From 1968
By REJEAN DUCHARME (Hamish Hamilton; 1966/68)
Here we have the psychotic inverse of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE: an unsparing first-person account of adolescent upset and dissatisfaction. The debut novel of French-Canadian author Rejean Ducharme, THE SWALLOWER SWALLOWED is highly regarded in its original language (it’s said to have been a key inspiration on the notorious Canadian film LEOLO) but is (surprise!) barely known in English, in which form its sole appearances were via a 2021 Esplanade Books publication (entitled SWALLOWED) and this expert 1968 translation by Barbara Bray. I haven’t read the newer publication, but can’t imagine it improving on this older one (which if nothing else has what is certainly the better title).
The eleven year old Bernice Einberg is a precocious and severely introverted brat living on an island in Quebec. Her father is a Jew and her mother a Catholic, a dichotomy that contributes, in part, to her schizophrenic mindset, in which fantasy is juxtaposed with reality in a manner that makes it difficult if not impossible to discern where one state leaves off and the other begins. At times Bernice’s reveries lead to startlingly poetic observations (“I look up at the sky, and try to explain to myself the gloomy effervescence it sends to my head, the anxiety and intoxication it sets all my body aflame with”), but more often result in bitter excretions like “I leave the bed of childhood pregnant. Crimes have taken root inside me, to grow and grow there. And when I give birth it won’t be pretty!”
The sole bright spots in her life are her older brother Christian, for whom Bernice harbors a borderline-incestuous affection, and Constance Chlore, an imaginary personage who embodies all the positive traits Bernice lacks. But Bernice’s mother is the dominant presence in her life, a woman she initially calls “Dead Cat” (because “She’s as hideous and repulsive as a dead cat that’s being devoured by worms”). Appropriately, Bernice poisons her mother’s pet cat and beats to death its replacement before, around the book’s halfway point, she’s sent by her fed-up father to stay with a relative in New York.
From 2021
There she remains for the next five years. During that time Bernice gets expelled from her school at least twice and makes the “acquaintance of Misses Menstruation.” She also kills off Constance Chlore, who’s remonikered “Constance Cadaverous” (and continues to visit Bernice in ghost form) and replaced for a time by another imaginary companion, a young man named Dick Dong, who, as that name implies, represents Bernice’s burgeoning sexuality.
After further troublemaking Bernice is sent back to the island and, her father deciding her relationship with Christian is too unnatural to continue, exiled to Israel. She initially finds the atmosphere, where “war has restored human beings to themselves,” to her liking, but her pissy demeanor quickly reasserts itself.
Not to spoil anything, but there are no lessons learned in the course of this book. Bernice does not ditch her antisocial ways and become a nice person, with the book concluding in just the opposite fashion, with she committing a despicable wartime act she lies about to her superiors, justifying her obfuscation with the claim that “Heroines were just what they needed.” The grown-up presence that pervades most every teen-centered narrative ever written (THE CATCHER IN THE RYE included), on hand to impart a mature wisdom to which the protagonist inevitably catches on, is nowhere to be found in THE SWALLOWER SWALLOWED, making it one of the very few novels that can truly be said to capture the pains of adolescence.
Yet, accurate though this book may be about an adolescent mindset, the language it uses is anything but. Quite simply, it’s far too learned and erudite to be believable as the rantings of a teenager, even a precocious one. In addition to her many poetically charged ruminations about human nature, Bernice possesses an impossibly thorough knowledge of Greek mythology, Shakespeare and, seemingly, the entirety of western thought. It makes me wonder how such an all-knowing girl could possibly be such a whiny sourpuss.