For Amélie Nothomb in “The Character of Rain,” life begins with nothing until we have the ability to claim our identity. Translated from its original and more compelling French title “Métaphysique des tubes,” Nothomb introduces us to the mind of God on its transition to humanity, using language and the image of “tubes” to illustrate the narrator’s descent from divinity.
Following Japanese tradition, before the age of three, children are considered to exist in the realm of the divine, comparable to God’s. The novel takes the reader on the journey of three-year-old Nothomb, following her evolution from a God to a child with a sense of self. As we follow the child’s development, we are flooded with her philosophical musing on being, language, nothingness, fluidity, identity and life itself.
The narrator enters the world incapable of producing speech, silent and immobile, but becomes aroused from her plantlike state with an engaging desire to produce complex language. God is aware and makes it incredibly clear to the reader that they are cogent and articulate, understanding Japanese and French, but without the ability to use either to express herself outwardly.
God, however, begins as a tube: an entity with no cycle, only a definitive beginning and a definitive end. God constructs a winding metaphor for what it means to have life pass through us as passive vehicles, only to be roused by pleasure.
It is not until the narrator’s grandmother gives her a piece of white chocolate that the screaming to express words ceases, and the narrator discovers that with pleasure exists “me.” It is at this moment that the narrative perspective shifts from an external “nothing,” observing the narrator, to occupying the position of the storyteller and finally switching to first-person. It’s the sweetness of pleasure that rouses the infant: “I’m not an ‘it’ I’m a ‘me’!”
With her vocal agency, the narrator manipulates the perception of those around her with her first words, after “mama” and “dada.” On a quest to say what captures her vision of the universe in a tubular sense, she gravitates toward words that turn something into nothing and vice versa. For the narrator, to utter a word is to give it weight and meaning, to give it an identity worth engaging with, and likewise to turn nothing into something.
Eventually, as the narrator grows, she realizes she has less power over her surroundings. We come to see the transition of a child who consumes the world with their divinity, to a world that consumes the child and at its heart the individual. Claiming identity becomes more difficult, and society assigns identity to you when you are no longer God. It is suddenly not so simple as the narrator suggests, using a pleasure as pure as white chocolate to launch and solidify one’s being into existence.
An observer and a master of language, God devolves and evolves simultaneously, coming to possess their own identity in exchange for divinity. The reader is placed on a journey, much like that of something passing through a tube, like the rice cakes our narrator feeds the carp bestowed upon her for her birthday. They are an assumption of her identity that brings her a grotesque and all-consuming disorientation, robbing her of her selfhood and her essence; they suck the life and godly being out of her, as much as those in her life around her.
“The Metaphysics of Tubes,” a much more fitting and intriguing translation for Nothomb’s short 132-page work, gives the reader the opportunity to reexamine what it means to exist, especially once we fall to nothing in our descent from being God and are stripped of our agency to dictate what’s around us.
Trigger warning: The novel does have references and discussion of death and suicide or suicidal ideation.
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Nicole Sydor is a graduate student earning her Masters in teaching to earn a certification in both secondary English and French.
Featured image courtesy of Pexels.com.
