Rosalind Belben, The Limit (1974)
Rosalind Belben
Like so many of my reading experiences, reading The Limit was prompted by the critic Merve Emre who, though preternaturally positive, has yet to champion a book I disliked. The author, Rosalind Belden, was completely unknown to me, as was this truly shocking book. First published in 1974, it has been reprinted in the New York Review Book, a series that also has yet to print or reprint a bad book. It is short (101 pages) and I read it in one unforgettable sitting.
Ostensibly, the book is about the last days in a woman’s life, or better about the first days of her death from cancer. Her husband sits by her side, feeds her, wipes her. The corporeal miasma in which life and death meet is rendered in astonishing, unsparing detail. The tone is Beckettian – I know this is not a genuine experience, but I am a professional reader after all – without the existentialist bravado that I seem to detect in, for example, Beckett’s trilogy. The narrative is segmented into short chapters with baroque titles that range from the common past of the couple to their present and the husband’s future.
It is surely useless to give a summary of the chapters in such a short book, but one aspect of this novel struck me as absolutely, well, novel: the narrative point of view floats, often within a chapter, even within a paragraph, between the husband, the dying wife, and an omniscient narrator. At first, this seems impossible to countenance – each of these positions strain our investment in a narrative, even though we somehow have convinced ourselves, sometime in the first half of the 19th century, that the omniscient narrator can provide us with a stable, even “realist” account of events. All three of them flowing into one another – I have never encountered this in my decades of reading and would have dismissed the possible success of such a construction out of hand. After reading The Limit, I cannot imagine anything more comprehensive, more “realistic,” more exciting to read than this formal device. I am still stunned that but for an accidental recommendation I could have missed this genuinely new way of experiencing a novel.
Of course, there is another side to these sensations: I am – and in a sense, we all are – closer to death than to life. The creaturely ending of my life is something I think about quite often, sometimes in panic, sometimes in peace. I have never been so close to that process of dying as in this novel. Yet for all its dreariness, soiled sheets, and cracked lips, this account did not terrify me. I am not sure why that is. The closest I get is that the formal triumph of this novel cancels out the terror. Perhaps art can save us after all?
