Esua Nadel
Esua Nadel | |
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| Born | 2 April 1924 Nazrin, Xevden |
| Died | 30 October 2004 (aged 80) Velouria, Nerveiík-Iárus-Daláyk, Gylias |
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| Years active | 1960–2004 |
Esua Nadel (2 April 1924 – 30 October 2004) was a Gylian writer, columnist, humourist, and public intellectual. She was one of Gylias' most prolific, popular, and widely-read columnists. Her work had a considerable influence on Gylian popular culture — particularly language — and social philosophy.
Esua cultivated the persona of a glamorous gadfly, and a writing style characterised by irony, burlesque, and (mostly Horatian) satire. She championed the wicked–evil distinction, celebrated rebelliousness and misfits, and condemned the "drab forces" that would destroy society through timid conformity. She wrote of etiquette's abuse as a tool of social repression, and presented "decadence" as a symbol of a society's vitality.
Esua's combination of graceful affect and eccentric radicalism, shared with fellow columnist Denise Sarrault, prompted The People's Voice to compare them to "modern-day daimones." She became a household name and one of Gylias' most popular media personalities. Later in life, she also wrote humorous mystery fiction and crime fiction, which proved an apt vehicle for her interests, and wrote the long-running adventure game series The Case of the Facts.
Early life
Esua was born on 25 April 1924 in Nazrin. Her father worked in a store, and her mother was a servant for a Xevdenite family. Her family background influenced Esua: her father's materialistic tendencies engendered a lifelong dislike of anti-intellectual conventionalism, while her mother's job made her first question "who decided such and such is how we're 'meant' to behave, and who does it benefit?".
In her youth, Nazrin was liberated by a Gylian uprising supported by the Border Guard, and became a TACS of Alscia. She attended primary and secondary school, but was a mediocre student who didn't fit well with the Alscian education system. After Alscia joined the Free Territories in 1939, she found the volunteer classes that replaced formal education more enjoyable.
Liberation War
Esua began working as a journalist during the Liberation War. She found the atmosphere of communal assemblies more interesting, and gravitated towards their "motley assortment of misfts and troublemakers" as a subject. When an editor complained that one of her submissions made them look bad, she responded, "If you're not prepared to be frank, then you don't really need my help with that, do you?".
During the second half of the war, she moved away from reporting and settled on opinion journalism. She would reflect on this as her "apprenticeship" period, where she refined her writing voice and soon-famous persona.
Columnist
Having refined her approach over the years, Esua officially began her column in 1960. She titled it "The World Through Green Eyes", a humorous reference to her favourite clothing colour and the idiom "green-eyed monster".
Initially published in The Envadra Express, Esua amicably left and became an independent columnist in 1962, distributing the column nationwide through syndication. The Envadra Express continued to print it on its front page, in honour of Envadra's "favourite daughter".
Esua was a prolific writer whose column appeared every day until her death, an unequaled achievement. Aided by copious notes and a fast typing speed, she sustained a remarkably relaxed but productive pace of work. She maintained a solid backlog of columns for publication and simply sent one to syndication each day. Sometimes she would delay a column until the next day to substitute a more topical one.
She had an irreverent writing style and enjoyed playing with language, using puns, word play, and terse aphorisms to capture the feel of Gylias. She used irony and satire to make serious points and commentary, quipping: "I prefer to make people laugh and then think to the reverse order." She wrote in English, providing a counterpart to Denise Sarrault's French-language columns, and delighted in "abusing and mangling English to meet Gylian needs", helping coin and popularise several terms.
Esua covered numerous topics in her column, and drew much material from her profuse travels throughout Gylias and resulting experiences. She wrote with a tone of bonhomie and Epicureanism, and was praised for her ability to capture the colourful personalities and communities of Gylias with an economy of language. She enjoyed posing ironic questions and playing the role of social gadfly.
