Possessions: Essays in French Literature, Cinema, and Theory (Modern French Identities, V. 24)

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Possessions: Essays in French Literature, Cinema and Theory

Julia Horn Lynsey Russell-Watts Editors

PETER LANG

Possessions

Modern French Identities Edited by Peter Collier Volume 24

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt a.M. • New York • Wien

Julia Horn & Lynsey Russell-Watts (eds)

Possessions Essays in French Literature, Cinema and Theory

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt a.M. • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.ddb.de›. British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA

ISSN 1422-9005 ISBN 3-03910-005-X US-ISBN 0-8204-5924-0

© Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2003 Hochfeldstrasse 32, Postfach 746, CH-3000 Bern 9, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

For Jean and Marilyn

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Acknowledgements

This collection of essays is the result of the Fifth Cambridge French Graduate Conference, which took place on 5 April 2001 at Newnham College, Cambridge. We should like therefore to thank the bodies who provided the funding which enabled the conference to go ahead, namely the Society for French Studies and the University of Cambridge French Department. In the process of organising the conference and editing this collection, we have sought and received help and encouragement from many sources. We should especially like to thank: Wendy AyresBennett, Anne Cobby, Simon Cobby, Peter Collier, Charles Forsdick, Sarah Kay, Libby Saxton, Michael Sheringham, Emma Wilson, and, at Peter Lang, Graham Speake and Andrew Ivett. Our contributors deserve as much acknowledgement as anyone else. We have immensely enjoyed the editing (and learning) process, and appreciated their openness to all our comments. Finally, we should like to acknowledge each other: we were able to laugh through even the dark moments of standardising bibliographies, and each knew when to give up possession of something (time or opinion) in order to make the collaboration work smoothly. Julia Horn and Lynsey Russell-Watts Cambridge, February 2003


Contents

Dedication Acknowledgements Introduction

5 7 11

Part I: Textual Possessions The Fox and the Lion’s Share: Tyranny, Textuality and Jouissance in the Roman de Renart (Le Partage des proies) JAMES R. SIMPSON Whose Life is it Anyway? The Politics of the Representation of Motherhood in two Female-Authored Memoirs of French Renaissance VALERIE WORTH-STYLIANOU Scribbling Ghosts. The Textual Spectres and Spectral Texts of Émile Zola KATHERINE GRIFFITHS

21 37 51

Part II: Possessing Ideas The Self as Dispossession: Deleuzian Becomings and Bataillian Excess JÉRÔME GAME Repossessing Travel: Postcolonial Theory and the Reordering of Space SIOBHÁN SHILTON Repossessing Theory COLIN DAVIS

69 87 105

Part III: Gendered Possession Stealing Beauty: The abbé de Choisy’s Appropriation of the Feminine JOSEPH HARRIS

121

Who Owns the Female Body? Women and Possession in Crébillon’s Lettres de la Marquise de M*** au Comte de R*** SUSAN GRIFFITHS Possessing Stars, Possessing Texts: Jeanne Moreau and the New Wave FIONA HANDYSIDE

135 151

Part IV: Traumatic Dispossession Troubadour Loves and Gloves FRANCESCA NICHOLSON Dispossession and Exclusion in La Vie rêvée des anges SUE HARRIS Surrendering Possession? Images and Ethics after Auschwitz LIBBY SAXTON

167

Contributors Index

217 221

183 199

JULIA HORN AND LYNSEY RUSSELL-WATTS Introduction

In A. S. Byatt’s romance, Possession (1990), a young academic steals papers he finds in a book in the British Library, thus beginning a tale in which possession is a recurrent theme. Through the unfolding of the parallel romantic stories of the nineteenth-century writers Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, and the twentiethcentury academics Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey, Byatt’s romance explores the possessive relationships not only between literary academia and the subjects of its research (texts, history, the lives of authors), but also between researchers working in the same field, who are haunted by competitive anxiety alongside love for their subject. The film adaptation of Possession (Neil LaBute, 2002), has recently added to this circular chain of possessive relationships by raising the question of the relation between novel and film, recalling the recurrent debate as to whether a film adaptation preserves or destroys the original book off which it feeds.1 Byatt’s Possession neatly encapsulates the problems posed by the theme of possession, and it seemed highly appropriate that the theme be the subject of discussion at a graduate conference, in which young researchers present, often for the first time, the results of their work. Undoubtedly, in tackling their Ph.D. thesis many students question not only the relationships between themselves, their knowledge and their interpretation of their subject of study, but also the very foundations of research and its community, based upon the interrelation between university, department, supervisor and student. These relationships can be characterized in terms of possession: the 1

The issue of text screen adaptation is discussed in Cartmell and Whelehan (1999); for an examination of the interaction of text and film in French cinema particularly, see Kline (1992).

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Julia Horn and Lynsey Russell-Watts

desire for originality is infused with dependence upon the advice of others, and independent research arises only from an understanding of and interaction with the work that precedes it. While the researcher may possess a unique approach or understanding of his or her work, s/he is undeniably also ‘possessed’ by his/her history of learning, individual circumstances and, as in the case of Roland Mitchell, by a relative lack of material possessions or funding. Finding a way in to a topic and discovering how one is going to interpret a text is one of the initial challenges of research. It is analogous with the challenge posed to the reader of any text, be it novel, theoretical text or film, who is faced with the problem of acceding or adding to the meaning contained within. The difficulty of crossing the threshold into the text and moving towards an understanding or interpretation has been neatly summed up by Michel Jeanneret: Devant vous un livre encore replié sur lui-même, clos et inconnu. Vous allez l’ouvrir et, peu à peu, en prendre possession. Mais comment passer de l’extérieur à l’intérieur? Comment pénétrer dans cet autre monde? (1994, 75)

What is at stake here, then, is examining just how this void between text and reader is broached, and the mutual interpenetration that results. Possession, then, is a theme characterizing not only relationships between academia, research and criticism, but also those between authors, books and their readers. Frances Wilson in Literary Seductions (1999), her study of celebrated literary couples and the texts by and through which the individuals concerned are possessed, demonstrates that love and literature are almost inextricably linked through possession. Her study reveals that it can be impossible to separate reading or writing from the desire to possess or be possessed, or the possession of the lover from the possession of the text: No writing is without what Roland Barthes called the love-me element, and this desire to be desired is writing’s appeal. By appeal I mean both the magnetic attraction of the words as well as their plea, and writing’s appeal is for the reader’s submission and devotion: come with me, absorb me, give yourself to me, it urges. (Wilson 1999, xv)

Introduction

13

These ideas condense in the figure of Nadezhda Mandelstam, who, in Stalin’s Russia, when physically writing down certain poetry was lifethreatening, memorized her husband’s work until long after his death, becoming an iconic example of literary devotion. As Wilson elaborates: Literature – in the sense of writing, manuscripts, letters – hardly exists here, and Mandelstam’s poetry had Nadezhda most firmly in its seductive grip in the years after his death, when she turned herself into his living archive, trading her flesh for his words. (1999, 150–1)

Owning the poetry in this way allowed Nadezhda to possess the spirit of the author at the same time as being utterly possessed by his words, and therefore by him. In many ways, possession thus forms an unacknowledged underside of much literary study and can be seen as key to many theoretical approaches to literature and film. Film theory, indeed, has long been infused by the notion of possession. The development of the concept of auteur cinema gave the director’s vision precedence over any other, awarding him complete control and ownership of the film. The spectator has been seen as possessed by the filmic text; from his/her theorization as simply a construct of the apparatus, to feminist film theory’s articulation of the possession of the feminine in film by a male gaze, leading to the inscription of the female spectator into the necessarily limited positions of such an economy of viewing. In the work of literary theorists and critics, the question of the ownership of the text – and whether, in the wake of Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author, this lies with the author or the reader – has long been debated. New Historicism, in its turn, questions the separation of text from the historical and cultural circumstances of its production, suggesting that all texts are possessed and may be enlightened by these origins. Possession is also central to the use literary theorists have made of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on kinship structures, ownership, exchange and the gift, where the act of possessing, or not, provides the fundamental bonds of human society. These concepts have been further developed by feminist theorists, for example in the work of Luce Irigaray, who examines the ways in which women can

14


challenge their societal status as the possessed objects of exchange of men. In psychoanalytic thought, of course, the nature of subjectivity and the extent to which we are in possession of our selves, of our consciousness, thoughts, dreams or language, indeed, of ‘reality’ itself, is a fundamental area of exploration. Following on from this, postmodernism’s problematization of the very notions of truth, knowledge, originality and reality can be reformulated as a critique of the ultimate impossibility of possession. This collection does not hope to offer a solution to the rich and complex problems of possession, nor even a full definition, but rather to provide an opening towards a theorization of this somewhat neglected concept. The essays here move towards this, employing the notion of possession in diverse ways, engaging with many of the issues raised above and illuminating still others. The difference in methods and texts, but recurrence of certain broad thematic approaches, brought about the sectioning of articles into Textual Possessions, Possessing Ideas, Gendered Possession and Traumatic Dispossession. This is not to indicate that the essays are rigidly distinct from each other: comparisons and connections can, and we hope will, be made across the collection, not only through their different ways of tackling possession, but also on the grounds of textual, period or theoretical similarities. The first section, Textual Possession, evokes many of the problems encountered when dealing with questions of the ownership of texts, and the (self-)possession their authors may expect to achieve. James Simpson’s opening of the discussion focuses on the wrangle between characters and authors over the possession of food and of the story of Renart the Fox in the middle ages. Simpson employs a Lacanian/Žižekian perspective to discuss the attempts to possess fictions and therefore power in Le Partage des proies, which reveals that the trickster’s power is in fact framed and contained, only allowed space insofar as his strategies serve and conceal the king’s tyrannical purposes and possessing appetite. Fiona Handyside’s essay on female stardom in auteur-based French cinema (here concentrating on François Truffaut and Jeanne Moreau, specifically in the case of Jules et Jim) unravels the attempts to retain possession over the female star of New Wave cinema, even as the image and fame of the actress

Introduction

15

begins to extend beyond the individual film. Though, as Handyside contends, the possessive male gaze of the camera retains control over the female character, the actress herself achieves some degree of freedom both from possession by the director and from the prevailing models of femininity of the time. Valerie Worth-Stylianou also explores the problematic relation between women and possession, this time enquiring into the relationship that sixteenth-century women had with the events of their lives, particularly focusing on their experience of motherhood. She suggests that a potential ‘repossession’ and retelling of these events was available to women through the genre of memoirs, which circulated in manuscript form during their lives. Possessing Ideas deals with the possessive hidden agenda of many theoretical writings. Siobhán Shilton takes the highly pertinent area of postcolonial theory (which itself has as a starting point the Western appropriation of the Oriental other) as an optic through which to re-examine the concept of travel in literature. Asking what it means to travel and who can be a traveller leads to a broadening of the concept and to a reversal of the Western gaze, undoing the centreperiphery dichotomy that has pervaded Western thought on travel. Jérôme Game plays the theories of Bataille and Deleuze against each other to uncover subtle differences in their theories of becoming, to test the resistance and play, the strength and limits, of the notion of dispossession between the two thinkers. This forms what he calls an ‘in between’, which he conceives of as the locus of a definition of the self as dispossession. Colin Davis employs the vocabulary of possession to examine the contemporary state of theory. Through a reading of Derrida’s Limited Inc., he examines the reorientation of the theoretical project between structuralism and poststructuralism and argues that Limited Inc. reveals that the loss of theory may also be its repossession, and that posttheory simultaneously abandons theory and remains dependent upon it. Katherine Griffiths’ essay, opening Gendered Possession, reveals a retrospective haunting of Émile Zola’s novels by the work of Lacan and Irigaray, evident particularly in Zola’s female characters. Writing itself is seen to be spectral: throughout his œuvre, Zola employs metaphors of writing to describe women, betraying its own ghostly origins. Griffiths suggests that the recurrent image of the female who

16


has a literary or inked hold over the male protagonist or author reveals Zola’s possession by the feminine. Reversing this, and examining the possession of women in the eighteenth century, Susan Griffiths’ exploration of Crébillon fils’ Lettres de la Marquise de M*** au Comte de R*** shows women colluding with the dominant medical and social discourses of love in the eighteenth century. However, through close reading, Griffiths shows that Crébillon fils’ fiction goes beyond these discourses to also depict women as a product of a nexus of social forces. Thus, he anticipates writers such as Diderot, who later in the century would argue that women were affected by their social condition as well as by their biological makeup. In a more literal reading of possession, Joseph Harris discusses the abbé de Choisy’s attempts to escape the confines of his own gender and to possess feminine identity, both for himself and for others. In his exploration of seventeenth-century cross-dressing and role-playing, and the achievement of this through material possessions and feminine trappings, Harris illuminates the complexity of issues surrounding gender identity, questioning the degree to which its possession can ever be attained. In our final section, Traumatic Dispossession, the potentially destructive side of possession and the difficulties associated with dispossession are explored. Sue Harris discusses not only how (material) dispossession characterizes the female protagonists of La Vie rêvée des anges, but also the apparent abandonment of political filmmaking in France. The exploration of the theme of dispossession does, however, illuminate a new type of political engagement amongst contemporary French filmmakers, evident both in the form and content of their films, and also in participation in such causes as the sans-papiers issue. Francesca Nicholson identifies unacknowledged common anxieties in both troubadour and trobairitz poetry. She argues that through the poetic use of the glove as a traumatic object and as a possession passed between lovers, both Castelloza and Giraut stage the tensions of troubadour identity. Finally, Libby Saxton explores issues of memory and possession through the particular demands made on the viewer by cinema dealing with the Holocaust. Rather than basing relationships between author and text, film and viewer, on the rhetoric of possession, Saxton calls for an adoption of the

Introduction

17

Levinassian allegory of ethic as a caress, an open hand that traces rather than possesses, and that permits a thinking beyond possession. Saxton argues that refusal to possess, non-identification and surrender to alterity are the conditions of filmic testimony. We can trace a movement here, then, from the demanding ‘loveme’ writing, which sets out to possess its reader, to a critical endeavour which takes a self-consciously ethical approach to texts, abandoning the possessive thrust which can result in the destruction of alterity. If this notion curtails the power of the reader or critic, Paul Auster calls on the writer too to accept a loss of control over their text: A book is a mysterious object […] and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen. All kinds of mischief can be caused, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it. For better or worse, it's completely out of your control. (Auster 2001, 4)

The relationship between readers, writers and texts, and their possession and control of them, also provokes questions which, of course, arise regularly during the editing of a book. The very placement of articles in groupings with each other, for example, may highlight particular aspects of their discussion at the expense of others. Dealing with the text itself requires some sort of possession, but this must then be relinquished as the volume is released to the next reader. For those who read this volume and emerge themselves in any way possessed, we can only advance a Rabelaisian-style panacea. A fifteenth-century book on household management from Wolfshurn Castle in the Tyrol offers the following remedy for possession (Kieckheffer 1989, 4–5): take three sprigs of juniper, douse them three times with wine in honour of the Trinity, boil them, and place them on the possessed person’s head without his knowledge. The near-impossibility of carrying out such a cure would seem to be symptomatic of the problems of both possessing and being possessed: reading and writing can be dangerous occupations.

18


References Auster, Paul. 2001 [1992]. Leviathan, London: Faber and Faber Byatt, Antonia S. 1991. Possession: A Romance, London: Vintage Cartmell, Deborah and Whelehan, Imelda, eds., 1999. Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text, London and New York: Routledge Jeanneret, Michel. 1994. Le Défi des signes: Rabelais et la crise de l’interprétation à la Renaissance, Orléans: Paradigme Kieckheffer, Richard. 1989. Magic in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Kline, T. Jefferson. 1992. Screening the Text: Intertextuality in New Wave French Cinema, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press Wilson, Frances. 1999. Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers, London: Faber and Faber

Part I Textual Possessions


JAMES R. SIMPSON The Fox and the Lion’s Share: Tyranny, Textuality and Jouissance in the Roman de Renart (Le Partage des proies)

You turn out to be a central figure in this story. I only got into it by stealing, in the first place. I’ve learned a lot. A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance One of the most salient aspects of the question of possession in literary works lies in its thematic reflection of issues of authorial style and voice. After all, one chief characteristic of literary discourse could be said to be its permeation or possession by a name of one kind or another, whether, on the one hand, that of an author or, on the other, a literary theme or matière. Of course, the names that mark literary works may do so not merely to a distinctive but also to an excessive degree, constituting a potential for trouble that can be reflected in motifs such as addiction, disease, madness, magical influence and haunting. These can be seen as what Harold Bloom (1973) would term the dose of anxiety the literary name always carries with it, or, in psychoanalytical terms, its stain of jouissance. For the Middle Ages, such marking is sometimes problematic in the extreme. A key case is that of Ovid, whose literary influence was often represented as a possessing force capable of corrupting his imitators, a moral degradation that mirrored the transformation of human into animal so common in the Metamorphoses (see Simpson 2000, 131–90). Ovid’s seductive style marked his works as his possessions, but also appeared dangerously capable of possessing those who followed in his footsteps and turning them into something less than human.

22

James R. Simpson

Relations between naming, possession and animality were also explored in other medieval textual traditions. One of the most possessed of figures was Renart the fox. As an illustration of his incorrigibility, one might cite the episode known as Le Jugement de Renart (Martin, Br. I), where the mischievous hero heads for court to face trial for his many crimes.1 After a desperate confession to his cousin Grimbert the badger, the fox is warned against returning to his old ways. However, he still finds himself gazing longingly after some chickens, a show of incorrigibility that causes the exasperated Grimbert to chide him sharply. Seemingly abashed, Renart follows his cousin on his way. However, as the narrator comments, he still found himself glancing back, and, had you cut off his head, it would have bounced over to the birds on its own (ll. 1184–88). In that respect, as Claude Reichler comments (1979, 79–149 at 79), the fox can be seen as a medieval version of Don Juan, the ultimate libertine, so possessed that, even when faced with his own death, he ‘does not give up on his desire’ (see also Scheidegger 1989, 397–98). Renart’s nature rapidly became synonymous with a name, as can be seen from the lion-king Noble’s threat in the trial episode: ‘n’i vaut vostre renardie’ (Le Jugement, l. 1290).2 And, indeed, that name appears almost coextensive with the world, as we can see from the conclusion of the version of La Mort Renart (Martin, Br. XVII) found in manuscript M: […] ja Renart ne finera Tant con cest siecle durera Car toz jorz sera Renart Et par son engin engingart. (Fukumoto et al. 1983–85, II, 318) […] there will be no end to Renart as long as this world exists, for Renart will always be and will use his trickery to trick. (all trans. mine) 1

2

For text, see Jean Dufournet and Andrée Méline, 1985. Translations are from Owen, 1994. The tale appears in a number of other manuscripts, but, for the sake of space, I will limit my comments to this version, found in Ms. D (Bodleian Library, Douce 360). On the classification and titling of the various branches, see Varty, 1989. Translated, perhaps a little flatly, by Owen as ‘your sly tricks are futile’ (1994, 23). Dufournet’s translation gives ‘inutile de jouer au plus fin’ (1985, 109).

The Fox and the Lion’s Share

23

This possessed nature reflects the scandalous vitality of the Renardian tradition: our monster’s misdeeds were the very life-blood of medieval comedy and satire, his fame and influence extending well beyond the period, through manifold translations, adaptations and rewritings (see Flinn 1963 and Varty 2000), all of which bear witness to the enduring stamp of his name. In its uncanny vitality, the Renart tradition bears comparison with one of Slavoj Žižek’s recurrent fascinations, namely the snarling, slavering creature from Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). For Žižek, Scott’s monster appears as a being of ‘pure semblance’, its flickering form, malign intelligence and diabolical purpose frequently serving to illustrate concepts such as the traumatic Real, enjoyment and the symptom (Žižek 1989, 79). However, far from simply being enemies to destroy, in their respective contexts both creatures are subject to attempts at domestication, faced by opponents who do not so much wish to defeat them as to appropriate and possess their qualities. In the case of the alien, the sinister ‘Company’ strives to harness and exploit the monster’s energies for its own purposes. Indeed, in that sense, the human characters are offered numerous opportunities to observe the inhuman, alien qualities of their own world. As for the fox, from Le Jugement de Renart onwards, Renart takes on the role of a mischievous baron in revolt, displaying a verve that marks him out from the inertia and stupidity of the other animal courtiers. In that sense, it is not necessary to wait for Machiavelli’s The Prince to see awareness of a special relationship between lion and fox. After all, the fable of the fox curing the sick lion shows that the former had long been thought to have the very thing the lion wanted, something that the rest of the body politic could not supply. However, there is a paradox: the fox only retains his fascinating power as long as this principle of energy he represents appears unbeatable or undomesticable. Similarly, all attempts to redraw the boundary between the human and the alien result in inhuman hybrids, whether socially, in the sense that human society emerges as a soulless mirroring of the alien collective, or biologically in the form of the grotesque, freak-show hybrids of Alien: Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997). The lesson of this

24

James R. Simpson

film can be read as a version of the Lacanian paradox that, like democracy, the pleasure principle or Symbolic Father may be the most flawed and constraining of all solutions, but all the others are far worse: ‘le père… ou pire’. As to what happens in the Renart tradition, we will see below. The episode I will discuss here – Le Partage des proies – can be read as giving voice to a debate about enjoyment, power and possession in both literary and political contexts. My comments draw on recent psychoanalytically influenced work on the place of jouissance in representations of medieval political culture and its institutions. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues (1999, 69–78), in defeating monsters and giants, kings and knights signal their refusal to be possessed by an obscene enjoyment whose usual manifestations are tyranny, violence and cannibalism. Through acts of punishment and renunciation generally marked by the killing and, paradigmatically, decapitation of monstrous figures, they dispossess themselves of enjoyment and accept the disciplining strictures of the pleasure principle. Consequently, the enjoyment manifested in monstrous creatures is subject to méconnaissance. The just ruler or good knight should not be able to see appetite given free rein without being driven to action. This idea reflects Lacan’s thesis that both the subject and the father must be blind to enjoyment: jouissance must be eliminated from the field of vision, its remainder localized in the symptom.3 The dread fate of fathers and kings who see enjoyment or are seen to enjoy is encapsulated neatly in Hamlet: the dead king, murdered without confession and thus bound to his sins, becomes a traumatic and unendurable vision for the son who sees him not merely dead but also debased through his knowledge of his fate. The nearest the father can come to that vision of enjoyment is in the anamorphic encounter of the dream, a paradigmatic example being that of ‘The Dream of the Burning Child’ recounted and commented on by Freud.4 For Lacan, 3 4

For accounts of the developments and shifts in Lacan’s conceptualisation of the symptom, see Evans 1996, 203–04 and 188–90 and also Žižek 1989, 71–79. For Freud’s account and interpretation of ‘The Dream of the Burning Child’, see Freud 1991, 652–54 and 725–26. Exhausted from caring for his son in his


25

and, later, Žižek, the dead child’s question, ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’, expresses most neatly the impossibility of any such vision of enjoyment on the parent’s part.5 The father could not have seen the fact that the child was burning with jouissance – except in the dream. The requirement for blindness sometimes imposes subterfuges and sleights of hand. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain, the exiled Cadwallo is sustained and reinvigorated by flesh his nephew Brian, unable to find game, has carved from his own thigh (1966, 271–72). It is crucial to the positive effect of this meal that Cadwallo not discover the origin of his meal, that it remain méconnue, otherwise he would be assimilated to the tyrannical, cannibalistic giants of the kind killed by Arthur at Mont Saint-Michel. The tale spun by his nephew keeps Cadwallo blind to the dimension of enjoyment symbolized in cannibalism, which means he can continue as father to his people. That the revival in his fortunes is legitimate is made apparent by the fact that Cadwallo then travels to Brittany and engages with Solomon in a debate about the duties and responsibilities of kingship (1966, 273–75) that shows no blindness to the failings either of himself or others. The counterpoint to this tale can be found in versions of the sicklion fable. When the fox persuades his ruler to mutilate or devour his subjects in the various versions of the sick lion fable, he renders unmistakeably visible the diabolic, tyrannical associations of the lion and thus destroys the state around him, making it clear that the collective body politic is mere fodder for the king’s self-serving appetites (most wholesalely and gruesomely in the Middle High German Reinhart Fuchs). However, the fact that the action is presented in terms of a cure provides a coy disguise for the lion’s tyranny, the curative sacrifice offering the oppressed courtiers the opportunity not to see what is happening much in the manner of a

5

final illness and shattered by his death, a father falls asleep. Confronted with the traumatic vision of his child asking him imploringly ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’, the man wakes to see that the sheet covering the corpse has been accidentally set alight when a candle was knocked over. For commentary on Freud’s reading, see Lacan 1979, 53–64 and Žižek 1989, 44–47.

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rather more bloody version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Through a violent extortion of assent, they are required to subscribe to the fiction that what devours them is not naked, individual appetite but political necessity serving the greater good. As long as they do not see his enjoyment, he will not be tyrannical towards them. If the representation of tyrants and their relation to enjoyment is a recurring preoccupation, what is perhaps more interesting is the way in which the image can serve as a metafictional reflection of the process of textual production. Renart’s renardie can be said to rule all in the measure that he proves capable of orchestrating the play of appetites to his own ends, guaranteeing that the tales generated around him are primarily the celebration of his jouissance and its corrosion of his society. In this regard, his relation with the lion-king is of capital importance in the sense that it is here that Renart’s mastery is most clearly open to question: as long as the monster he unleashes is his to control and command, then renardie rules the day and tyranny is but one aspect of the fox’s reign, as is made clear in the sick-lion fable mentioned above. The situation may be somewhat different in Le Partage des proies (Martin, Br. XVI). In this tale, again a variation on a widelyattested fable, the fox encounters the lion, Noble, and the wolf, Isengrin, who are looking for prey.6 The lion is initially suspicious of the fox, who counters that he would join them but for the fact he fears Isengrin, who believes Renart to have had an adulterous liaison with Hersent, the she-wolf. The lion imposes a peace and then suggests that the three of them unite in the business of finding food. The trio spot an ox, cow and calf. Renart disposes of the herdsman by defecating on him from up in a tree and then drowning him in a ditch when the unfortunate goes to wash his face. After this, he returns to the lion and the wolf and the sharing begins. Isengrin suggests that the lion take the ox and cow, while he himself gets the calf. Outraged, the lion lashes out at Isengrin, slicing away a good portion of his face. Noble then asks the fox to share out the prey. Renart suggests that the lion 6

For a discussion of the influence of the fable tradition on the Renart and the differences between Le Partage and its fable analogues/sources, see de la Bretèque, 1975, passim and Scheidegger 1989, 64–67.


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take the ox for himself, the cow for the queen and the calf for the lioncub (Le Partage, ll. 1233–36). Noble then asks Renart who taught him to share, at which the fox replies that he learned from the wolf. After the lion departs with his booty, the fox commiserates mockingly with Isengrin and tries to persuade him into a common cause of revenge. Driven almost mad by doubt and rage, the wolf wonders whether to side with the fox. The branch concludes rather abruptly with the narrator commenting that Renart should be left to his blandishing and trickery. Le Partage can be seen as a narrative exploration of the relation between appetite, enjoyment and possession, centring on the question of who owns renardie. The tale seems ostensibly clear as to where it belongs. In two ways, it locates itself in the traditional domain of renardie, namely the feud between fox and wolf, in two key ways. First of all, there is the question of their long-standing conflict over food and prey. Second, there are clear allusions to the motif of the fox’s adultery with Hersent the she-wolf and the resultant hostilities and trials that ensue from that. Central to the branch’s self-locating strategies is the fox’s comment on the wolf’s accusations: ‘De sa fame m’a mescreü. Mes, par Dieu et par sa vertu, Onques encor jour de ma vie Ne li requis je vilenie Ne nule chose a ma comere Que je ne feïsse a ma mere, Si ne le cuideroit il pas.’ ‘Renart, fet li rois, c’est tout gas, Si ne puet pas estre averé Qu’il ne vos i eüst trouvé, Se tant l’eüssiez maintenue. Or n’i ait point desconvenue, Orendroit la pais en feson.’ (ll. 785–97) ‘He suspected me concerning his wife; but, by God the almighty, never in all my life have I made to that dear friend of mine any request or proposition more dishonest than I would make to my own mother. He wouldn’t believe me though.’ ‘Reynard’, says the king, ‘that’s a lot of nonsense; and it can’t be proved unless you continued an affair with her until he caught you at it. So let’s have no trouble, but a prompt reconciliation.’

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Well larded with judicial preoccupations and liberally spiced with the usual nudges and winks (Renart’s oath about his mother echoes Le Jugement, ll.149–50), this passage clearly signals who gets top billing and the lion’s share of the gags: not Noble. So possessed is Renart by his verve and chutzpah that only the law, in the form of the lion, can get him to pipe down using the argument that, deprived of facts and reliable testimony, all this comment is so much hot air. What is on the menu for today is not fine words but that other staple of Renardian discourse: meat. This emphasis on the tangibility of what is possessed is apparent from the presence of the wolf. Isengrin’s emphasis on his hunger marks him as a creature of plain demands, of the corporeal degree zero that is so often the leitmotif of this ‘epic of hunger’ (le Goff 1989, 231). Like Brun the bear in Le Jugement de Renart (l. 541), there is not much more to him than his stomach, his ‘las ventres’. Jean Scheidegger describes him as a ‘figure du manque non domestiqué’ (1989, 188–89, my emphasis). Possessed by his predatory nature, his subordination to essence is most neatly rendered in the version found in Nivard’s Latin beast-epic from the mid-twelfth century: ‘Ysen-grimus makes the division according to his nature, and makes his choice according to his wishes’ (‘Ysengrimus, ut est, partitur et eligit, ut vult’, VI, l. 235).7 In that respect, reference back to the long-standing tradition of the fox’s adultery with the she-wolf and of the wolf as jealous cuckold appears not simply as an attempt to tie what might appear as a hastily co-opted fable into the Renart tradition, but rather to emphasize the fact that Isengrin is subject to the most basic of possessing emotions: his hunger and jealousy go hand-in-hand. Of course, the comedy lies in the fact that although Isengrin’s particularly leaden bundling of physicality and animal instinct means that he can never be entirely consumed by the fictions that sustain 7

For edition, see Mann 1987. Ysengrimus appears as an extended mockery of its greedy, idiotic anti-hero, a would-be all-devouring monster who is required to swallow every story Reinardus spins. His ultimate fate, being devoured by a horde of pigs, is a testimony to the extent to which his capacity for enjoyment is not allowed to devour his own tale.


29

court life, he is nonetheless partly a creature of that milieu as well. Thus by reducing his share to the bare minimum – the calf, his proposed division seeks to square the circle, giving nature its due on the one hand while not attracting the lion’s anger on the other. His line of thought privileges substance over discourse in that his sharing represents an implicit subscription to a fiction supplied by Renart, who had earlier intimated that the fact that the similar size of lion and wolf creates a natural affinity between them and excludes him, arguing that Noble only cares for the company of the ‘great barons’ (ll. 759–64). Noble’s response is not merely to dispossess the wolf of that part which would satisfy his material needs, but also to tear away the flesh he has, a diminution of substance and status that underscores the dissimilarity between them. Inevitably, Renart’s relation to meat and obtaining it is more complicated. The difference that the cyclical context makes to this version of a ‘timeless’ fable lies precisely in the expectations an audience would have of Renart’s character, more often satisfied by savage rapacity (or its narrative contemplation) than the ingestion of food. As Scheidegger points out, this characteristic opposes him entirely to the wolf (1989, 219–21). In Le Jugement, Pinte the hen complains that all her sisters have passed into Renart’s devouring ‘goule’ (Le Jugement, ll. 315–18), but the crime we see shows Renart only having eaten Coupée’s thigh and wing (ll. 293–94). In comparison, when giants kill, they devour or destroy utterly. This gap between Renart’s appetite for food on the one hand and his joy in the act of killing on the other distances the fox from the tradition of the giant’s greedy maw (‘gula’) as a figure of tyrannical appetite. A creature that kills to snack on starter portions is arguably not in the same league as the sort of giants who eat maidens whole on a regular basis. Such gratuity signals that Renart’s hunger always has an element of ironic distance in it, and marks him as a rather more mysterious creature than Nivard’s trickster-fox, Reinardus, who cheerfully gorges himself on a ‘great heap of meat’ to the extent that he becomes as round as a ‘football filled with air’ (Ysengrimus, III, ll. 283–327), a description that hints that, even at his most replete, the fox remains paradoxically hollow.

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Indeed, although Renart is hungry himself (Le Partage, ll. 688– 89), the sensation seems less desperate because he associates need for food at its most immediate and pressing with others, both fox and narrator referring to the fact that he is abroad seeking food for his family and pregnant wife (see ll. 721–29 and ll. 750–55). However, as we know from elsewhere, Renart is generally easily distracted from the pursuit of his family’s interests, to the point of accidentally leaving wife and child to starve in Renart empereur (see Simpson 1996, 76– 79). This can be seen as part of a general tendency of oaths concerning family members to go unhonoured or appear rather hollow, commonly turning out to be mere subterfuges (see Scheidegger 1989, 403–04). These kin either do not exist or might as well not as far as the animal is concerned. Thus, in Le Partage, Renart’s identification of urgent, gnawing hunger with his wife and children implicitly but strategically dispossesses him of the imperatives of his own need. That what drives him appears to be duty to his family distinguishes him from the wolf. However, the appearance of concern can be seen as a strategically developed fiction, allowing the fox to make quite clear that he is courtly enough to avoid the direct expression of material need: he is not so ‘possessed’ as to speak directly and nakedly about matters of substance in a milieu where, as the expression goes, ‘“I want” doesn’t get’. To mention the imperatives of nature would appear either boorish and unmannerly, or, worse, rebellious, insofar as it marks a refusal to be contained and managed by the status system of the court. Thus, instead, Renart marks himself as selfless, possessed and sustained either by the Law if his utterances are taken at face value or by his own textual jouissance, if his words are understood in the context of renardie. Appropriately then, Renart’s sharing continues with the same strategy of speaking in the name of third parties and absent kin by invoking other members of the royal family, the queen and the lion cub (ll. 1282–87). He then goes on to make a final appeal to the king in the name of his compère, Isengrin (ll. 1333–53). However, Noble lifts the veil on these fine words, dismissing his request on the grounds that the fox would cheat the wolf out of any largesse the king might offer (ll. 1357–78). Having witnessed the fate of the wolf,


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Renart does not feel at liberty to unmask such royal hypocrisy, and so the enjoyment marked by Noble’s tyrannical theft remains – if only technically – méconnue, camouflaged by a feigned blindness to his failure to renounce jouissance. In that respect, we can see Noble here as a sort of anti-Cadwallo. This is why the lion extorts a reasoned sharing even after the fox has invited him simply to take all the booty (ll. 1260–67 – cf. Ysengrimus, VI, ll. 237–50): he requires an ostensibly willing sacrifice. Noble’s insistence that Renart act thus reflects an awareness that if he had simply taken everything for himself as per Renart’s first suggestion, his tyranny would have been all too apparent. However, through the fiction of sharing the prey with the rest of his family, whether real or not, he imposes the illusion, most transparent to the one required to articulate it, of a rule whose non-tyrannical legitimacy must be accepted as beyond question. Food and flesh, although apparently the absolute material bedrock, are a vital part of the branch’s dissection of political discourse, a work in which the raw savour of meat plays a large part. For comparison, we might look to the tropes deployed in, for example, writings issuing from Charlemagne’s court circle at Aachen, texts which stand as some of the most effusively lavish representations of the emperor’s ravishing bounty and generosity, where the contrast is all too apparent (see Jaeger 1999, 36–53). Smaragd of St Mihiel’s Via Regia offers images of Old Testament abundance, speaking of the king’s ‘honey-dripping kisses’, a sweetness which flows forth also in his words (see Jaeger 1999, 40). In short, the ideal king’s love nourishes his courtiers, both physically and affectively, honey having precisely the power to blur the gap between letter and spirit because of its currency as sweet food and recurrent image of spiritual benefit. Renart had already appropriated the mellifluous language of promise and plenty in order to dupe Brun the bear in Le Jugement (ll. 499–575 and see Scheidegger 1989, 217–18). However, although insubstantial, the sweetness of his words there stands in stark contrast to the raw brutality of Noble’s actions towards Isengrin. Where the ideal kings of whom Noble is such an unworthy reflection sustained their courtiers with a suavity all the more perfect for not being merely abstract, the lion puts as little care into the actual menu as into the political fiction

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any real largesse would underpin. There is a spirit here that flesh is little apt to signify: honey is a distillation, while meat is a thing that can all too readily take on negative connotations. Honey flows where meat has to be chopped and rendered. The examples of fluidity that we have in front of us are rather less positive, however. Renart’s loose and watery diarrhoea, the ‘grant lesse / De foire clere’ (ll. 970–71) with which he covers the herdsman, may stand as a mocking foreshadowing of the lack of substance and sweet largesse of Noble’s own words. Of course, Noble’s possessing tyranny does not merely devour physical bodies but also textual ones. Indeed, what is most interesting about Le Partage is the manner in which it articulates the relation between tyranny and the matter of Renardian history: the fact that Noble wants it all, wants it now and knows how to get it can be seen as the end of that history. No more desire deferred; no more events savoured in their re-elaboration. Renardie must not allow Renart to steal the show. The playful, eccentric, savage weave of the roman is snatched as a cloak for the lion’s brutal determination to satisfy himself right here, right now. The first movement in this operation is the lion’s speedily, nay impatiently, imposed resolution of the feud between the fox and the wolf (ll. 792–97), cited above. Although the lion’s pronouncement appears reasonable enough, it can be argued that there is a degree of ambiguity as to whether his gesture is that of a regal lawmaker or a tyrant. His comments could appear as the fiat of the king as agent of divine will – the royal word striking terror like the roar of the lion, as the chronicler John of Worcester said Henry I of England’s failed to do (le Goff 1990, 310–11). However, their dismissive tone smacks less of a restrained and dignified brevitas than Noble’s self-willed interest in getting down to what he wants. The Renart’s and indeed Renart’s capacity for cornucopian discursive proliferation of episodes is, from the lion’s point of view, merely an obstacle to be brushed aside, the fox deferring to this brutal editorial intervention, lest the king impose another kind of cut such as that experienced by Isengrin. The lion’s tyrannical engulfing of histories, such as the fox’s rape of Hersent, that might distract from his own desires and purposes is echoed within the episode in his reception of Renart’s tale of the


33

ignominious fate of the drowned herdsman (ll. 1181–87). Noble appears as indifferent to the fox’s account as he is to seeing the evidence that guarantees its veracity. Correspondingly, the narrator’s mocking commemoration of the wretched unfortunate (‘Ore est mors, bien s’en puet vanter, / N’en orra mes nus hons chanter / Male chançon d’ore en avant.’ ll. 1089–91 ‘Now he is dead and can boast about it! No one will ever again hear any slanderous song sung about him.’) directly reflects the fate of the feud between fox and wolf, both summarily consigned to the dustbin (or cesspit?) of history. In dismissing bodies and words, Noble appropriates and ‘devours’ the cycle’s central motif of the burlesque feud, requiring it to surrender its substantiality and become no matter. Deprived of space, Renart’s discoursing appears shorn of the outrageous, scandalous character it had elsewhere in the cycle. The fox is thereby reduced to impotent cynicism, his powerlessness, the hijacking and checkmating of renardie unprecedented in the tradition, a turn of events mirrored in the concluding narratorial comment, which marks a certain distance from the fox’s cause: Ici fet Pierres remanoir Le conte ou se voult traveillier, Et lesse Renart conseillier. (ll. 1504–06) At this point Pierre breaks off the tale to which he has turned his hand and leaves Reynard to his deliberations.

