By Michael Collins
Cormac James third novel, Trondheim, spans only ten days, during which Alba and Lil’s eldest son, Pierre, is left in a coma by an accident, and they travel from their home in France to Trondheim to care for him. Yet, in this short interval, which Alba describes as “like some kind of dream” (175), the extreme and multiple forms of dislocation allow psyche its own fullness of reality, fostering profound reflections upon the characters’ individual and shared lives. Indeed, concurrent with its physical location, the novel gives the emotional and cognitive sense of taking place in a sort of psychological superposition, from which much can be perceived and revisited precisely because no one knows whether the shared life will continue. We are invited into this liminal psychic space, through the characters’ engagements with images, prayer, and argumentative release.
Kristen, a nurse at the hospital treating Pierre, makes a comment that correlates with the novel’s approach to a degree while running lines for a play with Lil, who does not speak the language of the script: “It’s actually quite moving […] To hear someone saying emotional or even quite profound things that they don’t understand. It would be an interesting experiment, you know. Foreign actors who just learn their lines phonetically. A whole play like that” (106). Kristen’s musing could also describe our experience of dreams—or situations that feel like them, as Alba mentions: We perceive our own lives through novel points of view, as if from the outside—or as if through the mode of complex human reflection that we call fiction. One commonality among all three is the capability of image to communicate across established boundaries, whether linguistic, unconscious, or relational.
Noticing images and allowing them to resonate in self-reflective moments—or realizations of more objective and existential understandings—is a kind of intuitive practice for Lil in which she glimpses and sometimes reconnects with feelings pushed away to attend to practical necessities. On their plane’s descent while heading to the hospital, the emerging city lights carry both the fascinating mystery and fragility of independent lives:
“Those lights did not swell or brighten, merely gained in detail, like something being brought into ever finer focus under a microscope. A single orange dot became three. An orange thread now showed the stitches from which it was made. Then those lights somehow separated from the surfaces they lit, showing walls, roads, houses, an entire solid world—one wiped out in an instant by the sudden upsweep of the starboard wing.” (36-7)
Her feelings of futility during her son’s coma are projected onto a woman doing rehabilitation exercises in the hospital gym: “Next, still bouncing, the woman had to catch a ball the therapist threw to her, now high or low, now left or right. Then the same routine over, but hopping on one leg. The longer she watched, the more anxious Lil felt, about how much further the circus act might go, and at what point you said no, enough” (65). The “shadows washing back and forth eight feet above her head” as she lies awake in bed connect her with the full depth of her struggle with despair: “There were no more solid surfaces to contain her, nothing now but warped geometric planes, some sharp, some blurred, all restless, like refracted light in a swimming pool, and Lil at the bottom, being crushed” (168).
The intrapsychic communication through the images forms a contrast with Lil’s tough exterior that shows both the tendency to repress feelings and some willingness to allow them space within her. Such synapses across psychic fragmentations are reflected in the remains of a statue Lil contemplates:
“The statue there was just two cracked heads suspended midair on stainless steel bars. Prague, c1400, limestone, Heads from a Pietà, badly damaged post-WWII by fire in Friedrichshain bunker. The Virgin’s face looked more jaded than serene, and only the bottom half of the other head had survived, from the tip of the nose to His loosely permed beard. Whatever had once connected the two—the body holding and the body held—was completely gone. Curious effect: Lil couldn’t look at the fragments without seeing the whole suggested by the shadow outline, and couldn’t look at the outline without seeing the thing as it now was.” (229-30; italics original)
The image can represent the relationship between ego consciousness, which thinks it is substantial, and the forgotten parts of itself—its shadow—from which it sometimes dissociates. Notably, Lil’s engagement with images is reforming such connections.
On a relational level, the image also indicates the way that dissociation from bodies and feelings also disconnects us from one another—and that these undefined spaces also offer possibilities for reconnection. The potency of image within a relationship’s shifting matrix of conscious and unconscious feelings arises when another patient’s family member begins to read the images on tarot cards:
“’The Door,’ Elsa said. ‘It generally indicates some kind of transition.’
