The Sphinx remains genderless

 Sphinx

By: Anne Garréta

Translated by: Emma Ramadan

(Deep Vellum Publishing)

At first glance Sphinx comes across as a simplistic romance story, void of the cliches and forced drama. It is a love story bare to the bone, it needed to be, in order for Garréta to pull this daring stunt with language worthy of the infamous Oulipian standards. At the age of twenty-three Anne Garréta managed to enter the French literary scene through its widest gates with the publishing her first novel Sphinx in 1986 which was immediately recognized as being a landmark in linguistic and literary accomplishment.

Sphinx tells the story of two people from opposite worlds, both figuratively and literally, who fall accidentally and then passionately in and out of love for each other. A struggle written about in long, poetic form by great novelists yet when approached by Garréta it seems her desire was not to just entertain but more importantly to challenge our ideas about love and how we approach it through literature.

The protagonists/lovers of the novel are nameless, well the narrator is, and the love interest is simply referred to as A***. While naming characters of a novel is the norm, leaving them nameless is not uncommon, Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebeccais narrated by one of the most famously unnamed character in 20^th-century fiction not to mention Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and Albert Camus’s murdered Arab man in The Stranger. We have seen the nameless before so then what is it? Where is the trick? One could read Sphinx a few times before finally recognizing what Garréta has done yet even going in the first time knowing what it is, it was still awe-inspiring to read through. 

By keeping her protagonists nameless Garréta allowed herself to go a step further and avoid gender descriptors altogether when characterizing them. Using this play with language Garréta has turned the romance formula on its head leaving it open for the reader to insert the gender of their choice into it allowing the same text to transform into a different story depending on who is reading it. 

Garréta did this by giving her characters’ a shallow description of physical attributes enough to highlight their differences, which are essential to the story, while keeping revealing factors out. According to Emma Ramadan the translator of the novel writing such an ambitious work in the French language is much more difficult than approaching its English translation, in the translator’s note she explains; “Translating Sphinx into English, I never had to deal with any of the verb tense agreement problems that Garréta was constantly confronted with”. Having said that Ramadan continues to explain how this constraint dictated every sentence, verb and adjective of the French text and so the translation was obliged to be bound by the same constraints albeit with various other grammatical challenges posed by the English language. It is no wonder that Garréta was asked to join the experimental France-based literary group Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, the Workshop for Potential Literature) although it was fourteen years after Sphinx was published the work joins the ranks of its members such as Raymond Queneau and Michelle Gringaud who used linguistic constraints as inspiration for their writing. 

English author Jeanette Winterson tackled this same idea a few years later in her novel Written On The Body published in 1992 using the English language (this also happens to be my favorite novel by Winterson) which is a glorious feat. As a writer, Sphinx is one of those novels that I would have loved to be able to read in its native language if only to admire how this work was finely chiseled from the hardened lump of linguistic restraints.

Garréta subverted gender in her novel to revolt against the sexist nature of the French language that is made up of grammatical gender, meaning nouns are assigned either masculine or feminine gender which are followed by the pronouns and adjectives. Ramadan who worked closely with Garréta to translate this novel and went on to translate her other novel Not One Day writes:

“Garréta believed that equality could not exist within a language that puts the two genders in opposition to each other, and so created a language and a world in which amorous relationships are not determined by a binary distinction”.

With Sphinx Garréta poses a question whose answer lies only in reading her novel. Can a love story be told, read and accepted without thinking about gender? Can a relationship be described and believed without such markers and could their erasure expand our understanding of love, desire and identity?

Like the winged sphinx of Boeotian Thebes who was said to have terrorized the people by demanding the answer to a riddle, taught to it by the muses, Garréta's linguistic riddle is immortalized in this novel.

There is only one way to solve it… read the novel, the answer will reveal more about you than about the book itself.