The eye at the gas pump: Alexandre Labruffe

Micro-scenes of a gas station attendant

Alexandre Labruffe, Chroniques d'une station service (Paris, Éditions Verticales, 2019). [quote as STS]

Alexandre Labruffe's debut novel presents the mental log of an unnamed gas station attendant who runs a station on the outskirts of Paris—wedged between a city highway, a Campanile hotel, and a dilapidated social housing complex. The text consists of 189 numbered chapters, many of which comprise little more than a single sentence and are appended to the main narrative like belated footnotes, using Latin additions (bis, ter, quater). The novel does not develop a plot in the classical sense; instead, it strings together micro-scenes: passing customers, a drunken guest calling out for the poets, a family in a Renault Espace, a truck carrying mooing cows parked in the lot at night.

The narrator fills the emptiness of his job with movies—he watches "Mad Max" on an endless loop—with reading, with checkers games against his friend Nietzland, a washed-up ex-tennis pro, and with the devoted observation of the smell of gasoline. From this static arrangement, loose narrative threads gradually unravel: the weekly appearance of a Japanese cyclist, who later takes shape as Seiza; the loss of a USB stick containing the only manuscript of his first novel, which he accidentally hands to a homeless person; enigmatic coded messages in books that strangers leave at the counter; a lit window in the supposedly uninhabited house across the street.

In the end, the narrator breaks free from his static existence. A cry for help from his father in the countryside—a woman he met online has robbed him—sets him in motion. He drives through the night in Nietzland's car, stops at a motorway service station, and a radiant attendant asks him: "Will you take me?" The novel ends on this threshold, with the transition from his immobile station to a nomadic life, open to the unknown.

The gas station as a form of consciousness

A drunk man staggers to the bar and shouts into the night, asking where all the poets have gone; a family gets out of a Renault Espace, buys a bottle of Coca Zero, the mother hurriedly dictates something into her phone, then they drive off; a cow moos through the fog from a cattle truck in the truck parking lot; every Tuesday at six o'clock a young Japanese woman arrives on a bicycle, buys onion chips and disappears again towards Paris; a man dressed as a priest needs gasoline in a canister and wears combat boots under his cassock; a stranger in a felt hat deposits a book containing an encrypted series of numbers; on the screen behind the bar, "Mad Max" is playing for the umpteenth time, while the security monitors show the departing customer as a limping flamingo – and above it all flickers the broken neon sign HORIZON, gradually losing letters. Whoever opens this book enters a place where everything merely passes through, yet nothing leaves a trace: a transit space that, as the following reading suggests, reveals itself as a mirror of consciousness and as a form of storytelling itself. This essay argues that Labruffe's novel stages the gas station not merely as a setting, but as a form of perception and writing: the non-place of late-capitalist transit becomes a model of a fragmented, permeable consciousness that registers the world only as a passage of signs and, precisely in this reduction, unleashes its own ironic-melancholic poetry. The formal fragmentation into short chapters, the narrative stance of the passive observer, and the obsessive metaphor of petroleum intertwine to form a poetics of transience, in which consumption, apocalypse, and desire fall into the same semantic field. This leads to the guiding questions of the following investigation: To which genre can a text be assigned that is called a novel but is structured like a book of aphorisms? How does a deliberately plotless text still manage to organize tension and coherence? What function does space assume when the classic plot disappears? And finally: How does the novel reflect on itself when its narrator is a writer who loses his own manuscript?

The subtitle promises a novel, but the structure defies genre expectations. The numbering of the chapters, their extreme brevity, and the use of postscripts place the text close to a notebook or book of aphorisms. Chapter 184 consists of two words – “Écran noir.” – others of a single thought. The narrator himself confesses his predilection for the marginal form par excellence: “I have always loved footnotes.” ¹ This remark should be read poetologically: the entire novel operates on the principle of the footnote, the addendum, the marginal, which intrudes upon the central theme. The "bis" and "ter" chapters are footnotes in form, in which the narrator comments on himself. Labruffe thus writes in the tradition of fragmentary French prose—from the moralists to Jules Renard's "Journal" to the minimalist texts of the Verticales series—a novel that constantly undermines its own novelistic nature and, at the same time, through the few continuing narrative threads, preserves just enough narrative to prevent the genre designation from becoming ironically empty.

