And if we look farther afield? Could that evening have been the work of an agent provocateur? A specialist in such “republican” acts? Was it, in fact, a tiny libertarian coup? An almost imperceptible piece of civil disobedience? Sure, anything’s possible, of course — but, then, who was our infiltrator? Always and again: who? Wouldn’t that sort of man have wanted to reveal himself, wouldn’t he want publicity, to be put to trial, wouldn’t he want as much attention as possible for his daring deeds? Silence doesn’t fit the profile.
There is one other outlandish hypothesis. The best, in fact. I dare you to do better. What if our Usurper was none other than the President himself — like Nero slipping into the roles of the great tragedians? Yes, our President himself, so well known for his unpredictability, deciding to act out his own outing as a tyrant to his people! But, then, the Usurper was much taller than our President. And, after all, we would have recognized him. And, again, why?
As I said, it’s exceedingly unlikely that we’ll ever find answers to our questions. The theater, for its part, continues (because nothing stops it). The smart money is on our taking what we learned that night and parleying it into a future success.
The day after that fateful night — the one Boehlmer now simply calls “The Evening,” with those capital letters he’s so good at pronouncing — Flavy took us all — including the entire production team — out to lunch. It was on this occasion that he asked me to write this account of the events. He reserved a table for eleven, well aware that there were only ten of us. We ate and drank in the presence of an empty chair. Marcel paused a moment before raising his glass for a toast, saying, at last, “Viewed as a performance, it wasn’t too bad. In fact, I think it was one of our best.”
Afterword
The Republic of Jacques Jouet
For readers unfamiliar with Jacques Jouet’s vast oeuvre, a few words on two topics are in order. The first of these is his Republic, the second its constraints.
Since the violent fall of its monarchy in 1789, France has been committed to the idea of the republic. So much so that in this interval it has known no fewer than five republics — which it is the joy and sorrow of French schoolchildren to enumerate and explicate. Jouet, formerly a French schoolchild, is the author of a series of works to which he has given the title La République roman. The books that make up that growing republic vary widely in form, content, and length. What they share is a republican ardor of a special sort.
Jouet’s literary productions are ample, diverse, and extend, in fact, beyond his Republic. He began as a poet and continues as one, most monumentally in Navet, linge, oeil-de-vieux (Turnip, Linen, Oeil-de-Vieux), a collection of verse — in a day when volumes of poetry tend ever more towards brevity — of more than nine hundred pages. Jouet is a practicing playwright and his dramas have been staged all over the world — from Paris to Ouagadougou. He is the author of a lexicographical work cataloging French figures of speech that involve parts of the body (of which there are more than a few).1 All told, he is today the author of more than fifty books spanning the genres of poetry, drama, criticism, fiction, and biography. And in that impressive production La République roman occupies a special place.
To date, the Republic consists of thirty-seven works of shorter and longer fiction (Jouet insists that he doesn’t write novellas, just shorter and longer novels). It began in 1994 with Le Directeur du Musée des cadeaux des chefs d’Etat de l’étranger (The Director of the Museum of Gifts from Foreign Heads of State) and took hold with his next book — and his first to be translated into English—Mountain R, in 1996.2 Since then it has been populated by works of all sorts — from, to pick the productions of a single year, the slim and symmetrical Annette et l’Etna to the gargantuan and sprawling La République de Mek-Ouyes (both 2001).
Jacques Jouet is not the first Frenchman to create such a fictional republic. In July of 1842, Honoré de Balzac, half-dead from caffeine abuse, finished his Comédie Humaine. The inspiration for his title was not humble. It had a precedent in another comedy — Dante’s divine one. Dante, in fact, never referred to his work as anything other than as his “Commedia”; the “Divina” came from a different hand.3 Balzac, however, did not know this and did not need to. His concern was with this world and the life led in France’s new republic. In the preface he wrote for a comedy which spanned some ninety works and featured more than two thousand characters, he praises the wonders of electricity, laments that Walter Scott had not been born Catholic, and announces that his great work was written to serve as a history of morals and manners for France’s young republic. Whereas Dante wrote an allegory of the divine side of life, Balzac aspired to write an account of its human one. Were Jacques Jouet not so modest a writer, he might have titled his series of works The Republican Comedy, as La République roman has a similar aspiration — to offer a comedy both light and dark, sinister and innocent, of this world and its republics.
Jouet has noted that he began his République roman “in thematic terms” with topoi such as the museum, the mountain, the theater, the boardroom, the high school, the hotel restaurant, and so forth. He has recounted, however, that this thematic inspiration soon began to intermingle with a different one, as “impulsions of a clearly formal nature” increasingly shaped his republican works. To understand these impulsions, a bit of history is necessary.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONSTRAINT
In 1960, a conference was held at Cérisy-la-Salle entitled Une nouvelle défense et illustration de la langue française (modeled on Du Bellay’s 1549 call for the enrichment of the French language). The conference was to honor the French man of arts and letters Raymond Queneau and, in particular, the colloquial richnesses he had discovered in such works as the recently published Zazie in the Metro (1959). This ten-day conference gave rise to one of the most curious French literary groups in a century rich in curious French literary groups — the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “Workshop of Potential Literature,” or Oulipo, for short. The mathematicians and writers who made it up agreed to meet once a month. While not secret, the group was private, and went seven years before inducting a new member. As a young man, Queneau had been a Surrealist and like many a member left with the door slammed behind him. Informed by his experiences with the temperamental Breton and others in his Surrealist republic, Queneau decided, along with cofounder François Le Lionnais, that there would be no exclusions from the group — the maximum that would be allowed would be “excused absences” for those who passed away. Queneau and Le Lionnais themselves now hold such exemptions — as do Marcel Duchamp, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and others.4