11. Marie Redonnet

“The termites have been beaten”-Marie Redonnet (trans. by Jordan Stump)

For Jane Alison, the structure of Marie Redonnet’s Hôtel Splendid resembles nothing so much as a series of wavelets. In her book, Meander, Spiral, Explode, Alison offers up readings of a dozen or so novels and short stories, showing how there are far more interesting ways to organize a piece of writing than the standard rising action/climax/falling action of Freytag’s triangle. Taking aim at what she views as the “masculo-sexual arc” of the traditional narrative structure, complete with its implications of male orgasm, she looks instead to nature for richer examples. And what she finds is that patterns observed in the non-human world not only offer more interesting models for fictional narratives to follow but that some of the best contemporary authors have in fact seized on those very models. So, as revealed in Alison’s study, The House on Mango Street is structured like a spiral, Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever unfolds as a radial, and Marie Redonnet’s debut 1986 novel, proceeds by “countless small waves.”

Redonnet's book takes place in a decrepit hotel at the edge of a swamp in some rather distant locale in (presumably) France. The nameless narrator is an aging woman who inherited the hotel from her grandmother who had built it in better times. As the narrator attempts vainly to maintain some kind of order, constantly unblocking the toilets or dealing with infestations, she looks after her ridiculous older sisters who live out their days in the hotel and attends to the periodic groups of guests who stay at the Splendid because there is nowhere else around. For Alison, what’s interesting here is not the chronological narrative, which is minimal but linear, but the ebb and flow of the narrator’s struggles with the hotel, her (modest) successes always alternating with more severe failures. Alison sees this pattern as being like tiny waves, coming and going in small but definite undulations.

Once you are trained to see wavelets, you see them everywhere. So while the narrative does also “grind forward in time,” as Alison puts it, it proceeds by fits and starts, by little waves. At the Hôtel Splendid, sometimes things happen. Then nothing happens. Then something happens that undoes that first thing. Leaks appear and then are fixed. Guests come and then just as suddenly depart. Termites infest the hotel and then are “beaten.” (Although we can be sure a different pest will soon take their place.) These modifications may involve human agency, but usually, for all her efforts, it is not that of the narrator. And so, she narrates each event and non-event in a simple declarative statement. Every sentence is similarly structured and similarly uninflected. In this way, events just occur and these events ultimately tend towards chaos. And that is how it often feels. We try to assert as much control over our lives and our surroundings as possible. But then one thing happens and then another and, without us even really noticing what is happening, we find ourselves, like the hapless caretaker of the failed hotel, quite defeated.