Light by Eva Figes
"Light" by Eva Figes is a novel set on a single summer day in 1900, centered around the renowned artist Claude Monet and his family at Giverny. The narrative unfolds in three parts, capturing the stream of consciousness of multiple characters as they navigate their distinct emotional landscapes. Monet is depicted as an obsessive artist who seeks to capture the ephemeral beauty of light, perceiving the dawn as a moment of perfect unity with nature. In contrast, his wife, Alice, grapples with her profound grief over their deceased daughter, feeling isolated in her sorrow. Their granddaughter, Lily, embraces the sensory delights of life, providing a youthful perspective that contrasts with the adult characters' struggles. The story also explores the dynamics of family relationships and the theme of isolation, as characters like Marthe and Michel feel overshadowed by Monet's artistic brilliance. Through rich imagery and a unique narrative style, "Light" delves into the nature of art, reality, and the complex interplay of personal connections within a household defined by an artist's ambition. The novel highlights the challenges of communication among its characters, suggesting that true understanding often remains elusive.
Subject Terms
Light by Eva Figes
First published: 1983
Type of work: Extended prose poem
Time of work: A summer day in 1900
Locale: Giverny, France
Principal Characters:
Claude Monet , the Impressionist painterAlice Raingo Hoschede , Claude’s second wifeLily Butler , Alice’s granddaughter, the daughter of Alice’s deceased daughter, SuzanneJimmy Butler , Alice’s grandson, Suzanne’s son, and Lily’s brotherMarthe Hoschede , Alice’s elder daughterGermaine Hoschede , Alice’s younger daughterJean-Pierre Hoschede , Alice’s sonMichel Monet , Monet’s son by Camille, his first wifeOctave Mirbeau , a writer and close friend of the MonetsAnatole Toussaint , a parish priestTheodore Butler , an American painter and father of Jimmy and Lily
The Novel
The action of Light takes place on a single day, from first light to nightfall, in the summer of 1900, and focuses on an artist in thrall to his craft and the people around him who live in a world dominated by him. In pursuit of his art, Claude Monet has built his own version of Eden at Giverny. He has painstakingly designed the gardens and even rerouted a stream to modify the lily pond which he carefully monitors.
The novel falls into three parts. The first period, chapters 1 through 6, from dawn to midday, presents the stream of consciousness of each character as he or she begins and progresses through the morning.
Monet arises in the predawn hour to go to the lily pond, while his wife lies awake in another room, suffering in the darkness from insomnia and claustrophobia. Obsessed with capturing the ephemeral truth, or light, of this world waterlilies, people, flowers Monet believes that he can penetrate, can see through to the essence of life only at dawn, when everything sky, water, land is in perfect balance, unified into one composite whole. On this particular day, at the instant in which Monet perceives that the one perfect moment of light has arrived, he believes that he is at the very center of the world.
While Monet’s obsession isolates him from those around him, his wife, Alice Raingo Hoschede, is, in her own way, just as isolated. Daily, she makes a pilgrimage to the grave of her daughter, Suzanne, and in her continuing grief, Alice feels outside time, as if “the wall separating night and day, the visible and invisible had crumbled....” She can almost feel her own mother’s hand stroking her hair. Such sensory apparitions make Alice feel more connected to the dead than to the living. She can breathe in the peace of the graveyard, lifesaving breath that is unavailable to her in her own home.
Lily Butler, her grandchild, awakes to a world newly created for her pleasure. In contrast to her grandmother’s protest against this fleeting visible world, Lily glories in the sensory delights of the moment. She is entranced by light, sound, smell, weight, weightlessness, color (as manifested in rose petals), an astonishing cobweb, pebbles, prisms of light. For Lily, pansies have human faces so real that she has an urge to talk to them.
Jimmy Butler, unlike his younger sister, whom he naturally tries to control, lives in a fantasy world full of Indians, pretending that what he sees is really something else.
Germaine Hoschede, Alice’s younger daughter, awakes to her memory of the previous day. She will spend this day alternately elated and fearful, worrying whether Monet will permit her to accept Pierre Sisley’s proposal of marriage. At lunch, she is aware that living in her stepfather’s house is like being a powerless passenger on someone else’s ship unable to come or go without permission.
Having been trained by her mother to care for the younger children, Marthe Hoschede, Alice’s elder daughter, has full charge of Jimmy and Lily. Central to Marthe’s character is her awareness that she has never been first with anyone. The two children she is rearing are not her own, and she fears that they will be taken away from her. Marthe’s life has consisted of answering other people’s needs, and she recognizes that should there be no needs to meet, she will not exist. To herself, Marthe must confess that she knows neither who she is nor what she might want. She cannot imagine doing anything by choice because she has never had the freedom to choose.
Michel Monet, Claude’s son, cannot, will not, leave Giverny. His father holds him in thrall. To Michel, only his father’s work is worth emulating, yet he cannot do it because he has neither Monet’s vision nor his talent. Michel seems destined to a lifetime of feeling inadequate in comparison to his father.
The second period of Light, chapter 7, presents the family at lunch with their guest, writer Octave Mirbeau, and the late arrival of Anatole Toussaint, the local cleric. Lunch is the only time during the day when these characters indulge in conversation, and the most articulate of the group is the outsider, Mirbeau. Like Michel, he yearns for the artistic skill and vision of the artist, and he shares Monet’s passion for botany, as does Toussaint.
The four chapters after lunch, which constitute the third period, cover the remainder of the afternoon, including dinner and the descent of darkness. Late in the afternoon, Theodore Butler, father of Jimmy and Lily, arrives and stuns Marthe by proposing marriage. Marthe accepts; the children will be hers. Theodore, however, proposes this marriage only because the union will enable him to remain in Monet’s household and under the great artist’s influence.
