Forever Valley

I’ll tell you what I like. I like a book with a narrator who tells you on page 8 she can’t read. That’s what’s going on with Marie Redonnet’s Forever Valley, in case you’re curious.

Forever Valley tells the story of a girl who lives in a rectory. She sets out on a ‘personal project’: to dig around the church for dead people. She is prostituted by a friend, Massi, of the priest she lives with, and the priest keeps all of the girl’s proceeds. It’s not a great way to be.

The narrator of Forever Valley can’t read, and she can’t write either (89). And yet the text putatively narrated by her is a serious read. A serious read can be anything read seriously, of course. Serious reading, in the sense I mean it, involves, among other things, constantly asking questions of a formal nature (‘How is this story getting told?’ ‘Why am I reading this?’ ‘What is a book?’). If Forever Valley is itself a serious read it’s because it would be very difficult to read it and not ask questions of this sort.

The fact that the narrator can’t read or write is provocative of serious reading for the further reason that, although it is clearly a significant or at least an astonishing detail, it isn’t the sort of detail whose significance has the usual narrative ‘cash value’ of becoming meaningful ‘down the road’. For that reason, Forever Valley requires what might be called complete engagement: The reader is never dropped into one or another usual channel and left to meander down the stream toward an inevitable conclusion. The killer is not on the loose only to be found, the boy and girl are not in a fight only to reunite.

I admit I got a little nervous. (Plot spoiler incoming, in case that is meaningful in this context. Maybe plot-spoiler warnings should be disallowed for serious reading.) After digging holes in four directions around a church, the narrator buries both of the men of the story in them. (No, she doesn’t kill them.) Here I thought: Oh, boring, she’s going to bury Massi and herself in the other two holes. But she doesn’t. There may be—in fact there definitely is—something significant about the fact that the two men die and are buried, while the two women survive, but the significant fact I want to draw attention to right now is that the story doesn’t go like this: Girl digs four holes for obscure reasons, buries three friends in three of them, and in the last one she buries herself. Forever Valley, thankfully, refuses this sort of symmetry.

Some of the seriousness happens also at the level of style. Redonnet employs a style so dense it sometimes feels like she’s writing with four words. A technical puzzle fun to think about is why Forever Valley reads so differently. It’s not just that the sentences are short and share the same basic grammar, although it is that, too. It’s also that maybe three-quarters of the sentences share a word with the sentence before them, and always in the flattest sort of repetition. The effect is stifling. With a device like this, the complete lack of lyricism is impressive.

The straight slit sateen dresses are for the girls from the dairy who work at the dancehall. The organdy dresses with flounces are made especially for me, Massi says. There are two of them. Massi says you should always have a spare dress. The father never told me Massi made dresses. (9)

Sentences to hit yourself over the head by. The controlled prose, however, conceals a frenzied chaos just below the surface. Witness for example the constant shift in tense here:

He was disappointed that I never learned to read. But I don’t need to know how to read to look for the dead. Maybe the father wants me to look for the dead. He doesn’t know what to do anymore, with his legs half paralyzed. He did not want to talk about it any longer. He said it was time for bed. We go to bed early in the rectory. (13)

While it is difficult to quantify such things (although, in a moment of weakness, I am imagining a stylometric study of the distribution of lexical recurrence over the course of the novel—but no, no, never do this, I have to tell myself), I found myself detecting an arc to this voice. In the earlier pages of the novel, the writing is sparse, stilted, as above. Toward the end, although the same paratactic style is there, it is much looser and open, and exhibits less of the innocence of a child. Consider for example the narrator’s mature summary, and brief self-conscious reflection, of what she learned about the yard after digging in it:

There is a sort of vein of sludge running across the garden deep down, from east to west. All you have to do to find it is dig deep enough. The subsoil of the garden is made up of the ridge of rock in one direction and the vein of sludge in the other. There is no way I could have known. (86; my emphasis)

This transformation of the narrator is interesting not only on its own but because simultaneously there is not much of a ‘journey’ the narrator goes on, no genuine self-realization.

I say ‘there is not much of’ and that there is ‘no genuine’ journey to hedge a bit; there is a journey, only it has virtually no external manifestation. One mark of the journey is the fact that, at the beginning of the novel she’s leading a bleak existence, and at the end of the novel she’s leading a bleak (though somewhat different!) existence, but she at least seems to have (though she is illiterate, so God knows how we are discovering any of this) the wherewithal, now, to say: “This sucks.” In that way, the journey is the usual one, of self-realization, but, again, with virtually no meaningful external correlate. She doesn’t open a soda shop or get the corner office or go on a road trip or fall in love with a foreigner. She lives in a bonafide trailer and works as a seamstress. It sucks, but now she says as much: “I don’t like sewing,” she writes (or not—remember, she’s illiterate), “and I don’t like the bungalow either” (102).

In the end, Forever Valley (the valley proper) is flooded by the opening of a dam. The real forever valley is the bottomless pit of human misery inside us all along.

Womanhood, femininity are inevitably of interest here. The dynamic relationship and contrast between the narrator and Massi is particularly interesting in this way. Massi is a former schoolteacher and the widow of the former mayor of Forever Valley. At the beginning of the novel, she is also the proprietor of a ‘dancehall’, which is fancy for prostitution ring. The (sixteen-year-old) narrator is one of the dancers (prostitutes). Massie sells tickets to have sex with the narrator and then sells the narrator dresses she must buy to wear to the dancehall and so on, in the usual exploitative capitalist ad infinitum. The priest pockets all of the money the narrator earns.

