Dorveille

In just a bit, I’m going to post on Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, but I thought I’d first pull this concept out for its own brief post.

One of the sections in Harlem Shuffle is called “Dorvay.”

Context: Our main character is Ray Carney, a youngish furniture store owner in Harlem in the early 1960’s. Here, we’re introduced to one of his habits, via his own recollection of his college days:

One day in October, while impressing the importance of scrupulous vigil over one’s accounts, Simonov recommended that they pick one time every day for bookkeeping and stick to it. “It doesn’t matter when you do it, but get it done.” His father, a textiles merchant back in the old country (Romania? Hungary?), preferred the dorvay, that midnight pasture, for squaring his accounts. “We’ve forgotten now, but until the advent of the lightbulb, it was common to sleep in two shifts,” Simonov said. “The first started soon after dusk, when the day’s labor was done —if there were no lights to see, what was the point of staying up? Then we woke around midnight for a few hours before the second phase of sleep, which lasted through the morning. This was the body’s natural rhythm, before Thomas Edison let us make our own schedule.”

The British called this wakeful interval the watch, Professor Simonov explained, and in France it went by dorvay. You went over your accounts, whatever they may be—reading, praying, lovemaking, attending to pressing work, or overdue leisure. It was a respite from the normal world and its demands, a hollow of private enterprise carved out of lost hours.

Professor Simonov returned to his lecture and his unique pronunciation of receivables. Carney wanted more on the nighttime flights. He spoke up in his classes but not Simonov’s—the old man was too imposing. A trip to the library was fruitless until another librarian overheard Carney pestering the reference desk and suggested the French word was spelled thusly: dorveille, from dormir, to sleep, and veiller, to be awake. Professor Simonov told the truth; the body had kept a different clock in olden times. Medieval scholars chronicled it; Dickens, Homer, and Cervantes made references. Carney hadn’t read Homer or Cervantes, but recalled Great Expectations (humble beginnings) and A Christmas Carol (rueful ghosts) with much fondness. Benjamin Franklin enthused over dorvay in his diaries, using the intermission to walk around the house naked and sketch inventions.

Learned gentlemen aside, Carney knew crime’s hours when he saw them—dorvay was crooked heaven, when the straight world slept and the bent got to work. An arena for thieving and scores, break-ins and hijacks, when the con man polishes the bait and the embezzler cooks the books. In-between things: night and day, rest and duty, the no-good and the up-and-up. Pick up a crowbar, you know the in-between is where all the shit goes down. He upheld the misspelling in his thoughts, in keeping with his loyalty to his mistakes.

In his school days, Carney was a young man alone, unencumbered by all but his ambition. He decided to heed the primitive call in his blood and slipped easily into two shifts of sleep. The lost art of dorvay. It recognized him and he, it. The dark hours were the canvas for coursework and haphazard self-improvement. Alley cats and gutter rats scrabbled outside, the pimp upstairs harangued his new recruit, and Carney drew up sample business plans, advertisements for improbable products, and furiously underlined Richmond’s Economic Concepts. No rent parties, no girlfriends to keep him up late just him jimmying his future. He put in nine good months advancing his cause: all A’s. Every morning Carney rose rested and energized, until his early-bird shift at Blumstein’s prohibited those nighttime jaunts and dorvay became a memento of those bygone days of solitary aspiration, before Elizabeth, before the store, the children.

Then three weeks ago he sacked out when he got home from work and was dead until one A.M. He woke alert, humming. His antenna capturing odd transmissions zipping above the rooftops. Elizabeth stirred in bed next to him and asked if something was wrong. Yes and no. He split for the living room, and the next night, too, when he woke, restlessly pacing until he figured out why he’d returned to dorvay. The banker, the offense. He turned the room down the hall into a second office for his second job of revenge. The elevated train clacking uptown and down his only company. He had been summoned to the old hours for a purpose.

Great stuff, and illuminating.

I don’t know about you, but when I was introduced to the monastic hours, it was in a context of strangeness: Look at these maybe heroic, but also a little crazy people.

And perhaps the specific shape and content of the monastic hours was less forgiving and more structured than that of those living outside the walls, in the village, on the farm, in the castle.

But how interesting, too, that the notion of being up and down around the clock, in the late hours of the night, was not invented or emerge out of the blue.

Even in their separation from the world, monastics still lived in it. Dorveille was, indeed, an embrace and sanctification of part of the shape of ordinary, daily life as lived in this world.

Letting grace, we might say, build on nature.

From a 2016 essay on dorveille:

It is sometimes noted that segmented sleep fits snugly within the Christian Liturgy of the Hours, which obligated the faithful to rise at dawn for Lauds and pray in the dead of night. This isn’t the whole story (pre- and non-­Christian cultures practiced biphasic sleep), but what is true is that dorveille was communal. Waking at 2 a.m. in 1550, you were not quite alone. Your husband or wife was up, too. Your neighbors were up, you might reasonably think, probably doing the same things you were. An invisible clamor of writing, drinking, lovemaking, fighting humanity enveloped you. That’s the part of segmented sleep I might never experience. I get the postmodern afterglow, the decay of a mass-­cultural behavior into an individual preference. I’ve gained another routine, when what I want is a sense of ritual.