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The spark for H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Bessette\u2019s 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\u2019s 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?<\/span><\/p>\n She published the book in 1955 as <\/span>Vingt minutes de silence <\/span><\/i>(newly translated as <\/span>Twenty Minutes of Silence<\/span><\/i>) with \u00c9ditions Gallimard, the home of her editor and champion, Raymond Queneau. It\u2019s not surprising that Queneau admired Bessette\u2019s 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 <\/span>Exercises in Style<\/span><\/i>, Queneau\u2019s translator Barbara Wright describes the Oulipo cofounder\u2019s interest in spoken French, citing a passage from his <\/span>B\u00e2tons, chiffres et lettres<\/span><\/i> (1950): \u201cI 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.\u201d Written language could be reformed by the spoken, and \u201cthe first statement of this new language should be \u2026 to put some philosophical dissertation into spoken French.\u201d <\/span>Twenty Minutes of Silence<\/span><\/i>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The novel\u2014and it is a novel first and foremost because the author says it is, and also because the novel form, like poetry, contains everything\u2014opens with a section titled \u201cAtmosphere,\u201d 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: \u201cYou\u2019re like a cow in a field gaping at an autumn train.\u201d It\u2019s reasonable to assume the weeper is the mother of the boy who has killed his father\u2014or the sister of the boy, being scolded by the mother\u2014but it could also be the narrator, the author, upbraiding herself for being \u201csilly,\u201d for crying over the strangers in whose lives she\u2019s entangled her mind and emotions:<\/span><\/p>\n You\u2019re not going to cry over nothing. (And, a little later: \u201cI am in other people.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s the first instance of the eccentric narrative slippage signature to this book. Who is the \u201cI\u201d? Who is the \u201cyou\u201d? Who is \u201cshe\u201d? Who is the audience inferred when the \u201cI\u201d abruptly turns away from the \u201cyou\u201d to describe the \u201cshe\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n You\u2019re not going to cry. The destabilization continues into \u201cPoem of the Facts,\u201d in which the narrative voice, shattered into blunt sentence fragments that build a harsh, staccato rhythm in their accumulation, reads like personal address (\u201cNo, excuse me, my apologies for misleading you, the revolver was in the cupboard, buried beneath a pile of sheets\u201d); yellow journalism (\u201cIt was hatred that put the murder weapon into the young parricide\u2019s hands\u201d); contradiction (\u201cHatred cannot put a weapon into anyone\u2019s hands for the good reason that she doesn\u2019t exist\u201d); peanut gallery (\u201cHatred isn\u2019t female. Is this journalist some kind of poet?\u201d); accusation (\u201cYou\u2019re deliberately misleading us\u201d); police statement (\u201cThe victim\u2019s son, aged fifteen, has confessed to <\/span>killing his father\u201d); judgment (\u201cLoad of nonsense\u201d); testimony (\u201cAll the lights were off. \/ No, they weren\u2019t, shouts the maid named Rose Hollyhock\u201d); editorial correction (\u201cThen she retracts her statement\u201d); and novelistic speculation (\u201cWe know all about the light sleeping habits of nervous, dissatisfied, irritated, belligerent, preoccupied, troubled, querulous, unhappy women\u201d). 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\u2014and 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\u2014something 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\u2019t be bothered to cite its sources, because the source is simply the novelist herself. It\u2019s what Bessette, in her manifesto of the <\/span>roman po\u00e9tique<\/span><\/i>\u2014the Poetic Novel\u2014calls a<\/span><\/p>\n Novel in the first A traditional \u201crealistic\u201d novel strives to develop characters with believable physical and psychological detail, but Bessette\u2019s approach might actually be the more lifelike one: while she pursues her narrative with a detective\u2019s 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\u2019s useful to know that Bessette once described her writing as \u201cauto-biographie realiste, non fantaisiste\u201d\u2014\u201crealistic, non-fanciful autobiography\u201d\u2014which makes me think of Gertrude Stein, whose work Bessette read and admired. In his afterword to a later edition of <\/span>Blood on the Dining-Room Floor <\/span><\/i>(1948), Stein\u2019s 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: \u201cLike much of Gertrude Stein\u2019s work, the detective novel she produced is a kind of interior monologue, in which past and present, the contents of the writer\u2019s mind as well as the room and the landscape in which she is situated at the moment of writing, are joined \u2026 The \u2018continuous present\u2019 in which Gertrude Stein\u2019s writing lives erases all distinction between the work itself and the writer as she sets it down.