Her column sympathetically covered and celebrated Gylias' rebels, misfits, and "wicked". Her fascination with the demimonde led her to sympathetically cover those she considered real-life lovable rogues: Ranyi Sesyk, Kaþi Mofat, Mava Organisation founders Maria Vaseva and Valeria Maneva, Lidia Leone, Emilia Malandrino and her ARENA party, Şaisa Tausi, Sári Gábor, and Samantha Thompson, to name a few.
She preferred "honourable friction" to "ordinary virtue", paying more attention to members of the Darnan Cyras government she saw as "unruly" or larger than life, such as Julie Legrand, Eðe Saima, Birgit Eckstein, Neelie op het Mensink, and Sweetie Letise. This pattern would repeat itself with the Mathilde Vieira government. She formed a close friendship with Julie, who dedicated her 1970 book Criticism and Self-Criticism to Esua.
She was notably attracted to the colourful and "decadent" glamour cultivated by market anarchists, and formed a close friendship with the Union of Independents' deputy and senator Ţaisa Eşal.
Esua reveled in the colourful aspects of Gylian political culture and used caricature to poke fun at high-profile politicians. She portrayed Darnan Cyras as a suave ladies' man, in reference to his predominantly female cabinets and allies. Darnan was bothered by this, feeling it painted him as a sexual predator. He once met Esua and protested that her depiction was unfair and encouraged people to consider him an immoral politician. Esua responded that she bore no malice and reassured him readers understood the joke and would not assume the worst of him. This resolved their differences.
Public image
Esua cultivated a public image to match her writing, portraying herself as a "bemused anachronism and sympathetic observer" akin to Isabel Longstowe. She was a fastidious dresser with a large collection of clothes, and always wore Levystile outfits in public and portraits, particularly favouring suits with buttons, hats, and jewelry.
She liked to portray herself as a "woman out of time", and preferred being photographed in black and white to further the impression. Silhouette founder Nan Şernéy famously described her as "an elegantly wasted participant at a party at the end of the world", prompting Esua to send a letter reading, "You're the most brilliant person on the planet for thinking of that, and a bitch for doing so before me."
Noted for her charm and dry wit, Esua was a proud gourmand and led a hedonistic lifestyle. She was a smoker for most of her life and always drank wine and champagne with her lunches and dinners. She was proud of her capacity to drink alcohol without becoming intoxicated, the result of a genetic condition that gave her a strong liver. She participated in Project Nous, being filmed experimented with psychedelics, but continued to prefer alcohol and cigarettes as her "drugs of choice".
She was a prolific traveler, joking that her column doubled as "a daily ad for GNRTS". When asked by Carmen Dell'Orefice to help promote her magazine The Travelling Companion, she replied, "It's Esua Nadel, but on a plane."
Esua's glamour, wit, and eccentric philosophy made her a popular media personality. She was a regular guest on radio and television shows, particularly panel shows. She was especially in demand at universities, where the students she spoke to and debated relished her quips and thought-provoking subjects.
She once said the most important things in her life were "good food, good drink, good clothes, good company, good arguments, and bon mots". Her most frequent piece of tongue-in-cheek advice was "Hope for a good friend, but pray for a good adversary."
She was a recurring guest on The Havomar Report's Gylias segments, as the show's primary "Gylias interpreter", and was interviewed for Nation Building. During the Siege of Gothendral, she spoke to Marius Lauritzen by phone, and praised his creative means of protest. The next day, she described the siege in her column as "a brief outbreak of Gylias in Gothendral".
Thinker
Esua described herself as "a patriot whose love is expressed through mockery", and her calling as "teaching people it's healthy to embrace doubts about their convictions, massaging the parts of the brain they don't regularly use, and administering mental enemas so they don't become intellectually constipated." She urged readers to consider flaws could also be things to be proud of and marks of humanity, rather than just defects to be remedied.