The optics of surveillance, deferred movement

The narrative is consistently told in the first person and present tense, which lends the text its immediacy and, at the same time, its sense of being detached from reality: there is no narrating "I" ordering from a distance, but rather a perceiving "I" that remains in the moment. Significantly, this "I" often does not see the world directly, but rather through intermediaries. The first drunk customer leaves the scene not in front of the narrator's eyes, but on the monitors: "Across the screens of the video surveillance: his gait like that of a limping flamingo." ² The narrator calls himself a "social sentry". ³ and describes his attitude as fluctuating between the "nonchalance of a melancholic zombie" and the "seriousness of a hypochondriacal anthropologist" ⁴. This mediatized optic makes him a camera among cameras; the narrative perspective is itself a surveillance perspective that registers people as a data stream and at the same time reflects on its own superfluity – the recurring question of why he has not long since been replaced by a machine.

If one asks how such a plotless text generates coherence, the answer lies in a web of interrupted, never fully resolved threads. Several micro-narrative threads run parallel and are deliberately kept in the realm of suggestion: the lost USB stick with the manuscript, the coded number sequences in the books ("4-5-13-1-9-14"), the mysterious light in the uninhabited house, the lamenting phone calls from the friend Ray in Malta. None of these strands fulfills its promise of suspense; they are, in the words of the blurb, "minimalist plot arcs," "chance clues," and "erotic mix-ups." The only thread that undergoes any development is the approach to Seiza—and even this culminates in an anticlimax, the grotesque escape from her apartment with the stolen lace lingerie in his trouser pocket. Only the ending, which sends the narrator onto the highway, lends the text a vector-like form: the point of view becomes a line of escape. After the chapter numbering is broken into alphabetically marked sections (A to I), the narrator leaves the suburban station, drives at night to his robbed father in the countryside and refuels at a motorway service station, where the roles are reversed – for the first time he is a customer, another person operates the pump:

These final words refuse any conclusion and establish a pure threshold. The symmetrical reversal—the gas station attendant as the server, the female attendant as the active participant—reflects the gender dynamic of the book, in which the initiative lies with the women; the inserted doubts in parentheses keep the scene suspended between reality, desire, and cinematic cliché, and the "inducing" smile once again takes up the vortex metaphor of the station. The structure, therefore, is not simply stagnation, but rather deferred, almost denied movement, which only reveals itself as a possibility in the very last scene.

Satellite figures and novlangue

The narrator forms a constant center around which characters revolve without permanently binding themselves to him – fitting the logic of transit, in which “people just pass by”. ⁵The few recurring characters are marked by telling names. Nietzland bears Nietzsche's name and lectures on the intellectual superiority of checkers; he is the novel's comic philosopher. The narrator himself is alternately called "Beauvoire" and "Beauvoire" by him, an allusion that lends him a literary shadow without ever giving him a fixed name. Seiza, the Japanese woman, bears the name of a meditative posture and remains, until the very end, the undeciphered "Mirage" or "Miracles." ⁶The absent father abroad, the sister on the phone, the distant friend Ray – they all exist primarily as voices on the telephone. The constellation of characters is thus one of the periphery, lacking a fixed network of relationships: a series of satellites orbiting a self that itself barely claims any substance.

It is remarkable how rarely there is direct face-to-face communication in this novel. Communication takes place via telephone, text message, surveillance monitor, television screen, and the codes stored in books. The narrator confesses his invisibility: "The customers who see me or speak to me are rare. I am transparent to most people." ⁷ The opposite pole is represented by the language of training and business, which the narrator detests as "novlangue"—Newspeak in the Orwellian sense. The training director announces that they will "revolutionize the world of the industrial sandwich." ⁸; a business travel couple lets the mantra "Return on equity" float through the room, which the narrator ironically describes as "postmodern poetry of this strange Anglicism". ⁹The entire communicative field of the novel stretches between silence and empty phrases.

The non-place as the center of the world and the time of the loop

In the anthropological sense of Marc Augé, the gas station is a paradigmatic non-place—a space of transit devoid of identity, history, and relationship. Labruffe takes this definition to a paradoxical level: the peripheral place asserts itself as the center. “Although located on the urban edge, between a hotel and a dilapidated social housing complex, my gas station is the center of the world.” ¹⁰ The narrator calls it a "vortex of paths", a "black hole of different routes", the "keystone of the Routo sphere" ¹¹The spatial semantics are strictly ordered inwards and outwards: inside, the illuminated "capsule" or "habitacle"—a spaceflight term that makes the station appear as a stranded spaceship—outside, the fog, the fallow land, the uninhabited house. Above it all flickers the broken neon sign HORIZON, which loses letters as the novel progresses until only "ORI ON" remains—the name of the constellation Orion, which briefly opens the profane place to the cosmic. The second imaginary space is Texas: the dreamed-of antithesis of infinite expanse, which immediately transforms in the narrator's mind into a longing for the Parisian suburbs—evidence of the fundamental placelessness of his desire.