What is perhaps more distracting than the evil of the narrator’s situation is the way she absorbs it. Sure, there is the usual blithe indifference—but that’s more or less par for the course for this sort of book. Far more striking is the fact that she comments on the particulars of sexual activity (sexual violence? I’d be game for that description) with the detached perspective of a mechanic: “almost no blood.” But by comparison she is enraged by the scuffed and sweat-ringed condition of her shoes and dress after being manhandled by a particularly active dance partner. Notice how quickly she rushes through the description of the first encounter.

The first customs officer hurt me a little, Massi said it would hurt a little, I am not soft, it didn’t hurt much, and the first customs officer knew what he was doing, it didn’t take long. I went and washed myself right away when he was done, just as Massi told me. There was almost no blood. (25)

And that’s it on that. But the second customs officer really gets on her nerves because she ends up with a dirty dress on his account.

I have sweat stains on my organdy dress from dancing with the second customs officer. Sweat stains are hard to get out, particularly from organdy. Organdy is a very delicate fabric. I am very upset that I stained my dress. The second customs officer didn’t care about the sweat stains spreading over my dress, all he could think about was dancing. . . . When the second customs officer told me to go up to my room [to have sex], I was very happy to stop dancing. (26)

One interesting dimension of the difference between her response to (I’ll just call it) rape and her response to having her dress dirtied (by her own sweat) is the obvious way in which, through this difference, the narrator refuses being reduced to her body, and centers the dress and her self-presentation as the locus for her identity. The matter of the dirty dress then becomes a crucial part of the turn in her relationship with Massi; a crucial ingredient of her nascent autonomy, even: The dirty dress—and, to remind you, not the systematic sexual assault, not the indignity of her body being sold like grain—provides occasion later for the narrator’s shedding her deference to Massi, owning her indignation.

[Massi] hasn’t washed my organdy dress. And yet I thought that was her responsibility. . . . My dress is dirty, with all the sweat stains from last week. It’s not wearable. There is a second organdy dress with flounces in Massi’s armoire. It’s not really my size, because the neckline hangs loose. Massi deliberately didn’t wash my dress so I would have to buy the other dress she keeps in her armoire. That is going to double my debt. (41)

She gets the exploitation; she gets it clear as day. (She’s illiterate, remember, and maybe one of the important ideas here is about the fundamental status of the human capacity for perceiving, not just displeasure, but misery, exploitation.) As free as she is of any sort of obvious desire for independence (she doesn’t so much as conceive of the possibility of getting away; the spot in the mountains that dips—the mountain pass—she regards with a kind of disgust), the narrator is nevertheless defiant from the start. Indeed, her “personal project” of digging up the dead around the church is first articulated in terms of this defiance. (Here again note the conflict with capitalist mores.)

My personal project is not a money-making project. I am lucky the father isn't opposed to it. I could not live without my project. I have not even had time to think about the dead this week. I am too preoccupied by Saturday night [the dancing and prostitution night]. . . . The father is taking advantage of my preoccupation to think about the dead in my place. You can tell it from his behavior, which is not the same as usual. He even told me he would guide me as I look for the dead. I don't want him to guide me. It is my project, not his. I even had a bad thought. I almost told myself it was a good thing the father's legs are becoming paralyzed. That way I will be on my own. . . . What matters most is I look for the dead. (19–20)

Refusing to accept the usual canons of feminine vulnerability is one of the more subversive acts of the narrator.

But Forever Valley is not a tale of triumph, by any means. For example, there is a consistent self-undermining that goes hand in hand with the defiance. “The father thinks he knows all there is to know about the dead,” she writes (30). Then, after turning to other matters, she suddenly interrupts herself, incapable of letting the issue go:

In the end the father knows nothing about the dead. He is depending on me. He must think I have a plan because it is my project. He is wrong. I don’t have a plan. (31)

In that way, although she claims she has her “instincts,” the digging project is not, say, an exercise of her practical reason or technical knowhow. It is a bald and openly ignorant act of defiance.

There is every reason to suppose the narrator is not the most interesting character in the world of the novel, and the choice to foreground her experience and perspective, and to tell the story of the other characters as refracted through the narrator, is part of what makes Forever Valley a provocative and compelling read. To take one example: Massi. At the beginning of Forever Valley, she is put together, has things figured out. She is saving up money, investing it with the father, she thinks. Then for no reason we’re aware of she seems to be falling apart, and the dancehall (prostitution ring) is in shambles. She decides she’s going to close it, start her life over in the valley below. She goes to the father to get her profits—and it turns out the father hasn’t invested it at all. But she makes a new life anyway.

Now, the girl, the narrator, is just digging holes, living her best life. More than once you’d be forgiven for wondering: But what the hell is going on with Massi?! She has a full arc, a traditional “everything was good until it wasn’t; and then it got worse; and then I made it better” story. Forever Valley not only refuses to shape the narrative of the girl into the customary “I had to make my own luck” model. Redonnet blatantly exhibits that model in the person of Massi, off stage as it were, as it to make clear exactly what sort of story isn’t being told of the narrator, what sort of story Forever Valley isn’t.

Forever Valley is a story of self-discovery without triumph, an inversion of bourgeois malaise (good outside, bad inside). It is also an exploration of different formal and stylistic possibilities for storytelling. What’s happening for the narrator also happens to the prose. It constantly churns, makes no forward progress, consumes itself, as it were. There is no moral, no lesson, no ‘payoff’, only the remnants of Forever Valley preserved, as if in amber, beneath the artificial lake of a dam.

Text

Forever Valley is part of a tryptich, along with Rose Mellie Rose and Hôtel Splendid. All three were translated by Jordan Stump for the University of Nebraska Press.