“Unwonted, shimmering, ruthless, the tiger poses man a question more intractable than the ancient enigma of the sphinx, a question all the more tortuous in that it refuses to be clearly formulated. Because the anguish imposed by the tiger does not reside in a fear of not knowing the response, but the impossibility of grasping the terms of the equation.”
The Passionate Puritan
I intend here to pursue a couple of questions, taking up more attentively aspects of Gabrielle Wittkop’s writings liable to open avenues of research, and which offer an occasion to explain the extent to which I find her writing indispensable in a period bolted into its unthinking principles, of books for likes and smileys, and the literature of good causes offering redemption of all kinds.
I will begin with the beauty of Wittkop’s writing, the seat of her superior art: language. Language is a way of thinking, not a way of saying. Wittkop does not think of subject, verb, complement, and that is the first aspect which makes her literature indispensable in the face of facile French thinking, and against, also, the literary illusion of a language that bears witness to the world: language is not a witness to the world, it is an organ of thought.
Next, theatre. In the opening of Murder Most Serene, Wittkop mentions Bunraku theatre, an enlightening image for understanding the narration she establishes in her books. I had associated this taste for theatre with Grand Guignol, on which she had worked with François Rivière. Now, I think there is something more profound to uncover, something which formally characterises all her stories, stories which she stages abstractly, locating them on a kind of mental plateau, the set dressed with a couple of strokes.
Finally, morality, another interesting question: Wittkop the moralist. Which is to say, her literature is moral thought. Just like La Rochefoucauld in 17th century or Chamfort in the 18th, Wittkop’s short stories deploy the talents of a portraitist, a style of high precision, a spirit of witty repartee, and the unerring cruelty of the social man.
The Tiger’s Robe: apparent non-transparent language
The Death of C. imagines a number of scenes that circle a single fact, the knife blow that caused the death of C., a character who appears throughout the narrative in flashes, as if by surprise, as though under a projector whose light suddenly casts from the shadows this or that feature—his mouth, his way of talking—a character in a story, but also someone in Gabrielle Wittkop’s life, a person she loved, someone essential. The writing in this text, one of Wittkop’s masterpieces, is confronted with the impossibility of recounting death, the suffering of the beloved man. And it is language which forces its passage: language, in its precision, and the exactitude of its evocations. Wittkop’s language dresses her writing in impeccable get-up; with dignity, she sets sentiment aside to scrupulously examine the cadaver, giving a clinical description of the work that corruption has done to the body of the man she loved. Wittkop’s prowess is that she had the guts to regard biological destruction up close, not with indifference but with love.
Everything is in the language. It’s the language, the precise terms, the precise relationships between the limbs of the phrase, which produce the images in Wittkop’s stories. Her sentences are composed, she has volume, she takes advantage of the amplitude of French, she articulates her propositions, works on their order, plays with our supple language and the relations that permit logical stacking, which allow for all kinds of phases and games of suspense in the unfolding of a thought; her sentences bear hierarchical thinking, directed precisely. Wittkop never followed the prescriptions of Colette, with her rolled Rs, which strictly forbade the young Simenon from employing adjectives. She worked on the accuracy of terms, the accuracy of their qualifiers, in meaning and number. Wittkop’s writing is a blast of mountain air in a period which takes platitudes for clarity. She worked over her writing as though it were the clothing of her tales, and tended to it to perfection: the folds, the finish, elegance. This art is expressed to its highest levels in her descriptions, marquetry of the utmost beauty, and in which she patently takes extreme pleasure.
Wittkop’s language is refined, it is not self-effacing. On the contrary, in a venture of opposition, of resistance to realism, it is set out to be admired. I think this refusal of realism is a fundamental point in Wittkop’s literature: her writing thwarts the illusion of the transparency of language that does not reveal itself, which is not designated an instrument of the author who composes the text; she thwarts the illusion of a simple transfer of the world into a story by language without its proper heft, language that can be scanned without being read.
Flat language wants us to believe that it grants access to an image of the world as it is, as it makes itself known, within the conventions that form what we call “reality”. The world as recounted by Wittkop is not a reflection of this conventional reality. Her writing creates an unwonted, shimmering and ruthless image of a world full of shadows, full of matter, a human matter that the frightened do their best not to see. The tiger’s robe in The Passionate Puritan, the leprous skin in Everyday Is a Tree that Falls, the body of C. after his death—Wittkop’s language in all of her stories—are the surface expression of a terrible beauty, animated by death. Corruption of the flesh, the thorough exposure of necrosis in all of its stages, all its nuances: with Wittkop, what is touched by death is touched by beauty.
