Hannah Szabó
Sphinx, Anne F. Garréta. Deep Vellum, 2015, 152pp., $14.95
I incite blanks, spaces (jumps in the meaning, discontinuities, transitions, changes of key).
– Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, 1974. Translated by John Sturrock, 2008
In 1969, Georges Perec published La disparition — 300 pages of twisted French prose, and not a single ‘e.’ More than a mere proof of concept, this formal constraint mirrors the central storyline of the novel, in which a cast of characters try to track down the missing Anton Vow[e]l (1). In obeying this self-imposed rule, Perec places La disparition in dialogue with two literary constructs. Through his specific choice of restriction, Perec evokes the lipogram, from the Greek leipográmmatos (‘leaving out a letter’), a kind of composition dating back to at least the sixth century BCE in which the writer systematically avoids a specific letter. And in his metafictional evocation of this constraint, Perec aligns himself with the Oulipo movement, from the French Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, an experimental literary group founded nine years earlier that sought to find new ways of writing by using structured formulas. Praising this oulipogrammatic feat in his 1997 treatise Le Ton beau de Marot, computer scientist and translator Douglas Hofstadter compares the task to “scaling Everest without carrying oxygen.” But the real feat, Hofstadter argues, is Perec’s ability to make it look easy: “A tacit goal of all writing bound by constraints … is for said constraints to approach invisibility … That is, an author’s words should flow so smoothly as to prompt no suspicion at all.” The author paddles against the current of constraint, crafting graceful strokes before a vigilant reader eager to call out any appearance of effortfulness.
In her 1986 novel Sphinx, Anne Garréta dares to splash as she swims. Her efforts are not only visible but conspicuous: as much as Sphinx is a practice in constrained writing, it is also a reflexive project drawing attention to the labor of rendering one’s thoughts in a bounded mode of expression. Hofstadter describes writing under constraint as a process “surprisingly much like learning a foreign language.” La disparition and Sphinx might then be thought of as ‘translations’ from an imaginary unrestricted urtext, brought into new restricted ‘foreign’ languages (Hofstadter cheekily calls Perec’s ‘e’-less French “Gallic”). For readers (like myself) encountering Garréta’s writing through Emma Ramadan’s 2015 English translation, this effect of transposition is tripled. Ambitious metaphrasts like Ramadan and Gilbert Adair (whose translation of La disparition came out under the title A Void in 1995) must carry content from the constrained source language into the target language — and then adapt that text into a new constrained language. Mirroring the layers of effort and transformation that underlie the text itself, Garréta focuses throughout Sphinx on the painstaking craftsmanship that undergirds beauty. Observing a dressing-room scene at a nightclub, the narrator marvels: “A thousand details in order to show off a behind, leaving the thighs and hips free and visible, but without revealing the crotch. I was amazed at the time it took for a body always to appear smooth, hairless, supple, and flawless: in a word, angelic … I learned how fragile the body is, how much care is required to maintain the suppleness of the limbs and joints.”
Sphinx is not, strictly speaking, an Oulipo novel; Garréta did not become a card-carrying Oulipian until 2000. Nor is the novel straightforwardly lipogrammatic: readers will find all 26 letters across the novel’s 120 pages, both in the French original and the English translation. Nevertheless, Sphinx shares something deep with La disparition: just as Perec’s novel is both “e-less” and about “e-lessness,” Sphinx is both a constrained text and a text about its own constraint. The narrator’s lamentations constantly remind the reader of this fact: “I drift through the world with no control,” “I couldn’t describe it,” “I was helpless against it,” “I don’t know how to recount precisely what happened, or how to describe or even attest to what I did, what was done to me.”
So what is Garréta’s self-imposed rule? Rather than avoiding a letter, she chooses to omit any indication of gender for her two protagonists: the narrator, a Parisian theologian-turned-DJ; and the object of affection, known as A★★★, a Black nightclub dancer from Harlem. Critics praise Sphinx as “the first genderless novel ever written,” yet unlike Perec’s ‘e’, Garréta does not entirely banish gender from her pages. Supporting characters — ‘exotic’ dancers, mobsters at the bar, A★★★’s mother — are endowed with gender, causing the protagonists by contrast to read as gender-missing rather than genderless. Garréta does not construct characters who primordially lack gender or cross gendered boundaries, so much as a duo whose gender markers have disappeared — two figures who have shed these signifiers only to cast them into the ether.
