“Creation” and the Commune

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“Sadie had to be who she is,” Rachel Kushner told The Walrus, “to make this novel work.” Sadie Smith, Creation Lake’s protagonist, is a character straight out of the purest canon: the American abroad, visiting Europe. Yet she is also a spy, a “narc,” an infiltrator among activists who live and work collectively on obscure projects in the south of France. Of their life, “inner workings would need to stay private,” Kushner explains, “because someone sympathetic would not go and tell the world.” And the character’s troubles of fitting in poorly may be more existential, still, than that: “As a friend of mine who read it said to me, it’s like the main character is inside of a genre novel, but the novel itself is a Rachel Kushner novel,” Kushner has said elsewhere. A genre novel wrapped in one that’s literary; an innocent abroad, cloaked in the mantle of an operative.

Because Creation Lake contains activists, other critics have, often as if speaking from positions on the politics of literature already claimed, in bygone days staked out, foregrounded a task of evaluating whether it (Kushner?) is cynical (Taylor, Dillon, Ruby, Caplan-Bricker finally in Jewish Currents) or sentimental (Garner, Schwartz). This has been the common project as if bait were being taken. “We have just seen, in the case of Creation Lake, how Kushner’s choice of narrative perspective and character have the effect of disaggregating a collective into its component individuals and reducing political convictions to personal interests,” writes Ryan Ruby, I guess damningly; “Homo sapiens cannot live on abstraction alone,” writes Alexandra Schwartz, offering the counterpoint. Yet it is almost as if activists were hard for literature to look at, or too easy; no one wants to ask what kind of activist. “Has ecological terrorism grown tired as a fictional subject?” This is Dwight Garner’s question (to which his own response, amazingly enough, is “Probably”). But the activists on whom Kushner has modeled her collective, Le Moulin, are not just any ecological terrorists. They are, and at a certain moment in modern French history crucially were, literary ecological terrorists.

Theirs was not a literature whose burdens were of character or tropes of character, of “fictional subjects” such as those for which the reading public clamors. “Don’t get it twisted”—this translation is about to be mine—“what happened to us, to my comrades and me, could happen just as easily to you.” In forgetting the aforementioned  one might easily fall prey, it was claimed, to “power’s first mystification: that nine people should be prosecuted . . . and should feel themselves particularly concerned by this serious accusation.” This is Julien Coupat, founder of the journal Tiqqun, in May 2009 telling Le Monde, though it has come to the prison to interview him specifically, that the act of sabotage of which he stands accused doesn’t have anything to do with him, not because he didn’t do it but because it doesn’t have, not saliently, anything to do with anyone (the ease with which self-interest blends and mixes with the loftiest of principles being no coincidence but an advantage, by rights, of the radical life). “There is no ‘Tarnac affair’ any more than there is a ‘Coupat affair,'” Coupat continues. “What there is, is an oligarchy vacillating along every one of its aspects and that gets ferocious, as all power gets ferocious, when it feels itself to be really threatened.”

Attending to the melodrama of the individual rather than the direr menace of the violence of the superstructure is just one trap this “selfhood” of our culture sets for us; the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, in its first “circle”—“I AM WHAT I AM” is the header—lays out more. Coupat had been presumed to be an author of this book; it was entered in as evidence; for now I will quote from it at length:

Decades of concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I = I. He’s running on a treadmill in front of the mirror in his gym. She’s coming back from work behind the wheel of her Smart car. Will they meet?

My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and something’s wrong. Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions—life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. . . .

The injunction, everywhere, to “be someone” maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. . . .

“I AM WHAT I AM,” then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign . . . 

Meanwhile at that time in France a mobilization among publishing milieux against the oppressive use being made of this book came to the defense of, particularly, the authors’ right to anonymity, all signing petitions saying they were the Invisible Committee. “Don’t you think I should say it now,” wonders the speaker of Nathalie Quintane’s Tomates, which deals with these events, “that I’m the author of The Coming Insurrection?” (Her friend tells her not to worry; the cops don’t read books published by P. O. L.) The stakes were high as leftist theory was put up against the narrative of the police—a genre novel, people noted in their op eds, certainly a “spectacle.” I am sorry if all this still seems inside but offer it as context about what, in Creation Lake, Kushner has ended up fictionalizing—the historical situation, and its players.

