THE VARSITY
There’s a lot going on in this book. When you started writing, was your intent to explore a historical period through a range of themes, or was it more specific than that? What was the spark?
TRISTAN GARCIA
I wanted to take on the contemporary world. Since adolescence I’ve naturally gravitated toward science fiction, fantasy, the literature of the imagination, which for me was like a refuge from the literature they teach in school, petrified literature, and from the contemporary novel, which is too occupied, for my taste, with dramatizing the conditions of its own expression (voice, narrative structure, literary enunciation) and not enough with representing the world.
I ended up with the fear of living in an ivory tower of fictions that are intoxicating, but that would no longer have anything to do with the real world, the day-to-day world: the life of ideas, current political debates, but also our bodies and our diseases …
I therefore tried to write an authentic “almost contemporary” novel, both funny and dramatic, borrowing multiple aspects of real events, debates, positions taken, and people to create characters somewhat like types, not quite original (because they call to mind people and common attitudes of the times) but not quite generic (because they each have their own identity, body, language, sometimes an eccentricity that — I hope — does not make them abstract figures).
I put the characters in an intermediary period between the past and the present, in the limbo of History and current affairs, somewhere between the ’80s and the ’90s, in the no man’s land of my childhood and adolescence. I wanted to bring back to life a comatose period that hasn’t yet entered History books, but is already more or less out of the headlines. And I tried to slip in a bit of the romantic between History and the everyday, between the already-dead past and the too-vivid present.
THE VARSITY
Did you know when you started that AIDS would figure so prominently in the book?
TRISTAN GARCIA
No. In the middle of this era that we still have trouble encapsulating, already out of the newspapers, barely in our History books, there were the very specific circumstances of the gay community, which experienced simultaneously the joy of emancipation (of body and spirit) and the tragedy of disease. AIDS was like the dark back of the shop of the glittering window displays of the ’80s and ’90s.
There is in the dramas, the individual and collective heartbreaks of this story of the French gay community, or in the disease herself, testimonies, autobiographic fiction (from Guibert to Dustan). But, in my opinion, none have given it a romantic dimension. It seems to me that the tale of events in the small Parisian gay community could find its place in the bigger story of the end of the millennium in France, in the West, and that this story comes to reflect itself in the tableau of this microcosm.
If I had written a novel about the ’80s in France without considering the gay community, its ebullience, and at the same time the appearance of the disease, it would probably have been a dreary, grey, and boring novel: not much happened in these years of decline, of disillusion in large collective movements, of ideas that the twentieth century produced (communism, avant-garde aesthetics, feminism, decolonization, underground pop culture, etc.) Aside from eternally rewriting Less Than Zero or American Psycho, I don’t see much else.
Cruelly, AIDS gave the period something tragic and romantic, something that ate at the body but also stimulated ideas, debates.
THE VARSITY
It seems to me that you set yourself the task of writing a couple removes from your own experience: two of your four main characters are gay, and the book’s plot follows how AIDS wreaks havoc within the gay community (of which you are not a part, I’ve read); the story is told from the perspective of a woman; and at least the earlier sections of the plot take place in the 1980s, a time when you were just growing up, hardly politically conscious. Was it necessary to have this distance from your subject? And if so, why?
TRISTAN GARCIA
Given my age, the timeframe of the narrative corresponded to the time period that I, like those of my generation, inherited and that I vaguely passed through, living outside Paris, without participating. It was more the time period when my parents were adults: the setting was the end of ideologies, even the end of History, the triumph of economic and cultural liberalism, the bitterness of leftism vanquished by the joys of money, prosperity, business, individual success, hedonism, the stock exchange and then new technologies.
During these years, I was a child and like all children, I didn’t perceive much of the outside world, the social world, except through the prism of my family. Once I was a teenager, I had the impression of inheriting a world that I didn’t really understand, and the novel was also an effort to live what I did not live: one almost always writes good novels when one writes about what came before us, about what we missed, about the generation that came before us. The novel is the art of the one who came just a little bit too late, it’s often a way of trying to relive as an adult the time of one’s childhood.
THE VARSITY
For the generation of gay men you write about, the beginning of the AIDS epidemic was a period of intense fear, pain, and anger. Was appropriation of voice a concern as you were writing? What has the response been within the gay community?
