious, engrossing novel—if it can even be called a novel at all. At times, the refusal to cohere a character, to pursue a plot, to leave the claustrophobic room of the Maître’s mind, can feel frustrating for the reader. But that is, perhaps, the point. At its best, Vengeance is Mine reminds us that “huddled masses” are composed of individuals, not stock characters in a courtroom, whether real or imagined. To come face-to-face with any one of them should be to realize that she contains multitudes in excess of the law, and of the novel.
Notes:
[1] Marie NDiaye, “The Good Denis,” The New Yorker, December 18, 2023; originally published in French as “Le bon Denis,” AOC media – Analyse Opinion Critique, March 27, 2022, https://aoc.media/fiction/2022/03/26/le-bon-denis/.
[2] E.g., one definition of conscience that conflates the English words “conscience” and “consciousness” is “Organisation de son psychisme qui, en lui permettant d’avoir connaissance de ses états, de ses actes et de leur valeur morale, lui permet de se sentir exister, d’être présent à lui-même” (“Organisation of one’s psyche that permits him to have recognition of his states, of his acts, and of their moral value; that permits him to know that he exists, to be present to himself”). See “Conscience,” in Centre National de Resources Textuelles et Lexicales, accessed January 10, 2024, https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/conscience. The word “conscience,” in English, can also be used to signify “senses without a moral dimension” and particularly “a person’s inmost thought or feelings,” though its usage in this latter sense is now rare. See “conscience,” in Oxford English Dictionary, accessed November 25, 2024: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/conscience_n?tab=meaning_and_use#8570992.
[3] See “Principal” (plural “principaux”), especially IA and IIB, in Centre National de Resources Textuelles et Lexicales, accessed September 28, 2024, https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/principal.
[4] Aurélie Maurin, “Interview with Marie NDiaye,” The White Review, accessed May 3, 2024, https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-marie-ndiaye/. See also Laura Cappelle, “Marie NDiaye Raises Questions She Has No Intention of Answering,” The New York Times, October 18, 2023, accessed November 12, 2024.
[5] Marie NDiaye, Three Strong Women, trans. John Fletcher (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 235–36.
[6] As Roland Barthes argues, a character in fiction is the sum of typical qualities that can be turned into a list, like “turbulence, artistic gift, independence.” And yet, “What gives the illusion that the sum is supplemented by a precious remainder (something like individuality, in that, qualitative and ineffeable, it may escape the vulgar bookkeeping of compositional characters) is the Proper Name…” (S/Z, translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1974: 191).
[7] Although Marlyne Principaux also seems inspired by Kabou, NDiaye deviates from the historical example by presenting Marlyne Principaux’s race as insignificant to her case. Through Maître Susane’s eyes, we catch only glimpses of Marlyne Principaux’s face—“she registered only pieces… like bits of a painting neatly cut up into three or more fragments”—but one might argue that Marlyne is implicitly racialized as a white woman, with a “thick growth of dull blond hair,” a “pale” mouth, and “dull green, grayish” eyes (106-7). Asked about this description by an interviewer, however, NDiaye insisted that she wanted the character to read as racially blank rather than white, per se, “so as to not add anything further to the situation. If she had been a Black mother, that could have brought the thinking about her motives to other problems that I didn’t feel like tackling here. I would have had to talk about her origins, her presence in France, the problems she might have encountered.” See Jasmine Vojdani, “Writer Marie NDiaye on Her Book ‘Vengeance Is Mine,’” Vulture, October 16, 2023, https://www.vulture.com/article/marie-ndiaye-profile-vengeance-is-mine.html.
[8] Francey Russell, “Identifications and Their Refusal: On Alice Diop’s ‘Saint Omer,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2, 2023, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/identifications-and-their-refusal-on-alice-diops-saint-omer.
[9] Michel Foucault, trans. Alain Baudot and Jane Couchman, “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 1 (1978):1-18, 1.
[10] The echoes are still present but perhaps somewhat attenuated in the original French: the title of the novel is La vengeance m’appartient (lit., Vengeance Belongs to Me); one online French translation of the Bible has “la vengeance m’appartient,” but another has, “À moi la vengeance.” See https://context.reverso.net/translation/english-french/Vengeance+is+mine%3B+I+will+repay+saith+the+Lord; https://saintebible.com/romans/12-19.htm
[11] As the translator, Jordan Stump, explains in a note appended to the text, the honorific “Maître” is often shortened in the original text, with the result that the character’s name reads as “Me Susane”; to avoid confusion for English-speaking readers, he renders the title with the “e” in superscript.
[12] “Réflexion éthique et métaphysique sur le visage: épisode 7/10 du podcast Levinas par Levinas,” France Culture (2022: Radio France), accessed January 12, 2024, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-nuits-de-france-culture/les-chemins-de-la-connaissance-levinas-7-10-1ere-diffusion-10-03-1981-2069338.
[13] Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 85–86; in the original French, ““Le visage est exposé, menace, comme nous invitant a un acte de violence. En mėme temps, le visage est ce qui nous interdit de tuer,” Emmanuel Lévinas, Éthique et Infini: Dialogues Avec Philippe Nemo (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard et Radio-France, 1982), 90.
[14] Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, 86.