Renart’s counsel can here take whatever direction it likes because, faced with the tyrannical presence of the lion, it is reduced to making mere pirouettes in the margins of a more grandiose larceny.8 The meat of the history of the Renart – the ‘guerre’ (Br. II, l. 10) and the ‘grant fornicacïon’ (Br. I, l.8) that make up the conflict between the fox and wolf – may be the first casualty but it will not be the only one. Should we assume that Noble would actually take the prey back to his family and thereby give due place and nourishment to his own 8

My reading here is clearly less optimistic than that of Scheidegger: ‘le texte nous laissera entendre que la suite des opérations est laissée à la décision du seul goupil’ (1989, 237).

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geste? The suspicion that this is not the case makes the lion rather similar to Renart, even if Le Partage offers less explicit comment on the subject than the Ysengrimus.9 Like the fox, Noble also makes reference to his kin as a foundation for his oaths, such as in the Le Jugement de Renart, where he swears to avenge Coupée on his father’s soul (ll. 368–69). Noble’s use of his family as a subterfuge shows that a tyrant does not merely devour the present in the form of resources and the bodies of its subjects, but also the future in the form of his own succession. The son appears as a fiction designed to camouflage and justify a monstrous appetite that reveals Noble to be possessed by enjoyment rather than duty. Tyranny devours not only past and present but also the future, or rather, if its bookkeeping is to appear legitimate, part of its appetite has to be said not to belong to present time. Another royal body has to be invented in order to make the accounts balance. What is thereby saved and sustained is not so much the lion’s genealogy but rather the façade that allows for his continued reign as sovereign, a façade made possible by his violent and reductive appropriation of renardie. What then emerges is a debate over who ‘owns’ the beast-epic. Even if, from the earliest tales, it was clear that the fox was subject to the law of trickster tricked, the cycle appears nonetheless his to its very marrow. In Le Partage, by contrast, the indifference shown by the tyrannical lion both to his subjects and to the subjects of Renart’s chatter is the mark of an all-possessing tyrannical enjoyment that engulfs both dull flesh and lurid tale alike. However, in a sense, this ‘end of history’ is all Renart’s fault. If his foxiness, his self-possessing renardie can always subsist on its own terms, then there is no point listening to the actual words. The trickster’s power is thereby framed and contained, only allowed space insofar as his strategies serve and 9

Here the details of the prey-division make it apparent that the fox’s division of the spoils into portions equal in size but not in quality (VI, ll. 253–54) allows the lion to ‘rightfully’ take the best portions for himself and leaves little but bones for the cubs. Reinardus comments that giving the cubs the bones to gnaw is the only way to safeguard the shares apportioned to king and queen (ll. 273– 76). This seems to imply that lion and lioness only thrive by doing down their offspring, and that the actions of any present generation in the royal household are justified by the fact that the young princes are no more temperate or just.


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conceal the king’s tyrannical purposes and possessing appetite. In that sense, Noble’s appropriation of renardie, the mark of the fox’s possession by and of a distinctive mode of enjoyment, amounts to a theft of the very substance that underpins his name. In Le Partage, Renart is left as Renart in name only, reduced to a thin fiction in a work where his devices only ultimately serve the interests of a figure whose possession of and by enjoyment is both patent and yet disguised. Where, in his poem ‘Renart le bestourné’, the satirical poet Rutebuef comments that ‘Renart reigns’ (‘Renars reingne’, l. 3),10 it is clear here that the name and art of Renart may rule, but it is not the fox who gains thereby, dispossessed of his central place in favour of the jouissance of a brutal usurper.

References Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press de la Bretèque, François. 1975. ‘Un conte à personnages animaux aux Moyen Age: Le Partage des proies (études des formes et des thèmes)’, Revue des Langues Romanes, 31, 485–507 Byatt, Antonia S. 1991. Possession: A Romance, London: Vintage Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1999. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters and the Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures, 17, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press Dufournet, Jean, and Andrée Méline, eds., 1985. Le Roman de Renart, 2 vols, Paris: Garnier Flammarion Faral, Edmond and Bastin, Julia. 1977. Œuvres complètes de Rutebeuf, SATF, rev. edn, 2 vols, Paris: Picard Flinn, John. 1963. Le ’Roman de Renart’ dans la littérature française et dans les littératures étrangères au Moyen Age, Toronto: University of Toronto Press

10

For edition, see Faral and Bastin (1977).

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Freud, Sigmund. 1991. The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. James Strachey, Alan Tyson and Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey, London: Penguin Fukomoto, Naoyuki, Harano, Noboru and Suzuki, Satoru. 1983–1985. Le Roman de Renart édité d’après les manuscrits C et M, 2 vols, Tokyo: France Tosho Geoffrey of Monmouth. 1966. The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe, Harmondsworth: Penguin le Goff, Jacques. 1989. Medieval Civilisation (400–1500), trans. Julia Barrow, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Jaeger, C. Stephen. 1999. Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press Lacan, Jacques. 1979. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin Martin, Ernest, ed., 1882–87. Le Roman de Renart, 3 vols, Strasbourg: Treuttel and Würtz Nivard. 1987. Ysengrimus: Text with Translation, Commentary and Introduction, ed. and trans. Jill Mann, Leiden: Brill Owen, D. D. R., trans., 1994. The Romance of Reynard the Fox, World’s Classics, Oxford: Oxford University Press Reichler, Claude. 1979. La Diabolie, la séduction, la renardie, l’écriture, Paris: Minuit Scheidegger, Jean R. 1989. Le ‘Roman de Renart’ ou le texte de la dérision, Geneva: Droz Simpson, James R. 1996. Animal Body, Literary Corpus: The Old French ‘Roman de Renart’, Amsterdam: Rodopi –––––. 2000. Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition in Medieval French Narrative, Bern: Peter Lang Varty, Kenneth. 1989. ‘De l’appellation des branches et des contes du Roman de Renart’, in A la recherche du Roman de Renart, ed. Varty, 2 vols, New Alyth: Lochee, I, 7–12 ––––– et al., eds., 2000. Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement and Cultural Metamorphoses in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present, Cultural Diversities and Intersections, 1, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology, London and New York: Verso

VALERIE WORTH-STYLIANOU Whose Life is it Anyway? The Politics of the Representation of Motherhood in two FemaleAuthored Memoirs of the French Renaissance

Pregnancies, births and their aftermath provide recurrent subject matter for writers of prose fiction in the early modern period. Rabelais’ account of Gargamelle’s eleven-month pregnancy and of Gargantua’s strange entry into the world are among the best known examples of the genre, but the encyclopaedic compendia of Bouchet and Cholières, or the Histoires tragiques of Goulart and Camus testify to the enduring fascination of these themes.1 Equally, a substantial number of reference works appear in both Latin and French, written by doctors, lawyers and theologians, on such thorny issues as the length of pregnancy, the baptism of premature babies, or the nature of procreation. Such volumes contain the reflections of men who have either been present at births in their professional capacity,2 or who are well-versed in the theoretical debates. But what of those who experienced at first-hand the daily drama of pregnancy, birth and lactation, the women themselves? Where should we look to see them taking possession, in writing, of these experiences? Not in Renaissance works of prose fiction, for of the few known women writers of fiction, none (as far as I am aware) alludes to the subject other than in passing.3 As far as professional manuals are concerned, 1 2

3

For a discussion of some of these authors see Berriot-Salvadore, 1993, Part III. It is only in the early seventeenth-century that the fashion for male accoucheurs seriously challenged the role of the female midwife. In the sixteenth century, however, midwives were required to summon the (male) doctor in case of complications requiring surgical intervention. See Gélis, 1988. Even in the seventeenth century, Madame de Lafayette seems exceptional in making (illicit) pregnancy the climax of La Comtesse de Tendre.

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Louise Bourgeois’s Observations diverses sur la sterilité et maladies des fammes, et enfans nouveaux naiz (1609) and Récit véritable de la naissance de Messeigneurs et Dames les Enfans de France (1617) are the first known published work by a contemporary female practitioner (Bourgeois was midwife to Marie de Medici).4 However, a few sixteenth-century women did leave journals and memoirs. In evaluating the evidence two key texts provide of the way in which women writers treat the themes of pregnancy and childbirth, I shall venture some remarks on the broader issue of possession within lifewriting and on the complex relationships between textual transmission and possession. In his seminal study of autobiography in France, Philippe Lejeune postulated that autobiography, in the modern sense, emerged only in the eighteenth century, but he accepted memoirs of the preceding centuries as part of the ‘préhistoire’ of the genre, defining a memoir as ‘la chronique de la vie privée à accent personnel’ (1998, 41). However, we should not assume that the emphasis on the private means that memoirs are thereby devoid of broader historical interest, for, in Lejeune’s view, they combine the personal viewpoint with the wider subject matter of the history of the social groups within which the writer lives and moves (1998, 11).5 When we turn to femaleauthored memoirs of the Renaissance, we encounter the particular issue that the four extant works we possess were all produced by aristocratic or royal women: Louise de Savoie, Jeanne de Bourbon, Marguerite de Valois and Charlotte Duplessis-Mornay. This obviously imposes limitations on the range of social groups depicted. In addition, the status of the authors, all of whom were educated, public figures, has a significant bearing upon their manner of writing. For they clearly understood that to compose memoirs for publication, or

4

5

See Perkins, 1996. A popular medieval gynaecological treatise, Passionibus muliebris curandorum, which continued to circulate throughout the Renaissance, was commonly attributed to a woman named Trotula, but her identity is no more than putative. Compare also the definition of Renaissance memoirs offered by Kuperty-Tsur, 1997, 21.

Whose Life is it Anyway?

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for circulation in manuscript form,6 or at least for transmission to posterity, was to project a particular image of themselves and their contemporaries. In short, to write one’s life was to make oneself a public possession, but the discerning author could substantially influence the way in which she would be perceived. In concentrating on the representation of pregnancy and motherhood, I am, in one sense, approaching these texts from an oblique angle, for, unlike in the Récit of Louise Bourgeois, these subjects are not a central preoccupation. Yet I would argue that this marginal space is itself revealing about the ways in which the authors negotiate their possession of both life-writing and motherhood. The relevant passages thus offer a very telling indicator of the way in which a mémorialiste constructs her public image of a private domain. Anthropologists and cultural historians have studied the complex power structures which surrounded the rites of birth in early modern Europe.7 In the particular case of the aristocracy or of the royal family, to bear an heir – or to fail to do so – was a matter of intense public interest and scrutiny and the woman was, in the immediate circumstances, the relatively powerless object of the public gaze, in the possession of onlookers. However, the version of events recorded in a memoir, with the benefit of hindsight, allowed the author to regain a degree of control. As a result, the dynamics of possession could be reversed: the author could take charge of her life-story and impose her own version upon her immediate readers and indeed upon posterity. I shall examine two examples of this complex process, the Journal of Louise de Savoie and the Memoires of Marguerite de Valois.8 The comparison is the more interesting in that both authors were prominent members of the royal family, and their writings are thus indirect, if not direct, political testimonies. 6

7 8

The distinction between the circulation in manuscript form and the publication of female-authored memoirs in the seventeenth century is discussed by Cuénin, 1995, 99–110. See for example Gélis, 1984. Jeanne de Bourbon’s memoirs are essentially political, and do not treat the subjects of pregnancy or motherhood. While they are mentioned (albeit briefly) in Charlotte Duplessis-Mornay’s memoirs, the focus of the text is upon the career of her husband rather than her own life.

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Louise de Savoie: the Mother of a King Louise’s Journal is conventionally grouped with memoirs of the sixteenth century, although in truth it is delicately poised between memoirs and the chronicle tradition. It is a short text, some twenty pages in length, written in the first person, and records the most significant events in Louise’s life. Historians usually assume that Louise began to compose it in 1522, when looking back at a life that had brought the great – and unexpected – triumph of seeing her son, François Ier, ascend the throne.9 At her death in 1531, the Journal appears to have been kept with family papers, and was not published for over a century when Guichenon (1660), a historian of the house of Savoy, recognized its interest.10 The transmission of the text, in the absence of any original holograph, raises various questions about textual possession, not least the extent to which the work should be assumed to be Louise’s own composition. As early as 1904, Henri Hauser looked at the possibility that Louise may have dictated the Journal from her notes, or even that another party may have written it up from such notes (1904, 280–303). More recently, D’Orth (1982, 55) has put the extreme view that it was ‘wholly ghost-written’ from Louise’s notes by François du Moulin (tutor to the young François d’Angoulême and then chaplain to him as king). However, I would agree with both Hauser and the recent biographer of Louise, Pauline Matarasso (2001), that both the emotional charge and the intimate nature of some of the recollections argue for Louise’s very close involvement with its composition.11 There is no clear case for dispossessing her of her title as author.

9

10 11

There are several biographies of Louise: Maulde La Clavière, 1895; HenryBordeaux, 1954; Moulton Mayer, 1966. A recent comparative account of the lives of Anne de France, Anne de Bretagne and Louise de Savoie also deserves mention: Matarasso, 2001. The Journal was reprinted in two editions in the nineteenth century. Matarasso (2001, 293) concludes: ‘if the arrangement [of the text] was the tutor’s, the dominant voice is unquestionably the lady’s.’


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In the majority of the entries in the Journal, the personal voice takes second place to the historical narrative. However, Louise is strongly aware that her status and identity depend on those accidents of birth (or workings of Providence) which made her mother of the king. The Journal records a number of births, including Louis XII, Anne de Bretagne and Louise’s children and grandchildren. Their inclusion reflects their dynastic and political significance. In most cases, the entry is strikingly concise, observing the name and status of the child, the place, date and time of the birth, as we would expect from an official chronicle. For example: ‘Louis XII, roi de France, fut né à Blois l’an 1462, le 27 juin, à cinq heures huit minutes avant midi’ (1826, 389). Admittedly, in the case of François Ier, Louise cannot hide her maternal pride: ‘François, par la grace de Dieu roi de France, et mon César pacifique, print la premiere experience de lumiere mondaine à Cognac environ dix heures après midi 1494, le douziéme jour de septembre’ (390). The image she has used (‘print la premiere experience de lumiere mondaine’) is not inconsequential. She, the mother, is eclipsed; it is as though her son experienced the moment of his birth alone. There is one other passage in which Louise refers to the birth of François, this time using an expression which acknowledges her own emotions, but still accords first place to François: ‘[au]dict lieu de Congnac, auquel mon fils sortant de moi avoit pris sa très-heureuse naissance’ (401). When Louise is recording the deliveries of other women, she includes few circumstantial details unless the birth is of dynastic importance. To take the most significant example, had the son of Anne de Bretagne lived, François Ier would not have become King of France. However, since the baby died, Louise does not even trouble to record the hour of his birth. What matters is the infant’s death: ‘Anne, reine de France, à Blois, le jour de Sainte Agnès, 21 de janvier, eut un fils; mais il ne pouvoit retarder l’exaltation de mon César, car il avoit faute de vie’ (390–391). There is one small exception to this general rule, the second child born to François Ier’s wife, Claude, who was thereby daughter-in-law

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to Louise.12 The report of Charlotte’s birth follows the standard formula, but it is preceded by a very precise reference to the day when the mother first felt the stirrings of the foetus: ‘Le septiéme jour de juin 1516, ma fille Claude, à la Tour-Dupin en Dauphiné, commença à sentir en son ventre le premier mouvement de ma fille Charlotte’ (400). Of course, in the Renaissance such movements by the foetus remained the only incontrovertible proof of pregnancy. The moment is thus not insignificant. Yet Louise is not recording the birth of the first child of François and Claude (her namesake, baby Louise, was born on 19 August 1515), nor even that of the first male heir (a Dauphin was not born until 28 February 1518). There are no parallel references for any of the other pregnancies mentioned. It is possible that the anomaly reflects the emotional intensity of Louise’s memories of 1515–1516, which had brought the battle of Marignano (13–14 September 1515) and Louise’s first period as Regent. Certainly, her entry on the return of François I in 1516 leaves us in no doubt as to the strength of her maternal feelings: ‘et Dieu sçait si moi, pauvre mere, feus bien-aise de voir mon fils sain et entier’ (399). Might this explain her unusual attention to Claude’s pregnancy over the following months? We should note, however, that Louise usually attributes to Claude a secondary, passive role, similar to that she ascribed to herself when recording the birth of François Ier. One interesting example of this attitude is provided by the entry for the birth of Magdelaine: ‘En aoust 1520, le jour Saint Laurent, à dix heures apres midy, à Saint Germain en Laye, sortit du ventre de la Reine ma fille Magdelaine, troisieme fille du Roy mon fils’ (404). Claude is represented as the sixteenth-century equivalent of a surrogate mother. She provides the womb to carry the king’s offspring, on behalf, as it were, of his family, and particularly of his mother. For Louise’s language makes no distinction (here or in the rest of the Journal) between a child and a grandchild.13 What strikes the modern reader is the predominance of the possessive adjective of the first-person singular. Louise is laying claim to the lives of those 12 13

Claude bore three sons and four daughters in the space of nine years. See Knecht, 1982, 88. Both are regularly designated by ‘mon fils’ and ‘ma fille’.


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she mentions. Ultimately, the Journal is closer to the style of memoirs than to chronicles in that events are selected and recorded according to their impact upon the author. I must conclude this section with the observation that pregnancy and childbirth usually merit only brief entries in the Journal. Far more space is devoted to such key events of François’s reign as battles, treaties and journeys. Certainly we should not look to the Journal for any intimate gynaecological details, nor for any exploration of a woman’s personal reaction to childbirth. Yet on other subjects, personal sentiments are admitted. Louise comments on the fear which a riding accident of François Ier caused her, on her grief at the death of a beloved dog, and, on three separate occasions, she ventures comments on the more serious physical afflictions from which she suffered. But birth, like marriage or death, is treated almost exclusively as a topic of dynastic importance. The child is the possession of the state and of the royal family rather than that of the mother.

The Mémoires of Marguerite de Valois: the Childless Wife The recent work of Eliane Viennot has demonstrated that Marguerite de Valois, sister of Henri III and first wife of Henri de Navarre (later Henri IV), and great-niece of the author of the Heptameron, Marguerite de Navarre, began the composition of her memoirs to correct inaccuracies in Brantôme’s portrait of her in his Discours.14 Once again, the history of the composition of the Mémoires is revealing of the vicissitudes of textual possession. Originally, Marguerite probably assumed that her embryonic text would be incorporated into a revised edition of the Discours. In other words, she assumed her draft would pass from her possession to that of an acclaimed male author. However, as she continued to write, the Mémoires came to acquire an independent status. They offered 14

See Marguerite de Valois, 1999, 24–26.

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Marguerite the opportunity to give her own account of a difficult and turbulent period of her life.15 In the parts of the text which have come down to us, covering the years 1570–82,16 she has chosen to portray herself as an intelligent woman who acted with integrity in matters of the highest political significance, but who was the victim of court intrigues, badly used by both her brother and her husband. Although the first printed edition of the Mémoires did not appear until 1628, some thirteen years after her death, it appears that the text circulated in manuscript form during her lifetime, and the process of repossession of her life was thus in part achieved (Viennot 1995, 50–65). Marguerite’s treatment of the themes of pregnancy and motherhood is extremely brief, and she says nothing about her own case. On the one hand, this is unsurprising given that Marguerite remained childless.17 Yet she was known to be interested in medicine in general, and in 1578 Laurent Joubert controversially dedicated to her the first volume of Les Erreurs Populaires, concerned precisely with gynaecological and obstetrical questions. Thus, we can ascribe the fact that she does not discuss her sterility in the Mémoires to a deliberate choice, one example of what Viennot (1995, 45–46) describes as ‘les limites du témoignage’. On the subject of her marital relationship with Henri IV, Marguerite restricts herself to an allusion to its cessation (‘nous ne couchions plus ni ne parlions plus ensemble’, 1999, 123), the import of which is underlined by two separate, later references to their occupying separate beds.18 She equally avoids any reference to her extra-marital affairs, except for one denial of having sought to marry Henri de Guise (88–89). We are thus left with only two passages in the Mémoires relating to the themes of pregnancy and motherhood, both concerning 15 16 17

18

See the biography of Marguerite (Garrisson 1994) On the state of the text, see Viennot, 1995, 50–58. There was a rumour, repeated in the seventeenth century by Tallemant des Réaux in Les Historiettes (1862, 103), that she had borne one or more illegitimate children, fathered by Champvallon. However, modern opinion generally dismisses the notion: see Viennot, 1995, 54. ‘couchant en deux lits comme nous faisions toujours’ (1999, 126); ‘Nous étions couchés en une même chambre, en divers lits, comme nous avions accoutumé’ (211).


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Marguerite’s observation of a third party. The contrast between them is striking. In the first case, Marguerite describes the comtesse de Lalain, her hostess at a château in Flanders, breastfeeding her infant son in the course of a banquet: elle faisait chose peu commune à personne de telle qualité, ce qui toutefois témoigne une nature accompagnée d’une grande bonté: elle nourrissait son petit fils de son lait [...]. Elle le met entre nous deux sur la table, et librement se déboutonne, baillant son tétin à son petit, ce qui eût été tenu à incivilité à quelque autre; mais elle le faisait avec tant de grâce et de naïveté (comme toutes ses actions en étaient accompagnées) qu’elle en reçut autant de louanges que la compagnie de plaisir. (1999, 149)

Marguerite has painted a charming tableau of provincial life, but it is carefully nuanced by her expression of astonishment at country manners (‘chose peu commune [...] ce qui toutefois témoigne’). Her sophisticated French readership could not fail to remark that her admiration is tinged with condescension (‘ce qui eût été tenu à incivilité à quelque autre’). While medical works of the period are united in advocating the advantages of maternal breastmilk, it seems that in practice French noblewomen preferred to leave the feeding of their babies to wet nurses.19 Marguerite avails herself of the comtesse de Lalain’s case to give local colour to her account, but also in the process reaffirms her own social superiority. In the second passage concerning motherhood, Marguerite makes no pretence whatsoever of being sensitive to its charms, for the incident concerns the birth of an illegitimate child to her husband’s mistress, Françoise de Montmorency-Fosseuse, who was seeking to displace Marguerite. It may seem surprising that such an intimate and potentially humiliating episode should be included by Marguerite, but we shall see that she presents the incident in a light wholly favourable to herself. She casts herself in the dual role of the patient, longsuffering wife and of the woman possessed of excellent political judgement. By her refusal to abandon ‘la Fosseuse’, first when she 19

See Berriot-Salvadore, 1993, 187–196. A century later, in the letters of Madame de Sévigné, there is equally no question of Madame de Grignan breastfeeding her own children.

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sought to escape from malicious gossip, and secondly when she was about to give birth, Marguerite shows herself to have acted with great forbearance. Furthermore, she displays the practical good sense entirely lacking in her husband when ‘la Fosseuse’s’ labour pains start: ‘il se trouva fort en peine, ne sachant que faire, craignant d’un côté qu’elle fût découverte, et d’autre qu’elle fût mal secourue’ (1999, 211). It is Marguerite who takes charge of the situation, declaring to Henri de Navarre: ‘et y ferais comme si c’était ma fille’ (211). This parallels Marguerite’s words to ‘la Fosseuse’ when she had learned of the mistress’s pregnancy: ‘et croyez que je vous ferai office de mere’ (211). Taken at face value, these utterances of Marguerite suggest that she took on the role of a surrogate mother. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the role she assumes is closer to that of the father: Henri de Navarre is dismissed for the duration of the birth, and Marguerite acts with the authority and cool rationality normally expected of a man:20 ‘Je la fis promptement ôter de la chambre des filles et la mis en une chambre écartée, avec mon médecin et des femmes pour la servir, et la fis très bien secourir’ (212). It is noteworthy that ‘Je’ (Marguerite) is the active subject of the three verbs in this sentence; the labouring mistress (‘la’) is relegated to the role of passive object. Her humiliation is completed by Marguerite’s brief reference to the stillbirth which ensued: ‘Dieu voulut qu’elle ne fît qu’une fille, qui encore était morte. Etant délivrée, on la porta en la chambre des filles’ (212). The invocation of divine will directs the reader to approve Marguerite’s handling of events. Her moment of importance past, ‘la Fosseuse’ is cast aside by Marguerite, transported by an anonymous ‘on’ to the bedchamber she shared with other ladies. The queen concludes her narration of the episode by depicting herself once again as the victim of the insensitive and ungrateful Henri de Navarre (for on his return he reproaches her for not visiting his mistress again following the birth), just as, in addition, she is once again about to be subjected to unfair pressure by her brother Henri III. 20

In her examination of the identity of the ‘je’ in the Mémoires, Viennot (1995, 69–79) has observed that Marguerite tends to shun the female role in favour of the male.


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As far as the delivery of Françoise de Montmorency-Fosseuse is concerned, Marguerite has taken possession of another woman’s (her rival’s) birthing story and told it, with remarkable economy, to the discredit of her husband. It is one of many instances in the Mémoires where she implicitly demonstrates how she was wronged, yet how cleverly she conducted herself in the circumstances. This narrative of childbirth by a woman is particularly intriguing because of Marguerite’s silence in the rest of her text on the subject of her own sterility. Both the inclusion of this episode and her discretion on her own account can, I think, be attributed to the same political conception of the function of her Mémoires. Unlike Louise de Savoie’s Journal, Marguerite’s Mémoires record a bitter struggle and defeat, not a maternal and political triumph. For Louise, the subject of childbirth could be subsumed within the rhetoric of dynastic succession. The modern issue of the personal possession of motherhood through life-writing is largely inconsequential in the Journal, although small traits of style do indicate both Louise’s maternal pride and her wish to take credit for the continuation of the Valois line. For Marguerite, in contrast, childbirth is a topic which either meets a painful silence or must be negotiated with skilful obliqueness. However, with a sophisticated grasp of literary mechanisms for taking possession of the moral high ground, she does succeed in shaping the narrative in such a way as to turn the tables on her husband and her rival. Finally, what light does our examination of these texts shed upon textual possession by/of women writers in early modern France? Most significantly, neither work was published in the lifetime of its author, yet both have been transmitted and widely discussed in the intervening four to five hundred years. We are reminded anew of the importance of the continuing manuscript tradition alongside print culture, and the more so in the case of women of high birth. It seems that both Louise and Marguerite retained possession of their works in their lifetime by not seeing them into print. Louise’s text may well have been mediated in part by the labours of Du Moulin, Marguerite’s prompted by the writings of Brantôme, but ultimately the choice to publish or not rested with the female authors. Since their deaths, the transmission of their works, including the form in which the texts have come down to

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us have, of course, been in the possession of subsequent editors. Louise and Marguerite succeeded in defining their version of the history of which they were part; it is now the right of later readers to claim possession of documents which constitute valuable examples of life-writing by early modern women.

References Berriot-Salvadore, Evelyne. 1993. Un Corps, un destin. La femme dans la médecine de la Renaissance, Paris: Champion Boursier (=Bourgeois), Louise. 2000 [1617]. Récit véritable de la naissance de messeigneurs et dames les enfans de France. Fidelle relation de l'accouchement, maladie et ouverture du corps de feu Madame, suivi du Rapport de l'ouverture du corps de feu Madame. Remonstrance à Madame Bourcier, touchant son apologie, ed. François Rouget. Instruction à ma fille, ed. Colette H. Winn, Geneva: Droz Cuenin, Micheline. 1995. ‘Les Mémoires féminins du XVIIe siècle, disparités et convergences’, in Le Genre des mémoires, essai de définition. Colloque international des 4–7 mai 1994 organisé à l'Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, eds. Madeleine Bertaud et François-Xavier Cuche, Paris: Klincksieck, 99–110 D’Orth, Mary 1982. ‘François du Moulin and the Journal of Louise de Savoie’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 13 Garrison, Janine. 1994. Marguerite de Valois, Paris: Fayard Gélis, Jacques. 1984. L'Arbre et le Fruit. La naissance dans l'Occident moderne XVIe-XIXe siècles, Paris: Fayard –––––. 1988. La Sage-femme ou le médecin. Une nouvelle conception de la vie, Paris: Fayard Guichenon, Samuel. 1660. Histoire généalogique de la royale maison de Savoie, Lyons: G. Barbier Hauser, Henri. 1904. ‘Le Journal de Louise de Savoie’, Revue Historique 86, 280–303 Henry-Bordeaux, Paule. 1954. Louise de Savoie, régente et 'Roi' de France, Paris: Plon Knecht, Robert. 1982. Francis I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press


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Kuperty-Tsur, Nadine. 1997. Se dire à la Renaissance: les mémoires au 16e siècle, Paris: J. Vrin Lejeune, Philippe. 1998. L’autobiographie en France, 2nd edition, Paris: Armand Colin Louise de Savoie. 1826. Journal de Louise de Savoie, in Collection complète des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France, 16e volume, ed. M. Petitot, Paris: Foucault Librairie Marguerite de Valois. 1999. Mémoires et autres écrits 1574–1614, ed. Eliane Viennot, Paris: Honoré Champion Matarasso, Pauline. 2001. Queen's Mate. Three Women of Power in France in the Eve of the Renaissance, Aldershot: Ashgate Press Maulde La Claviere, René de. 1895. Louise de Savoie et François Ier. Trente ans de jeunesse (1485–1515), Paris: Didier Moulton Mayer, Dorothy. 1966. The Great Regent. Louise of Savoy 1476– 1531, Liverpool, London and Prescot: Weidenfeld and Nicholson Perkins, Wendy. 1996. Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France: Louise Bourgeois, Exeter: University of Exeter Press Reaux, Tallement des. 1862. Les Historiettes, Paris: Techener Viennot, Eliane. 1995. ‘Les ambiguïtés identitaires du je dans les Mémoires de Marguerite de Valois’, in Le Genre des Mémoires, essais de définition, Paris: Klincksieck, 69–79


KATHERINE GRIFFITHS Scribbling Ghosts. The Textual Spectres and Spectral Texts of Émile Zola

In the light of psychoanalysis with its insistence on constructed realities and identities, Naturalism’s mirrors have long seemed naїve, conceptualized as textual surfaces providing an unproblematic reflection of the world and its subjects. However, this paper seeks to use psychoanalytic thought to re-evaluate the mirrors of Émile Zola, demonstrating that they anticipate, evaluate and even eclipse psychoanalysis’ conclusions on identity in general and gender identity in particular. The locus from which my re-evaluation will be launched is that of the feminine within Naturalism. Censored in order to enable the publication of masculinity, femininity constitutes a spectral absence in the reflective surface of Naturalism. However, Zola’s novels stage the return of the dispossessed. His feminine ghosts mimic masculine methods of self-textualization, bedevilling and possessing the Naturalist world, as Zola moves to cast into question our possession of the very reality we live, the subject we believe ourselves to be and the text we appear to hold in our hands. I shall begin by sketching out the stances usually associated with Naturalism and psychoanalysis in their explorations of subjectivity. For Lacan, the self is a construct which fashions itself via largely specular means. As the infant comes closer to possessing its body by seeing its image in the maternal gaze, so too the fragmented subject in later life looks to the mirror-like eyes of others to see, and thus attempt to be, a vision of itself as je idéal, a coherent, specularlydefined being. Lacan writes: ce qui me détermine foncièrement dans le visible, c’est le regard qui est audehors. C’est par le regard que j’entre dans la lumière et c’est du regard que

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Katherine Griffiths j’en reçois l’effet. D’où il ressort que le regard est l’instrument par où [...] je suis photographié. (1966, 98)

Though perhaps its supreme proponent, Lacan is not alone in his vision of the specular self. Indeed, it is Luce Irigaray’s insistence on the gendered nature of this specular process that will prove crucial to my argument. For Irigaray, the feminine is the mirror, the ‘sorte d’alter ego inversé, ou de négatif – aussi photographique [...] exigé [...] par la relance, et la relève, d’un procès de spécula(risa)tion du sujet masculin’ (1974, 20). It is in the mirror of the feminine gaze that the masculine subject sees and thus becomes himself. The metaphor of the mirror is similarly central to the Naturalist project. Conceived in the aftermath of Stendhal’s conceptualization of the novel as mirror,1 reflective surfaces appear throughout Zola’s texts. La Curée describes a ‘lac [...] d’une propreté de cristal’, a ‘miroir clair’ which ‘reflétait les verdures noires’ (1927a, 10). Within the Contes et Nouvelles the landscape ‘se reflétait dans le miroir d’acier de la mare’, its ‘images pures se répétaient exactement’ (1928e, 63). As these quotations with their emphasis on reflective exactitude suggest, Zola’s mirrors have long seemed naïve, conceptualized as claiming to provide a seamless reflection of a given world. It is my contention that the reflections at work within Zola’s novels are far more sophisticated than this. Anticipating Lacanian notions of the specular self, La Terre’s Monsieur Charles gazes in mirrors and his image is not passively reflected, but rather progressively reinforced. Zola writes that, ‘il était allé se regarder dans la glace, d’un mouvement inquiet; et il revenait satisfait de lui’ (1929a, 187). A similar sense of subjective creation in the mirror takes place in the tableau vivant of La Curée where Maxime explicitly plays the role of Narcissus, applauded and admired by Second Empire society (1927a, 251). Moreover, concurring with Irigaray, Zola’s reflective surfaces are gendered in the feminine. Maxime may be Narcissus, but the tableau of his specular ratification depends upon the gaze of Renée in 1

Stendhal quotes Saint-Real commenting that, ‘un roman: c’est un miroir qu’on promène le long du chemin’ (1972, 88).

