Death-Watch

John Charles was Rare Books Librarian at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

An important Montreal poet and literary theoriest, Jacques Brault has written, in Death-Watch, a work which must be read as closely as any post-modernist poem, and preferably in one sitting. It is the author’s only novel and won the Governor General’s fiction prize for 1985.

A Montreal university student, fascinated for years by glimpses and rumours of his philosophy professor’s enigmatic life, manages to get hold of the professor’s private notebook. “I am about to fathom the mystery,” he thinks. But neither he nor Brault’s readers are likely fully to fathom the mysteries of this dense, exciting short novel, reminiscent of Claude Simon’s fictions.

In the novels’ opening scene the professor decides to gloss a nine-line poem by the Italian poet Guiseppe Ungaretti to convey to his scholastic philosophy students the difference between “beauty” and “the beautiful.” But, in one of many academic jokes from Brault, the gloss is the whole novel. Thus, like Nabokov’s mercurial Pale Fire (1962), the professor’s life is a commentary on this poem, just as the poem is a distilled, epitaphic version of the life. But is it the professor’s life we really learn about, or the narrator’s — or neither?

Though the unnamed narrator seems to be gathering his observations from experience and the notebook, he tells us, “I’m speaking from hearsay,” admits he’s “elaborately embroidering,” and that the notebook “offers few hints” and is “indecipherable.” And as he gradually confronts his own empty life — as bereft of relationships and events as the unnamed professor — the book seems to be a study of two isolated beings whose lives merge in a communion of sympathetic words and ideas through the creation of the book itself. Describing his own life, the narrator writes: “Here and there, a glimpse of tenderness, an oasis surrounded by ruins. So few moments of grace.” And his imagined thoughts for the professor, when the latter’s mother dies, is apt for himself: “Didn’t you understand that I was your absent double?”

But the reader increasingly realizes that most of the narrative happened to no one, and is the narrator’s sometimes bathetic musings on what the professor’s life may have been. At that point, the novel deconstructs in our hands, and we’re left with an imaginative and exhaustive reading of Ungaretti’s poems, and a marvelous depiction of self-deception.

David Lobdell’s translation of this polished, precise work reads fluently and naturally. The original title is Agonie, which echoes Ungaretti’s poems, Agonia, and refers to death-agony — the narrator, in a single night, observing the professor’s “death in life,” and his own. Lobdell’s title conveys that well.