To and From the Void: On Barbara Molinard's "Panics"

Barbara Molinard, transl. Emma Ramadan | Panics | Feminist Press | 2022 | 128 Pages

One day, on a walk through Paris’ sixteenth arrondissement, Barbara Molinard discovered a cemetery vault, a half-circular room with four tombs hidden behind a temple gate and down a flight of stairs. She felt at peace in this vault. Here was a world within, yet apart from, that of people; here was a world that invited her to linger. A few days later, she made up her mind to stay there for three days and nights. She drew up a list of provisions: candles, four bottles of wine, salami, bread, a sleeping bag, warm clothes, and—most importantly—books. On the night before her departure, her initially compliant husband put an end to her plans, having just visited her doctor. Barbara Molinard was not to enter the vault: it would, according to the doctor, be bad for the family. Denied her journey, Molinard experienced nocturnal pains and breathlessness over the next month. And just as her doctor stood over her bed, proclaiming that suffering would heal her and pain was a blessing, Molinard’s hearing shut off. She watched his lips move, blissfully deaf to his sermon. Later, when talking to her mentor, Marguerite Duras, she understood why she had suffered: she had been deprived of the vault. Her body offered her the solace of what the vault’s hard ground and cramped space and deathly silence could not. “The doctor tells me, reasonably, that it’s madness. For me, in me, not at all.” 

Panics, a short story collection originally published as Viens in 1969 and translated by Emma Ramadan, is Molinard’s only surviving work. Since she destroyed the rest of her writing (blaming an “enemy” who would tear the pages into four pieces, then burn the shreds), it’s tempting to read the collection through her doctor’s diagnosis of “madness.” Panics’ 13 stories are filled with characters who display classic symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress, with one explicit reference to psychiatric institutionalization. In “Taxi,” for instance, staccato prose conveys the narrator’s panicked disorientation and powerlessness during a cab ride with a dog-killing, car-crashing driver, as she reminds herself not to speak, not to think, not to scream. The story ends, abruptly, with the words of a psychiatric attendant: “She’s a lost cause then, incurable. Write down: one injection tonight for bed 4327.” 

While the hellscape of psychological suffering serves as the central setting throughout Panics, madness—as defined by psychiatric institutions—is not its intended subject. Like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and, yes, Albert Camus, Molinard is far more concerned with how life itself is inescapably mad—how living means suffering, and suffering means falling into what she calls “the void,” an existential quality that infuses everything in modern life. Religion and reason will not save us; they are mere palliatives, distracting us from questions about mortality we cannot answer. But as Molinard told Duras in an interview included at the end of the collection, the void is a way of accessing death, “the only surprise left,” and attempting to express it in life. Not simply a patient returning the medical gaze, Molinard writes to and from the void. And this means writing with death and its sisters—panic, fear, bodily mutilation, futility, loss—whispering in her ear. 

The characters in Panics face fittingly hostile situations as they combat their own sluggishness, exhaustion, inability to communicate and see clearly, bizarre bodily transformations, and unmooring from linear time. They hurry. They wait. They fall and stand up, only to “resume [their] demented race, disoriented by panic and grief.” As if Molinard asked her characters to descend into darkness when she could not, they enter holes in the earth and take staircases “down and down and down.” They are beckoned: “Come!” (the book’s French-language title, Viens). They cling to that “Come!” Then, they endure what comes. 

In the Kafkaesque story “The Meeting,” the longest in the collection, a character named X undertakes a nightmarish journey on his way to a meeting with “the Other.” Rats crawl across his skin and cling to him with their teeth. He pauses: 

Seriously exasperated, X swore that, once the introductions had been made and he and the Other were, perhaps, seated in large armchairs sipping tea, he would demand an explanation. If the Other, looking down on him, refused, he would insist, discreetly but firmly, that the Other elucidate the things that were tormenting him. But X was sure deep down that such a conversation would be unnecessary, for the Other, from the first moment of their encounter, would be eager to clear up any misunderstandings. 

But the Other does not clear up any misunderstandings, nor does anyone else in Panics. Whether the characters hurry or wait, trudge along or stop to reflect, each story opens up the void through its proliferation of torment and misunderstandings. Molinard’s characters can only fall in.

What are X and Molinard’s other characters to do, having tumbled into the void with no opportunity for escape? Panic. X screams out his own name in order to quell his fear, which draws a procession of strange figures towards him, figures so terrifying he dare not identify them. His evasion strategy is only temporarily successful, however, as faceless men and women later appear, gesturing threateningly as he nears a house which, he assumes, must be the meeting place. His body ravaged by the suffering he has endured, he holds himself aloft, trying to look presentable for the Other. These attempts at rising from his animalistic crawling prove futile. The door swings open. “X cried out in horror; his eyes haggard, wild with terror, he tried to recoil [...] Once he had crossed the threshold, the door shut slowly behind him. X knew he had arrived.”

With X as the exception, Molinard’s characters don’t turn away from the horror bearing down upon them. They engage with horror so deeply that panic becomes the most reasonable response: “I feel it rising in me,” notes the unidentified narrator of the fragment “Panic.” “It creeps up and I know that any effort to stop it will be useless. I have to wait. It will entirely invade my heart, my soul, my head. It will dig hollows in me and I will lose my reason in them. The void will offer itself to my despair without greed until my annihilation is complete.” Moments of panic, suggests Molinard, bring us to the void, where we may glimpse death’s annihilation of self and other, reason and emotion. It is here that language fails, too. If death is the ultimate silence, the ultimate suspension of human reason, then the void becomes Molinard’s way of hollowing out original meanings and speaking into those empty spaces. Panic is not a sign of madness. For Molinard, panic is a way of making meaning outside of repressive institutions which, in claiming to keep death’s sisters at bay, only draw them closer. 

Like her characters, Molinard drew close to death. This was her sanity; for others, this was her madness. But what, truly, is madness, if not pretending that suffering, panic, and the void do not await us just as we near our destination? What is death if not the destination, the meeting place whose interiors are hidden from us until we arrive, unable to ever turn back? Still, we find ways to endure. For Molinard, this meant secluding herself in a cemetery vault and partaking in a ritual of writing and destroying her work, a ritual which was interrupted, just once, when her husband and Duras persuaded her to relinquish her texts. As Duras wrote in the prologue to the resulting collection: “What readers will find here is neither invented nor dreamed. It’s a record of lived experience. Writing is a part of that. Writing is lived. It is a step in the walk of suffering. Without it, the constant suffering would not have been bearable. Of that I am sure.”