By Jared Joseph
A work of both experimental and historical fiction, Jesi Bender’s Child of Light serves as a memento mori, but in the literal sense of the Latin: “remember (that you have to) die.” It’s set in the era when electricity becomes available to the public. Child of Light then illuminates the moment a new form of darkness, Enlightenment, overtakes the world.
The novel takes place in Utica, New York in the late 1800s and tells the story of Ambrétte Memenon, the child of Thales Memenon, a light-obsessed failed inventor, and Agathe Memenon, a spiritualist bent on communing with her dead brother. Although the two parents live under the same roof, they sleep apart and dream apart, and neither seems able to see what, or, rather, who might unite them: their daughter, Ambrétte, who seeks to be a conduit both to the spirit world and the world of science. Ambrétte is neglected by both parents, ignored by her father and instrumentalized by her mother, the latter seeking to galvanize in Ambrétte the powers of a medium. When a public séance attempt fails, Agathe turns away from Ambrétte, who’s left to the cruel and horrifying whims of her brother, Georges, who constantly reminds her that “men take care of women and women take care of children.”
It’s the end of the Enlightenment: humanity’s domination of the earth, the materialist vanquishing of spirituality, the etiolation of mystery by science. Depicting the sputtering spark of the Enlightenment coinciding with the harnessing of electric light, Bender re-establishes herself as a master of language play, even on the level of narrative structure, moreover deftly depicting the gendered hierarchy of mind over body, established and executed by violent force, which insinuates its way even into Ambrétte’s sentimental core:
How can you get someone to love you?
And, yet, also—
How can you love the horrors around you?
Ambrétte seeks to commune with the dead for answers, but her mother supplies the most crushing and accurate one, an answer that perhaps justifies the tautological futility of resurrecting past horrors, the horrors not around you but founding you:
Oh, suffering often has a long history. They are the same; suffering and history. You can’t have one without the other.
Child of Light engages the mysteries of science and the occult; and, fittingly, much of the book is itself occluded, mysterious. Its ambiguities recall Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, whose au pair narrator witnesses ghosts and hauntings, her telling of which no one believes; ultimately, she smothers the living children in her charge while attempting to protect them from ghosts. Everyone else in James’s novel thinks the narrator is hallucinating, is over-excited, is neurotic. She and Ambrétte are like Cassandra, the seer from Greek mythology cursed with the power of prophecy, but without the power of being believed. But Cassandra, at least, does have at least one witness, and this is the reader. In the case of James’s narrator and Bender’s Ambrétte, however, not even we always have access to the real. Thus, we must rely on our own faith, or succumb to our own prejudices: Does Ambrétte see ghosts, or is she insane? Does Ambrétte conjure the dead, or her own morbid imagination? In one such scene, we are unsure whether Ambrétte witnesses her mother’s death, or her mother’s orgasm (a “little death”)—the woman’s pleasure prohibited her in such a society. Will we be like the surrounding society that has determined women have no bodily autonomy, and thus are subject to the mind and body of men?
One of the few unambiguous events in the novel is a sexual assault wrought on Ambrétte but, in an amplified and distorted and all-too-realistic version of Cassandra’s curse, Ambrétte does not know if her memory of the past here is real: “The detritus of a secret,” the book says, a book that is tragically familiar to the modern sensibility, regarding a culture where women are taught to disbelieve their own experiences, where many institutions teach women that not only is the rape of women a “natural” fact, but that this fact is their own fault. Ambrétte is sent to the Old Main asylum after being assaulted and, during a routine medical evaluation, is discovered to be pregnant. The obvious—that this pregnancy is not only resultant from the rape, but proves Ambrétte’s recollection was true—is forcibly converted into obliviousness. “What have you done?” the doctor says to Ambrétte. When Ambrétte explains what the assaulter has done, he does not believe her, and forces Ambrétte into a holding box alternately called “the crib” and “a breathable coffin.” Such are the extreme ends of a woman’s life, where men “take care of” women and “women take care of children.”
