Verbal Magazine

Written on the Body…

Sometimes a man can be a lot less interesting than his art. You read the masterpiece of a novel, only to discover this god like genius that produced it, is about as interesting as watching paint dry on the wall.

For Tristan Garcia, the man, or at least the ideas the man discusses, are actually more invigorating than the art he produces.
Garcia’s latest novel: Hate a Romance, despite its lofty aspirations, is caught in a cobweb of hyperbolic language, over the top, in your face prose, which travels at such a rollercoaster pace, it is hard to keep track of, and feel any empathy for the chic, left wing intellectual, and bohemian characters he has constructed.

The novel follows three male characters and a female character, the narrator, who never really actively participates. She only recounts the intersecting lives of the other three: Leibowitz, her lover, a highly media-friendly philosopher who came out of the far Left’s anti-establishment in France, only to years later sell out and join the conservative side; her friend and colleague Doumé, the founder of the first French gay rights association, who settles down over time; and William Miller, a young gay man whose confidante is the narrator, Elizabeth Levallois.
The prevailing public image of William, we’re told quickly, is a grisly one—a shallow, volatile, public intellectual with a known history of purposefully infecting partners with HIV. 

In just under three hundred pages Garcia traces the trajectory of western political and philosophical ideologies- from the early nineteen eighties to the present day- namedropping just about every intellectual from Freud to Foucault, Marx to Mao, and everyone in between. So is the novel attempting to explain how The Right swallowed up The Left in the nineteen eighties, when the flood gates of extreme capitalism were let open in the West?

‘The novel is, in a way, trying to understand why and how we get there,’ Garcia explains, ‘in this kind of democratic trap of ideas. It’s confronting bodies - sick bodies in fact - to this infernal logic of ideas. In a democracy, to achieve power you have to have a hold over the majority. To counterbalance that, minorities are given a very important role in ideological debates. Thus to assert one’s individual opinions, one needs to present one’s thoughts as representing those of the minority. The emphasis of Western debates — and this is often infernal — that the politically correct is born out of this logic of the minority: even people claiming to be against minorities (Wasps, for example), are saying that they became a minority, oppressed by the politically correct.’

Garcia wrote the novel in a few weeks, and he says little research went into the medical terminology or case studies of AIDS - the disease that many of the characters, as homosexuals in the 80s and 90s, fall prey to in the novel. He says that Hate a Romance was never intended to be a realist novel, but something that captures the Zeitgeist.

‘This novel is not a realist novel in the sense of a work that requires a lot of research, a detailed description of a reality, a social environment, and a historical moment. It is a novel about the real, part imaginary, part history, and part fiction. Everything (Aids, medical terms, ideological debates etc) were stuck in what we call in France, the air du temps, the zeitgeist, if you will. The hardest part of the work was to catch these breezy ideas and feelings, in the papers, in everyday talks.’

Hate a Romance won the Prix de Flore award in France in 2008, causing quite a bit of controversy over the similarities that the main characters in the book bear to real life characters in French intellectual/ political life.
In the book’s preface, he writes that readers should be reminded that this is entirely a work of fiction and that none of the characters are based on real people. Some critics since the novel’s publication have alluded to the fact that the main protagonist, William, is based on the writer, Guillaume Dustan, and Dominique, another character is based on Didier Lestrade, who founded ACT UP in Paris (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) -an international organisation working to help people living with AIDS.
Garcia scoffs at the notion that the characters in his novel act as a mask to portray historical events.

‘I reject the idea of the roman à clef, whereby a magical switch of names of a character is simply equivalent to a person. The character of William Miller borrows certain traits from Guillaume Dustan, a writer and activist who was both an underground cult figure and the object of French media attention in the 1990s, and who has since died tragically. But for instance William’s social trajectory is the opposite of Dustan’s. Dustan, the real person, was the son of a psychoanalyst and was a cultivated man with an extensive academic background. Willie, in the novel, comes from the very bottom of the middle class. He is rather uncultivated and in some aspects has nothing to do with the real person Guillaume Dustan. Similarly, the very French character of the philosopher Leibowitz is a collection of attitudes and ideas, as well as small acts of cowardice, common to a generation of European intellectuals who slowly slid from the radical Left to the neo-conservative Right. Lastly, Dominique Rossi is described as an activist sharing some political ideas with Didier Lestrade, an important figure in French gay activism’s history. But he is not Lestrade, who was far more sympathetic.’

Garcia’s book frantically races through so many characters, political landscapes and historical epochs, it’s hard to pin down what political argument the author is trying to persuade the reader to by the end of the novel. Garcia argues that if readers prevail, their patience will be rewarded at the end of the novel with intellectual rigor.

‘This was supposed to be a novel about bodies and ideas. You never know when bodies are finally buried under ideas. I suppose my characters are trying to embody ideas and attitudes toward the present, in bodies, sick bodies, and sexual bodies. Otherwise it would just be a fleshless, tedious volume—that’s the danger, for sure. But disease weighs down all these minds looking for meaning, for a truth, it ballasts them, makes them heavy: they return to reality, because they are sick and mortal. I hope that readers are patient enough to discover the end and to emphathise with William’s pathetical destiny.’

When Garcia speaks, he puts strange, yet interesting phrases together, like an eloquent philosopher rather than a novelist. With a book of Philosophy already behind him before the release of this novel, and with several essays this year to be published (the topics ranging from animal cruelty to the aesthetic of comics) it seems it’s a subject he cannot escape.
‘Most of the time, I’m trying to forget about philosophy when I’m writing fiction, but in the end, it seems to me I’m making fictional metaphysics and morals, and moral and metaphysical fiction. I’m trying to deal with it. With this book I didn’t want it to be too well written- it had to be dirty sometimes- in order to reflect mental dispositions of my characters: they’re always lost in some places and at times they can’t understand.’

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