The Wife of Martin Guerre

At this Sanxi, who had been hiding behind his mother, burrowed his head into her skirts, drawing the ample folds about his shoulders.

            “Come, Sanxi,” said his mother, taking him by the shoulders. “here is your father, your good father of whom we have talked so many times. Salute him.”

            “Ah my little monsieur,” exclaimed a great voice, “it is good to see you,” and Sanxi, clinging like a kitten to his mother’s skirts, so that she had to disengage his fingers one by one, felt himself hoisted into the air and then folded close to a hard shoulder, smelt the reek of leather and horse-sweat, and then felt the wiry beard rubbed joyously against his face.

            “Mama!” he cried. “Mama!”

            “It is the strangeness,” he heard his mother’s voice saying apologetically. “Do not hold it against him. Consider, how sudden and how strange—for him, as for me.”

“Tonnérre!” cried the great voice. “He is hard to hold. But never mind. We shall be friends, in time.”

The operative word and feeling in this passage is “strangeness.” Unlike the rest of the Guerre family, Sanxi is wary of the swarthy stranger and keeps his head in the folds of his mother’s skirts (a move that would be adorable if it wasn't so Oedipal). His wariness presages his mother’s eventual revelation. What is particularly notable about this passage, however, is that it conveys this sense of discomfiture from Sanxi’s perspective without being discursive (i.e. it shows without telling outright).

Throughout the story, there is a privileging of the visual. The description of characters and their interactions are rather superficial (in the sense that Lewis doesn’t really elect to describe anything in other sensory modalities; for example, we as readers do not know how the blood tastes in young Martin’s mouth as his father strikes him, nor do we hear the sounds of Martin and Bertrande’s lovemaking—we simply see Bertrande getting larger). Moreover, in the latter half of the story, Pansette and Martin are likened and compared by criteria that is mostly physical: their stature, features, and deformities are considered by the Bertrande and then the jury in trying to establish identity. Thus, the reader is constantly visualizing because visual cues are what Lewis offers most. In this passage, however, there is no person and nothing to visualize—because Sanxi is overwhelmed by the strangeness and has his head in Bertrande’s skirt, sight is the only thing that he (and, therefore, we as readers) does not have. Pansette exists only as a disembodied voice, a hard shoulder, an unfamiliar smell, and a wiry beard. Here, Lewis tries to make the reader experience Sanxi’s discomfiture; we depart from what was heretofore a silent film onto the stage of a live performance, in which we “[smell] the reek of leather and horse-sweat, and…[feel} the wiry beard rubbed joyously against [our] face[s].”