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the supporting role of Echo. The female gaze is constantly referred to in aquatic, mirror-like terms. The Contes et Nouvelles refer to female eyes as ‘ces clairs miroirs’ (1928e, 269), whilst Zola’s originary female character Tante Dide has ‘clairs yeux d’eau de source’ (1928h, 211). Not only is the water so central to Zola’s corpus incessantly feminized (the river in his Nouveaux Contes à Ninon is addressed as ‘bonne rivière [...] je t’aime comme une maîtresse’, 1927b, 389), but it is this feminine gaze which makes the masculine self possible. The author in La Confession de Claude writes, ‘je sentais ce regard attaché sur moi, j’étais comme soulagé [...], je ne saurais dire quelle [...] consolation je prenais à me savoir regardé [...] par une femme’ (1928b, 69). However, for Lacan, the stade du miroir is not just specular, it is also textual. The split subject speaks to the other as aural mirror, ‘le langage humain constituterait donc une communication où l’émetteur reçoit du récepteur son propre message’ (1966, 298). The self tells itself as narrative via the listening other, gaining a skin from a story. Hence, the self narrated to the other is an ‘œuvre’, a ‘drame’, a ‘fable’ and a ‘fiction’ (Lacan 1966, 97, 117, 94). But the self’s fable does not restrict itself to the spoken word. Rather, it mirrors the revolutions articulated by historians of the book, extending to the written manuscript, ‘la parole se met à couler dans le feuillet manuscrit’ (Lacan 1975a, 30), and finally the type faces of the printed page: l’on voit qu’un élément essentiel était prédestiné à se couler dans les caractères mobiles qui, Didots ou Garamonds, se pressant dans les bas-de-casse, présentifient valablement ce que nous appelons la lettre. (1966, 501)

Subjectivity, for Lacan, is paralleled with, and imbricated in, the book-making process as it is via the gaze of the other that the self publishes the book of its being. For Irigaray the self is indeed a textual construct, but it is also a gendered one. She metaphorizes the feminine as ‘le miroir, le plus souvent masqué, qui permet au logos, au sujet de se redoubler, de se réfléchir, lui-même’ (1977, 73). The feminine gaze is at once the ink with which the phallocentric self-text writes itself (the ‘sang qui peutêtre n’aura plus droit de circulation, de cité que sous forme d’encre’,

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Katherine Griffiths

Irigaray 1974, 157), the paper upon which masculine stories are scrawled (the blank that ‘l’homme est en position de remarquer’, 1974, 286), and the printing press by which such a self is published: La femme, dont il est impossible de suspecter l’intervention dans le travail d’engendrement de l’enfant, devenant l’ouvrière anonyme, la machine, au service d’un maître-propriétaire qui estampillera le produit fini. (1974, 21)

This notion that the mirrors with which the subject sees itself are mirrors of words is central to the texts of Zola. His works juxtapose printed pages and specular surfaces. La Curée’s Maxime ‘possédait un petit miroir [...] qu’il posait entre les pages de son livre, et dans lequel il se regardait des heures entières’ (1927a, 103). A similar conflation of word, identity and mirror is to be found when Maxime seduces Renée in a room where ‘la curiosité du cabinet était [...] une belle glace trapue que les diamants de ces dames avaient criblé de noms, de dates, de vers estropiés’ (1927a, 147). The specular and scriptive facets of the subjective mirror are inextricably entwined for Zola. Moreover, Zola’s texts present the self created as a textual artefact. Of Pascal’s pages we are told that ‘en les détruisant, en les brûlant, on brûlerait de sa chair’, ‘ce serait un véritable meurtre, comme si tu assassinais quelqu’un’ (1928h, 95). Life and literature, page and self are interchangeable. Stories make the self. The self is a story. Hence, not only is Germinal’s Maheu described as being ‘pris entre deux feuillets d’un livre’ (1928k, 46), but the phrase ‘le roman de sa vie’ abounds within Zola’s novels. A man marries in Fécondité ‘à la suite d’un roman d’amour qui durait depuis l’enfance’ (1928a, 419), Renée considers an encounter with an admirer as ‘son roman en deux rendez-vous’ (1927a, 208), whilst we are told of the marriage of Angélique’s step-parents in Le Rêve, ‘ce fut tout leur roman’ (1928f, 11). Characters are often deemed ‘poètes’ regardless of their occupation. Saccard is a ‘poète de l’argent’, just as another character is ‘un grand poète menuisier’ (1928g, 260, 424). For Zola, the self is a script. So too is the world which it inhabits. He presents reality as the stuff of ink: L’Œuvre depicts ‘le vieux Pontneuf, avec la tache d’encre de sa statue’ (1929c, 110); Germinal describes ‘la nuit [...] d’une épaisseur d’encre’ (1928k, 9), whilst in La

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Terre ‘la ligne [...] de l’horizon gardait sa netteté de trait d’encre’ (1929a, 20). Zola’s insistence on the ink of reality is reinforced by his use of the déjà-lu. Within his Contes et Nouvelles the war is described as ‘un conte des Mille et une nuits’ (1928e, 618). Likewise a place within La Curée is ‘comme le coin enchanté d’une cité des Mille et une nuits’ (1927a, 82), whilst the storm in L’Argent is ‘léger et musical, comme dans un conte des Mille et une nuits’ (1928g, 86). Zola’s choice of The Arabian Nights to demonstrate the insistent infusion of the ‘reality’ of his texts by fiction is significant, for, just as Zola’s characters fashion themselves through fiction, safeguarding against the lack which lies at their core, so Shahrazad’s tales constitute a famous instance of storytelling as a means to stave off death. Zola is aware not only of the scripture of the self and its world, but also of the gendered nature of textual structures. Clorinde has ‘petits yeux, pareils à deux gouttes d’encre’ (1927c, 61), whilst another female character’s eyes are ‘deux trous sombres d’une épaisseur d’encre’ (1928e, 269). The blackness of the feminine gaze inks in the masculine text. Pauline’s sexual organs are described as ‘la tache d’encre qui ombrait son ventre’ in La Joie de vivre, strengthening Zola’s parallel between sexuality and textuality (1928j, 60). Moreover, a notion of femininity as page is hinted at by the essential whiteness that characterizes Zola’s attractive women. Germinal’s Catherine is a striking example of the feminine blank. Étienne sees her ‘toute blanche, de cette blancheur qui [...] l’obligeait à se détourner, par crainte de céder à l’envie de la prendre’ (1928k, 174). This association between the feminine gaze and page is made explicit as Zola insists that Sérafine in Fécondité has ‘la peau dure, jaunie, cassante comme un parchemin’ (1928a, 464), and that Nana’s Madame Jules has ‘le visage parcheminé’ (1968, 151). Femininity is also a means to publication. In relation to Saccard in L’Argent: ‘on raconta qu’il avait fait tatouer ces mots: Achetez de l’Universelle, aux petits coins [...] délicats des dames aimables, en les lançant dans la circulation’ (1928g, 270). For Zola, it is via femininity, its ink and its pages, that masculinity prints the book of its being. Far from exempting himself from scriptive processes, Zola presents his own works as the pool from which, Narcissus-like, he gleans his own image. He metaphorizes print in aquatic terms,

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advising authors ‘jetez-vous dans la presse à corps perdu, comme on se jette à l’eau’ (1928i, 326). He gives his body to the printed page, ‘je vous donne ma chair et mon sang [...] je me mets nu devant vous, je me livre’ (1928d, 24), but only in order that it may be retaken, gleaned as a je idéal from the gaze of the reader. He writes that ‘les lecteurs viennent, ne s’en vont plus [...] C’est ainsi que les jours et les nuits passés sur une page par un écrivain [...] soufflent à cette page une âme, une vie, que rien n’étouffe’ (1929b, 283). Consequently, on n’a plus seulement sous les yeux un paquet de papier imprimé; un homme est là, un homme dont on entend battre le cerveau et le cœur à chaque mot. On s’abandonne à lui, parce qu’il devient le maître des émotions du lecteur, parce qu’il a la force de la réalité. (1928c, 176)

Thus, the corporeal vocabulary of the printing process is far from insignificant as it is through the typefaces of his printed pages that Zola seeks to type a face, an imperishable textual identity for himself. But perhaps the ‘lecteur’ of this last quotation should be substituted for ‘lectrice’. Just as his masculine personages scripted themselves on the feminine, Zola underlines his own self-scripture on a silent, absent female reader named Ninon. He says lovingly, ‘tu entendais chacun de mes langages. Sans jamais répondre, tu m’écoutais, me laissant lire dans tes yeux [...] mes récits’ (1927b, 56). This woman whom he imagines waiting for him by a limpid pool holds the possibility to soothe his lack: ‘je sens combien moi-même je trouverai d’apaisement à m’écouter te parler’ (1927b, 57–58). He writes himself upon her, subsuming her into his book, ‘tu eus mon premier livre. Il était tout plein de ton être’ (1927b, 274–5). He writes his first published work of fiction to her (the Contes à Ninon), and he publishes his Nouveaux Contes à Ninon just a few years later. Her gaze periodically reappears within his corpus and I would argue metaphorically hovers before each of his works. Having explored the gendered processes of self-textualization, Zola moves to ask where the self-scriptive structure, so reliant upon the feminine as other, actually leaves femininity. Specularly, she cannot see herself. The Naturalist heroine is frequently myopic: La Curée’s Renée is described in terms of ‘la faiblesse de sa vue’ (1927a,

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8). Zolian woman’s interaction with the mirror is almost exclusively defined in terms of lack. Renée mutters at her reflection ‘il manque quelque chose’, in a powerful statement of absence which is repeated both when she looks at herself and asks ‘si elle était vraiment délicieuse, comme on le lui disait’, and when, in an inverted reflection of Maxime’s Narcissus pose, ‘debout devant le bassin, elle regardait l’eau, elle se demandait où Louise et Maxime avaient pu se cacher’ (1927a, 102, 23, 271). Specularly dispossessed, femininity within Zola is also textually blanked out, its story of self censored, written over by that of masculinity. Only in death do his heroines speak or write their stories in confessions and testaments. Dying, Lazare’s mother is ‘comme ces coffrets que l’on vide des lettres jaunies d’autrefois, il semblait qu’elle se débarrassât la tête des souvenirs de sa jeunesse, avant de s’expirer’ (1928j, 189). Significantly her son ‘s’en effarait comme d’une histoire ignorée’ (1928j, 189). Similarly Pascal suspects that Tante Dide has her ‘souvenirs emmagasinés au fond’ (1928h, 70). And of his ‘vieilles aux yeux bleus’, Zola hypothesizes that ‘il devrait y avoir en elles des histoires terribles et douces’ (1928e, 19). These female stories will never be spoken for there is no space for them in the scriptive system, they may only be uttered in the interim between this world and the next. This space between worlds occupied by the feminine, her halfpresence, half-absence within the structures of the self-scriptive is best conveyed in the myriad of feminine ghosts which glide through Zola’s pages. Le Rêve is not only haunted by generations of Hautecœur wives (‘toutes revenaient’, ‘leur vol blanc emplissait le château’ 1928f, 62, 63), but within the novel we witness the progressive spectralization of Angélique herself as she joins the ranks of her spectral ‘compagnes’ (1928f, 180). But Angélique is far from the only spectral female of Zola’s œuvre. Indeed, each of his novels contains an example of le fantôme de la femme, a female figure trapped in the margins of scriptural existence. In L’Assommoir Gervaise sees hosts of ‘femmes muettes’ walking ‘avec une lenteur vague d’apparitions’ (1928l, 430). Fécondité’s Constance is ‘un spectre qui sortait de l’ombre’, whilst Sérafine has veiled her mirrors ‘tant je tremble à l’idée de rencontrer mon fantôme’ (1928a, 437, 463). Tante Dide is ‘ce spectre de l’attente

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et de l’expiation’ (1928h, 199), and even Zola’s Ninon is deemed a ‘pauvre ombre disparue [...] dans les solitudes où vivent nos chers fantômes’ (1927b, 57). Thus, Zola’s Naturalism with its aspirations to supreme realism proves to be unexpectedly suffused with and predicated upon the hosts of feminine spectres whose ghostly bodies lie trapped, seemingly inescapably, beneath Zola’s scripture. It is precisely towards the renegotiation of the feminine textual space, towards the escape from the seemingly inescapable, that the theory of Luce Irigaray directs itself. Her texts advocate mimicry or mimeticism as a means to instigate such a renegotiation. Irigaray suggests that the feminine momentarily and strategically mimics the masculine model of specular, textual subjectivity, developing a gaze of her own in order to look upon her own image, writing, printing and publishing herself as story. Symbolically in ‘Le miroir, de l’autre côté’, the masculine subject’s glasses are taken by the feminine character. Irigaray writes, ‘tout le monde [...] devraient en porter [...] cela aiderait à redresser la situation, ou le contraire. Ensuite, ils les jetteraient’ (1977, 18). Using these borrowed glasses, feminine absences ‘doivent, eux-aussi, se remarquer, réinscrire. Notamment dans le mémoire’ (1974, 313). Zola, like Irigaray, rethinks the spectral feminine place within scriptive structures precisely in mimetic terms. Clorinde from Son Excellence Eugène Rougon is a striking example. She explicitly mimics Rougon in an imitation that both amuses and disconcerts him (1927c, 66). Using the ink of her eyes, she textualizes herself. Having gazed at herself in the mirror, she refuses to let Rougon touch her, but instead imprints herself on him. She slaps him feeling ‘une envie de toucher du doigt la cicatrice, de s’assurer qu’elle l’avait marqué, qu’il lui appartenait désormais’ (1927c, 127–8). She inks herself into existence and is described as ‘étalant sa blouse noire, dont l’ampleur faisait sur la couverture blanche une mare d’encre’ (1927c, 337). Her existence is crammed with papers and Zola conceives of her in his preparatory notes as a ‘romancier’ (1927c, 417). Moreover, La Curée’s Renée symbolically bites a ‘feuille’ from the tree, metaphorically ingesting textual processes. She seduces Maxime on a ‘fourrure d’encre’, saturating her outline with its blackness before imprinting herself on him. Zola writes that ‘Renée était l’homme [...]

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les lignes claires de ses épaules et de ses reins se détachaient avec des sécheresses félines sur la tache d’encre dont la fourrure noircissait le sable jaune’ (1927a, 187–190). Le Docteur Pascal’s Clotilde participates in a similarly mimetic process when she touches her name in the family tree that Pascal has penned, and makes him tell her story (1928h, 120). Nor should Nana, the heroine of the novel symbolically bearing her name, be exempted from a list of Zola’s scriptively mimetic females. She famously looks at and loves herself in the mirror on several occasions, writing the text of herself by caressing a ‘petit signe brun’ on her body so that ‘elle le faisait saillir’ (1968, 215). She signs the text that she writes of herself with masculine blood. Steiner pricks his finger on a pin in her dress, bleeding on to the fabric. ‘Maintenant, c’est signé dit Nana sérieusement’ (1968, 134). Thus, having usurped the pages and narratives of existing stories of self, women such as Clotilde, Clorinde, Nana and Renée attempt to pirate a feminine text for themselves. The deconstructive success of this feminine publication has been the subject of much debate in recent years. It was no less a subject of debate for Zola. Each of his mimetic women is ultimately reread into existing scripts of being. Clorinde closes her novel wearing a necklace bearing the words ‘j’appartiens à mon maître’ (1927c, 361). Similarly, whilst Renée worked to unbind the self-scripts of her husband and stepson, La Curée closes with the two men reunited, an image which ‘la déchira’ (1927a, 305). The pages of her nascent story are ripped apart. Significantly, she hears ‘les phrases de la valse [...] comme les derniers cercles mourants sur une nappe d’eau’ (1927a, 283). Narcissus’ pool becomes smooth again as her troubling mimeticism sinks. Likewise, Clotilde ultimately protects Pascal’s texts, reproducing them through her son who ensures that ‘page à page, son œuvre s’achevait’ (1928h, 334–5). Textual production has not been halted, far from it. Even Nana is repossessed by scriptive structures as stories are written on and around her death. It appears that feminine mimeticism is indeed the ‘impasse’ that Lacan, exploring its instances in Maupassant’s texts, deems it to be (1975b, 79). However, such a judgement of mimeticism is somewhat incomplete. Let us examine the mechanism by which these nascent feminine self-texts are suppressed. They are hailed as sinning against

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the code of vraisemblance. They are not real, not real-seeming and thus can be written off, written over, excluded. Disbelieved feminine stories abound within Zola’s text. Claude’s reaction to Christine’s story in L’Œuvre is a striking example. He puzzles, ‘mais pourquoi lui avait-elle conté une histoire si peu croyable?’ asking himself, ‘est-ce que des histoires pareilles arrivaient?’ (1929c, 16, 29). He writes off her words as ‘des mensonges sans profit, inexplicables, l’art pour l’art’ (1929c, 29). Sérafine’s story detailing the castration of a doctor by all the female patients he himself sterilized meets with a similarly disbelieving response. Her story is deemed ‘fou, invraisemblable, impossible’ (1928a, 635). As Irigaray puts it, ‘dès lors, le scénario hystérique, dramatisation privilégiée de la sexualité féminine, se trouve condamné comme prolifération de “mauvaises” copies, de caricatures mensongères’ (1974, 70). This notion of the feminine text’s contravention of the codes of vraisemblance is complemented by the constant invocation of femininity as bizarre and fantastical. Son Excellence Eugène Rougon describes Clorinde in ‘un épanouissement d’étrangeté [...] elle restait la grande fille excentrique [...] accomplissant les actes les plus extraordinaires’ (1927c, 321). Likewise, La Curée’s Renée is ‘folle’, ‘la moins analysable des femmes’ (1927a, 118). However, far from striving to attain vraisemblance, Zola’s scriptively mimetic women constantly and joyfully cultivate their lack of it. Nana’s voice is described in the following terms, ‘jamais on n’avait entendu une voix aussi fausse, menée avec moins de méthode.’ Furthermore, ‘elle ne savait même pas se tenir en scène,’ and yet she winks and smiles at her audience to admit and underline both facts (1968, 43). Sérafine makes no attempt to defend the invraisemblance of her castration story in Fécondité (1928a, 635), and indeed La Terre’s La Cognette seems to delight in the falseness and implausibility of her chosen story. Symbolically she cries ‘pas vrai!’ and under this banner ‘elle devint insolente, provocante, décidée à jouer sa toute puissance’ (1929a, 98). The question as to why these feminine mimetics should cultivate the very invraisemblance that will ensure their own censorship must be asked. I believe that, in Irigaray’s words, they italicize ‘la fausseté de notre impression, puisque ce reflet n’est qu’un mensonge et n’a

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aucune ressemblance avec l’objet qui l’a produit’ (1974, 211), hoping that the evident invraisemblance of the feminine self text will throw into relief that of the masculine text of self and indeed the invraisemblance of vraisemblance itself, challenging realism, denaturalizing Naturalism, forcing society to ask, just as Irigaray does, ‘mais alors où sont les fantômes? Et les simulacres? Dehors? Ou dedans?’ (1974, 351). Quite simply, if femininity imitates masculine methods of self-textualization, replicating phallocentrism, and the end product is written off as a chimera, logically masculinity’s judgement of its own self-text might be couched in similarly invraisemblable, fantastical terms. Zola appears to concur with such an argument. Averted by insistent feminine spectres, somewhat unexpectedly, the works of this Naturalist novelist prove to be peopled, upon closer inspection, by legions of masculine ghosts. Within Germinal Bonnemort appears ‘d’une pâleur de spectre sous la lune’ (1928k, 300). Likewise Saccard in L’Argent ‘ne reconnaissait plus les gens, c’étaient des fantômes flottants qui l’entouraient [...] tout ce monde fantomatique’ (1928g, 356). Even the emperor is ‘une apparition de face cadavéreuse’ that people watch ‘venir et disparaître comme un spectre’, ‘de son air silencieux et morne de fantôme’ (1927d, 189, 208), just as the Pope is described as ‘marchant [...] d’un petit pas qui semblait glisser sur le sable [...] Ce ne fut qu’une apparition familière’ (1929e, 227). However, not only is the masculine scripted self rendered ghostly by this feminine mimetic onslaught, but so too the reality he inhabits comes to be perceived in similarly phantomatic terms. Within L’Œuvre we witness ‘l’apparition violâtre d’une cité fantastique’ (1929c, 8). Likewise, L’Argent presents the reader with an image of ‘un pâle fantôme de Bourse près de s’évanouir’ (1928g, 306). The scribbling ghosts of femininity spectralize reality, its truth and its vraisemblance. Clotilde states, ‘il n’y a pas de réalité’ (1928h, 85). Nana concurs ‘je ne sais même plus si tout ce monde existe’ (1968, 256). Indeed, I would argue that Zola’s novels come to conceive of a truth beyond ‘truth’, of a reality beyond the ‘reality’ that they ostensibly represent. A scriptive woman again provides the catalyst for this partial and fleeting reconception of reality. When confronted with Sérafine’s castration story Mathieu asks, ‘était-ce vrai, était-ce

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faux? Et le grand froid terrifiant passa, ce froid de mystère, de ce qu’on ignore, de ce qu’on ne saura jamais’ (1928a, 635). Naturalism’s realism is a haunted reality, a reality that conceives of the suppressed and unthinkable spectre of its impossibility lurking beneath the scripted surface. As the writer puts it in La Confession de Claude, ‘frères, je crains bien que nos rêves ne soient pas seulement des mensonges, je les sens petits et puérils en fâce d’une réalité dont j’ai vaguement conscience’ (1928b, 38). Neither Zola nor his Naturalism can or do remain exempt from this spectralization. Rather, Zola ultimately comes to be haunted by his own ghost. His dreams of textual being rest upon the reflective gaze of his reader: J’écoute en eux naître l’avenir, et je me demande parfois, avec une certaine anxiété, [...] ce que deviendra notre œuvre entre leurs mains, car elle ne peut être définitivement que par eux, elle n’existera que s’ils l’acceptent. (1929b, 284)

Whilst he may dream of a perfectly reflective reader who will give him back to himself, the reality of the reading process is, he realizes, entirely more phantomatic. Lacan claims that ‘une lettre, c’est justement une parole qui vole. S’il peut y avoir une lettre volée, c’est qu’une lettre est une feuille volante’ (1978, 232). Zola concurs with such a logic, obsessively filling his texts with images of the wind carrying away the pages of his corpus. He writes in his Mélanges, ‘il ne m’en reste pas une phrase entière, pas une parole nette, pas un son distinct. Le vent a tout emporté’ (1929b, 81). His character Pascal claims that ‘de toute cette passion solitaire, il n’était né que des livres, du papier noirci que le vent emporterait sans doute’ (1928h, 152). Concurring with Lacan, Zola realizes that he is condemned to an obsessive pursuit of a spectral body that is ever beyond his reach. This notion of his own scriptive spectre finds best expression in the severed hand that hovers like a bloodied apparition over the Paris skyline in Nana. Zola describes ‘parmi la débandade [...] des enseignes, un énorme gant de pourpre au loin [...] une main saignante, coupée’ (1968, 196). The image of the hand pervades the Naturalist project – Lacan associates Naturalism with the desire to thrust ‘une

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main’ into ‘les entrailles du monde’ (1966, 25), and indeed Zola characterizes the hand as the symbol of power, the implement of scriptivity. (Of l’abbé Faujas we are told ‘il était le maître [...] il pouvait allonger la main, prendre la ville, la faire trembler’, 1929d, 296). This writing Naturalist hand is not only severed in Nana and in the figure of the ‘pauvre amour [...] manchot’ of the Nouveaux Contes à Ninon (1927b, 287), but its spectre haunts Naturalism as a whole. But for all this, neither Zola nor the authors in his texts stop writing. Sandoz ends his reflections on scriptive impossibility saying, ‘allons travailler’ (1929c, 324), and the sheer number of works published by Zola lives up to his character’s exhortation. Humanity is thus faced with a stalemate. Not writing reality is impossible since ‘il n’y a ni santé, ni même beauté [...] en dehors de la réalité (1928h, 85). Yet the self and reality that writing produces are equally impossible. Zola does not seek to reconcile these two impossibilities. Rather, it is precisely in this stalemate that Zola paradoxically finds some means to be. He writes from and of this scriptive impossibility and ironically grasps some kind of textual possibility in so doing. The words of Saccard, support such an argument: ‘si ma passion me tue, c’est aussi ma passion qui me fait vivre. Oui, elle m’emporte, elle me grandit, me pousse très haut, et puis elle m’abat, elle détruit d’un coup son œuvre’ (1928g, 413). Or, as Zola’s author Claude puts it: je sais et je vois, je m’aveugle et je rêve. Tandis que je m’avance sous la pluie, en pleine boue, tandis que j’ai énergiquement conscience de tout le froid, de toute l’humidité, je puis, par une faculté étrange, faire luire le soleil, avoir chaud, me créer un ciel doux et tendre, sans cesser de sentir le ciel noir qui pèse à mes épaules. Je n’ignore pas, je n’oublie pas: je vis doublement. (1928b, 88)

Emphasis must surely fall on the ‘je vis’ of this quotation. In the stalemate of these two impossibilities, Zola scriptively is, paradoxically just as he is not, somewhat like a ghost. Thus, in conclusion, the ghosts that haunt the texts of Émile Zola are unexpectedly legion. Haunted in the first instance by ghostly femininity, Zola’s novels allow these feminine spirits to return to reality, throwing into relief the spectrality of identity, masculinity and indeed the printed pages of Naturalism as a whole. Zola stages the

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return of dispossessed femininity, in order to query the self-possession of masculinity and its world. He does not exempt himself from this process of spectralization. Via the figure of the feminine, he enacts the drama of his own textual dispossession, testifying to the phantomatic nature of the scriptive process. Zola’s texts are thus peopled by ghosts – the ghosts of reality, the ghost of subjectivity, the ghost of Zola and, perhaps most of all, the ghosts of their own pages.

References Irigaray, Luce. 1974. Speculum. De l’autre femme, Paris: Minuit –––––. 1977. Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, Paris: Minuit Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Écrits, Paris: Seuil –––––. 1975a. Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre I, Paris: Seuil –––––. 1975b. Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XX, Paris: Seuil –––––. 1978. Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre II, Paris: Seuil Stendhal. 1972. Le Rouge et le Noir, Paris: Gallimard Zola, Émile. 1927a. La Curée, Paris: Bernouard. –––––. 1927b. Contes à Ninon, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1927c. Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1927d. La Débâcle, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928a. Fécondité, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928b. La Confession de Claude, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928c. Le Roman expérimental, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928d. Mes Haines, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928e. Contes et Nouvelles, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928f. Le Rêve, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928g. L’Argent, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928h. Le Docteur Pascal, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928i. Une Campagne, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928j. La Joie de Vivre, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928k. Germinal, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1928l. L’Assommoir, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1929a. La Terre, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1929b. Mélanges, Paris: Bernouard

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–––––. 1929c. L’Œuvre, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1929d. La Conquête de Plassans, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1929e. Rome, Paris: Bernouard –––––. 1968. Nana, Paris: Garnier-Flammarion

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Part II Possessing Ideas


JÉRÔME GAME The Self as Dispossession: Deleuzian Becomings and Bataillian Excess

Who dispossesses whom of what? And how? And why? In which overall ontological, but also ethical, esthetic, and political contexts? These are the questions that spring to mind when the notion of dispossession is mentioned in general. In twentieth-century French thought, no other writer has engaged with the binary couple possession/dispossession more explicitly than Georges Bataille. From his seminal article ‘Sur la notion de dépense’ published in La Critique sociale in 1933 to La Part maudite via his concepts of excess and general economy, Bataille never ceased to cast this binary couple into an existential, indeed ontological, but also esthetical and political set of contexts. Bataille’s work was hugely influential on a range of theorists and writers encompassing both the structuralist and poststructuralist moments of French thought, notably Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Sollers. To this first wave of historic Bataillians, as it were, whose laudatory commentaries of Bataille's work were published in the 1960s, a second wave was to be added in the 1970s and 1980s both in France (Denis Hollier, Francis Marmande, Michel Surya, Georges Didi-Huberman) and in the United States (Yves-Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss). If all these authors have addressed Bataille’s understanding of dispossession, they have done so from a series of particular epistemological positions and discursive practices (psychoanalysis, literary studies, literature, history, philosophy of literature). They all took from the polymorphous and heterogeneous Bataillian corpus something which echoed each one’s specific standpoint, whether it be that of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Lacan. Indeed they also

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commented on the main thematic and stylistic features of Bataille’s heterology: notably the ultimate instability of meaning, the condensed and disequilibrated nature of writing, the attention to the abnormal and the pathological, the mix of pictorial and literary documents into one text. Alongside this very fecund genealogy, and in order to push further a discussion of the double bind possession/dispossession in a philosophical context, it seems appropriate to confront Bataille’s conceptions of it with those of someone who has not been an historic Bataillian (neither in style nor in inspiration, apart from Nietzsche) and whose preferred and explicit stance was not history, literature or psychoanalysis, but ontology; namely Gilles Deleuze. Although the following assertion requires some contextualization (which I shall provide in the coming pages), it can be said that Deleuze is pretty much Bataille’s exteriority, Bataille’s other, or, more polemically, Bataille’s impensé. In the first part of this article, I shall examine how both Bataille and Deleuze radically reconceptualize the traditional notion of dispossession: as expenditure or excess in the first case, as becoming in the second; and how they locate such notions at the heart of their respective systems. In so doing I will bring out certain resemblances between these concepts. In a second part, I shall look at the crucial differences existing between excess and becoming. I would like to stress, however, that the present article does not showcase a competition between two French authors, but is merely an attempt to test the resistance and play, the strength and the limits of a notion – dispossession – via a comparison of two thoughts. The latter differ enough for a comparative study to form an in-between which in turn can be the locus of a definition of the self as dispossession. For Georges Bataille, being is neither an essence (as in Platonist ontology) nor a substance (as in Spinozist ontology) but an unending movement of sliding and overflowing (‘glissement’) towards an unspecified ‘more’ and an indeterminate ‘elsewhere’. Thus neither the individual (as autonomous physical entity) nor the subject (as autonomous consciousness) are ever able to possess themselves, that is to say to control, objectify and master their own forms and meanings. This movement is on the contrary one of constant mispossession and ultimately dispossession: being fails to grasp itself

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either as an object or as a subject. Excess is the name of such unpossessable/dispossessed being; it is therefore the name of a movement, of a force, rather than of a substance. Such is the core of the notion as Bataille presents it, but it is worth going back to Bataille’s œuvre and unpacking it genealogically, that is to say in conjunction with that of expenditure. In the words of Robert Sasso, the notion of excess: est présente en tout lieu de l’œuvre: elle l’anime en tout sens, elle la constitue même, elle la construit. Bataille la nomme aussi ‘dépense’, ou ‘démesure’, ou ‘violence’, ou ‘consumation’, ou ‘consommation sans calcul’, ou ‘potlatch’ ou ‘crue’. (1978, 170)

In fact, even if all these terms are used as synonyms of one another there is nevertheless a progression between two key terminologies throughout Bataille’s work: that from ‘dépense’ to ‘excès’. Genealogically, ‘dépense’ is first yet it is soon considered too linked to anthropology and economics, and therefore gives way to ‘excès’, which will in turn be continuously refined throughout Bataille’s life. Bataille bases the concept of expenditure on what he sees as the universal law of being, according to which everything, in order to exist and grow (that is to say, to enact the developing telos of life itself: birth, maturation, death), has to consume – power, substance, cells, and so on. Expenditure is then defined as the generic terminology designating various practices by which being-as-loss manifests itself: ‘rire, héroïsme, extase, sacrifice, poésie, érotisme ou autres’ (Œuvres Complètes, 11). To develop this concept, Bataille first used the notion of ‘potlatch’ introduced in France by the ethnologist Marcel Mauss in his essay on the gift and which designates an archaic and paradoxical exchange practised by North-American Indian tribes (Mauss 1923, see also Métraux 1963). The potlatch is a ceremonious destruction of riches which triggers a series of gifts between tribes competing to offer the most precious thing to their rival. It is thought that in the gift, the giving subject appropriates the virtue of the gesture, that is to say, of the power to overcome the influence of basic ownership instinct. The power of the potlatch is that of the abandonment of power. It triggers a paradoxical economy into

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perpetual movement. Bataille thinks of the gift in terms of ‘perte somptuaire’ and ‘acquisition paradoxale’ (Marmande 1985, 154) able to account for non-productive social expenditure.1 By extension, ‘dépense’ is the ontological force that spends purely and simply, without being paid back: it is a downright loss, a fundamental and gratuitous waste organized dialectically with the purely productive part of life. It defines souveraineté: Dans la souveraineté, l’autonomie procède [...] d’un refus de conserver, d’une prodigalité sans mesure. L’objet dans un moment souverain n’est pas substance en ce qu’il se perd. La souveraineté ne diffère en rien d’une dissipation sans limite des ‘richesses’, des substances [...]. L’énergie excédante ne peut être que perdue sans le moindre but, en conséquence sans aucun sens. C’est cette perte inutile, insensée, qui est la souveraineté. (OCV, 215, n. 1, cited by Sasso in 1978, 182)

Nature is a spontaneous and unstable dialectic between being and spending: a surplus is produced in order to be dilapidated in vain, in a non-rational and non-equilibrated way.2 The world as a whole is therefore also conceived as that which has in part already been spent: trash, waste, garbage. Bataille calls ‘homogène’ the worldly economy of production, of acquiring and of hoarding, and ‘hétérogène’ (or ‘économie générale’) the economy of unproductive spending. In his mind, homogeneity is bound to be artificial: it is but the face of mankind’s anguished inability to deal with the chaotic and paradoxical prodigality of nature, as well as of man’s greedy urge to possess and control everything. Nature, rather than being a form (let alone a virtue or a value), is a force – amoral and shapeless. Hence the feverish efforts of men and women to give it a shape, to instrumentalize it, most of the time destroying it in the process.

1

2

In La Part maudite Bataille claims that his theory of excess is scientifically corroborated by movements of energy at the surface of the globe. Via an ecological study, he extends his notion of expenditure to life in general, but I shall concentrate on the ontological aspect of his notion. See Piel 1963, Goux 1990 and Paquot, 1998–1999. ‘LA DEPENSE constitue une absence de but: un trou dans le domaine des buts [...] Rien ne permet de la donner pour un bien.’ (OCVI,423)


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In the useful and homogeneous economy, that which dilapidates is deemed subversive; it is therefore utterly denied and excluded from social legitimacy by being cast as irrational, abnormal, sick, and by being contained in the institutions of the pathological (hospitals, asylums) and the dangerous (prisons). For Bataille, on the other hand, it is labour which reduces everything to things, and through that process life is in turn reduced to usefulness and results. In short, the desire to possess lying at the core of labour is the morbid desire for ontological closure. Yet even in a homogeneous economy certain actions relapse from the realm of the useful. Examples given by Bataille are luxury, wars, mourning, cults, gambling, arts, and non-reproductive sex. As Robert Sasso puts it: il y a, dans ce qui est, une part insubordonable, radicalement hétérogène, dont la différence avec le monde homogène de la raison et du travail n’est pas assumable dans le cadre des catégories rationnelles. Le jeu de l’univers n’a pour ‘loi’ que la transgression de tout principe économique et se joue dans l’homme, y suscitant ‘la fonction insubordonnée de la dépense libre’. (1978, 174)

The concept of ‘excès’ for its part, is the generalization at an ontological level of the concept of expenditure. Excess is difficult to grasp coherently insofar as it is precisely the generic force which exceeds any limits and forms, emotional or discursive: cette définition de l’être et de l’excès ne peut philosophiquement se fonder, en ce que l’excès excède le fondement: l’excès est cela même par quoi l’être est d’abord, avant toute chose, hors de toutes limites. (OCX, 262)3 Il est en nous des moments d’excès: ces moments mettent en jeu le fondement sur lequel notre vie repose; il est inévitable pour nous de parvenir à l’excès dans lequel nous avons la force de mettre en jeu ce qui nous fonde. C'est bien au contraire en niant de tels moments que nous méconnaîtrions ce que nous sommes. (OCX, 176)

3

Notably, excess is never an object (of writing or knowledge): fragmented, full of digressions and variations, Bataille’s writings do not follow traditional forms of essayistic writing (rigorous, linear, dialectic, holistic).

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Excess is presented by Bataille as that which, constantly and systematically, relapses and eludes language, thought and social values. It resists any attempt at intellectual or physical possession, mastery, or domination. It is the figure of an all-encompassing, endless and autistic ‘More!’ in which being is inherently entangled. It has no object or container: Bataillian excess is never an excess of something, or in excess of, but pure excess. Rather than a graduation or a quantity measuring an overabundance, it is a substance that is also a movement, it is a verb (the act of exceeding) that is also a substantive (the actual excess and/or whatever is being exceeded).4 Excess is the thought-experience of the unthinkable, of the irrational,5 and of the unrepresentable: since it is limitless and formless, excess cannot be thought; it is prior to any individual being and to thought itself. As Sasso puts it: ‘Il n’y a pas, à proprement parler, de pensée de l’excès, mais un excès de la pensée se dépassant vers la non-pensée’ (178). Never fixed in a stable definition excess is alternatively qualified as ‘communication’, ‘hasard’, ‘souveraineté’, and ‘l’impossible’. Just as for expenditure, there are several figures of excess: drunkenness, eroticism, laughter, sacrifice, and poetry are the most important according to Bataille. The ultimate goal of the notion of excess in Bataille’s ontology is to overcome the fundamental discontinuity and separation characterizing being. Individuality and unity are associated with alienation which is spatially delimited and fixed: ‘l’homme asservi est celui qui s’est laissé réduire à l'ordre des choses’ (OCVII, 339). Excess is the process by which the individual breaks free from the position of separation. Paradoxically, the loss which is excess moves the person who experiences it away from the state of separation, away from individuality and the finite, and towards the infinite, towards the whole.6 Excess is a rupture of the artifice of separation: it is a 4

5 6

‘si l’on pense l’excès, en même temps cette pensée est excédée hors d’ellemême: ce n’est pas un cercle logique, c’est une expérience (infiniment) circulaire’ (Sasso 1978, 179). ‘Par définition, l’excès est en dehors de la raison’ (OCX, 185). Bataille’s conception of the whole is very much influenced by that of Hegel via Kojève’s teaching.


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separation from the status of separated being. As such, it is the ‘expérience intérieure’ allowing the subject effectively to become real and reach the state of the sovereign life. As this double negativity – separation from the status of separated thing, parting with the parted – excess is the limit of individuality: ‘je veux excéder ma limite’ says Bataille (OCXII, 477); it is the ultimate violence into boundlessness, limitlessness, infinity. This immanent sovereignty is presented as ‘plénitude de l'existence totale’ (OCI, 530), effective substantiality of that which is not separate from itself. Its essence is its continuity. Yet, fear of death as well as the guilt of trespassing moral barriers more often than not prevent individuals from taking a leap into excess: ‘nous n'osons pas affirmer dans sa plénitude notre désir d'exister sans limites: il nous fait peur’ (OCX, 140). To sum up, Bataillian excess or ontological dispossession (dispossession of the self/the self-as-dispossession) is the main modality of sovereignty; it is another word for loss: ‘je deviens souverain en cessant d'être’ (OCVIII, 255). Dispossession violently destroys the naïve self-certainty of the cogito, it destabilizes feelings of individuality, specialness, oneness, exceptionality, uniqueness, as well as feelings of self-appropriation through language. As such, dispossession in fact separates the already separated: it breaks the discontinuity in which we are maintained by the homogeneous economy. Whereas to possess means to possess an individuality, to be a separated instance of life, to dispossess means, paradoxically, to possess the whole, the totality. But to achieve this, one has, as a fixed subject, to disappear – and Bataille states clearly that this death can only be a paradigm rather than a project: true excess cannot be achieved. Deleuze’s concept of becoming is, for its part, another name for the endless immanent play between the virtual and the actual: between the infinite forms that things and meanings can potentially take and the finite occurrences that they actually are: Devenir n’est pas atteindre à une forme (identification, imitation, Mimésis), mais à trouver la zone de voisinage, d'indiscernabilité ou d'indifférenciation telle qu'on ne peut plus se distinguer d'une femme, d'un animal ou d'une

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Jérôme Game molécule: non pas imprécis ni généraux, mais imprévus, non-préexistants. (1993, 11) [C]e n’est pas un terme qui devient l’autre, mais chacun rencontre l’autre, un seul devenir qui n’est pas commun aux deux, puisqu’ils n’ont rien à voir l’un avec l’autre, mais qui est entre les deux, qui a sa propre direction, un bloc de devenir, une évolution a-parallèle. (Deleuze and Parnet 1977, 13)

Even if meaning always exceeds and precedes the becoming, it is never emptied or encircled or circumscribed or definitively formed by any becoming. Correlatively, becoming is achieved according to perpetually new local parameters rather than as a function of meaning. A becoming is simultaneously a verb and a substantive, an action and a thing, a development and an origin, an attribute and a substance. I am not going to enter into the detail of the concrete aspects of Deleuze's materialist ontology (that of pre-individual impersonal nomadic singularities, magmatic differences, and multiplicities), but just recapitulate them by saying that, at the end of it, the individual (let alone subjectivity) is not a first given but a relative construct, a phase, a moment of the permanent ontogenesis, or constructivist process, that is life. The ultimate dimension or condition of life is the virtual, and the engine, as it were, of this dimension/condition is the becoming. As with Bataille’s theory, the notion of the separated individual is also revoked by Deleuze, but in favour of the notion of individuation rather than that of the whole. An individuation is the intense process from the virtual to the actual in which the latter is not a final, substantial, stage. Rather, the actual is a precarious, metastable state (neither stable nor unstable but in-between), itself promptly engaged in a new becoming as the virtual of a new actualization. Becoming is hence endless, or to put it another way, it takes place in a pure present that Deleuze conceptualizes following Nietzsche’s ‘Eternal Return’ and Bergson’s ‘synthesis of time’. The notion of dispossession is hence built into Deleuze’s concept of becoming insofar as with such a definition of being-as-pure-movement nothing is fixed and can be appropriated. At this stage, it appears that both Bataillian excess and Deleuzian becoming suggest the fundamental inability of the subject to possess


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itself. Such inability in turn implies an immanent realm in which fundamental separation between beings is rejected. Being and life overcome the realm of possibilities for that of an immanent, meaningless and sovereign movement. In both cases, to dispossess is to refuse actions and projects:7 to dispossess is to refuse to subordinate the present to the future. The Heraclitean topos of the river-like subjectivity, forever unable to retain itself in a self-possession, marks an important meeting-point between the thought of becoming and that of excess: S’il était possible de vivre non plus une main ou un pied [as Tibetan monks do], de vivre l’inutile chevelure, il semble que rien ne retiendrait plus cette vie au plan du sol, qu’elle ne serait plus qu’un ruissellement perdu de lumières dans un espace noir, qu’elle ne serait plus que l’irrémédiable perte de soi qu’est un fleuve. (OCI, 495–496, cited in Sasso 177)

This paradigmatic image of the river/flux stresses the common preeminence for Bataille and Deleuze of immanence over transcendence, of a goalless existence, and generally, of life as creative process rather than as sheer biographical sum of occurrences. But the differences between excess and becoming are in fact paramount. Albeit eternally deferred, excess as movement consists in breaking a limit in order to penetrate a whole – sovereignty – in which the individual has been replaced by the collective. Bataille seeks to free himself from discontinuous being: ‘je veux [...] excéder ma limite’ (OCXII, 477). The goal is to reach ‘la totalité de l’être ou de l’univers à laquelle je ne puis renoncer’ (OCXII, 126), ‘l’immensité immanente, où il n’y a ni séparations, ni limites’ (OCVII, 306). Yet, paradoxically, this limitlessness, this continuous pre-existing totality founding Bataille’s ontological monism (‘la continuité’, ‘l’immensité immanente’) appears static and fixed because, unlike Deleuze’s becoming in its play with the virtual, it is not animated by a transcendental principle. The difference between his and Deleuze’s ontology is that the latter explicitly formulates the ways in which separation exists within the whole, so making of dispossession the 7

Both Bataille and Deleuze oppose Jean-Paul Sartre’s doctrine of engagement.