In the afterword to her nimble translation, Emma Ramadan claims that Garréta crafts “a language and a world in which amorous relationships are not determined by a binary of distinction.” But even as Garréta’s protagonists are liberated from their grammatical gender(s), they remain shackled by the fetters of binaristic thinking. Upon meeting, the two note their “striking dissimilarity:” one is brooding, shy, awkward, just beyond the callowness of youth; the other is hypersocial, impulsive, svelte, worldly, and ten years older. The two characters soon enter a deadly doubled dance: “I made myself into a demon, and A★★★ symmetrically put on the mask of the angel that I had abandoned.” In their first night of physical intimacy, the two are described as colliding complementary bodies, their reunion a re-fusing of the Platonic Androgyne: “grop[ing] in the darkness for A★★★’s body,” the narrator recounts, “I threw myself against it.” Negotiating identities around one another, each figure reads the other as a text of negative theology: I am not that which you are; I am that which you are not.
The back cover of the French original reads, “aux yeux de je, A★★★ devient sphinx” (to the eyes of je, A★★★ becomes a sphinx). In her afterword, Ramadan follows this convention, using je to refer to the slippery first-person narrator. But one might just as well refer to the narrator using the author’s name, ‘Anne,’ instead. Indeed, the figure can only speak through the very restriction that Garréta has imposed upon herself (2). Ramadan notes that Garréta’s restrictions “become part of the narrator’s identity:” for example, the frequent use of the literary passé simple (which does not require gender agreement) shapes ‘Anne’ into a “rather pretentious, bourgeois(e) scholar.” Attempts to sidestep verb and adjective agreement cause Anne to write, and ‘Anne’ to narrate, in forced and fragmented musings. The mode of narrative — an uncanny mix of detached distance and penetrating intimacy — pushes the gendered dynamic even further. The reader is forced to see A★★★ through the vampiric gaze of ‘Anne,’ who in turn feasts on A★★★’s body as a set of dismembered parts: “I used to love watching it move, hips and back swaying in rhythm.”
Even when these bodies come together at their closest, the restriction against gendered language causes ‘Anne’ to describe A★★★ as a jumbled collection of sensory experiences, tessellated by a throbbing strobe light. “I have in my mouth, still, the taste of skin, of the sweat on that skin,” recalls Anne. “Against my hands, the tactile impression of skin and the shape of that flesh … Crotches crossed and sexes mixed.” The reader encounters a similar sort of alienation when ‘Anne’ attempts to describe self-observation. Although in English one might write “I saw myself in the mirror” without disclosing one’s gender, using the reflexive in the French passé composé requires a reveal: suis vu or suis vue? So instead ‘Anne’ must write of having “observed my naked form displayed in the mirror” (“j’observai ma nudité étalée dans le miroir”), avoiding the reflexive altogether and thus fracturing the self into two. Enthralled and repulsed by the author’s rendering through rending, the reader adopts a similarly stalkerish obsession: as ‘Anne’ traipses through tawdry clubs of 80s Paris nightclubs hunting for A★★★, the reader too begins to scan the pages of the text in search of the three bold stars that mark A★★★’s name.
To construct or translate a constrained text is to embark on a quixotic quest: in pursuit of a self-imposed ideal, the writer follows a strict code of behavior. At times, one might wonder if this obedience to a noble principle is not a crutch that allows constrained writers to anticipate and shirk all judgment of style or attitude. Is the rigor of the form an excuse for superficiality? A puzzle solver is easier to commend — and harder to critique — than a poet.
But Ramadan’s translation of Garréta tears apart this very taxonomy, defying the notion that constraint limits creativity. More than a mere display of wit, masochism, or insanity, her contorted prose becomes a sonic spectacle in its own right, rippling under pressure like a cookie tin in a hydraulic press. “Random limitations can leave you open to things beyond your control, spaces for the Muse to move through,” argues formalist poet A.E. Stallings. In her note at the end of another of her Garréta translations, Ramadan is more direct: “Restraint can be generative.”
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1. For a recent analogue to Perec, one might look to Jennifer Croft’s recent The Extinction of Irena Rey, a novel told through a frame narrative of a fictionalized translation that is itself the story of a team of translators searching for their missing an author in the Białowieża Forest on the border of Poland and Belarus.
2. And the connections among author/narrator A-N-N-E, character A-★-★-★, and translator E-M-M-A (a modified reversal of A-N-N-E) are too good, too Oulipo, to resist toying with.