Baga by Robert Pinget

First published: 1958 (English translation, 1967)

Type of work: Fantasy

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: The fictional world of Fantoine and Agapa

Principal Characters:

• Architruc, the king and narrator
• Baga, his prime minister
• Piston, one of the king’s two musicians
• Vieille, the other royal musician
• Corniflet, the king’s barber
• Conegrund, the queen of Doualia

The Novel

So that his nephews, who will inherit his throne, will understand his life, King Architruc is writing his memoirs. Although his narrative is fragmented and even contradictory, one can piece together much of Architruc’s life from the story that he tells. At twenty, he became king after his father was assassinated. On the day of his coronation, he named Baga to be his prime minister, because Baga gave him an antacid to soothe his churning stomach. At first, Architruc traveled around the country dispensing justice, but later he tired of all activity. He now believes that “what one has to find in life is a formula,” and he has adopted one that suits him. He gets up at noon, does some simple exercises—which he hates because they require exertion—and examines his collections of pebbles, shells, leaves, and eyeglasses. Corniflet, the royal barber, arrives; after the daily shave, Architruc waters his pet plant, Ducky, dresses—always in white—and goes to the hall for his meal, which invariably consists of beef, followed by an omelet and a serving of cheese.

Anything that upsets this tedious existence threatens him, so when ambassadors from Novocardia arrive, he does not want to receive them. Not only will their visit disturb his routine, but also he suspects that they plan to cause trouble. Architruc’s suspicions prove correct, for the Novocardians intend to occupy the valley of Chancheze, where Baga has been breeding rats. The rodents have been straying across the border and damaging Novocardian crops; despite repeated petitions to Architruc, nothing has been done to stop the depredations (probably because Baga has kept all these petitions from the king), and now Novocardia has determined to resolve the matter itself.

With the aid of the rats, Architruc defeats the invaders, but the ensuing war of attrition proves costly. Architruc’s kingdom is almost depopulated, and he himself flees to the forest to live as a hermit. After a century, he tires of his loneliness; he then returns to his palace, pausing only to visit his two old musicians.

Soon, another intruder upsets the king’s daily round of inactivity, though Conegrund, the queen of Doualia, is less bellicose than the Novocardians. Still, the royal treasury is hard-pressed to provide the pageantry and food she requires, and her voluptuousness even threatens to involve Architruc in lovemaking, until a black dishwasher satisfies her lust temporarily. The queen finds the dishwasher so satisfactory that she buys him for a thousand rupees, thus somewhat replenishing the king’s coffers.

With this money, Architruc resolves to build a castle in the valley of Rouget. One day, while supervising the construction, he wanders off and finds Sister Louise. He joins her convent and even converts to being a woman, taking the name of Sister Angela. Together with Louise, he persuades a local girl, Mary, to join their religious order of Saint Fiduce. Mary and Sister Angela sleep together until the king regains his masculinity. Mary then loses interest in him, so Architruc once more returns to the palace to resume his former routine.

The Characters

In the opening lines of the book, long before the narrator reveals his name, he asserts, “I am a king. Yes, a king of myself. Of my stagnation.” These are the same words used by the nameless speaker in Quelqu’un (1965; Someone, 1984). Is he then the same person? Even after he begins to call himself Architruc, the reader can hardly be said to be enlightened, for Monsieur Truc is the French equivalent of Mr. What’s-his-name, so that Architruc is simply King What’s-his-name. Nor does his appellation inspire confidence, when one realizes that “truc” also means trick, making Architruc a master trickster, the archdeceiver.

One cannot even be certain whether Architruc is deceiving the reader or himself. He claims to be writing his memoirs so that his nephews will understand his life and presumably benefit from the account. Yet he adopts Rara, a dishwasher—the same one Conegrund buys?—as his heir, thereby subverting the purpose of his memoirs. He claims that he made Baga his prime minister out of gratitude, and in the course of the book he confers other honors upon him also: He presents Baga with the ribbon of the Order of St. Honore, makes him his cousin, and proclaims him Count of Fidelity. Yet he also seems to distrust this man, stating that he named Baga his prime minister to lure him away from the Queen Mother, with whom Baga was having an affair.

Even more shadowy and enigmatic than Architruc is this prime minister. Is he merely the instrument of the king, the loyal umbrella carrier, or is he the power behind the throne? He knows more about the state of the country’s military preparedness than the king, and he seems to have sought war with Novocardia. When Baga claims that only sixty people died in the war, should one trust his version of events or Architruc’s? If Baga is such a schemer, why does he not take advantage of the king’s lengthy absences to stage a coup? Or did he already engineer the one that put Architruc on the throne?

The identities of the other characters also pose challenges. The king cannot distinguish between his two musicians. In both name and character, Queen Conegrund closely resembles Voltaire’s Cunegonde in Candide: Ou, L’Optimisme (1759; Candide: Or, All for the Best, 1759). Architruc’s nameless father seems to be the king’s double, not only in lack of name but also in behavior. The old king was killed because his subjects tire of his self-indulgent sloth. Significantly, in Pinget’s play based on this novel, Architruc (1961), the title character is killed. Is one therefore reading a dead man’s tale prepared for disinherited heirs?

Critical Context

In a lecture in 1970, Pinget observed that his characters and setting “exist not as defined but as in the process of definition”; he uses what he calls “continual metamorphosis” to mirror the uncertainty and instability of the late twentieth century. Architruc assumes numerous avatars in the course of the novel, as does his domain of Fantoine and Agapa. The valley of Chancheze in Pinget’s previous work, Graal flibuste (1956), had contained a temple; now that building has yielded to a factory for manufacturing rat pelts.

While these constant alterations serve a serious thematic purpose, they also parody conventional genres. Graal flibuste rewrites the novel of quest as a journey to nowhere. Similarly, Baga assaults autobiographical fiction by presenting a narrator so unreliable that nothing is certain—not his age, not his sex, not even his actions or the reasons for them. Baga also shares the surrealism of Pinget’s earlier books, in which a steeple (clocher) may be a coachman (coacher) and a cucumber may choose to get a suntan.

At the same time, this book’s search for reality anticipates Clope au dossier (1961) and subsequent novels by Pinget in which various characters try to piece together reality from clues that refuse to yield their secrets. Baga thus occupies an important place in Pinget’s canon, both epitomizing his earlier work and foreshadowing even the 1971 play Identite, suivi de Abel et Bela, which, as its name suggests, once more explores the problem of self-knowledge.

Bibliography

Bann, Stephen. “Robert Pinget,” in The London Magazine. IV (October 7, 1964), pp. 22-35.

Cismarie, Alfred. “Robert Pinget: An Introduction,” in American Benedictine Reivew. XIX (June, 1968), pp. 203-210.

Henkels, Robert M., Jr. Robert Pinget: The Novel as Quest, 1979.

Knapp, Bettina, ed. French Novelists Speak Out, 1976.

Mercier, Vivian. The New Novel from Queneau to Pinget, 1971.

Oppenheim, Lois, ed. Three Decades of the French New Novel, 1986.