That is the enigma of the tiger, the coupling of death and beauty. Wittkop looks at the tiger, which is to say she looks the Gorgon in the eye, not impudently but audaciously. Audacity is a characteristic of her narratives, a rare quality which makes her literature indispensable. And the scandal of this literature lies much more in its audacious gaze than in its themes, which make the kindly chroniclers of comforting books (the feel good shit) choke. The scandal is in the look in the tiger’s eye, which forces us to be lucid. The enigma of the tiger makes darkness without the possibility of resolution, of being made transparent, shimmer. More fascinating and complex by far than the sociological lessons administered with vegetable peelers by the literature of just causes, petty enquiry and grand intentions, that is Wittkop’s world.
The Tiger’s Eye: The theatre of experience
The Passionate Puritan appears to have been deeply inspired by the experiences of Wittkop herself. Throughout the text, we can find clues to her method: transfer, projection. Language forms the puppet booth in which Wittkop sets her tales, isolating them from the regular course of life, her stories taking place on an abstract stage.
In this theatre established by language, Wittkop stages what Rachilde, at the end of the nineteenth century, called “Beyond Nature”, an exploration of human nature through its limits, its depths, and the extreme exercise of freedom, which is to say through jouissance, and through evil. Wittkop creates performances which are the projection of her freedom of thought in the puppet theatre booth.
I had associated this taste for the theatre with Grand Guignol, the theatre of horror, a subject on which Wittkop had worked with François Rivière for a book in which Wittkop, it is interesting to note, took charge of all the sections concerning story and dramaturgy. But I believe there is something more profound to be uncovered alongside the theatre of experience: the scientific spectacles for which a fashion developed in the eighteenth century, in the salons, learned societies, cabinets of curiosity, and more popular venues, the fairs and boulevards.
What interests me is that the theatre was a frame for experimentation and the spectacle of natural phenomena. Wittkop mounts her theatre of experience, and there presents human phenomena, which her stories transform into subjects exercising their freedom to desire and climax in the face of social laws. This theatre of experience is also a show of the exploration of man through the limits of what his humanity allows, formed by the yoke of religion, morality or, more recently, the managerial lessons drawn from the hasty reading of social science summaries. Wittkop’s literature precedes the social sciences, precedes psychology and sociology, which from the ninetine-eighties on have calibrated the bulk of what is marketed on the most successful stalls. Wittkop’s literature has no interest in faithfully mimicking so-called “social realities”, and even less in denouncing injustices according to the contours of an idealized perspective.
Wittkop deals with lucidity, the bringing to light of the darkest folds of what is not the human “soul” with a materialist philosophy she inherited from La Mettrie and de Sade, a philosophy of man grounded, of the man of matter, against the world of ideas.
[By way of an anecdote, several of those close to her were witness to Wittkop’s aversion to children. Her friend Martine Moll offered a psychological interpretation for this misopaedic trait, which is all the more appealing for its scarcity among women in a culture which steers girls toward motherhood from the moment they receive their first doll. Moll took this aversion as a consequence of the indifference of Wittkop’s mother. As for me, I have attempted a literary analysis: children are detestable because they bring into existence that jouissance through evil which belongs to the theatre, the creative stage, and Wittkop’s poetics; children are detestable for spoiling Wittkop’s poetics by imposing an inverse projection to that which her literature provokes, the projection of a vision into life.]
About the tiger, I recall this commentary taken from The Passionate Puritan:
“The figure of the tiger is not at all attached to the collective or the community of Dionysiac orgies, but pertains rather to another aspect of the divine: to that of the depths, of blood, the unfathomable fields of the soul and of the flesh wherein monsters sleep, the labyrinths of shadow within us.”
The Tiger’s Exoticism: the morality of the singleton
Thus, Wittkop completes the portrait of the tiger: “his exoticism, conferring on him a character foreign to the norm, makes of him a monster born of Hades.” The image of the monster returns once more in the fairground shows, those theatres of experience which exposed phenomena. These terms of adoration for the tiger are perhaps even those of Wittkop’s morality. The common point throughout the majority of her stories is staging scenes of aberration, a word that I find corresponds very well with Wittkop’s characters; those who dismiss the general rule and constitute an exception: they are aberrant.