Thus, Child of Light reads not only as the story of a girl tethered by her parents into a debilitating childhood her whole life but an autopsy story of our own current moment—a “more modern” era where the Supreme Court of the United States misogynistically overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion—a forensic account of modernity grotesquely detailing just how we got here:
Énouement is the bittersweet feeling of having arrived in the future, where you now know how the whole unfortunate drama plays out, but are unable to save anyone, back there, in the past. Time is distance. Knowledge is memory.
And yet Bender’s novel offers not solely a trenchant reading of western modernity and its “enlightened” splitting of mind and body along gendered, phallogocentric axes; Child of Light is also a reading of reading itself. While Bender may indeed believe we are “unable to save anyone, back there, in the past” of this master narrative, I suspect she does not believe the present is unsalvageable. If the past of this narrative cannot be saved, perhaps the key lies in narrativity itself, in retellings. The evidence I have for this is the linguistic play throughout the novel, the extraordinary orthographic moments of musical scores transposed over dialogue and poems, and Bender’s own vivacious and, I argue, “enlightened” instances of translation.
If there exists a writing technology—and writing is already by definition a mnemotechnic, a memorial device—that realizes Child of Light’s axioms “Time is distance” and “Knowledge is memory,” then that technology is translation. To translate is not simply to transfer content between two languages, but rather to reread, re-interpret, update, recreate, and joyfully and recreationally generate a source anew. It is to say of the source text “I think this is what these words mean to say,” yes, but also, “I think this is what these words mean to say right now.” In this sense, every most recent translation of an oft-translated text is a critique—a reading—of a less recent translation, a correction.
On the other hand, to look at translation this way implies a logic of progression, the same sort of optimistic striving toward continual betterment and perfection that Enlightenment society values so naively (and destructively) espoused. The result is a world so perfected it’s exhausted (e.g., global climate change), so certain and correct it’s indisputable (e.g., fascism).
Bender’s modes of translation, on the contrary, privilege poetics: they delight in possibility and in process, in meaning-production rather than fixity. For example, in one passage, Bender transcribes a moment of translational play in Ambrétte’s mind, while she is thinking of a stanza from “Abel and Cain,” a Baudelaire poem:
Race de Caïn, Race of Cain, Rass-do-Caan,
au ciel monte, from sky …, awh seal montay,
Et sur la terre jette & on the earth A-sir la tear jet-tay
Dieu! throw G-d! Do!
This to me is one of the most beautiful moments in the book, and there are many such moments. Ambrétte is still learning French and so her translation is errant; it strays; in doing so, she produces surprising effects that shed light on the source text, the left-most column. The right-most column is a phonetic transcription but, rather than being a prescriptive and standardizing pronunciation guide, it highlights Ambrétte’s particularity, how her mind and thus how her tongue works. Instead of ciel’s common pronunciation “see-EL,” we get “seal”: an engraved or embossed signal of status and permanence, or the joyous aquatic mammal that is itself surprisingly phonetic, the unmistakable “arp arp” that seals its identity. Similarly, the original poem from Fleurs du mal appears in couplets, but the re-potting into a quatrain reinvigorates the lines with remarkable energy. Under this treatment, it flourishes. Here are some previous famous translations of the final line of the couplet:
William Aggeler (1954): And cast God down upon the earth!
Roy Campbell (1952): And to the earth hurl down the Lord.
Kenneth O. Hanson (1955): And down upon the earth cast God!
Walter Benjamin argues that this particular Baudelaire “Abel and Cain” is an extended metaphor for class revolution: “Cain, the ancestor of the disinherited, appears as the founder of a race and this race can be none other than the proletariat.” What could be more revolutionary, in the treatment of a poet disenchanted by the Enlightenment tradition in which he finds himself, than to translate it errantly, anew? Than to, after having arrived in the future, save this past text by betraying it? To take the most sacrosanct, numinous thing, to cut everything around it, and then to “throw G-d!”
It’s time to translate the past and save the future. If the meaning of Bender’s Child of Light is dark, its very language is light, flexible, revivifying. This is serious play.