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principle of a moving totality. Bataille’s ontology on the other hand often seems to criticize Platonist and Judeo-Christian idealism and teleology only to make of such critique a new positivity, only to make of such destruction a negative theology.8 Limitlessness and continuity are never posited in Deleuze’s doctrine as they are in Bataille’s; they never pre-exist an act of thought or an act of creation. In a paradoxical twist, Deleuze conceives a transcendental plane (either of immanence: for philosophical concepts, or of composition: for artistic sensations) which has to be built first and on which all constructions can subsequently be called precarious.9 This plane is always to be rebuilt anew in the very act of thinking or creating. It is at this most stringent of levels – the transcendental level – that the ultimate intensity of a thought can be grasped and its idealist, or on the contrary materialist stance, can be best evaluated. By failing to account for or to provide such an epistemological or meta-constructability, Bataille’s notion of excess suddenly appears idealistically posited rather than materialistically constructed; and his monism, like any dualism, seems to be founded on a pre-existing dimension. Deleuze, on the other hand, conceptualizes thought itself as a series of relations rather than as a sum of separated contents. Therefore, unlike in Bataille’s doctrine, thought may well be a dispossession: this is how Deleuze defines philosophy itself in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Thought is a transcendental empiricism, a constructivism, rather than a catalogue of definitions and prescriptions. Another way to express this fundamental difference is via the status of immanence. Bataille’s immanence, or whole, is indeed 8 9

Bataille’s links with Heideggerian philosophy, and his reception by Derrida are in this respect not insignificant. This plane corporealizes thought and conceptualizes the body as ‘Body without Organs’. Taking on Artaud’s notion of Corps sans Organes Deleuze and Félix Guattari aim at invalidating any notion of the organism as representation of the physiological body, as normalization of an undetermined matter into compact and controllable units. In their book, Mille Plateaux they put forward the concept of BwO as a dis-organ-ization of the human body into informal singularities, sum of vectors, gradients, and magnitudes stretched out as a surface: pure virtual.


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presented as a plénitude, an arrival, a blissful ultimate state, whereas for Deleuze, immanence is a pure process – radical, all-encompassing, and never-ending. For Deleuze, immanence can only be pure (immanence tout court, as it were); for Bataille, immanence is to something: being is immanent to the subject: l'objet – tout autre que moi – me transcendait (une transcendance veut dire ceci: est autre que moi): la suppression d’un objet transcendant révèle l’immanence, une réalité qui m’est immanente, de laquelle je ne suis pas clairement et distinctement séparé. (OCXI,103)

For Deleuze, immanence is an operation, an arrangement, a series of relations in the manner of an archipelago of islands ceaselessly reconfigurating itself – it is a moving surface. These two notions of movement and relation are not concretely at work in Bataille’s conception whereas they are omnipresent in Deleuze’s; he devoted a book to the key thinker of the ontological status of relation – Leibnitz – and another one to the notion of movement – L’Image-mouvement. If Bataille sometimes mentions movement, it is in an abstract way or as a simple topic rather than as a concrete principle of his concepts of excess and whole. Deleuze’s concepts of rhizome and arrangement, for their part, are about the real as pure movement, the real as perpetual dispossession of itself via intensive and creative expression. Bataille’s whole, comparatively, is a pure presence ‘où rien n’est séparé’ (OCXII, 48): a limitless continuity. Yet what exactly is the regime of this continuity? It is as if his theory of dispossession lacks a physics. A good illustration of this difference is given by the status of things vis-à-vis that of being. For Bataille, things are agents of separation, of individualization: ‘comment sortir du monde des choses’ (OCVII, 328). For Deleuze on the other hand, such a ‘sortie’ is irrelevant not only because we are things, but also because this ‘thingness’, this thing quality of our being, this aliquid in us, is a principle of porosity which destroys the interior/exterior paradigm proper to dualist philosophies of transcendence. In a radical attack on anthropocentrism, Deleuze makes the case for a metamorphing matter. According to him, things do not separate life from itself: it is not

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enough, as Bataille does, to get rid of things in order to get rid of transcendence for the latter will linger on as emptiness, fixed ideality. For Deleuze, the issue of dispossession (ontological precariousness) does not depend on the absence or presence of things but lies entirely within things conceived as dynamic relations rather than as fixed substances. To dispossess oneself from oneself as it were is, according to Deleuze, to enter the metastable dimension of the real rather than to exceed one’s rationality or self-preservation instinct. To dispossess oneself from one’s humanity is to become, to be engaged in a becoming – a becoming-thing, a becoming-animal, a becomingimperceptible. The becoming-animal, for example, is not an imitation of an animal: Il y a des devenirs-animaux dans l’écriture, qui ne consistent pas à imiter l’animal, à ‘faire’ l’animal, pas plus que la musique de Mozart n’imite les oiseaux, bien qu’elle soit pénétrée d'un devenir-oiseau. (1977, 55)

It is a combination of two conditions: that of a human and that of an animal. The becoming-animal is a mutual deterritorialization of an animal and a man indetermining both original states: Dans un devenir-animal, se conjuguent un homme et un animal dont aucun ne ressemble à l’autre, dont aucun n’imite l’autre, chacun déterritorialisant l’autre, et poussant plus loin la ligne. Système de relais et de mutations par le milieu [...] L’écriture opère la conjonction, la transmutation des flux. (1977, 62)

Bataille’s use of the concept of animal on the other hand, is very different: it concerns a substitution of human individuality by that of an animal: Comme si quelque chienne rangée s’était substituée à la personnalité de [la femme] qui recevait si dignement. [...] Pour le moment, la personnalité est morte. Sa mort, pour le moment, laisse la place à la chienne qui profite du silence, de l’absence de la morte. La chienne jouit – elle jouit en criant – de ce silence et de cette absence. (OCX, 106–107)

This physiological trance reveals the essence of a species hidden in the empty body of an individual from another species – recalling the


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way in which Mr Hyde exists in the depths of Dr Jekyll. It is a play of predetermined essences rather than a becoming. In Bataille’s texts, the labour of excess is always presented in classically (Hegelian) dialectic terms: rather than those of a becoming they are those of an over-coming (‘dépassement’) that is also a coming-back, a return to ‘l’illimité, l’infini’ (OCX, 91). The limitlessness always pre-exists and sovereignty (ontological dispossession) consists in recovering it: ‘c’est dans la mesure où ce monde sera détruit que l'homme pourra revenir à sa source primitive’ (OCVII, 437). Something exists, therefore, which is fixed and substantial. From a Deleuzian perspective Bataille’s critique of relation appears as an apology of itselfness, pure presence to itself, substantiality. Bataille states explicitly that excess is always already here: events merely reveal it or teach it to us. For Deleuze on the contrary, becoming has to be produced: it never pre-exists, only its dimensions pre-exist. Becoming is never certain, and when it happens it is always as an event, that is to say as something radically undetermined and unpredictable. In the face of Bataillian pre-existing, hidden or implicit sovereignty one thinks of Heidegger and his theory of the forgetting of being and the necessary recovery of a meta-arch-origin. Nietzsche’s accusation of Platonist philosophy and Judeo-Christianism for having parted with the airy lightness of Dionysus and pre-Socratic wisdom also comes to mind as a model of sovereignty. Finally, Derrida’s phenomenological work on and after Bataille further contextualizes the thought of the latter around the notion of trace and that of a phenomenological immanence in which reality and meaning pre-exist, (Derrida 1967, 369–408) as opposed to Deleuze’s purely materialistic immanence, in which only contingent energetic fields occur. In other words: epiphany and revelation are here opposed to perpetual construction and production. Insofar as excess consists in seeking the trace of the original presence, Bataille’s dispossession (as Derrida’s) is one of destruction: ‘le sens de cette profonde liberté nous est donné dans la destruction’ (OCVII, 63). Destruction – albeit perpetually deferred – is a movement whose meaning is that of a return and of a reunion with real presence and true life. To dispossess oneself ‘c’est laisser place à la révélation de l'antérieure présence’, bring back ‘la

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souveraineté originaire’ (Le Lannou 1997, 444). Deleuze’s dispossession, on the other hand, is one of change, metamorphosis, becoming: that is to say, fundamentally (as those of Spinoza and Nietzsche), one of expression and creation.10 Here lies the crucial difference between dispossession as thought in the theory of excess and dispossession as thought in the theory of becoming: the latter is taken in the constructivist and productivist ontology of multiplicities whereas Bataille’s method is ‘soustractive’: the forces of excess pre-exist but are covered by layers of separation (‘il y a dans la nature et il subsiste en l’homme un mouvement qui toujours excède les limites et qui jamais ne peut être réduit que partiellement’ (OCX, 43).11 The ontological movement at work in excess is from the vacuity or absence of being in which we are maintained by the teleological and homogeneous economy (in which all is separated, reified, desubstantialized, predetermined according to usefulness) to completeness: ‘plénitude de l’existence totale’ (OCI, 530). Relation is presented as the locus and the pattern of alienation though the fluid aspects of sovereignty determining being as a moving whole are never made explicit or exemplified concretely. This makes one think that Bataille’s immanence is more rhetorical than real and remains predicated on a projection of individualism onto a wide image, that of the ‘whole’. From a Deleuzian perspective, the whole allowed by dispossession in Bataille’s theory of excess is in fact a replica of individualism insofar as it is structured by the same concepts and reflexes – it is an artificial immanence duplicating a dualist structure of thought. The essence of being-as-excess resides in the continuity of this movement: ‘C’est une ontologie de la dualité des modalités d'êtres qui constitue le centre de cette pensée: [...] de la transcendance à l'immanence, de la 10

11

‘Tout devenir ne passe pas par l’écriture, mais tout ce qui devient est objet d’écriture, de peinture ou de musique. Tout ce qui devient est une pure ligne, qui cesse de représenter quoi que ce soit’ (1977, 89). See Game 2002, Introduction, ‘A Poetics of the Virtual’, which shows how the Deleuzian ontology is fundamentally a philosophy of expression. ‘toujours antérieure, [la plénitude] n’est en vérité jamais absente, simplement voilée par l’irréalité de la chose et de l’action, donc par la relation’ (Le Lannou 1997, 442).


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vacuité à la plénitude’ (Le Lannou 1997, 440). Immanence is truncated and reduced to a predetermined set of loci by the play of binary oppositions structuring Bataille’s essays, novels, and poems: good/evil, the church/the brothel, the virgin/the whore, the low (excremental waste)/the high (the soul), and so on. The highly ritualized climax of L’Histoire de l’œil, during which a woman kills a young priest whilst having sex with him in his church, is paradigmatic of Bataille’s systematically reversed morals.12 In what seems a surprisingly literal reading of Nietzsche, Bataille tries to reverse all values but, in this strict pendulum movement, reinstalls another symmetrical orthodoxy. A good example of this pendulum movement is the couple sexual desire/death. Why would desire have to be desperate, black, doomed, unhappy, anguished? Are these determinations something other than the representation of death?13 In Bataille’s work desire is never a passage through death. The latter is never part of a becoming creating an original third element. The same death (that of the subject) is being eternally restaged; it is an original matrix, a mould, rather than a gate towards something else, something

12

13

‘The irony is (and transgression will produce multiple ironies), which Bataille himself is not always aware of, that a writing which appears to be most transgressive can, in fact, be the least transgressive’ (Noys 1998, 308). Noys adds: ‘Bataille’s violently blasphemous eroticism can end up supporting what it is supposed to disrupt’ (310). See also Alféri and Cadiot 1995, 296–300, and editor’s interview. In L’Anti-Œdipe, Deleuze and Guattari fiercely criticize Bataille in this respect: ‘il doit y avoir deux avortements, deux castrations pour le désir malade: une fois en famille, sur la scène familiale, avec la tricoteuse; une fois en clinique de luxe aseptisé, sur la scène psychanalytique, avec des artistes spécialistes qui savent manier l’instinct de mort, et “réussir” la castration, “réussir” la frustation’ (1972, 399). See also François Warin 1994, 66–67 and 1994, 292. In Dialogues, Deleuze gets sarcastic: ‘Georges Bataille est un auteur très français: il a fait du petit secret l’essence de la littérature, avec une mère dedans, un prêtre, un œil au-dessus. On ne dira pas assez le mal que le phantasme a fait à l’écriture [...] en nourrissant le signifiant et l’interprétation l’un de l’autre, l’un avec l’autre [...] On invente toujours de nouvelles races de prêtres pour le sale petit secret, qui n’a d’autres objets que de se faire reconnaître, nous remettre dans un trou bien noir, nous faire rebondir sur le mur bien blanc’ (1977, 59); see also Noys 1998, 310.

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x. It is the locus of a ritual repetition rather than that of a crossing.14 Excess hence appears as a mirroring game putting everything upside down, and in so doing, it fixes meaning and condemns it to be endlessly repeated in this specularity, frozen in reiterations.15 What is completely missing from this gesture is an understanding of the fact that an escape from a tyrannical moral set-up does not reside in the predictable endorsement of its formal opposite but in the relapse of any set-up whatsoever. Bataille’s dispossession is in fact a binary repossession of human life by an all-encompassing and all-empowered moral web. Deleuzian dispossession, on the other hand, is a transcendental (amoral rather than immoral) dispossession of thought by itself, and therefore it posits action as a pure opening or becoming. Excess is an individual wish to become everything, to become a whole as paroxysm of the separated. Becoming, on the other hand, is a desire to be nothing, ‘without quality’, without specificity, indeterminate.16 Bataille hence functions with fantasy inasmuch as excess subsumes the following sequence: forbidden-limits-transgression, whereas Deleuze functions with productive desire. The fantasy is hierarchized, œdipalized, as Bataille himself suggests, referring to his blind and syphilitic father and to the traumatic and founding moment of his death: ‘Mon père m’ayant conçu aveugle (aveugle absolument), je ne puis m’arracher les yeux comme Œdipe./J’ai comme Œdipe deviné l'énigme: personne n’a deviné plus loin que moi’ (OCIII, 60).17 14

15 16

17

In the Notes au Dossier de l’œil pinéal Bataille writes: ‘Un fantasme répond en maître et non en esclave: il existe comme un fils libre après une longue souffrance sous la férule jouissant diaboliquement et sans remords du meurtre de son père’ (OCII, 415–416), and in the Préface to Madame Edwarda: ‘la joie est la même chose que la douleur, la même chose que la mort’, ‘l’identité du plaisir extrême et de l’extrême douleur: l’identité de l’être et de la mort’ (OCX, 261); see also Pasi 1987, 143–162. In his study of masochism, Deleuze (1967) sees sadism as a self-repeating theatre. With more space, it would have been possible to address the status of time and temporality in Bataille’s Nietzscheo-Hegelian dialectics in its relation with subjectivity and to see how the Deleuzian being-as-relation (becoming), is a thought of time, of presence as eternal return. Bataille and his mother had abandoned his dying father in front of the 1915 German offensive on France during World War I. Heimonet claims that not


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At the end of his study, Le Lannou asks: Désindividualiser sans se dissoudre, est-ce possible? Qui peut se défaire et se libérer de l’individualité, donc être soi sans être rivé à cette contingence [séparation, limite] asservissante? Comment penser la détermination et le statut d’une individualité autre que limitative? (453)

It is my contention that this programme is precisely achieved by the Deleuzian becoming: it is that of the becoming rather than that of the pendulum, that of pure immanence rather than that of immanence to, that of transcendental empiricism rather than that of idealism.18

References Alféri, Pierre and Cadiot, Olivier, 1998–1999. ‘“Bataille en relief”: retour sur une provocation’, Les Temps Modernes 602, special edition on Bataille, 296–300 –––––. eds., 1995. Revue de Littérature Générale 1 Bataille, Georges. 1970–1980. Œuvres Complètes, Paris: Gallimard Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. Critique et clinique, Paris: Minuit ––––– and Guattari, Félix. 1972. L'Anti-Œdipe, Paris: Minuit –––––. 1967. Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, Paris: Minuit ––––– and Parnet, Claire. 1977. Dialogues, Paris: Flammarion Derrida, Jacques. 1967. ‘De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale: Un hégélianisme sans réserve’, in L’Écriture et la différance, Paris: Seuil, 369–408 Foucault, Michel. 1963. ‘Préface à la transgression’, Critique 195–196, 751– 69

18

only Deleuze’s ontology is heavily indebted to that of Bataille, but also that unlike the latter, Deleuze did not physically experience what he talks about, which is enough to disqualify his theories (Heimonet 1990, 38 ssq.). I disagree with this however: the Deleuzian concept of thought is indeed separate from any notion or necessity of biographic details, this is the point of such a concept. See Foucault 1963, Klossowski 1963 and also Libertson 1977.

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Game, Jérôme. 2002. ‘Expression as Becoming: A Poetics of the Virtual in the works of Christian Prigent, Dominique Fourcade, Olivier Cadiot, and Hubert Lucot’, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Cambridge Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1990. ‘General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism’, Yale French Studies 78, special edition on Bataille, 206–224 Heimonet, Jean-Michel. 1990. Politiques de l'écriture: Bataille/Derrida: Le sens du sacré dans la pensée française du surréalisme à nos jours, Paris: Jean-Michel Place Klossowski, Pierre. 1963. ‘Le simulacre dans la communication de Georges Bataille’, Critique 195–196, 742–750 Le Lannou, Jean-Michel. 1997. ‘Bataille: la plénitude souveraine’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 102:3, 431–453 Libertson, Joseph. 1977. ‘Excess and Imminence: Transgression in Bataille’, Modern Languages Notes 92:5, 1001–1023 Marmande, Francis. 1985. Georges Bataille politique, Lyons: Presses Universitaires de Lyon Mauss, Marcel. 1923. ‘Essai sur le don – Formes et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques’, Année sociologique, 30–186 Métraux, Alfred. 1963. ‘Rencontre avec les ethnologues’, Critique 196, 677– 684 Noys, Benjamin. 1998. ‘Transgressing Transgression: the Limits of Bataille's Fiction’, in Larry Duffy and Adrian Tudor, eds., Les Lieux interdits: Transgression and French Literature, Hull: University of Hull Press, 307–323 Paquot, Thierry. 1998–1999. ‘Utilité de l'inutile?’ Les Temps Modernes 602, 109–120 Pasi, Clemente. 1987. ‘L'Hétérologie et “Acéphale”: du fantasme au mythe’, Revue des Sciences Humaines 206, 143–162 Piel, Jean. 1963. ‘Bataille et le monde: de “La notion de dépense” à “La Part Maudite”’, Critique 195–196, 721–733 Sasso, Robert. 1978. Georges Bataille: le système du non-savoir: Une ontologie du jeu, Paris: Minuit Warin, François. 1994. Nietzsche et Bataille: la parodie à l'infini, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

SIOBHÁN SHILTON Repossessing Travel: Postcolonial Theory and the Reordering of Space

Before the emergence of postcolonial theory, travel in both theory and criticism was confined to an almost exclusively Western understanding. Perceived as a generic, yet highly restricted practice, travel was used uncritically to signify journeys by white, Western, bourgeois, male travellers from former imperial centres to former colonial peripheries. All other vectors were ignored, all other travellers occluded or dismissed as vagrants, immigrants or madmen.1 Postcolonial theory has led to a dismantling and a renegotiation of the hierarchical relationship between centre and periphery, forcing an acknowledgement of journeys to, between and within neglected spaces or contact zones. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the emergence of postcolonial theory and criticism has led to the recovery or revelation of aspects of travel which theory has previously failed to possess, in order to produce a more inclusive understanding of the concept. This will involve a consideration of the emergence of a postcolonial consciousness of colonial cultures, specifically in the early work of Edward Said and James Clifford, and the consequent need to problematize Western understandings of travel. Particular attention will be given to Said’s Orientalism (1978), which might be seen as the foundational text of postcolonial theory, and Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (1988), which is representative of a similar shift towards a postcolonial perspective on colonial cultures. A focus on the implicit problematization of travel in these texts will be followed by an analysis of more recent postcolonial criticism by these 1

For a critique of the description of such travellers as madmen, see Hacking 1999.

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authors (see Said 1994 and Clifford 1997), in which the concept of travel is more explicitly renegotiated. These texts, as well as the work of critics such as Mary Louise Pratt, Ali Behdad, bell hooks and Caren Kaplan, signal a paradigm shift in the understanding of cultures of travel, entailing the mobilization and recognition of the subjecthood of the non-metropolitan other, or the ‘travellee’,2 who acquires an equal right to subjectivity and to the status of traveller. Said and Clifford force an acknowledgement of journeys which disrupt the centrifugal, colonizing direction of traditional journeys, recovering previously marginalized figures of travel such as the immigrant, the exile and the refugee. Intrinsically linked to this liberation and decolonization of the signification of travel is the challenge that postcolonial theory poses to the familiar notions of culture and identity as autonomous, monolithic entities. The questioning of these concepts challenges the stability of the traveller’s identity, and calls for a recovery of neglected journeys as well as a re-examination, or a repossession, of what it means to travel in the postcolonial era.3 My analysis of the postcolonial renegotiation of the semantic field of travel and the recovery of previously marginalized aspects of the concept will be applied primarily to a Francophone context. In contrast to Anglo-Saxon approaches, recent French travel criticism seems on the whole to be resistant to postcolonial theory. A postcolonial relationship to colonial models of travel can be found in the work of critics such as Romuald Fonkoua and Jean-Marc Moura.4 However, the majority of French travel criticism is primarily concerned with generic and sociological issues, perceiving arguments such as Said’s as purely polemical (see Le Bris 1995). This article will address the possible reasons for the exclusion of postcolonial theory 2

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4

The term ‘travellee’ was coined by Mary Louise Pratt (1992, 7). This term refers to the colonized other who cannot travel but is travelled over, reinforcing its passive status as object of the Western traveller’s gaze. Mildred Mortimer (1990) signals the multiple heritage of the journey motif, which, as well as being central to the European novel, is also rooted in the African oral tradition. Mortimer also argues that colonialism promoted voyages undertaken by both Europeans and Africans, thus recovering the occluded journeys of Francophone non-metropolitan subjects. See Fonkoua 1998, 117–191; also Moura 1998a, 1998b, 1999.

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from French approaches to such debates and the consequent bifurcation of travel scholarship, considering what the implications of an engagement with postcolonialism would be for the definition of travel within the Francophone space. The impact of postcolonial theory on travel must first be situated in relation to postmodernism, which presented the first challenge to traditional, exclusive definitions of the concept by foregrounding another Western traveller: the tourist. The work of critics such as Dean MacCannell and the semiologist Jean-Didier Urbain has helped to demolish the traveller/tourist binary, in a sense dispossessing the traditional traveller, by destabilizing his apparently cohesive identity, revealing the once exclusive, individual practice of travel to be available to the masses. MacCannell and Urbain demonstrate that the routes, destinations and often the preoccupations of the tourist coincide with those of the traveller. The supposedly democratic expansion of travel as a critical term is, however, less inclusive than it appears. Despite postmodern efforts to democratize the concept, thus blurring the distinction between the traditionally polarized categories of traveller and tourist, travel still remains restricted to a Western definition. In fact, the inclusion of tourism as a mode of travel, with its associations of leisure and freedom, further excludes the nonWesterner from definitions of the traveller, reinforcing the status of the non-metropolitan subject as travellee, or immobile, passive object of the Western gaze. Of such ‘indigène(s) sédentaire(s)’, Urbain states: ‘Pour eux […], le nomadisme de loisir est un luxe inaccessible. Ils ne seront jamais touristes. S’ils partent, ils seront immigrés, promis à une autre sédentarité: celle de l’exil’ (1991, 10). Is the exile necessarily sedentary, as Urbain implies? Are, as Clifford maintains, the definitions of traveller and exile, or even tourist and exile, so distinct? Could the concept of travel be expanded to include exiles, immigrants and other figures of diaspora, as Clifford maintains, or, as hooks argues, is such a gesture merely a neo-colonial recuperation of a jaded term? Before addressing these issues, which are problematized by postcolonial theory, I will examine the emergence of a postcolonial consciousness of colonial cultures and the implications this has for travel.

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Demythifying Centre and Periphery: Towards an Ontological Understanding of Travel Although the travellee is not explicitly mobilized in Said and Clifford’s early criticism, their exposure and critique of the centre/periphery binary and the essentialist notions of culture and identity on which this depends implies a further decentring of the travelling subject and blurs the boundaries of travel as a Western practice. Implicit in these texts, which problematize the traveller more than the travellee, is the potential for the other’s mobilization. Before considering the possibility of the non-Westerner as a traveller, I will address the challenge Said and Clifford’s work poses to conventional, geographical definitions of travel and the binaries perpetuated in Orientalist travel texts. Said’s Orientalism exposes travel’s complicity with the Orientalist project. Said conveys the power of travellers’ tales to secure ethnocentric perspectives, fortifying Europe’s sense of cultural superiority and reinforcing it as the centre from which the rest of the world is observed (1995, 117). The very fact of the traveller’s mobility, of his presence in the Orient because he could be there, lends him power and superiority over the travellee who can only be described by him. In the texts produced by travellers in the Orient, all traces of the other’s subjectivity are erased, its diversity subsumed so that it presents no threat to the identity of the self; the centre can be reassured of its superiority over the periphery. As Said states: ‘[t]he Orient is watched […] the European […] is a watcher’ (1995, 103). The other is looked at but cannot look, for, as bell hooks asserts: ‘to be fully an object [is] to lack the capacity to see or recognize reality’ (1992, 168). Said makes clear the binary implicit in Orientalist texts between Western traveller and non-Western travellee. This suggests that the European travels ‘over’ the dehumanized other who is condemned to sedentariness. As Clifford reminds us: ‘in the dominant discourses of travel, a non-white person cannot figure as a heroic explorer, aesthetic interpreter, or scientific authority’ (1997, 33).

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Orientalism reinforces the meaning of travel as an exclusively Western phenomenon. One way in which the travel writer subsumes the heterogeneity of the other is by systematically reducing the Orient to its representative parts. This diminishes the threat of the other, making it palatable for the intended European reader back home. In such texts, there is no focus on individual subjects whose specific history and experience are obscured. The Orient is fixed both in space and time, thus maintaining the illusion of distance between the constructed identities of self and other. Moreover, this illusion is presented in travel texts as the absolute truth. Such texts gain more authority even than the reality they portray through their reference to earlier Orientalist texts. The traveller’s account, which seems to be a faithful representation, is in fact a reinterpretation and a rewriting of the constructed Orient. Rather than being retranslated with each successive journey, the Orient is constantly freighted through references to someone else’s account. This intertextual process functions to reinforce the Orient’s main characteristics, essentializing and further orientalizing it. Said’s exposure of the truth-effects perpetuated by colonial travel texts implicitly dismantles the hierarchical opposition between centre and periphery, colonizer and colonized, traveller and travellee, revealing it to be porous. The implication in Orientalism that identities are sociocultural constructions suggests that the other, against whom the traveller defines himself, is fluid and dynamic, thus threatening the boundaries of the supposedly coherent identity of the traveller. Said’s critique of Orientalist procedures is applied by Clifford to the notion of culture (1988, 273). Extending Said’s argument, Clifford asserts that ‘[i]f all essentializing modes of thought must […] be held in suspense, then we should attempt to think of cultures not as organically unified or traditionally continuous but rather as negotiated, present processes’ (1988, 273). What does such a questioning of the organicist assumptions of the notion of culture, of its synonymy with language and place, mean for travel? If a culture is considered in terms of its relations with other cultures exterior to its physical (and imagined) borders, as Orientalism implies it should be, the notion of home, on which travel is traditionally posited, is equally unstable. Though the binaries of

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home and abroad, familiar and exotic exist geographically, the perceived hierarchical opposition between their constructed identities is revealed to be founded not upon this reality but upon myth. Moreover, the twentieth-century exotic, as Clifford points out, is close by (1988, 13). If otherness is no longer necessarily located on a geographical periphery, how can one travel in the traditional sense? How can the traveller return? Clifford’s assertion that ‘an older topography and experience of travel is exploded’ (1988, 14) would seem to suggest that the quest for exoticism ultimately leads back towards the self, implying a shift from a geographical to an ontological understanding of travel. Travel in its conventional sense is no longer possible (and has, as Clifford implies, always been based upon myth). What does this mean for the travellee? Clifford debunks the myth of the sedentary travellee, by introducing the possibility that the apparently rooted ‘natives’ may have been somewhere, though, significantly, he seems reluctant to say they have actually travelled (1988, 17). Although the travellee has not achieved the status of traveller at this stage in postcolonial criticism, his/her subjectivity is acknowledged. The recognition of the individuality of the rootless colonized subject presents a challenge to the static identity of the Westerner; the problematization of home is mimicked through the fluidity of abroad. The issues raised by Said and Clifford in these texts are developed in their more recent criticism which explicitly problematizes the inclusion of the non-Westerner as a traveller.

Travel and Transculturation: the Mobilization of the Travellee Clifford and Said develop their attack on the notion of culture seen as a monolithic entity, further challenging the superiority of the West by their demonstration that the metropole is a site of travel for others. Their consideration of how spaces are traversed from the outside by diverse travellers and by various cultural forces reveals the notion of

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the immobile travellee to be impossible, thus undermining the colonial traveller’s attempt to fix otherness. Both Clifford and Said acknowledge as travel the journeys to the supposed centre by formerly colonized subjects, thus relativizing travel, suggesting that Paris is not only the origin of journeys but also ‘a place of […] arrivals [and] transits’ (Clifford 1997, 30). This postcolonial remembrance and recovery of previous journeys that have been obscured by Orientalism reinscribes the objects of the Western gaze as historical subjects, demanding the coevalness of the other so that the gaze can finally, ‘belatedly’, be returned.5 Said acknowledges the presence in the metropolitan centre, since the interwar period, of travellers such as expatriates, students (who, in a Francophone context, have been educated in the colonial education system), exiles, refugees, and immigrants (Said 1994, 62, 292). Clifford, too, suggests that the great urban centres could be understood as specific, powerful sites of dwelling and travelling (1997, 30), as the destination or place of transit for diverse and heterogeneous travelling others. What are the implications for definitions of Frenchness of postcolonial journeys to the metropolitan contact zone, and the diasporic conjunctures they create? The journeys undertaken by non-metropolitan Francophone subjects from the periphery to the centre counter the colonizing, centrifugal direction of conventional journeys and turn France itself into the exotic other. They might be said to appropriate and reverse the Western traveller’s gaze. As is the case for Orientalist travellers, their knowledge of the other is freighted through exotic texts. For example, the protagonists of both Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris (1937) and Bernard Dadié’s Un Nègre à Paris (1959) initially base their preconceptions of France and the French on texts such as Dumas’ Les trois mousquétaires, which, from their perspectives, are exotic. The supposedly immobile travellee is transformed from 5

For a discussion of the colonial gaze see, for example, Pratt 1992. Ali Behdad signals the power of postcolonialism’s ‘belatedness’ to rework and transform the perception of the colonial encounter and opposition to it (1994, 3). The phrase ‘denial of coevalness’ was first used by Johannes Fabian (1983) to describe the fixing, in anthropology and ethnographic practice, of the other as object.

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passive object into active travelling subject, being both mobilized and empowered by vision. As bell hooks notes: ‘to look directly [is] an assertion of subjectivity, equality’ (hooks 1992, 168). Embarking on his journey from Dakar to the metropole, Dadié’s protagonist declares: ‘[j]e vais voir Paris […] avec mes yeux […] on ne verra pas pour moi’ (1959, 7), provocatively emphasizing his power to see and therefore to analyse and define the other for himself. Such journeys force a recognition that ‘one group’s core [can be] another’s periphery’ (Clifford 1997, 25), that French culture can be defined from the outside. The encroachment of elsewhere on the centre, which indicates the arbitrariness of boundaries, could be perceived as a serious threat to a cohesive, autonomous French national identity. This could partially explain why writers of colonial (and neo-colonial) travel texts, including many contemporary French travel writers, nostalgically fix otherness in time and space in a desperate attempt to hold off what they perceive to be the end of travel.6 An example of this can be found in the work of Jean-Luc Coatalem who locates his novels in ‘[l]es colonies d’antan, vestiges d’un passé qui me manque, d’une aventure qui m’a échappé’ (1999, 84), or Gilles Lapouge whose aim is to block all communication with, and understanding of, the other in order to heighten its opacity: ‘[j]e ne vais pas dans un pays pour le connaître mais pour l’ignorer un peu mieux’ (1999a, 116). The threat that non-Western travellers to France pose to definitions of Frenchness could also provide an explanation for the omission of postcolonial journeys and postcolonial theory from French approaches to travel. A further challenge to French culture is presented by Clifford’s epistemological use of the travel metaphor, that is, his foregrounding of travel as a way to understand culture and identity in contingent and partial ways. His suggestion that cultures be rethought as sites of dwelling and travel helps to de-essentialize both (former) colonizer and (former) colonized. As well as being crossed by a network of intersecting trajectories undertaken by travellers of diverse origins and motivations, French culture is a space traversed and constructed by a 6

Modern fears of the end of travel, that is, the impossibility of literal displacement to undiscovered, often geographically remote, territories, can be traced back at least to the work of Châteaubriand. See Forsdick 2000.

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complex variety of political, economic and cultural forces such as television, radio, tourists, commodities, and armies (Clifford 1997, 27–28). Even a subject who has not travelled by any standard definition has a ‘local/global sense’ (Clifford 1997, 28), due to exposure to outside or transnational influences. Paradoxically, colonial (and neo-colonial) travellers themselves contribute to the perpetual transformation of cultures they strive to fix. The supposedly rooted objects of their gaze are, in fact, travelling metaphorically (if not literally) between cultures. In accordance with Clifford, Caren Kaplan demystifies the idea of centres as stable entities whose purity is contaminated by others from elsewhere (1998, 102). The connections of centres to spaces outwith their imagined boundaries already exist; metropoles, and so-called peripheries are ‘dynamic, shifting complex locations that exchange goods, ideas, and culture with many other locations’ (Kaplan 1998, 102). Said, too, challenges the idea that cultures are unconnected, exposing the fact of their interdependence on one another, revealing the inevitable influence of the non-European world on what is often believed to be a homogeneously white and Western society (1994, 43, 292). As in the work of Clifford, the notion of travel which emerges in Said’s recent criticism is not confined to a literal, geographical understanding. Northward voyages are, in a sense, repossessed in Culture and Imperialism, where Said describes the appropriation in fiction by postcolonial subjects of the voyage motif, a topos of colonial culture (1994, 34, 254–55).7 The Anglophone examples he details serve to highlight the current absence of an equivalent Francophone canon of travel texts focusing in particular on African travel writers, which might include: Bakary Diallo’s Force-Bonté (1985), Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris (1964), Ferdinand Oyono’s Chemin d’Europe (1960) and Pius Ngandu Nkashama’s Vie et mœurs d’un primitif en Essonne quatre-vingt-onze (1987).8 This adoption and reuse of a colonial topos for postcolonial purposes is an instance of what Said

7 8

As examples, Said uses Ngugi (1965) and Salih (1970). This list could be extended to include Dadié 1959; Boudjedra 1975; Essomba 1996; and Tshibanda 1999, amongst many others.

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terms the ‘voyage in’; that is, the engagement with and transformation of the discourse of Europe and the West (1994, 260). Significantly, this process of appropriation does not subvert the colonial use of the voyage motif but adapts it. Importantly, accounts depicting Francophone journeys to the metropole do not simply invert stereotypical representations of the other, falling into the trap of Occidentalism. The ‘reverse ethnography’ practised by travellers such as Dadié’s protagonist (that is, the description of the colonizer in terms of ethnographic types) might be seen as an ironic parody, given that their real objective, in contrast to that of the Western traveller, is by no means to fix difference. Rather, the aim of many Francophone travellers to the metropole is to become transculturated in the sense of being integrated into a host culture transformed by their presence, without abandoning their culture of origin. In a sense, they transcend the self/other binary by focusing on the communication between these supposed polar opposites: the journey undertaken by Dadié’s protagonist is one which leads to ‘une “découverte-interrogation” du moi, de l’Autre, des relations entre les uns et les autres’ (Fonkoua 1998, 7, my emphasis). Such texts mix and engage with the metropolitan world in equal debate rather than reacting against it. Although the reuse of the voyage motif by a postcolonial subject does disrupt the power of Western narratives of the Orient and Africa, it does not signify a replacement of the colonial model of travel with a new model. Rather, it entails a renegotiation of colonial travel from a belated postcolonial perspective, subtly expanding the semantic field of travel. Said’s insistence on the overlapping, intertwined nature of the discrepant histories of Empire of both (former) colonizer and (former) colonized, and the resultant ‘cross-fertilization’ of European and non-European cultures in the (in this case) metropolitan contact zone (1994, 292), is reminiscent of the process of transculturation detailed by Mary Louise Pratt (1992, 6). Significantly, Pratt uses this term to refer not only to the selection and absorption of elements from the metropolitan culture by the subordinated non-metropolitan culture, but also to this process in reverse, affirming that the periphery has also determined the metropole (1992, 6).

