Making a Novel explores Gavarry’s revolutionary approach to language in Hoppla! 1 2 3
.
He takes three objects for his novel—a coconut palm tree, a cargo ship,
and the centaur—and creates entire worlds around them. With these in
mind, Gavarry then uses the deuterocanonical Book of Judith as a frame,
writing the story of this biblical heroine from the perspective of an
adolescent male character named Ti-Jus. Well versed in etymology, the
scientific understanding of things, words and proper names issued from
ancient Greece, Gavarry applies his knowledge to create new jargon and
description for his novel Hoppla!
. For example, in the
first “panel” of the triptych, Gavarry uses the scientific name for the
coconut palm, coco nucifera, and its flower, spadice, as the root for
slang when one of Ti-Jus’ teenaged friends expresses annoyance as he
tries to open a door while the train is moving, “What the Nucifera!”
Another youth replies mockingly, “Spadices, dude, spadices!” Gavarry
explains:
This language is a jargon of
sorts, or something resembling jargon. Understood only by insiders, it
comprises various borrowings, distortions, and wordplay, all having some
connection to the coconut palm.
Together with language, art, myth (personal or
historical) and memory, Gevarry shows us that the possibilities are
endless when writing a novel, and the most fascinating parts are the
discoveries (from either accidents or the subconscious) the writer makes
along the way. Making a Novel presents different ways to look at
language, history and synchronicity. Gevarry refers to the synchronic
events as “pleasant surprises”:
The times when suddenly a writer
discovers that the hand of fate has worked in his favor. Or at least,
this is his impression when, upon rereading his text for the umpteenth
time, he suddenly apprehends an unexpected meaning or connotation, a
stubborn echo of his own personal story, or a resurgence of some
implicit theme he believed to have buried deep in the subtext; and
likewise, while doing some research, he comes across a word he never
knew existed, but which he immediately recognizes as the one he needed
to complete a certain sentence.
