As Sara Mesa states in her introduction to The Madman, explaining this essay, short novel, or, to avoid nitpicking, Anne Serre’s text, is impossible, for to define it would betray the work. Therefore, I have a great problem. How can I write a review faithful to the book’s concept of “not letting itself be defined” and still manage to encapsulate its elusive essence?
I suppose it’s up to me to mimic the narrator and start at the beginning, dissect the object of my fear and, with any luck, write something decent.
The Madman by Anne Serre arises from the narrator’s reflection on the card of “THE FOOL” from the Marseille Tarot that she holds, a gift from a friend whom she did not find meaningful until ten years later. When she looks at the card of “THE FOOL,” she sees a vagrant who “parades across hills lush with grass with his jester’s hat and his dangling bundle” (p. 27). This bundle, or rather the way he grips it, is the first of her obsessions, for it rests on the right shoulder even though the figure holds the bundle with the left hand, which for her becomes an incomprehensible acrobatic act. The second obsession is the indefinable little creature that accompanies him, which “is of a frightful color, flesh-colored, just like the Fool’s dangling bundle […]” (p. 28).
It is important to begin with this description. There are as many tarot decks as there are artists who wish to give their own interpretation to symbols that, even if ridiculed by the staunch rationalists or corrupted by those who seek to take advantage of others, have accompanied us for centuries and, therefore, deserve a place in daily life.
Olivia Segura writes in her essay Money and Writing that she is fascinated by those languages that the women in her family have practiced for years in the absence of formal education, among them cards, coins, or runes. For her, they are an “ancient ritual embedded in meanings” (p. 96). She even notes that her cure for insomnia had been prayer, “to build relationships between my person and the world with words” (p. 97), which resembles quite closely what the narrator of The Madman does with the various manifestations of “THE FOOL.” Sometimes she speaks to him, sometimes she avoids him, but in one way or another their encounters always lead to the discovery of something new.
The tarot forms part of our history in a unique way, for it is a language open to interpretation that appeals to that part of ourselves that expresses itself without the need for words. Fear, passion, happiness, or sadness manifest themselves through tremors, sweating, smiles, or tears. Love can be the heart wrapped in silk that Mary Shelley kept on her desk. Depression, the stones with which Virginia Woolf fills her pockets.
We all fear that uncontrollable part that is so difficult to translate, hence one of the first reflections the narrator has about “THE FOOL” is that, as a magical figure, it operates in esoteric language, which wields malignant powers. The thoughts narrated throughout the work are the attempts of a writer trying to transfer “THE FOOL” from fantasy to reality.
Her tools, as I noted at the start, are observation and dissection. She encounters “THE FOOL” as enemy, as ally, as companion, as lover, etc. She discovers that “THE FOOL” can be one and the same, for the writer is nothing more than a madwoman who draws others to her with her narratives. The madwoman tries to decipher the essence of “THE FOOL” by walking with her bundle (in which she carries pen and paper) and with curiosity as her sole companion to help her understand the path she traverses and which traverses her in turn.
The Madman by Anne Serre is the slow and fugitive analysis of a writer about a figure that terrifies her for using a language, movements, and companionship that she does not understand. It is, in short, the journey and the search for answers that perhaps were never meant to explain something foreign to her, but rather something she feared confronting within herself.
—————————————
Author: Anne Serre. Title: The Madman. Translation: Cristina Pineda Huertas. Publisher: Nórdica. Available at: Todos tus libros.