Watching French film professor Bernard Aoust vainly grasping at the sands of time makes for captivating reading.
Set in the author’s alma mater—UC Berkeley—we feel we are visiting an old haunt; such is Terry’s vivid description of the place. There we find fuddy-duddy Aoust in the timorous autumn years of his career, bewildered by the encroaching modern world. The fact that he refuses to buy a cellphone or open an email account says it all. In so doing he thinks he’s got one over on the faculty, that he’s deftly cloistered himself from the distractions of constant bureaucratic communication. He holds that if something is that important, they will post him a letter or indeed pick up the phone to call his landline—it worked perfectly well in the old days. He’s just asking to be hoisted by his own petard!
Having lolled for years in his silent ivory tower, lost in the rituals of silent film, he is eventually forced to reckon with a cold, hard fact: His darling movies no longer have any relevance to a generation raised on the internet.
The “pancake generation” of sophisters and dilettantes has a smattering of knowledge of a variety of topics but no desire to delve into any particular one—especially not something so monochrome, so anachronistic, so arcane as silent film. Aoust’s sin is that he has complacently held the belief that tenure alone will protect him from the evolving tastes of others and the very onslaught of time. We meet him as it is all starting to catch up with him.
Dwindling numbers in his classes, the attendees increasingly disengaged, he becomes the victim of the feedback system now ruling the university. Education is increasingly transactional. Student reviews mean it is now a service industry; the students paid for it so they want it their way. The perversity of the tail wagging the dog is too much for Aoust to bear, and we watch through slitted fingers as he crashes headlong into modernity.
The same fusty lectures he has been giving his whole career don’t cut it anymore, and his superiors are starting to notice. He can either change or be consigned to the academic dustbin. This has grave consequences for a man for whom his work is his life.
Aoust makes a last-ditch effort to create a final monograph about a 1923 silent film, a part of which has been lost. Musing and lecturing on the contents and possible missing sections of Le Retour has been a lifelong obsession of his. He assumes the academic world will share his fervor, and the publication will be his professional vindication and existential redemption.
At a time when we are all caught in the quicksilver slipstream of Moore’s law, The Return is an allegory about the loss of long-standing culture and ways of life. Our closing arthouse cinemas are emblematic of a greater dying off of art. Aoust believes it is being replaced with the same inscrutable noise he hears at his son’s nu metal concert. When we witness Aoust’s meltdown as he smashes computers on Lower Sproul Plaza, we can’t help wondering if he’s going to fight back or slope off somewhere to lick his festering wounds and expire.
To be in James Terry’s hands is to be in the hands of a humble master. His considered style is marked by precision and a decided lack of flair. There’s a leanness to his prose almost as if he wrote it once, brimming with sentimentality and Romance, then wrote it again, stripping out all but the bones, the marrow. The result is arresting. We feel how he cares deeply for his hero but wants to make him pay for his shortcomings—like some ancient god—so that we might learn. This is the essence and function of the allegory. Indeed, this is the essence and function of all stories well-told.
The Return, by James Terry. Outpost19: Shortish Project, September 2023. 146 pages. $16.00, paper.
Jack Quinn is an Irish writer who has penned a number of books and screenplays. Based in Dublin, he works as a music producer and DJ.
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Heavy Feather Review 