by Anne Garréta
International Praise for Anne F. Garréta and Sphinx
NOMINATED FOR THE 2016 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE AND BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD
ONE OF Flavorwire’S TOP 50 INDEPENDENT BOOKS OF 2015
ONE OF Entropy Magazine’S BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2015
ONE OF Bookriot’S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH
INCLUDED IN Words Without Borders’
31 WOMEN TO READ IN TRANSLATION
“Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, an Oulipo project, tells a love story without ever referring to gender—a feat that’s all the more impressive in French, which has gender baked into its grammatical constructs.” —DAN PIEPENBRING, The Paris Review
“Merciless and androgynous, this sphinx-like love soon renders gender stigmas pointless.” —CHARLOTTE GROULT, The Paris Review staff pick
“[Garréta has] been called influential and groundbreaking, and with this, her first translation into English, it is easy to see why. Sphinx is an important contribution to queer literature—fascinating, intelligent, and very welcome.” —SARA RAUCH, Lambda Literary
“The set-up is such a classic, relatable tale of falling in—and out—of love that one wonders why gender has always been such a huge factor in how we discuss relationships, in fiction and otherwise.…So, the author, and the translator, created their own language, championing love and desire over power and difference.” —MADDIE CRUM, Huffington Post
“A short but deep exploration of the nature and complexity of desire and longing.” —Publishers Weekly
“A master of thought and language, an astounding authority and elegance.” —ANNE SERRE, Marie Claire
“Garréta finds endless shades of in between and out of bounds, her characters taking shapes no other text before—or since—has imagined.” —LAUREN ELKIN, Bookforum
“A unique novel, Sphinx succeeds in telling a love story without names or genders, allowing the reader to interpret the novel however they wish. Set in Paris and calling to mind the work of James Baldwin, this both feminist and LGBT book is deeply evocative in its word usage as it celebrates love without the constraints of gender.” —World Literature Today
“A powerfully compelling narrative.” —TOBIAS CARROLL, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Garréta’s mastery is in never committing to one allusion or formation, like the mythological sphinx. Subsequently, she avoids didacticism, while still hinting at moral and philosophical dilemmas.” —SARAH COOLIDGE, ZYZZYVA
“The strength of [Sphinx] lies in its philosophical eloquence…Take away gender and race from the book, and what’s left? Love, viewed as a nihilistic transcendence… considerably more than a language game.” —ADAM MARS-JONES, London Review of Books
“Quite remarkable, and a rewarding piece of experimental—in the best senses of the word—fiction.” —MICHAEL ORTHOFER, Complete Review
“Centering her tale on the love and lust of a young couple in the Parisian underworld allows Garréta to train our eyes on the physical beauty of youth, the sensuality of anonymous bodies, and our preconceptions regarding both.” —JANE YONG KIM, Words Without Borders
“The trajectory and style of the writing are breathtaking, and…Emma Ramadan’s translation is superb.” —TOM ROBERGE, Albertine Books
“By removing gender from language, the author forges a language that stands at a remove from daily discourse as we know it; these stylistic efforts have been made in order to force us to scrutinize the ways we perceive each other in new ways.” —JOHN TAYLOR, The Arts Fuse
“Garréta’s removal of gendered grammar is less an indictment of gender—or signbearing bodies—and more of a narrative challenge, a queering of language. This is also to say Sphinx is less of a queer romance novel than it is a poetic queering of love itself.” —MEGHAN LAMB, The Collagist
“The fragments that do surface from this unconscious reservoir are vividly and eloquently incarnated. This is particularly true of the prose around lights, music, and bodies—the primary elements that compose nightclubs. They are rendered in rapturous tones…I could go on—exquisite fragments like these are packaged in nearly every page.” —JOHN TAYLOR, The Rumpus
“…a bold, strange, perfectly constructed novel.” —EVA DOMENEGHINI
“A literary feat…The most beautiful praise one can give to a novel is to say that it is unlike anything else…What she has done is a kind of masterpiece.” —JACQUES LAURENT
“Astonishing.” —SYLVIE GENEVOIX, Madame Figaro
“A remarkable entrance into the literary scene… A first novel so promising that it foreshadows, one hopes, a long literary career.” —JOYSANE SAVIGNEAU, Le Monde
“Anne Garréta has achieved what is certainly the most difficult and rarest feat in a first novel-memoire: she disconcerts the reader.”—ANDRÉ BRINCOURT, Le Figaro
“The sharpest analyses of intelligence and of the heart… A celebration of the most beautiful and most fragile of bodies, of all endangered flesh, destined to die.” —GEORGES ANEX, Le Journal de Genève
Deep Vellum Publishing
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Copyright © Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2002
Originally published in French as Pas un jour by Anne F. Garréta, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle in Paris, 2002
English translation copyright © 2017 by Emma Ramadan
First edition, 2017
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-941920-55-8 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2016959431
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Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut Français.
This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français.
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Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz · annazylicz.com
Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.
Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution · (800) 283-3572 · cbsd.com
Table of Contents
Ante Scriptum
B*Night 1
XNight 2
E*Night 3
K*Night 4
L*Night 5
D*Night 6
H*Night 7
N*Night 8
Y*Night 9
C*Night 10
INight 11
Z*Night 12
Post Scriptum
Afterword
Author & Translator Biographies
To none
ANTE SCRIPTUM
What’s to be done with our inclinations?
Why not write something different, differently than you usually do? Once more, but with a new twist, rid yourself of your self. Shed the accoutrements of this disentangling, keep at bay a little longer, if you can, who you think you are. Since you can no longer conceive of writing except in long and intricate constructions, isn’t it time to go against the grain?
Figuring out the next novel on the horizon will take years of research, composition, writing. You pity your few readers and always take care not to exceed their patience and good will. In the meantime, you would like to offer them what you expect they desire: a distraction, the illusion of revealing what they imagine to be a subject. For they charitably assume you to be—a common failing, until further notice—a real me.
You don’t have the heart to tell them that no subject ever expresses herself in any narration. And besides, they would refuse to believe this terrifying bit of news—we’re still punch drunk on our little selves. So
you have resolved, at the very least, to pretend to step out onto the slippery slope that seems so natural these days and to subject yourself to the discipline of confessional writing. All we seem to do nowadays is tell and retell the stories of our lives. For over a century, we’ve tried to grasp at ourselves from the same angle, convinced that there’s only one key to unlock the secret of our subjectivity: desire.
And you could say, with and against Rousseau, he who invented or perfected our corruption: “We must have spectacles in the great cities of the post-modern era, and confessions for idolatrous people. I have seen the mores of my times, and I have published these stories.
Would that I had lived in an age when I should have thrown them into the fire!”
The irony delights you before you’ve even written a line. You will play at a very old game that has become the hobbyhorse of a modernity balking at radical disenchantment: confession, or how to scrape the bottoms of mirrors.
On a September day in 1835, strolling near Lake Albano, a man named Stendhal or Henri Beyle or Henri Brulard—which is it? Who knows…perhaps all three—draws in the sand the initials of the women he has loved: V, An, Ad, M, Mi, Al, Aine, Apg, Mde, C, G, Aur, and finally Mme Azur. The first name of this last one escapes him. The list of an unlucky Don Juan: “In reality, I had only six of the women I have loved.”
Here H.B. is tempting you with the outline of a project both melancholy and tinged with cruel irony, and perfectly suited to your convalescence: the stammering alphabet of desire.
If you aim to thwart your habits and inclinations, you might as well go about it systematically. Here’s what you have resolved to do (there’s no more radical way to differ or dissemble from oneself than what you’re planning here). It comes down to a single maxim: Not one day without a woman.
Which simply means that you will allocate five hours (the time it takes a moderately well-trained subject to compose a standard academic essay) each day, for a month, at your computer, aiming to recount the memory you have of one woman or another whom you have desired or who has desired you. That will be the narrative: the unwinding of memory in the strict framework of a given moment.
You will write as one goes to the office; you will be the archivist of your desires, thirty-five hours a week. Five hours per initial, no more, no less.
You will take them in the order in which they come to mind. You will then put them down, neutrally, in alphabetic order. To hell with chronology.
You will refrain from using your customary instruments: no pen, nothing but the keyboard (to the last syllable of recorded time). No draft, no notebook to gather bits and pieces, no considered and composed architecture, no rules other than the purely material and logistical ones that you’ve already assigned to the act.
No other principle than to write from memory. You will not try to capture things as they happened, nor will you reconstruct them as they might have happened, or as you might have liked them to happen. You will tell them as they appear to you at the precise moment you recall them.
Stabbing at your keyboard, you will decimate your memories. And who cares if at the end of your five hours of recollection, nothing will have been consummated? Who cares whether we’ve actually had the women we’ve desired? Writing at the whim of memory twists and turns on uncertainty. Like desire itself, never assured of its end or its object.
No erasures, no rewrites. Sentences as they come, without plotting them, cut off as soon as they’re left hanging. Syntax matching composition.
Perhaps you will finally manage, in some feeble way, to emulate your peers, who recount their every experience, spewing out volumes of life matter—and buy into it.
It would have been better had you kept a journal. But you do not possess the talent of your peers. From day to day, you would have had nothing to report: nothing ever happens to you except in remembering. You only grasp the moment in distant memory, once oblivion has given things, beings, events, the density that they never have in the broad evanescence of daylight.
Your days are made of vapor, of imperceptible condensation. The world (and you with it) is a phantom that only time, the sands of time, makes visible and in the same moment erases. In full daylight, they don’t even cast a shadow. An exquisite sensitivity, a photographic plate slowly revealing the image. But there seems to be no fixer for it: exposed to the light of the screen, of the page, and held too long under our gaze, memory dissolves without remission, leaving behind only the image of an image, a snapshot taken at the moment of recollection. From copy to copy of remembrance, it fades, moves. Soon nothing remains but the caricature—and the few details that the gaze has selectively magnified.
