The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger's Guild by Mathias Énard

  Based primarily on its cover and the ‘book feel,’ I picked up The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild by Mathias Énard and it was a wild ride. We start with David Mazon, a PhD student in anthropology who has embarked on writing a thesis about a small town in France. I was immediately immersed; David’s flailing academic venture is represented with such wonderful humour, though not without empathy. He fails to make progress on his thesis and gets wrapped up in small-town dramas, where he is also compelled to break into a church to steal candles to light and heat the home of his crush’s grandfather. The story is recounted through David’s journal, which maintains a lively informal style and the humour is partly in his idiosyncrasies and partly in his obliviousness. The first part of the book sees him interact with the townsfolk and is essentially an extensive dramatis personae for the hundreds of pages to follow.

But it’s a bait-and-switch.

The first part of the book ends and the narrative transforms into alternating short bursts referred to as “Song”s and lengthy parades of the lives of others. I think the work critiques anthropology as a discipline because the subsequent sections demonstrate just how little David Mazon knows about the townspeople. Their personal dramas and backstories have been totally overshadowed by his fraught relationship with his girlfriend, drinking at the bar, and other country matters. So, the subsequent section reveals the backstories of his new love interest’s great grandfather, great grandmother, grandfather, grandmother, and mother. These are lengthy tales. It also revealed as a matter of course that reincarnation is real. As soon as someone dies, they are reborn as something else somewhere else; it’s similar to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in that respect, where Énard introduces a character and then introduces all the people they have been throughout history and all the people they will become.

There are a few aspects of Énard’s reincarnation that seem of particular interest. Number one is that reincarnation is not limited to species. We see a priest get reincarnated as a boar, for example. There are people reincarnated as other human children, but also trees, worms, and even seemingly non-sentient entities like a storm. The implications for time are also pretty interesting. Énard questions our assumption that lives and reincarnation work in some sort of linear fashion. Why would death and time care to follow our rules? So, it’s implied that when someone is reborn, they might be reborn into a past life or far in the future. This nonlinear mode of reincarnation offers us an interesting perspective on the implications for an individual soul across time.

The downside to this approach is that it raises the question about why I should care about any of the characters. What does it matter, for example, if someone used to be a Burgher or a farmhand or a piglet that lived for three days before it was abandoned to die? Énard has a unique storytelling approach that relies on excess to show the full scope of what escapes the eye of his seeming anthropological protagonist. I have to admit, though, it felt inconsequential knowing the multiple backstories and futures for these characters. One exception that was a wonderful touch, though, is that in the first part of the book David is constantly clearing out wormy vermin from his shower drain and wonders where they can all be coming from as he repeatedly kills them with chemical solutions. Much later in the book, Énard gives accounts of a series of murders conducted by different people in the history of the area. One is particularly grisly: a man kills his sister with an axe-blow to the head, rapes her dead body, and then cuts her open to find the source of his desire, removing organ after organ and then placing them back in her. When he is killed, we are told he is reborn in David Mazon’s drain as a worm. It’s a moment where the past-and-future-lives motif seems to connect to the central narrative in a satisfying way.

That being said, I keep talking about the central narrative as David Mazon’s, which isn’t quite fair; it is simply that his story felt the most immediate, most relatable. He gets some primacy because his story starts the novel and ends it, but there is a wealth of content in between. Énard seems to criticize David’s surface-level reading and that critique, I can’t help but feel, extends to me. At one point he interviews his new girlfriend’s grandfather for his thesis. He barely listens and asks inane questions. When the grandfather dies, he rebukes himself upon relistening to the recording:

I was embarrassed by the puerile questions I had asked and I thought, uh-oh, it’s going to take some creative editing to cut that out [...] I put on my headphones and listened to the three-hour recording. What a roller coaster. I was fascinated. It was like listening to a program on France Culture or reading a book in the Terre Humaine series—a long, arduous yet ultimately unique experience. Bloody idiot that I am, at the time I hadn’t listened to a word the old man was saying. It’s unbelievable, it’s as though I was resistant, as psychoanalysts say. The recording relates an extraordinary story. The death of his mother, his father’s suicide, the fact that he was illegitimate, cast out by his family, forced to work in the fields, robbed by his cousins of his rightful inheritance, forced to earn a living as a tractor driver, a knife grinder, sometimes a lumberjack—”two weeks we’d spend out younger, camp’d out in the swamps, hackin’ down trees, hewing elms, buckin’ the poplars, endin’ up sky west and crook’d.” Oh, he had a regional accent and an old-fashioned turn of phrase, but he was perfectly intelligible. It’s strange to think that during the recording session I was both present and absent. (375)

Upon reading that passage, I saw a little too much of myself. David misses so many important details, distracted by the immediate. Yet, when looking back on the interview he recognizes that there was a real story there—one that he needs to investigate further. That’s exactly what happened to me; I was seduced by the immediacy of David’s narrative to the point where I did not effectively appreciate the real story, that is, the full genesis of what had led to this moment in time for Lucie’s grandfather.

