David O. Scaer, Passacaglia. Roanoke, VA: The Fourteen
Seventy.
Reviewed by Michael Evans, Delta College (michaelevans@delta.edu)
“You should never be king” King Louis VI of France tells his son at
the beginning of David Scaer’s Passacaglia,
“You have no sense of the arc of years“
(p. 5). Such an accusation could never be leveled at the author of this “Analytical
Novel”. Scaer’s characters and storylines interweave and collide to illustrate
how time is not a neat continuous thread but a
big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. For example, Vincenzo Peruggia,
the would-be patriot thief of the Mona Lisa, drags his loot in a brass-cornered
case through the streets of Nice, streets named after Napoleon and his generals
who Peruggia (falsely) believes stole La
Gioconda from his beloved Italy. Peruggia’s tragi-comic journey is
interweaved with vignettes from the life of king François I, patron of Leonardo
and the man really responsible for bringing the painting to France. Leonardo
proposes a series of ambitious engineering projects to François, who reluctantly
turns them all down, as Peruggia embarks on his equally ambitious and equally fruitless odyssey to repatriate Leonardo’s greatest work to their shared homeland.
Scaer spins five distinct but
interwoven threads, two of them medieval (although medieval themes and motifs
also overlap into the modern and early-modern storylines): Havoise, wife of one
of William the Conqueror’s thuggish knights-turned-lords (turned-abbot in the
case of her husband Torsten, an unreformed cleric who brings the Gregorian
reform to England at the point of a
sword), creates the Bayeux Tapestry; Philip Augustus, son of that same, hapless
Louis VII who has “no sense of the arc of the years” and who loses Aquitaine,
obsessively plans to win the duchy and his father’s former wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine,
back for the crown of France; Peruggia embarks on his picaresque quest while
Leonardo languishes at the court of François I; Vicus, an intellectual is adrift
in modern-day France amid a failing marriage; and finally Vicus again, now
recast as a lover, woos his beloved El. The image of weaving and threads seems
particularly appropriate in the case of the Havoise, who when we last see her
is literally wrapped in history as she returns from England to her native Normandy
clothed in her tapestry (p. 510). The characters all share in the fanatical
pursuit of a lover or a work of art (or both; Peruggia’s concern for his stolen
painting matches the tenderness of a lover for his beloved). A recurring motif
in the novel is George Santayana’s definition of a fanatic as “one who
redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim” (p. 423). Scaer does not,
however, condemn his characters for their redoubled efforts.
As the musical-themed title
suggests, the novel’s strands are also linked rhythmically. French sonnets with
English translations (both written by Scaer) introduce each section (there are
no numbered chapters), adding their own 4-4-3-3 rhythm to the text. The
numerical sequence 9-1-4-7-3-6 recurs like a musical motif, whether describing
the number of islands in the Loire delta at Nantes, the mathematics of Leonardo’s
engineering, or the registers of a window dedicated by Philip II at Chartres
cathedral. The author describes this numerical pattern as a site-shifting algorithm,
determining the transitions between the five narrative strands of the
novel.[1]
The passacaglia (from Spanish pasa-calle – literally, walking along a
street) accompanies the reader in the footsteps of Vicus through Nantes and
Peruggia through Nice. Scaer has also written accompanying music,
and the notation for one composition (“Conditur Alme Siderum”) appears in the
book, where it is attributed to Vicus (p. 489). The relation between music and
mathematics feels appropriate in a medievalist novel, given that the two disciplines
were classed together in the quadrivium on
the curriculum of medieval universities.
