To the Third: The Genderless Body in Anne Garréta’s “Sphinx”

Sphinx by Anne Garréta

Editions Grasset & Fasquelle Paris (1986)

Translation by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum Books, 2015)

120 pages  |  $14.95

Beneath a night club’s dim haze, the body disintegrates. Limbs slip into the rhythmic pulsing of the beat, suspended by sweat and dance. As bodies collide, flesh melts together, evolving into a ravenous and indistinguishable mass that obliterates bodily subjectivity. Within this vertigo is an “essential melancholy,” one that both anticipates and postpones the “death and division of the collective body” that is achieved by a night club’s atmosphere (28). Although unearthing an ambiguous if not grim understanding of the body, these layered impressions offer a furtive glimpse into the psychology of the genderless, unnamed narrator at the center of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (1986; 2015). 

Originally written in 1986 when she was 24-years-old and a student at the École Normale Supérieure, Garréta’s Sphinx was recently translated from the French by Emma Ramadan and published by Deep Vellum Books in 2015. While the source material’s immediacy may escape a translated work, Ramadan’s interpretation and treatment of Sphinx nevertheless retain Garréta’s celebration of bodies that are motivated by constant oscillation. At its core, Sphinx reveals itself as a genderless love story, one propelled by a vocabulary purged of linguistic gender. Unfolding across the nightclubs and cabarets of Paris, Sphinx maps the relationship between the narrator, a jaded theology student and DJ at the popular nightclub Apocryphe, and their love interest A***, a Black cabaret dancer from Harlem. Throughout the entirety of Garréta’s novel and Ramadan’s translation, the narrator as well as A*** assume genderless personae, playing with and slipping in between the various shades of sexuality. Despite only becoming a member in 2000, Garréta and her novel encapsulate the impulses of the OuLiPo (ouvroir de littérature potentielle), a collective established in Paris in 1960 with the intention of exploring constraints as a literary device, such as Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition that was written without any words containing the letter “E.”

It’s clear that Sphinx belongs in and is informed by Oulipian traditions—after all, Garréta’s novel eschews the primacy of gender throughout the French language. Although the narrator and A*** journey across the uncharted landscapes beyond gender, Sphinx’s topography is still grounded by piercing meditations upon corporeality, ephemerality, and love. Within the first few pages of the novel, the narrator immediately acknowledges their rigorous and somewhat obsessive “contemplation of bodies” (4), one that is discerned through the “faint, colored luminosity” of Parisian clubs and anticipates their eventual fascination with A*** (15). As a DJ at the Apocryphe, the narrator is at once repelled and captivated by the “flesh [they try] to make move every night,” brutally alternating between “excitement and dejection” as individual bodies blur and transform into collective masses (28). While conveying an underlying sense of repulsion, these observations don’t contradict the narrator’s eventual understanding of the body—and, in particular, A***’s body—as precious or fleeting, both of which increasingly characterize the novel’s tone as it progresses.

After meeting and eventually igniting a romance with A***, the narrator’s detached, fragmented evaluations of the body acquire an anxious yet mythic quality. While watching A*** dance one morning, the narrator is overwhelmed by “anguish,” a “profound paralysis” that crescendos with the narrator lamenting that A***’s gestures, their flesh, are intrinsically and inevitably “ephemeral” (84). Beyond these anxious connotations, though, Garréta prevents the body from adhering to strict platitudes. Within and throughout Sphinx is a corporeality governed by fluctuation, straddling the boundaries between the tragic and the euphoric through its essential ambiguity. Coupled with its fragility and impermanence, the body also locates sites of play in the novel, providing moments that abound with a magnetic attraction and movement that border on the fantastical, “What I was feeling for A*** needed its own embodiment; the pleasure I took in A***’s company demanded its own fulfillment…In a sudden rush of vertigo, I was tantalized by the idea of contact with A***’s skin” (39). 

The elasticity with which the body navigates these fleeting sensations and lingering impressions, however, often complicates linear characterizations of A***. Steeped in linguistic gender, French and its system of gender agreement necessitate careful dissection, as Ramadan claims in her Translator’s Note, “In French, gender agrees with the object, meaning that the phrase son bras, son is in the masculine because bras is a masculine noun, not because the person the arm belongs to is a man.” To cohere with the novel’s genderless constraint, then, Garréta exploited the tension and ambiguity between an object—in this case, bodies or body parts—and the subject to whom it belongs. In Sphinx, the narrator’s corporeal ruminations filter A*** through synecdoche, distilling spectral images of A***’s supple yet muscular limbs, their “cat-like” movements, their “nonchalant strides,” the sublime rhythm of their choreographed gestures. While Garréta’s vocabulary remains distinct and, in some moments, incredibly moving, the narrator’s perception of and relationship with A*** nevertheless depend upon a projection of bodily fantasies rather than an amalgamation of lived experiences. At one point in the novel, A*** confronts the narrator as they prepare for a cabaret show, asking, “How do you see me, anyway?,” to which the narrator answers, “I see you in a mirror” (73).

Reduced to these metaphors and images, then, A*** haunts Sphinx as a phantomic reminder of endangered flesh, of an ephemeral body that reflects rather than deconstructs the narrator’s somewhat fetishistic contemplations. At the center of Sphinx is the narrator’s corporeal projections, all of which derive from a troubled history of exploiting Black bodies as literary devices. Throughout the novel, A***’s gestures and physical attributes are often textured with an exotic, animalistic tenor, and the fixation upon A***’s body obliterates any possibilities for nuance in their personality. The simultaneous hypersexualization and annihilation of Black bodies as a vehicle through which to comprehend whiteness betray what Toni Morrison terms as literary surrogacy, “The simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette…provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.” In playing with and destabilizing gender, Sphinx remains sharp and compelling, with Garréta’s proposed intersections between the body, love, and fragility offering intriguing avenues through which to consider queer theory (the fact that I’ve even been referring to the narrator and A*** with gender neutral pronouns conflicts with Garréta’s constraints, given that she avoided them throughout the novel entirely). In its treatment of Blackness, however, Sphinx is clumsy at best and, at worst, perpetuates histories of bodily dehumanization. 

As a meditation upon fragmentary, genderless bodies, Sphinx astonishes with its eloquence, one that effectively reimagines the varied spaces a body can occupy. Stripped of arbitrary and, as Garréta seems to suggest, largely artificial binaries, language collapses into a tactile drama that beckons us with its immediacy, producing a uniquely queer landscape of play, of beauty, and of loss. Written almost five years before Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Garréta’s novel clearly provokes the exploration of unmapped bodies, all of which are fragile and still beautiful in their “irresistible” ephemerality. Perhaps, too, the narrator’s reflexive perception of bodies contributes to the overall impression of gendered or bodily absurdity—the continued superiority of the body in Sphinx, regardless of its lack of gender, proves futile and ultimately detrimental, the ramifications of which echo solemnly throughout the latter half of the novel. 

Despite its various slips into tragedy, there remain moments of profound beauty in Sphinx, moments that fundamentally repackage gendered binaries and our relationships to the body. One night at the Apocryphe, the narrator is asked by A*** to dance. “I had the impression that never until this day had I reveled in such a carefree lightness of being,” the narrator marvels as they sway with A***. This “lightness” briefly—and stunningly—transcends the impermanence that Garréta often assigns to the body in Sphinx, resisting the fatalistic collectivity that seduces as well as repulses. Beneath the pulsating lights, the heavy beat, “There was no longer anybody but us on the dance floor.”