The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Tact and Failure

278 Tact TactandFailure For something defined by what it doesn’t say, it is amazing how many forms tact may actually take: euphemisms and understatements, parables and fabulation , silences, even deflecting speech by speaking to a third party rather than directly to the intended recipient of the tactful gesture; tact’s obliqueness , circumventing or sidestepping its object, is what makes it difficult to define and imitate. But I am focusing here on the sort described in Stolen Kisses. Within Fabienne’s fable, tact is itself a mode of failure—­ a willing failure of language (“Pardon me, sir”for“Pardon me, madam”) that rewrites Antoine’s unwilled lapse (“Yes, sir” for “Yes, madam”). In this case, tact is not located in the actual statement but in the conditions of its utterance. We can find another, far more tragic example in Charlotte Delbo’s Measure of Our Days. In this scene, Charlotte and two comrades say good-­ bye to a dying friend in Auschwitz. Sylviane can no longer speak, and words seem all but pointless in the situation. Carmen tries:“Comment vas-­ tu, ma petite Sylviane? demanda Carmen, et cette question qui était fausse sonnait juste.” An English approximation would be something like, “How are you, dear little Sylviane” asked Carmen, and this question, which was false, sounded right.” I prefer to quote the original French text rather than the published English translation because the last segment is rather difficult to render. “Fausse” suggests falsity but also hypocrisy—­ the hypocrisy of tact—­ and “juste” implies not just accuracy but justice and fairness.“Fausse” and“juste” also evoke music, especially when used near the verb sonner. Carmen’s question may be fausse, but the contact it establishes with the dying friend is juste. The community at work here represents a form of disaccord. The “false statement” that is Carmen’s query, because it is also right, conveys some kind of truth. The question is, what kind of truth? Truth here—­ or perhaps rightness: rightness of feeling, of care, of support; “The tenderness in Carmen’s voice was true”—­ doesn’t occur despite the statement ’s falsity but thanks to it. Had Carmen addressed the reality of Sylviane ’s situation bluntly,she would not have been able to convey with accuracy the friendship of the group. But rightness that may not be separated from falsehood cannot be grounded in the sort of reason premised on the objective separation of the two. Yet in the context of the concentration camp, that is to say, in the face of an experience in which the self no longer exists as such, it would be equally inaccurate to describe the rightness of the scene as subjective or even, despite my use of the word feeling, as affective. I prefer Tact 279 to think of it as rightness in and as relation, emerging neither from a purely objective source nor from a subjective one. This sort of rightness is thus in and of the moment. Not unlike dysclosure, it changes with each utterance without being any less right for it. In this specific scene, the rightness is about Sylviane but it is also, and more importantly, for Sylviane. It is the rightness of friendship. ...