TRISTAN GARCIA
I’m not from Paris, I didn’t live through this period, I don’t belong to the community that is the canvass of the novel: basically, my legitimacy in writing it was null. But it’s fiction, not testimony.
I took the admitted risk of writing this novel, by considering that my complete lack of legitimacy as an observer or an actor in these events that I haven’t lived through perhaps gave me the chance to be its novelist, at once empathetic and distanced. According to some witnesses of the time period, it was successful: they recognized what they lived through in this small tableau. For others, it was a complete failure or indecent. Either because the novel didn’t bear enough resemblance to what their reality was, or because it bore too much resemblance, and I didn’t really have the right to talk about lives that weren’t mine. The reactions were mixed, rarely aggressive, often interesting. It’s normal: the relationship between fiction and reality becomes abrasive as we catch up with the present.
THE VARSITY
You’re a trained philosopher. What is the relationship between your work in philosophy and your novels ? How do you choose the medium for your ideas — are certain types of ideas better explored in a novel than in another form, such as the essay ?
TRISTAN GARCIA
In philosophy, I’m interested in more or less three fields: aesthetics (my thesis concerned the concept of representation), the animal question (I just released a book titled Us, animals and humans, which returns to the gnawing question of “animal rights” from a critical perspective), and metaphysics. Metaphysics don’t have much to do with my novels. For me, evidently, the theses that I defend in metaphysics (which are close to the “speculative realism” movement of Quentin Meillassoux or Graham Harman) belong to the same mental universe as the novels I have written or would like to write. But I doubt that someone who has read my articles on metaphysics and my novels would on the off chance identify the author of the former as the author of the latter. Too bad.
In aesthetics, I defend a position of “neither strictly classical nor strictly modern nor strictly contemporary” that pretty much corresponds to the style that I try to express in what I write: to talk about the contemporary world with classical forms and modern ideas, or something like that.
As for my interest in animals, it’s expressed in the second novel, Memories of the Jungle. [Note: There’s wordplay in the French tile, where Mémoires means both “memories” and “memoirs.”]
THE VARSITY
The title for English readers is Hate : A Romance. How did you arrive at a title so different from the original, La meilleure part des hommes (The Best Part of Men)?
TRISTAN GARCIA
The French title is a distant echo of a Spanish expression that my partner (who is of Andalusian descent) taught me: “of men, the best hung,” which is not very flattering for men, since it means that even the best of men deserve to be brought to the gallows.
The Best Part of Men, in French, means several things: ironically, it could designate, by antiphrasis, all that was revealed to be bad or immoral in the novel (especially betrayal). But it can also indicate that the best part of human beings was, as the epilogue says, that which stays hidden, that which even the lowest scum take with them to the grave. Often it seems to me that what is best about men is what they never succeed in giving, what stays imprisoned in themselves.
In English, there’s a distinction between “man” and “human,” which doesn’t allow for the French ambiguity between humanity and masculinity (since the book talks a lot about masculine homosexuality, and women, except for the unhappy narrator, are nearly excluded). In addition, it seems like The Best Part of Men means “most of,” “the majority of,” which would have produced a misinterpretation: the novel talks about a minority, the homosexual minority …
In short, we took the title of a chapter and we came to an agreement with the editor on Hate: A Romance.
THE VARSITY
Will latches onto this idea that hate has value, that it is stronger than both love and death, that it’s a means of self-expression. But hate’s relation to love and death is not entirely one of negation. As Liz paraphrases Will’s thoughts on this, “Hate = (love + death) – lies.” Will hates Doum — he wants to erase from the world any memory that Doum ever even existed — but Will is incredibly faithful in his hatred: he hates no one else like he hates this man. Given the relationship between love and hate in the equation above, does Will hate in this way just because he wants to be superfamous when he is dead (as he claims), or can his hate also be read as an expression of love?
TRISTAN GARCIA
I’m not a hateful person, but hate is a feeling that fascinates me. It’s a sort of remedy to the sentimentality of love in all cultures, which reduces love to a positivity, which excludes the negative. Will, deep down, wants hate, because he loves love too much to let everyone dirty it by rendering it vacuous, blissful, common. Rather than love moderately, like everyone else, he prefers to hate, frankly and completely. Deep down, pursuing his hate for Doum is for him the only way to stay truly faithful to him. He even discovers that he is more attached to [Doum] through hate than through love.
