The narrator seems to have no remorse about having severed ties with his family. Indeed, he describes the decade that followed as “the best ten years” of his life. Why, then, do you think he decides to commemorate this anniversary, as it were, by revisiting the past, especially the painful episode of domestic violence on which “Constellation” centers?
Remorse has a moral slant, therefore it exists entirely within taboo. There’s a crucial passage in the novel where, in the course of a few lines, the narrator switches from the verb “abandon” to the verb “retreat.” “Can one abandon one’s parents?” he asks himself. He then refines the question: “Can one retreat from them?” That verbal shift is like a Copernican revolution. It marks the point where the protagonist essentially moves from submission to a taboo to assertion of a right. From the guilt that freezes him in a permanent state of expiation, to the claiming of something simple: the right to feel safe. We act as though it’s scandalous to treat familial bonds like other bonds, as things that one can break if one so chooses, particularly if they put one in danger. That’s why the theme of violence, both psychological and physical, is central to the novel, precisely because for so long—and unfortunately still today—violence hasn’t been considered sufficient reason to bring an end to the dominion of the male, founded on force and on the subordination of women. And that’s why I consider “The Anniversary” a deeply political book; cauterizing empathy toward victims of violence in order to shore up an institution—in this story, the institution of a certain kind of patriarchal family—is a political choice in service of a particular social project.
“It’s still not clear to me whether my father ever actually hit my mother,” the narrator prefaces, before recounting the night he came home to find police officers in his parents’ apartment, his mother covered in blood. The details he goes on to provide seem to clearly indicate that his father did strike his mother. What accounts for the narrator’s lingering doubts?
I think you’ve touched on one of the novel’s central points, though it’s not so much about doubt itself. The narrator, not having witnessed the incident, still clings to doubt, but for the reader the matter is clear: the episode is the culmination of a longer, subtler violence that goes back years, and was normalized by the members of that family and by an entire society. The blood in the mother’s hair is evidence of a personal and political violence that the narrator calls into question. But this is the beginning of that calling, the first crack. Those lingering doubts you mention might also be seen as a last vestige of credulity, of fear. The fact that the narrator is a man is important. His telling of the story is the result of his refusal, as a man, of his patriarchal inheritance. He rejects the father’s narrative, which renders the mother not only subordinate but invisible. In doing so, though, the narrator realizes that he had believed his father’s narrative for so long that he knows nothing about his own mother and now has to invent her. It’s why he places her at the center of his story.
The narrator struggles to make sense of the, at times, shifting power dynamic between his parents, framing their behavior as adhering to a “script.” Do you think we all play a particular role within our families, dysfunctional or otherwise?
I’m interested in the novel as a machine, and in what Milan Kundera called the “wisdom of uncertainty,” which is precisely what literature, at its best, produces. By freeing us from dogma, it also necessarily consigns us to uncertainty. To your question, I want to answer on two levels. The first is the sociological, or political, one: when an individual enters a family—or any other institution—they tend to settle into dominant cultural models. It’s a way of simplifying, of resolving complexity, like buying from IKEA: you follow the instructions. From this follow both the political dimension and a certain form of ignorance as to the source of so much unhappiness—and not only on the family front. The second level is that of the novel, whose task is to plumb the depths of the human condition. For me, writing means trying to get close enough to each character to feel their heart beating, which challenges the first level, because human beings are much more complex and contradictory than sociological simplifications. They follow the “instructions,” in part, but they are also inhabited by ghosts, by memories, by the need for love. It makes writing a marvellous adventure in knowledge.