BOOKS
495
pers
themselves, lost in self-mortification, possessed by Christ, alight with
raptures and yearnings, literally act out the sensuous transports of the Song
of Songs. The theme is as old as the Song of Songs and as contemporary
as the recent French film
Therese.
But the imagery - of blood, of wine, of
kissing wounds - is so rich that Hansen all but envelops us in his spell.
The thrill, even the titillation, of the book arises, of course, from the
way its excitements rub up against the tightness of its strictures; and
Hansen knows that eroticism is only as strong as the proscriptions against
it, placing Mariette's abandon within the tight corset of the nuns' daily
routine, and that within the larger confinements of the Calendar of Saints'
feasts. Each section begins with a still life that makes the woman's con–
vulsions the more tremendous by comparison. What Hansen also recog–
nizes (as Baker does too, in a sense) is that there is nothing so erogenous
as a small, dark space (the confessional, say), and that nothing is more
exciting than mystery and prohibition. In an age when everything is made
explicit and open, Hansen sees (as A. S. Byatt did in
Possession)
that there
is
nothing so daring as a chaste white bed. And in a world where anything
is
possible, the only way to set up tension is to recover a time when li–
cense was as difficult as abstinence. Sex, more than anything, shrivels at
the prospect of naked exposure, and Hansen cunningly erects a net as
surely as Baker, in some senses, plays with the net down.
The other great distinction of Hansen's book, which puts it in a dif–
ferent world from Baker's, is that it feels almost entirely like the product
of the subconscious, of an imagination so possessed that a relatively young
man from Santa Cruz, California is able to evoke the tensions of a seven–
teen-year-old postulant in a women's community eighty-five years ago.
Baker, always conscious of his place in the literary firmament, congratu–
lates himself on the new words he creates ("frans" for breasts and
"strumming" for masturbation). Hansen, by contrast, is so much in the
thrall
of his vision that his language breaks through the barriers of con–
vention: "Even in her eyes there is no travel," "Foot marries foot in the
night's £looding cold," "Each tale I hear is a place I haven't been." The
whole novel vibrates with a sense of language reborn; with fingers
"drawling," with hair "all thrash and storm," and with the "haunting" of
milk-white skin.
It
is also lit up by a poet's insistent rhythms, returning
again and again to Mariette's "chocolate-brown hair," to the dressing and
undressing of wounds, to the shock of red on white. Hansen has created a
world so soaked and suffused with sensations - as in Keats's "Eve of St.
Agnes" - that everything shivers with life, "choiring and starshine and
trickling snow."
Best of all, for me,
Mariette in Ecstasy,
set amidst Romance-language
oodes and names, is a decidedly American book, bringing the French-
