The Garter and the Lilac in Mihail Sebastian's The Accident
This essay discusses selected scenes from The Accident through chapter VI. It does not discuss the ending.
Nora has heard something snap. After falling from a tram into the snow, she tries to find what has broken. At the opening of Mihail Sebastian's The Accident, she can already name the event. The word accident tells her very little about what has happened inside her body.
What broke?
The Romanian opening already says “Va să zică un accident”—literally, “So, an accident.” Nora has the general explanation almost at once. What she has yet to establish is what the accident has actually done.
She cannot hear her watch. Listening inward fails to bring reassurance from pulse, heart, or breath, and she imagines herself stopped like a clock.
The snap calls up a possible broken ligament and sends her through the learned names: “Clavicula? Aorta? Rotula?”—“Clavicle? Aorta? Patella?” Each question gives the sound a place, then gives it up for the next. Knowledge of the words cannot settle which one belongs to what she heard.
Cold reaches the exposed knee. The stocking has slipped, metal presses, and the body gradually supplies a less exalted answer: the garter broke. The sound has survived every theory; the explanation finally catches up with the clothing.
The correction comes through the same situation as the mistake. Sebastian needs no outsider to announce a trick played on Nora or the reader. Cold and pressure become available as she attends again to the body whose first silence let the frightening explanations multiply.
The anatomical inquiry ending at a garter is comic. Then Nora puts weight on her right leg and cries out. The fall has not become a harmless occasion for the reader to feel superior. One explanation has been corrected while pain and the need for help remain in the snow with her.
A bouquet interrupts a departure
In chapter VI, Paul, the man who helped Nora after her fall, receives two branches of white lilac without a note. He is preparing a mountain trip with her.
At first the object may have been delivered by mistake. Then a bent branch recalls the movement of Ann's face over her shoulder. Paul has not emotionally separated from her, and remembering the gesture becomes expecting her return. Sebastian keeps the thought close enough for association to turn into apparent evidence without a separate announcement of the change.
The third-person narration, which elsewhere follows Nora, stays here with Paul. He is already picturing Ann in her car below the window, waiting for a signal to come upstairs, before he knows who sent the flowers.
Five minutes earlier, Paul had been struggling with the ski bindings, absorbed in the preparations for the trip. Now he stumbles over the skis and feels ashamed of that absorption. Still wearing only one boot, he starts to regard the whole costume as a disguise.
He turns toward his ordinary clothes. The flowers have brought him close to abandoning an arrangement with another person, and Nora is about to hear a refusal whose cause she cannot suspect.
Nora telephones with packing instructions. Clothing, food, equipment: she keeps attending to the journey while he tries to say he cannot go. Then, within the practical stream, comes “I sent you two branches of lilac.” The gift changes sender, and Paul's imagined reunion loses the object it had recruited as proof.
She had seen him look sadly at the florist's window on their walk. At first she meant to leave the flowers unexplained, then decided against presenting an enigma just before departure. An incident he had carried past has continued in another person's attention, acquiring a purpose he could not learn by consulting his memory of Ann.
Nora is still trying to get them onto a train. What has become an immense message for Paul takes a small place in her hurried telling, followed by the departure time. Her practical instructions continue through the disclosure that has undone his imagined reunion.
Nora has a holiday to ask for
Earlier, Nora moves from suggesting that Paul give his empty holiday to somebody to asking for it herself: “Give me your holiday.” She has exposed a wish to refusal. The mountain journey has a person who wants it, and the later telephone call can proceed from that purpose instead of existing only to correct Paul.
She dislikes Bucharest at holiday time, when everybody seems to leave. Cernăuți and her mother, a ski camp, a small mountain party have all been possibilities. Paul enters a difficulty she already has. His unhappiness gives her somebody to invite; it has not brought her own loneliness into existence.
The sports shop gives her expertise something to do. Paul is bewildered by equipment she can measure, explain, and have altered; his uncertainty offers her a way to involve him. She treats embarrassment as an improvement on indifference. Sebastian allows this modest bodily discomfort to register before Paul could plausibly announce a new self.
Nora's wish for company and her competence with skis are already active before the telephone call. Much of her activity still serves Paul's recovery, but she has something to lose if he stays behind.
For a supporting character, a wish that precedes the protagonist's notice can do considerable work. It can cause the awkward request, altered appointment, or gift whose origin he gets wrong. Nora's independence reaches the story through what she has been arranging for both of them.
When the date is part of the evidence
The Journal requires another patience. A novel can arrange a later correction to its flowers; a diary entry records what a day has made available and leaves tomorrow beyond it. Sebastian's distinctions between witnessed, remembered, and reported things have to remain part of the evidence.
On February 18, 1935, he sets the lawyer Istrate Micescu's participation in an antisemitic campaign beside the man's recent language about liberty, Alain, and the individual resisting the state. The inconsistency is close enough to be painful. A principle still audible from a recent conversation has not protected its speaker from conduct that betrays it.
The report of Nae Ionescu encouraging Micescu reaches Sebastian through Scarlat Froda. That intermediary must stay in the account. Rewriting the information as something the diarist overheard would give it an immediacy the page has taken care not to claim. Remembered speech and another person's report can meet without becoming the same kind of testimony.
The entry ends at Băneasa, with spring weather and a wish for happiness. Disgust and the appetite for another kind of day persist together, with no later correction available to bring them into harmony.
Paul can eventually learn who sent the lilac, and Nora can locate the snap in her garter. The diary's date leaves Sebastian inside an unfinished account of the day. Read beside the fiction, it reminds us how much the novelist's power to arrange a correction has done for those small, painful discoveries.
Sources
Mihail Sebastian, Accidentul. Fundația pentru Literatură și Artă “Regele Carol II,” 1940. Chapter I, pp. 5–9; chapter VI, pp. 148–162, especially pp. 150–155 and 159–162. Digitized original edition. English renderings of the short quotations above are literal translations from this Romanian edition; they are not quoted from the published English translation. The Accident, translated by Stephen Henighan, was published by Biblioasis in 2011.
Mihail Sebastian, Jurnal 1935–1944, second revised edition; text edited by Gabriela Omăt, preface and notes by Leon Volovici. Humanitas, 2016. February 18, 1935, p. 20. Publisher's sample. English edition: Journal 1935–1944: The Fascist Years, translated by Patrick Camiller, Ivan R. Dee, 2000. The entry is paraphrased here from the Romanian edition.
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