Making a Novel

Gérard Gavarry, Jane Kuntz

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781564786586
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Moving back and forth between detailed explanation and personal anecdotes, Gérard Gavarry's Making a Novel is partly a memoir of a writer's life and partly a memoir of his work, showing us how every story, no matter how well-planned, could always have been written countless other ways.

EXPLANATIONS

In my experience, writing a novel has always involved the preliminary step of organizing a workspace: a place that brings together bits of experience, memories, blocks of private feeling, gestures, tastes, voices, landscapes, distastes, all connected in one way or the other to my life. Yet, before any writing takes place, I need to invent, or bricoler—for it does come down to bricolage—a machine meant to denature all these odds and ends, so that by relinquishing my own story I’m in a way reprocessing it, with my affective freight kept intact only to be reinvested in a fiction now turned resolutely outward.

It is one of these workspaces¹ that we will be visiting in the pages that follow. We will be finding out which materials were brought to bear. We will also learn what kind of machinery was assembled, what motor kept it running, and how the cogs meshed. In short, what are the means, the interactions—if not ceremonies—whereby it does occasionally happen that a novel gets produced.

THE PRIMARY ELEMENTS OF THE HOPPLA! PROJECT

The primary elements of the Hoppla! project were so mismatched as to appear irreconcilable.

What, after all, did I feel compelled to write about?

On the one hand, about the suburbs. On the other, about coconut palms, cargo ships, and centaurs. But also, and perhaps most especially, I felt compelled to write about Judith, the disturbing biblical heroine of the book that bears her name.

How was all this to cohere?

The project didn’t really take shape until this double idea was in place: the book would be organized as a triptych, and then include a certain reversal.

The triptych form, with its three “panels,” addressed an ongoing concern of mine: the desire to associate the principle of variation with that of complementarity. I had a model in mind, supplied by a volume of the Adventures of Tintin. Perhaps you’ll recall the three parchments from The Secret of the Unicorn, and how they need to be superimposed and backlit in order for their message to be read in its entirety, revealing the location of pirate Red Rackham’s treasure. This device suited my purpose—in many ways similar to the way we read the four Christian Gospels—and relates to storytelling in the oral tradition and indeed to all myths, several versions of which are generally passed down through the ages or coexist in the same era, at once confirming, completing, and competing with one another.

As for the reversal, it goes like this: my novel wasn’t going to talk explicitly about centaurs, cargo ships, or coconut palms, but rather, coconut palms, cargo ships, and centaurs were to be mobilized in writing the novel. Rather than subjects, they would serve as rhetorical tools, each of which would in turn assist me in telling the same story of the suburbs—or, more precisely, the same story of Judith, as transformed into a story of the suburbs.

JUDITH, BRIEFLY, AND HER TRANSFORMATION

Holofernes, general of the mighty King Nebuchadnezzar, after having subjugated the greater part of Samaria, has laid siege to Bethulia. Soon out of water and provisions, the inhabitants of the small Jewish town are growing desperate. Just when they are on the verge of surrender, a young widow named Judith, beautiful and pious, readies herself for a heroic mission: dressed in her most elegant clothing, she leaves the town in the company of her faithful servant to go present herself as a defector to the enemy camp; then, having seduced Holofernes, she takes advantage of the general’s wine-induced slumber and lops off his head. In the aftermath of which the Babylonian army in great disarray is hacked to pieces by the emboldened Hebrews.

This in essence is what is recounted in the Book of Judith.

Now, from this story, what am I to retain for my novel?

First of all, the dramatic thread that, from a situation of collective defeat, leads to a lone and liberating murder—or at least one we may assume was so.

And then, a few key scenes or sequences, which we can break down as follows:

• invasion of Samaria
• lamentation of besieged Bethulia
• Judith determined to act, donning her most sumptuous clothes
• Judith and her servant descending into the valley where the besieging army is camped
• Judith’s encounter with Holofernes
• Judith’s slaying of Holofernes

But I will also be changing a good many things.

The time and place, to begin with. Everything will take place in the present day, in the suburbs, between Bagneux and Ris-Orangis.

And then, the initial premise. There will still be an assault, but not in the strict sense of an invasion or siege—and the assailant, besides, will be less a physical entity than a mode of being, a gesture, a word, an utterance standing in for any manifestation of the Intolerable.

Finally, I will invert the genders of the two main characters and scramble the letters of various proper names. Holofernes will thus become Madame Fenerolo, manager of a supermarket, while the same anagrammatic process will turn Judith into Ti-Jus D(eux-Rivières).² Likewise, Bethulia will become Beuilhet and will be used as the name of a street on the edge of the housing project where my “Judith” will live. As for the valley where the Babylonian army is camped out, this will become Vallon Apartments, located in the neighborhood of the same name, separated from the housing project by a large, muddy stretch of empty lot bordering a heavily trafficked road.

When all this has played out, it will produce three accounts telling thrice the suburban tale and thrice the gradual unfolding of the same dire fate—the rape and murder of a female supermarket manager by the son of one of her employees—with the understanding that rape and murder, just like landscapes, young people, or housing-project slang, will all be cast in the successive molds of coconut palm, cargo ship, and centaur.

THE COCONUT PALM WAY

At the outset, the Hoppla! workspace marshaled various elements comprising the project’s “stock material.” These were the characteristics peculiar to the coconut palm, to its morphology and growth, to the fruit it produces and to the industry and crafts related to its development. This involved various particular locations and situations, with all the gestures and attitudes one would ordinarily associate with these. It further included botanical terminology, whose special role will be addressed below, in the section entitled COCONUT PALM JARGON.

