the wife of martin guerre

"The prisoner stepped forward with an easy manner, as if he stood before his own hearth.  He explained that during his absence he had served the King of Spin, that he had traveled extensively both throughout Spain and France, and that he had not known until he came to Rieux, some three years earlier, that his parents were dead; that upon learning that he was head of the house, he had made all haste to return to his wife and child, and had endeavored in every way to make up for his past neglect.  He furnished the names and addresses of people who could verify the story of his wanderings.  He told of his return to Artigues, of how Pierre Guerre, his uncle, had been the first person in the village to recognize and welcome him, and averred that Pierre had been to him in all things friendly until he, Martin, had found reason to question Pierre about the disposition of a certain sum of money which he had left in the care of his uncle.  Since that time, he said, his uncle had sought to destroy him.  He even hinted in conclusion that an attempt had been made upon his life" (77-8).

I want to begin by pointing out how this imposter is named here, as "the prisoner."  Throughout the novel, Janet Lewis does this really amazing thing where she calls her characters by different names, sometimes with different epithets, depending on whose perspective we are being focalized through at that moment in the narrative.  I'm actually not sure if her active use of different names relates to the focalization, but it certainly adds another layer of complexity to the story by forcing the reader to think of this person according to a certain name, and often these different names for characters are somehow valuated as more positive or more negative.  Here the imposter is called "the prisoner," which alienates us from him and calls on us to call into question his verisimilitude.  At this point in the story, we are generally thrust into Bertrande's perspective, and so we see through her eyes - or perhaps the eyes of the jury - the imposter.  He is not Martin Guerre right now, although he is at other times called Martin Guerre, which shows the omniscient narrator sort of verifying his identity as Martin Guerre.  Rather, he is the prisoner.

His status as the prisoner is immediately at odds with the catalogue that follows, which lists what has happened to him in the past eight years.  It shuttles through his past in both content and form.  The effect is like we're left with a great heaping pile of information, all of which is directed towards the imposter's goal of being deemed truthful.  Part of the interesting work that's going on here is that we see how the imposter himself narrativizes the (potentially fictive) things that happened to him.  We see what his story is, and we hear him louder because the narrative voice is less present.  We get the sense that some of these words may be his, how he traveled extensively, made all haste, endeavored to make up for his past neglect.  Or at least the narrative voice does a good job at bringing out the imposter's sense of justice, of authority over the truth, of "this is what happened to me and I'm telling you so you should believe me."

The reason why I actually picked this passage is because of the fragment "the story of his wanderings."  This immediately drew the connection between this story and the story of Odysseus and Penelope.  Suddenly The Wife of Martin Guerre became a retelling of The Odyssey, homage to it, and as such it became more epic in scale.  And that's a large part of why I accepted the story's expository style and perhaps unrealistic renderings of life and psychology.  The Wife of Martin Guerre isn't trying to be realistic; it's trying to be real, and it's trying to be real in a manner that I find akin to the epics (or folktales or parables).  The broad strokes aren't unspecific.  They're just simple, and the simplicity is what allows Lewis to tell this story the way it needs to be told if it is to ascend to the epic heights to which it (I think) aims to reach.  This is the story of Penelope not trusting Odysseus after his wanderings, grounded in a different far off time, but one that is specific in its own way, but strange to us.  This story asks, "What if Odysseus hadn't proven his identity by getting angry about moving the bed?  Or what if Penelope still hadn't believed him after that?"