From the periphery of Europe to the heart of America:
The Color Gray
Book feature for The Stranger, 4-16-98
On the surface, The Factory of Facts (Pantheon) is the simple memoir of Luc Sante’s search for his roots, as a child brought to the U.S. northeast in the ’50s by parents emigrating from a depressed small factory town in still-war-scarred Belgium. But Sante wants more than to scratch any mere surface. If you’ve ever lived someplace on the periphery of the bigtime cultural action but not really in the middle of it (hint: you’re in such a place now), Sante’s got some parallels for you to ponder.
Sante (a book reviewer for the New York Review of Books and Microsoft’s Slate) sees himself as an outsider everywhere, neither fully American nor European. What’s more, he sees Belgium as an outsider among nations–something patched together during the breakup and formation of assorted Euro empires over the centuries, situated on an all-too-convenient invasion route to and from France, an amalgam of French and Dutch (and, in his own Wallonia region, German) influences. A place that gave the world (via French publishers and other middlemen) the occasional detective author (Georges Simenon), actor (Jean-Claude Van Damme), or cartoonist (Hergé), but which lives under the largely unbreached notion that the real sociocultural action is elsewhere. A country where Francophone newspapers still encourage readers to erase “colorful native idiomatic expressions”, in favor of pure, Paris-approved French. A country whose “hallmarks are ambivalence, invisibility, secretiveness, self-doubt, passivity, irony, and derision.”
Naturally, this made for little inspiration to an immigrant boy, an arriviesté in the nation that led the world in the export of dreams and ambitions. “Willfully, accidentally, organically, negligently, crudely, systematically, inevitably I got rid of a section of myself, a part that was once majority and shrank to accessory. I went from being the little Belgian boy, polite and diffident and possessed of a charming accent, to a loutish American adolescent. This was nothing special: I drank, I smoke, I stole, I swore, I stopped going to church…. My mother was convinced that Belgian children did not do such things, her view of Belgium becoming more idealized with every year she spent away from it. My view of Belgium became correspondingly more hostile, because it represented authority and also because I was certain its taint was what made me timid and awkward and unpopular and unattractive and solitary. I began a project to reinvent myself, acknowledge no bonds or ties or background, pass myself off as entirely self-made.”
A French culture minister might say the young Luc was buying into American cultural imperialism, abandoning his own heritage for the commercialized temptations learned from James Dean movies. Sante’s explanation is more melancholy: “We lost connection to a thing larger than ourselves, and as a family failed to make any significant new connection in exchange, so that we were left aground on a sandbar barely big enough for our feet. I lost friends and relatives and stories and familiar comforts and a sense of continuity between home and outside and any sense that I was normal…. Continuing to believe that I had just made myself up out of whole cloth was self-flattering but hollow.”
So the grownup Luc returns to Belgium as time and money allow. He seeks to re-connect with the extended family he left behind–not just his blood relatives, but the still-depressed industrial economy of Wallonia, its heritage of radical labor organizing (and authoritarian repression of same), its dying regional language, its once-thriving indiginous music and theater communities, its declining Catholic ideology of personal suppression (what Sante calls “the Sacred Fear”), its remaining un-globalized way of life. “What makes a country, apart from tangled history? Baked goods. Churches. Weather. The habit of discretion. Fried potatoes. Shrubbery. The color gray. The elaborate mandarin ritual that attends commercial transactions, or even just stepping into a shop. Compactness, miniaturization. Cleanliness. The cross of modesty and prudery called pudeur in French. Brickwork. Class consciousness. Women of all ages suffering in skirts and stockings in the dead of winter. Reserve, aloofness, judgment. Varnished wood. Silent children, well-bred dogs, unassertive houseplants. The fear of God, the god of fear. Wallpaper. Comic strips….”
Sante ultimately reconciles himself to his roots by re-defining himself again. He now views himself as a sort of literary industrial worker, toiling in an intangible factory constructing intangible products of value, as his forebearers had built tangible products in tangible factories. He (and we) may now be part of an “information economy,” but he (and we) still exist as the result of all which has come before us, something we forget at our own peril.
