Intertextuality and Murder: Anne F. Garréta’s La Décomposition and À la recherche du temps perdu

Abstract

In his introduction to the English translation of Anne Garreta's Sphinx, Daniel Levin Becker writes that Garreta's later novels Ciels liquides and La Decomposition are excellent examples of the class of modern French novel or film that sounds charming or fun when you hear its synopsis but turns out to be of existentially upsetting when you actually read or watch it.1 Leaving aside for the moment the question of what Levin Becker means by sort of existentially upsetting, I would point out, by way of a first approach to the novel, that even hearing the synopsis of La Decomposition might upset a Proustian, and would certainly offend a member of what Christopher Prendergast has called the Proust cult.2 The book's unnamed narrator-protagonist has devised a plan for executing perfect crimes, murders that are neither random nor humanly motivated, but determined by the rigorous impersonality of a constraint.3 The constraint is supposed to work in the following way. The criminal counts off the sentences of A la recherche du temps perdu until he finds one containing a proper name. In the thirty-seventh sentence Madame de Saint-Loup appears. He then takes up a position:Maintenant, postez-vous un apres-midi en quelque point strategique d'une metropole quelconque (la salle des pas perdus d'une gare, l'axe d'un tourniquet du metro, la terrasse d'un cafe faisant angle de deux avenues ...). Comptez les corps. Le trente-septieme a passer devant la mire que vous vous serez choisie sera le bon. Accord en nombre. A present, examinez: est-ce un passant? est-ce une passante? C'est un passant? Vous [...] renoncez au meurtre pour jour-la. C'est une passante? Bingo! accord en genre. [...] Vous voici dans l'obligation d'executer l'entite amphibie surgie a l'interface de la fiction et du [...] au couteau, au revolver ... tout cela est regle d'avance au gre des contraintes supplementaires de l'oeuvre. (D, p. 29)Not only are these supplementary constraints never explained, but the principal constraints leave the murderer ample latitude for choice: no rule is given for determining the place, the time, or where precisely in the visual field to begin counting.After having killed the stranger corresponding to a character from Proust, the criminal is required by the constraint to go home and remove from an electronic copy of A la recherche all the sentences containing the name of that character or a pronoun referring back to it: Par la facon a la fois fortuite et inevitable dont la victime a ete rencontree, il s'agit de nier la subjectivite comme methode criminelle dans la decomposition du roman et le depeuplement du monde (D, p. 31). The negation, however, is not entirely convincing. The unregulated choices required of the killer are so many windows through which subjectivity, kicked out the front door, may easily return. And no attempt is made to negate the subjectivity of the motivation for this singular project. While the serial killer is not provided with an explanatory psychological wound, he does give some reasons for his double destruction. At one point he declares that his aim is to make death palpable for the reader, to make her face ce bloc obscur de la douleur, the mortal body (D, p. 129). His nihilism seems to rest on a horror of mortality and physical decay, which nourishes a longing for disembodiment, to which I will return below.It becomes clear quite soon that the narrator-protagonist is a well-read madman rather than a brilliant criminal mastermind, gifted for rhetoric and literary style but not committed to coherent reasoning. And this becomes progressively clearer. On page 125, for example, he replies to the imagined objection that an eliminated character might reappear in a new work of fiction: Que m'importe, lecteur, que m'importe puisque effectivement, par mon meurtre, elle [Francoise] manque enfin a son origine. She is missing only from the electronic copy of A la recherche on the protagonist's hard drive, not from the numerous other copies, and certainly not from her historical origin in the mind of Marcel Proust. …