Geranium Logic: Intensity and Indifference in Emmanuel Hocquard

Emmanuel Hocquard recalls having had a lot of trouble learning to read and write. He was a slow pupil, he says—an unusually clumsy struggler with classroom materials. Leaky pens, smudges, chalk dust, torn papers were problems for all schoolchildren in those days (right after World War II), but upon him they weighed inordinately, wearing him down so much that he barely made it in the early grades to even the most elementary forms of abstract knowledge. Reading was as bad as writing. The words and phrases that revealed meaning to his classmates—the same meaning, he dimly perceived, to all of them—for him remained obscure. He kept crashing into strange piles of letters, and the force of the collision would cause whole pages to crack up and smell terrible: “It was a period when I felt truly miserable.”¹

This sad period of his life unfolded in a primary school in Tangiers, Classroom Three, second seat in the first row, on the side with the windows. Bad as it was, nothing since has ever really mattered to Hocquard, except from the perspective of that seat next to the windows, with the dark, sticky desk in front of it upon which a schoolboy’s reader lies open forming a smaller white rectangle against the black one. At least so he said, when he was close to forty: “The world, people, history, none of this makes sense to me until I’m back in the second seat in the first row on the side by the windows.”² Otherwise, landscapes, spectacles, life situations bore him. It’s what takes place on the surface of the printed page that counts. He never stops in the street to watch a parade, he says, or firemen putting out a fire, but he is apt to go back and stop in Classroom Three, because there, something in the world gives way for him and opens onto writing. There, first row, second seat, just as for one of the characters in a story by Jean Ray who would veer off and disappear down a narrow street at a particular spot where for everyone else there was just the continuation of a brick wall, something in the world opens for Hocquard—“quelque chose du monde débouche sur de l’écriture” (“mf,” 33–34).

In short, the riveting character of literature lies in its close relation to a child’s first language-learning efforts, to early encounters with printed matter, and to writing’s own childhood phase when, in schoolroom manuals and picture books, it is still linked to images and illustrations. In order to convey something about a type of literature he particularly admires, Hocquard dwells, in one little essay, on the clean, sharp outline characteristic of comic strips. He calls it la ligne claire. It’s “the smooth edges, the simple images, the bright images.”³ No psychological or dramatic effects of the sort obtained by cross-hatching or shading. He recognizes this clean line in literary texts that employ what he calls “une technique minimale de représentation” (“lc,” 132). Their syntax is plain, he observes; their words have a familiar meaning. They don’t want much interpretation, they don’t propel you outdoors to check what they depict against reality; they just stand out, I think you might say, bright and distinct, in their nice, new, clean-cut self-evidence.

Such minimally representational writing is most likely to appear in descriptions, Hocquard believes, and perhaps especially in travel descriptions. He isn’t thinking so much of the great descriptive passages in Hugo, Balzac, or Zola as of a first sight of new things in Fromentin or Loti or Valéry Larbaud. He mentions the narration degree zero in Lucretius’ De Rerum natura, too: “quelque chose comme une première prose du monde” [something like the world’s first prose] (“lc,” 134). Things’ initial appearance, then, in the light of words. A sort of dawn, when writing first cleanly and distinctly cuts out from the speechless chaos of the sensory world a gamut of distinct designations...