Whilst the “Introduction” (by Daniel Levin Becker) to Anne
Garréta’s “Sphinx” urges the reader to “do everything in your power to stay
ignorant” of the Oulipian constraint in this work, every interaction I have had,
via social media, brings up the structure of this work, and therefore it would probably
be hard to find a new reader who had no knowledge of the constraint. Simply
having a reference to it in the “Introduction” makes it a hard constraint to
ignore, however if you’d like to read this work without knowing what rules have
been applied, then this is not a review for you (plus you should avoid twitter
and Facebook reference, not read the back cover, not read the introduction!!).
Oulipian fiction (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle or
Potential Literature Workshop OuLiPo) was launched by Raymond Queneau and François
Le Lionnais in 1960. It is based on the concept that writing is always constrained
by something, be it simply time or language, therefore instead of attempting to
avoid constraints the writing is performed with acknowledgement of their
presence and they “embrace them proactively”. As I pointed out in my review of
Paul Fournel’s “Dear Reader” (translated by David Bellos) earlier this year the
constraints can be playful, that work contains 36 chapters, the first six all
containing exactly 7,500 characters, including spaces, and each ending with the
words, read, cream, publisher, mistake, self and evening.
The next six chapters contain 6,500 characters (including spaces) ending with
the same words, and so on down to the sixth set which consists of 2,500
characters (including spaces). Making the entire composition a “poem of 180,000
signs (including spaces)”.
Anne Garréta’s “Sphinx” was published in France in 1986, and
it was not until 2000 that she received admittance into the Oulipo literary
collective. This work marks the first full-length work by a female member of
the Oulipo to ever be published in English. So what’s the constraint? If you
don’t want to know, look away now….it is a love story that is genderless. This
has seen a number of references to the work being LGBT literature, I would
argue that just by not being overtly heterosexual it is also not overtly
homosexual, nor bisexual, nor transsexual. This thought alone did cause a bit
of a twitter frenzy over the weekend, however my point is that each reader will
bring their own preconceptions, own conditioning and bias to their experience
and this will become blatantly obvious to you as a reader the further into the
work you go.
A timeless love story, our work begins with a nameless
narrator denying theology, living a life of endless night clubbing and includes
corpses floating in shit – a living hell. The journey from night club to night
club featuring strippers and excessive music, the language in baroque in style,
I was thinking Dante for a while, would our narrator move through purgatory and
ascend to paradise?
I spent the night drifting from
port to port. While waiting for Tiff, I wallowed in seedy dressing rooms which
were in reality mere landings between two flights of stairs, blocked off with
battered chairs and cardboard boxes surrounded by bottles of fizzled-out sparkling
wine under the gray of a flaking ceiling. I observed the hellish comings and
goings of strippers dashing around, dressing, undressing, touching up their
makeup, fixing their outfits, and spraying perfume; I gazed at myself
distractedly in a mirror imprinted with lipstick and etched with clumsy
letters, The wheezing of the ceiling fan, the rumble from the nearby stage, the
sight of the red velvet sofa covered in holes, burned through by cigarettes,
and the feeling of exile between blue walls defiled with the imprints of dirty
hands brought me all the closer to that single, splenetic feeling so difficult
to define: melancholia. I relished it to the point of drunkenness. In this
refuge, a haven of ennui, I could give myself up freely to a vision of bodies
shiny with sweat, stranded and exposed under the blind eye of the spotlight,
infected by the dampness and stuffy stench of a mob crouching in the shadows of
the stage. And here I found what I had come looking for: before my eyes, a
sweltering, vitrified clash of light and flesh in the swaying red darkness.
Our narrator
accidentally becomes the DJ at a nightclub the Apocryphe and then becomes
friends with A***, a dark skinned dancer, from New York:
Soon we became rather close; we
would call each other almost every day when we woke up and we would eat dinner
together at least once a week, just the two of us, after which I would allow
myself to escort A*** to the Eden. We would meet again at the Apocryphe, and
would often go loiter somewhere else after closing. This strange intimacy didn’t
stem from any common social or intellectual interests; it wasn’t the sign or
effect of a close friendship or romantic relationship. I wasn’t particularly
enthralled by the originality of A***’s views, or by a similarity in our
tastes; we neither combated nor conversed. Our time together and our conversation
were simply a pleasure, like the contemplation of A***’s body or A***’s dance,
an aesthetic pleasure that I could attribute only to a lightness of being that
never dipped into inanity. I can’t define A*** as being anything other than
both frivolous and serious, residing in the subtle dimension of presence
without insistence.
Of course the friendship deepens and love ensues, with
travelling together, living together and the monotony of everyday existence
taking over. With the clubs they work at being called “Eden” and “Apocryphe”
(named after the apocryhus?) and our narrator taking on apophatic tradition
studies (analysing the metaphysical), there are hidden meanings throughout. Is
this work itself not approved for public consumption? Is it our writer’s
secret? So may avenues you can pursue!
This work is a fine balance between the musings on the
creation of an identity as well as remaining (gender) anonymous. The concept of
“what am I?” is floated, “I” is nothing.
The strange sensation of always
feeling as if I were at the dreadful edge of some imminent break…This sentiment
is the very foundation of all that is intractable in me: a sort of inebriation,
bitter from drawn-out solitude, the inevitable tendency toward a final
disenchantment with all idylls. And I can’t explain why, or how. I’ve never
expected much from those I love. I would have given all, conceded all, pardoned
all the wandering of anyone who accorded me the space and time for my discreet
tenderness. So much did I fear smothering those I cherished that I never made a
fuss, which was doubtless the reason for my repeated falls and defeats. I carry
my silence – this constant withdrawal into a suffering that I thought of
perhaps mistakenly as immoderate and obscene – as a cross that has never
promised any redemption, a calvary without deliverance, an involuntary
sacrifice made in vain.
Without giving away the plot of our narrator’s and A***’s relationship
and the events that follow, this work highlights our preconceived notions, our
bias, the path we naturally take when there is no clearly defined path. Whilst
reading you are jarred into shaking off the shackles of your bias, your own
identity of “self”. A work defined as “impossible to neatly classify as essay,
novel, or allegorical memoir”, the “Translator’s Note” to close the publication
highlights the following:
By omitting the supposedly
ever-present phenomenon of gender, Garréta both reveals and undermines
sex-based oppression, demonstrating that gender difference is not an important or
necessary determinant of our amorous relationships or our identities but is
rather something constructed purely in the realm of the social.
A wonderful work to include as part of Women In Translation
Month, a landmark of modern literature, a work which can raise numerous debates
and discussions, and that alone is a worthwhile enterprise. In my humble
opinion, a certain contender for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. Thanks to
Deep Vellum Publishing for bringing this book to the English reading public.
One you need to invest in.
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