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This hitherto neglected aspect of travel indicates that cultures are permeable, in that they inevitably absorb elements from other cultures, as has been discussed above. Said’s assertion that far from being unitary or autonomous, ‘cultures actually assume more “foreign” elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude’ (1994, 15) provocatively signals the porous nature of the imagined boundaries surrounding definitions of Frenchness. The presence of non-European travellers and the influence they bring to, and have always had, on the metropole, contravenes the French colonial ideal of assimilation, as well as its contemporary ideal of integration (which aims to suppress their histories of travel), forcing a recognition that French society is multi-ethnic. Furthermore, Said’s assertion challenges the popular myth (central to much French political rhetoric) that cultural diversity will lead to the dissolution of the Republic. Both Said and Clifford imply that the acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of cultures, histories and territories is preferable to conceiving of (French) identity as a reductively unified whole.

Translating Travel The voyage in, or the adoption and adaptation of elements from the colonizer’s culture, has only been available to the colonial intellectual, or évolué, in a Francophone context. However, the journeys of postcolonial subjects are not all destined for the metropole; they are not limited to an engagement with the culture of the former colonizer. The postcolonial traveller, who need not be an intellectual from a former colony, can also travel to other peripheries. As well as allowing for what might be called the ‘voyage out’, Clifford’s analysis further attenuates the concept of travel to include ‘travel stories’, thus questioning the link between travel and textuality so necessary to the colonial enterprise. Clifford calls for an acknowledgement of journeys which have never been textualized in a literary form but which we might gain access to through letters, diaries, oral histories, music and

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performance traditions (1997, 34). In a postcolonial Francophone context, it certainly seems important to repossess oral histories of travel, given the oral roots of the African Francophone cultures considered in this article. We might think of the stories of the travellers to the metropole cited by Clifford and Said, or of the guides, servants, companions and translators who accompany supposedly individual travellers between peripheries. These subjects have been denied the status of proper travellers, partially because of their race and class (Clifford 1997, 33). Clifford offers a list of occluded subjects whose journeys could count as travel, such as servants, migrant labourers and recent immigrants (1997, 25). His expansion of the concept of travel, although inclusive of diverse Western and nonWestern subjects, is extremely problematic. Although these figures travel, the coercive nature of their journeys makes it difficult to label them travellers. bell hooks argues with Clifford’s controversial stretching of the concept of travel to include such exilic journeys: ‘[t]ravel is not a word that can be easily evoked to talk about the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, the landing of Chinese immigrants, the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans, or the plight of the homeless’ (hooks 1992, 173). hooks’ statement seems justified when applied to the Francophone journeys depicted by Socé and Dadié considered earlier. Despite their appropriation of the French gaze, it is impossible for the colonized Francophone subject to assume fully the identity of the traveller in the conventional sense. In contrast to the freedom of Western travel, the journey undertaken by the non-metropolitan Francophone subject is often one of deracination and rupture, an enforced exile from their own country, or at least one motivated by socio-economic necessity. Although they may set out as travellers, upon arrival they become exiles, being literally exiled from their country of origin and metaphorically exiled by the host community. The évolué experiences profound alienation when the ‘real’ Paris he discovers does not correspond to the iconic notion of Frenchness that had been inculcated in him. Once in Paris, Socé’s protagonist nostalgically longs for the ‘mirages de Paris’ imagined during his childhood in West Africa: ‘où étaient les personnages habituels de ses lectures?’ (1964, 32). The disorientation they experience is a long way from the voluntary dépaysement of contemporary travellers such as

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Nicolas Bouvier (whose project of self-effacement, most extremely illustrated in Le poisson-scorpion, 1982, relies on travelling and travel writing, as ‘exercices de disparition’, 1999, 44) and Gilles Lapouge (whose effort to lose himself, ‘de s’embrouiller dans les routes et de voyager comme un éberlué’, 1999a, 113, 115), is exemplified in Besoin de mirages (1999b, 172–182). Clifford himself acknowledges the risk of downplaying the extent to which the mobility of such subjects is coerced, admitting that an inclusion of these journeys as travel would be problematic (1997, 34). His insistence on the application of this term to exilic journeys might seem to dehistoricize postcolonial experiences of travel, communicating a fascination with imperialism, as hooks believes (1992, 173). However, Clifford prefers to hang onto this word precisely because of its ‘historical taintedness’ (1997, 39). Seeing very different types of journeys as travel exposes the discrepancies between the cultural, political, and economic situations of diverse but connected travellers (Clifford 1997, 35). This illuminates not travel per se, but travel as a field of constant interaction. Importantly, Clifford puts as much emphasis on a subject’s cultural location, or histories of dwelling, as on his/her histories of travel. Similarly, whilst underlining the intertwined nature of cultures, both Clifford and Said highlight their distinctiveness. This challenges the idea that otherness is rapidly disappearing and that, therefore, travel is coming to an end. The world is increasingly connected but this does not mean it is unified (Clifford 1988, 17). The hybridization of cultures in which travel results is not leading towards a monoculture but towards the perpetuation of diversity in new forms, resulting in a cultural mosaic rather than all-encompassing métissage.9

9

Such apparently celebratory evocations of plurality and multiculturalism should not obscure the new hierarchical oppositions which continue to result from the designation of difference. We might think of the condition of exile imposed upon many travellers to Paris – the colonial model having been transposed, in a sense, from the former colonies to the metropole.

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Concluding Remarks As this article has demonstrated, the emergence of postcolonial theory and criticism has led to a renegotiation, or a repossession, of the concept of travel. The emergence of a postcolonial consciousness of colonial cultures in the work of authors such as Said and Clifford inevitably involves a questioning of the very notions of culture and identity (neither of which can be delimited or possessed) and, therefore, challenges the dynamics of possession between colonizer and colonized, subject and object of the colonial gaze, traveller and travellee. The reordering of space, or the dismantling of the hierarchical relationship between centre and periphery, home and abroad, on which conventional Western definitions of travel have depended, implicitly problematizes travel itself. The world’s increasing interconnectedness (a consequence of travel) has resulted in a shift from a geographical to an ontological understanding of the concept, the focus no longer being on the other but on the self and its relationship to otherness. This shift is explicitly acknowledged in more recent postcolonial theory and criticism which has recovered previously neglected journeys undertaken by the supposedly sedentary other and revealed aspects of travel, such as the displacement and influence of cultural forces and the process of transculturation, which theory had failed to possess. Indeed, the mobilization of the travellee and the repossession of the semantic field of travel has led to the term’s decolonization and liberation from a fixed, exclusive, Western definition, demonstrating that fears of the end of travel are linked to a nostalgic desire to hold onto a colonial or neo-colonial model of travel. Finally, the appropriation and reuse of the signifier ‘travel’ to apply to diverse modes of displacement, including tourism, exile and immigration, reveals the links between conventionally separate categories, emphasising the fluidity of the traveller’s identity. Travel literature such as Socé’s Mirages de Paris demonstrates the inevitability of the traveller’s movement between various types of travel as the protagonist negotiates the relationship between the cultures to which he simultaneously belongs. Access to such an experience of

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travel is not limited to non-metropolitan travellers for ‘intervening in an interconnected world, one is always to varying degrees, “inauthentic”, caught between cultures, implicated in others’ (Clifford 1988, 11). Journeys between cultures provide the contact zones of postcolonial travel. The project of the postcolonial traveller is not to possess otherness but to focus on the communication between the fluid, interconnected poles of self and other. It is a project that negotiates the cultures to which the traveller is connected, focusing on the exchange or process of transculturation between them, and seeking ways of allowing coexistence whilst avoiding the extremes of hierarchization or reductive unification.

References Behdad, Ali. 1994. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, Durham, N. Carolina and Cork: Duke University Press and Cork University Press Boudjedra, Rachid. 1975. Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée, Paris: Denoël Bouvier, Nicolas. 1982. Le poisson-scorpion, Paris: Gallimard Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press Coatalem, Jean-Luc. 1999. ‘Un Mauvais Départ’ in Le Bris, 83–86 Dadié, Bernard. 1959. Un Nègre à Paris, Paris: Présence Africaine Diallo, Bakary. 1985 [1926]. Force-Bonté, 2nd edition, Paris: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines Essomba, Jean-Roger. 1996. Le Paradis du Nord, Paris and Dakar: Présence Africaine Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press Fonkoua, Romuald ed., 1998. Les discours de voyages: Afrique – Antilles, Paris: Karthala

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Forsdick, Charles. 2000. ‘Exoticism in the fin-de-siècle: Symptoms of Decline, Signs of Recovery’, Romance Studies 18:1, 31–44 Hacking, Ian. 1999. Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness, London: Free Association hooks, bell, 1992. ‘Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination’ in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston, MA: South End Press, 165–78 Kaplan, Caren. 1998. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, 2nd edition, Durham, N. Carolina: Duke University Press Lapouge, Gilles. 1999a. ‘Les Timbres-Poste de l’Exotisme’, in Le Bris, 109– 18 Lapouge, Gilles. 1999b. Besoin de mirages, Paris: Seuil Le Bris, Michel. 1995. Fragments du Royaume: Conversations avec Yvon Le Men, Vénissieux: Paroles d’aube Le Bris, Michel, ed., 1999. Pour une littérature voyageuse, 2nd edition, Brussels: Complexe Le Bris, Michel, ed., 1992. Pour une littérature voyageuse, Brussels: Complexe MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, London: Macmillan Mortimer, Mildred. 1990. Journeys Through the French African Novel, Portsmouth, NH and London: Heinemann and James Curry Moura, Jean-Marc. 1998a. L’Europe littéraire et l’ailleurs, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France Moura, Jean-Marc. 1998b. La Littérature des lointains. Histoire de l’exotisme européen au XXe siècle, Paris: Champion Moura, Jean-Marc. 1999. Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France Ngugi, James. 1965. The River Between, London: Heinemann Nkashama, Pius Ngandu. 1987. Vie et mœurs d’un primitif en Essonne quatre-vingt-onze, Paris: L’Harmattan Oyono, Ferdinand. 1960. Chemin d’Europe, Paris: Julliard Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London and New York: Routledge Said, Edward William. 1994. Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage Said, Edward William. 1995 [1978]. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, 2nd edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin Salih, Tayeb. 1970. Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys JohnsonDavies, London: Heinemann

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Socé, Ousmane. 1964 [1937]. Mirages de Paris, Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines Tshibanda, Wamuela Bujitu Pie. 1999. Un fou noir au pays des Blancs, Brussels: Bernard Gilson Urbain, Jean-Didier. 1993 [1991]. L’Idiot du voyage: histoires de touristes, 2nd edition, Paris: Editions Payot


COLIN DAVIS Repossessing Theory

This article is about the loss and repossession of theory, in particular with reference to what is still for us a defining theoretical moment, that is, the reorientation of the theoretical project which occurred in France between structuralism and poststructuralism; and more particularly I shall comment on what I take to be, for reasons which I shall explain, a key text of French poststructuralism, Jacques Derrida’s Limited Inc. It is my argument here that poststructuralism signals both the loss and the persistence of a project of theoretical mastery sometimes (rather rapidly) associated with the Enlightenment. But to begin: what sense does it make to talk about the loss of theory? Surely the theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s ended in the decisive victory of the theorists, and theory is now everywhere and indispensable, at least in the academic world. The training of graduate students would be incomplete if it did not expose them to theoretical concerns; and postcolonial theory, feminist theory, queer theory, trauma theory or disability theory are the common currency of the academic world. It would be shaming to admit in public that you don’t know polysemy from dissemination or the theft of enjoyment from the traumatic kernel of the real. But the ascendancy of theory is not as straightforward as it might seem. Theory by its nature operates at a high level of generality. The key branches of theory of an earlier generation – Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism – all aspired at their most ambitious to a near-exhaustive level of understanding. Postcolonial theory, queer theory and disability theory are all on the contrary particularising and limiting. And so a question arises: is a theory worthy of the name if it starts out by excluding most of the available material from its purview? Is (much of) what is currently proposed as theory actually theory at all, or is it rather a series of local applications of already-theorized, un-theorized or under-theorized positions?

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In an essay entitled ‘In Praise of Theory’, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer gives two senses of theory, both derived from its Greek etymon: theory is an activity with sometimes sacred resonance, the participation in something which might take us closer to the divine. At the same time it is a form of seeing, ‘Sehen dessen, was ist’ (seeing that which is), as Gadamer puts it: not ‘seeing that which is’ simply in the sense of observing ambient phenomena, but seeing things of fundamental importance, catching a glimpse of the secrets beneath the surfaces of the visible (1983, 43). It is this second sense of theory which seems to be no longer tenable, or at least no longer fashionable. In his book After Theory Thomas Docherty makes what is now the common move of associating theory with an alleged Enlightenment impulse to impose order on the waywardness of the real. Theory is ‘totalizing’ and ‘dominating’, whereas thought ‘after theory’ has ‘emancipatory and radical potential’ (Docherty 1990, 213). Theory here is stigmatized because it is fettered by repressive totalizing aspirations which restrain thought from a genuine meeting with otherness. Thought is only possible once theory is rejected (Docherty 1990, 206). So, contrary to Gadamer, theory is not the noble endeavour to see that which is; it is a set of inhibiting predispositions which obstruct us from seeing the unseen and thinking the unthought. Things were very different in the structuralist era, when theory corresponded much more closely to Gadamer’s double definition as participation and insight, as both the activity which leads to knowledge and the knowledge which that activity produces. Indeed, I would suggest that structuralism is more characterized by the particular status it accords to theory than by any shared interest in structures or sign systems. The case of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser is interesting in this respect. He is commonly grouped amongst the structuralists despite the fact that he is more influenced by Freudian, and to a lesser extent Lacanian, psychoanalysis than by Saussurean linguistics. Theory, in Althusser’s complex definition, is a form of political practice which operates within and on epistemological and ideological contexts. But for Althusser theory must be carefully distinguished from Theory, which is identified with dialectical materialism; Theory is the Theory of practice in general which unifies empirical practices into scientific truths (Althusser

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1965, 169). In other words, whereas theory is a practice within ideology, Theory is a practice – indeed the only practice – capable of knowing the truth of ideology itself. It expresses ‘l’essence de la pratique théorique en général, et à travers elle l’essence de la pratique en général, et à travers elle l’essence des transformations, du “devenir” des choses en général’ (Althusser 1965, 170). So, in a move that would make him deeply suspect to fellow Communist Party militants, Althusser establishes Theory as the sole instance which views the ruses of ideology from the outside. Althusser liked to quote Lenin’s dictum that without theory there was no revolutionary practice. Theory was a weapon of emancipation from bourgeois humanism and from the dictatorship of ideology and common sense. The crux of the divide between structuralism and poststructuralism lies to an important degree in differences over the status granted to theory. Poststructuralism can be understood as the heavily theorized dismantling of the privilege of theory in the structuralist sense. Theory, as it were, turns against itself and begins to consume its own tail. In a paper entitled ‘Apathie dans la théorie’ originally published in 1975, Jean-François Lyotard announced that ‘La grande affaire est maintenant pour nous de détruire la théorie’ (1977, 28). This does not mean simply abandoning theory, but rather severing it from its claims of truth. Lyotard gives an example of a self-consuming theoretical practice by quoting from the end of section six of Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. Here, Freud directly addresses the epistemological status of his speculations: It may be asked whether and how far I am myself convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them. There is no reason, as it seems to me, why the emotional factor of conviction should enter into this question at all. It is surely possible to throw oneself into a line of thought and to follow it wherever it leads out of simple scientific curiosity, or, if the reader prefers, as an advocatus diaboli, who is not on that account himself sold to the devil. (Freud 1984, 332; quoted Lyotard 1977, 10–11)

According to Lyotard, this is much more than a disarming, modest disclaimer through which Freud concedes that he might be wrong. Freud is adumbrating a different kind of theoretical practice un-

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coupled from claims of mastery and truth. Conviction plays no role, as the theorist becomes someone who speculates rather than someone who knows or believes or seeks to convince others. In ‘Spéculer – sur “Freud”’ (published in La Carte postale) Derrida shows an interest in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ similar to Lyotard’s, analysing its dazzling and disorientating textual elaboration rather than assessing the truth or falsehood of its theses. What intrigues both Derrida and Lyotard is the possibility of a theoretical text detached from claims of epistemological mastery. In this view, theory is denied its authority over other practices of language. Destroying theory thus means continuing to practise theory, but in self-parodic, self-subverting forms: ce qui nous fait défaut est une diablerie ou une apathie telle que le genre théorique lui-même subisse des subversions dont sa prétention ne se relève pas; qu’il redevienne bonnement un genre et soit débouté de la position de maîtrise ou domination qu’il occupe au moins depuis Platon; que le vrai devienne une affaire de style. (Lyotard 1977, 9–10)

It is possible to see here some of the characteristic moves of poststructuralist thought at its most ambitious: the identification of a defining feature of Western thought which can be traced back ‘at least’ (‘au moins’) to Plato; the attraction to Freud, or to a certain – in some ways very un-Freudian – reading of Freud as marking an important hiatus in the otherwise monolithic tradition (elsewhere, Nietzsche, or Marx, or Spinoza, or Heidegger will fulfil the same role); the rejection of truth as the guiding criterion of valid intellectual enquiry; the anticipation of a possible and even imminent moment when thought may venture into hitherto unexplored territories. If Lyotard’s call for the destruction of theory may appear to be antiintellectual, then this is in no way the case. Rather, it entails a thorough reconceptualisation of the role and status of philosophy which is both modest and outrageously ambitious: modest, because philosophy loses its power to legislate over other disciplines; ambitious, because in depriving itself of its legislative function it also liberates itself from its most distinctive fallacy and makes it possible to think what had never been thought before. If Kant famously

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annulled knowledge in order to preserve faith, Lyotard annuls it in order to make possible new ways of doing philosophy. So destroying theory does not mean destroying thought; on the contrary, Lyotard describes his problem in Le Différend as precisely saving the honour of thought (Lyotard 1983, 10). This is done by a reconceptualisation of philosophy which draws on Kant’s distinction between reflective and determinant judgement: the latter subsumes the particular under the already-known universal; reflective judgement, on the other hand, occurs when the principle is lacking, so that there is no given rule for judging the particular. For Lyotard, thought occurs in the mode of reflective judgement, when the rules of one’s own discourse are anticipated but not known at the time of writing. This conception has inevitable consequences for philosophical practice. Parody and self-doubt are to be incorporated into the forms and fabric of theoretical writing. Postmodern philosophy is to be reflective rather than determinant, entailing thought without assured knowledge, investigation without telos. This is clearly no longer ‘theory’ in the same sense as the term was understood by structuralism. Even so, the destruction of theory takes place to some extent within theory itself. To match terms like ‘postindustrial’, ‘postmodern’, ‘postmarxist’, or ‘postfeminist’, the word ‘posttheory’ has been coined to characterize the ambiguous persistence of theoretical reflection after the demise of ‘theory’ proper. Ernesto Laclau describes the posttheoretical condition as the blurring of the boundaries which kept theory separate from its objects or applications: theory cannot be opposed by a flourishing empiricity liberated from theoretical fetters. What we have, instead, is a process of mutual contamination between ‘theory’ and ‘empiria’ – the former having abandoned its aspiration to constitute a ‘superhard transcendality’ and the latter having lost the innocence associated with pure ‘data’. So, although we have entered a post-theoretical universe, we are definitely not in an a-theoretical one. (Laclau, in McQuillan et al 1999, vii)

Posttheory isn’t the absence of theory, but rather the condition for what Laclau calls ‘a new sophistication in the analysis of the concrete’ (Laclau 1999, vii). This is both the triumph and the end of theory as such; we are disabused of our innocence, intellectual straitjackets are

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cast off, boundaries collapse. We emerge as more sophisticated for the encounter with theory, but now capable of seeing theory itself as vitiated by its naïvety. Older, wiser and posttheoretical, we can now get on with our proper task: the analysis of concrete particularities. In this context the recent work of Toril Moi is instructive. Her early, much-read book on feminist theory Sexual/Textual Politics (1985) is clearly sympathetic and indebted to poststructuralist theory. Her more recent What is a Woman? (1999) is in part a work of self-critique in which poststructuralist work on sex and gender is described as reaching ‘fantastic levels of abstraction without delivering the concrete, situated, and materialist understanding of the body it leads us to expect’ (Moi 1999, 31). Drawing on the thought of Stanley Cavell, Moi now argues for a return to ‘the sphere of the ordinary’ (Moi 1999, 120). The excessive abstractions of poststructuralist theory can now be seen as neglecting the familiar and the everyday. The final twist of the theory wars is that, once they were won, theory itself began to appear moribund, surviving only as a fading memory of exorbitant ambitions. At this stage, I want to turn to Derrida’s Limited Inc since it is a text which analyses and brings about theory’s dispossession of its dreams of authority whilst also intimating what a posttheoretical textual and theoretical practice might look like. But it is also – and this is its crucial importance in this context – a text which reclaims the project of theory despite its dispossession. The main body of Limited Inc is made up of three essays written by Derrida at different times in different contexts. The first, ‘Signature événement contexte’, deals in part with J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, and was published in Derrida’s Marges de la philosophie in 1972. The second, ‘Limited Inc a b c…’, was first published in 1977 in response to fierce criticisms of Derrida’s reading of Austin made by the American philosopher John Searle. The final piece, ‘Vers une éthique de la discussion’, is a postface for Limited Inc which looks back at the Searle-Derrida controversy with over a decade’s hindsight. The dialogue or non-dialogue between Searle and Derrida has been extensively analysed, so I will confine myself here to a few comments relevant to the status and practice of theory in Derrida’s essays. Derrida’s initial interest in Austin comes from Austin’s notion of the performative, defined as those utterances which perform what

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they state, such as ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’, ‘I promise to meet you at six o’clock’, ‘I bet you sixpence’, and so on. The details of Austin’s discussion are of relatively little interest to Derrida. Rather, he is drawn to Austin’s performative for a range of interconnected reasons: it is an act embedded within a context which produces or transforms the situation in which it occurs, it has no referent, it does not describe anything which preexists it outside language, and it is not subordinate to the value of truth or falsehood. On this latter point, though, Derrida makes a fascinating slip. He writes that ‘Austin a dû soustraire l’analyse du performatif à l’autorité de la valeur de vérité, à l’opposition vrai/faux’ (Derrida 1990, 37 ; my emphasis on l’analyse). This is nearly, but not quite, true. Whilst Austin certainly does endeavour to unsettle the truth/falsehood fetish, the analysis of the performative remains firmly under its authority. In other words, the performative is not true or false in the same way as a constative utterance, but Austin’s theorization of the performative is still maintained as being or at least aspiring to be constative, that is, susceptible to proof or disproof by established procedures of argumentation. Austin is still a theoretician. The crucial shift in Derrida’s account is that it is not only the performative which escapes evaluation in terms of its truth or falsehood, but also the analysis of the performative. So Derrida’s discourse on the performative is itself drawn into, fatally imbricated with, performativity. This tiny slip on Derrida’s part is the black ice on which theory slides into posttheory. In the appropriation of Austin’s performative, a sort of recognition scene occurs in which the poststructuralist discovers something fundamental about the nature of his own theoretical activity. Performativity is both the mode and the object of analysis. Much of the subsequent exchange with Searle is concerned with Derrida’s manner of practising philosophy, and in particular with what Searle charmingly calls Derrida’s ‘distressing penchant for saying things that are obviously false’ (quoted Derrida, 1990, 83). Searle alleges that Derrida cannot be serious. Derrida retorts with one of his most unserious, playful or perverse texts in which what is at stake, in large measure, is the value of seriousness itself. According to Derrida, theory in its classic, traditional sense demands speech acts which are serious, literal and strictly policed in order to achieve proper theoretical impartiality. Yet this impartiality is necessarily impugned

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when what is being analysed is the value of serious or literal utterances. To claim that only a serious analysis of the serious/nonserious opposition is valid entails a prior decision in favour of one side of the opposition, so that the theorist’s discourse is pre-determined by the hierarchy of values which it purports to stand outside and to theorize dispassionately. But Derrida insists that, as theory, the serious analysis of seriousness cannot be taken seriously because it is so entangled with its object. The theorist is thus knocked off his impartial pedestal because his prior options disqualify him from neutrality. Through this analysis of seriousness, Derrida both diagnoses and performs the theorist’s exclusion from the position of knowledge; he is no longer, and for theoretical reasons cannot be, Gadamer’s theorist-observer who sees that which is. This does not so much entail the end of theory as a modification of its claims: ‘Cela n’implique pas que toute “théorisation” soit impossible. Cela délimite seulement une théorisation qui voudrait incorporer totalement son objet et ne peut le faire que de façon limitée’ (Derrida 1990, 136). Theory is deprived of its ambition to see things as they are. And this inevitably has consequence for the status of the theoretical text, which can no longer unambiguously occupy the ‘serious’ side of the serious/non-serious opposition: ‘J’avais (très) sincèrement promis d’être sérieux. Ai-je tenu ma promesse?’ (Derrida 1990, 197). Should we take Derrida seriously in his non-serious assault on seriousness? What is the nature of his speech act in Limited Inc, is it felicitous or infelicitous, serious or non-serious, literal or metaphoric, performative or constative? Derrida’s practice does not simply offer an alternative to Searle’s views which would be susceptible to discussion according to shared standards of academic debate; he questions those standards themselves, their indebtedness to unquestioned preferences for the serious or the literal, preferences which simultaneously validate and limit the validity of theory. Without simply opposing this position, Derrida subjects it to extreme theoretical pressure which brings its authority into question. Crudely put, he is the ludic posttheorist to Searle’s serious theorist. Derrida’s demonstration of the way in which theory is complicit with the object it is theorising is, in my view, decisive. From the perspective of poststructuralism, Althusser’s notion of Theory as the sole agency capable of telling the truth of others looks self-deluded in

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the extreme. Limited Inc provides the theoretical explanation for theory’s self-dispossession of its own most cherished claims and privileges. Deconstruction, according to Derrida, resembles a theory (Derrida 1990, 271), but it is also theory’s other (Derrida 1990, 135– 6), a practice which accepts that theory is always in some way ironic, parasitic, metaphoric, citational, cryptic, fictive, literary, deceitful (Derrida 1990, 137). In terms of Gadamer’s dual definition of theory, the pretension ‘to see that which is’ has been overwhelmed by the view of theory as a form of participation or performance, a process rather than a product. Limited Inc can be read as the mirror phase of poststructuralism and posttheory. The mirror phase is a scene of misrecognition in which the dispersed subject catches a glimpse of its specular image, sees itself as other and claims the other as the self. Something like a subject comes into being, but that subject is inhabited from the outset by an otherness which is both the condition of its identification and the scission within its identity. It is dispossessed at the very moment that it possesses itself. This is pretty much the situation of theory as it looks into the mirror of Austin’s performative and envisions itself as posttheory. It finds itself by misrecognizing Austin and identifying itself with the misrecognized other. And just as Lacan describes the ‘affairement jubilatoire’ of the infant in front of the mirror (Lacan 1966, 90), poststructuralism sometimes looks like a dog with two tails to wag. Derrida acknowledges that his speech-act opponents may not be happy that their seriousness cannot be taken seriously, but he advises that it is ‘A eux de saisir cette chance ou de transformer cette infélicité en jouissance’ (Derrida 1990, 137). Jouissance is as much pleasure as pain, and here it is the exquisite and distressed insight into the dissipation of the claims of theory. Limited Inc diagnoses the fatal misrecognition from which theory draws its authority; at the same time, in large measure through its own playful, irritating and brilliant textual practice, it gestures towards a recognition of theory as something other than a discourse of knowledge. In this key moment when poststructuralism grasps its own activity, it knowingly forfeits theory’s defining claims of abstraction and universality. It gestures towards the possibility of opening up thought to something unheard, and in the process theory is itself othered, made unrecognisable to itself.

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Limited Inc is then an emblematic text in that it thematizes and embodies the impossibility of encounter between structuralism and poststructuralism, or between analytic philosophy and deconstruction, or between theory and posttheory. In each case, the self-understanding of one is simply incommensurable with the self-understanding of the other. However the importance of Derrida’s book is not exhausted by the power of its theoretical dismantling of theory and its robust staging of the non-encounter with its philosophical counterpart. The account I have given of Limited Inc so far emphasises the break between structuralist and poststructuralist conceptions of the theoretical enterprise. This has also been depicted as the collapse of a certain Enlightenment project to dominate the real and to domesticate thought. But just as the othering of theory which I have described derives from an appropriative misreading of Austin’s notion of performativity, the recognition of theory as othered, as emancipated, is itself a further misreading. In the mirror phase the subject’s selfidentification is a misrecognition; likewise, posttheory’s identification of itself as unfettered from the illusions of theory is the new illusion which makes it what it is. Otherness is as much a misrecognition as identity. The interest of Limited Inc in this context is that, whilst performing its departure from the normative, regulative fallacies of theory, it knows full well that those mechanisms inevitably continue to regulate its performative flouting of them. In the final essay of Limited Inc, ‘Vers une éthique de la discussion’, Derrida’s writing position shifts abruptly, as he himself signals: ‘En m’adressant à vous de façon aussi directe que possible, je reviens à une forme très classique, straightforward, de la discussion’ (Derrida 1990, 206–7). Now, in response to questions posed by Gerald Graff rather than to Searle’s more oppositional polemic, Derrida writes in a manner much closer to the philosophical style he had previously parodied. This goes together with statements of intention which suggest that deconstruction, as the other of theory, is nevertheless within theory, contained by its practices and norms, rather than in some unlocatable elsewhere. Deconstruction turns out, after all, to be regulated and contained by the frameworks it calls into question: Je n’ai jamais mis ‘radicalement en question des concepts comme la vérité, la référence et la stabilité des contextes interprétatifs’, si ‘mettre radicalement en

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question’ veut dire contester qu’il y ait et qu’il doive y avoir de la vérité, de la référence, et des contextes d’interprétation stables. J’ai, ce qui est tout autre chose, posé des questions que j’espère nécessaires au sujet de la possibilité de ces choses, de ces valeurs, de ces normes, de cette stabilité (par essence toujours provisoire et finie). Ce questionnement et le discours qui s’accorde à la possibilité de ces questions (voire le discours au sujet de la possibilité et des limites de l’attitude questionnante en général) n’appartiennent évidemment plus, plus simplement, de façon homogène, à l’ordre de la vérité, de la référence, de la contextualité. Mais ils ne les détruisent ni ne les contredisent. (Derrida 1990, 277–8)

Here is a statement in which the theorist’s interest in generality and conditions of possibility is explicitly upheld. Even the aside that makes the possibility of norms always provisional and finite addresses finitude in terms of essentiality (‘par essence’) and universality (‘toujours’). Derrida acknowledges that asking questions about the conditions of possibility of concepts such as truth and reference is a move embedded within the philosophical tradition, even if it also seems to weaken some of the privileged terms of that tradition. This places him in an ambiguous relationship to the project of theory, but one which certainly cannot be characterized as outright rejection. Deconstruction, like Kantian critique, does not purport simply to stand outside the objects of its scrutiny. It knows itself to be part of what it strives to question. And this means that the Enlightenment aspirations of theory are retained in the process of their deconstruction. Indeed earlier, in what is for me the most astonishing moment of Limited Inc, Derrida had described the absence of an unequivocal definition of deconstruction as ‘un hommage respectueux à une nouvelle, très nouvelle Aufklärung’ (Derrida 1990, 261). This Enlightenment may be ‘nouvelle, très nouvelle’, but it is still Enlightenment, still using the old names even as it reiterates its newness. It occupies the paradoxical space of something which exceeds what contains it, and is still contained by what it exceeds. Limited Inc shows that the loss of theory may also be its repossession, and indeed the repossession of theory may also be the repossession by theory. It retains its hold over even the most liberated posttheorist, its abandoned terms are never quite abandoned. Theory is posttheory’s other, inhabiting the host which rejects it but which would be senseless without it. Posttheory has been variously described

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as the possibility of the hitherto unthought and as something that can easily become an excuse not to think very hard.1 Either way, the defeatism or triumphalism, the sense that for better or worse something is at an end, that what is most repressive or most emancipatory about Enlightenment has been abandoned, all seem to me to be rather rapid. The theoretical project may be faltering and even foolish as it proceeds in the knowledge of its own ungrounded performativity; it nonetheless remains an attempt to preserve a dialogue with others, or with the Big Other, when our concrete particularities are so diverse that there is little common ground between them. Therefore, the question is not, as in Laclau’s version of the posttheoretical condition: how does our new theoretical sophistication inform our understanding of particularities? Rather we should ask: how do our particularities – the texts we study, if you like, or our taste in videos, our political affiliations, or our sexualities – serve to constitute a theoretical discourse in which we might still have something to say to one another? One of the most moving lessons of psychoanalysis is that the repressed returns, that the dead live on even if the living die with them, that what is lost and forgotten still haunts us and makes us who we are. And so, the demise of theory is the condition of its difficult survival. To pick up once again Gadamer’s dual definition of theory, if we no longer expect to see things as they are, the other version of theory as a form of participation may in consequence be all the more indispensable. Moreover, the aspiration to see things as they are seems bound to remain the enabling mystification of intellectual enquiry, and pre-eminently of theory. In this light, theory survives as the necessary and deluded desire for a shareable discourse without which no one might understand anything or anyone.

1

See Post-Theory, xi and 105 (the editors and Geoffrey Bennington respectively).

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References Althusser, Louis. 1965. Pour Marx, Paris: Maspero Derrida, Jacques. 1980. La Carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà, Paris: Aubier-Flammarion Derrida, Jacques. 1990. Limited Inc, Paris: Galilée Docherty, Thomas. 1990. After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism, London and New York: Routledge Freud, Sigmund. 1984. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, The Pelican Freud Library volume 11, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1983. Lob der Theorie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Ecrits I, Paris: Seuil, Points edition Lyotard, Jean-François. 1977. ‘Apathie dans la théorie’, in Rudiments païens, Paris: Union générale d’éditions Lyotard, Jean-François. 1983. Le Différend, Paris: Minuit McQuillan, Martin. MacDonald, Graeme. Purves, Robin. and Thomson, Stephen. eds., 1999. Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Moi, Toril. 1985. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Methuen Moi, Toril. 1999. What is a Woman? Oxford: Oxford University Press


Part III Gendered Possession


JOSEPH HARRIS Stealing Beauty: The abbé de Choisy’s Appropriation of the Feminine

Does one possess an identification or is one possessed by it? Diana Fuss, Identification Papers The figure of François-Timoléon, abbé de Choisy (1644–1724), could never be out of place in a book entitled Possessions. His very fragmentary memoirs testify to the great importance that material possessions such as money, clothing and residences held for him. For example, although one of his autobiographical episodes starts with his mother’s death, this is not portrayed as an emotional loss, but is inverted or displaced into purely financial gain. Indeed, the only sentiments he acknowledges when discussing his mother’s inheritance are positive ones, suggesting, on the surface at least, a simple equation between financial status and emotional well-being. Choisy and his two elder brothers are ‘tous trois contents’ with their inheritance, just as their dying mother ‘jouissait de plus de vingt-cinq mille livres de rente’ (2000, 474–75, my italics). The young François-Timoléon in particular, after inheriting 34,000 francs’ worth of jewellery, furniture and silverware, is ‘ravi d’avoir de belles pierreries’ (2000, 475). Material possessions, however, play a far more complex role in Choisy’s worldview than this facile equation between wealth and happiness might suggest. Indeed, although in this paper I shall focus on another, more symbolic form of possession, I also wish to stress how this symbolic possession is itself constantly underpinned by Choisy’s own wealth, belongings, and financial privilege. The reasons for Choisy’s ravissement at inheriting his mother’s earrings, hairpins and so forth are not limited to their financial worth; indeed, jewellery held a particular personal relevance for Choisy. After all, as he frankly tells us, ‘depuis mon enfance j’avais toujours

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aimé à m’habiller en fille’ (2000, 475); for a budding transvestite, jewellery clearly has an importance that exceeds the wealth it denotes. For reasons best left to his biographers,1 Choisy had been brought up by his mother dressed as a girl, and his taste for cross-dressing lasted throughout much of his life. Unlike his childhood companion in crossdressing Philippe d’Anjou (or ‘Monsieur’, younger brother of Louis XIV), however, Choisy grew up to be resolutely heterosexual; indeed, the fragmentary memoirs which Choisy wrote towards the end of his life recount his cross-dressed exploits with a succession of young women. Many of Choisy’s recounted adventures are similar in structure and style; as a result, I have decided to focus here principally on one episode of the memoirs, in which Choisy, as ‘la comtesse des Barres’, seduces an innocent young girl named Mademoiselle de La Grise. From his first meeting with her, Choisy is taken with the girl’s beauty; he comments approvingly that ‘quoiqu’elle eût seize ans, elle n’en paraissait que douze’ (2000, 487). Indeed, youthful female beauty is the particular ideal to which Choisy aspires both in his sexual preferences and in his cross-dressing. As one biographer puts it: Choisy aimait les fruits verts, les adolescentes maigres et gauches chez qui la femme ne s’est pas encore épanouie. Des doubles de lui-même, ni filles ni garçons, ni enfants ni adultes, qu’il saisissait dans ce court instant de doute et de mutation (Reynes 1983, 67, my italics).

This paper explores the dialectic between the two elements italicized here: the play of identification with, and possession of, the young female body. Choisy’s relationships with his partners invariably contain elements of both identification and possession, ‘being’ and ‘having’, and so what interests me here is less Choisy’s cross-dressing per se than its relation to the beauty and femininity of others. Choisy often likes to take credit for the beauty of his partners, and has a habit of dressing them up for his own pleasure. Indeed, as I will suggest, Choisy is someone for whom the process of education – in particular, of introducing a young girl to the masquerade of 1

For theories about Choisy’s upbringing, see Reynes 1983 and Van der Cruysse 1995, esp. 45–59.

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femininity – is itself eroticized. Rather than explore Choisy’s own gender performances so as to assess their transgressive and subversive potential, then, my intention here is to focus on Choisy’s attempts to assert himself as the active subject and possessor of his partners’ gender performances.

