A Look at Luc Sante’s Resume

Luc Santé narrates in “Resume” vastly different accounts of his life, stitching fragments of memories together to create an identity of extraordinary invention and imagination but also one of isolation and loneliness.

The first line of the text which reads ; ” I was born in 1954 in Verviers , Belgium , the only child of Lucien Mathieu Amelie Santé and Denise Lambertine Marie Ghislaine Nandirn”(15) .This along with, “following the Bankruptcy of  [Sante's ] father’s employer”(15)  appears , with little variation at the start of every paragraph of the text. This repetition serves to emphasise to the reader that while memories are malleable and can be turned into anything that the individual imagines, events that are outside the individual’s control such as the Bankruptcy of the employer of Sante’s father, which is where his story begins, remain fixed. Santé does not change the world’s historical events such as “the Belgian government [announcing] that the Congo would be granted its independence that June” (16) or “the terrible winter of 1944″ (16) Instead, he uses these events as tools that shape his identity.

Unlike most texts of the memoir genre, Santé does not recount his memories in a linear, episodic way. The sentences avoid the systematic account of details style familiar to the genre and usually free of descriptive language that a reader may expect from memoir. Rather than relive any particular moment vividly, Santé opts for a fast-paced delivery like in this paragraph where he goes through events very quickly. This is evident in the first paragraph when he talks about the events after his family re-emigrates to in 1960, “Several more such trips occurred over the next few years, spurred by momentary hopes, The Cuban Missile Crisis, by the Illnesses and deaths of my maternal grandparents.”(15)In one sentence, Santé covers a period of years without much detail. This type of recital does not allow the reader to engage with the narrator on a personal level, heightening the sense of isolation in the writing.

Another effect of this style is gives the writing the feel of an action film, with every self contained paragraph Sante transforms events  into moving images of  fantasy using history tie them all together. The author takes the reader on a journey through time, to 1960s colonial Congo, to 1970s Marrakesh when British Rock bands were a worldwide phenomenon, and when Sante imagines himself as a Jesuit priest to early eighties in El Salvador, a country in a civil war at time. Placing himself into these events serves to reveal the author as a creative individual with a love for history. However, these wild tales of his life also alert the reader to the author’s dissatisfaction, and need to invent an alternative identity for him.

The last paragraph of text is the most revealing of all in the text, with the author changing his tone of writing to a more personal one, using short sentences and greater use of description, “Dust accumulated. Things fell and were not picked up. Mold grew on the potatoes in the cellar.”(19)  These sentences invoke in the reader the sense of isolation and time going by slowly without event. The imagery is bleak with the “snow [covering] the dust, and then soot [covering] the snow” (19) imagery adding to the sense of coldness and loneliness.

The last line of the text, “We grew increasingly warm as we slept” (19) is an interesting line for Sante to end on; unlike the other lines in the text, it is positive. After taking the reader on a fantastic journey, Sante brings reality back into the text with an ending without action.

Bibliography:

Sante, Luc. “Resume”, ENGL117 Course Reader: Writing the Academic Essay.  Christchurch, N.Z.: English Programme, University of Canterbury, 2008.  15-19