This aspect informed her entire worldview, expressed in books that retain her mischievous humour and compassionate view of humanity. Arguably her manifesto, The Imperative to Decay (1965) embraces and subverts degeneration theory, presenting decadence as the measure of a society's health. She argues that decadence is liberating by its embrace of self-indulgent tendencies, becoming a great weapon against "silent authoritarianism" and "conservative sterility".
Etiquette as a Social Weapon (1962) and Let Them Eat Civility (1967) established her as a prominent theoretician and critic of etiquette. She argues that humans are capable of constructing functional norms of behaviour by themselves, and portrays the extreme, pointless complexity of etiquette as a totalitarian force, used to maintain the elite in power and keep the powerless in a state of learned helplessness.
A recurring theme in her works is the defense of "harmless indulgences and small vices", a prominent manifestation of her scorn towards piety and "killjoys". She was strongly sympathetic towards refusal of work, and championed laziness, slacking, and procrastination as legitimate life choices. She elaborated on these themes in The Joys of Decadence (1973), No Servants, No Masters (1976), and The Pleasure Principle (1982).
Writer
Esua began writing mystery fiction and crime fiction in the 1980s. The genre proved a logical outgrowth of her playful contrarianism and demimonde fascination.
Her novels feature her linguistic flair and masterful eye for local detail, humorous presentations of the minutiae of investigation, and a Madame Rouge-inspired mockery of "hardboiled" genres. She created a cast of recurring characters, and inevitably made her protagonists worldly and mischievous female characters, not bothering to conceal their status as self-insertions.
In the 1990s, Esua collaborated with a Gylian video game company to produce the acclaimed adventure game series The Case of the Facts. She was the lead writer for the series, and considered it a highlight of her later career.
The games starred advocate Mitsuki, a "not even thinly veiled clone of her author"—a sharp-dressed, self-indulgent, and witty advocate who successfully fights to establish "the facts of the case" in between "aging disgracefully", drinking constantly, and going through numerous sexual partners. Cultural commentator Hanako Fukui identifies Mitsuki and the characters of Michiko Moreno as notable Miranian characters to gain popularity by humorously defying positive stereotypes of Miranian Gylians.
Esua's persona and work were the inspiration for Core's songs "The Fly" and "Until the End of the World" (1991). She made guest appearances at certain shows on the Achtung Baby Tour to recite the verses of "The Fly".
Personal life
Esua never married, and as she grew older she came to favour describing herself as a "broad" or "old broad", considering it an accurate summary of her persona and occupation. She explicitly acknowledged she wished to "age like Cécile Sorel", and succeeded in being a Cécile Sorel for the the 1990s–2000s.
She had a succession of long-term relationships and one-night stands. Her appetite for the latter increased somewhat during her later years, a trait reflected in The Case of the Facts. Her most famous dalliance was with erotic novelist Anaïs Nin, who effusively praised her in her diaries.
As a result of her mischievous tendencies and embrace of the adversary–enemy distinction, she was known for expressing affection and friendship through teasing and light-hearted insults.
While a strong defender of harmless vices, she recognised the importance of personal boundaries and strongly supported regulation of drugs by the Controlled Substances Administration, and public smoking bans. She said of the latter, "I have the right to risk giving myself cancer, but not to risk giving someone else cancer."
Esua did not identify as religious, but her writing is strongly influenced by Concordianism, particularly in her tone of friendly guidance meant to elicit introspection, her morality, and her use of Concordian symbolism of transcendental dance and movement in her paeans to modern life.
Death
Esua's physical health declined later in life, and she had to quit smoking and cut down on her drinking. She remained mentally alert and continued to work. She joked about her refusal to retire, telling an interviewer in 1999, "The only appropriate conclusion to my life will be dying at the typewriter in the middle of a column."
She died on 30 October 2004 in her apartment in Velouria. Her death prompted tributes in the media, including from Prime Minister Mathilde Vieira, and approximately 100.000 attended her public funeral. She was cremated and buried in Nazrin; her headstone bears her desired epitaph, "I may be wrong."