Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
There’s a breath of resurrection in the air, murder transformed into grace.
This is how Fleur Jaeggy described Spring in her native Switzerland in her semi-autobiographical book Sweet Days Of Discipline. The Swiss writer, who writes in Italian from her adopted home Milan, recalls with ambiguity her coming of age in a boarding school in the 1950s. Post-war Switzerland, despite its picturesque beauty and financial richness was deeply stuck in tradition and Protestantism was a sombre backdrop for a teenager’s eager heart. Adolescent obsession with death and suicide are as present on the hundred pages, as is the Swiss idyll: Alpine roses, birds, and mountains. First published in 1989, Sweet Days Of Discipline, her fourth novel, made Fleur Jaeggy a name. Writing it, the author now 81 years old, says, was an exercise in self-punishment.
The story, told in hindsight by the unnamed narrator as an older woman, is set in a boarding school for rich daughters, the Töchterinstitut in Appenzell, Switzerland. Since her parents’ divorce when she was eight, the narrator, then fourteen, has spent her life in a succession of boarding Swiss schools. Her mother, now living in Brasil, sends letters of instructions only to the headmistress. When visiting her aging father, he brings the narrator to hotels instead of home. She feels orphaned, homeless, but seems to have accepted her fate with stoicism. Her current school, the Töchterinstitut, is protestant, but not excessively so, and while it is hierarchically structured and strict, it’s not militarily so. Rather, it’s the eventlessness, the daily rut and lack of privacy that keeps the teenage girls in a state of senile childhood protracted almost to insanity.
Few fellow students are given names or faces. There is a German roommate, whose dimply-smiled gaiety the narrator can’t stand. There is the only black girl – the daughter of an African president, who, disturbingly, gets wooed by the headmistress. There is pretty Marion, who slips the narrator a love-note, but gets rejected. Unable or unwilling to connect, the narrator searches for ever more solitude, for absolute solitude. Secretly, she sneaks out the dormitory at five every morning to walk in the mountains.
You can’t help but take walks in the Appenzell. If you look at the small white-framed windows and the busy, fiery flowers on the sills, you get this sense of tropical stagnation, a thwarted luxuriance, you have the feeling that inside something serenely gloomy and a little sick is going on. It’s an Arcadia of sickness. Inside, it seems, in the brightness in there, is the peace and perfection of death, a rejoicing of whitewash and flowers. Outside the windows, the landscape beckons; it isn’t a mirage, it’s a Zwang, as we used to say in school, a duty.
These are the very meadows, so the narrator informs us in the opening of the book, where the same year Robert Walser was found dead in the snow. Like the narrator, the Swiss poet had connected to nature, but alienated from the world: The moon is the wound of the Night/ Every star is a blood drop he wrote in his poem The Office. On his last walk, Walser had escaped a mental institution.
Sometimes I think it might be nice to die like that, after a walk, to let yourself drop into a natural grave in the snows of the Appenzell.
Death comes tenderly in nature’s arms. The narrator would have loved to pick a flower for him, but she didn’t know of the writer’s existence and neither did her literature teacher. It is really a shame… she says.
Classes seem to have left no impression on the narrator, they are hardly mentioned in the book, and, when the narrator finally leaves the Töchterinstitut, her mother quickly found her a new boarding school.
As ever the orders came from Brazil: I was to learn to keep house, to cook, to bake cakes. I had already learnt a bit of embroidery, at eight. It was now expected that I prepare myself to become a housewife. They found a school near a lake, Lake Zug, renowned for its cherry flans.
Girls’ boarding schools were less educating, but merely preparing the daughters for matrimonial submissiveness and protestant industriousness. Especially in Appenzell, which was the last canton of the Swiss confederation to introduce suffrage for women. While it was legally introduced in Switzerland in 1971, Appenzell found a loophole to delay its realization until 1990.
When the girls venture to the village, to spend a boring afternoon in the café, they find a society devoid of joy. The people in the village live their lives according to the Protestant principle of Ora Et Labora – pray and work. Wir wollen kein Glück. We want no luck, you hear people say in the village.