Love and Subjection Before exploring the play of identification and possession that characterizes his relationships, it is first necessary to sketch out Choisy’s theory of love. Choisy’s peculiarly narcissistic notion of love is never fully theorized in his memoirs, but a few broad conclusions can be drawn from his comments. Choisy’s logic is unsettlingly simple: we all wish to be loved, he argues, and since ‘c’est la beauté qui fait naître l’amour’ (2000, 435), it is only through beauty that we can win others’ love. The greatest pleasure conceivable, he claims, is to hear people murmur ‘voilà une belle personne’ (2000, 435), especially when people say this without realizing that he is in earshot. One typical comment suggests the extent of Choisy’s narcissism. He once loved a young girl called Charlotte, he claims, ‘mais quoique que [sic] je l’aimasse beaucoup, je m’aimais encore davantage, et ne songeais qu’à plaire à tout le genre humain’ (2000, 443). The love of others confirms and bolsters our own love for ourselves. Indeed, the joys of love, ambition and of wealth can never equal the joy of being loved, for this is ‘un plaisir qui ne peut être comparé à rien, tant il est grand’ (2000, 435). According to an early modern conceit, love is also a form of selfsubjection, and Choisy draws on this notion when he defends himself against the love of an unwanted male suitor: ‘je suis heureuse et maîtresse de mes actions, je ne veux point me rendre esclave’ (2000, 509). Choisy, then, can reach a degree of stability or compromise with the outside world when he is the object of other people’s love but only when he himself remains unattached on an emotional level. Revealingly, Choisy claims that ‘le propre de Dieu est d’être aimé, adoré;

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l’homme, autant que sa faiblesse le permet, ambitionne la même chose’ (2000, 435). If to love another entails a form of self-subjection, then to be loved by ‘tout le genre humain’ is for Choisy akin to being godlike, a sovereign subject, or the ultimate ‘maîtresse’ of one’s actions. In the light of this theory, Choisy’s cross-dressing can be seen to serve an important prophylactic function; dressed as a beautiful woman, Choisy can win the love of numerous men,2 but being a solidly heterosexual male he will never reciprocate their desires. However, his female attire does not prevent him from feeling love for women, nor indeed, as it turns out, from expressing and even satisfying these desires. Nevertheless, Choisy experiences his own love for others as a profoundly disruptive emotion. At one point Choisy refers to an idyllic time in his early days as ‘Madame de Sancy’, when he is admired and praised by all. However, the sudden advent of love changes everything: ‘Enfin, il me semblait que tout le monde était content de moi, lorsque l’amour vint troubler mon bonheur’ (2000, 442).3 The curious inversion in this quotation suggests again the primary importance for Choisy of the outside world: for Choisy, stability is to be found when ‘tout le monde était content de moi’, rather than vice versa. Once Choisy becomes the subject of love, rather than just its object, his dyadic relationship with the outside world is disrupted; his attractive young partner becomes a troubling third term in the equation which prevents Choisy from enjoying the godlike pleasure of the sovereign subject.

2

3

That said, of Choisy’s two adopted identities, only one (that of the ‘comtesse des Barres’) is strictly a disguise intended to dupe others. As ‘Madame de Sancy’, on the other hand, Choisy lives openly as a transvestite, seeking to deceive nobody. Surprisingly, it is only as the latter that Choisy can claim to believe himself to be ‘véritablement femme’ (2000, 436). Here I take issue with Choisy’s biographer Geneviève Reynes, who argues that Choisy’s cross-dressing can only take place ‘dans une relation duelle’ with the presence of a young female partner (1983, 174). While not denying the importance for Choisy of his sexual attraction to young women, I prefer to follow Choisy’s own suggestion and to see his sexual desires as disruptive of a more primary dual relationship between himself and the outside world.

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From Possession to Identification: Choisy and La Grise Choisy’s behaviour with his numerous young partners represents a variety of attempts to overcome this newly triadic constellation by appropriating and neutralizing the disruptive power of the third term, namely, feminine beauty. It should be clear now that identification and possession are Choisy’s two principal strategies for doing so. Conventionally, identification and possession, ‘being’ and ‘having’, have been seen as mutually exclusive positions. This is no less the case in our post-Freudian era than in the early modern period, in which, as Jonathan Dollimore argues, ‘identification with should actually preclude desire for’ (1991, 305, Dollimore’s italics). If I slip here from a language of ‘possession’ to one of ‘desire for’, then it is only because patriarchal culture (particularly since the decline of Renaissance Neoplatonist ideals of spiritual unity with one’s beloved) has invariably figured the satisfaction of sexual desire in terms of symbolic possession. Indeed, for all his feminine sympathies, Choisy explicitly reasserts this same patriarchal conflation of desire and possession when he refers to a young woman ‘que j’avais bien envie de posséder trois ou quatre jours toute seule’ (2000, 512). Nevertheless, the complex identificatory procedures entailed by Choisy’s cross-dressing mean that the two positions of possession and identification are perhaps not as polarized as common sense might suggest. Choisy’s social and sexual authority over his partners allows him to introduce them to the world of femininity, and hence to fashion them in his own idealized self-image; as I hope to suggest, this fashioning can serve as a bridge between possession and identification. What forms do Choisy’s possessions of female beauty take? Most obviously, of course, Choisy’s sexual encounters demonstrate a rather crude form of sexual possession. Furthermore, this form of possession is often backed up by financial considerations; money and gifts, for example, often change hands, either between Choisy and his partners, or between him and their families or guardians. At one point he offers a hundred louis d’or to a poverty-stricken old woman in exchange for custody of her niece; the old woman willingly accepts and Choisy is

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happy with what he himself calls their ‘marché’ (2000, 516). Furthermore, when another of the girl’s suitors tells Choisy that he wants to marry the girl, Choisy not only agrees to give her away (‘la […] donner’ 2000, 519), but is even keen to pay for the wedding out of his own pocket and to host it at his home. This second example also illustrates how Choisy likes to have ownership of the ‘stage space’ in which the events recounted in his memoirs are played out. Even when he is losing a lover, then, Choisy likes to feel that he is nonetheless ultimately in control, and he is able to maintain this sense of power through skilful deployment of his financial resources. More interesting are the circumstances of Choisy’s individual seductions. Choisy, like his contemporary, Philippe d’Orléans, enjoyed dressing other women up almost as much as dressing up himself.4 Yet while Philippe d’Orléans’s interest could be seen as a displacement of his own forbidden transvestism, Choisy’s taste in dressing others up has a perhaps more insidious relation to power, domination and sexual possession. Throughout the memoirs, mothers and guardians often entrust their young girls to Choisy, either innocently duped by his masquerade or cynically expecting some financial recompense; Choisy, in turn, often takes full advantage of his authoritative position as mentor, teacher or fashion adviser. In the case of Mademoiselle de La Grise, Choisy persuades the girl’s mother to let her spend a week with him, on the pretext that the young girl could profit from some lessons in hairstyling. After showing off his own impeccable coiffure, Choisy boasts that after a week Madame de La Grise’s daughter ‘saura se coiffer parfaitement’ (2000, 488). Choisy and his young companion soon spin this week out to nearly a month, and during their affair Choisy teaches her far more than simple hairstyling. Above all, Choisy introduces her to the pleasures of performance, both theatrical and sexual. Indeed, for Choisy the theatrical and the sexual are often inextricably intertwined. This I mean not simply in Judith Butler’s sense that gender is ‘performative’ (although Choisy is certainly aware that gender entails bodily stylisations), but that Choisy often feels both a sexual thrill in theatrical performance and a theatrical thrill in sexual performance. As 4

Philippe’s second wife, Elisabeth-Charlotte of Bavaria (‘Madame’), testifies to this in her letter of 9 December 1718 (1925, 185).

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we have already seen, he certainly enjoys the pleasure of being the object of others’ gazes; indeed, the theatre, the opera and even the church are the public places most conducive to his private pleasures. In his relationship with Mademoiselle de La Grise, too, theatricality and sexuality are codependent. When an intendant (a provincial official) comes to visit, for instance, the pair performs a scene from Corneille’s Polyeucte, with Choisy playing Pauline and Mademoiselle de La Grise as her former suitor Sévère. The scene (presumably II.ii.)5 is a passionate one, in which Pauline, wife of Polyeucte, confesses that she is still struggling to contain her desires for Sévère. In particular, Choisy must have appreciated the play of surface and depth, appearance and reality that characterizes some of the lines of the play. Above all, Pauline’s confession that her composed appearance is deceptive and masks a deeper sexual ‘trouble’6 must have appealed to Choisy, as would her claim that ‘Un je ne sais quel charme encor vers vous m’emporte’ (II.ii.505). In the mouth of Choisy’s ‘comtesse des Barres’, Corneille’s lines take on a different meaning, since they allow veiled references both to his own sex and to his sexual desire for Mademoiselle de La Grise; these, however, of course remain private meanings and connotations that further strengthen the bond between Choisy and his lover. A similar dynamic of truth and illusion recurs when Choisy draws La Grise into a more physical form of sexual complicity with him. Indeed, if we are to believe Choisy, both partners soon become such consummate performers that they can enjoy sexual intercourse in full view of a number of entirely unsuspecting bedside visitors. At one point during such an act, the little La Grise gasps ‘Ah! que j’ai de plaisir!’, and Choisy is pleased that she is quick-witted enough to make up for her ‘sottise’ (2000, 503). When La Grise pretends that her pleasure was simply at feeling nice and warm in bed (perhaps not the most convincing of excuses) it is clear that Choisy has drawn her into his world of deception and secrecy. 5

6

The only other scene uniting the two lovers onstage is IV.v.; however, this scene consists only of two long speeches and is thus unlikely to be the one chosen by Choisy. ‘[…] quoique le dehors soit sans émotion, /Le dedans n’est que trouble et que sédition’ (II.ii.503–04).

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In addition to the more formalized bodily disciplines of the toilette and the theatre, then, Choisy also introduces the girl to other modes of behaviour, self-fashioning and self-presentation. Even when these have no implicit erotic thrill for Choisy, they at least help to keep the affair secret. When Mademoiselle de La Grise is finally to be married off to another, Choisy, sent to console her, instructs her on how to act on her wedding night. She must ‘faire par raison’ with her new husband what she did with Choisy ‘naturellement’ for fear of giving away what Choisy (in a wonderful move of disavowal and displacement) calls ‘votre secret’ (2000, 515). Elsewhere Choisy criticizes the girl’s lack of elegance and poise in order to reassure the anxious mother ‘que je voulais son bien et que je n’en étais pas coiffée’ (2000, 495). The pun on ‘coiffée’, meaning ‘excessively fond of’, is significant. For Choisy, to be ‘coiffée’ is to be both subordinated to another by puppy love, and shaped and styled by his or her constructions. Colloquially, the verb ‘coiffer’ also had sexual undertones, as it could mean ‘to cuckold’. On several counts, then, Choisy styles himself as the active, sexual coiffeuse rather than the passive object of others’ constructions.7

Strategies of Construction Through the bodily disciplines of poise, the toilette and the theatre, Choisy introduces the young La Grise to certain aspects of performance and the female masquerade, issues of course close to his own heart. Ironically, then, Choisy’s ‘false’ femininity serves as the template for his young partner’s ‘true’ femininity. Yet a comment he makes about another lover, a young actress named Roselie, is particularly revealing. After singling Roselie out from a fairly dire 7

The fact that Choisy’s maidservant Madame Bouju is Choisy’s literal coiffeuse does not, I believe, weaken this point. Since Bouju belongs to Choisy’s household and is thus financially dependent on him, Choisy is able to maintain his position as the symbolic subject of the coiffeuse, taking both the initiative and most of the credit for Mademoiselle de La Grise’s lessons in hairstyling.

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theatre troupe, Choisy gives her a few tips on acting. Her subsequent success as Pauline in Corneille’s Polyeucte affords Choisy no little self-satisfaction: ‘je reconnus à sa manière de jouer que j’y avais mis la main’ (2000, 511); indeed, ‘je commençais à l’aimer sérieusement et la regardais comme mon ouvrage’ (2000, 512). Elsewhere Choisy is emphatic that all love is primarily narcissistic – ‘nous nous aimons toujours mieux que nous n’aimons les autres’ (2000, 435) – and this is amply illustrated by the case of Roselie. Indeed, what Choisy seems to love in Roselie is the reflection of his own handiwork. Just as he constructs La Grise, at least in part, in his own image, Choisy is pleased to see himself reflected in Roselie’s acting style. By both possessing and identifying with Roselie, Choisy can take credit for her success with her audience; this, in turn, increases her desirability. Incidentally, Choisy’s casual reference to Roselie as ‘mon ouvrage’ has further resonances in terms of possession and identification through the text. One of Choisy’s literal ‘ouvrages’, his short story ‘Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville’, evidently holds a great personal value for him as it is alluded to twice in his memoirs and in many of its episodes can be read as an idealization of his own life. The tale tells the story of a young boy brought up by his mother as a girl; he, or rather she, soon proves to be impossibly beautiful, and inevitably attracts plenty of admirers. It is clear that Choisy enjoyed identifying with his fictional creation; he confides to his reader in one of his autobiographical pieces that ‘la petite marquise pouvait bien faire des choses qui m’étaient défendues, sa prodigieuse beauté la mettant à l’abri de tout’ (2000, 471). In his young protagonist, then, Choisy is able to take the construction of gender and the body to its extremes, since the little marquise is a purely textual creation. Considering the importance for Choisy of possession in all its many forms, it is surprising that Choisy elsewhere disclaims ownership of his tale. For a start, when he published the work in the Mercure galant, he did so anonymously, claiming in his introduction to be a woman and even apologising for the ‘mollesse’ and ‘faiblesse’ of the tale (1695, 13ff). Choisy also makes an anachronistic8 allusion 8

The allusion is an anachronism because, although the events being recounted take place in the early 1670s, the ‘Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville’ was not published until 1695.

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to the tale in the memoirs themselves but denies writing it himself. In conversation with some companions he has one of them read out ‘une petite histoire qui était dans le Mercure du dernier mois, où il était parlé d’un homme de qualité qui voulait être femme à cause qu’il était beau’ (2000, 436). Choisy not only denies authorship of the tale, but also pretends to be mildly annoyed at being the obvious model for its protagonist. One of his interlocutors even states that ‘pour moi, je voudrais qu’à la franquette il eût mis votre nom, afin que tout le monde parlât davantage de vous’ (2000, 437). Yet perhaps Choisy’s denial of authorship is not as perverse as it might at first seem. Paradoxically, by disowning the work Choisy is able to assert a stronger bond between him and it. The tale becomes linked to him not through the symbolic claims of authorship but rather through the mediation of others, who will all (Choisy hopes) recognize him as the model for the work. In other words, if writing the tale gives him the pleasures of authorship and ownership – of ‘having’ – then identification by others as ‘being’ the tale’s hero(ine) can give a deeper and more enjoyable pleasure. In his fictional marquise Choisy finds a particularly docile surface onto which he can project and impose his gender constructions. In real life, however, the dialectic between self and other is more complex. As we have seen, Choisy is particularly attracted to young girls in their early teens, those who are on the borderline between childhood and maturity and whom he personally can introduce to the world of adult femininity. Indeed, Choisy idealizes ignorance or innocence; not only will an ignorant girl fail to recognize Choisy’s true sex, she will also provide a tabula rasa onto which he can impose his own projections and constructions. At one point Choisy compares Mademoiselle de La Grise’s naïvety to that of Molière’s Agnès, who famously believes ‘qu’on fait les enfants par l’oreille’ (2000, 497). It cannot be seen as innocent that the theatreloving Choisy here alludes to L’École des femmes (1661), the story of an older man who for fear of being cuckolded brings up a girl in utter ignorance from the age of four years old to be his bride. Despite his love of innocence, Choisy is also attracted to the worldliness of actresses: ‘j’étais né’, he claims, ‘pour aimer des comédiennes’ (2000, 510). Actresses at sixteen, he claims, know more than other women do at twenty. The appeal of the actress lies in her

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exposure to the gaze of numerous spectators – a pleasure that Choisy seeks both directly and indirectly with the same zeal. Indeed, in the quotation above Choisy only loves Roselie ‘sérieusement’ once she has charmed ‘toute la compagnie’ (2000, 512) with her acting skills. Desire and possession thus seem to collapse into their near-opposite, identification. After all, Choisy’s methods for initiating others into the construction and performance of femininity – through poise, the toilette, the theatre, and so on – are not necessarily recognized by others as reflecting back onto Choisy as subject. Choisy can privately take the credit for the beauty of his lovers, but he must also identify with them if he is to enjoy the pleasure of being the object of their admirers’ gazes. So once Choisy is no longer recognized by all as the cause of his partners’ beauty, grace and poise, the question of rivalry raises its exquisitely coiffured head. How can Choisy’s considerable amourpropre cope with being upstaged? On two occasions, Choisy’s response is simple: to banish his pretty, young partners from the realm of femininity altogether by dressing them up as men (2000, 444–58; 517–518). Elsewhere, Choisy surrenders more completely to the pleasures of identification, as when he puts his mistress Mademoiselle Dany to bed and then invites guests around to admire her half-naked body (something he could of course never do himself without giving his true sex away). Although Choisy believes self-love to be natural and unavoidable, his concept of amour-propre is flexible enough to allow a degree of pleasure in identification, through a certain displacement. For example, although Madame de La Grise no longer prides herself on her beauty, ‘tout son amour-propre s’était tourné sur sa fille qui le méritait bien’ (2000, 487). Unlike Madame de la Grise, however, Choisy cannot give up his narcissism so easily. One short passage, in which Choisy dresses Mademoiselle de La Grise up for a ball, illustrates some of the tensions inherent in Choisy’s attempts to invest his narcissism elsewhere. Although he claims that his partner is to be ‘la reine du bal’ (2000, 507), Choisy deploys a number of strategies to share in her glory. For a start, the ball follows a mock wedding ceremony between Choisy and Mademoiselle de La Grise, in which Choisy clearly stakes

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his symbolic claim to her person.9 Secondly, Choisy gives La Grise his favourite diamond earrings, thus both winning her favour and appropriating her person in a manner visible and legible to all. Thirdly, despite Mademoiselle de La Grise’s beauty, Choisy stresses that she still finds him the more beautiful. Indeed, when she claims that ‘vous êtes belle, vous n’avez pas besoin d’être ajustée’ (2000, 507), Choisy’s response is to adorn the girl’s face with a dozen or so beauty-spots, thus reinforcing the contrast between his own ‘natural’ beauty and Mademoiselle de La Grise’s artifice. Yet secretly Choisy plays on his own artifice: he wears a pearl necklace and ruby earrings which are ‘faux, mais on les croyait fins: le moyen de croire que madame la comtesse qui avait tant de pierreries, en voulût porter des fausses?’ (2000, 507). Choisy is well aware that he, like his earrings, is ‘faux’, but he passes as ‘real’ almost by default in comparison with his extravagantly overdressed female companion. Choisy, then, subtly orchestrates his partner’s appearance, staking a claim on her person by stressing her subordination to him in marital, financial, and emotional terms. Furthermore, as he does elsewhere, he also exaggerates the distinction between the modesty of his clothing and the extravagant dress of his partner. What pleasure he derives from identifying with Mademoiselle de La Grise’s beauty is constantly both bolstered and restrained by a number of strategies of possession.

9

Although here Choisy is held by all (except for a few initiates) as a woman, it is interesting that he nonetheless seeks to consolidate his relationship with Mademoiselle de La Grise through an enactment of the conventional (heterosexual) marriage ceremony. In the eyes of those present, the ceremony is therefore carried out purely in jest; for those who know of Choisy’s true sex, however, the ceremony might appear not quite as ludic as it first seems. Indeed, weddings have a peculiar personal significance for Choisy, who elsewhere ‘marries’ another young girl, Charlotte, in a doubly cross-dressed ceremony (2000, 448).

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Concluding Remarks The case of the abbé de Choisy illustrates both the importance of distinguishing between two types of identification, active and passive, and the limitations of too simple an opposition between identification and possession. For identification falls into two main categories for Choisy, and these correspond broadly to his two different conceptions of femininity. Besides his ‘active’ and performative identification with certain ideals of femininity (characterized by his cross-dressing), there is another, more ‘passive’ and vicarious kind which, as we have seen, entails sharing in the glory of his partners’ successes and, indeed, redirecting this glory back to himself. This second type of identification cannot be clearly distinguished from symbolic possession as the former already presupposes the latter. Like Madame de La Grise, who can invest her amour-propre in her daughter, Choisy can only acquire vicarious satisfaction from a girl once she already ‘belongs’ to him in one form or another. Yet Choisy does not have Madame de La Grise’s parental privilege, and so his partners must be subordinated to him by other means – not only by their physical and emotional love for him, but also through their age, inexperience, class, financial status, and so forth. Whereas he always bows to female authority to authorize his cross-dressing, Choisy needs to feel socially and sexually superior to his female partners if he is to take any pleasure, whether directly sexual, or vicariously so, in their beauty. Furthermore, like his material possessions (the clothes, jewellery, buildings and furniture that he relishes describing), Choisy’s partners are ultimately only of value to him when they reflect his own glory – and, above all, when they reflect it straight into the dazzled eyes of the world he is so desperate to seduce.

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References Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London: Routledge abbé de Choisy, François-Timoléon. 2000 [1966]. Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme, in Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy, ed. Georges Mongrédien, Mesnil-sur-L’Estrée: Société Nouvelle Firmin-Didot, 429– 522, –––––. 1695. ‘Histoire de la Marquise-Marquis de Banneville’, in Mercure galant, dedié à Monseigneur le Dauphin, February, Paris: Michel Brunet, 12–101 Corneille, Pierre. 1963. Polyeucte Martyr, in Œuvres complètes, ed. André Stegmann, Paris: Seuil, 289–313 Dollimore, Jonathan. 1991. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault, Oxford: Clarendon Press Fuss, Diana. 1995. Identification Papers, New York and London: Routledge ‘Madame’ [Elisabeth Charlotte of Bavaria]. 1925. The Letters of ElisabethCharlotte of Bavaria, Princess Palatine, Duchess of Orleans, called “Madame” at the Court of King Louis XIV vol. II: 1709–1722, trans. Gertrude Scott Stevenson, London: Arrowsmith Reynes, Geneviève. 1983. L’Abbé de Choisy ou l’ingénu libertin, Paris: Presses de la Renaissance van der Cruysse, Dirk. 1995. L’Abbé de Choisy, androgyne et mandarin, Paris: Fayard

SUSAN GRIFFITHS Who Owns the Female Body? Women and Possession in Crébillon’s Lettres de la Marquise de M*** au Comte de R***

Judith Butler (1993) has shown that bodies emerge from discourse, rather than existing as pre-defined entities to which language applies labels. Representations of bodies are not simply neutral depictions of an objective reality, but participate in some form of ideology. This observation is not limited to straightforwardly physical or realistic forms of description. It also encompasses the more oblique portrayals of characters’ bodies found in the early eighteenth-century French novel, where an enumeration of abstract qualities often takes the place of the description of physical features. This form of representation can be found in the works of Crébillon fils (1707–1777) whose novels are peopled by the libertine high society of pre-Revolutionary France. In this world, appearance is all important, but is described in terms that a modern-day reader might find unfamiliar as a passage from the Lettres de la Marquise de M*** au Comte de R*** (1732) shows: ‘On a rendu justice à votre mérite, on vous a trouvé l’air noble, la démarche aisée, l’esprit charmant, les yeux d’une vivacité… En un mot, une figure adorable’ (94).1 To give an image of the Count, the concepts of nobility and vivacity are preferred to those of, say, brown hair or blue eyes. Nevertheless, this judgement of his physique will determine his position within society. The Lettres, Crébillon’s first full-length novel, chart the love affair between two aristocrats through the writings of the Marquise to the Comte. The Marquise considers at length the potential consequences of her liaison for her social status as well as the effects of 1

All quotations are taken from Crébillon, 1992, 69–200.

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love on her body. Again, the vocabulary of direct physical description is not a feature of her writing. Instead, her self-analysis relies on the terminology of Enlightenment discourses such as medicine, law or rhetoric. Her words reveal attitudes to the female body that centre on possession: by society, by individual men or by mysterious biological forces beyond a woman’s control. By examining the place of these discourses within the novel, we may determine the extent to which the Lettres confirm or critique their precepts concerning the female body. Early eighteenth-century French discourses on femininity formed the culmination of a growing tendency to treat women as possessions. State legislation penetrated previously religious areas of jurisprudence, leading to an increasingly strong puissance paternel, especially under Louis XIV. Just as the king wished to be thought of as the absolute ruler of the country, the father was awarded absolute power over his family. Clandestine marriage ‘des enfants de famille contre le gré des pères’ had been banned since 1556, when Henri II wanted to annul the injudicious marriage of his daughter (Bonnet 1980, 197). This was the first state regulation of marriage and applied to women under the age of twenty-five. The law was reaffirmed in 1606, 1629, 1639 and 1697 (Traer 1980, 35). In 1739, Louis XV felt the need to further define this crime as ‘rapt de séduction’, or seduction of a minor, reminding courts, which rarely enforced the prescribed death penalty, of its severity. When a woman moved from being in the possession of a father to that of a husband, her legal status hardly improved. All the property and affairs of the couple, excepting household management, were under the control of the man (Birkitt 1991, 127). Divorce was illegal in pre-Revolutionary France, and separation allowed only in exceptional cases and under strict terms. Under sixteenth-century religious canonical law, adultery by either party had been considered adequate grounds for separation (Garnot 1993, 99). Now, a man’s adultery ceased to be grounds for separation, but a woman’s infidelity became punishable by sequestration in a convent for two years. If her husband did not wish to take her back after this time, she became a permanent resident and her property reverted to her children or the institution (Serpillon 1767). A wife could request separation only on

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grounds of demonstrable physical abuse or moral slander (‘séparation de corps et d’habitation’) or financial misadministration (‘séparation de biens’). In the latter case it was often necessary for the wife to continue to receive permission from her husband before contracting any major administrative transactions (Traer 1980, 40). Throughout, Ancien Régime legislation stayed true to the biblical ideal of man and wife as one flesh controlled by the husband. The notion of possession central to early eighteenth-century legal discourse on women can also be found at the heart of medical theories of femininity. Here, women were declared to be possessed by an inherently unstable constitution. Doctors blamed the influence of the uterus and the dominance of emotion over reason for women’s ‘irrational’ nature. The main model used to explain feelings at this time was the system of the passions, notably expounded by René Descartes in Les Passions de l’âme (1649). Emotions were understood in an intensely physical way, being attributed to variations in the esprits animaux present in the blood.2 A woman’s fragile anatomy was thought unable to cope with the sudden physiological fluctuations caused by the passions, making her particularly susceptible to their unbalancing effects and therefore incapable of detached reason. Legal and medical discourses on women were combined when laws on pregnancy were formalized in 1693 (Abensour 1923, 26). Again, women were brought more strictly under the power of male experts, as they were not trusted to complete a pregnancy without supervision. Midwives, suspected of dealing in abortifacients, started to be marginalized in favour of male accoucheurs,3 and it became compulsory to disclose a pregnancy by making a déclaration de grossesse to the authorities. Pregnancy was a topic of particular interest, because the life of an innocent and potentially male child was at stake. How could a woman’s unstable biology be tamed in order to prevent her unruly passions from damaging the baby? Nicolas Male2 3

James (1997) sets out the system of the passions in greater detail. This was a controversial trend, as witnessed by Philippe Hecquet’s influential condemnation of the practice, De l’Indécence aux hommes d’accoucher les femmes, (1708) but by the 1730s, it was no longer surprising to find male doctors specialising in maladies des femmes.

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branche attempted to answer this question in his De la Recherche de la vérité, a popular work that went through six reprints between 1712 and 1720. Malebranche blames the corps rebelle of the mother for the child’s original sin: Ainsi une mère, dont le cerveau est rempli de traces qui, par leur nature, ont rapport aux choses sensibles, et qu’elle ne peut effacer à cause que la concupiscence demeure en elle et que son corps ne lui est point soumis, les communiquant nécessairement à son enfant l’engendre pécheur quoi qu’elle soit juste. (1712, 132)

The female mind, he claims, is debilitated by an overactive sensibility. Women are children, unformed men incapable of rational analysis and their rebellious bodies must be regulated by men in order to stop them from doing any harm. Malebranche suggests that a strict education of the mind can remedy the sinful tendencies of the infant boy allowing him to combat unworthy passions by the use of reason. But female weakness of reason is considered congenital, another symptom of her delicate physical composition: ‘les moindres objets produisent de grands mouvements dans les fibres délicates de leur cerveau’ producing ‘dans leur âme des sentiments assez vifs […] pour l’occuper toute entière’ (1712, 140). The power of her body outweighs that of her reason so that she cannot combat her passions but must instead try to avoid exciting them in the first place. This widespread view also lay at the root of differences in girls’ and boys’ education. Girls were discouraged from reading fiction, however serious, for ‘l’imagination vive des jeunes personnes saisit avidement tout ce qui flatte les sens et qui est favorable a la cupidité’ (Rollin 1736, 41). The job of education was to fit children for their adult roles: ‘orner l’esprit des filles’ to make them interesting companions, ‘former l’esprit des garçons’ to create leaders and thinkers. Doctors, lawyers and many establishment figures believed their views on the instability of female physiology were finally confirmed


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by the incident of the convulsionnaires at the St. Médard cemetery.4 In 1727, the tomb of the Jansenist leader, Pâris, became a place of pilgrimage where many followers claimed they received miraculous healing. The cure was apparently bestowed when the pilgrim experienced a series of rapturous fits or convulsions. Significantly, the majority of the devotees were women.5 Their convulsions were ascribed to their unruly bodies and their superstitious activities to a lack of rational thought on the matter. Nevertheless, the continued claims of the convulsionnaires presented a threat to the established order, and the cemetery was closed by royal order in 1732, the same year in which the Lettres were published. Women were therefore thought of as doubly possessed in the early eighteenth century, both by a man and by powerful inner emotions. This view permeated legal, medical and religious discourse. But does the model hold for Crébillon’s fictional heroine? At first, the Marquise seems to follow the standard template of the woman possessed, controlled by the men around her. The account of her marriage exemplifies the concept of puissance paternel discussed above, in that she is a possession to be traded between men in the interests of familial connections and social status: ‘on me maria sans que je le voulusse, ou que je m’y opposasse’ (134). An impersonal ‘on’ makes decisions to which she must submit. The Marquise’s marriage is not an unhappy one until her husband loses interest in her and begins to indulge his libertine tendencies. Left alone, she is finally persuaded to take a lover, the Comte. It has been shown that infidelity was far more acceptable for men than for women in early eighteenth-century France, and the decision causes the Marquise great moral trepidation as well as burdening her with the practical difficulties of hiding the relationship 4

5

Lacombe (1948) documents the correspondence between Jean Astruc, a doctor specializing in women’s illnesses, and abbé Nigon de Berty, a theologian, on the matter. Wilson (1993, 148) cites the case of Elisabeth de Laloe as typical. Giving birth six weeks after claiming to have been cured of breast cancer, her disease was immediately attributed to an attempted abortion. The authorities argued that God would certainly not cure such a sinner and Elisabeth was imprisoned in a convent until she retracted her claims.

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from her husband. But for all this, the affair gives her little more happiness and no more freedom than her marriage, being no less commercial in nature. We know from later novels such as Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) that libertine partnerships were contracted on the basis of evaluation of worth. As in the Lettres, descriptions of lovers abound with terms such as perte, dédommagement and prétention. To a male libertine, or petit-maître, the value of a woman lies solely in her conquest; once she is safely possessed the next prospect surpasses her (Laroch 1979, 197). For the Marquise, this explains the Comte’s long periods of inattention, followed by sudden bouts of jealousy: ‘Vous êtes indigné de voir qu’un bien si longtemps à vous allait vous échapper’ (185, my italics). The Marquise appears to be a typical early Enlightenment woman who cannot escape being possessed by one man or another. If the Marquise has lost control of her life to the men around her, she equally admits to a loss of control over herself due to her own strong emotions. This is expressed through the anatomical trope of the heart in her exclamation ‘Puis-je disposer de ce cœur? Est-il à moi?’ (77). The image of the heart is a well-known romantic cliché. Here, however, the metaphorical discourse of love conceals a more sinister meaning. The Comte has ‘stolen’ the Marquise’s heart. By making her fall in love with him he has forced her to become dependent on him, to cede control of herself to him. The use of the word ‘cœur’ here and in the Lettres as a whole deserves further attention. By participating both in a tradition of physiology as well as one of rhetoric, it exemplifies the ways in which discourses of the body converge with other ideological currents within society. The heart had long been thought of as the most vital component of the human body and death was widely attributed solely to the failure of this organ (Descartes, 1649). In the system of the passions outlined above, the also heart played a central role, regulating the emotional esprits animaux and conveying them to the mind of an individual. Against this background, a rhetorical use of ‘le cœur’ had developed which stood for the body as a whole and the passions in particular. This usage is illustrated by one of the Marquise’s angry responses to the Comte’s jealousy: ‘Mais si vous vous mépreniez à


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mes lettres, n’entendiez-vous pas de mes regards? Ils étaient les interprètes de mon cœur. Que vous deviez y lire d’amour!’ (185). She argues that the Comte should be able to ‘read’ her emotions (her passions), by looking at her. Because they truly come from the heart, her feelings should saturate her entire body making them easily visible to the attentive observer. Given the overlapping meanings of feelings, heart and body, it might be said that the Marquise has not only lost her heart to the Comte, she has lost control of her emotions and ultimately her whole body. Crébillon’s language of the heart, then, participates in the biblical image of man and woman sacrificing their separate bodily identities to become one flesh, but again the female party gives up more than the male. When separated from her lover, the Marquise wonders if he feels ‘lacking’ as she does: ‘votre cœur sent qu’il lui manque quelque chose’ (119). In her mind, the two hearts have figuratively become one, and without him, she can never feel whole. Whether her lover feels the same way is uncertain, but by the time the Marquise reaches the end of the novel, and her death bed, she has sacrificed her own body to her lover, leading a vicarious existence through him that she hopes will persist even after death: ‘Ne m’oubliez jamais, que je vive dans votre cœur’ (198). Her body is irrevocably linked to his and her passions to his desires. This use of the word ‘cœur’ is thus founded in corporeality and a concept of the emotions rooted in physicality. The heroine of the Lettres experiences this corporeality as one dominated and controlled by the men around her. The bodily sense of ‘cœur’ is often emphasised by contrasting it with ‘esprit’, the opposing faculty of the mind or reason, as can be seen in the title of Crébillon’s more famous novel, Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit (1738). Does the mind offer a path to freedom for the woman, a way to overcome her involuntary physical and emotional reflexes as it allows men the chance to escape their physical nature? The Marquise often employs the binary opposition of ‘cœur’ and ‘esprit’ to describe her relationship with the Comte. She complains that the Comte’s fine words are ‘bien moins de votre cœur que de votre esprit’ (88). He can distance himself from the passions of an affair whilst the Marquise’s emotions leave her feeling overwhelmed:

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‘est-il possible qu’au milieu de tant de trouble on puisse avoir tant d’esprit?’ (119). Her faculty of reason (‘esprit’) is overcome by the physical ‘trouble’ experienced by her body, leaving her unable to calculate any means of escape from her unhappy situation. The Marquise can observe the ‘mouvements’ of her own body and find that they are unwelcome, even dangerous, yet she cannot divert herself from the path they dictate she should take. Instead, she struggles unsuccessfully against her own body, seemingly possessed by an alien force: À quelle fatale situation me reduisez-vous? Je sens des mouvements que je n’ose démêler, je fuis mes réflexions, je crains d’ouvrir les yeux sur moi-même, tout m’entraîne dans un abîme affreux: il m’effraye, et je m’y précipite. (90)

The word ‘mouvement’ in the eighteenth-century sense describes the involuntary physiological reflexes caused by emotions, as Furetière’s dictionary definition shows: ‘Toutes les passions excitent des mouvements dans notre âme: les uns sont louables, comme ceux de pitié, de honte, de tendresse; les autres odieux, comme ceux de colère, de haine, de vengeance’ (Rey 1978). The Marquise seems to have a particular vulnerability to these passions that cannot be overcome by the use of reason. She herself acknowledges this weakness in her expression of fear at the emotions a meeting with the Comte might provoke: ‘je ne veux point assujettir mon cœur à ces mouvements-là’ (75). Again the word ‘mouvements’ denotes an uncontrollable physical reflex and ‘assujettir’ signifies a loss of mastery over the body from within, confirming the model of women as possessed inside as well as out. Once more, this puts her in line with the typical eighteenth-century woman as defined by doctors of the time. The Marquise’s self-analysis does at least succeed in convincing her that it would be better to avoid meeting the Comte entirely than vainly struggling against the passions it would provoke. Perhaps this is why she insists on the importance of her ‘repos’ and ‘tranquillité’ when the Comte makes his first advances (Letters 1–3), claiming that ‘ce n’est que dans la tranquillité de la solitude qu’on jouit parfaitement de soi-même’ (120). The risks of emerging from this solitude are a loss of self-control (‘soi-même’) or even subjectivity as she ceases


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to exist in her own right and becomes merely the possession of another. It would seem that women must avoid provoking their passions in the first place or suffer the consequences. The fictional female publisher of the Lettres concurs with this view in her introduction to the collection: ‘la Marquise aimait: voilà le premier malheur, et les autres n’en sont qu’une suite presque inévitable’ (69). This female has survived the writing process, even taken control of it by becoming a publisher of another’s letters; a process that has only become possible because she has also taken control of her emotions. Once a woman’s passions get the better of her mind, she is set firmly on the road to self-destruction. At this stage we might consider that the Lettres fit neatly into the pattern of early Enlightenment discourses on femininity explored above. Crébillon’s heroine is unable to control the acts of her body, and cedes control of herself to the men around her. But a closer examination of the structure of Crébillon’s novel reveals that female possession is a more complex and troubled aspect of the work than might first be thought. An indication of this can be found in the form of the work itself. The female narrative voice provides a seemingly authentic source for women’s experience, while also mediating that of the Comte. Although it is necessary to remember that the author of this fiction is male, its structure seems to reverse the standard methodology for determining femininity discussed above, which relied on the testimony of male subjects to define the female object. The form of the Lettres lays the foundations for an interrogation rather than an endorsement of early eighteenth-century textbook explanations of women’s behaviour. We may remember Butler’s assertion that biological ‘facts’, even that of sex itself, are to a significant extent constructed through cultural and political discourse (Butler 1993, 4). Crébillon’s novel affirms that women were positioned firmly in the sphere of the corporeal, constantly subjected to the destabilizing influence of their bodies. Yet instead of finding the cause for this in biological reality, it is posited as a role monitored and enforced by society. The Lettres contain many clues as to the real provenance of biological ‘truths’, showing that a diagnosis of the body depends just as much on the approval of the libertine aristocracy the novel depicts

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as on the opinion of medical experts. The body became the primary mode of classification of individuals in early eighteenth-century polite society, acting as a privileged repository of truth about an individual that could never be wholly disguised. At the masked ball, the Marquise is sure she and the Comte will be able to recognize each other despite their costumes: ‘Je serai avertie quand vous entrez, et comme je ne doute pas que vous n’ayez la même pénétration, je ne prendrai pas la peine de vous instruire de mon ajustement’ (88). The lover’s glance easily penetrates the outer clothing and the body beneath reveals its true identity. In the society of the Lettres, a reading of the body, male or female, goes further that this simple revelation of identity, it is also one of the main ways of determining an individual’s worth. The physical form is seen as a cipher for the person within. For women this social reading is absolutely crucial and it is almost impossible for the female body to ever pass unseen. The novel confirms appearance as almost the sole criterion by which women are judged. Often, this is confined to a simple assessment of beauty, the ultimate accolade over virtue or intelligence in a libertine society. The Marquise thanks her lover, even when rejecting him, for ‘sans vous encore je ne saurais pas affirmativement que je suis jolie’ (73). Yet the ability to be classed as beautiful is not under a woman’s control and may not even depend on an aesthetic judgement. Instead beauty corresponds to the social classification of the body, a process carried out with just as much reference to abstract qualities such as virtue or prudishness as to the pleasing appearance (or otherwise) of actual physical features. This procedure can be witnessed in operation when the Marquise is left in dull, studious company all day and complains ‘Que je les trouve laides ces femmes vertueuses’ (101). If a woman chooses to take on the ‘masculine’ quality of virtuous reason, she is precluded from the ‘feminine’ physicality that is beauty. Conversely, the mental faculties of a woman classed as ‘beautiful’ are thought of as secondary to the attractions of her body and she is determined to be ruled by her physical being at the expense of her mind. It is significant that such social dictates are not simply imposed by men upon women, but are part of a societal matrix in which women are complicit, as Crébillon


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demonstrates by placing the condemnation of ‘ces femmes vertueuses’ in the mouth of a female character. Even when the social reading of an individual’s body focuses on a man, the consequences may still fall upon his female associates. The Comte’s voluble corporeality strikes fear into the Marquise’s heart when she realises her lover’s gestures could reveal their affair to those around them: ‘Vous m’embrassiez hier avec tant d’emportement et il paraissait tant de fureur dans vos yeux, qu’il était impossible de ne pas s’apercevoir de ce que nous avions tant d’intérêt de cacher’ (116). The ‘nous’ in this warning is probably employed more as a rhetorical plea for sympathy on the part of the Marquise than any concern for the Comte’s well-being, for as she is well aware, the aftermath of a discovery will be far more drastic for her than for him. This passage suggests that the signals exhibited by male and female bodies are similar, yet it has been shown that they are read differently by society. A far greater weight of signification is ascribed to the symptoms of the female body, leading to the judgement that women are ruled by their uncontrollable bodies whilst the male body passes unseen. This structure is paralleled in the Marquise’s own realization that men and women actually have the same desires, but that in her society they are differently regulated: Que vous êtes heureux, vous autres hommes, de pouvoir sans honte vous livrer à votre penchant; pendant que soumises à des lois injustes, il faut que nous vainquions la nature qui nous à mis dans le cœur les mêmes désirs qu’à vous – d’autant plus malheureuses que nous avons à combattre vos poursuites, et notre faiblesse. (93, my italics)

The word ‘cœur’ is again used to suggest passion or emotion sourced in physicality, but here it is presented as common to both male and female physiology. The reason only women seem possessed by it is because female desire is prohibited, or at least severely restricted by society. Male desire goes unnoticed because it is socially acceptable. On the one hand, any display of female desire appears as uncontrollable excess and is attributed to a faulty biology. On the other, men have less difficulty in stoically overcoming their passions, because many of their emotions are not seen as out of place to begin with. The

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Marquise discovers the origin of the passions’ power in whether or not society openly opposes them or ignores them, rather than whether or not an individual is able to overcome or disregard them. Crébillon’s presentation of the unruly female body has begun to diverge from the standard early eighteenth-century medical and legal model. Through the character of the Marquise, his novel suggests that the excess physicality ascribed to women stems not from biological predestination, but rather from the prescriptions of society which regulate not just men and women, but also the young and old, the Frenchman and the foreigner6 within a pre-evolved matrix of desire. Each is allocated a role to play, and each is judged, medically, legally and socially on the evidence of how well their body fits into that role. We can find evidence of this matrix in the scene where an elderly Marquis attempts to seduce the Marquise: [Il] me jura que j’avais tout effacé de son cœur, que rien n’était impossible à mes beaux yeux, qu’ils avaient rallumé chez lui des feux auxquels la bienséance, plus que la nature, ne lui permettait pas de s’abandonner […] qu’il avait craint le ridicule que se donne un homme amoureux, lorsqu’il n’est plus dans cette première jeunesse qui fait pardonner les écarts; mais que je l’avais emporté sur toutes ces réflexions. (125)

The Marquis claims his excessive desire is natural, but that he feels he should restrain it through a sense of propriety or decorum (‘bienséance’) as it would generally be considered improper. His state is described in similar terms to the female uncontrollable body; inability to resist his desire, a heart in the power of an other, and the realisation that his desires do not fit with the role society has laid out for him, as an old man. In this scene, Crébillon identifies sets of rules governing attitudes towards various groups in society and implicates the Marquise in maintaining those rules, reinforcing the act of social categorization through her own behaviour as she scorns the Marquis’ overtures with derisive laughter. The heroine is well aware of the 6

More licentious eighteenth-century novels were often set in the East, as the Oriental was considered another ‘type’ ruled by body and desire rather than reason. Crébillon’s own Tanzaï et Néadarné (1734) and Le Sopha (1742) are instances of this practice.