[A further anecdote: Wittkop herself presented with exotic traits, she lived elsewhere, not set apart but far away, far from the social interactions of the French literary milieu to which her publications belonged. It is, no doubt, that exoticism for which the milieu made her pay, entirely unconsciously, by not accepting, nor even making the effort to cast an eye over, her work.]
A singleton is a mathematical set composed of a unique element. Here, it is a society made up of only one member. All of Wittkop’s literature holds to this rule of the absolute singularity of her characters, who are something other than characters, in the same way de Sade’s are not exactly characters. According to Wittkop, speaking on Bernard Pivot’s show (which you can watch on the site of la Société des Amis de Gabrielle Wittkop), they are “figures”, an important term which demonstrates that she thought theatrically, that she discarded all social readings of her stories, and that she removed from her characters any trace of psychology, sociology, and genealogy.
Her writing is an obstinate vigil on this condition of singularity, it is its purpose even, its fundamental audacity, that which erects the monster’s singularity against the common voice, against the common good. It is in these terms, and not in those of subversion, that one finds Wittkopian morality.
None of it has anything to do with scandal. Wittkop’s literature associates lucidity with freedom, and it is the principle of lucidity which determines its aberration. The underground man which she brings to the stage, the infernal face of man, is the sovereign individual. What Wittkop indefatigably relates is the unjustifiable individual, independent of transcendence, justified by death alone, from whence the omnipresence of death in her stories comes; the sovereign undomesticated, individual; put otherwise, emancipated, by their own means, by that which contributes to their willing submission, the sacrifice of their desires, the dilution of their strength.
The most acute lucidity is necessarily anti-social, the exercise of free will is necessarily the exercise of evil; free will is the very principle of evil, conceived since Saint Augustine so as to resolve the guilt of God, and emerge from the paradox by according man the freedom of choice, exonerating the supreme being, whose presence the Libertines, initiating the overturning of the western world in the seventeenth century, set about denying altogether, just as they set out to deny any kind of grand plan for world harmony.
The libertine, fundamentally independent of all superior authority, is unjustifiable, like the narrator confronting the enigma of the tiger. In The Passionate Puritan, he alone must discover his original cause, and find his own resources for deciding who he is.
[This is what motivates the Sadean exploration of human possibilities: I took this remark of de Sade’s from Some Thoughts on the Novel, which seems to me the key to his writing, and from which Wittkop’s writing largely stems: “the work must make us see man, not only as what he is or what he shows himself to be, that is the task of the historian, but as what he might be, such as all the modifications of vice may render him, every tremor of passion, thus, one must know all of it, one must employ it all if one wants to work within this genre.”]
Wittkop’s stories illustrate this exploration of freedom through characters who are themselves not only their own justification but also their own unique society. That is Wittkop’s morality, the effort of “high solitude”, of obstinately holding onto exception, of the aberrant exception, the only path for the emancipation of collective fiction, which has progressively, but not definitively, detached from the image of the divine to be reproduced in profane, more political, more social images, representing, as ever, the instruments of domestication: the fiction of an ideal plan for man.
This text was composed for the first gathering of la Société des Amis de Gabrielle Wittkop, held on May 4th 2024. More information and instructions on how to support the organisation, as well as exclusive texts, interviews, and more, can be found on their website.
Wittkop’s The Necrophiliac, translated by Don Bapst, is available from ECW Press. Murder Most Serene, translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, and Exemplary Departures, translated by Annette David, are available from Wakefield Press.
Gabrielle Wittkop (1920–2002), self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, was a writer and translator whose remarkable series of novels and travelogues are laced with sardonic humour and dark sexuality, with recurrent themes of death, decay, disease, and decrepitude. Her first novel, The Necrophiliac, appeared in 1972. She committed suicide aged 82, following a lung cancer diagnosis.
Nicole Caligaris is a writer who has published numerous novels with Mercure de France, Éditions Verticales, Le Nouvel Attila and elsewhere, since she debuted in 1997 with La Scie patriotique. Her most recent novel, Carnivale, was published by Verticales in 2021. She also teaches on the Master Lettres et Création littéraire programme at L’Ecole Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen.
Tobias Ryan is an English teacher and translator, based in Paris. Twitter: @tobiasvryan
minor literature[s] 