The Novelist as Information Machine
Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, is, in essence, a three-part novel where the first and last parts–comprised of the diary of a young French ethnologist named David Mazon–are relatively easy, light, comic, and the middle section–a panorama and phantasmagoria of the history of French village life–is vexing and, at times, fascinating and delightful.
The novel is set in a small, fictional nameless village in the Vendée (a region famous for its brutal counter-revolutionary fighting during the French Revolution) which Mazon calls The Savage Mind, echoing the canonical ethnology of Lévi-Strauss. Mazon, a kind of useful academic idiot, a young Quixote figure, imagines that he, like Lévi-Strauss in the Amazon, has come to a semi, savage almost prehistoric place (though he can always take the high-speed rail back to Paris and his frigid girlfriend Lara, who he jacks off to on webcam while they’re apart).
Rather than descending into the Amazon, however, Mazon drinks pastis with the mayor and talks about local politics. Mazon meets the jolly and attractive maid of the local priest Matilda and begins to enjoy eating rabbit. He finds himself acclimatizing to the savage state of the villagers; it’s not so savage after all. His academic fantasies about village primitivism–even in first-world France–are just that; even while The Savage Mind shares its traditions and quasi-medieval spirit with the ethnologist, often, his projections, and theories, clearly over-write and transform his factual observations. Mazon (which sounds like the French word for house "maison") never really leaves home, leaves France; his imagination is more powerful than his five senses.
Most of the first part of the novel is a kind of joke on David–as he exchanges pissy emails from his academic overseers and peer reviewers–that we’re in on, along with Énard. So, even though we're reading David's journal, so to speak, we get no real sense of him as a character; he’s a Quixotic prop, a joke on the French ethnologists and their ethnologies–on the rationalist spirit (not so rational Énard wants us to realize) of French intellectualism.
In the last third of the novel, we pick up where we left off, essentially, except David has met a nice village girl; Laura's dumped him, but he's happy about it. The girl's name is Lucie. She grows market vegetables, and they decide to start an organic farm together somewhere else in the region. Even though he decides to become a savage himself and live out in the Vendée, David still thinks of his gardening in the most progressive modern Parisian terms. He now changes the title of his dissertation to “Among the Noble Savages.” Having been naturalized to the Vendée, Mazon admits his subjects are no longer purely savage, but noble. He's no longer a Lévi-Strauss, but a Rousseau.
By starting a farm, Mazon, always a Quixote a figure, thinks he’s “saving the planet,” which is funny. He's a dunce, but a happy one. He never stops being a Parisian or an academic nincompoop, no matter which village girl he marries or what recipes he learns.
Now in the middle third of the novel, things are much stranger (and I mean it). Running parallel to all of David's diaries is an organic, seething world of life and death, narrated in the third person, in which, in The Savage Mind, as we learn, souls reincarnate: people become bacteria, become wild boars, become soldiers and priests and fish and deer and so on; underneath the visible world that Mazon observes, is a world of souls, a bardo world (conveyed in a Rabelaisian patois, which is apparent even in translation). Sandwiched between Mazon’s diary sections, “The Wheel of Life” section spins and spins and spins.
As part of this long, third person section, we learn about the town’s gravediggers, who throw a magnificent, ritual feast, during a magic three-day period of truce when The Wheel of Life stops and no one and nothing dies in the village while the gravediggers drink and eat and sing. It's a medieval–maybe older–celebration in the midst of the modern world, and a transcendental one. There are exactly 99 guests. Mazon has nothing to do with his; he is like a child looking at an ant colony with a telescope.
It's worth noting that translator Frank Wynne has done an admirable job, and the present reviewer can discern the touches of Rabelaisian parody in the original French through the English. Even the English translation is infused with many layers of the French language, including pastoral patois, and medieval and early modern French. That all comes through during the long section of the gravedigger's banquet sequence. This is not an easy book to translate because it’s so fundamentally French–about the language, its history; a history of the country’s peasantry (Mazon in his diary cites Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s fascinating account of late medieval village life “Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324”); a history of ethnography.
Taken together, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild was one of the most interesting new works of fiction I've read in the past year, and in many ways the most challenging–without at any point feeling like a masterwork; I can't help but feeling, as I once did with Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers, that the moments of brilliance and insight and erudition are there to be celebrated–pyrotechnics; there’s a degree of showing off: the novelist performs the role of postmodern master (as if afraid to let us forget that postmodern mastery is happening).
This is not to say that I don't think novels should have excess, that they shouldn't be loose and baggy–that's part of the form, that's part of the tradition, that's part of the experience, the richness and open-endedness (and living inside of a novel is in many ways preferable to living inside of life); wordplay, with digression, games aren’t antithetical to the novelist’s art. I just couldn’t help shake the feeling, the uneasy awareness, that, post infinite-scroll, and post generative AI, this piling up of information–take the endless enumeration and descriptions of food in the banquet section for example–is… dated; the way large language models can generate verbosity at scale tells us something: torrents of information are ancillary to the human core (whatever that may be) of literary art; there is something machine-like about the most ambitious late modernity fiction, and we’re only realizing it just now.
This is unlikely to be a popular argument (because many writers and readers are invested in the heroic archetype of literary giganticism), but in preparing to review The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, I realize something has shifted; a quality novel by the standards of another decade (Énard tells us he began writing the novel in 2009) do not always ‘translate’; not all brilliant books endure as classic novels (almost none at all).
Novels tell us about how we think; how we think determines the novel. A novel is a marker of the cognition of the era; a novel is a map of a map. Without the newspaper there is no Balzac or Dostoyevsky; the gramophone is part of the modernist novel; the infamous postmodern or systems novel tracks the transition of the transformation of America into an information economy; the systems novels self-conscious heirs both in form and content are influenced by TV and the word processor and the Internet and Google respectively. It is fair to say that talented and ambitious novelists are cartographers of cognition; even failed novels by almost-geniuses show us something about the relationship between mind and world, or more specifically between technology (cognitive extenders like the typewriter and computer and smartphone).
What I realized while reading The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild is that novelist-as-researcher, as master-of-information, of data-set, as good-Googler, is not a permanent appendage of the broader concept of novelist; sadly, a large language model (machine) can do practically all of that cataloging. What remains our province is ultimately what Énard forgoes: the complex subjectivity of the human animal. Énard writes convincingly of hunting, cooking, academic wrangling, ecology, et cetera; David Mazon is the least interesting part of the book.
Matthew Gasda is a writer and director.