“Pascal Balmy” is her Coupat, with his “wire-rimmed glasses”; Coupat’s girlfriend Yildune Levy has an analogue, who is not named (to be fair, she appears just in a flashback). Manuel Valls is a guy called “Platon”; he’s knocked off. Wonderfully, Kushner’s “Guyenne,” which I thought was a pitch-perfect made-up name for a French department, is taken from history; a part of southwest France was long ago called that. Speaking of France, there’s a Houellebecq! “Michel Thomas.” And the jokes are on France or “France” more than they are on French activism (which has produced admittedly few celebrities). Bernard-Henri Lévy is Bernard-Henri Lévy; Jospin is Jospin. Céline is Céline and “Flaubert” is “spared,” writes Ruby, but there is a version, pivotal, of the famous scene of an agricultural competition from Madame Bovary. 

Such games of identification are so central to this novel not only because it is a pastiche, quite delightfully inviting us to feel egged on in doing match ups as above, but because it is a spy novel. Sadie’s job consists, for most of the novel, in identifying her marks; there are running gags about getting it wrong. Interlaid with her travel story are theoretical digressions about the spiritual benefits we humans may enjoy of being part Neanderthal, minutely; these are the production of a character named Bruno, guru to the commune whose emails she has hacked. In this way even the deepest foundation of “identity”—what “makes” “us” “human”—is called into question! Meanwhile cases of mistaken identity, even the small ones, are always, always mined for comedy: “‘Did you know he thinks he’s Guy Debord, reincarnated?'” My very favorite of these is Sadie’s complaint about her Google Alert for the French city of Nancy turning up pages upon pages of results about a gal or gals named Nancy. Actually, wait! This one’s my favorite: “Ralph Lauren-né-Lipschitz” (never mind the context). So, to make a return to Kushner’s provocative statement: “Who” “is” “Sadie”? 

Of course it’s not her real name. And her breasts aren’t real, either; other critics have waxed moral about ink spilled on her behalf by Kushner about her personal appearance. “I’m merely what white women are meant to look like,” she remarks—there is a lot of this. A relationship to her own gender, its procreative possibilities, throughout is fittingly ironic. An image of a newborn in a dumpster will seem relevant to her as she goes on; we will find her fixating, additionally and often, on medical complaints, her IUD. She observes settings or people just briefly, only to swerve away in sort of boastfully connecting them to the wealth of cultural knowledge she claims for herself: “Having never been there”—this one is a little heavy-handed—“this was exactly how I had imagined Marseille would be.” And in that city the “housedress” of a “matron,” of a female who apparently is local, gendered resident—Is she supposed to be “La Marseillaise”?—immediately upon being glimpsed is related back to Sadie’s time in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, spent sitting in judgment on garments of Orthodox women. All roads lead inward. Where Kushner’s The Mars Room put into circulation elements of found language from the real-world situation it referred to of a women’s prison, Creation Lake is welcoming more to slightly larger fragments of the culture, earworms, literally a melody—and like the rest, to this heroine, a collectible.

Yet despite these interests, the knowledge with which she lets us know explicitly she is equipped, Sadie is as a rule in poor taste. Her comparisons are bathetic, inappropriate—“The hills above Vantôme were scattered with bald areas, like the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition”—even if one can’t help noting that occasionally, in being so, they strangely succeed: “large rolls of hay” are “wrapped in white plastic like giant pills.” She favors a style of humor I would like to call “office Christmas party,” essaying observations about how, for example, Italian pasta, though shaped differently, all tastes kind of the same.

But then something amazing happens to Sadie. When she does “join” Le Moulin, on the pretext of helping translate their Coming Insurrection-like Zones of Incivility (that its name is such a groaner is a kind of lapse that’s rare for Kushner), the narration I’ve described above starts changing. She gets curious about others, their interconnections with each other and with nature (Bruno’s thought has proven influential); she begins, astonishingly for Sadie, to “just be.” “The flutter and play of light and leaves was breaking down along the edges of my vision,” she remarks. A turn in her thinking by which it comes to welcome in a Bruno-ism is narrated like this: “maybe it is only by admitting that some harmful condition is permanent, that you begin to locate a way to escape it.” “My insistence on difference dissolves,” she observes a hundred pages later. “And her face was my face, and her tears were my tears,” she continues. Following Bruno’s wisdom, she stops herself from fixating; after Platon’s death she stops herself even from drinking, flees to (sending up the Platon tribute) Spain, the assumed identity having been left behind very literally (Smith’s clothes do not come with her), the false self of whoever this person is really following after as she bathes, at last peaceful, in the sea.

