Éric Rohmer’s Novel “Élisabeth” Is a Precocious Literary Triumph

The undercurrent of unsatisfied lust that runs through “Élisabeth” bursts to the fore when Michel, giving a high-school student named Jacqueline a lift, introduces himself under a false name and then unhesitatingly dares, as she later says, to “jump on top of” her. He touches her sexually—apparently not to her displeasure—but then keeps going, forcefully, after she clearly and repeatedly tells him to stop. The scene is far more sexually detailed than any in Rohmer’s films. It describes the precise placement of Michel’s hands on and in Jacqueline’s clothing, mentioning her wool brassiere, and on her body; at what point she says no; exactly what he does nonetheless; and why she doesn’t call for help or flee, but, rather, moments later, laughs it off, explaining to him that she knew he wouldn’t rape her.

Michel’s awareness of the ignominy of his actions is marked by his pseudonym, which signals them as premeditated, not a spontaneous outburst of sudden desire but a plan for a sexual experience that would either break or steady his relationship with Irène. His aggression seems to have left Jacqueline unfazed (whether bravely, proudly, self-defensively, or resignedly) but leaves Michel devastated. The gratuitous act obliterates both his self-image and his indecision, sparking not just a split with Irène but a total rupture with the social fabric of his present life. (One thing that ultimately salves his conscience regarding the breakup is Élisabeth’s indiscreet disclosure of “an encounter—such a big, grand word, ‘encounter,’ isn’t it?—anyway, from a little misunderstanding” that had taken place, months earlier, between her son and Irène.) The novel’s subtle yet brutal psychology is only the manifestation of a literary thread that binds the novel together, erotically, at the level of language itself—or, rather, at the level of the book’s subject matter, which, before it’s a question of dining and swimming, driving and talking, making plans and disclosing secrets, is bodies themselves.

Cinema is the great compensatory art, the one that artistic temperaments frustrated by the practice of a classical art form turn to when there’s no other outlet left. Rohmer’s passion for movies was awakened around the time “Élisabeth” was published, or, perhaps significantly, just afterward, when his book failed to make an impression on the world of literature. By 1947, Rohmer was watching lots of movies at ciné-clubs, and the foundation of his own ciné-club and a film journal, his critical essays, and his first steps as an independent filmmaker came in short order. But he didn’t quite renounce literature, either: in 1949, he submitted to Gallimard a volume of short stories, “Moral Tales,” which was turned down.

Though he made films throughout the fifties, it took Rohmer, the elder statesman of the New Wave, a while to get his directorial career going. His first completed feature-length movie, “The Sign of Leo,” shot in 1959, wasn’t released until 1962. While waiting, he jump-started his career with an inspired decision: to film his Moral Tales, which he adapted, between 1962 and 1972, into two shorts and four features (including “Claire’s Knee” and “My Night at Maud’s”) that made his name as a filmmaker. The result was the creation of the Éric Rohmer film, a genre unto itself—of stories of romantic intricacy, paying close attention to the behavioral fine points of middle-class people, told largely through abundant dialogue, filmed in modest and unflashy images, presenting the action with quasi-documentary geographical specificity.

Rohmer’s great concept was to translate literature—his own literature—into cinema by means of a distinctive cinematic form that was, in a sense, the absence of form, or, rather, a style which, as reserved as it may be, reverberates with the sheer power of his self-consciousness about form. The contrast between “Élisabeth” and his films is one that Rohmer himself characterized in the book’s supplementary interview: “As a novelist, I considered myself modern; as a filmmaker, I’m considered classical. (Though I can’t say I completely agree with that.)” The modernism of “Élisabeth” is in its teeming detail, its rhetorical interplay of observation and subjectivity, its wide variety of formats and methods. What Rohmer discovered in cinema was that the elaborate, rhetorically intricate, tonally disjunctive modernism of literature, of his literature, could be achieved in movies by way of radical simplicity, because cinema offers, in its images, what the succession of words and of lines of print on a page can’t: simultaneity.