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Sport 29: Spring 2002
Words, like things, have been monstrosities7
Words, like things, have been monstrosities7
So what, if anything, makes Romand's case different from the usual domestic murder? And what makes The Adversary more than just another true-crime book? In both cases the answer seems to lie in a connection to existential and (for Carrere at least) theological questions, a connection made explicit by journalists and reviewers, by Carrere, and, most disquietingly, by Romand himself.
Of course, many criminal cases invite debate about philosophical questions, not least about the nature of evil. In the online version of The Guardian, interviewer Gaby Wood is surprised to hear Carrere refer to Romand as ‘a figure of Evil’. When quizzed on the usage, Carrere replies that he believes ‘deeply’ in Evil. ‘I think psychosis is absolute Evil,’ he continues. ‘That's not a moral condemnation—psychosis is hell on earth.’8
What is unique about Romand's case is the extent to which the philosophical, theological and essentially abstract elements of the case threaten to overwhelm the simple prosaic details. In most true-crime books there is a focus on the physical evidence of the crime, on the blood-stained rolling pin, the placement of the pillow, the telltale marks on the silencer. This focus on the crime ‘scene’, as it is evocatively known, is often derided as being sensational and speaking to a tabloid sensibility.
That is certainly not something of which we can accuse Carrere, or, for that matter, Romand. The Adversary, and Romand's own page 216 testimony, focus instead on the philosophical and moral minutiae. As Carrere notes, Romand is ‘as little inclined to go over past events as he [is] passionately keen on scrutinising their meaning’. (29)
The reader too starts to investigate the crime like a literary critic, seeing a fingerprint of Camus here, a fibre of Lacanian psychoanalysis there. Romand feeds this image by telling Carrere that he is reading up on Lacan9 and quoting from Camus's novel The Fall. One sometimes feels trapped inside one of those academic murder mysteries where the protagonists debate French literary theory the way those in Agatha Christie discuss the vicar's privet hedge.
If tabloid pictures of body bags and blood stains are one kind of obscenity, then surely this is another: to render this most visceral, concrete and conclusive of acts as a kind of existential puzzle feels uncomfortably like taking a criminal at his own grandiose estimation.
Carrere notes a desire in Romand to appear as a grand, abstract, even tragic figure. It is the reason, Carrere speculates, that Romand will not confess to killing his father-in-law. While admitting another murder would not have increased his sentence, Carrere notes that this supremely image-conscious killer has every reason to lie, because he can clearly see the difference between ‘monstrous but irrational crimes and a sordid crime’.
It's not at all the same to be the agent of a tragedy, impelled by some obscure fate to commit acts arousing pity and terror, and to be a petty crook who … to save himself shoves his father-in-law down the stairs. (87)
That one is buying in to Romand's own spin on the case is just one of the uncomfortable suspicions that are the reader's constant companion during the course of this most discomfiting of—I nearly wrote novels—most discomfiting of stories. And yet, there is no denying that the most extraordinary thing about Romand's crime is that the murder of page 217 his family is its least noteworthy component. Every day men kill their loved ones, but to fake an existence for no apparent reason is really one out of the box.
At the heart of Romand's story, and of Carrere's and my own interest in it, is the idea of the construction of identity, that hardy annual of French intellectual discourse.10 But while accepting that a person's identity is not innate and coherent but jerry-built and discontinuous is great in the lecture room, as far as it goes, we can't live as though it's true. Eighty per cent of our bodies are water but we still don't carry ourselves round in buckets.
On some level, maybe that duplicitous old ‘common sense’ level so rightly distrusted by theorists, we must live our lives as if there were something at our centre. It is this illogical belief in our inner core—our soul, or goodness, or humanity—that keeps us from being sucked down the plughole of existential angst. For what might we be, how might we behave, if we truly believed ourselves to be no greater than the sum of our culturally accumulated parts?
One answer is, that we would be a Jean-Claude Romand: a self-impersonator, a mirror image with no original, a ‘void disguised as a man’.11
Like the World Trade Centre towers, the revolutionary architecture of which is now an article of faith, Romand seems to be held together by nothing more substantial than his skin. While most of us benefit from the supporting framework of an illusory but deeply convincing authenticity, he appears devoid of integrity, both moral and structural. And yet, we can't help but wonder, doesn't this empty shell remind us of someone? Couldn't it be a kind of figuring forth of our own self-deluding, play-acting, insincere selves?
Perhaps what is so frightening about Romand's case, and what draws us to it with such magnetic fascination, is that he represents page 218 that figure so familiar from myths and fairy tales: the stony, monstrous, deadened creature we might all become if we even for a moment stopped believing.
If one had to pen a cautionary tale about the perils of taking French structuralism to heart, one could hardly do better than the case of Jean-Claude Romand.