Jean-Patrick Manchette,
radical writing

Serge Quadruppani – more info -
Translation: Steve Novak

The following essay was written for a conference in Frankfurt on Saturday May 20, 2005, sponsored by the French Institute.

Jean-Patrick Manchette © Jean-Paul Gratias

During his last years, when one called Jean-Patrick Manchette, one got invariably the answering machine which he had put between the world and himself and it said : « we are either gone, or busy or sleeping… ». Gone from the ‘noir’ literary scene since 1982, his presence was still felt through his occasional editorials, his interviews and above all his literary influence.

Having left the answering machine speak for him, he always called back though, and apologized with extreme curtesy, for the delay thus imposed on frienship, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes a few weeks. After having been his literary stamp, his stand back/withdrawal style had become part of his real life. Illness was certainly part of it but above all it came from his association with a social criticism trend, derived from the ‘Internationale Situationniste’, for which style and life were but one thing.

For those who might not know, the ‘Internationale Situationniste’, or IS for the initiated, was created through the more or less successful fusion of a marxist-antileninist-antistalinist revolutionary trend (embodied in France through the Socialisme ou Barbarie magazine), and of the literary trend that runs from Dada to ‘lettrisme’ and also through surrealism. At the end of his life its most well known representative, Guy Debord, was transformed by the media and the literary hip, and one might also say by his own collaboration, into a kind of hauty dandy figure, contemptuous of his time and devoid of any hope of social transformation. But to reduce Debord to that is to forget that the first paragraphs of the book, La Société du Spectacle, by which he marked his era, is a tracing, a "détournement" (a ‘re-routing’), as it was called then, of the first pages of The Capital.

It is this situationism and Debord, still active revolutionary forces in the 70’s, which occupied a central place in the heart and mind of Jean-Patrick.

When I speak about heart, it’s not by chance, since paradoxically for people who in their writing favored litotes and sacarstic irony above all, the emotional dimension was essential in the relations that linked the first situationists to the others, to allies, contacts, followers and imitators. In this flow, reciprocal insults often followed closely initial contacts and association. For those who don’t know this context, they should read the letters of Debord, or his bio by Christophe Bourseiller, to appreciate the kind of terror that Debord and his acolytes, practicing a policy of excomunication, sometimes under futile pretexts, just like the popes of previous rebel movements like André Breton and Isidore Isou. Manchette received his brunt of insults, his spouse having even, because of her marital link, a translation refused by Lebovici, publisher of Debord, who was trying to become one of his clones.

I speak of the heart but I should also mention another organ: the liver, put also under heavy stress through alcoolism, spread so widely in these circles. The deepest discussions about theory and the most violent separations often occured in Parisian bars. Alcoolic paranoia explains soundly the histeria in personal relations and the madness in which the situationist pope often walled himself in, against any sense or reason. For example, his theories about Italian extreme-left terrorism which he saw as totally manipulated by the carabinieri, or his obstination, despite his friends denials, to link Manchette with Pierre Georges, another associate of the ‘situ’ during the 70’s. In spite of or because of this atmosphere, Manchette, while being capable of understanding the defects of the theory or the ridicule of the person, remained stained until the end of his life with a kind of inward culpability, since according to the radical ‘situ’ edict, to have chosen to write ‘commercial’ novels was already tantamount to have crossed to the enemy’s camp.

"Starlette de la littérature" (little star-girl of literature) : this was Manchette own self definition in the first letter he wrote to me while I was boss of Mordicus, a magazine which insisted on defending radical anticapitalist positions around the early 90’s. One would have thought that he was just waiting for the traditional insult answer letter. There he was, in step with the text he published in Les Nouvelles littéraires on Decembre 30,1976, "Cinq remarques sur mon gagne-pain" (Five notes about my bread winning). After differentiating the enigma novel, where the bougeois Law is reinstalled, from the noir novel in which this bougeois Law order is deemed bad, Manchette came to describe as such the role of class struggle in the noir novel : class struggle is not absent there « in the same way than in the enigma novel, but here the exploited have been defeated, and are subjected to the world of Evil. This world is noir novel’s field. And in his fifth note, we should appreciate the following : « The end of the counter-revolution and the renewal of the proletarian offensive signify for intellectual professions, in the short term, the end of everything. Among other things the noir novel will soon disapear, as a phenomenon which represent a notable quantity of zero importance… ». And then he concluded in a P.S. : « One cannot deduct from this that to have spent your time and your youth (as the saying goes) writing noir novels or in Les Nouvelles littéraires (a non-limitative list) will automatically absolve you ».

In 1990 the counter-revolution was not finished, we were still waiting for the proletarian offensive and the noir novel, for our greatest pleasure, was far for disapearing. But Manchette remained in his self-denigrating attitude, logged between humorous and masochistic and as defined by his P.S. Nonetheless the oversimplifying, the arrogance, the voluntary blindness, all despicable aspects of situationism, must not lead us to forget that this trend represented, around 1968, one of the highest layers of radical thought, a particularly successful expression of what was new in that era, far from maoist buffoonery and trotkists shabbiness (…the cheap touch of these last polemical formulas will show that I also live under their influence).