While Scaer emphasizes the fragility
of the barrier between past and present, we are also made aware of the blurring
of arbitrary national and geographical boundaries. The border between France and
Italy is of utmost importance to Valois armies invading the peninsula and to Peruggia as he attempts to smuggle the Mona Lisa back to his (and its) homeland. Yet Vicus in the age of the
European Union and the Schengen Agreement “had wandered over the border with
Italy – and back – a few dozen times that year. It was no big deal. There was
no wall, no fence, no nothing. No Italians with machine guns demanding his
papers in one direction, no Frenchmen with machine guns in the other direction,
either” (p. 28). Ironically, Peruggia barely notices the frontier when he
reaches it; “It’s not like there’s a wall or anything before legal Italy starts
… it’s not like they’re suddenly about to leap out, weapons drawn, as I Cross
Over” (p. 449). Nice itself is barely French; originally Greek Nikaia, given to
France only 21 years before Peruggia’s birth as payment for Napoleon’s III’s
aid in the wars of the Risorgimento,
it is today the place “where France and Italy rub their loins together” (p. 86).
Seated in the city’s Italianesque cathedral of Sainte Réparate, Peruggia
encounters a huge (French) tricolor and fantasizes about tearing it down (p.388).
Nice is also the venue for his rendez-vous with partner-in-crime Guillaume
Apollinaire; the Roman-born Apollinaire is an appropriately Franco-Italian
figure to encounter in this hybrid border city.
The River Loire also plays an
important role intersecting the different timelines. It flows through the
Angevin lands that Philip Augustus covets, past François I’s palace at Amboise
down to Nantes, where we first encounter Vicus in the city where land and sea,
France and Brittany meet and blur together. Leonardo’s plans to divert the
Loire as part of his grandiose architectural schemes on behalf of François are
rejected as unrealistic by the king’s advisors, and we are reminded later that
the movement of rivers’ courses must be the work of centuries, not of a single
man: “empires rose and fell and rivers changed their course in their meandering
way” (p. 433). Water is not the only element to cross the time-lines; fire destroys
Chartres Cathedral in the twelfth century, and the Cathedral of Nantes in the
twentieth, just the latest of a series of conflagrations from Viking invasion via World War II bombs. (A percentage of the price of each copy of Passacaglia is donated to the Amis de la Cathédrale de Nantes).
Geography is also central to
Philip Augustus’ obsessive pursuit of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Like Prince
Herbert’s father in Monty Python and the
Holy Grail, he is interested not so much in the woman herself as her “huge
tracts of land”. As he lies with his wife Isabelle of Hainault, the young king
thinks of territories and titles, “Aquitaine with her ammonitic peaks. Aquitaine with her rushing-grustling forests sighing. Aquitaine with her dappled Atlantic sands, her salt-capped waves and her dusty grapes ... Aquitaine and her Eleanor, that restless
huntress who had besotted his slow, cold, dimwitted father … And he came, hot
and freely” (p. 13). When he finally defeats and kills Richard the Lionheart at
Château-Gaillard (the historical Richard died in the Limousin, fighting a
rebellious vassal) Philip’s joy is almost sexual as he exclaims “Eleanor, you are mine” (p. 500). Eleanor
never appears directly in the novel, but her presence is felt not only through
Philip’s ambitions but in the modern love triangle between Vicus, his beloved
El, and his rival Ricus, which recalls Philip’s father Louis VII’s loss of
Eleanor (and Aquitaine) to Henry of Anjou; [Ludo]Vicus, El[eanor], [Hen]Ricus.
Scaer, a professor of French
literature of Roanoke College, joins the ranks of academics who also engage in
the writing of fiction (and, in Scaer’s case, of music and poetry also). His
interdisciplinary background allows the author to adopt a more complex,
playful, and multilayered approach to the past than is usually encountered in the
sometimes tired genre of the historical novel. Like other academic-novelists
such as Umberto Eco and Bruce Holsinger, Scaer strives not to reproduce the
past as a Rankean “as it really was” – there are deliberate historical “errors”
(improvements?), such as Philip Augustus killing Richard the Lionheart, and
Peruggia and Apollinaire’s meeting in Nice – but to engage with how history is
made, and how the past intersects with the present. Scaer’s work is complex
without being baffling, challenging without being inaccessible, and intellectual
without being pretentious. Readers with a background in the history, music, art
or literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance will enjoy identifying the allusions
and references, but those without such a background will still appreciate the
novel for its strong characterizations, fine prose and poetry, and evocation of
France.