‘What’s the bright light?’
‘What’s on the other side of the door is unknown. That may feel like opportunity or danger, which you can accept or resist. Resistance means bringing your fears with you, which is another way of saying trying to keep living your old life. To go through the door willingly, on the other hand, is to embrace change. What that change is will be evoked by the other cards. Maybe it means a new relationship, or seeing a current relationship differently. It could be a new lifestyle choice, a new mental perspective, a new sexual attitude . . .’
The longer Elsa spoke, the more afraid Alba felt, as though an actual door had been opened nearby, with a bright light beyond, the kind to lure horror movie victims to calamity, and as Elsa lowered the next card toward its preappointed place, Alba’s right arm rose up without thought and slapped it away.” (161)
Alba’s intuition of the destabilizing potential of images—and perhaps Elsa as well—in the tarot reading is somewhat ironic as her partner has been “reading” images this the whole time with no need of the cards. We understand her need for this boundary partly through her processing images like the one of “her own nightmare face in the dark glass. That face was both proof and accusation. Her whole life—body, brain, ambition—was melting. I am history, she thought, and held that thought in her mind like a comfort, until a group of masked runners slid across her reflection, all with rifles on their backs” (154). The comfort of the objective, notably internal, reflection, as if temporarily separate from her own life’s contingencies, returns to shivering realities about how she deals with the tenuousness of some of her closest relationships as her associations with an image of spilled soup unfold themselves:
“’Manure can accomplish miracles saints cannot,’ Alba’s grandfather used to say. He was being literal, not wise or poetic, as so many want their peasant ancestors to be. But how smartly she had repurposed him—forgotten that he’d been a narrow-minded bigot who dealt daily with manure as almost his only reliable resource. Likewise, until tonight she had continued to believe that this trial might bring her and Lil closer, heal or dumb their differences, which for years she had tried to treat as petty irritations and nothing more.” (155)
Alba’s interaction with this image is much more complicated: first association with memories, then reflection on the memories, the reflection on the reflection itself, which returns her to a realization about her approach to her relationship with Lil. It’s a complex dialogue with the self, not an external “reader.”
Lil’s images seem to impose themselves on her conscious outlook, demanding—or begging—to be recognized; whereas, Alba more gradually opens their implications, willingly, yet with a greater sense of conscious control over the process. This likely reflects her sensibility; however, it may also reflect its cultivation in prayer: “If You save him, she began. If You give him back to us, no matter what his state, I will accept—no, too mean—I will love him as he is, no matter what. He began to hack harder than ever, and she leaned back out of the way but didn’t let go of his hand. I will love them all, she offered now, upping the stakes. With all their faults, just as You love me with mine. That was the highest price she could think of just then.” (184)
As her considering of associations to images moved seamlessly between psychological levels of realization, so her address to god organically self-edits, in the process functioning concurrently as self-reflection. We sometimes call this bargaining, but beneath this surface, Alba is also opening to imaginal future possibilities some of which were previously unconsidered because the accident had not yet prompted them, others because she had been holding interior anger or pain too strongly to consider them.
