Gérard Jarlot: Un chat qui aboie (1963)

In Laure Alder’s biography Marguerite Duras (1998) she declares – in a sentence that reminds me of Albert Camus’s remark about Jacques Copeau and French theatre – that there is a before Gérard Jarlot and an after Gérard Jarlot in Duras’s work. She met him in 1957: he was a charming seducer, cultivated, and a writer. Adler says she used to drink with him, went to Italy with him, and he was an excellent fuck. He told his journalist friends that he had devised a way of lifting his bed up to allow him to see himself making love to Duras in a mirror, and even allowed some to visit his handywork.

With Jarlot, her books took on a new style, notably with Moderato Cantabile (1958) and Le Ravissement de V. Stein (1964). She also helped him considerably with his third novel, Un chat qui aboie (lit. ‘A Barking Cat’). It just won the prix Médicis, the jury including Duras herself,  although it did so against the wishes of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. So what is this bizarrely-titled book exactly about?

The back cover was presumably written by Jarlot, who says:

‘What makes a barking cat? At worst it’s an incongruity, at best an error in essence: it does precisely that for which it’s not intended.’ (My translation.)

He goes on to ask if Armand Peuche, the main character, is made to love Rose, his wife, whose mother Louise-Anna was against the marriage. Then he mentions Armand’s devouring excesses, and generally excessive behaviour, but the same could be said of a number of other characters in this huge, tiny-font-sized, 464-page book.

In fact I’d say that there are many barking cats here, and not just the characters: scenes tend to merge, possibly in mid-sentence, with for instance the behaviour of two characters merging with two others, and even two more, possibly using different (but usually clearly indentifiable) names. The present also merges with the  past, which is usually revisited in memory: Armand’s infernale mémoire recalls Samuel Beckett’s L’Expulsé (1946), in which this sentence appears: ‘C’est tuant, les mémoires’, and which Beckett later translated as ‘Memories are killling’.

Essentially, the immensely rich Armand from Pracomtat marries Rose, has three children (Jacques, Fernand and Eliabeth, in that order) by her, and then Rose starts disappearing into the countryside with agricultural engineer Albert Colombille. In a desperate attempt to win back her love, Armand in a wildly extravagant, hugely expensive moment, launches a festival that many people come from miles around to see: but Rose escapes to Lyon with her new lover.

Then, after about eighteen months of seclusion in the basement, Armand is smitten by a young woman pissing into the basement window: he must find out who it is! Unfortunately, Armand is rewarded by the woman – Roma Heïdowicz – covering Fernand in love bites and losing her virginity to Jacques. Even worse, as a result of Fernand discovering Jacques and Roma in a post-coital moment, Fernand drowns. Armand’s wrath is huge and he banishes Jacques to his lycée for three years, giving strict instructions that he is to receive no mail from Roma, now Armand’s pet hate.

I could continue by mentioning Rose’s lapse into poverty and alcoholism, Roma’s new love in Lyon and area, a dead body in a basement, the (sado-)masochism, Armand’s turning of the castle into a fortress to keep out Roma, Armand’s cheating in a major cycle race, or even an apocalyptic ending in which virtually everyone is blown sky high, but I’ve probably said enough so far. An insane comedy-cum-tragedy in which almost everyone is mad or obsessed with something or someone.

Gérard Jarlot was jealous of Margaret Duras because she was a brilliant writer. Marguerite Duras was jealous of Gérard Jarlot because he was a brilliant seducer. Nevertheless, Un chat qui aboie is a brilliant (if very unven) novel but Jarlot is now virtually forgotten, which is so very wrong.