Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline brought on my yearning for Europe. Silent
trains. The reverent mundane. In Europe a slice of bread is holy. The miracle
of a towel drying on a line. Such subtle, taut delicacy, especially when read
surrounded by wild American country.
Sweet
Days of Discipline: A boarding school, the Bausler
Institut, in the Appenzell.
Regulations,
codes, discipline. Switzerland: the narrator, adolescent, possesses an old
woman’s hands. At no point does the girth of the prose open to drop in what
someone else might call out to her, say, as she trudges back from one of her
daily 5 am walks, “looking for solitude, and perhaps the absolute” (2). Our
narrator adopts the phrase “senile girlhood” on p. 70, deems the boarding
school world one in which “time was out of joint” (46). Girls, supported by
parents spread all across the world, are kept in the confines of the Appenzell
like delicate creatures, like plants: “Though one can hardly speak of human
beings in a boarding school,” our narrator writes on p. 41. A narrator who
never names herself.
The
authorities allowed us to use a key. It was a symbol. A symbol was part of the
expensive fees. But there was no point in insisting on symbols, they’re
gratuitous. I never used my key. Not because I disdained the symbol: just as I
had no past, so I had no secrets… I possess nothing. (36)
Instead, from page 2 she fixes her
attention elsewhere, upon a newcomer to the school, Frédérique, whose “looks
were those of an idol, disdainful. Perhaps that was why I wanted to conquer
her. She had no humanity...The first thing I thought was: she had been further
than I had” (3). A transcendent “further,” excelling beyond the confines of the
boarding school: “At school—she was top in everything. She already knew
everything, from the generations that came before her.” Frédérique: a wise, decaying
nihilist: “It was as though she talked about nothing” (39). Frédérique,
mirroring the boarding school landscape, which “seemed to protect us, the small
white houses of Appenzell, the fountain, the sign Töchterinstitut, it was as if the place hadn’t been affected by
human distortions.”
And yet, Frédérique’s pristine
remoteness begins to disquiet the narrator, who asks, “Can one feel
disorientated in an idyll? An atmosphere of catastrophe covered the landscape”
(65). So Frédérique, in her void, is the perfect vessel for the narrator to
empty her own congealed, cloistered nothing.
A paragraph at the precise midpoint of
this taut novel reveals the formal-thematic interweave that I find to be the
heart of this work, and whose hypnotic lyricism makes it one of the best
paragraphs I’ve ever read:
When
it rained we would all be kept in the same room. We listened to the radio. Some
girls read. A Krimi Roman. Others
stared, lost, misty. The older girls, Germans, cooked. Bavarian lace makers.
Mater Hermenegild kept guard. She kept guard over liberty. Those who weren’t
enjoying themselves idled away the hours. The bathrooms looked out on a narrow,
dark alleyway and a wall. The water had already been run for us. Very hot. I
felt as if I were getting into it with my clothes on. There were two churches,
Catholic and Protestant. We had freedom of religion on Lake Constance. Just for
a change I went to the Protestant one. Even though the order from Brazil was:
Catholic. She orders, I obey, she steers me through the terms, it’s all written
in letters and stamps, bells with no sound. Dispatches.
The way that the sentences move, the
subject of one spilling over to become the subject of the next, but thicker
this time, more defined, like a lash: “Mater Hermenegild kept guard.” Go on. “She
kept guard over liberty.” And yet the narrator offers the possibility that in
this cordoning off, for some, there is still the possibility of easy amusement.
Easily sated girls, like the narrator’s Bavarian roommate, languishing in the
stupefaction of her mind, even primping before bed, as though she might cross
over into some enchanting, other world.
But for the narrator, there is no such
reality beyond the emptiness of the school, the coolness of Frédérique. And
though it can rain outside, the girls go to showers looking out on a “narrow,
dark alleyway, and a wall. The water had already been run for us. Very hot. I
felt as if I were getting into it with my clothes on.” And yet, “We had freedom
of religion on Lake Constance.” When orders are given over mail, words are “bells
with no sound” words sent through the mail, orders in writing, which cannot
replace the body. “Just for a change I went to the Protestant one. Even though
the order from Brazil was: Catholic.” An announcement, the narrator’s whole
life in letters and stamps: “Dispatches.”
The
pleasure of disappointment…I had been relishing it ever since I was eight years
old, a boarder in my first, religious school. And perhaps they were the best
years, I thought. Those years of discipline. There was a kind of elation, faint
but constant throughout all those days of discipline, the sweet days of
discipline. (72)
