The Beckoning Void in Moravagine

The Chapter «Mascha,» lying at the heart of Cendrars's Moravagine, contains within it a variety of images and themes suggestive of emptiness. The philosophy of nihilism is exemplified in the motivations and actions of the group of terrorists seeking to plunge Russia into revolutionary chaos. Mascha's anatomical orifice, symbolizing both a biological and a psychological fault, and the abortion of her child, paralleled by the abortion of the revolutionary ideal among her comrades, are also emblematic of the chapter's central void. Moreover, Cendrars builds the theme of hollowness by describing Moravagine with images of omission, such as «empan» (space or span), «absent,» and «etranger.» Moravagine's presence, in fact, characteristically causes an undercurrent of doubt and uncertainty about the nature of reality to become overt. It is this parodoxical presence which seems to cause the narrator (and consequently the narrative) to «lose» a day at the most critical moment of the story. By plunging the reader into the narrator's lapsus memoriae, Cendrars aims at creating a feeling of the kind of mental and cosmic disorder for which Moravagine is the strategist and apologist. This technique of insufficiency is an active technique, even though it relies on the passive idea of removing explanation and connecting details. The reader is invited, or lured, into the central void of the novel and, faced with unresolvable dilemmas, becomes involved in the same disorder that was initially produced. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol3/iss2/6 THE BECKONING VOID IN MORA VAGINE STEPHEN K. BELLSTROM To anyone who has tried to analyze it, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine (1926) is an almost perversely complex novel. What most dramatically illustrates this complexity, as it reveals the man and clarifies the novel, is the fact that its center is conspicuously occupied by a hole. It is a very interesting hole, because it is simultaneously a narrative gap, a philosophical void, an anatomical orifice, and a lapsus memoriae. This unfilled space occurs in the chapter entitled «Mascha,* which is both the physical and the psychological center of the novel. The setting is Russia in full revolutionary upheaval. A group of conspirators, including Moravagine and the narrator, Raymond La Science, is preparing to overthrow the government and assassinate the czar and his family. As a kind of obscene centerfold for his novel, Cendrars introduces a new character, Mascha, whom he describes as an obese Lithuanian Jewess, «a cold, cruel woman, never short of ideas, capable of satanic invention and perversion.*(1) Mascha is at first the mastermind of the group's terrorist activities, for she possesses the peculiar ability to sense what course of action to take and the precise mechanistic qualities to execute the most cold-blooded plans. But she also has a fatal flawan exaggerated sentimentality--and this soon undermines her authority in the group, as it causes her to fall in love with Moravagine. This psychological fissure in Mascha's facade of precision and intuitiveness is symbolized by the physical opening in her abdomen, her vagina, for through it Moravagine exploits her weakness and brings about her downfall. The clove* affair culminates with Mascha becoming pregnant, but as her stomach expands, her self-possession and her power as a revolutionary leader decline. She becomes at first unreliable, then disoriented and paranoid, until finally the terrorists are forced to send her away to have her baby. In her final, postmortem appearance in the novel, we see Mascha's grotesque body hanging from the 173 1 Bellstrom: The Beckoning Void in Moravagine Published by New Prairie Press 174 STCL, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 1979) ceiling of a railroad boxcar, a grimacing fetus dangling between her legs. The conception and abortion of Mascha's child represents a kind of biological parallel to the conception and abortion of the revolutionary ideal among the group of terrorists she had once led. They too progress from a state of expectant fullness toward a void of deception and betrayal. They are at first committed to a brand of nihilism loosely associated with the Russian anarchists Kropotkin and Bakunin, which calls for an idealistic and somewhat crude revolt against the established social order. But as circumstances force them to evolve from philosophical opposition to open revolt to underground terrorist tactics, physical exhaustion and moral apathy transform the last desperate members of the dwindling group into cold, efficient realists. They become technicians who can scarcely taste the death in their mouths. Their excesses force them to live in virtual isolation from the Russian people, from the moderate political leaders, and even from most of their former allies: We were abandoned by everyone and each one of us lived all alone, in a rarified atmosphere, hunched over himself as if over a void. . . . Each of us sought rather to collect his most secret strengths, whose extreme dispersion was hollowing out a void in our depths, and to stabilize his thoughts whose inexhaustible flow was swallowed up in this abyss. (pp.