Selling Tainted Blood: On Leslie Kaplan’s “Miss Nobody Knows”

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“Nothing more must happen, not in the street, nor in public buildings. Nowhere.” —Charles de Gaulle

No one died in ‘68. For the revamped bourgeois order that emerged in the wake of that year, this statement has functioned as both reformist summary conclusion, which neatly sweeps aside the general strike of 9 million workers that saw its head of state flee the country, and justification of its control over what would come after, according to Kristin Ross in her May 68 and its Afterlives. And the police, of course, did kill people that year, and went on to kill many more. Leslie Kaplan’s novella Miss Nobody Knows, published in France in 1996 and recently made available by Tripwire Editions in Jennifer Pap’s crisp translation with a clarifying translator’s afterword, investigates one of these deaths of 1968—a death not directly at the hands of the police, but rather from revolutionary discouragement. “Image: a man hanging. He’s made the table and chair slippery with soap and he’s left a note. ‘I’ve lied all my life.’ A young man, my uncle, Stéphane. The date: May 69.” 

Once a body has been introduced, the enquête must follow. For Maoists like Kaplan in France in the late 60s, it was a tactic central to their activism and connotesinvestigation,inquiry, andsurvey: to go to the workers to gain a fuller understanding of their situation and join in their struggle—no investigation, no right to speak. In the novella the investigation takes the form of a symbolic act. Where in a former life the activist hit the pavement to speak to farmers and workers, or went as far as seeking out factory jobs themself in order to better discern there the contours of proletarian struggle, Kaplan deploys novelistic form as a way to represent and probe the various and also competing desires underlying the social upheaval and where and how it all fell apart. The method for investigating worker’s consciousness as it breaks out of the factory is subsequently directed at the living conditions within the family and household. On the whole, there’s a celluloid quality to this pursuit, as if family slides were being slowly but rhythmically shuffled, both backward and forward and back again in time, a voice narrating the details while sifting through the memories evoked in search of a fuller picture. Was it suicide or murder? What’s the difference and does it matter?

It’s Marie, the titular Miss Nobody Knows and a foil of sorts for Stéphane, whose mysterious presence is linked with the latter’s decline and demise. She figures as an amalgam of all the women the narrator knew during and after the strike at the factory, though Marie has never mentioned doing any factory work herself. As Pap’s clarifying afterword mentions, Marie has an attachment to details and is committed to cataloguing the ephemera of everyday life, and it is her role as the narrator’s conversation partner that makes it possible for the story of what happened to be told. The words on the deep-blue poster (a real May artifact) tacked to the factory walls when work resumed becomes a mantra or watchword uniting them in a conspiratorial collective when Marie sings them to the tune of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and later writes them on a postcard with a string of question marks and hearts to the narrator after moving out: 

“What’s happening?”“Nothing.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“But I thought…”

“You shouldn’t think.”

Still, people think, to borrow anthropologist Sylvain Lazarus’s axiom, despite capital’s white-knuckle grip on the reins of ideology which social compact dictates: you will always owe more labor to the factory—and that’s a good thing for everyone involved. In the middle section of the book we then get glimpses of a world where those reins have slipped some, where people begin demanding just exactly how that’s a good thing, and where the prevailing social reality recedes and “the walls move back, they split apart and get out of the way, they make room, and now and now and now…” In this space a new association forms, new bodily rhythms expand outward and assert themselves, the characters of the strike redefine their identities “like statues suddenly moving”; now they themselves choose what to do with their time, their lives. It’s the festival aspect of ‘68 that emerges in dances, games of boules, costumes and performances, radio broadcasts, art making, collaborative construction projects, field trips, and lively conversation out in the open. Clock-in-to-clock-out time is transformed into the self-directed present until the strike is called off on the bosses’ terms, papering over in short order the underlying contradictions such as the gender division of labor made visible. Emblematic of this dynamic is an immigrant worker, with whom the narrator often went to the strikes and who was easy to laugh and active in discussions, and who “referred to the girls as his little sisters,” but by the end of the strike the mood shifts; he grows cynical and decides he will become a boxer or a pimp. His trajectory is mirrored by the narrator’s uncle, though where the former will assume a lumpen lifestyle, the latter throws in with the bourgeoisie in a managerial capacity as a Rimbaud-quoting adman. Even if these two didn’t die directly on the job, we are compelled to count them as victims of social murder at the hands of that same bourgeoisie who hurried them to the grave before their time. 