Once complete, all this material is found, both same and different, throughout the suburban fiction, where it steers invention and feeds the writing.

For example.

Not all coconut-palm trunks are perfectly vertical. Once outside coconut groves, you will see them grow askew—curvy, so to speak—some almost trailing on the ground, others twisted, arched, and even oddly sinusoidal…Now, let’s jump ahead to look at the opening of “The Coconut Palm,” first of Hoppla!’s three parts, which features a huge electronic map of Île-de-France on which points of light reproduce traffic patterns. The actual vehicles on the actual road-grid show up as points of light on the giant map. Same movements, same slow-down, same gridlock here or there, depending on whether things are flowing, stalling, or jammed.

In the course of these transmissions, tiny points of light moved about the gigantic map, blinking on and off in a rolling trompe l’oeil wherever traffic was flowing smoothly, but elsewhere barely twinkling, or already clustered into large patches, growing at the same rate and in the same proportions as their counterparts on the real network of streets, they would enlarge, stretch, and, incidentally, retract before resuming their entropic dispersal across the map; so that eventually, having been halted by a succession of stop signs and tricolor traffic lights, the automobile population in motion reached its maximum density on the highways out of Paris into the suburbs, by which time the entire map of Île-de-France was aglow with glittering trails of luminescence: elegantly arched trajectories, some weirdly sinusoidal, other sections impeccably straight, these being the most numerous, a jumble looking like the ruins of some immense multi-columned piece of architecture.

We see here how the “trunk roads,” as the British say, make shapes reflecting both traffic patterns and coconut-palm trunks; or, rather, how by outlining the trunks of the coconut palm, they conjure up images of gridlock and contribute to the creation of a desolate suburban atmosphere; and, likewise, how by shading the text with a sense of disillusionment or dismay, this depiction of suburban despond depicts a real landscape only to the extent that it also implies a virtual coconut-palm universe (or, for that matter, any other sort of conceit for which either of them might serve as a metaphor).

Or again.

A coconut grove extends over several kilometers, sometimes dozens of kilometers along a coastline. The trees planted in a zigzag pattern create an indefinitely geometric design, airy and incandescent. For the coconut palm is a very airy sort of tree, and a very solar one as well. Its branchless trunk, you see, instead of nurturing a dark undergrowth, is always surrounded by a bright and empty clearing. As for its fronds, shiny, almost varnished, they offer no real impendent to the tropical light, which is broken down, passing through them, into striped shadows, the sort cast by striated shutters or open-work partitions.

But a number of the sunny regions where coconut palms grow are also hurricane-prone. Though the trunk is supple enough to bend under strong winds and resist uprooting or snapping in even the most extreme conditions, the fronds, on the other hand, are relatively vulnerable. Winds have been known to tear them right off and carry them away in a single gust, and in the wake of a hurricane, an entire coconut grove can be transformed into a grim vista where nothing remains but headless stumps.

Already we’ve accumulated a number of ideas that found several applications in the text. Among them:

The brief portrait of Ti-Jus that begins chapter 1.05 depicts him as a “solar” figure. This is because the young man was conceived as a sort of angel (of the exterminating variety), but also as a coconut palm:

Perhaps it was his halo of wooly hair, his aerial silhouette, and a certain solar luster emanating from his person that all made Ti-Jus so popular with the girls. Willingly, women or young girls would allow themselves to come into contact with his skin, pressing their dresses or jeans, their undergarments, their bare flesh to it fearlessly…

Apart from his Afro-angelic “halo,” which crowns this lanky adolescent like a bouquet of palm fronds topping a slender branch, the confident and sensual postures attributed here to Ti-Jus’s girls come directly by way of an analogy between Ti-Jus’s body and the trunk of a coconut palm (which is, in fact, smooth enough to be comfortable or even delightful to lean against).

In front of the SUMABA (the supermarket managed by Madame Fenerolo, where Ti-Jus’s mother Bessie works as a cashier), the streetlights that surround the parking lot are “planted in staggered rows”. And on the Paris-Corbeil rail line, two trains pass “in a cyclonic din” . And again, below the window of Madame Fenerolo’s apartment, a car is maneuvering, making a noise “that could in no way compare with the silky, heartrending rasp that such tires would have produced on sand”.

These are some of the ways the coconut palm leaves its mark and permeates the scenes of Hoppla.

Once the suburban setting is posited in the first chapters of the book, along with the “coconut palm way,” and once the “manager-being,” the supermarket manager as embodiment of contempt, is not only made manifest, but made manifest as something intolerable (1.03), it suffices to leave these elements to play out their respective destinies, according to the modified biblical scenario that I referred to above. Now Ti-Jus can appear, accompanied by three other tall, well-built teenagers. They are on the Paris-Corbeil commuter train, and since two girls have just come into the same compartment, the boys start hitting on them, pressing ever closer, getting dangerously aroused…The equivalence between boys and palm trees runs parallel here to that of their mounting, shall we say “masculine” excitement, and the menacing winds of the cyclone.

[T]hese same four were now getting increasingly agitated, and each in his own way. One stamped, as if pawing the ground, marking time, a fleeting wave running up his body to the back of his neck with each tread, bending him first in one direction, then the other. His neighbor stuck out his chest, broadening his shoulders; while a third, to keep a lock of hair out of his face, repeated the same cervical twist, over and over again, accompanied each time by a fresh snort, his head thus tossed around at the end of the neck as though swept up by some powerful cyclone.

In chapter 1.08, Île-de-France is being invaded, and the Mermoz Projects (Beuilhet Alley) besieged, by the pe...