That the lesson in Sadie’s sentimental education is about the dissolution or a shedding of the self is at the very least an in-joke for those who’ve read The Coming Insurrection (at least have read the first chapter of The Coming Insurrection). “Les procureurs sont des écrivains de polars ratés”: this is Coupat interviewed much later, in 2015, for L’Obs.[1] Yet is it enough for the genre novel in this case to fail, to give way to a real one, for us at last, imperfectly enough, to “see around” its narrator? I think perhaps not. My idea is that Creation Lake is less a genre novel wrapped in a literary novel than it is a genre novel wrapped in a “literary” novel. Even if you identify with the cop—as Kushner productively, if a little depressingly, posits most people will—you will be able to turn the pages, have an experience that is edifying, instructive; it beats what’s on TV. You may certainly be helped to dream of that exotic possibility, the commune. You may even get a feel for left thinking from this star turn for the commune. Maybe Bruno is in a real novel. He lives in history. “Sometimes, though, Kushner lets us glimpse the man behind the inert myth, and, when she does, it is wonderful,” writes Alexandra Schwartz for The New Yorker.

A concern that she has written her French activists as genre does occur—just once, midstream—to Kristin Ross in her slim and lucid book The Commune Form, the culmination of a larger project of her scholarship, also released last year. “I am aware that making an example out of haying runs the risk of veering dangerously close to the genre of pastoral,” she writes, having just recounted, with verve and charm, a visit to the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes where she was to give a talk that was delayed by diversions including helping round up wild horses and eating fresh-baked bread as well as pitching hay. You could not say of this scene that it is peopled by any “character,” in the novelistic sense, other than Ross herself—generously, with an open spirit, she assimilates the ideas of those she meets, but then she leaves. This is not a novel but a work of theory that contains within it, to useful ends, a well-written scene in which zadistes are glimpsed. As I was reading The Commune Form I emailed myself (this is what causes my inbox always to be trashed), “Write about Christian.”

In fact I think Ross may have seen him. “Balancing like goats on the top of the bales, Jojo or Christian would haul the flung bales into an arrangement that would keep them from toppling over.” They were like that; Joe was his friend.

So anyway, who’s Christian? He’s this one:

Christian wore the same muddy rubber boots and blues. “I remember you,” he shouted, embracing me. “The American. You cried and everything. Why did you come? It’s not even interesting, it’s a piece of shit, it’s a conspiracy. […]”

Christian bummed cigarettes, dodged tennis balls the others threw, told them the American would pay for dinner and hugged me saying not to cry, that he was kidding, farmers had thrown torches at him. He rolled his overalls and asked if he looked like a farmer. […] Joe sat on the smooth brick and pulled up his hood. I crouched beside him. He spoke quietly. Since the eviction he had stuck with Christian, finding spots to sleep in the Ariège. They were afraid that farmers followed them. He had been hanging around some shitty people, as he told me, laisse tomber. “It’s not easy, for me, this ephemeral life. I have nothing to do with all that.” He was using a marker to color a knee of his jeans. “Voilà,” he said. “All that I will have done at the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Albi. And I will have done the rest on my way out.” The court was ready.

The zadistes filed inside; a few, passing Joe, patted his head. “Come on Joe,” Dujardin said.

“Let me finish,” Joe said, still scribbling.

Christian moved to tower over Joe. “I won’t go in without him,” he said. “What are you doing, Joe?”

“Glad,” wrote the editor—younger yet more professional than I was, kind—“that you have the stomach for some of those cuts.” [2]

I’d met Joe and Christian not at Notre-Dame-des-Landes but at the ZAD there used to be at Sivens, in the Tarn department, where, it was accused—and indeed found, though they maintained that they were innocent—they had assaulted a farmer (the extreme violence of the local farmers, who tended to belong to the FNSEA union that supported the construction project the zadistes there opposed, having been a defining feature of the Sivens experience; the only time I took objection to Kushner’s occasionally book report-esque treatment of the movement was when her gloss of this constellation of violence-farmers-local attitudes occurred without the dark shading that such realities, as it would come to seem to me, required).

