The spark for Hélène Bessette’s third book came while she was on holiday with her two sons on the northern coast of France. One night, they heard a gunshot in the hotel where they were staying; Bessette later read in the newspaper that a boy had shot and killed his father. She continued to follow the case, and at some point began to reconstruct her findings on the page. A reader will quickly realize, however, that Bessette is not interested in anything like a straightforward true crime story; what burned in her were questions, and the book’s resulting form could be called an interrogation. Can we say she departed from the facts in the service of fiction, or should we say instead that fiction enabled a looser and truer vision of the crime?

She published the book in 1955 as Vingt minutes de silence (newly translated as Twenty Minutes of Silence) with Éditions Gallimard, the home of her editor and champion, Raymond Queneau. It’s not surprising that Queneau admired Bessette’s novels, which resolutely ignore norms of grammar, typography, plot, character, and narrative, and look something like long, erratic dialogue-poems. In the introduction to the English version of his Exercises in Style, Queneau’s translator Barbara Wright describes the Oulipo cofounder’s interest in spoken French, citing a passage from his Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (1950): “I came to realize that modern written French must free itself from the conventions which still hem it in, (conventions of style, spelling and vocabulary) and then it will soar like a butterfly away from the silk cocoon spun by the grammarians of the 16th century and the poets of the 17th century.” Written language could be reformed by the spoken, and “the first statement of this new language should be … to put some philosophical dissertation into spoken French.” Twenty Minutes of Silence, though a novel, can also be read as a cacophonous speech-collage-turned-philosophical-investigation of crime and punishment, of social and familial mores, and of the genre of the novel itself.

The novel—and it is a novel first and foremost because the author says it is, and also because the novel form, like poetry, contains everything—opens with a section titled “Atmosphere,” in which a female figure weeps while she watches a busy train pass over a viaduct at dusk. The scene sets a heavy and melancholic mood sharply undercut by the rapid-fire narrator who mocks this disconsolate figure: “You’re like a cow in a field gaping at an autumn train.” It’s reasonable to assume the weeper is the mother of the boy who has killed his father—or the sister of the boy, being scolded by the mother—but it could also be the narrator, the author, upbraiding herself for being “silly,” for crying over the strangers in whose lives she’s entangled her mind and emotions:

You’re not going to cry over nothing.
In the street.
In other people.
When you’re in other people.

(And, a little later: “I am in other people.”)

It’s the first instance of the eccentric narrative slippage signature to this book. Who is the “I”? Who is the “you”? Who is “she”? Who is the audience inferred when the “I” abruptly turns away from the “you” to describe the “she”?

You’re not going to cry.
She’s crying.

The destabilization continues into “Poem of the Facts,” in which the narrative voice, shattered into blunt sentence fragments that build a harsh, staccato rhythm in their accumulation, reads like personal address (“No, excuse me, my apologies for misleading you, the revolver was in the cupboard, buried beneath a pile of sheets”); yellow journalism (“It was hatred that put the murder weapon into the young parricide’s hands”); contradiction (“Hatred cannot put a weapon into anyone’s hands for the good reason that she doesn’t exist”); peanut gallery (“Hatred isn’t female. Is this journalist some kind of poet?”); accusation (“You’re deliberately misleading us”); police statement (“The victim’s son, aged fifteen, has confessed to killing his father”); judgment (“Load of nonsense”); testimony (“All the lights were off. / No, they weren’t, shouts the maid named Rose Hollyhock”); editorial correction (“Then she retracts her statement”); and novelistic speculation (“We know all about the light sleeping habits of nervous, dissatisfied, irritated, belligerent, preoccupied, troubled, querulous, unhappy women”). Little of this is attributed in any way: the narrative jumps from line to line with rarely an indication as to whether what we are reading is speech, quoted text, or thought—and whose. The effect produced is both that of an agitated mind in restless argument with itself and the gossipy, chaotic polyvocality of a public forum—something like a town square on a busy market day, or a contemporary comment section at the foot of a news article. It is an ingenious novelistic device that can’t be bothered to cite its sources, because the source is simply the novelist herself. It’s what Bessette, in her manifesto of the roman poétique—the Poetic Novel—calls a

Novel in the first
And the last person
Novel reduced to its simplest expression
A single character
The others diminished.

A traditional “realistic” novel strives to develop characters with believable physical and psychological detail, but Bessette’s approach might actually be the more lifelike one: while she pursues her narrative with a detective’s intent, the novelist remains more or less visible as the source of the artifice, and she never lets us forget that what we are reading is a text. Put another way, it’s useful to know that Bessette once described her writing as “auto-biographie realiste, non fantaisiste”—“realistic, non-fanciful autobiography”—which makes me think of Gertrude Stein, whose work Bessette read and admired. In his afterword to a later edition of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948), Stein’s short novel about several mysterious incidents that occurred one summer while Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas were living in a country house in eastern France, John Herbert Gill writes: “Like much of Gertrude Stein’s work, the detective novel she produced is a kind of interior monologue, in which past and present, the contents of the writer’s mind as well as the room and the landscape in which she is situated at the moment of writing, are joined … The ‘continuous present’ in which Gertrude Stein’s writing lives erases all distinction between the work itself and the writer as she sets it down.” For Stein—and, because everything she wrote was filtered through her particular consciousness: the first and last person.