The novel's time is the time of the loop. The continuous present tense, the films running in an endless loop, the cyclist's "weekly epiphany," the friend's identically recurring phone calls of complaints—all this negates linear chronology in favor of a cyclical, ever-same pattern. At the same time, the narrator conceives of the gas station itself as an allegory of transience: "Symbol of fleeting time, of impermanence itself. As an anti-temple, my station celebrates the ephemeral." ¹²This Buddhist-inspired reflection—reinforced by Far Eastern motifs—stands in tension with the grand archaeological epoch in which the narrator imagines himself in Chapter 8 as the "last dinosaur of the carbon world." This passage follows a series of self-definitions in which he elevates himself to the "foundation of modern society" and "essential cog in the machine of globalization," after having previously calculated the number of barrels he has sold.

The excerpt intertwines the two time levels in a grotesque image: by imagining himself as a future exhibit, "baked together with petroleum and steel," the narrator literally becomes a fossil of his own era, in which body and commodity, human and fuel, merge indistinguishably. The string of superlatives of the final ("last dinosaur," "last guard," "last lighthouse keeper") stylizes the lowest position in the consumer chain into the tragic final figure of a world epoch, while the unemployment figured down to "exactly one hundred and fifty years" immediately ridicules the apocalyptic gesture through pseudo-precise accuracy. The present loop and the geological age, the ephemeral now and the fossilized forever, permeate one another.

Consumption and apocalypse, the eroticism of scarcity

The novel's organization of meaning rests on two intertwined semantic fields: that of consumption and that of apocalypse. The best-selling product is Coca Zero, and the narrator diagnoses a "Coca-Zeroization of humanity." ¹³, a world of “junkies,” whose main dealer he is. This field of addictive satiation contrasts with the “apocalyptic semantic field,” which the narrator spells out in a litany of technical terms – “oil shock,” “counter-oil shock,” “scarcity,” “spectre of the peak” – and which stylizes him as the “messenger of the apocalypse.” ¹⁴Petroleum is the central, all-pervading metaphor: it is substance, smell, historical epoch, and erotic aura all at once. The narrator loves the "indelible smell of gasoline," that "persistent perfume" that "permeates everything." ¹⁵In one of the central metaphors, unleaded gasoline becomes an allegory for a castrated present: "Unleaded is to gasoline what the condom is to sex, sweetener to sugar." ¹⁶ Consumption, decay, and desire speak the same language in the novel.

The narrator's desire is consistently defined by lack and failure. Women appear to him as unattainable specters—Seiza as both "mannequin and saint"—and his attempts to woo her end in comical impotence: nothing happens in Seiza's bed because he is "too intimidated by her beauty." ¹⁷The gender-based comedy ultimately tips into a reversal of power dynamics: Seiza turns him into a "sex toy," a "subjugated object of her desire," rips out the television cable, and ties him to the bed. The novel's eroticism is thus not one of fulfillment, but rather of voyeurism, mistaken identity, and grotesque embarrassment. Significant are the ironically deployed female figures on the periphery—the didactic mother in her miniskirt, Nietzland's sister—and the disturbing echo of gender-based violence in an overheard street scene where a man hurls threats at a woman. Masculinity, in turn, is consistently presented as insecure, plaintive, and ridiculous: the robbed father, the whining Ray, the narrator running away from the naked female body.

The gas station attendant as novelist, aesthetics of the trivial

The text's crucial self-reflection lies in the fact that the narrator is a writer who loses his own work. On the accidentally given-away USB stick, alongside films and administrative files, is "my next novel, so... my first novel"—the only existing version. ¹⁸ The loss is autopoetologically charged: STS is indeed Labruffe's first novel, and the text incorporates this fact into the lost USB drive. What we read could be understood as the reconstruction or the substitute for the lost book—a novel about the impossibility of capturing a novel, which arises precisely from this impossibility. The fragmentary form finds its inner justification here: a text whose manuscript has vanished can only exist in splinters, addenda, and footnotes. The repeated desire to "be Baudrillard"—that is, a pure observer and theorist of the sign—marks the unfulfillable longing for the sovereign position above things, a position the narrator precisely fails to occupy.

