Nathalie Léger’s Hall of Mirrors

A woman plays a role she wrote herself, in a film she directed, a film that is based on the life of a woman she does not know, in whom she recognizes herself. Watching this film, a generation after it was made, another woman writes a book about the director of the film and the woman she plays, in whom the author recognizes both her mother and herself. The film is “Wanda,” the director is Barbara Loden, and the author is Nathalie Léger, the French writer and curator, whose book “Suite for Barbara Loden,” translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon, has all the ingenuity of the mechanism inside a camera that allows a mirror to fold away so that light may pass through a focussed lens.

The genesis of “Suite for Barbara Loden” was a request that Léger received to write a brief entry on “Wanda” for a film encyclopedia. Early in the book, convinced that she must know more, rather than less, in order to keep the entry brief, Léger embarks on an ambitious regimen of research. This premise becomes increasingly absurd, part of the levity that balances the book’s gravity, as Léger throws herself into her subject. “Please, just write me an entry for the encyclopedia, not a self-portrait,” an exasperated editor says at one point. Léger reads through the history of the self-portrait from antiquity to modern times, researches cinéma vérité, learns about coal mining in Pennsylvania and postwar pin-up models, and eventually travels to the United States, where she visits locations from “Wanda.” She writes, of this process, “I felt like I was managing a huge building site, from which I was going to excavate a miniature model of modernity, reduced to its simplest, most complex form: a woman telling her own story through that of another woman.”

Midway through “Suite for Barbara Loden,” Léger wonders why she is so drawn to the title character of “Wanda,” with whom she has little in common. Unlike Wanda, she has never been homeless, she has never been taken to court and accused of neglecting her family, she has never lost custody of her children, she has never depended on a man for money, nor for anything else. She has never surrendered herself, as she puts it. “And yet: it did happen to me once,” she writes, “just one time and it was enough, but who hasn’t experienced that—not knowing how to say no, not daring to say it, yielding to the mortal threat, escaping in the end by withdrawal, absence, slipping to the ground, no longer even offering him the gift of fear, no longer pretending.”

What is it that a woman recognizes when she recognizes herself in another woman? This is the question that hovers in the margins of all three books in Léger’s exquisite trilogy. “Suite for Barbara Loden,” the second in the series, was the first to be published in the United States, in 2016. The trilogy was completed this past fall, when the first and third books were published by Dorothy, a small press devoted to publishing women writers. The first book, “Exposition,” translated by Amanda DeMarco, is about the Countess of Castiglione, a nineteenth-century aristocrat who dedicated herself to becoming the most photographed woman of her time. The third book, “The White Dress,” translated by Natasha Lehrer, is about the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered, in 2008, during a performance in which she filmed herself hitchhiking across war-ravaged countries in a wedding dress.

The books are all slim and beautifully designed. They can be read in any order, and Léger herself has insisted that they do not have a set sequence. But there is a distinct sense of progression when they are read in the order in which they were written, moving from a woman who commissions photos of herself, to a woman who acts in and directs a role she has written herself, to a woman who stages her own performance and films it herself. Lines of thought are introduced in the first book and then picked up again in subsequent books, and each book gains greater significance when read alongside the others.

The books are extraordinary in the way they are written. Léger’s sentences give the impression that they are doing exactly what they want to do. Her paragraphs are not dutiful, not in service to the previous or following paragraphs, but exhilaratingly independent. In some passages, each paragraph takes a different approach to the subject at hand, moving freely from research to lived experience to observation to speculation. The essay, already a flexible genre, is at its most gymnastic here, as Léger passes through the many postures of a complex floor routine to produce one fluid, circuitous movement of thought. Her style, unconventional as it is, does not feel contrived. It feels inevitable—as if these books sprang from her mind fully formed, like Athena, born of a splitting headache.

Léger’s project is not exactly biography, and not art criticism, but, as she says in an interview with her translator Amanda DeMarco, recognition. This recognition is charged with magnetic attraction and buffered by the dismay of a woman who sees her mother in herself. There is some horror to Léger’s accounts of the women she writes about, women who are isolated and alone, who go mad, who are listless and passive, who are unable to speak their own desires, who are raped and murdered.

Matrophobia is not a fear of mothers—it is the fear of becoming your own mother. More specifically, as Adrienne Rich writes in “Of Woman Born,” matrophobia is the fear of finding yourself compromised in the same ways your own mother was compromised. When a mother is feared in this way, Rich writes, “there may also be a deep underlying pull toward her, a dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely.” This pull, and this dread, are ever-present in Léger’s books. Rich, who was haunted by her own mother’s passivity and pain, was of the same generation as Barbara Loden, also the generation of Sylvia Plath and Léger’s mother.

Léger’s mother appears in all three books, obliquely at first, tentatively, and then persistently. Her presence in “Exposition” is almost spectral, but in “The White Dress” she asks questions and makes requests and offers commentary, insinuating herself into the text until she eventually displaces Pippa Bacca as the central subject of the book. This displacement, like much of what Léger brings to the page, reads like a dramatization of a psychological reality. “Perhaps everything goes back to the large tapestry in the dining room that loomed over all our meals, The Assassination of the Lady,” Léger writes at the beginning of “The White Dress.” This tapestry, inherited by her mother, depicts a woman pursued by an armed man in the background and, in the foreground, the same woman dead and disembowelled, stabbed by the man. This recalls Léger’s description of Wanda in the previous book: “She sits the way my mother used to sit next to my father, upright, short, alert, holding her breath, just waiting to be murdered.”