His faithfulness is a romantic value: I think that a novel lets us accept everything about a character (he can be ugly, bad, nasty), as long as the character is faithful, that is to say he holds on to his idea. Even a traitor in the novel can be faithful, if he betrays systematically, that is to say he is faithful to his betrayal.
The idea of the book is that Will appears to be the most incoherent and vicious character, but that unlike others, he doesn’t change with the times, he holds on to his hates right to the end, right to his death. This faithfulness, which only the narrator, Liz, is there to understand, is perhaps the best part of men (or humanity) named in the French title.
THE VARSITY
By the end of the book, we’ve seen the consequences of Will’s ideals, and it’s easy to place judgment on him as someone who willingly infects his partners: we can see Richard as a victim. On the other hand, it’s hard to resist a raw biological empathy with Will in the end, when his body betrays him. What balance did you hope to strike regarding the reader’s sympathies for this man?
TRISTAN GARCIA
Empathy in regarding Will is only possible, I believe, through the way he is seen by Liz, the narrator. The only woman in the novel, she is a half-character: she never acts, she always submits, but she teaches the reader to love William, who is insufferable, chaotic, disgusting, who defends indefensible values and who willingly infects his partners.
The reader’s empathy for Will has precisely to do with the disease, with the weakness of his body and with his defeat. The other characters coped with their time period, renewed themselves, changed political sides or returned back to their original social environment: William was used by the media, he served as a clown for a time, then, like all those who no longer amuse, he is sent back to oblivion. His humble social environment promises him no safety net: he falls.
In reality, I’d probably dislike a being like William; but through fiction, we can learn to love what is contrary to our values. In writing the book, I loved William. The reader who will appreciate the book will probably feel some of this love. But it is not an immediate love, flat and common: it’s a love that has passed through hate, that has stood the test of its opposite.
THE VARSITY
Despite the denial at the beginning of the book, so many striking similarities have been noted between your characters and real people (between Will Miller and Guillaume Dustan; Dominique Rossi and Didier Lestrade; Jean-Michel Leibowitz and Alain Finkielkraut) that some say this is a roman à clef. How do you respond?
TRISTAN GARCIA
A roman à clef assumes that each character corresponds to a real person. In reality, each of the main characters of the novel combines different facets of different individuals that existed. The philosopher, Lebowitz, is a type who corresponds to many French intellectuals of this generation, who started their career at the end of leftism, especially of Maoism, and who moved closer little by little to neo-conservatives. The truth is, it’s a common trajectory in France, which adopted the end of the intellectual sphere’s faith in Marxism.
Will shares certain common traits with Guillaume Dustan, a writer and eccentric personality of ’90s France. But Dustan came from a well-off background, he was an intellectual and he took up brilliant studies in law. William — readers of the novel would have remarked — comes from a very humble background, he’s more of a little punk, a willing idiot.
The character Dominique Rossi is, in a certain number of details or anecdotes, close to Didier Lestrade, a very important figure in the militant homosexual scene (but not only there). Lestrade was an influential music critic who introduced house music to France, who always defended contemporary R&B. He retired to the countryside and clashed violently with Guillaume Dustan about the problem of unprotected sex, of bareback. But Rossi, in the novel, is Corsican, from a university background, and ends up allied with the reactionary philosopher, which certainly wasn’t the case for Didier Lestrade. I recommend reading his Act-Up, une histoire, or his recent Chroniques du dancefloor.
To write a novel on the contemporary world, on debates of ideas, of politics, it was necessary to adopt the public positions of certain real personages. But it’s as if the novel reconstructed characters by sculpting them from different profiles of real people.
THE VARSITY
Liz disapproves of Will’s “autofictions” (a term that isn’t as widely used in North America as it is in France). What’s your own opinion of the current French literary scene?
TRISTAN GARCIA
At the time when I was writing this book, I was very angry with this genre’s domination of French literature. To me it was the flat literature of the contemporary ultraliberal universe: everyone no longer has anything but themselves, their “self” to transform in fiction. This genre was very popular in France.
