Anne Garréta’s new novel a question of language and imagination

Anne Garréta is an Oulipian: a French experimental literary group who apply mathematical constraints to their writing. Surprisingly, her novel translates rather well.

Garréta’s novel questions gender roles. Patrick Guedj / Getty Images

Sphinx

Anne Garréta

Deep Vellum Publishing

Dh60

Anne Garréta's Sphinx (1986) is the first novel translated into English by a female member of the French experimental literary group Oulipo, whose members apply mathematical constraints to their writing in the hope, as founding member Raymond Queneau said, of building "the labyrinth from which they will try to escape".

Appropriately, it poses a riddle. Members of the Oulipo are divided over whether the linguistic or mathematical "constraint" of a work should be revealed to the reader. The experience of reading Sphinx, writes American Oulipian Daniel Levin-Becker in his introduction, is enhanced if the reader remains in the dark.

Those not wanting to know should look away now, as it’s impossible to discuss the novel’s achievement without giving the game away.

Writing in French, a language in which many verbs and almost all adjectives have gender agreement, Garréta creates a work that gives no hint of the sex of either the narrator or his (or her) lover, a feat matched by Garréta’s translator, Emma Ramadan, for whom the constraints of English posed different but parallel challenges.

Rather than creating an Oulipian "constraint", Sphinx highlights the already gendered nature of the French language, and of French society: "Were there really women who wore these blood-red bodices, purple garter belts, and sheer lace thongs?" Garréta's narrator wonders, passing a seedy Pigalle shop. A theology student turned DJ, s/he lives in a world that is utterly gendered, but in which gender is so performative that it can be put on and off easily by either sex. The trick of the text is to see what genders your imagination conjures.

Garréta's narrator is down on boundaries, not only of gender, but also of class. S/he criticises "the overall intellectual weakness of the sons and daughters of well-established families", to whom s/he is happy to compare him/herself favourably. S/he is also disgusted by France's philosophical tradition "this distressing, foul-smelling intellectualism – also known as '­existentialism'" – and has a horror of the physical: of Michel the DJ who dies in a toilet. Sphinx's narrator is looking for something else: "Beauty is just as vapid as its distinctions. I was running after the sublime, where everything is good."

S/he meets it in A***, a lover s/he makes an embodiment of what the French thinkers the narrator despises would call “the Other”. A*** is (literarily) black to the narrator’s white, gregarious where the narrator is reclusive, sensual where s/he is intellectual. S/he is fascinated by A***’s dancer’s physique “the time it took for a body always to appear smooth, hairless, supple, and flawless: in a word, angelic.” The body may be divine, but it can only be seen in such close focus that individual limbs can hardly be distinguished: we are left with flesh and bone, plus a few spinning hormones.

“How do you see me, anyway?” A*** accuses the narrator, as their relationship falters. It is no accident that the narrator’s studies concern Apophatic theology, which meets the inability of the human to speak of the divine by describing only what God is not. The narrator self-­reproaches for being unable to tackle love in language that is not reflexive: “A response came to my lips, which I murmured pensively in the silence: ‘I see you in a mirror’.”

The most interesting works of the Oulipo question language, and experiment with its ability to convey reality. Oulipian practices are commonly concerned not with adding, but with taking away, for example the technique of "slenderising", or consistently removing certain letters: the best-know example being Georges Perec's A Void, written without the letter e. These techniques attack writing itself.

Ironically, Garréta’s narrator attempts personal redemption by “writing” the book we’re reading, in which memories are recounted not as order, but as brief, fleshly experiences, answering Garréta’s first-page teaser: “Why do I always live only in memory?”. This reminds me of Perec’s obsession with noting mundane details “to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive: to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows”.

Perhaps the riddle of identity retold is at the heart of the Oulipian ­experiment: not a missing “e” but the missing “I”, and its corresponding, absent “u”.

This book is available on Amazon.

Joanna Walsh is a United Kingdom-based writer. She edits fiction at 3: AM magazine and runs @read_women.