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| André Aciman Photo by Leonardo Gendamo |
André Aciman’s Quiet Bliss
A brilliant and charming new collection of essays, ‘Homo Irrealis,’ starts in Egypt, travels to Rome, and ends on the other side of an Eric Rohmer film, by way of Billy Wilder, Fernando Pessoa, and W.G. Sebald
Jews frequently specialize in nostalgia—a tricky business since the time of Moses, whose Israelites gloss over the cruel facts of slavery so they can yearn after the lost culinary delights of Egypt, the garlic and the onions. These biblical hunger pangs strike a particularly rich chord with André Aciman, novelist, essayist, memoirist and Proust scholar. He caresses his memories, but he knows the risk of being too wispy, too wistful, too comfortable with the bittersweet—and he realizes that memories can deceive.
Aciman’s new book of essays, Homo Irrealis, starts from his birthplace, the patchwork city of Alexandria, the core of Jewish Egypt, a place where the tawdry and the sacred rubbed shoulders. He lived there until age 14, when his family, escaping their harsh Egyptian taskmasters, departed for Europe.
When Aciman was born, in 1951, Alexandria was an international city, where (he says, exaggerating slightly) everyone had four native languages and a second home elsewhere. Jews dominated the city’s business world. But then came Nasser, and Egypt’s Jews were increasingly in peril. Aciman confesses that “as an adolescent living in Egypt in what had become an anti-Semitic police state, I grew to hate Egypt and couldn’t wait to leave and land in Europe, preferably France.” His longing, he says, “was not so distantly related to sex, which, in my mind, I was confusing with the longing for France.”
During the weeks when the Acimans packed their suitcases and talked about the journey, desire and memory became a Möbius strip. The teenager still in Egypt pictured himself already in Paris remembering the boy back in Egypt longing for France. And the 70-year-old Aciman remains nostalgic for the youth who imagined from the shores of Egypt what Paris might be like.
In Homo Irrealis Aciman patiently works out an algorithm about love, memory, and desire: The older man looks back at the boy fantasizing about his future. This is irrealis nostalgia, and Aciman, as his title indicates, is irrealis man. Irrealis moods, Aciman explains, are counterfactual, hinting at “the might-be and the might-have-been”; they suit his life story exactly. Aciman is an exile with no actual home, but instead a string of unreal ones, beginning with Alexandria. Then came Rome, Paris, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at last New York. (Aciman is a distinguished professor of comparative literature at CUNY.)
Aciman’s diffidence has its roots in the French novel as it passes from Balzac to Flaubert and then on to Proust. Balzac’s typical young man from the provinces, newly come to Paris, thirsts after glory. He wants to acquire a mistress, defeat his rivals, and be crowned a brilliant success. Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau in Sentimental Education, by contrast, savors his frustrations, even preferring a hopeless love to fulfillment. You educate your passions, Flaubert implies, when you deflect and analyze them. Flaubert opens the way to Proust, who makes a whole world out of the subtle disjointed affairs of the heart.
In Homo Irrealis, Aciman discusses jealousy in Proust, that dire, endless craving for disappointment, contrived by the lover out of flimsy or absent evidence. Manifold Proustian pleasures stem from the same inventiveness, when the mind takes a tiny germ of reality and stretches into lustrous reverie. Invoking Berma’s acting or Elstir’s painting, Proust shows how the artist stirs within us a response that is “maybe more in us than in the work itself,” something telling and intimate. We become dissatisfied, suddenly unwilling to take life as it is. As a result, things will forever be what we thought they could or should be—the irrealis mood. This is not wish fulfillment but the amending of reality by illusion.
As a blues singer might put it, Aciman thinks not of his old time used to be, but of his might have been. He dwells on erotic encounters that almost, or sort of, happened, and therefore have a staying power far superior to more blatant fulfillments. “Getting what one wants takes it away,” Aciman says, channeling Proust, and as Freud reminds us, there is no satisfaction in satisfaction. Better “to rehearse, to defer, to ritualize,” than to consummate.
And if you do have a love affair, you need to keep your imagination working. Aciman charmingly invokes “the first week of a new love,” when “everything about the new person seems miraculous, down to the new phone number, which is still difficult to remember and which I don’t want to learn for fear it might lose its luster and stirring novelty.” In an essay on his fellow Alexandrian, the Greek poet Cavafy, Aciman writes that “the senses are too canny not to know that something like disquiet and loss always await lovemaking.” Haunted by loss, we try to keep a new love fresh, even though we know it will eventually fade.
Homo Irrealis contains two fascinating essays on Rome, that palimpsestlike, many-layered city. Aciman reminds us that Freud was obsessed with Rome and regarded it as an image of the unconscious. Aciman quotes Freud: “What is primitive is … commonly preserved alongside of the transformed version which has arisen from it.” Freud’s love for antiquity, described by scholars like Richard Armstrong, is, Aciman speculates, “a stand-in for his lifelong penchant for buried, shifty, undisclosed, primal, feral stuff.”
The undisclosed, furtive stuff behind Aciman’s writing has much to do with bisexuality, which Freud insists is inherent in everyone. Aciman cites Freud’s description of Leonardo da Vinci’s “pretty boys of feminine tenderness,” with their eyes “mysteriously triumphant, as if they knew of a great happy issue concerning which we must remain quiet”—no doubt a “love secret,” Freud adds.
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