It was a multi-year project; that was not the first editor. I had thought, by transposing narratives of lives like Joe’s and Christian’s, to show how they lived in time. But this could make the text hard to work with as a text.

I met them in 2014; the piece was published in 2019; in 2021 on my birthday I got a note from Joe, a Facebook message, wishing me a happy birthday while also letting me know that Christian, whose descent into anti-statism had progressed far enough to make it impossible, by that point, for him to tolerate hospital care—he suffered from the same treatable yet extremely painful back disease as Luigi Mangione, actually; tall men are susceptible—was planning to, on his upcoming birthday and in the company of friends like Joe, end his life.

I remember thinking, as a first thought, that if evil exists this is it; this will take from me as much as I will give it, and I will not be strong enough not to let it take from me everything I have until it’s over. It happened that way; I spent the month on the phone. In the end I could not save him. 

“It’s hard to stop someone from hurting himself when he’s the one who wants to do it,” I remember Joe telling me, “you don’t have any lever.”

Is literature political? How about can literature use activists? If they are people too, I guess it can.

Over many years Ross, a literature professor, has built an oeuvre out of beautiful conjectures about the contributions of French movements in particular to thought coterminous with literature’s on form. About pacing, arrangements. “Everyday life harbors the texture of social change; to perceive it at all is to recognize the necessity of its conscious transformation,” she writes, in one of the essays collected in her Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life; “the everyday harbors rich oppositional resources.” Of the ZAD she writes, “There was a kind of physical density and physical intensity there made up of bodies in action, the palpable sense of a world.” Over and over she returns to a phrase of Marx’s about the “actual working existence” of the 1871 Commune, in one of her many redactions “the living, breathing shape of people leading unscripted lives based on cooperation and association.” “The space-time of the commune form,” she writes, in this latest, “is anchored in the art and organization of everyday life and in a collective and individual responsibility taken for the means of subsistence.” Opposed to “the one-sided hodgepodge gratification of possessing and having,” this is a “struggle to make accumulative processes prevail” in which time itself has been, thanks to this collective energy, “appropriated”—the term is Henri Lefebvre’s—opened up to allow for spontaneous action.

So from French activists like Christian she takes form; Kushner takes, I would say, “content” (and not, despite her action packing, plot; the plot is Sadie’s sentimental education; it is perfectly untrue, meanwhile, that the “inner workings” of such latter-day communes remain private; notable are the writings of the collective Mauvaise Troupe, at least one of whom I met on the ZAD and whose output Ross has worked to translate).

It’s been so long since I began writing about these activists, their action so influential on my understanding that I have almost felt the literary interest as developing ulterior to work like this, at least that it allowed for a renewal of the adolescent vows. The coherent articulation has an anarchic power. No matter who you are, you can say anything to anyone if you manage just to say it right (this is what I tell my freshmen).

Lately in the depths of black depression the only thing that helped me was tinkering with some essays like the one about the ZAD I have alluded to, restoring them to fluency—someone asked me to do this—or helping them to reach a fluency that had always seemed, due to trouble in the process, my own weakness probably or trauma, unattainable on reported issues. That latter makes you literal, and something interesting about the sociology of literature is that if they think of you as “just a journalist” you will not be able to defend your choices on bases other than their factuality yet this can make you very stupid quickly when literature’s thought is to tell us fact and language are the same.

Really I started writing about French activists, and particularly about a squat in Paris, France, because I thought that I could use the plotline it, and they, provided.

“With the weak,” writes Hardwick, winding up to deliver it, “something is always happening,” her list delicious: “improvisation, surprise, suspense, injustice, manipulation, hypochondria, secret drinking, jealousy, lying, crying, hiding in the garden, driving off in the middle of the night.

“The weak have the purest sense of history,” she writes. “Anything can happen.” Sometimes, they run off and join the ZAD.

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[1] Consulted, along with the other Coupat interview, in lundi.matin’s valuable anthology Textes et documents relatifs à l’affaire dite « de Tarnac ».

[2]  Of the piece ultimately entitled “Forms of Life” (The Point, 2019).