Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you is the maxim at the heart of Roland Topor’s The Tenant. This 1964 French novel details the breakdown of Monsieur Trelkovsky, the titular tenant, after he moves into a Paris apartment following the previous occupants’ suicide. The novel, imbued with elements of surrealism, explores the dark themes of alienation, identity and obsession, as it highlights society’s role in Trelkovsky’s psychological descent into paranoia and madness.
From the beginning, Trelkovsky is seen as an outsider. He’s detached from his work colleagues, and at odds with Stella, his love interest. No matter how polite, reasonable or obsequious he is with his new neighbours in the apartment building, he is never accepted. He has an exile’s mentality, even though he is at pains to point out that despite his Eastern European name, he is a French citizen. But that counts for nothing against the unspoken xenophobia directed towards Trelkovsky by his neighbours. He is desperate to keep the apartment, to fit in to society, to not be looked at as the other. But he is outside the homogeneity of their values, alien to the uniformity of their cultural beliefs. There’s a creeping paranoia as he starts to believe that they are conspiring to drive him mad, to have him commit suicide, just as, he believes, they did to Simone, the previous tenant.
His own sense of self begins to erode, and he is subsumed by the identity of Simone. Her presence is embedded in the very fabric of the apartment, very literally, as one of her teeth is hidden in the wall. After a narrative blackout, he wakes up to find himself wearing her clothes and her makeup.
Topor’s bleak world view infuses the weird internal mechanics of the novel. There’s a surreal logic at work that pertains to the quality of nightmares. The autobiographical details that have a bearing on the novel’s paranoia and distrust is the fact that in World War II his jewish parents were outed to the Nazi’s by his Parisian landlady. As a jewish child hiding in collaborationist France, Topor’s early life was spent separated from his family, passing as a Catholic school boy, under the acute stress of being denounced and recognised as a jew at any moment. Topor is the true outsider, and he has seen through the paper thin veneer of civilisation, seen the true dark heart of people. His wariness and his profound unease are manifest on every page of The Tenant.
KULCHUR KAT 