“On this hospital bed, over which dung flies are hovering, images of my life come back to me...and if they were placed end to end they would make up a film at once grotesque and horrific, since it would have the peculiarity that the soundtrack, parallel to the longitudinal perforations along its edge, would emit nothing but explosions of intestinal gas.”
This is the opening paragraph of Serge Gainsbourg’s first and only novel, called Evguenie Sokolov. It is a surrealist-inspired tale, semi-autobiographical in content, mock-confesional in tone, and employs both low-brow and learned language to poke fun at the modern art world which is depicted as pretentious, unsophisticated and deserving of our scorn.
It is, of course, all tongue-in-cheek, tasteless and funny but the underlying message is clear.
The conceit is utterly original: Evguenie Sokolov is the protagonist and narrator whose life is complicated by a condition of extreme flatulence which, while at first socially and artistically debilitating, soon enables him to penetrate the art world.
Initially, he wins over the commercial art world by inventing a successful comic strip character (under his most aptly conceived pseudonym “Crepitus Ventris”) called the Jet-Man, ”a new Batman propelled by his own wind”. Later, Sokolov introduces his main contribution to the serious art world: “hyperabstractionism which resembled the electro-encephalographs of epileptics”, more crudely known as “gasograms”. These gasograms are the result of a happy accident of timing (the simultaneous firing of fart and brushstroke) facilitated by the rigging of a chair-like device consisting of a tripod and a metal bicycle seat with coil springs “which gave my perch a variable power of amplification and the sensitivity of a finely tuned seismograph.”
And then, when he loses the ability to synchronize brushstroke with passing wind, he learns to make “shit stars” which he is paid to paste on to the embassy ceiling in Moscow. But of course, like so many geniuses before him, Sokolov dies an early death. His, appropriately enough, is brought on by “peritonitis resulting from an especially powerful explosion of intestinal gases”.
The novella ends thus,
“Just as one of the gravediggers was about to throw down the first shovelful of earth, and Gerhaart Stolfzer, complying with the wishes expressed in the artist’s note, put a light to a cigar, there was a muffled report which lifted the lid of the coffin. Evguenie Sokolov had just breathed his final anal sigh, and rendered a last, gaseous, posthumous, poisonous salute to the memory of mankind.”
The final paragraph, like the first, maintains the irreverent tone of the work while simultaneously signalling its intentions: Gainsbourg is writing about himself and his reputation as an outsider, a bad-boy, one who breaks all the taboos and invites us to look truthfully at our culture.
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