Léger’s mother is not murdered. She survives a different sort of annihilation, one that is, as Léger notes, much more ordinary. At the court proceeding in which Léger’s father divorced her mother, her mother was denied custody of the four children she had raised, and denied even the opportunity to argue in her own defense. This annihilation of her role as wife and mother, the role that defined her life, began with another woman. “L’autre—that’s what we called the woman my father left my mother for—Lautre became her name,” Léger writes in “Exposition.” “Lautre, whatever she might do, you hate her, you want her.” All this appears inside parentheses, and Lautre herself is only ever mentioned glancingly, glimpsed through a hedge. But the presence of an unreachable other permeates all three books. Sometimes Léger refers to this other as “the subject.” She writes, “Like death (and perhaps one or two other things), the subject is simply the name for what cannot be spoken.”

The subject of “Exposition,” the Countess of Castiglione, can be read as the other woman, but the countess is also her own mystery, which Léger explores with tenderness and repulsion. Though the countess was famously beautiful, the portrait that emerges of her is not enviable. An admirer writes, of meeting her, that “one returned, dazzled, without feeling any sympathy for her person.” She is surrounded by admirers, but she is alone. As she ages, she loses her social standing and her wealth. In her solitude and her suffering, she is Léger’s mother as well as the other woman. This other is and is not the author, too, just as these books are and are not self-portraits.

In approach, in purpose, and even in something that might be called essence, Léger’s three books bear comparison to the three essays that compose “The Women,” by Hilton Als. Both Léger and Als retell the lives of a series of women—and, in “The Women,” a gay man—while investigating what that category, “women,” might mean to those who live within and adjacent to it. Both authors are irreverent and unorthodox, both are drawn to abjection, and both engage in an extended reckoning with their own mothers.

Als’s mother is Black, like the women in his book, and, like the women in Léger’s books, her mother is white. A reader may recognize her own mother in both mothers, though they do not exactly resemble each other. Their degradation as women takes somewhat different forms, as does their response to that degradation. “Some problems we share as women, some we do not,” Audre Lorde writes. “You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.” There are limits to recognition, in other words.

These limits are, in some ways, as much a part of Léger’s project as recognition itself. She repeatedly circles back to the distance between herself and her subject, to all that she does not know about the other woman. “You have no experience of your subject,” her mother warns her. “You didn’t live it, so it’s just a fiction.” Léger does not deny this, but her performance of recognition suggests that a shared experience is not what draws her to the other woman.

“It’s as though she is appearing and disappearing before us, like Moby Dick’s spume as he roams across the ocean, her whiteness, the visible absence of color as she crosses Europe,” Léger writes, reflecting on footage of Pippa Bacca in her wedding dress. Here, Bacca is the white whale. She is unreachable, strange and unknowable, but also, mysteriously, recognizable. Léger pursues her, but does not pretend to capture her. Léger’s telling of her story is full of gaps and omissions and frustrations and intentional silences. This reënactment of an effort to understand is endlessly moving. Bacca’s performance does not make sense to Léger, but Léger keeps trying to understand it, because it is, in some way, also Léger’s performance.

That the performance is flawed is part of what Léger recognizes. “Even when artists are heavy-handed, when their ideas are confused, when their gestures fail in some way, their performances nonetheless stubbornly articulate something true,” she insists. She is openly skeptical of the ideas underpinning Bacca’s work, including Bacca’s belief that her performance might help heal a wound in the world. But it was not Bacca’s intentions that initially interested her, Léger clarifies, “it was that she wanted, by making this journey, to mend something that was out of all proportion, and that she did not make it.” Léger recognizes in Bacca’s performance her desire, her struggle, and, wrenchingly, her failure.

“What is a performance?” Léger’s mother asks in “The White Dress.” As she asks this, she is paging through a dossier, a collection of documents related to her divorce. This dossier might be real or imagined, like many of Léger’s stage props, but that distinction hardly matters. The dossier holds the evidence that Léger will use to testify on her mother’s behalf, which is what this final book reveals all the books to be: a testimony.

In answer to her mother’s question, Léger describes a series of performances—a woman scrubs the pavement in front of a brothel, a woman shakes hands with every sanitation worker in New York City, a man pushes a block of ice through Mexico City, a woman climbs a ladder with a razor blade on every rung, a woman sits on a stage near a pair of scissors and allows the audience to cut away her clothing. Léger writes, “Each one of these acts, I say to my mother, it seems to me that it was me doing it, and if you put them all together I think it’s the story of my life—mine, actually, she says, snapping the dossier shut.”

Whose story is this, and whose performance? With mirrors and lenses, with echoes and silences, Léger’s books suggest that we may write and perform the stories of our lives, but our roles have also been written for us, and have already been performed by other women, whose experiences we may recognize as our own. In the end, the most original performance here is Léger’s, and it is undeniably virtuosic.