\u201d For Stein\u2014and, because everything she wrote was filtered through her particular consciousness: the first and last person.<\/span><\/p>\n There is likewise\u2014relatedly?\u2014a simple, slightly jarring, repetitive quality\u2014a certain bounce and singsong, like a child\u2019s primer\u2014in both Bessette\u2019s and Stein\u2019s 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: \u201cThese novels <\/span>aren\u2019t difficult at all; it\u2019s 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\u2019s not difficult. You just have to submit to the author first.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In<\/span> Blood on the Dining-Room Floor,<\/span><\/i> Stein frequently invokes Lizzie Borden (\u201cLizzie do you mind\u201d; \u201cOh Lizzie do you understand\u201d)\u2014 the American woman suspected but never convicted of murdering her father and stepmother with an ax\u2014who seems to function in the book as a specter of unsolved crime and deep mystery. There is no sleuthing and no resolution in Stein\u2019s \u201cdetective novel\u201d; her interest seems to lie precisely in the frustration and disquietude of not-knowing, a modernist instinct Bessette pursues relentlessly in <\/span>Twenty Minutes of Silence<\/span><\/i>: 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\u2019s established scope and tropes offered the opportunity for formal play, the subversive pleasure of writing against type: as Queneau knew, constraints typically\u2014paradoxically\u2014expand narrative freedom. In his book on the work of Raymond Chandler, Fredric Jameson writes: \u201cThe detective story, as a form without ideological content, without any overt political or social or philosophical point, permits \u2026 pure stylistic experimentation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Bessette was a reader of Chandler, and I can\u2019t help but think that another aspect of her Poetic Novel concept\u2014\u201cthe novel as arc lamp\u201d\u2014might have been influenced by the streetlights that appear in his noir portraits of Los Angeles in the thirties and forties:<\/span><\/p>\n The wind had risen and had a dry taut feeling, tossing the <\/span>tops of trees, and making the swung arc light up the side street <\/span>cast shadows like crawling lava.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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\u2019s novels, the arc lamp\u2019s effect is moody, melancholic, sinister: illumination only deepens the darkness around it.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 <\/span>Twenty Minutes of Silence<\/span><\/i>, after the train has left the station and the weeping figure has gone home, Bessette\u2019s narrator tells us:<\/span><\/p>\n This is a story of candles . . . 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\u2019s 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 <\/span>Twenty Minutes of Silence<\/span><\/i>: the candle has been blown out, the crime has not been solved, we can\u2019t see a thing.<\/span><\/p>\n Hardly any arc lamps exist now, as most were melted for scrap metal during World War I, which ended in 1918, the year H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Bessette was born and the Great Influenza epidemic began. The gun that kills the father in <\/span>Twenty Minutes of Silence<\/span><\/i> is a German model, a token of the father\u2019s profiteering collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. In her manifesto of the<\/span> roman po\u00e9tique<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> Bessette tells us:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cPoetic\u201d 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\u2019s in the right place.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n<\/span>In the street.
\n<\/span>In other people.
\n<\/span>When you\u2019re in other people.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n<\/span>She\u2019s <\/span>crying<\/span>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n<\/span>And the last person
\n<\/span>Novel reduced to its simplest expression
\n<\/span>A single character
\n<\/span>The others diminished.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n<\/span>It\u2019s a novel to be read and that\u2019s in the process of being written
\n<\/span>by candlelight.
\n<\/span>Which is why no one can make head or tail of it.
\n<\/span>There\u2019s a blackout.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n