"Eastbound": Taking Language Seriously
In Maylis de Kerangal's novella, a conscript fleeing the army and a woman who will shelter or expose him meet on the Trans-Siberian railway.
Eastbound, Maylis de Kerangal; trans. Jessica Moore (Eng. 2023; Fr. 2012)
When someone casually asks what a piece of literary fiction is “about”, giving a satisfying answer is often difficult – if they’re asking what happens in the plot, the answer is often “not much”. In Maylis de Kerangal’s Eastbound, however, the answer is far more involved and exciting: this novella reads like a thriller, in which a Russian conscript, travelling the Trans-Siberian railway, attempts to flee military service by hiding in the cabin of a Frenchwoman who might be on his side. Not sharing a common tongue, varying degrees of trust, body language, and brutish coercion become their lingua franca. And it’s in the idea of language that we find the deepest answer to the question of what Eastbound is about.
From the first sentence, we are in the hands of a writer who values the weight of each word on her page. The novella opens, in Jessica Moore’s translation, with: “These guys come from Moscow and don’t know where they’re going.” Everything is balanced here between opposing notions: these are “guys”, not boys nor men but something in between; they exist metaphysically between the known of their pasts and the unknown of their futures; they exist literally between places, taking up temporary residence in the ever-transitional space of the train. This is the manner in which every word is balanced and placed with precision on the page. Here’s part of a representative and illuminating passage on train attendants:
“... these women had smuggled packages during the Soviet period, carried secrets, whispered promises, trafficked all there is to traffic, using the extraordinary privilege of being able to move around while everyone else remained still, under house arrest, and still today, their bodies split the whole of Russia across the width, from Moscow to Vladivostok and from Vladivostok to Moscow – nearly a quarter of the circumference of the earth with each trip, did you know; their skin habituated to the climate, their feet have felt the earth’s relief, the least rise in the contour line stretching over more than nine thousand kilometres, their eyes have seen wild irises and forbidden villages – clouded in coal with names that don’t even appear on maps ...”
Whole essays could be written on the joys and secrets to be uncovered and relished in this passage alone: from the dual meaning of “irises” (have their eyes seen the flower or, perhaps, the eyes of corybantic people?) to the conspiratorial “did you know” as the author turns directly to the reader like a fellow traveller divulging a fascinating titbit. But my favourite detail, hidden in plain sight, is the unobtrusive semicolon linking together the phrases of this run-on sentence about women who are “cross-border agents without a passport”, human semicolons bridging the distance between disparate places and people.
This interest in crossing boundaries has unfortunately meant that the cliché of “liminal space” has been refried and served up half warm in most reviews of Kerangal’s book. It appears once in the text itself (in Jessica Moore’s translation at least). Liminality describes being placed between before and after, at a doorway through which one travels. But transitions only punctuate the human condition, which forever rests in the in-between of existence. Metaxy, by contrast, is the condition of being eternally suspended on a web of polarities, such as the individual and the collective, the finite and the infinite, or the mundane and the transcendent. This is also where Eastbound sits.
Our conscript, Aliocha, doesn’t learn French nor does Hélène learn Russian. Ignorant of the depths within each other – the fullness implied by a definite past and possible futures – they live with the immediacy of what they know right now. While a few scenes occur off the train, the book itself is suspended in the in-betweenness of the train journey. Eastbound is made up of the finite “now”, the truth that we only exist in moments, each eternally hung between other moments, which gives meaning to the trite observation that tomorrow never comes. This is baked into Aliocha’s story – we know that even if he escapes the train and avoids his military duty, we can only be assured of that safety for the duration of the book’s pages. After that, who knows if he is later discovered and sent to the army, or lives a long life as a free man.
This emphasis on the temporal does not, however, lead to resigned fatalism. In Eastbound, art is a reversal of the spiritual diminishment caused by violence. War reduces: the individual to the collective; the soul to the soldier; the named to the nameless. Aliocha is the only conscript given a definite name. He is in turn reduced further to his physical strength; when two of his comrades attack him, he resorts to animal violence in his defence. Later, the semi-mythical duality of the train attendant extolled above is reduced to her being “two-faced”. The provodnitsa who reveals herself to be untrustworthy is diminished with a single word: “bitch”.
Art, however, returns fullness to the world. In spite of Aliocha’s bitter construal of the provodnitsa, we are offered that percipient passage quoted in part above, which restores her to something like a multitudinous being, “whose gravid body contains the entire country”. Later, Hélène “examines each face” among the young draftees, “her way of parcelling out the group, allowing individuals to emerge” – and they emerge as possible names, those individuating pieces of language that breathe first life into characters. Even Aliocha and Hélène are reduced to entities that exist only in relation to each other – he is a runaway in her carriage, and she could be his saviour. It’s only in the text, which we as readers are privy to and the characters are not, that Aliocha and Hélène are revealed in their fullness and complexity. It’s only through Kerangal’s art that their human inflorescence unfurls.
It’s evident in Eastbound that Kerangal takes language seriously, and she expects us to take it seriously too. The deliberate ambiguities of certain words interrogate the belief that our assumptions – about people, places, or feelings – can carry us meaningfully across the page simply by removing unwanted cognitive friction. Kerangal’s prose is a volley in the war against what Martin Amis called “dead words”. By forging new linguistic associations (describing, for instance, a forest as “like a magnetic cloth, modulated to infinity by the thickness of the air”) and kicking the legs out from under tired sentential structures (as when she makes unusual demands of the comma), Kerangal spurns cliché.
This is more than the mere prose styling of an expert at her craft. Cliché is an affront not only to language but to our humanity – which is why Amis described it as “herd writing, herd thinking, herd feeling” – and which degrades our view of the humanity of others. The categories we allow to subsume the individuality of other people are clichés of a sort. “Soldier”, “ex-pat”, “train attendant”: borrowed ideas that replace the singularity of those whom we label. In Eastbound, for the duration of our train ride with Aliocha, Hélène, and Kerangal’s wonderful story, the curtain of cliché is torn down, the diminishment of the soul caused by war and violence is counteracted, and the world becomes full again.