Listen, language is no more stable or fixed than anything else — youth comes to mind; health; a sense of comprehension. Start with a family: a mother, a father, two children. Even a set of grandparents. The father is a tinkerer and a junk collector hell-bent on modernizing — that’s the word they use — the family and their home. He has no particular talent for this endeavor, though it consumes him. For instance: he replaces their wood-burning stove with an electric range which, when it’s turned on, overloads the circuit. “It’s simple, our father explained to Grandma, when you want to use the oven, just unplug the fridge and it won’t fry the fuses anymore.” (The older child — twelve years old or so — narrates.)
Then the father acquires a concrete mixer, and before long, the children are joining him in his work. “We’d concrete every weekend in the countryside,” the narrator explains, “even some of summer vacation too.” Then there’s an accident and — I’m not giving anything away when I say this — the narrator’s younger sister, Poulette, is encased in concrete. Statuefied, if you will.
Anne F. Garréta’s latest novel — her first in a decade — is a riot of wordplay and puns and grammatical tricks, the transmutation of “concrete” into a verb among the least of them. Emma Ramadan, who undertook the seemingly impossible task of translating the novel from French to English, writes in a note at the end that the work was “like trying to catch an eel in one pond and put it in another.”
Many of the tricks have to do with the slip from written to spoken language, and vice versa. Words are spelled as they are pronounced, so “punctuation” becomes “punkchewation” and “modernizing” becomes “muddernizing,” yielding both udders and mud. Not a few of the puns take an embryonic cast: “hens” for “hence” and “eggzoom” for “exhume” — not to mention “eggzeptionally,” “eggsclusively,” and “eggzample” — all kinds of hens laying all kinds of eggzamples — and then there’s the matter of Poulette’s name. Une poulette is, literally, a hen, but it isn’t Poulette’s “real name, the one she takes to school,” the narrator tells us — that would be Angélique. Angélique becomes Poulette after she acquires a little black hen — or possibly a rooster (“Who’s to say? It’s not so straightforbird …”) as a pet.
Nor is the narrator assigned a definite gender, though at one point they Freudianly allude to a biological sex. “Fignole, that’s my nickname,” the narrator announces, but “the worst is when they call me Fanghole. Beware teeth down there!” This is a game Garréta’s played before: her first book, Sphinx, described a love story between two people, neither of whose gender was ever specified. It was a feat not only of storytelling but of grammatical ingenuity, given our penchant for ascribing genders to our pronouns.
Garréta also has the distinction of being the only member of Oulipo to be born after the 1960 founding of the group. Oulipo is an anagram of the French ouvroir de littérature potentielle (“workshop of potential literature”), and its members, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, and Italo Calvino among them, applied constraints to their writing — arbitrary, frequently mathematical constraints — to produce results both playful and profound (or not). Perec’s novel A Void famously avoided any use of the letter “e.” The idea, as Ron Slate wrote here a number of years ago, was to discover “whatever unanticipated language may appear through play and chance.”
Of course, the decision to avoid or to blur gendered pronouns is not an arbitrary constraint: in addition to being, perhaps, simply an accurate reflection of any given character’s gender identity, here, now, the practice also radiates as a political act of resistance. But in Concrete, unlike in Sphinx, this gendering or de-gendering or non-gendering of characters isn’t at the forefront of the book.
What is? Language itself, I think. The narrative is located not so much in the father’s shenanigans or Poulette’s plunge in concrete as in the language used to describe them all — the language that is turned inside out and upside down on page after page as we are shown, again and again, just how inconcrete it can be. “May swell begin at the beginning,” the narrator says. “We didn’t have any time toulouse.”
The narrator also describes with relish and zest the war games played by the village children. They vanquish one particular bully but don’t take him captive because there’s nothing worse, the narrator explains, than captivity; you wouldn’t inflict such a thing on even your worst enemy. “If to live vanquished and without glory is to die each day,” Fignole pronounces, “to live as a captive is to teem like a dead rat in the rank moat of time.” To live as a captive of, say, the standardized rules of grammar and syntax has surely got to be worse.
School, too, is a kind of imprisonment and the narrator attempts an escape but is caught. Eventually they learn “to escape in my head.” But the teachers notice that, too, and ask, “Are you in dreamland?!” “Yes, I’m dreaming,” the narrator tells us. “Of war and defective conjugations, of destructions, devastations, capitulations. I dig holes in grammar and I concoct escapes” — escapes from meaning, I think, from linear meaning. There’s more fun to be had outside of it. And — if you follow — more meaning. Each word, re-routed, points to another possible sphere of definition.
But how to hatch Poulette from her concrete husk? The narrator and their father consider a sledgehammer, but the narrator worries they’d “make an omelet of Poulette before we managed to crack her out of her shell.” In any case, they can’t find the sledgehammer. For now, at least, she’s stuck. At any rate, their dad can’t get her out. But then, you wouldn’t expect it of him.
[Published by Deep Vellum on May 11, 2021, 152 pages, $15.95 paperback]