From what has been said, the novel's poetics can be defined as an aesthetics of the insignificant. The narrator consistently finds "poetry" where the ordinary eye sees nothing: in the "brief moment of snow" on the surveillance monitors, in the stirring of the plastic stick in the coffee, in which he claims "the universe is contained in this rotation." This method is most vividly realized in Chapter 4, immediately after the departure of the drunken customer who called for the poets, when the narrator, now alone and "finally idle," records an acoustic detail from the truck in the parking lot at night.

From a banal stimulus—livestock in a 35-ton truck—the narrator conjures a lyrical image of heart-rending intensity; the natural metaphor of the misty sheep "caressing" the gas pump coats the industrial non-place with a pastoral patina, until the station itself dissolves and is "only a memory"—a foreshadowing of the disappearance that underlies the entire novel. The decisive moment is the final twist: no sooner has the emotion condensed into tears than the narrator dismisses it with the self-ironic "I'm too sentimental." This double movement of emotion and immediate detachment defines the book's characteristic tone, a sensitivity that never quite trusts itself. The same ironic distance immediately undermines any sense of grandeur elsewhere as well—for example, when the metaphysical "Mad Max" exegesis at the snack bar ends with the judgment that the croque monsieur is "regressive." The preceding Baudrillard motto – that gasoline is “born from the erosion of words” – sets the program: Language itself is an eroding, fossil substance, and the novel gains its beauty from decay, from the residue, from what remains.

Intertextual and intermedial references

Hardly a page exists without references to film, literature, painting, or music; this density of references is constitutive of its meaning. Dystopian and B-movie cinema dominates: "Mad Max" as a metaphysical, endless film, "Soleil vert" ("Soylent Green") with its line "Once upon a time there was a world," and the Japanese monster and science fiction films of Ishiro Honda. These films provide the narrator not with distraction, but with interpretive frameworks for his own apocalyptic mood. The gas station itself is reflected upon in terms of film history as an "aurora of narrative." ¹⁹, as an obligatory stopover in the road movie and thriller ("Paris, Texas," "Baghdad Café," "Tchao Pantin"). In painting, two pictures in Seiza's apartment correspond to the poles of the novel: Hokusai's erotic woodcut "The Fisherman's Wife's Dream" and Edward Hopper's "Gas," that deserted gas station at the edge of the forest. In chapter 78, the central apartment visit, the narrator scans her rooms for clues about her identity and stops in front of the Hopper:

In this mise en abyme, the narrator recognizes his own existence in the painting: Hopper's solitary employee in the "supernatural light" is his double, and the observation that the street seems to have "swallowed" the cars directly transfers the novel's spatial logic—the station as a "black hole" absorbing trains—to the artwork. At the same time, this passage reveals the narrator's fundamental hermeneutic approach, which reads images like symptoms and seeks the connection between eroticism (Hokusai) and loneliness (Hopper). The fact that both works hang in the enigmatic Seiza's gallery intertwines the intermedial quotation with the erotic enigma and makes the woman herself an image that cannot be resolved. Literarily, the allusions range from Baudrillard's "Amérique" through Pessoa, Poe, and Fitzgerald to Beckettian waiting-room dramaturgy. Intertextuality constitutes the consciousness of the narrator, who can only perceive the world as a context of quotations – another symptom of that mediatization which shapes his entire perception.

A question at the threshold

Labruffe's STS transforms a despised site in the consumer landscape into both a model of consciousness and a typewriter. The gas station is a non-place and a world center, an anti-temple and a spaceship, a capsule of solitude and a vortex of railway lines—and in each of these configurations, a mirror reflecting a self that understands itself as transparent, superfluous, and simultaneously as the last guardian of a dying age. The formal fragmentation, the mediated narrative perspective, the cyclical time, and the double metaphor of consumption and apocalypse combine to form a coherent poetics of the ephemeral, which finds its own condition in the autopoetological point of the lost manuscript: This novel is what remains of the vanished book. That it ends with a question—"Will you take me with you?"—is no accident, but rather the consistent refusal of closure. Where everything is transit, even the end can only be a threshold. The melancholic-ironic wit of the book lies in the fact that it distills a delicate, fleeting poetry from the exhausted material of late capitalism – from Coca Zero, neon tubes, surveillance images and phrases – entirely in keeping with its motto: that gasoline is born from the erosion of words.