Not One Day

by Anne Garréta

  And the blissful will keep burning incense at the monstrance of the mystical objet petit a, maintaining rigorous accounts of their daily devotions, of every last kneeling. They will loudly profess not having once in a quarter century been visited in the middle of the most severe orgies by perverse pleasure, so ardently were they spurred on by hope in the promised ecstasy, the ineffable Assumption.

  For coming, you shall come, in truth you were told, it has been promised, provided you carry on fervently celebrating the holy office of desire.

  For coming, our economy, our human commerce, the very possibility of our religion demands it.

  For coming, in kind, cash, or credit (credit above all, to the point of usury), you shall come, that is contractually stipulated in the new pact.

  You will get laid and it will be paradise on earth (but how is that different from the old credo that says you will get laid to rest and it will be paradise in the heavens?).

  What could we object to in such a universal religion? The torments of doubt, the falterings of impotence, a flaunting of anticlericalism… none of this, nor heresy, moreover, nor any schismatic move, will ever carry any consequence. It’s the least that the empire of desire can expect from its subjects, the very condition of their sincere worship.

  Incredulity alone is sinful.

  Thus, in the minor orders known amongst the clerics as literature, henceforth the only recognized vows shall be what the subject confesses publicly as the grateful expression of pure desire: a poetics that shall be a liturgy or an orgy, and a litorgic or liturgiastic oeuvre.

  Irony alone is damning.

  The flesh will be bland and you will believe you are forever reading the same book.

  Thus draws to a necessary close, at the end of the five hours devoted to writing according to a rule that you instituted sixteen months ago (and the only one that you scrupulously enforced), the last nocturnal excursus of this little volume composed at the margins of memory, according to an art which is memory’s own, and at the whim of your good pleasure.

  [On Apple Macintosh machines, July 19th 2000–November 19th 2001]

  AFTERWORD

  Restraint can be generative. An Oulipian writer, Anne Garréta is accustomed to writing within restraints: her debut novel Sphinx is a love story written without identifying the main characters’ gender. But Not One Day, though given parameters, is not an Oulipian book. It doesn’t follow its own set of rules. Garréta opens with the intention of writing five hours per day, each day for one month, and each time recollecting one woman she’s desired or who has desired her. She’ll write them in the order in which they come to her, she says. She won’t alter them after they’re written. At the end of the month, she’ll put them in the alphabetical order of their initials. The book will be a “stammering alphabet of desire”—will locate, spell out, delineate it in Garréta’s life.

  But in the end, we discover this has not been the case. We’ve been misled: we understood her story as one language, and now we learn that she’s been speaking a different language. Instead of an alphabet, the sections of the book have delivered us a story from beginning to end, in chronological order. Furthermore, Garréta broke off writing the book for months and then returned to it. She has forfeited every rule she set out in the beginning.

  Do we now go back and read the book again, to reinterpret the meaning of its events? Except, Garréta tells us that one of the sections has been fictionalized, and she won’t say which, nor will she give us the clues we would need to figure it out. Her true desire cannot be located within the text. As she says about the possibility of knowing an author through her novels: “no subject ever expresses herself in any narration.”

  Though Not One Day is a work of nonfiction, it is nonetheless a collection of constructed narratives. As a story, it’s limited to the semiotics and hermeneutics of storytelling: language, culture, action, and time. Though these stories originated in Garréta’s own life, and we feel the emotional labor of her writing them—where five hours a day seems manageable at first, later it feels like all that one can bear—as the author she remains at a certain remove from her recollections, observing and interpreting the subtext of her characters’ dialogue, their gesture. She compares them to the invisible threads of a spiderweb, delicate but strong, ensnaring, more felt than seen. With the nightly designation at the end of each section, indicating when Garréta recollected it, we’re reminded of the interlacing neural pathways that hold these memories.

  One way that Garréta brings awareness to the construction of the narrative is in her use of the second-person point of view. In the second person, Garréta sets herself apart from herself, can coldly observe her own behavior—she also becomes the object of her own desire. She addresses herself, and directly addresses the reader, making the reader another desired object—and the reader reciprocates. The text itself becomes interrelational; there is a back-and-forth movement, dialogue—someone giving, someone receiving—ever-shifting victim and aggressor, desirer and desired. The use of “you” creates a focal point, even as it slips away—allows us to track its movements, follow it. Otherwise, desire would be all over, too diffuse to be detected.

  Even as Garréta observes herself as a character, she observes herself as an author. Her “you” turns scolding at times, such as when she gets off-task—at other times, it is fascinated with itself, such as when she observes a tendency of her own memory: “What you find in your memory when you probe it: there are memory-images that are like paintings defying the articulation of a single perspective.” Even in this sentence, the focus of the “you” slips again: Does she intend to use the collective “you”, or is she talking to herself, or talking to the reader? Like a subtle gesture passed between desirer and desired, its meaning could be multiple.

  Not One Day performs desire. It is tempted away from predictable courses, the “common narratives.” Garréta regularly takes long digressions from the present story to muse on seemingly unrelated topics such as mathematics, or her tendency to overspend on books and travel. She’s uncomfortable with her experience of desire at times: its messiness, its vulgarity. She prefers the more serious, more rational diversions of the mind in philosophy and literature—and distrusts the “libertinage” of confessional literature, writers writing about their own lives. But she’s also tender, and in observing desire’s behavior in her life, she comes to understand it. It won’t be contained or restrained. It won’t follow the rules you set out for it. It is the opposite of reason, and yet it is the universal religion and “transcendental horizon of value and its base.” Like light and sound it is ever-present. Its only rule is to desire more of itself.

  Sarah Gerard

  ANNE F. GARRÉTA is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. A normalienne (graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx, hailed by critics in France and the US alike, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator’s love interest. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994 and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002 for this novel, Not One Day, awarded each year to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent” (she is the second Oulipian to win the award; Georges Perec won in 1978).

  EMMA RAMADAN is a translator living in Providence, RI, where she is co-owner of Riffraff bookstore and bar. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. Her translation of Anne Garreta’s Sphinx, published by Deep Vellum, was nominated for both the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. Her recent translations include Anne Parian’s M
onospace (La Presse), Oulipian Frédéric Forte’s 33 Flat Sonnets (Mindmade Books), and Fouad Laroui’s Prix Goncourt-winning story collection The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers (Deep Vellum). Her forthcoming translations with Deep Vellum include Laroui’s debut novel in English The Tribulations of the Last Sijilmassi, and Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator.

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