The Death of a Nobody was Jules Romains’ attempt to answer to an apparently simple question: when does a person die? Jacques Godard is a retired and widowed railway engineer who lives quietly in a little apartment in Paris. He visits his wife’s grave each week, occasionally joins his old colleagues at the bar, and otherwise mostly keeps to himself. Not long after climbs the stairs to the top of the Pantheon to look out over Paris — something he’d never done — he feels a sharp pain in his back, and after a few days of weakness and discomfort, he experiences something quite new and strange: “Something which was in him, which had served no purpose but to hold his life together, something contractive, elastic, formative a sort of mainspring suddenly let go, relaxed, expanded, and with a shiver of released vibrations lost itself m space.” And just as he realizes what is happening, he dies.
Yet Romains proceeds to argue that this was only his physical death. For a little while later, his apartment building’s porter finds the body and has to make the initial arrangements — sending a telegram to Godard’s aged parents in the Auvergne, informing the medical officer at the maison communale, telling the other residents. All of which bring Godard to mind for dozens of people, either as a memory or as an image of the person he may have been.
And later still, when Godard’s father has made the wearying overnight journey to Paris and the small crowd gathers to accompany his casket to the ceremony, he comes to life again in their thoughts:
No one could tell exactly how much of Godard s spirit had been saved by this close-packed gathering. When a servant-girl carelessly breaks a full bottle which she is carrying her hands come together quickly as if trying to catch the spurting wine, and a moment after nothing is left but a few reddish traces m the folds of her palms and a smell as of vomit. The sudden huddhng together of human beings was just like this; they were like fingers curling up to catch the essence escaping from the broken flesh. But they were not sure of having caught anything; and when the coffin was in position and the hearse lurched forward, the people walking in the procession felt an obscure sense of disillusionment.
Bit by bit, those thoughts of Jacques Godard evaporate. His mother dies, then his father, then there is no one who remembers him as a child. And soon the only person to think of him is the young man who took that telegram to his parents — and for him, Godard is nothing more than the idea of a person who was once alive. Yet this is still enough to make him wonder, “What will be left of the thing that I am?”
Recently, in rereading Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage as part of a reading group we’re running this year, I came across the following line: “No man, or woman, can ever engage the whole of my interest who believes, as you believe … that my one driving-force, the sole and shapely end of my existence is the formation within myself of another human being….” Richardson’s protagonist, Miriam Henderson, is arguing with her would-be lover, Hypo Wilson (a fictional counterpart for H. G. Wells), who maintains that a woman’s primary obligation is to have children — indeed, that she cannot become a mature writer until she has had a child.
Except, I misread the key phrase as “the … end of my existence is the formation of myself within another human being….” And ever since then, I’ve wondered if that might, in fact, be as valid a premise as anything else one might come up with. Jules Romains, at least, would agree.
The Death of a Nobody, by Jules Romains, translated by Desmond MacCarthy and Sydney Waterlow
London: Howard Latimer Limited, 1914
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