There were a number of storylines that were really compelling despite my ignorance. In one section, Lucie’s great grandmother is abused by her great grandfather, who is insistent on having a child. Yet, they seem unable to conceive and he beats and rapes his wife. In order to avoid the abuse, she pretends that she is pregnant. Appeased, he also gets called to war—and tries to plead his case that he cannot go because his wife is expecting, which is a horrific moment when it might work—and his wife expects him to die. As time progresses, though, she has to continue to fake her pregnancy until she gives it up, he returns unexpectedly and sees her through the window, leading to a violent misunderstanding. The different threads are woven with a deft hand.

The other side of things is that the book mimics David’s own thesis project. He flounders to complete it, loses himself in the minutiae of daily living. Towards the end, after years of not being able to complete his work, he applies to switch his studies to agriculture (denied!) and ends up abandoning his studies to work the land with Lucie. It is then revealed in full what has been the secret undercurrent of the book all along: environmentalism. There’s a real focus on ecology and preserving the land, including a whole subplot about activists preventing the use of land for artificial lakes. Given the premise that we are endlessly reincarnated, it instills a sense of importance in maintaining the environment (not that the characters are necessarily aware of the reincarnation Wheel).

The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild also revels in excess. Énard’s style is consistently lively, and the novel is heteroglossaic—there are many voices from many time periods. The sentences are sprawling with comma after comma. Énard picks up on the spirit of excess with plenty of reference to stories replete with detail (consider David’s interest in Victor Hugo, for instance). Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel in particular serves as a grotesque intertext for the sprawling novel before us. In fact, in the section that recounts the banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild, the gravediggers take turns discussing philosophy and telling stories. It’s somewhat like The Decameron or perhaps more appropriately 120 Days of Sodom where the gravediggers tell bawdy tales spoken largely in rhyme, including a retelling of Gargantua’s mammoth sex organ and its emissions on the people below. There are also excessive descriptions; lengthy lists of the foods the gravediggers eat and, later, David’s packing list for a portage trip.

All of this excess might just be a joke.

One of the characters in town is Max, a local artist with a girlfriend named Lynn. In a Bluebeardian twist, when Max shows Lynn his glorious artistic project, she is horrified by its perversity and breaks off the relationship. The audience is not at the time told what Max’s artwork actually involves. Much much later, Max reveals his work to David and the audience finds out the source of Lynn’s horror: a maximalist photography exhibit of all of Max’s excrement. It makes me think that Énard is toying with the audience: there is so much shit to cover that we then build up with false pretension. When first seeing the work, David narrates that he could not bring himself to speak. He “wondered how an artist like Max could have forsaken beauty and plunged into abjectness. Some kind of depression, no doubt. Weltschmerz. The horrors of the world that plunge you deeper and deeper into excrement every day” (360). He continues, “This was not some subtly ironic game for art cognoscenti, nor a conceptual piece by Manzoni, an inside joke for the happy few, but an almost pathological immersion, a way of being in the shit, which to me seemed both borderline psychotic and very much part of the zeitgeist” (360). It feels like commentary on the excess that the book revels in. Then, David, when pressed for commentary, offers a glowing review to Max: 

I think it is very much a work of its time. It’s a reflection on the immediate, and on the infinite yet frustrating materiality of homo faber, who is capable of simultaneously producing art and excrement. This is not about sublimation, about the artist transforming shit into art. We live in the era of and, of conjunction. Art that is simultaneously this and that. The sublime and the shit. The impossibility of escaping from the mire, you know? (361).

David’s commentary is presented here as a lie and yet it also seems to serve as a commentary on the book itself. It is this and that. A ridiculous lie and an analysis of the work. The humour cuts both ways. It makes fun of the artist but also makes fun of us for imbuing the work with meaning. 

All this said, the ending of the book offers a pretty comforting and tidy ending. Sure, there are some loose ends regarding David’s academics, but starting a farm with Lucie and being in a happy relationship away from the city gives the idyll its gentle conclusion. Despite there being a lot of excess that drew me away from the book, the ending was pretty moving, actually. It isn’t unqualified—I expect there are some things I’ve missed that would challenge my naivety—but the warmth of the ending imbued the book with a sense of optimism that these lucky hominids had a great position in the Wheel of reincarnation.

There’s a lot to like in the book; it took me on a journey, for sure, sometimes to its own detriment, but there is enough here to make the book worth reading. There is much to discuss, the style is masterful, and some of the passages that shine really shine. I think if I were smarter, the book would get even better. If you pay close attention, there will be a lot here to hang onto.

Happy reading!