Kaplan began to use literary form to think through the political situation first in her pathbreaking 1982 book L’excès-L’usine published in Pap and Julie Carr’s translation by Commune Editions in 2018, which depicts the harrowing workaday life in a women’s factory in a language both intimate and alienating. Nine sections (circles) of cadenced prose recounted from the 3^rd person general perspective—the French on, which contains shades of “we,” “they,” “one,” as well as “you”; a collectively recognized everyone that is woman—track in parallel the atomized movements of one’s human body alongside walls, teeth, cables, coffee, dust, stairs, vacant lots, hard crackers, soft, disgusting paper, foiled paper, and old used-up plastic, on-time, off-time, down-time, in the factory where an infinitely long rotation of ground-up bits and fragments of living and dead labor cycle around and around invariably. “Woman”/”women” appear 30 times in the book, whereas “man”/”men” appear once, in the fourth circle: “You go up. The sexes are separated./The men stay below.” Here, we see how the Fordist factory’s spatial divisions co-determines a gendered division of labor.

The first narrative account of French factory life of the period, Robert Linhart’s L’établi (The Assembly Line, tr. Margaret Crosland), features a perceptive sequence when the Robert-figure finds out from another worker why he was classified as an OS2, or a semiskilled worker, upon being hired despite having no previous experience: “The distinction is made in a perfectly simple way: it’s racist. The Blacks are M1, right at the bottom of the ladder. The Arabs are M2 or M3. The Spaniards, Portuguese, and other European immigrants are usually OS1. The French are automatically OS2. And you become OS3 just because of the way you look, depending on how the bosses want it.” In the strike depictions of Miss Nobody Knows, we see the suspension of this gender and racially-based class stratification, but the strike of course comes to an end and with it the space that was opening (literally space: “Space without function, the sensation of space[…] Space was opening, enormous”) for new social relations, which drives some instead to revolutionary terrorism (see Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Nada) and some others to rural areas where they could prepare for coming revolution (see my translation of Nathalie Quintane’s The Cavalier), while still others conclude: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! 
So, back to the narrator’s enquête. Because what happened is that something happened during the strike, and there is still no adequate language or framework to adequately represent what that was exactly, even if French society managed to get the wheels back on the rails so to speak. After Stéphane’s death the narrator learns from her mother that he had been following her journey away from home and into militant activity with curiosity, that she had served as a model for him. He went down to the Latin Quarter to join up with the students in the streets, then journeyed with them to occupy the factories, becoming close with three male workers there. He never fleshed out the details of this time with any emotional valence, however. In the throes of disappointment and revolutionary failure, Stéphane and the narrator never communicated with each other about their experiences of ‘68 and instead vicariously contend over the degree to which a new regime has installed itself ex post facto. In a scene worthy of Cassavetes’ intimate dramas we witness Stéphane instrumentalize Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell in front of his sister and niece to cryptically justify his new position at the ad agency, quoting such lines as “When the infinitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and through herself” and “Woman it is known, is the future of man,” as well as “One must invent a poetic language that will be accessible, some day, to all the senses,”  replacing Rimbaud’s “I kept the translation to myself” with his own unitalicized cynical spin: “Advertising.” Rimbaud, whose poetic visions were nourished by the Paris Commune’s working out the economic emancipation of labor, gave up poetry altogether at age 21 to sell coffee and guns in colonial Africa. Even so, what aggrieves the narrator, is that she will never have a chance to quote her Rimbaud back at him, and that he, like Rimbaud, exited the stage too soon, after two mere acts: revolt and ironic capitulation. Well, on we go.