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roles society assigns to individuals based on an assessment and classification of their bodies and she participates in the censure or denial of their desire accordingly. The Marquise does sometimes express a sense of dismay at society’s unjust regulation of female desire, dreaming of the love ‘que peuvent goûter deux cœurs bien unis […] cette confiance mutuelle, cette amitié véritable, ce désir toujours pressant de se plaire’ (78). But she considers this vision of a freer society as an impossible dream, only ‘une idée, et je ne crois pas qu’il ait jamais existé’ (78). This is perhaps due to her all-too-perfect internalization of society’s rules on women, which has been accomplished despite the fact that they disadvantage her. She demonstrates this by quoting maxims such as ‘une femme s’accoutume à ne rien déguiser des mouvements de son cœur’ or ‘il m’a paru qu’il était dangereux pour une femme d’avoir un ami si intime’ (80). It is precisely this complete assimilation that will cause her downfall. She is unable to reconcile society’s prescriptions for how a woman’s body should feel and act with her own real emotions. Equally, there is no way for her to have an existence outside society’s formulae: ‘Croyez-vous que, de quelque façon qu’on puisse vivre, on échappe aux discours?’ (188). The female body in the early eighteenth-century novel is constructed through the discursive judgements of others. These are disseminated until they become accepted facts informing scientific, legal and political texts and forming discourses in the sense Judith Butler uses the term, that is, as means of perpetuating power structures. The Marquise sees no possibility of adapting this system to her needs: the only resolution can be her removal from society, and this finally occurs by the most drastic means possible: her death. The Lettres have been seen to draw heavily on the terminology of the dominant discourse on women in the early eighteenth-century. Although it would be difficult to read as a feminist text, Crébillon’s novel does locate the standard early eighteenth-century assessment of femininity as the product of a nexus of social forces rather than simply the result of direct scientific observation. The character of the Marquise also provides an instance of the real and drastic consequences for an individual of generalized attitudes to the female body. In the society the novel depicts, the Marquise has no alternative except to be

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in the possession of a man, a system supposed to work for the good of all concerned. But Crébillon’s heroine can find no escape except through death, a less than optimistic conclusion. The model for women’s place in society was to evolve rapidly over the eighteenth century as authors such as Diderot (1772) started to argue that maladies des femmes arose more from the conditions in which women were living than the destabilizing influence of their wombs. Crébillon’s fictional Lettres foreshadowed these overt articulations of the need for change by almost half a century.

References Abensour, Leon. 1923. La Femme et le féminisme avant la Révolution, Paris: Ernest Leroux Astruc, Jean. 1985 [1740]. Traité des maladies des femmes, New York: Garland Birkitt, Jennifer. 1991. ‘A Mere Matter of Business: Marriage, Divorce and the French Revolution’ in Craik ed., Marriage and Property: Women and Marital Customs in History, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press Bonnet, Jean-Claude. 1980. ‘La Malédiction paternelle’, Dix-huitième siècle 12, 195–208 Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter, London: Routledge and New York de Crébillon, Claude Prosper Jolyot. 1992. Œuvres, ed. Ernest Sturm, Paris: François Bourin Descartes, René. 1996 [1649]. Les Passions de l’âme, Paris: Flammarion Diderot, Denis. 1933 [1772]. Sur les Femmes, Paris: Hilsum Garnot, Benoît. 1993. La Justice en France de l’an mil à 1914, Paris: Nathan Hecquet, Philippe. 1708. De l’Indécence aux hommes d’accoucher les femmes, Trevoux: Jacques Etienne James, Susan. 1997. Passion and Action: the Emotions in Seventeenthcentury Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press de Laclos, Choderlos. 1972 [1782]. Les Liaisons dangereuses, Paris: Gallimard


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de Lacombe, Bernard Mercier. 1948. La Résistance janséniste et parlementaire au temps de Louis XV (1720–1772): l’abbé Nigon de Berty, 1702–1772, Paris: Grand Armorial Laroch, Philippe. 1979. Petits-Maîtres et roués: évolution de la notion de libertinage dans le roman français du XVIIIe siècle, Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval Malebranche, Nicolas. 1935 [1712]. De la Recherche de la vérité, Paris: Flammarion Rey, Alain, ed., 1978 [1685]. Le Dictionnaire Universel d’Antoine Furetière, Paris: SNL Rollin, Charles. 1736. De la Manière d’enseigner et d’étudier les belles lettres par rapport à l’esprit et au cœur, 2 vols, Amsterdam: [n.pub] Serpillon, François. 1767. Code Criminelle, ou commentaires sur l’ordonnance de 1670, Lyons: Frères Perisse Traer, James. 1980. Marriage and the Family in eighteenth-century France, London: Cornell University Press Wilson, Lindsay. 1993. Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate over ‘Maladies des femmes’, London: Johns Hopkins University Press


FIONA HANDYSIDE Possessing Stars, Possessing Texts: Jeanne Moreau and the New Wave

The eponymous heroes of Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1961) fall in love with a slide projection of a beautiful statue of a woman: a selfreferential moment in a key New Wave text. Images of men sitting together falling in love with a projection of a feminized ideal are the perfect mise-en-abîme of the film and indeed of the entire New Wave project itself. New Wave directors promoted their vision of a new cinema at least partially through the sexual and aesthetic possession of the female body by the privileged gaze of the male cinéphile become auteur. This article will demonstrate that despite their revolutionary cinematic style and the representation of the contemporary, modern woman, the New Wave retained a stifling and conservative belief in the power of the male gaze to understand and interpret the female star. New Wave stars such as Anna Karina, Jean Seberg and Jeanne Moreau, were presented as different and modern. They were represented as being in stark contrast to traditional French or Hollywood female stars, yet underneath this modern gloss they still functioned as objects of desire. This article, focusing on Jeanne Moreau as one of the most famous New Wave stars, explores how the notion of the male gaze, as developed by feminist film criticism,1 was 1

Originally devised using a psychoanalytic framework by Laura Mulvey in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), the concept of the male gaze has been extremely fruitful for feminist film theory and star studies. It has been explored by feminist scholars such as Mary Anne Doane (1991) and in French cinema by Colin McCabe (1980) and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (1990). It is however usually neglected in auteur-focused accounts of New Wave cinema and it is unusual for it to be articulated alongside a socio-historical account of cinematic femininity.

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mobilized by the New Wave movement despite an apparent commitment to modernity and self-determination for female protagonists. Such feminist theorization argues that the gaze assumes the existence of a masculine subjectivity that regards the female protagonist in the film as a beautiful object to be looked at, desired, and understood through its operation. The gaze of the male subject is elided with that of the camera and thus the spectator. There is no room for feminine subjectivity in this cinematic system. Even in the allegedly modern New Wave cinema, this gaze possesses the female star as art and sex object within the narrative of the film. By examining Jeanne Moreau’s role as Catherine in Jules et Jim, this article will demonstrate how a surface gloss of modernity in fact allows the female star to be even more firmly possessed by discourses concerning masculine fantasies of idealized femininity, whether sexual or aesthetic. The New Wave cinema was produced primarily by young male directors such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, Jacques Demy and Jacques Rivette. The only female New Wave director of note was Agnès Varda, and she was slightly tangential to the film movement, having made her first feature La Pointe courte in 1954.2 This preponderance of male directors is ‘a phenomenon that signals a major discordance between the creative renascence represented by the New Wave and the evolution of women as creative and social subjects in their own right’ (Sellier 2001, 125). These directors first made a name for themselves as critics on journals such as Arts, and most famously Cahiers du cinéma, under the editorship of André Bazin. Cahiers du cinéma claimed a high-art role for film precisely through the introduction of the notion of an omnipotent (male) auteur who could claim possession of the text. The auteurs of the New Wave defined their mode of filmmaking in distinction to that which had gone before. Traditional French cinema was derided for its literary scripts, its period settings, its studio 2

In classical accounts of cinematic history, the start of the New Wave is signalled by the release of Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge in 1959, five years after Varda’s film.

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bound representations, and even the way it used its female stars. In an article published in Arts in April 1959, Jean-Luc Godard made an impassioned plea for a different, improved cinema, locating better filmmaking at least partially in the representation of a modern, contemporary woman: Vous ne savez pas faire du cinéma parce que vous ne savez plus ce que c’est. […] nous ne pouvons pas vous pardonner de n’avoir jamais filmé des filles comme nous les aimons, les garçons comme nous les croisons tous les jours, […] bref, les choses telles qu’elles sont. (cited in Baecque 1998, 40)

Truffaut also argued for a more invigorating and contemporary cinema. He defined the auteur as the filmmaker who produced a text based on his own subjective experience. Truffaut argued that this position of subjectivity was the ideal starting point for contemporary filmmaking and likened this personal approach to making love, again locating the New Wave project in a sexualized domain. Both Truffaut and Godard thus conflate authentic and contemporary filmmaking with the woman as a cinematic love object. The female star is there to be looked at and loved. The New Wave conception of the auteur, despite its claims to novelty and modernity, thus posits the male director as the subject who gazes at the female star, his beautiful object. In his declaration that tomorrow’s film will be an act of love (Baecque and Toubiana 1996, 163), Truffaut conflates the aesthetic and sexual possession of the female star through this privileged gaze. In appearance and spatial positioning, New Wave stars were strikingly different from glamorous cinema stars such as Marilyn Monroe in Hollywood or Martine Carol in France. Their hair was its natural colour, they wore relatively little and less theatrical makeup, and, most crucially, they were independent, urban women. Janet Wolff has argued that in the nineteenth century the urban woman did not have the same access to strolling along the streets and experiencing modern urban life as the male flâneur did, but was instead restricted to the private sphere. She thus labels the urban woman the invisible flâneuse, concluding that if this woman has a presence on the street, and by extension in the public sphere, it is marginalized at best, denied at worst (Wolff 1990).

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Jeanne Moreau is in contrast a visible flâneuse, a modern woman enjoying the city streets. Like the nineteenth-century male flâneur, she is the subject rather than the object of the street, using the urban milieu to inform her own experience. However, this outward literary and cinematic modernity and contemporary nature cannot prevent her aesthetic (and often sexual) possession by a male decoding gaze; indeed Moreau’s modernity often seems only, ironically, to aid this possession. The modern public sphere, and the cinematic text as its expression, acts to contain and possess rather than liberate the female star. Ironically, it is the female star’s very modernity and independence that is recuperated and objectified by the auteur. The New Wave female star appears in a film that is defined as modern and different. Jeanne Moreau was a new kind of star whose beauty (an attribute generally considered necessary for cinematic stardom) was unconventional. She was a talented actress and had worked on the stage and in films in minor roles throughout the 1950s. When she worked in studios, she had makeup heavily applied to her face to even out her skin colour and make her features appear more symmetrical. With the different demands of the New Wave, however, Moreau was able to become a star, embodying as she did the authenticity and modernity required by the auteur. L’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Louis Malle, 1957) was the film that launched Moreau as a star, as it played on notions of contemporaneity, sexual daring, different looks and modern, urban femininity. The modernity of the film is thus at least partly located in the way it creates Moreau as a new kind of ideal. She is filmed in a modern urban setting on location instead of in a glamorized studio setting. The scenes in the street in L’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud were filmed using natural light sources (mainly neon, electric street lights, and shop lighting). This necessitated the use of very fast film, with quick exposure times, which creates harsh, sharp images. The technicians in charge of developing the film in the laboratory were shocked by these shots ‘qui ne dissmulait ni ses cernes, ni ses imperfections. Ils se liguèrent contre le chef opérateur, Henri Decaë, futur favori de la Nouvelle Vague, et contre Louis Malle: “On ne peut pas faire ça à Jeanne Moreau.” […] L’anecdote souligne la modernité


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du film’ (Delmar 1994, 45). Moreau is presented in contrast to the glossy perfection of the studio star. Modernity is thus present only in Moreau’s appearance; her meaning is utterly conventional. This summarizes the position of the female New Wave star: rather than functioning as a radical break with tradition, she only enters the cinematic arena once the means of her recuperation and normalization have been found. The criteria for female stardom may have changed with the New Wave auteurs but its ultimate meaning has not. Moreau does not have the regular features of previously admired female stars, yet her unconventional appearance functions in exactly the same way as the most normative beauty. She is admired as artistic image by the male auteur who reifies his own gaze through the operation of the camera. She becomes the object of artistic idealization and various aspects of her image are fetishized. Male auteurs possess their female stars through a very traditional gaze, even if they do present their own presentation of them as modern and different. It is thus not so much the case that women have entered the public sphere; it is more that the scope of their objectification and control, usually linked to the private sphere, has been enlarged. Rather than the public sphere being a place open for the subversion of traditional femininity, in modernity it seems to serve only as a reflective mirror bouncing back to the woman idealized images of herself. The flâneuse’s image is reflected back to her from shop windows filled with mannequins wearing the latest fashions. As she walks, she sees beautiful pin-up girls pictured in magazines; she is thus surrounded by idealized images of femininity. The modern woman escapes the private sphere, only to have an idealized femininity predicated on the gaze constructed in the public sphere. The New Wave’s emphasis on location shooting moves the female star from the enclosing studio to the city street, but she is still possessed by discourses of idealized femininity. The female flâneuse projected into the public sphere is thus not experiencing the modern city as a site where she can construct her own identity, but rather is possessed by discourses of literature, cinema, capitalism and consumption that can now contain her wherever she may be.

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In Jules et Jim, the problematics of Moreau’s modernity are firmly established. Her character, Catherine, can be interpreted as an artistic creation of two ‘painters of modern life’, Jules and Jim, the phrase recalling Charles Baudelaire’s famous essay, and indeed the characters in the film discuss his aesthetic ideas.3 Jules and Jim identify the contemporary Catherine with their idealized image of beauty, the screen projection of a statue they later go and find in Greece, an identification that confirms Catherine’s beauty as both eternal and contingent. The feminine features of the statue are examined in detail through brief shots of its eyes, nose and smiling mouth. The fragmented scanning of the statue’s face is repeated when the real Catherine appears, confirming the aesthetic rapport between these two representations of female beauty. Jules and Jim’s male gaze thus works within the film to create the bond between the statue and Catherine. The film itself records Catherine as a frozen image, a fascinating object of desire during a freeze frame sequence when her image is literally frozen into a photographic pose, as if she is being returned to the stone from which she came. Truffaut’s celluloid possesses Catherine as an expression of the eternal feminine. Catherine’s representation in the film thus confirms her as an object to be possessed by the modern artists’ gaze, the artists here being Jules, Jim and Truffaut. Catherine is the beautiful, ahistorical feminine art image. The male gaze possesses her several times over as she becomes a beautiful art object in different media, whether this be carved in stone, watched on a slide screen, or gazed at by a cinema audience. Jules, Jim and Truffaut create her as a projected, timeless ideal of femininity, insisting upon the power of the male gaze. Indeed, Jules et Jim dramatizes the idealized female’s struggle to possess some meaning beyond her representation as a fascinating image for the male gaze. Catherine’s attempts to take control of the narrative are thwarted, as this male gaze possesses her within its one limited sphere of meaning. When Catherine, Jules and Jim discuss a 3

The phrase comes from Baudelaire’s eulogy to Constantin Guys in which he praises him as the consummate painter of modern life. Baudelaire (1995) argues that Guys creates beautiful art works through the skilful combination of contemporary, contingent elements with an ineffable, essential soul.


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play they have just seen, Jim begins to dismiss Catherine’s opinion. She is praising its historical and spatial fluidity, that is to say its modernity, commenting ‘on ne sait pas à quelle époque ça se passe, ni dans quel milieu’. She admires the freedom it gives the female protagonist, who is ‘libre, elle invente sa vie à chaque instant’. Jim however retreats to visions of eternal femininity as supported by Baudelaire to counter Catherine’s praise of a woman who is free to possess her own meanings. He declares ‘comme dit Baudelaire, la femme est naturelle, donc abominable’: women are removed from the divine act of creation, as they are to be created by others. Catherine’s response to this contempt is to try and create her own moment of meaning by jumping into the Seine: ‘she mocks Baudelaire’s vision of women by acting nobly, artfully, creatively, creating “a moment of meaning”’ (Murphy 1992, 29). This attempt to possess some of the meaning within the text is disrupted and only partially successful. As she throws herself into the river, a voice-over from the male narrator immediately frames and interprets this event. Truffaut slows and freezes her descent, creating an aesthetic image out of even this most spontaneous gesture. Catherine’s attempt to possess the meaning of the text is rejected by an authorial presence that orders her experience into his own interpretation of Catherine as beautiful art object. Catherine’s narrative action becomes transformed into eternal image. Catherine’s unconventional behaviour acts here to make her a possession of the male creator of the text. Just as her modern looks signal the New Wave star not as an independent subject but a new kind of objectified ideal, so her modern mobility also contributes not to her independence but rather to her aesthetic fetishism. Dudley Andrew argues that in the historical context of the film, Catherine represents eternal feminine artistic beauty in contrast to the film’s emphasis on Paris as a modern city of exchange and translation (Andrew 1997, 33–53). The film can thus be read as a promise of the possibilities of freedom for men, whereas women are fixed by aesthetic conventions. Jules and Jim use art to fix and objectify the body of a woman. However, they fail to hold this feminine beauty in stasis outside the shifting processes of translation and exchange in which they find themselves in the modern capitalist city. The woman

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is produced in their artistic processes as both sex and art object for a mobile, modern market exchange between men. Jules attempts to stop this modern exchange, asking Jim not to sleep with Catherine, who at this moment is ‘declared unexchangeable, unreproducible, and absolutely different’ (Andrew 1997, 47). Yet Jules fails in his attempt to keep her for his unique sexual possession. Catherine is sexually modern, in a capitalist system of exchange. This sexual daring, which may initially appear to be a positive sign of independence and subjectivity reveals that Catherine is even more thoroughly possessed than is usually the case with a female protagonist. The exchange of women to forge and preserve male bonds is a typical symptom of patriarchal location of women. In her exploration of male homosociality in literature, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick quotes Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological discussion of marriage as cementing the bonds between men rather than between a man and a woman: ‘the total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners’ (Kosofsky Sedgwick 1985, 25–26). Patriarchal heterosexuality can be best discussed in terms of the traffic of women: as the title indicates, Jules et Jim is about the relationship between two male friends rather than that between a man and a woman. Indeed, the trio seems at their happiest when they are all men together: when Catherine disguises herself as Thomas, a young Chaplinesque boy. The two men use Catherine in order to maintain their fusion with each other. When Jim betrays Catherine by returning to his lover Gilberte in Paris, Jules castigates his friend for his infidelity, commenting ‘j’ai peur qu’elle nous quitte’ (my italics). Rather than Jules et Jim being a simple matter of a triangular relationship, it exposes the deep processes of male bonding that occur through the possession of a woman’s body. It is Jules and Jim in the film, and the auteur Truffaut beyond it, rather than Catherine, who decide who will possess her, and Catherine only destroys the bond between them when she removes her body entirely from the equation. Her sexual subjectivity is negated within their close relationship, her own bodily pleasures must be categorically and absolutely denied if she is to break their bond.


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It is Catherine’s very spontaneity that makes her so appealing to Jules, Jim and Truffaut, with their mediated, observational relationship to the world. When Jim tells Catherine he understands her, she replies that she does not wish to be understood. This can be interpreted as her wishing to create her own motives for her behaviour that will be unknown to the male protagonists of the film, and by extension the audience. She does not want to be possessed as a feminine image or a readable narrative. However, while the film dupes us into thinking this will be a ‘woman’s story’, beginning with her voiceover, it quickly mobilizes the masculine structures of the possessive gaze, creating Catherine as sexual and artistic object. The film thus suggests to its audience that it is about female desire when it is really about homosocial desire and masculine fantasies of women. Catherine may operate as a fascinating image, but the narrative ‘demonizes the woman in order to require her destruction. […] The film thus dramatizes the culture’s complicated relation to the feminine as both fascinating vision and destructive essence’ (Flitterman-Lewis 1993, 942). Catherine’s attempts to escape male possession are thus demonstrated not to be revolutionary and modern but part of a misogynistic process that eliminates her from the narrative precisely through displacing the destructive force onto her. In the dramatic dénouement of the film, where Catherine kills herself and Jim, the moment with apparently the most potential for escape, it will be shown that she is the cinematic femme fatale, another convention that acts to possess the meaning of the female star. In an early article written for Cahiers du cinéma in 1952 Godard, writing as Hans Lucas, associated female beauty with the cinema and it is in this relation that he attempts to locate the meaning of the closeup: Le gros plan le plus simple est aussi le plus émouvant. Notre art sait ici le plus fortement marquer sa transcendance. […] De ces yeux immenses qui se plissent, pleins de prudence et de luxure, de ces lèvres qui pâlissent, […] nous ne voyons que ce qu’il suppose de noirs desseins, de leurs aveux ce qu’elles cachent d’illusions. […] Le cinéma ne s’interroge pas sur la beauté d’une femme, il ne fait que douter de son cœur, enregistrer sa perfidie […], ne voir que ses mouvements. (1952, 28–32)

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Cinema records an artificial surface of feminine beauty that it cannot question or alter. The moment when the woman is recorded in this manner is also the moment when her treachery is revealed. Behind female beauty, the close-up warns, lies only the deadly, damaged femme fatale: the beauty will only be used for destructive sexual or emotional gain. When, in the final sequence of Jules et Jim, Catherine drives her car off a broken bridge, killing herself and Jim as Jules watches, Jules’s gaze is powerless to determine the meaning of Catherine’s act. This suicide and murder is undoubtedly the moment in the film where Catherine appears in control of events. However, it is ironically also the moment where her possession in discourse is total. She is revealed through this action to be the femme fatale of cinematic convention. Her association with sexual jealousy, forbidden desires and treachery has suggested this throughout the film. Catherine’s narrative function as femme fatale culminates in her and her lover’s death, a fate warned about in the film’s central song, Le Tourbillon, sung self-reflexively by Catherine. As in the song, the femme fatale is deadly not only to others but also to herself. If Catherine’s death could arguably be seen as a moment of self-determination, it is achieved only at the highest price. Her song has located the femme fatale in a whirlpool of movement, fluidity and exchange. In contrast, the dénouement of the film reveals the fixity of the femme fatale hidden behind her gloss of modern freedom and movement. The car, driven by Catherine and a symbol of her modern independence and movement, is transformed into a coffin. Her body finishes not in the swirl of a whirlpool but in the stillness of a millpond. Catherine is one of many femmes fatales that Moreau has played. Molly Haskell emphasizes that the femme fatale is an icon connoting containment, entrapment and stasis rather than freedom or independence: ‘The femme fatale is almost invariably a male invention, the projection – and prisoner – of a director’s or writer’s fears and fantasies, and probably a means of satisfying his own destructive urges. In return, she is flattered by being worshipped as a goddess and given god-like powers. One often feels that trapped inside the maneating female is a cheerful, nonvoracious woman trying to get out’ (Haskell, 1997, 67). Moreau’s screen image thus works as an image of


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projection and entrapment. Her characters’ fates are often those of imprisonment or death. She may have a gloss of cinematic modernity, but her representation – as with all representations of women, according to Godard’s argument – serves only to hide the ugly truth. Her screen persona is that of a deadly, dangerous woman. Her star image of independence is only ever contingent and she will be possessed, like more conventional stars, by cinematic conventions and fixed narrative endings. Moreau’s star persona thus exposes the objectification of the New Wave star behind the surface modernity. Moreau herself has commented ‘une actrice est une femme-objet absolue, mais cela n’a aucun importance, quand on est libre de choisir son maître’ (Delmar 1994, 143). Here, Moreau admits the absolute nature of the objectification of the actress. In New Wave cinema, the female cinema star operates as an object, an actress, and a slave to the subject, director and master of the film, the male auteur. The actress is a pliable image for the male auteur who is located as the source of all meaning in a film explicitly dedicated to his own subjective experience. Moreau however emphasizes not only her objectification but also her freedom to choose who objectifies her. Despite the manipulation of Catherine’s image by the operation of the possessive male gaze in Jules et Jim, Moreau’s star image cannot be totally contained within one text or possessed by one individual auteur, but rather ranges across films. She can move between and beyond individual texts giving her a financial and social power unusual for her gender at the time and suggesting alternative performances to that of hegemonic femininity. It is beyond the films, in the socio-economic context, that a more positive interpretation is available. Whereas modernity for many women in the 50s was presented in terms of possessions,4 Moreau’s 4

Modernity for most women in 1950s France was judged by the number of household appliances possessed: ‘Nouveau Fémina showed the woman in 1930 with her 13 machines and the woman of 1955 with 25. Elle in 1956 published a test to discover if the reader was a modern woman [centred on how many possessions she owned]’ (Duchen 1991, 6).

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was at least couched in terms of her struggle for self-possession (however contingent her films might reveal that to be). In contrast to the housewife ideal promoted in the media, Moreau had an economic self-determination linked to her stardom that can be seen as empowering within the context of the time. Ginette Vincendeau quotes Truffaut’s ‘typically bombastic’ comment that he would never work with five of the most successful French stars of the time (Fernandel, Michèle Morgan, Jean Gabin, Gérard Philipe and Pierre Fresnay) as he felt that they imposed their own image upon the film (2000, 110). The New Wave discovered new stars, female and male, who redefined notions of glamour. No longer located in polished studio close-ups, star quality was found in freshness, youth, vitality and improvisation. Whilst the New Wave was theoretically committed to replacing stars with an auteur vision, it also created its own canon of female stars, such as Brigitte Bardot, Jean Seberg, Catherine Deneuve, Anna Karina and Jeanne Moreau. To varying degrees, no single male auteur could entirely control or possess the meanings and images of these women, all of whom had a freedom lacking in the housewifely ideal. Auteur theory stresses the narrative and visual control exerted by the auteur over the film text. Feminist film criticism stresses the misogynistic conventions that produce cinematic femininity. Neither of them can thus fully account for the power of the images of these women, locked as they are into text- rather than context-based criticism. Female New Wave film stars moved across textual and spatial boundaries, into different films, magazines, reviews, and settings. While they are harnessed within individual film texts and possessed by the male auteur’s gaze, these star images also suggest a social and economic freedom that anticipates later political developments. The New Wave star’s freedoms are not those depicted on the screen, but rather those that happen away from the piercing gaze of the auteur. An alternative femininity is constructed based on economic freedom and political action, rather than a new appearance or sexual promiscuity. Freedom from possession by the male gaze occurs not through but beyond the cinematic representations of the New Wave. While Catherine utterly fails to escape male possession, Moreau’s mobile star image can be shown to succeed in this to some


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extent. The beginnings of female emancipation thus occur within a cinematic framework that conceives of women as the sexual and artistic object of masculine fantasy.

References Andrew, Dudley. 1997. ‘Jules, Jim, and Walter Benjamin’, in Dudley Andrew and Sally Shafto eds., The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 33– 53 Baudelaire, Charles. 1995. The Painter of Modern Life and other essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon de Baecque, Antoine. 1998. La Nouvelle Vague: Portrait d’une jeunesse, Paris: Flammarion de Baecque, Antoine and Toubiana, Serge. 1996. François Truffaut, Paris: Gallimard Delmar, Michel. 1994. Jeanne Moreau: Portrait d’une femme, Paris: Norma Doane, Mary Ann. 1991. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, London and New York: Routledge Duchen, Claire. 1991. ‘Occupation Housewife: The Domestic Ideal in 1950s France’, French Cultural Studies 2:1, 1–12 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. 1990. To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, Urbana: Illinois University Press –––––. 1993. ‘Fascination, Friendship, and the “Eternal Feminine”: Or, The Discursive Production of (Cinematic) Desire’, The French Review 66, 941–46. Haskell, Molly. 1997. Holding My Own in No Man’s Land: Women and Men and Feminism and Film, Oxford: Oxford University Press Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press Lucas, Hans [Jean-Luc Godard]. 1952. ‘Défense et illustration du découpage classique’ Cahiers du cinéma, 47, 28–32 MacCabe, Colin. 1980. Godard: Image, Sounds, Politics, London: BFI Murphy, Kathleen. 1992. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, Film Comment 28:6, 28–30

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Mulvey, Laura. 1975. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16:3, 6–18 Sellier, Geneviève. 2001. ‘Gender, Modernism and Mass Culture in the New Wave’, in Alex Hughes and James S. Williams eds., Gender and French Cinema, Oxford and New York: Berg, 125–137 Vincendeau, Ginette. 2000. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema, London: Continuum Wolff, Janet. 1990. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, Oxford: Polity Press

Part IV Traumatic Dispossession


FRANCESCA NICHOLSON Troubadour Loves and Gloves

‘the lover acting as a glove that returns the contours to the hand’ Alain de Botton, Essays in Love

The quotation from Alain de Botton’s novel is both an epigraph and a postscript to the argument I wish to advance in this essay. It serves to introduce the glove in an amatory context, and I shall be privileging the glove as an amatory rather than as a feudal object in my discussion of the troubadours.1 Second, it conflates the desired object, the lover, with the glove. Third, the lover/glove is represented as the affirmation of the loving subject’s sense of self, or the hoped-for sense of self, by the fact that it ‘returns the contours’ of that identity. The unassailable body called troubadour poetic tradition has meant that troubadour identity has never appeared to be a questionable identity. By this, I do not mean the problematic attribution of certain texts, or the question of anonymity, or the ‘phantom troubadours’ with an identity but no corpus; I mean the very fact of calling oneself a troubadour. Despite the variety of voices with which the male troubadours spoke, they have invariably been viewed by scholars as the exponents of a unitary poetic practice, one which the female troubadours or ‘trobairitz’ never quite managed to form among themselves. Troubadour and trobairitz have thus been aligned to

1

By feudal object I mean one that was used in the historical ceremony of vassalage. After a vassal had pledged allegiance to his lord, usually by placing his hands within his lord’s hands, the lord would give him an object as a symbol of the land that the vassal would receive in exchange. The glove was one of several possible objects (others including a handkerchief, a belt or the leaf of a walnut tree etc.). For a fuller discussion of the ceremony of vassalhood, see Le Goff, 1977, 349–420.

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mutually exclusive poetic practices, with the principle of exclusion being that of gender difference. But what if the ‘secure’, masculine gender, the one with the ‘stronger’ poetic tradition, were itself subject to divisions and selfdoubt? What if it sought external validations and grappled with the very possibility of composing poetry, in a way that has been judged to be characteristic of the uncertain trobairitz voice? To explore this possibility, I have selected part of Giraut de Bornelh’s corpus to compare with a canso (lyric poem or song) by the trobairitz Castelloza.2 At the level of poetic identity, I am bringing together one of the most assured troubadours, both in the field of troubadour studies and for his contemporaries, with one of the most tortured and paradoxical trobairitz.3 The striking convergence of their texts lies in the representation of the glove. I will argue that in both cases the representation exceeds the immediate narrative context of the canso (that is, the story in or of the canso) and that the glove bears a function and a significance in the canso’s composition that may be simultaneously phenomenological and psychoanalytical. The 2

3

Giraut’s poems and the Occitan prose texts relating to him are cited from the edition by Ruth Sharman; Castelloza’s poems are cited from Angelica Rieger’s edition of trobairitz poetry. Translations are mine throughout. Giraut is famously titled ‘maestre dels trobadors’, master of the troubadours, thanks to his vida (the vidas were short prose biographies of the troubadours, composed by those who collected their poetry and committed it to the manuscripts): ‘E fo meiller trobaire que negus d’aquels qu’eron estat denan ni foron apres lui; per que fo apellatz maestre dels trobadors, et es ancar per toz aquels que ben entendon subtils ditz ni ben pauzatz d’amor ni de sen.’ (Sharman 1989, 488) [He was a better troubadour than anyone who came before him or anyone who came after; which is why he was called master of the troubadours, and still is by all those who understand subtle poems with wellplaced love and wit.] On Castelloza’s conflicted persona, see Amelia Van Vleck, 1989: ‘Castelloza’s lyrics depict a woman driven as much by exasperation as by joi to justify her breach of silence against the charge that she should not, in conscience, sing.’ (95). On Castelloza’s self-abasement and negativity, see Siskin and Storme, 1989, 116: ‘Castelloza chooses not to avail herself of her rights to renounce her lover even as she acknowledges the lack of reciprocity in their relationship, thus proving once again that despite repeated incidents of cruelty and neglect, she stubbornly persists in the behaviour that causes her suffering.’