I didn’t like these works that reduced literature to the single voice of the writer, to their body and their person: the writer uses their family, their origins, their diseases, their love stories, as if today everyone no longer has access to anything but their own experience, that we are no longer capable of embracing the world through imagination, through fiction. As if we are tired of the world, and wrapped up in individuality. This novel was written polemically against this idea: I wanted to tell the story of an era, of a sexuality, of communities who aren’t mine. For me the novel was always a tool for knowing the world: I don’t give a damn about myself, I’m not too interested in myself and I certainly don’t know myself. It’s up to others to know me, to tell me what I am. My role is to know others.
THE VARSITY
English readers are waiting for the translation of Mémoires de la Jungle. What can you tell us about it?
TRISTAN GARCIA
One can say that The Best Part of Men was an attempt at a novel of a different genre and that Mémoires de la Jungle is an attempt at a novel of a different species. It’s a novelistic experience no doubt stranger than the first, by which I wanted, a bit tired of the human voice, the speech and the body of our human species, to embrace the subjectivity of a different species, though a close one, to ours. It’s the Naïve novel (in the sense of a “Naïve” painting, as in the work of Rousseau the Douanier) of a chimpanzee who has learned to talk.
This idea has been bouncing around my head for a long time: after all, the chimpanzee is in us, and often I came to feel, as a human, like a fallen ape. Some years after my Baccalaureate, I took ethology courses, in particular those of Dominique Lestel, who had me read Gregory Bateson, Jerome Bruner, Frans de Waal and understand the major scientific stages in the modern study of chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans or bonobos. I read with great interest the theories, but also the anecdotes about the jungle adventures of “Leakey’s girls,” Dian Fossey, Jane Gooddall and the less famous Biruté Galdikas (models for the character Janet in the novel), the lab experiments of the Gardner couple, David Premack, Herbert Terrace or the Savage-Rumbaughs. I discovered the genius particular to these apes in captivity, managing sign language, lexigrams or artificial idioms like the Lantek, from Washoe to Koko, from Sarah to Nim, from Kanzi and Mulika to Louis.
These fascinating and romantic experiences were to a large extent ignored by literature and film.
During this whole time, I completely questioned my scholarly philosophical certainties about different human properties: language, culture, tools, laughter, consciousness of oneself or consciousness of death. I learned to recognize great apes’ social behaviour, culture, politics, tools and communication methods of great finesse. I was interested in this incredible variety of expressions, drumming, cries, gestures, postures … But what fascinated me the most, very quickly, was the fierce will of scientists, beginning around the ’40s and after the seminal work of Robert Yerkes, to educate and make great apes talk like humans.
And I wanted to make from that an original novel.
THE VARSITY
The story is told from the perspective of a chimpanzee? To what end?
TRISTAN GARCIA
The story is the following: in the future, humans have let Africa lie fallow. Only a few scientists continue to study fauna and flora, close to Lake Victoria. A couple of ethologists decide to adopt and educate a small chimpanzee at the same time as their young son and their older daughter. As the small ape, who is the narrator, learns to dress himself, to eat like a human being and to talk, in particular with the help of sign language, his human brother falls ill and regresses.
Having become an adult, the chimpanzee narrator, Doogie, is the victim of a plane accident. He crashes in the jungle of Cameroon. To survive and return home, at the zoo he has to progressively cast off his human education, relearn how to be an animal, regain his intuition, fight other apes, feed himself with leaves and insects.
As we go along in the novel, which is partly experimental, Doogie loses his ability to talk. His language becomes more difficult, more incoherent.
As is the case with The Best Part of Men, my main interest in writing this novel was to have a being talk in a strange, nervous, sometimes irrational voice. In the first book, it’s William Miller and his implausible reasoning, his familiar yet odd delivery, his wonky expressions, the rhythm of his inconsistent thinking, that interested me. In the second work, it’s the language of the chimpanzee. Doogie is this time omnipresent since he is the main narrator. In each case, it’s about language that’s far removed from mine, from my speech delivery, my type of thinking, and my general behaviour, which are rather composed. I look for characters who think and talk as differently from me as possible.
I don’t know if I’ve succeeded, but in writing I tried to have that which is not me speak through my voice. A sort of rational trance, perhaps.