There is likewise—relatedly?—a simple, slightly jarring, repetitive quality—a certain bounce and singsong, like a child’s primer—in both Bessette’s and Stein’s work that tends to baffle or infuriate readers. Or does the irritation come instead from an unwillingness to meet an unusual book on its own terms? Asked in an interview about her lack of readership, Bessette responded: “These novels aren’t difficult at all; it’s just that people refuse to read them out of prejudice. Otherwise, all you have to do is open them, and any high school graduate can read them; it’s not difficult. You just have to submit to the author first.”

In Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, Stein frequently invokes Lizzie Borden (“Lizzie do you mind”; “Oh Lizzie do you understand”)— the American woman suspected but never convicted of murdering her father and stepmother with an ax—who seems to function in the book as a specter of unsolved crime and deep mystery. There is no sleuthing and no resolution in Stein’s “detective novel”; her interest seems to lie precisely in the frustration and disquietude of not-knowing, a modernist instinct Bessette pursues relentlessly in Twenty Minutes of Silence: the culprit, victim, motive, method, circumstance, and location of the crime in question shift continually throughout the book, right up until the final lines. It seems that for both writers, the genre’s established scope and tropes offered the opportunity for formal play, the subversive pleasure of writing against type: as Queneau knew, constraints typically—paradoxically—expand narrative freedom. In his book on the work of Raymond Chandler, Fredric Jameson writes: “The detective story, as a form without ideological content, without any overt political or social or philosophical point, permits … pure stylistic experimentation.”

Bessette was a reader of Chandler, and I can’t help but think that another aspect of her Poetic Novel concept—“the novel as arc lamp”—might have been influenced by the streetlights that appear in his noir portraits of Los Angeles in the thirties and forties:

The wind had risen and had a dry taut feeling, tossing the tops of trees, and making the swung arc light up the side street cast shadows like crawling lava. 

Arc lamps were the first practical electric lights, widely used in public places from the 1870s until the early 1900s, when they began to be replaced by incandescent lamps (although some ancient ones doggedly endured until mid-century); they tended to sputter and hiss and they cast high-intensity and somewhat harmful ultraviolet light (on early film sets, actors wore sunglasses between takes for their sore eyes), the brightness of which produced exceptionally dark shadows. In Chandler’s novels, the arc lamp’s effect is moody, melancholic, sinister: illumination only deepens the darkness around it.

An early French arc lamp was called the Yablochkov candle, and the brightness of arc lamps was initially measured in candlepower (some were equivalent to four thousand candles). At the end of the first section of Twenty Minutes of Silence, after the train has left the station and the weeping figure has gone home, Bessette’s narrator tells us:

This is a story of candles . . .
It’s a novel to be read and that’s in the process of being written
by candlelight.
Which is why no one can make head or tail of it.
There’s a blackout.

In this book, then, the novel-as-arc-lamp has been reduced to novel-as-single-candle against the dark of night; the dimmed effect twins the narrative, where perception is limited to the circumference of the individual who holds the flame. It’s the difference between a painting by Caravaggio and one by Georges de la Tour: a spotlit tenebrism versus a candlelit one; in both, however, darkness waits to envelop the scene. This is the sense with which we are left at the end of Twenty Minutes of Silence: the candle has been blown out, the crime has not been solved, we can’t see a thing.

Hardly any arc lamps exist now, as most were melted for scrap metal during World War I, which ended in 1918, the year Hélène Bessette was born and the Great Influenza epidemic began. The gun that kills the father in Twenty Minutes of Silence is a German model, a token of the father’s profiteering collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. In her manifesto of the roman poétique, Bessette tells us:

“Poetic” language is necessarily the language of difficult times. It is the language of suffering and everyday normal expression in Times of war. In a noisy anxious world, it is the sentence that makes itself heard. A sentence that has no choice but to be haunting and painful. The cousin of Jazz. That grabs at the attention. It might be cruel. Evidence that it’s in the right place.

There’s the sense here, as Alice Oswald says, that “it’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poem has to exist.” Add to this Bessette’s notion that “traditional prose … even when it has thoughtful and intelligent things to say, remains a very commercial product.” A Poetic Novel, then, is perhaps one from which all the excess—words, commerce, false comfort—has been wrung, because the author (and her reader) is living under duress, in extremity, at a time when the finitude of life is quite clear. All of which is not to suggest that a Poetic Novel must be somber and heavy, because Twenty Minutes of Silence is nimble, playful, funny, irreverent. I particularly like the exchanges between Monsieur the Chief Inspector and his Deputy, who remind me of Chandler’s brutally absurdist cop duos (The Little Sister’s Fred Beifus and Christy French, for instance). Bessette’s impatience with the traditional elements of a novel is apparent: it seems she simply did not write what didn’t interest her. To make a profound book by stripping it to the bone (to the “I,” the first and last person)—to write, as a scrawled note in her literary archives declares, “the biggest novel of the world by the smallest novelist of that world”—that was her ambition.

My definition of a Poetic Novel might be: a work in which the writer, against the constraint of hardship and difficulty, feels free to do whatever she pleases.

Adapted from Kathryn Scanlan’s afterword to Twenty Minutes of Silence, by Hélène Bessette and translated from the French by Kate Briggs, which will be published by New Directions on July 14.

Kathryn Scanlan is the author of The Dominant Animal, Kick the Latch, and Aug 9—Fog.

Kate Briggs is a translator and the author of This Little Art and The Long Form.