In the twilight, Monet and Alice walk together in the garden. Alice knows that despite all of her efforts to know her husband, a part of him remains unattached either to her or to the home she has made for him. As they walk, Monet becomes aware that a point of starlight has just become visible, and once more, the mystery revealed to him in the dawn has eluded him. He must wait for a new day.
The Characters
Although the details of Monet’s life are historically accurate, in Light, Eva Figes is dealing with the obsession of an artist, not with history or biography. The overriding desire of Monet is to show in his paintings “how light and those things it illumines are both transubstantial, both tenuous.” His goal is to capture the shifting and disappearing substance of this world both natural and human substance to see through the luminous cloud which envelops each person and part of nature. Only in the early morning hours can he seize, he believes, the actual tone and color of earthly life. Ultimately, Monet knows, he will die before he can complete his quest, but with each new day, he is reinvigorated with the challenge of trying.
Monet, in godlike fashion, has designed his estate at Giverny, with the lush gardens and the lily pond, as his own natural world. Yet the isolation of the characters in Light is inescapable. Alice talks to voices in her head at night; she and Monet have no mutually sustaining words or conversation. When there is something to see, Monet cannot hear. Marthe has felt closer to some of the servants than she has ever felt to members of her own family. Jean-Pierre can no longer get Michel to say anything.
The other members of the household recognize themselves in relation to the artist but not to one another. In their isolated inner struggles, Monet believes that the spiritual is omnipresent, while Alice yearns for knowledge of another realm where nothing is lost but where past and present, living and dead, somehow coexist.
Only the youngest person, the child Lily, perceives the difference between her grandparents: Her step-grandfather is all on the surface, to be seen, heard, smelled, touched. Her grandmother is just the opposite, someone whose essence is all on the inside, a secret indicated but not revealed by the expression on her face or by the odors coming from her clothes. While Lily’s perceptions are credible and provide insight, her thoughts are presented in language far more sophisticated than one might expect of a six-or seven-year-old child. She functions neither as a child nor as an adult, yet within this novel, Lily is the one character most able to see things as they truly are.
Lily, like Monet, finds that she can perceive the essence of reality. In the first instance, she finally, after many failures, blows a perfect soap bubble: “The few seconds during which it held were enough for Lily. Memory holds the shining bubble, bright with the newborn glory of the world.” With the revelation of what she has seen, Lily will always carry that moment in her memory, but whether she will be able to share her new awareness is another question.
In the second instance, Lily, concentrating on her new red balloon, sees the figure of her dead mother, her face lost in shadow behind the balloon. In Lily’s vision, her mother looks like the angel Lily has been told she is. In each instance, the trigger for her epiphany is neither art nor nature.
Critical Context
Light, Figes’ eighth novel, offers yet another departure from her earlier works, although the structure of her second novel is similar in that it is limited to a single day. Each of Figes’ novels is an experiment, using a new mode to impose order on chaos, a mode different from any she has tried earlier. While Figes acknowledges the influence of T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf, her fiction is different and distinctly her own.
While one may think of Woolf’s use of the stream-of-consciousness technique when reading Light, Figes uses the technique to quite different ends. The luncheon in Light differs radically from dinner with the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse (1927). There is no larger whole composed by the interrelated thoughts of different minds in Light. Mr. Ramsay needs reassurance from his wife and responses from everyone around him; Monet requires only submission. Lily’s apprehension of the reality beyond appearance is hers alone. Not only does she fail to communicate her visions, but also it does not occur to anyone that her perceptions could be of interest.
When Figes became known for Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society in 1970, she had already won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1967 for her second novel, Winter Journey (1967). Alienation, identity, lack of identity, the nature of reality versus the nature of art are Figes’ themes. Her innovative power in creating new modes to express various facets of these subjects is beyond question. The aesthetic precision of Light, and the rich density of its imagery, provide a provocative view of art as it anatomizes the artist.
Bibliography
Bannon, Barbara A. Review in Publishers Weekly. CCXXIV (August 26, 1983), p. 367.
De Feo, Ronald. Review in The Nation. CCXXXVII (January 7, 1984), p. 38.
Deveson, Richard. Review in New Statesman. CVI (September 2, 1983), p. 24.
Oates, Joyce Carol. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX (October 7, 1984), p. 38.
DeFeo, Ronald. “Hail, Holy Light.” The Nation 237 (December 31, 1983): 706-708. Compares Figes’ work on paper to Monet’s style in paint, finding that her prose mirrors and enhances the artist’s work.
Howard, Maureen. “Fiction in Review.” Yale Review 73, no. 2 (Winter, 1984): 9-12. Although Howard enjoys reading Light, she finds that it closely resembles Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse yet fails to measure up to Woolf’s standard.
Nation. CCXXXVII, December 31, 1983, p. 706.
New Statesman. CVI, September 2, 1983, p. 24.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Monet, Summer, 1900.” The New York Times Book Review 88 (October 16, 1983): 11, 30, 32-33. Praises Light as a prose poem, placing it in the category of experimental novel, a proper successor to the tradition of experimentation begun by Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse and The Waves.
Skenazy, Paul. “Stilled Life.” The Threepenny Review 5 (Summer, 1984): 24-26. In a lengthy review, Skenazy analyzes Figes literary techniques, comments on her historical accuracy, and theorizes about her ultimate message.
Taylor, Linda. “Light.” The Times Literary Supplement, August 26, 1983, 898. Praises Figes’ ability to capture light in words and to evoke its transformative power in much the same way Monet did with paint.