In pointing with Debord to the power of Spectacle (Entertainment) in modern societies and in asking with Vaneigem that a revolution not just be an ‘ideal’ separated from daily life, the situationists gave a language to rebellion for this end of XXth century and for those to follow. Draped in the repute of the French language of the Great Century era, with its special moments, its readily old-fascioned expressions, and its respect of grammar (including the subjunctive tense in some of its funniest occurances), this superb language seems coming straight out of the chronicles of Cardinal of Retz (a chronicler often quoted by the situationists): this being the paradox of a critique of the capitalist modernity which takes for its language the idioma of old regime aristocrats. To that one must add the hegelian style of young Marx with its genitive tense reversals (philosophy of misery and misery of philosophy), its taste for unannounced misdirections and a true feeling for potent formulas. In the end a biting language whose influence grew bigger with young people as the education crisis had thrown into quite dissaray the language of the new generations. The intimidation and the seduction of situationism is also explained by its literary style which spoke without telling it overtly about a time when words were not thrown into the blend-all mixer of mercantile fashions.

It is that language that Manchette made his and worked out in his own way. But everything that in the confines of the situationist bistro took on accrimonious accents, became jewels of truth, joyous roghisness and happy provocation in the novels of Jean-Patrick.

I will only give this quotation as an example, about the hero of Three to Kill (Le Petit bleu de la côte ouest), who the author tells us at the start (and will tell us again in the same scene at the end of the book) that as an company executive who will kill and near be killed before coming back to the oppressing world of normality, his ‘reason’ to be there, circling Paris on the highway (motorway in UK) is « because of his place in the chain of production ».

In theory Manchette defended a stark conception of writng, based on rigorous behaviorism. He explained that in a world were spectacle (entertainment) and manipulation rule, to abstain to enter the inner feelings of characters seemed still the only least-manipilative strategy. Quoting one of his last texts : « The barbaric times that we entered lead less than ever to romantic effusions » (J.-P.M, Chroniques, Rivage, p.314). According to him, in that world there was no room left for lyrical effusions. His claimed model was Dashiel Hammet. But re-reading Red Harvest one sees how behaviorism can be efficient (the famous first scene in which the simple description of a cops’ attire foreshadows the town’s gangrene) or sometimes ridiculous : instead of saying simply that a man is angry, Hammett paints a picture of facial expressions that could as easily tell of an epilepsy attak.

Manchette was saved from these derailings thanks to a quality that his model decidedly lacked : a very keen sense of humour. In The Prone Gunman (La position du tireur couché), Terrier, the hero, a hired killer who wants to retire, learns from a paper that his girlfriend was assassinated after having been savageley tortured. Here’s Terrier’s reaction : « For a moment , he looked like he was thinking. He didn’t look shocked. Maybe a bit of pain. Surely he was reflecting : in fact his face looked tense ».

Somewhere else in Three to Kill (Le Petit Bleu) : « I killed him yesterday, Gerfaut said suddenly. I shattered his goddam nuggin, I broke his head. And Gerfaut astounded broke into tears. He folded his arms on the formica table, rested his forehead on his arms and sobbed nervously.His tears stopped immediately but he remainded there trembling breathing air in and out with the sound of a Brazilian music instrument ».

Who will beleive that this funny Brazilian musical instrument is cold behaviorism ? Similarly in the superb start of The Prone Gunman (La position du tireur couché), he was telling about the effects of the wind coming from the North Sea going through the plain of Cheshire « that made cats flatten their ears when they heard it snarling in the chimneys » : could he ignore that he was being lyrical, a lyricism mixed with humour an rendered so efficient as it was surrounded by held-back thoughts.

The scriptwriter he was knew better than anybody (and that’s literally true : no present day noir novel writer can measure up to him in the domain of dialogs) how to open up the logic of emotions through the incoherences of speech. His maniacal attention to objects and in particular the precision of his weapons descriptions (it’s thanks to one of his chronicles in Charlie Hebdo that I got, for my own use in my novels, the books of weapons specialist Dominique Venner, of course an ultra-rightist), or the sociological exactitude of wardrobes, all betrayed a vision close to the one of Perec in Choses, a book lauded in its time by the situationists. The art of Manchette, closer to Echenoz than to Hammett, and richer in deas than that of Echenoz, overflowed on every count the clinical framework in which he pretended to enclose it.

In writing this I still have the feeling to be conversing with him. When I objected to him that, in my view, behaviorism was only a literary convention as any other one, and that I didn’t share his conviction that it was the only ‘politically correct’ literary style, he ended up answering while laughing : « in any case it’s my opinion, and if you don’t agree I’ll shoot you ». Nonetheless, one has to look for the reasons for his stylistic rigorism, for his obstination to remain in the noir domain, for his sarcastic rejection of a self-involved ‘artistic literature’, in his stance bent on ethics more than esthetics, ethics even beyond politics and all that the pratice of situationism involved as posing or affectation.

When, after writing and phone calling for years I met him in flesh and blood for the first time (he, already didn’t have much flesh left), it was not by chance that this first meeting took place among the riots which occured in the 18th Parisian district after the killing of a young black in a police station. The cigarette holder he held in the tear-gas saturated air and the banana peels that he carefully laid under the steps of the police are worthy to remain as markers of a spirit endowed both with the charm of adolescence and a knowledge as old as rebellion.

I’m not unaware that he would hear my present speech about rebellion, here among ‘respectables’, which much irony. But I do beleive that the forces of creation and critical thought are able to go beyond the frameworks, institutional or stylistic, were people pretend to box them in. In saying so, I imagine my dear buddy, just like Griffu, that graphic novel character he wrote for Tardi, who, in the end, when dead, tell us « From where I am, I smile ».