Originally published in 1947, Georges Simenon’s compelling existential tale, Act of Passion, is one of the very few of the author's five hundred novels written in the first-person. Although assuming the form of a lengthy letter penned in a jail cell by condemned prisoner Charles Alavoine, for our ease of reading, Alavoine’s letter contains all the standard punctuation for dialogue and takes on the form of a conventional novel.
Also fortunate for readers is how this New York Review Books (NYRB) edition includes an astute Introduction by film critic Roger Ebert. And since Act of Passion is one of the author’s “hard novels,” a psychological study of character rather than detective mystery, I’ll focus on what I perceive as key moments and conflicts in the life of the narrator.
Charles Alavoine, a man Roger Ebert deems as entirely encased within himself, is devoid of any capacity for empathy. Charles is a country doctor, his mother’s choice (either doctor or priest), a career he himself considers no more than a job; indeed, Charles would much rather be outside in the fields.
Of course, a French novel of a country doctor by the name of Charles married to a beautiful wife (actually, his second wife) will have inevitable associations with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I suspect an entire essay could be written comparing the two novels but I will refrain from making any further parallels beyond noting these obvious similarities.
“From my bench I could see the jurors scowling and wrinkling up their foreheads, sometimes jotting down notes like detective story readers whom an author, without seeming to do so, has switched on to a new track.” What a great Simenon line – from an author of many dozen Detective Maigret stories.
Anyway, Charles has the distinct impression he has broken through to the other side, “I have enormous advantage for I have killed” - claiming the man he is writing to, the Examining Magistrate, is the only person he would like to comprehend the underlying reasons for his murder, reasons expressing his own profound wisdom of the true workings of the world. "It would be so much easier if you too had killed!"
But there’s the rub. How much wisdom and understanding does Charles Alavoine, in fact, possess? For starters, as Roger Ebert remarks, Alavoine is a fetishist: “His eye for specifics is that of a fetishist: he remembers a street, a café, a room, a train, how the light fell – and always the lonely Alavoine is at the center. The accretion of details suggests the mind of a masturbator re-creating scenes of past erotic intensity. It is possible to imagine Alavoine reading over his own pages and feeling aroused.”
Moreover, after the premature death of his docile first wife delivering her second daughter, Charles has to deal with the stunning Armande, a gorgeous blonde who initially enters his household as his daughter’s nurse but eventually completely takes over. And Armande’s domination is total, including, in effect, forcing Charles into marriage and holding Charles's mother under her powerful thumb. How much does Armande’s perfectionism and control (nowadays our term for such a personality is “control freak”) have on pushing Charles Alavoine to hook up with young barfly Martine from the Belgian city of Liège (nice touch, Georges, since Liège is also your native city), the woman Alavoine falls in love with and eventually strangles?
Charles also writes of the terrible emptiness he feels, how he alone realizes just how indifferent the universe is to our fragile human desires. An all-pervasive uneasiness forces Charles to conclude he is wasting his life. But then it happens: Martine awakens in him a furious desire - not only a sexual desire but also a desire to "find his shadow.” Ah, the mention of finding one's shadow opens the novel up to a thoroughly Jungian interpretation, the shadow referring to the unconscious, dark aspects of personality.
However, there’s a price for his newfound passion. Charles is so totally bound to Martine, wants to melt into her, such that he has "awakened the phantoms" and thus loses psychic control, even to the point where he hates all other men who so much as approach her. He desires Martine and demands the world completely accommodate his desire. Big problem. A force, a passion, has been given to him, a man who up until this point in his life “didn’t even have a shadow.” We hear echoes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit that "hell is other people” when Charles rages against what he labels “the Other,” when he rages against an entire society he deems a suffocating net. And there are times when Charles's rage, his phantoms, boil over - he physically assaults Martine.
Charles recognizes he is, at times, possessed by his rage. He also realizes there are other times his obsession for Martine becomes overwhelming. But what about his own ignorance? Throughout his letter, Charles claims a capacity for unique awareness and a rarefied understanding.
Alas, by my eye, one of the key philosophical issues of Simenon’s novel: Charles can detect when he is in the grip of rage, of anger; likewise, he can identify those other times when he is filled with greed, of the need to make Martine his own. But how about his pervading ignorance, his lack of compassion and empathy? Such a lack can be much more pernicious, insidious and destructive since it is all inclusive; in other words, it doesn’t have an edge - he is continually snared in its grip.
And how much of our own life can we detect in Charles Alavoine? In the spirit of French existential novels written in first-person, such as Camus’s The Fall and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, Simenon's Act of Passion is a work of probing life-and-death questions, one I highly recommend.
"I burst into a rage, your Honour. Not only against Armande. Against all of you, against life, as you understand it, against the idea you have of the union of two beings and the heights of passion they can attain." - Georges Simenon, Act of Passion
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