With the arrival of a new student, the narrator’s limited world gets challenged. Frédérique is sophisticated, beautiful and metropolitan, dressed in loose grey clothes, as opposed to the school girls’ cinched petticoats. In the daily grind of boarding school, Frédérique appears almost angelic:
The bell rings, we get up. The bell rings again, we go to bed. We retire to our rooms; we saw life pass by beneath our windows, observed it in books and on our walks, watched the seasons change. It was always a reflection, a reflection that seemed to freeze on our windowsills. And perhaps now and then we saw a tall marbly figure stand out stark before us: it is Frédérique passing through our lives and maybe we’d like to go back, but we don’t need anything, anymore. We imagined the world. What else can we imagine now if not our own deaths? The bell rings and it’s all over.
But what seems most impressive is that Frédérique was so composed, and disciplined it almost made your flesh creep, her underwear folded orderly in the drawer like altar clothes. The narrator sets out to conquer the older student. At first, Frédérique is not interested, but eventually they become a pair, or rather, accomplices. I had to submit to a rite that she was celebrating. What connects the two girls is a shared disdain of the world.
The crows flew low over the steep grassy slopes, hideous, boastful, cruel. I had compared them to our adolescence as they searched for a place in the earth round the school to sink their claws into.
At the boarding school, the relations between the girls as best girlfriends seem to frequently become romantic, often physical. Frédérique and the narrator are often holding hands, their attraction is mutual, but never explicit, never consumed.
Fleur Jaeggy, who was raised trilingual (German, French, Italian) in a Swiss family, and who won almost every noteworthy literary prize, is not much of a talker. She rarely gives interviews and when she does, she often prefers not to speak. On one occasion she made the journalist promise to write nothing but that she uses her green typewriter like a piano – not to play, but to practise, to do scales. The act of repetition, she says, of duty and exercise brings her in concert with a mysterious void.
A void that becomes thunderous on the page. Jaeggy’s writing pushes the reader away, as the New Yorker once stated, with its coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy. Yet, Jaeggy’s novels and short stories are compelling, almost addictive. Her language, court, and distanced, and like the character of Frédérique, fascinatitingly dramatic.
The story of Sweet Days Of Discipline doesn’t progress in chronological order, but keeps jumping forward, coming back in loops and repetitions, to the effect that everything happens at the same time, confounding cause and effect. There is frenzy on the pages, an urgency and egocentricity – a foreboder that the two girls, and when they later meet as young women, will never come close, suspended between attraction and rejection, between desire and rationality.
At one point, surprisingly, the narrator leaves Frédérique for another new arrival, Micheline, a cheerful, happy girl from Belgium, who wears not grey jumpers, but white flowing skirts her young Daddy sends her. “What Micheline wanted from life was to have a good time, and wasn’t that what I wanted too?” But here the narrator errs profoundly. She cannot enjoy the simple happiness.
The characters in Sweet Days of Discipline don’t change. They appear planted into the world like the mountains, immobile entities. Unable to detach from their origins, they are unable to attach to the new.
Death, futility and loss play a prominent role in Jeaggy’s writing, as do dark secrets and mysteries that are neither resolved, nor even challenged. As an older woman, the narrator wonders why she never asked the cheerful German roommate from Nuremberg about Hitler and the Nazis, so shortly after the war. The warriors marched beneath her window; her mother held her in her arms, a little bundle with a cap and ribbons. But again the narrator fails to mention a detail: It was Switzerland who, until 1944, declined asylum to fleeing European Jews, sending them back into the arms of to their murderers.
“Frost makes the poet,” Jaeggy once said, admitting to an inner frost that makes her hold within. In a portray for the New Yorker, Sheila Heta described Jaeggy’s style as an ‘aesthetic resistance’ to the soul searching other writers go for. By keeping guard of her feelings, Jaeggy creates a severity that goes beyond the sentimental. As did headmistress of the Töchterinstitut.
And the nordic light, harmful and crazed, dwells on the wall. In a window the lace curtains twitch, eyes find themselves trapped there, as if it were the horizon. The headmistress respected each of us and our families. She keeps guard. Someone is suffering from Weltschmerz. And is mocked.