Her renewed determination to love seems to permeate the narrative itself in the dialogical body language of mother and son. Necessarily, perhaps, this takes place in the presence of potential death that is embedded in the very language of her prayer, inevitable loss perhaps in the process of becoming conscious: “On the monitor, the red was flatlined now, and the green ragged as a seismograph. Even if ghosted Alba’s every hope. Even if they managed to get the tube out. Even if they managed to wake him. What would she be satisfied with? Awareness? Recognition? Motor skills? Or was that too greedy? Would she have to up her bid? What would she give, for instance, for him at least to be able to talk?” (185; italics original)
The prayer deepens its self-reflective aspect until Alba is answering her petitions with deeper questions, not only about the outcome, but her own assumptions of control. In an amazing turn of this meditation, she rediscovers a lost openness of her faith:
“When she was younger, Alba had quietly worshipped the possibility of change, much the way she worshipped God. Perhaps potential was part of what God meant to her. Few prayers ask for things to stay the same. Just as some say the silence between the notes is where the music really is, perhaps what Alba had never dared pray for was the fullest confession she’d ever made. Perhaps the mere idea of change had let her go on with things the way they’d always been. [….] Here was a new formula: from that, this.” (257; italics original)
The quiet state allows for a conceptual acceptance of processes that experientially are much more tumultuous: “At Pierre’s bedside, Alba got out her rosary beads and prayed for a long time. There was such violence in his absolute calm. He had been so restless in the womb” (54). Indeed, her own silencing of Lil’s doubts causes upheavals of its own in her need to quell them:
“All those times you said you wanted to kill yourself, why didn’t you?”
This was so hard a punch that Lil could not immediately counter it.
“Because it’s just an escape fantasy and you’re a coward,” Alba told her. “That’s why.”
Listening, Lil’s face was plaster.
“From now on,” Alba ordered, “if you don’t have something positive to say, keep your mouth shut.” (164)
And, yet, consciousness of fracture within the relationship allows Alba’s complicating—or perhaps clarifying—of perspective, which also arrives in prayer: “’So be it,’ she said, nodding in concession to a contract of her own devising. Danger had dug a hole that deliverance had not filled, and now she needed to learn how to live in it. She nodded again, confirming the bid on her lot. She had what looked from just a little distance like a home, a family, a relationship. Maybe the shapes were enough” (228-9).
Both Alba’s rebuke and her processing of Pierre’s trauma through prayer are complicated by her response to a childhood story of Lil’s:
“I remember when I was a kid, being afraid to go to sleep,” Lil said. “I think I was starting to realize just how sick my mother was. I must have been six or seven years old. And I was afraid, I think, that by the time I woke up, she’d be dead. As if by keeping myself awake I was somehow keeping her alive. Like she was a product of my imagination.”
“Magical thinking.”
“It’s funny what the stress brings out—stuff you’ve been carrying around unawares for years.”
“Like herpes,” Alba said. (103)
Whether it is called, prayer, imagination, memory, conversation, magical thinking, both women understand the need to feel connected to something that allows psychic mirroring and movement in part because of its illogic. They also balance this need with conscious thought, which often manifests in the rejection of apparent illogic in others. Exploration of such complexities—both the interior and relational aspects—is one deep gift of this novel to its readers. It shows how relationships must shift to allow partners to see different aspects of themselves both expressed and mirrored, while maintaining a bond. A former fling of Lil’s seems to confirm this delicate truth by stating an inverse potential: “That’s what people never get about affairs. It’s not the deception you’re drawn to, it’s the truth. The relief of being with someone you don’t have to keep convincing you’re better than you really are” (241).
Alba’s description of her mending of the sweater cut off of Pierre during his rescue, may also serve as a metaphor for the careful work of stitching together such traumatic events and their psychological aftermath into such a novel: “I can’t wave a magic wand and undo the damage [….] What I can do—what I am doing—is put an exact replica on top of the original, to lock in all the broken yarn” (263). As with the sweater, this rearranging, this holding together of imperfect and fragile life is ultimately one way of thinking about healing. Through the detailed developments and meaningful digressions of the plot, the characters’ arrangement in—which is also arranging of—one another’s lives, and the clashing and reflecting perspectives that result, Trondheim itself holds together a small world sometimes desperately clinging to its threads of connection, sometimes appearing equally determined to tear itself to pieces. In doing so it offers a poignant and prescient reminder that it is also a role of art to contain such apparent polarities as love and thought, self and other, within a world “outside” such dreams, a world that needs such connections even more than it shuns them.
You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Trondheim-Cormac-James/dp/1954276230
Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Visit notthatmichaelcollins.com.
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North of Oxford 