Literature has the modesty of cumbersome things. Those that are not talked about, but that pass where they can anyway – establishing themselves, in the end, as a memory and a habit. It will be enough to read this book by Didier Eribon, who belongs to the family of men with deep eyes, Life, old age and death of a woman of the people. But let’s not be fooled by the title, even though it resonates with the French realist novel. It’s much more. Who had already read Return to Reims you will not be disappointed by this twin, double and mirror-image; he will find echoes of Annie Ernaux’s language (published not by chance by the same publisher), but above all those of Pierre Bourdieu’s lesson – all in a text that once again presents itself as hybrid. Autobiography, story of minimal lives, theoretical essay, homage to the deceased mother who perhaps was not given enough attention and kindness, especially in the final phase of life.
The drama of children faced with dying parents, Eribon warns, consists in understanding too late that the parents could physically disappear. This is what happens to him with his mother; in response, here he carries out a secular transubstantiation in words: he brings to life the humble remains of unexceptional fathers and mothers. Indeed, even unpresentable: the mother of these pages is spiteful, racist, ignorant, consumed by social envy. Eribon insists on marital and work frustrations, on the small dreams of a single-family house which from a certain point onwards became entangled in the grossly left-wing ideals of the mother, so much so that over the decades it was transformed into a reactionary fair, hostile to immigrants and foreigners who “invaded her house”, as well as everything that smells of radical chic (including her son, whose judgment she both fears and challenges). It is not only and is no longer the decadence of the individual, it is the epilogue of a class consciousness.
The insistence on the details of the minimal life of individuals belonging to a lower social class responds to the desire to restore body to a painful and unknown humanity; works in the folds ofEncyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš, not surprisingly explicitly cited: «How I would like to have an encyclopedia entry like that, about my mother! Even about my father. On those common people whose individual history is rarely reported.” Eribon succeeds, leaning out to look with clarity, almost objectifying his mother’s life; he does it with an entomologist’s eye – benignly, without acrimony.
The story, always slow and flowing, starts from the moment in which Eribon and his brothers have to decide whether and how to admit their mother to a nursing home. It will immediately become clear as the clinic’s whirlpool swallows up the old woman that the loss of autonomy and the consequent hospitalization have the same harmful effects for everyone, rich or poor: even before death, old age is the level of life.
Reading these pages we discover that there is a lexical repertoire linked to old age: the fee that the police ask to raise elderly people who have fallen at home alone from the ground is called “lifting cost”, the decline that follows hospitalization is called “slipping syndrome ” and so on… The shock linked to the disorientation of finding oneself in a new environment in which one is uprooted from the past and without the comfort of a future; physical constraint (being in a bed with bars); the forced socializing with strangers (who in their blank stares foretell what awaits the newcomer); the scarcity of care linked to the insufficiency of staff: Eribon spares nothing of the series of sufferings linked to the nursing home. The clinic is configured as a true “total institution”, to use the expression used by Erwin Goffmann and which unites hospitals, mental hospitals, prisons, concentration camps and barracks.
But it’s not just the hospice. There is her life as a mother, stuck in an unhappy marriage, first a worker and then a domestic worker with her friendships and her romance novels which soon mark a distance between the student-son and the mother with limited cultural tools. There is old age, late falling in love, there is death, last wishes, the progressive fading of the desire to live and, above all, what happens to those who remain, to those who lose the role of a child. Mourning is the guilty conscience of the survivor, says Imre Kertész.
There is also what does not appear in the title: critical theory. It arrives at the end, without altering the story, naturally inserting itself into the reasoning and anecdotes linked up until then, calling into question two texts and two authors already mentioned: Norbert Elias with The loneliness of the dying and, above all, Simone de Beauvoir with The third age. With them Eribon points the finger at the conspiracy of silence that surrounds senescence. And that not even philosophy has been able to heal. The elderly have never been considered subjectivities endowed with political action: who will the body of those who cannot be present in public space be represented? Who will speak for them? Which group is it that needs a spokesperson external to itself? And who will listen to those recriminations classified as old men’s complaints?
His mother, Eribon says, in the last days in the clinic, proclaimed her indignation against him, against her other children, left messages on the answering machine, shouted at the nurses. Her protest, like those of many other patients, was in all respects a political act, it represented a complaint against an institution and against a system. Yet she “never left her room”. She remained confined to private matters, she was not recognized, therefore she did not access the level of public discourse. It is her son, the “class defector”, who tries to break through the silent walls of that room: with a gesture of filial love which is also a warning to all of us.