In one fell swoop, you will focus and dissipate yourself through thought. You will give yourself over, at set hours, to a purely discursive mental libertinage, you who have long ago renounced libertinage, and have adopted a simplicity of morals that would amaze your peers. And that you certainly never would have been able to imagine when you believed that you were only living in the present.
You will dissipate yourself through thought, in order to dispel the desires that you might still feel, that you are liable to feel even though you have learned to thwart their most trivial ploys.
Let’s say it’s a beautiful summer night, that after three months spent lounging on your sofa waiting for the double fracture in your right leg to heal, which left you with two metal plates, thirteen screws, and the leisure to analyze the subtle nuances of physical pain accompanied by the taste of morphine mixed with grenadine, to marvel at your luck, all things considered, in getting off so lightly after that absurd accident. For when you developed the memory of it, you finally saw that it could have cost you your life or your body, cut in half by the force of a relatively serious paralysis, that after these three months and a new lease on life, on movement, it’s a truly beautiful summer night, a night when the body, free at last from too much pain, rediscovers all of its appetites helter-skelter: for dancing, for other bodies, for women. It’s a perfect evening for sitting on the terrace of a café, watching the women go by. Desire would surely come hurtling down its slope, natural and abrupt, and before even realizing it you would probably have accrued additional memories.
In this regard, desire and pain are alike—your accident taught you this. Only when they take you by surprise do they get out of hand. You wake up after a respite and they will overwhelm you. To keep them in check requires a cool head, focus and consistency.
To dissipate, evade, or sidetrack your desires, such is the purpose of this little experiment you are attempting and which you hope will suffice to keep you going until you board the plane that will carry you across the Atlantic to the other coast of desire. Or to put it another way, you who were frivolous for so long, a fact the stories that you intend to unwind each day of this month of July 2000 will fully illustrate; you who were frivolous for so long, and you whose natural, and certainly human, tendency (exacerbated by all the typically French fondness for fickleness which confounds grace and flippancy, pleasures of flesh and vanity) is far from tamed. For a long time now, you’ve resolved to stop living as a slave of your disorderly desires.
For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don’t love.
B*
Memory of a body: inscribed in a given space, anchored in light.
Seated, legs stretched before you, in an armchair like those Balthus wrapped in the ruffled fabric that haunts his paintings, in the orb of light of one of those rusted iron floor lamps imagined by the same Balthus, a bottle of cognac propped up against your stomach. To your right, the glass-top table overloaded with papers, books, two computers. To your left, the dinner table (a plank set on two massive trestles borrowed from an artist’s studio), not yet cleared.
Behind you, a ledge on the white-washed wall which serves as a shelf for still more books. Facing you, the staircase slanting up to the mezzanine and your bed. Now and then you open the bottle of cognac to re
fill your glass, and you reflect.
A little while ago, you walked your guests home. Who were they? You remember only (who was your lover, and present at all of your dinner parties) and B, who had come to give a talk in this Roman villa where you spend your nights reading, strolling through the gardens, playing pool alone in the deserted bar.
No memory of the dinner either. Probably the typical Roman foods, which you’ve never tired of. Fragrant prosciutto that melts in your mouth, buffalo mozzarella, figs, tomatoes, fresh dates, smoked scamoza, perfectly seasoned pasta with cream. Finished off, no matter what the exact menu might have been, with cognac; you always had a good bottle within easy reach of your desk.
Afterwards, the group had gone trooping out into the gardens and strolled down the wide path, gravel crunching underfoot. At the fountain of Hermes, B took her leave. You’d felt a pang of regret, an almost physical torment, with no possible solution, given the present company. You suggested she come for breakfast the next morning (this would pass for a simple gesture of the hospitality due to visitors of the villa) promising her pancakes (in your fridge was a large can of maple syrup brought back from your last trip to NY). Perhaps she wanted to further pursue the conversation you’d started after her lecture. She headed off into the shadows of the loggia to one of the rooms where the Academy houses its guests, speakers, and returning former fellows.
You walked to her door and then headed back along the alley of orange trees to your house, isolated in the middle of the gardens. Crossing the main courtyard you glanced at the wing of the villa, counting the windows of the upper floor to see if B’s room was still lit.
Leaving the gravel path, you slipped between the worn face of a tall bust and the hedge that marked the borders of your section of the gardens.
Seated in your own Balthus painting, you were now contemplating that other, interior painting of your confusion, your turmoil. For it seemed that ever since her talk, an unanticipated attraction had been growing between you and B. Certainly, you had identified, in the course of the ensuing conversation, intellectual affinities, common trajectories and readings. Nothing is more seductive to you in a woman—you have known this for a while, but it surprises and arouses you just as much each time—than a certain sharp form of intelligence, a manner of bringing that intelligence into play, a freedom of movement in discussion, a self-oblivion in the pursuit of the pleasure of thinking, of understanding. She was inviting you into games of language, and you threw yourself in headfirst.
