158
PARTISAN REVIEW
ter). For all three, what really matters has to do with the social situa–
tion, in late twentieth-century culture, of sexual love.
Albert Guerard's superb
Christine/Annette,
his seventh novel, is
moved by the desire at the heart of the Freudian sexual mythos: the
"Oeidpal" desire of the son for the mother. Guerard, author of books
on Hardy, Conrad, Gide, and, in
The Tr£umph
of
the Novel,
Dickens,
Dostoevsky and Faulkner, writes in the great tradition of interna–
tional modernism, with its artful complexity and self-reflexivity, its
preoccupations with time, consciousness, and the psyche, and its
double focus on subjectivity and society. Guerard has a broad com–
mand of modern European history rare now in America outside
academic history departments - certainly rare in serious contem–
porary fiction.
Christine/Annette
is not a "researched" historical novel,
however; rather it is written out of a remarkable breadth of what
used to be called "general knowledge" (now it is called "cultural
literacy").
The novel's doubly double protagonist(s) are a woman who has
two chronologically disjunct incarnations, and her son , who is dou–
ble of both . The story is narrated primarily from the son's point of
view, and is primarily the story of his search for the mother. He loses
her (and she him, also an important fictional thread) at the only
slightly post-Oedipal age of seven. Recovering her, and his idyllic ,
lost pre-Oedipal childhood, becomes his permanent obsession. In a
sense, this is a Freudian story of the fatedness or invevitability of the
Family Romance: of adult lives spent in an effort to reconstitute the
family configuration of early childhood no matter how appalling it
was . The father/husband of this novel, as villain of the Oedipal plot,
is appalling indeed: a shady Houston capitalist, a sort of squalidly
belated robber baron , who "saves" the teenaged, French Christine
from German patriotic fervor in Berlin at the outbreak of the Great
War by, in effect , buying her-a patriarchal paradigm.
But this is a Freudian family romance with a big difference: it is
just as much the mother's story as it is the son's . The mother, in fact ,
is the title character, and the novel is dominated thematically and
morally by its investigation of her socially constrained, sexually dis–
torted feminine life . Moreover, as (doubled) doubles , mother and
son are an exploration of the gender-egalitarian aspect of Jungian
animus/anima androgyny.
Guerard employs various fictional modes to generate the rich,
complex texture of this novel. A large chunk of it, in fact, is written