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theoretical formulations of Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Žižek which I adduce assist in demonstrating how the glove as object participates in a traumatic process of poetic self-fashioning. To express it in terms of the Alain de Botton quotation, I will be proposing that the glove ‘returns’ the identity of the poet, but that in having only contours, not substance, that identity may find itself less determinate. Maurice Merleau-Ponty brought the glove image into one of the Notes de travail at the back of his unfinished work, Le Visible et l’invisible. Here, it serves to illustrate his theory of reversibility: Réversibilité: le doigt de gant qui se retourne – spectateur qui soit des 2 côtés. Il suffit que, d’un gant qui s’applique sur l’endroit, que je touche ‘représentation’ d’un point ou plan du champ) réversibilité. (1964, 311)

Il n’est pas besoin d’un côté, je vois l’envers du l’un par l’autre (double le chiasme est cela: la

The concept I wish to extrapolate from this is that of chiasmus. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chiasmus is at once physiological (a twisted optical nerve) and rhetorical (a cross-like symmetry of expression). His particular contribution to the disparate school of phenomenological thought is in situating the world relative to the body, positing an intertwining of the two which raises sensation to the domain of perception and, ultimately, knowing. Things, no matter how different they appear to us, are not external to us, but part of a contiguous and continuous relation. In the passage containing the glove image just quoted, Merleau-Ponty insists on the fundamental duality of body and world, articulated as ‘two pages’, which allows for the world to be inserted in the body and, reciprocally, the body to be inserted in the world. Effectively, his theory is one which undermines distinctions of interiority and exteriority, or self and other. Since the principle of chiasmus is reversibility, one thing can be turned inside out to become or to reveal the other. Whereas Merleau-Ponty dwells on the act of removing a glove (hence the ‘doigt de gant qui se retourne’ like a ghostly finger pointing back to itself), Lacan has recourse to the actual structure of the glove to formulate his theory on the structure of the gaze. This abstraction of the glove by Lacan, both in the way Lacan takes an

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image out of phenomenological theory and in the way he turns it into an abstract object, is what will lead me to posit the glove as more than an object: as an objet petit a. Lacan refers to Merleau-Ponty’s note in Seminar XI: Quant à moi, je ne puis qu’être frappé de certaines de ces notes, pour moi moins énigmatiques qu’elles ne paraîtront à d’autres lecteurs, pour se recouvrir très exactement avec les schèmes – spécialement avec l’un d’entre eux – que je serai amené à promouvoir ici. Lisez, par exemple, cette note concernant ce qu’il appelle le retournement en doigt de gant, pour autant qu’il semble y apparaître – voir la façon dont la peau enveloppe la fourrure dans un gant d’hiver – que la conscience, dans son illusion de se voir se voir, trouve son fondement dans la structure retournée du regard. (1973, 78)

The contiguous relation of the visible outside of the glove and its invisible inside, which Merleau-Ponty articulated in terms of the external je touching one side by or through (‘par’) the other, is analogised by Lacan in terms of visible surface (leather) and invisible lining (fur). The glove serves Lacan as an illustration of the inside-out structure of the gaze – or the gaze looking at itself looking – a product of psychoanalysis which he comes to schematise as the objet petit a. I now wish to argue that the status of the glove may be elevated from that of mere illustration in the material world to that of phenomenological object, one with which the subject is vitally connected. Lacan developed the concept of the objet petit a in the twenty or so years that his seminars span, therefore it seems almost disrespectful to summarise it in a few words.4 For the purpose of my argument, however, the most salient notion to keep in mind is that it is an object that sets the subject’s desire in motion and one that the drives of the subject circle around. In psychoanalytic theory the objet petit a is usually constituted by the breast, the faeces, the voice or the gaze in correlation to the oral drive, the anal drive, the invocatory drive and the scopic drive. By definition, these are objects that are unassimilable by the subject. By the same token the glove, and particularly the eroticised, fetishised glove in troubadour poetry, has many properties in common with the objet a. It is not itself the object of desire – the 4

The best synthesis is offered by Dylan Evans, 1996, entry ‘objet (petit) a’.


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beloved is – but it serves as a propeller of desire: the glove is the promise, the infinitely deferred illusion, of bodily possession. Both the glove and the objet a enclose and conceal an empty space – one that should be filled (by substance, such as a human hand, something ‘real’) but is not. Imitating the way troubadour poetry circumvents physical love but is nonetheless trying to attain it, the glove suggests a hide-and-seek game with the corporeal. Initially given by the lady as preliminary satisfaction for the troubadour, the glove does nothing but incite the troubadour’s ardour even more. In the appendix (‘A SelfInterview’) to The Metastases of Enjoyment, Slavoj Žižek provides a further definition of the objet a: ‘Object’ gives body to the void that is the subject qua $, and to the void that gapes in the midst of the big Other. Here again we are dealing with the topology of ‘curved’ space in which the inside coincides with the outside5: identification with the object is not external to the Symbolic, it is an identification with the extimate kernel of the Symbolic itself, with that which is in the symbolic more than the symbolic, with the void at its very heart. (1994, 178)

Razos are prose commentaries which, like the vidas, were interpolated with the poetry by the compilers of troubadour chansonniers. A razo pertaining to Giraut de Bornelh – the one which precedes his tenso with the presumed trobairitz Alamanda – explains his ill-fated courtship of his domna, identified as a lady from Gascony called Alamanda d’Estanc, and thereby provides us with a context for the set of poems known as his ‘glove cycle’6:

5

6

The objet a would therefore be structurally akin to the Moebius strip, the topological figure which flouts binary distinctions, as one side twists into the other. See Evans, 1996, entry ‘moebius strip’. Razo B in MS Sg (see Sharman for details) clarifies that Alamanda, interlocutor in the tenso, and Alamanda, domna, were not one and the same: ‘venc s’en a una donzela qui era apelada Alamanda, atresi con sa domna. Aquesta donzela era fort corteza e savia, e sabia ben trobar et entendre, e sabia letra[s].’ [he went to a young lady called Alamanda, like his lady. This young lady was courteous and wise, and could both compose and understand troubadour poetry, and was learned.]

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Francesca Nicholson Lonc temps la preget; et ella, com bels ditz et com bels honramenz e com bellas promissions, se defendet d[e] lui corteizamen, qe anc no.il fetz d’amor ni.l det nuilla joia, mas un son gan, dont el visqet lonc temps gais e joios; e pueis n’ac mantas tristessas, qant l’ac perdut; que ma domna N’Alamanda – qan vi q’el la preissava fort q’ella li feses plaser d’amor e saub q’el avia perdut lo gan – ella [l’]encuset del gan, digan qe mal l’avia gardat e q’ella no.il daria mais nulla joia, ni plaser no.il faria mais d’amor, e qe so q’ella li avia promes li desmandava, q’ela vesia ben q’el era fort loing eissitz de sua commanda. (Sharman 1989, 486-489) [He pleaded with her for a long time, and she, with pleasant words and honours and promises kept him at bay courteously, and gave him no sign of love or cause for joy, except for one of her gloves, which kept him happy for a long time. Then it gave him many sorrows, when he lost it. Lady Alamanda – when she saw that he was pressing her for love favours and when she knew that he had lost the glove – reproached him about the glove, saying that he had been careless about it, and that she would never give him any cause for joy nor bestow any other love favour on him. And she asked to have back what she had promised him, because she could see clearly that he had wandered far from her command.]

The glove recurs in five of Giraut’s songs with the persistence of a traumatic memory surfacing into consciousness. Indelibly associated with the loss of favour with his lady, the glove, or more precisely the memory of it (since it is no longer in his possession), was also the only cause for joy that she gave him. Bound up as it is with the equally feared and hoped-for encounter with the lady, the glove can again be interpreted psychoanalytically, within the framework of trauma. Trauma is, for Lacan, the missed encounter and it is precisely this that haunts the metaphors of appropriation which the glove as a courtly symbol creates: La fonction du tuché, du réel comme rencontre – la rencontre en tant qu’elle peut être manquée, qu’essentiellement elle est la rencontre manquée – s’est d’abord présentée dans l’histoire de la psychanalyse sous une forme qui, à elle seule, suffit déjà à éveiller notre attention – celle du traumatisme. (Lacan 1973, 54)


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Giraut’s canso, ‘La flors el vergan’, (‘The flower on the branch’)7, presents an equivocation between being dejected at the loss of the glove and being inspired to sing in a simpler style which he claims to favour (an ironic claim, given Giraut’s propensity for hermetic expression): E pero l’autr’an, Qan perdei mon gan, Anava chantan Plan e plus ades, E si m’en tarzes, En for’encolpatz, Pois lo dos ni.l gratz No m’era tardatz. Mas ara si.m sona M’amia fellona Sera.l bes poiatz. Doncs a que No.m poiara be Si.m sona ni m’acuoill gen? No.i a gran refraignemen? (stanza 4) [And yet last year, when I lost my glove, I went about singing more and more simply, and if I had delayed I would have been blamed for it, since the gift and thanks were not kept from me. But if my angry/ wicked lady addresses me now, the good will be great. Surely it will be even greater if she addresses and receives me kindly? Is there not great comfort in this?]

Note how the persistent ‘-an’ rhyme scheme effectuates a connection between the glove object and poetic style ‘…an/ Qan…gan/ Anava chantan/ Plan’, a technique that paradoxically undermines the simplicity of style he claims to be utilising. The expected chronology of events (gift of glove leads to loss of glove leads to composing in the 7

I have used Sharman’s edition of Giraut’s poetry and her numerical order. Hence ‘La flors el vergan’ is also referred to as canso 28, ‘Era si.m fos en grat tengut’ is canso 29, ‘Si.m sentis fizels amics’ is canso 30, ‘Tot suavet e de pas’ is canso 31, and ‘En un chantar’ is canso 51. In the older edition by Kolsen, the corresponding numbers are 26, 25, 27, 28 and 52 respectively. Titles are simply the first line of the canso.

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simple style) is also confounded. The gift, ‘lo dos’, which Giraut says was not kept from him, may well be the glove again, or more specifically, Giraut may have represented the glove as a lost or absent object before he represented it as a gift. By turning this chronology inside out, the poem itself assumes a glove-like structure. Gain coming from loss and loss as possession are effects that the glove image, with its simultaneous hollowness and fullness, makes visible. The possessive adjective ‘mon’ used with ‘gan’ in this canso is similarly equivocal: in what way can the poet be said to have assimilated his lady’s gift of a glove, for him to call it ‘my glove’ and not ‘hers’? Alamanda’s reaction at its loss, reported in the razo, indicates that it is still connected intimately with her, and that Giraut was not so much in a position of owning the glove as of looking after it, a situation resembling the tenure of land by a vassal. Canso 29, ‘Era s.im fos en grat tengut’ (‘If anyone were to thank me for it’), refers to the glove at the last line of stanza 4: ‘La perda qe pris per lo gan’ – ‘the loss I took for the glove’. Once again, loss is, paradoxically, something to be grasped or held. At the beginning of this same stanza, Giraut remembers the time when ‘a perdut/ M’o tengra’ – ‘I would have taken myself for lost’, two lines which set up another chiasmus of possession and loss. In canso 30, ‘Si.m sentis fizels amics’, (‘If I felt like a faithful friend’), the recollection of the glove occurs at the heart of stanza 8: E pois no m’em val chastics C’ades non sion peior, Ges no m’ha tant de sabor, Lur solatz com dels Galics, Deus lor deinh maldire! Q’antan Per un gan De que.m sove – Pero si.s fara iase ! – Mogron m’ist no-fezat fals Tal ghera, pois fo mortals. [And seeing as reprimands do nothing to stop them [the slanderers who, supposedly, informed Alamanda of the glove loss] from being more and more wicked, I don’t care for their company any more than that of the Galicians,


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damn them! For last year, because of a glove which is fixed in my memory – as it will ever be! – these faithless good-for-nothings stirred up such a rumour, which in the end was fatal [to me].]

How should one read the line ‘Per un gan’? Is it a weighty utterance, a heaving forth of the traumatic object buried in Giraut’s memory and which will always remain there? Or is it tinged with a sense of triviality, that such ‘fatal’ consequences should have ensued from the possession and loss of a glove? The last two songs in the cycle would seem to attest to a mitigation in the traumatic impact of recalling the glove. In canso 31, ‘Tot suavet e de pas’ (‘Gently and one step at a time’), the act of remembering is transferred to the unnamed interlocutor: […] membre.t del gan Don Mos Segurs Fetz avol bargajna, (ll. 23-25) [[…] [you] remember the glove with which My-Sure-One made a base bargain]

The object that used to be inextricable from the poet’s adulation of his lady, which caused him to continue composing even after he lost the tangible token, transforms itself into a baser symbol, one that is involved in a base bargain – ‘avol bargajna’. When the reputation of his lady is said to have degenerated – ‘Que I seus rics pretz sobeiras/ Es tornatz fragils e vas’ (ll. 26-27) – the inversion that has taken place seems to have much in common with the dual surfaces of the glove, one side being ‘rics’, opulent, the other being ‘vas’, hollow. The glove remains the object in and through which the lady can be contemplated, but it is capable of altering its appearance, of turning itself inside-out and imitating the different contours of her presence. By modifying the way he sings about the glove and the consequences of possessing and losing it, Giraut is also, in a sense, shaping himself around the contours of the glove, and by extension the lady, who can only be contemplated through it. The final appearance of the glove in Giraut de Bornelh’s song casts it as a mere echo of trauma: ‘Qu’ie.m solia

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d’un gan clamar’ (canso 51, ‘En un chantar’ – ‘In a song’) – ‘I used to wail about a glove’ – but nevertheless an echo voiced in the present. The trobairitz Castelloza speaks of a glove in her canso ‘Ia de chantar non degr’aver talan’ (‘I should not have the desire to sing.’ Rieger 1991, 529-538). This poem is addressed to an uncooperative male lover from whom Castelloza desperately wants a sign of love (indeed, the need for signs, usually called gifts or joys, is a recurring feature of Castelloza’s poetry). As if to provide him with an example, she steals a glove, a doubly transgressive act which contravenes laws of possession and ownership, and also the laws of courtly conduct where the lover should bestow the gift: Si pro.i agues, be.us membri’en chantan q’aic vostre gan qu’enbliei ab gran temor; puois aic paor qe i aguessetz dampnatge d’aicella qe.us rete, Amics, per q’ieu desse lo tornei, car ben cre q’eu non ai poderatge. (stanza 5) [If it could have helped me I would have reminded you willingly by singing that I had your glove which I stole in great fear; then I was afraid that it could cause you harm from she who keeps you in her service, Friend, therefore I gave it back at once, because I truly believe I have no right to it.]

This hermetic stanza contains a number of conflicting issues. For one thing, the lover apparently already knows about the glove theft, since Castelloza is reminding him, ‘us membri’, about the episode. Because she believes that reminding him will be futile (‘if it could have helped me I would have...’), the act of reminding seems more of a pretext for telling us and reminding herself of the event, as Giraut does in canso 31. Remembering is, of course, necessary to dealing with trauma, and Žižek says, elaborating Lacanian theory: The point is not to arrive at the factual truth of some long-forgotten event – what is effectively at stake here is, quite literally, the recollection of the past,


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i.e. the way this remembrance of the past bears on the subject’s present position of enunciation, how it transforms the very place from which the subject speaks (is spoken). Herein lies the ‘effect of truth’ intended by the psychoanalytic cure: when I draw a childhood trauma out of the shadowy world of ‘repression’ and interrogate it with my knowledge, this radically transforms the symbolic horizon that determines my present ‘self-understanding’ – after accomplishing it, I am not the same subject as before. (Žižek 1992, 32-33)

Such a drawing forth of the traumatic event (losing/stealing the glove) and placing it in the centre of one’s poetic narrative, as Giraut and Castelloza do, seems to indicate a wish to recreate one-self around it after one has called it forth and interrogated it, as well as the conflicting impetus to keep it buried at the heart of oneself, thus drawing attention to the object and simultaneously concealing it. Like the ambiguously proprietorial ‘mon gan’ used in Giraut’s canso ‘La flors el vergan’, ‘vostre gan’ could conceal a multiplicity of rights of ownership. Castelloza does not say from whom she stole the glove (it could have been from the lover or from the lover’s other lady to whom she alludes in the line ‘aicella qe.us rete’). As a courtly object, the glove could have been given by this other lady, and hence not really be the lover’s. The one certainty is that the glove’s absence from the person with which it is meant to be, and its new, if transient, ownership by Castelloza creates the traumatic scenario. Castelloza is afraid at suddenly seeing the glove in her possession, and afraid, one could surmise, at seeing the glove transformed from desired object to possessed object which can by definition no longer be desired. Returning it ensures that desire is kept in motion. The fear which is suggested throughout Castelloza’s narration of the glove theft – the ‘tremor’ while she is stealing it, the ‘paor’ afterwards – is analogous to the psychic state with which, in Lacanian terms, one approaches the Real.8 As the domain of eluded experience, ungraspability, unfathomability, the Real can be said to be that which looms around Giraut and Castelloza’s frustrated attempts to possess 8

In this I differ from Peter Dronke’s reading of the cobla, which sees ‘an element of self-mockery in her account of the glove escapade’ and an ‘involuntarily comic instance of the woes that may befall ladies who in loving take that active part, the part that was mostly held to be the prerogative of knights’ (Dronke 1984, 139).

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the glove. Though it provokes anxiety, the fundamental unknowability of the Real is also that which makes it desirable. Because the Real cannot be approached directly, desire must latch itself on to a subsidiary object – the objet petit a. This object is both a surplus piece of the Real in the domain of the symbolic, and that which serves to conceal the split in the subject. Žižek provides the following elucidation: Why must the symbolic mechanism be hooked onto a ‘thing’, some piece of the real? The Lacanian answer is, of course, because the symbolic field is in itself always already barred, crippled, porous, structured around some extimate kernel, some impossibility. The function of the ‘little piece of the real’ is precisely to fill out the place of this void that gapes in the very heart of the symbolic. (Žižek 1991, 33)

As such, the objet a appears to the subject as something which will give it an illusion of wholeness. Coming from the Real, it also serves to validate the subject’s tendencies towards that domain, the domain from which it is barred. For Giraut and Castelloza, possession of the glove would entitle them to occupy a position in the courtly matrix. If love were their objective, the glove constitutes the lover’s authorisation of their love, whilst not necessarily signalling the reciprocation of it. And by being denied the courtly relationship, they are, in a sense, being denied the possibility to sing in the courtly manner. In all cases, the glove constitutes the means by which to attain the truly sought after object, whether it be the loved one, love, or the justification to compose poetry. Going back to Merleau-Ponty and his relation to the Lacanian concepts on which I have hitherto dwelt, it is worth noting that the point of departure for his note on the finger of the glove is not the gaze, but the voice, or rather a silence that has the properties of voice (‘parole’).9 Could one not say that Giraut and Castelloza are striving for the same penetrating effect of voice in their cansos, as a means of getting round and getting at the objects of their desire? When 9

The note begins: ‘Il faut bien que la parole entre chez l’enfant comme silence – perce jusqu’à lui à travers le silence et comme silence […] Silence = absence de parole due’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 311).


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Merleau-Ponty speaks of the ‘négatif fécond’ in the same passage as a potentially reversible phenomenon, one is reminded of the negative foundation of Castelloza’s canso – ‘de chantar non degr’aver talan’ (‘I should not have the desire to sing’) – and the negatives with which it is pitted: ‘no.m rete’ (‘does not keep me’, l. 8); ‘ioia no.m ave’ (‘I don’t have joy’, l. 15); ‘no.m recre’ (‘I don’t fail’, l. 16); ‘non aurai cor truan’ (‘I would not have a false heart’, l. 19); ‘no.us n’aic meillor’ (‘I have had nothing better from you’, l. 30); ‘preiador/ no.m mandetz ni messatge’ (‘you don’t send me a messenger or a message’, ll. 32– 33); ‘no.n fassatz re!’ (‘you don’t do anything!’, l. 34); ‘iois no mi soste’ (‘joy does not sustain me’, l. 35); ‘non ai poderatge’ (‘I don’t have the right’, l. 45); ‘ricor/ no.i ant ni seignoratge’ (‘they don’t have wealth or rank’, ll. 49–50). This superabundance of negativity has produced something – the canso, hence the negativity can be said to be ‘fertile’ in Merleau-Ponty’s terms. It is also, paradoxically, the ‘something’ on which Castelloza subsists – ‘viu en bona fe, / bontatz e bon coratge’ (‘I live in good faith, goodness and a true heart’) she says at the end of the canso, although clearly she has none of these three things from her lover. She is assimilating the nothingness of love and enveloping it in her canso. Might one, then, be led to say that the canso itself functions as a sort of objet a for Castelloza? The piece that partakes of the Real and appears simultaneously valuable and valueless; the object that gives the subject the illusion of wholeness and, paradoxically, keeps it at bay, in the same way that the glove is and is not the body of the beloved. If, again according to Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic logic of body and thing, one can say that subject and object, lover and glove, poet and poem are interchangeable, one can pursue the idea of a subjective poetic identity concomitant with, if not developing from, poetic composition. Based on the position of the glove in Giraut and Castelloza’s texts, I wish to suggest that their subjectivity mimics the structure of the canso in circling around the objet a, which in this case would be poetic identity. The circling movement, as I see it, is based on the position occupied by the glove within the formal structure of the canso. In three of Giraut’s cansos – ‘La flors el vergan’ (28), ‘Era si.m fos en grat tengut’ (29) and ‘En un chantar’ (51) – the glove appears in

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roughly the middle stanza of the canso: respectively, stanza 4 of 9, stanza 4 of 7, and stanza 5 of 8. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, since the stanzas are in any case of varying length, that the point at which the glove is mentioned is always at the canso’s middle. The glove’s occurrence in canso 29 is in a single line (76), ‘La perda qe pris per lo gan’, but it is both prefigured and echoed by the persistent end-rhyme ‘-an’ before and after this line. ‘Chan’ (song, l. 12) ‘afan’ (worry, l. 13), ‘gran’ (great, l. 14), ‘aitan’ (such, l. 18), ‘enfan’ (child, l. 19), ‘Talan’ (desire, l. 31) are but six of the eighteen rhyming words which precede ‘gan’; ‘Pensan’ (thinking, l. 88), ‘Suffertan’ (suffering, l. 89), ‘Qan’ (when, l. 90), ‘Denhan’ (deigning, l. 94) are among the twelve rhyming words which follow it. This echo that ‘gan’ provokes on either side of it reinforces not only the centrality of the object, but casts it as a pivot on which the entire canso turns. Possession and loss of the glove both caused Giraut to compose poetry, but the ‘before’ and ‘after’ are intertwined in this and other cansos, as though one was the suddenly apparent underside of the other – always there but not always visible. Castelloza positions the glove similarly, right in the middle of her canso: stanza 5 of 8, line 37 of 62. A similar array of words with “-an” as the end-rhyme is offered by Castelloza: ‘talan’ (desire, l. 1), ‘chan’ (song, l. 2), ‘semblan’ (appearance, l. 10), ‘enan’ (before, l. 11), ‘truan’ (traitor, l. 19), ‘engan’ (deceit, l. 20), ‘coman’ (command, l. 28), ‘tan’ (such, l. 29) before stanza 5; ‘dan’ (injury, l. 46) and ‘preian’ (asking, l. 47) after it. If either poet’s subjectivity follows this hypothetical circular motion, then in each case there is the idea that the completion of that subjectivity is perpetually deferred. In other words, troubadour identity is no more sure of itself than trobairitz identity. The recollection of trauma within the present position of enunciation – as a troubadour composing courtly lyric – is left in this suspended, median position by both Giraut and Castelloza rather than finding a definitive resolution. Although Giraut manages to hold on to the glove for longer than Castelloza, it is the not having rather than the having which gives rise to his poetry. Just as it showed itself to be only a fleeting validator of the courtly relationship invoked in these poems, the glove is an illusory and elusive object in the canso. The poetic creation and by extension the poetic identity which I suggest hinge on it are thus


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revealed to have an uncertain core, one which has the contours of solidity but which is in fact quite hollow. Read through the shared image and deployment of the glove, both Castelloza and Giraut could be said to stage in their poetry the tensions and traumatic negotiations of troubadour identity. They offer a model for viewing afresh the poetic practices of the troubadours and trobairitz. Instead of poetic practices constructed on one side or the other of an irresolvable gender binary, their poems point to a dynamic chiasmus which overarches the binary. Such a chiasmic structure allows for the movement of discrete elements into the place of the element they appear to be opposed to; for example, how troubadours sing and how trobairitz sing, or gendered poetic practices. When simultaneous movement along the axes of the chiasmus occurs, particularities become enmeshed at its intersection. Unlike binary structure, chiasmic structure accommodates the enmeshing of poetic practices, without making it impossible to speak of alternation and difference.

References de Botton, Alain. 1994. Essays in Love, London: Picador Dronke, Peter. 1984. ‘The Provençal Trobairitz Castelloza.’ in Katharina M. Wilson, ed., Medieval Women Writers, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 131-152 Evans, Dylan. 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London and New York: Routledge Kolsen, Adolf. 1935. Sämtliche Lieder des Trobadors Giraut de Bornelh, 2 Vols. Halle: Niemeyer Lacan, Jacques. 1973. Le Séminaire Livre XI: Les Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse – 1964, Paris: Seuil Le Goff, Jacques. 1977. ‘Le rituel symbolique de la vassalité’ in Pour un autre Moyen Age, Paris: Gallimard, 349-420 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Le Visible et l’invisible, Paris: Gallimard Paden, William D. ed., 1989. The Voice of the Trobairitz, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press

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Rieger, Angelica. 1991. Trobairitz. Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen höfischen Lyrik. Edition des Gesamtkorpus, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Sharman, Ruth Verity. 1989. The Cansos and Sirventes of the troubadour Giraut de Borneil: A Critical Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Siskin, H. Jay and Storme, Julie A. 1989. ‘Suffering Love: The Reversed Order in the Poetry of Na Castelloza’ in Paden, 113-127 Van Vleck, Amelia. 1989. ‘“Tost me trobaretz fenida”: Reciprocating Composition in the Songs of Castelloza’, in Paden, 95-111 Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge MA: MIT Press –––––. 1992. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out, London and New York: Verso –––––. 1994. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality, London and New York: Verso

SUE HARRIS Dispossession and Exclusion in La Vie rêvée des anges

French cinema has a long and proud tradition of embracing filmmakers who ‘talk politics’. Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda are just some of the most obvious examples of directors whose status as auteurs is bound up with their repeated exploration of political questions. This has been particularly evident in post-war French filmmaking: in particular, much of the filmic output of the New Wave in the late 1950s and 1960s was concerned with what has come to be known as ‘the politics of representation’, a complex exploration of questions of gender, class and nationhood, underpinned by energetic technical experimentation. As the methodologies of political engagement became better defined in the post-1968 era, so the political dimension of cinema became more generally explicit. Discussion in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma in the early 1970s posited political filmmaking as a cinema with certain non-negotiable positions.1 Jean-Louis Comolli and colleagues advocated collectively that authentic political filmmaking would embrace documentary principles, either by actually being documentary (for example Le joli mai, Chris Marker, 1963) or by reconstituting political events in fictionalized form (such as Tout va bien; Godard, 1972) in such a way as to problematize the class struggle. Secondly, a profound engagement not just with issues, but with aesthetics would be crucial: as Jill Forbes puts it, filmmakers had a choice between ‘filming different things or filming differently’ (Forbes 1992, 18). An awareness of the film’s own position in the

1

Cahiers du cinéma (1970), a special edition dedicated to the re-release of Jean Renoir’s La Vie est à nous.

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relations of production would be fundamental to its status as a political work. As the 1970s turned into the 1980s, the political make-up of France changed completely: 1981 heralded a new era of politics with the election to power of a socialist president and administration, the first since the demise of the Front Populaire in 1938. The muchreported mood of national optimism that gripped the country in the early 1980s was underscored by the active investment by the government in cultural policy. Concern with the cinematic representation of modern France was high on the agenda, as evidenced by the overnight doubling of the avance sur recettes fund for new filmmakers.2 The conditions were right, so it would seem, for a new kind of progressive political filmmaking. And yet, it soon became apparent that the cinema of the revolutionary republican tradition – a cinema of contestation – was no longer the priority of filmmakers and cultural policy makers, who broke radically with the practices and priorities of the 1960s and 1970s. This rupture is best understood in terms of two distinct genres: the painterly ‘heritage film’, and the glossy fragmented narratives of the cinéma du look. These two very different aesthetics, which together represent a large proportion of the cinematic output associated with the years of the Mitterrand administrations (1981– 1995), share a preoccupation not with the political, but rather with the material, in form and in content. In these films, the material dimension of cinema matters, functioning on the one hand at the level of décor and visual detail, and on the other as either a critique or a celebration of the modern consumerist society and its predilection for material trophies. In their conscious mise-en-scène of products, be they artefacts or designer brands, high-profile stars or state-of-the-art technology, these otherwise opposing filmic forms mutually reflect an engagement with the broad trends towards commerce, acquisition and

2

The avance sur recettes, set up by the state in 1959, is an advance on box office receipts. Awards are destined for original scripts, and the loan is only paid back if the film has a certain level of commercial success. The avance remains a key source of funding of auteur cinema in France.

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possession that prevailed in Western Europe throughout the 1980s and on into the 1990s. The heritage film typically expresses nostalgia for a different kind of France, a France of the classic literary canon, or a sanitized and mythical golden age France in which traditional values and cultural norms are privileged and reinforced. Thus, literary adaptations, of which there were many in the 1980s, were regarded as prestige products, characterized by what we might term a significant materiality conferred by the very high production values that big budgets inevitably entail.3 The second trend in question, with its depiction of beautiful misfits and their underworld culture, is also dependent on a material dimension, though this is evident less in terms of form than of content. From the designation ‘style Forum des Halles’ (after the 1980s designer shopping centre in Paris),4 to ‘néobaroque’, to the more critically neutral cinéma du look, this is a cinema concerned with the image, the material trappings of modern youth, and the extravagance of accessories and environment. Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1980), the film that announced the style, was admittedly a low-budget film, driven primarily by the artistic creativity of its young director, rather than commercial interest,5 and many of the films of the early to mid-1980s were similarly impoverished in production terms. But from Subway (Luc Besson, 1985) to Nikita (Besson, 1990) to Les Amants du Pont-neuf (Léos Carax, 1991) the cinéma du look grew in stature and in economic significance: the celebration of the image above all else brought its own rewards in the form of a loyal audience. Box office figures and media coverage reveal that the young target audiences of the 1980s and 1990s delighted in the collision of visual and narrative styles that charac3 4 5

For a fuller discussion of the materiality of the heritage genre, see Andrew Higson’s discussion of heritage aesthetics (1993). The Forum des Halles in 2002 is barely recognisable as the once-chic shopping centre that so troubled the Parisian landscape in the late 1970s. Diva was originally commissioned as a low budget polar (budget of 7.5 million francs). The producers were so disappointed with the final product that the film was given only a very limited distribution in France. In spite of a poor reception in the cinema press, it nevertheless acquired cult status among young cinemagoers and went on to gain four Césars in 1982.

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terized this cinema. However, the tendency in both genres to prioritize the image over all else saw critics dismiss the filmmaking of this era as superficial. Critics seemed to regret that at a time of unprecedented political and social change in France, its leading filmmakers had forgone a contemporary frame of reference, favouring instead nostalgic or existentialist modes, modes that displaced topical issues, and contributed little to national debate. French lives and experiences as mediated by the screen now seemed to be only rarely touched by political questions. The late 1990s – the years immediately following the re-election of the centre-right in France – witnessed a rebirth of a political cinema of sorts, with a vogue for socio-realist ‘state of the nation’ films, films that offer a description of a socially complex France, presenting problems without necessarily offering solutions. The work of a new generation of directors including Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine, 1995), Arnaud Desplechin (Comment je me suis disputé…(ma vie sexuelle)), 1996), Robert Guédigan (Marius et Jeanette, 1997), Cédric Klapisch (Chacun cherche son chat, 1996) and Sandrine Veysset (Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël, 1996) is interesting in the way in which it revives the relationship of film to contemporary political debate. Addressing issues such as homelessness, unemployment, sexuality and class and racial difference, many of these films paint a bleak picture of modern urban France, and seem to lead us into an impasse of intense pessimism. Less a criticism of the right, these films seem to articulate the disaffection of the generation that grew up under the left, and experienced first-hand the fallout from the unfulfilled promises and expectations of the 1980s.6 Erick Zonca’s film La Vie rêvée des anges (1998), which is highly representative of this new vogue, and which received particular critical acclaim at the time of its release,7 stands as a clear example of 6

7

Dina Sherzer (2001, 228–9) argues from another angle, suggesting that the films of this era ‘are the work of individuals whose lives have been shaped by feminism, by the gay and lesbian movement, and by postcolonial politics/ thought, that is to say, by major contemporary changes in mentality and behaviour in the domains of gender and sexuality’. The leading players in Zonca’s film (Elodie Bouchez and Natacha Régnier) shared the best actress prize at Cannes in 1998.


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those late 1990s films that position themselves in ideological and aesthetic opposition to the visual and sensory excesses of the cinéma du look and the heritage film. The desaturation of the screen, together with the industrial or urban topography and uncharismatic characterization of many of the characters is the direct antithesis of the glossy, high-tech, almost decadent society and characters depicted in the cinéma du look in particular. Furthermore, although they recall intertextually their cinematic predecessors, the protagonists in the new genres of the 1990s are not glamorous hedonists like Fred (Subway), anarchic transgressors like Nikita (Nikita) or repulsive outcasts like Alex (Les Amants du Pont-neuf). The characters are equally marginalized in their relationship to modern France and its social structures, but what is different here is that the nature of the exclusion centres on the characters’ status as the ‘unpossessing’ (of desired goods and material security) rather than as ‘les exclus’ (the socially marginalized and often anti-social misfits) of previous films. Indeed, Marie and Isa, the central protagonists in La Vie rêvée des anges, are partially socially integrated characters whose actions reveal a desire for further integration and modest elevation within established social structures: work, home, relationships. They have the option of adopting the classic marginal lifestyle represented by their leather-clad biker companions – carefree male outlaw figures, ageing ‘Easy Riders’ – and riding off into the sunset with them in search of identity and sexual adventures; but this appeals to neither woman as a potential answer. These woman are fixed within an avowedly consumerist society which they must negotiate rather than reject outright, outright rejection being a fantasy allowed only by the escapist conventions of the cinema, not by real life. Thus, Zonca’s film challenges 1980s and early 1990s cinematic notions of social exclusion as defined by either the celebration or the wilful rejection of material wealth and possessions, and the social structures which enable these, and relocates voice and subjectivity in a dispossessed underclass of working women. This realism contrasts with cinéma du look’s fantasy, with a clearly stated internal politics about lifestyle and choice. The political consciousness underlying Zonca’s La Vie rêvée des anges is not an isolated case in modern French cinema, but is to be found over and over again in work by others of his generation and has

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its roots – or at least a partial explanation – in the evolving political events of the late 1990s in France. For the first time since debates about Algeria in the 1960s and women’s rights in the 1970s, filmmakers of all ages and degrees of celebrity found themselves committing publicly and as a unified group to an identifiable and inflammatory political issue, that of the ‘sans papiers’, or clandestine immigrants. In early 1997, sixty-six filmmakers led a call for civil disobedience in response to the legislation proposed by Jean-Louis Debré and Charles Pasqua regarding the status of the ‘sans papiers’. Declaring themselves to be in breach of the proposed law and requesting submission to due legal process, the filmmakers in question gave a clear signal that their relationship to social politics should be understood in terms of active commitment as well as aesthetic choice. For the first time in a generation, cinema became a powerful and effective vehicle for the articulation of dissent from established political ideology. The film and broader artistic communities in France (musicians, dancers, actors) came together in a show of unity that lasted only as long as it took to defeat the proposal, but which continued to be felt in the change of emphasis and direction which French filmmaking subsequently took.8 La Vie rêvée des anges engages very forcefully with the broader issues at stake in the ‘sans papiers’ debate. It is a film about the ‘sans’: those ‘without’; not the ‘sans papiers’ who lack the crucial passport to French citizenship – the main women protagonists are unproblematically French after all – but the ‘sans’ within the structures of French citizenship, those without the access to the material infrastructure that confirms integrated Frenchness. As such, we can read this film as contributing to a continuous line of debate about inequality, class division and exclusion in France, a debate that goes counter to the received wisdom that ‘tout va bien’ with society in the egalitarian post-1968 France. Indeed, Godard’s Tout va bien provides a 8

‘Le Manifeste des 66’ was first expressed at a press conference held by sixtysix French filmmakers on 11 February 1997, and was followed up by two ‘appels’ published in Le Monde and Libération on 18 February 1997 and 14 May 1997. The leading signatories were Pascale Ferran and Arnaud Desplechin.


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barometer against which we might evaluate the kind of politics that are evoked in La Vie rêvée des anges, even if the aesthetic and institutional modes favoured by the latter are significantly different from Godard’s. Tout va bien is a polemical, rhetorical reflection on the condition of the workers and the nature of the class struggle four years after May 1968. In this film workers, but particularly female workers are seen as being wholly at the service of a consumerist society: those on whom the film primarily focuses work in assembly line food production, but women are also seen posing as models for an advertisement for tights, envisaged as having their bare backsides rubbed by unshaved chins in an advertisement for razors, seen working as cashiers at a Lille hypermarket, a uniformly female body of workers, captured with their backs to the camera, dressed in identical yellow overalls. Thus, the productive activity of an extensive female workforce in France in 1972 is reduced across a range of sectors to a common gesture: mechanically repeated, carried out without apparent consciousness. We never see the heads of the dancers in the advertisement, or the faces of the cashiers; the whiteoveralled women in the factory are but cogs in the machinery of sausage-making, hands who actually touch the visceral product of which consumerism demands plastic-wrapped sterility. Even Susan (played by Jane Fonda), the journalist and radio broadcaster whose investigation structures the film, is denied her creativity: where Jacques (her partner, played by Yves Montand) has the luxury of what he terms ‘honesty’ in his filmmaking career (filming commercials, commissioned films, or his own ‘New Wave’ work), Susan’s reports are refused or rewritten by others, reducing her function to that of a faceless talking head. As a bourgeois intellectual, Susan is inevitably the privileged voice of the female worker: as the film nears a close, she openly articulates the classic Marxist view that the personal domain is inseparable from the labour market, which is in turn bound up with a broader capitalist system; within this framework women are on the lowest possible rung of the ladder. Her subsequent visit to the Lille hypermarket (described above) concretizes this concept visually: although both sexes are ‘liberated’ by the anarchist revolutionaries

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who stage a riot in the shop, the consumers in Godard’s hypermarket are – surprisingly given the realities of life in early 1970s France – male in the majority: the workers, the exploited rather than the exploiting, are without exception female. Like the earlier Godard work, Zonca’s film is styled like a documentary, although it is entirely a fiction. It dramatizes the class struggle as a destructive force in society, and one that is intrinsically bound up with sexual politics; it acknowledges the politics of representation by engaging with the established iconography of political texts, thereby recuperating the expressly political spectacle cited above. The women in La Vie rêvée des anges, like their Godardian sisters, are problematized primarily by their relationship to material goods and their role in the chain of production. They are to a large extent empowered by their appropriation of material goods, and such acquisitions bring material security, friendship and love, in other words a social foundation within which the characters can exist. These goods, however, and the desire to possess and own equally bring about a brutal disempowerment: transitory security, superficial relationships and a pathological obsession with self-abasement. These extremes are represented respectively in the film in the characters of Isa and Marie. From the outset, Zonca’s film engages the spectator in a vision of a modern France indelibly etched with the signs of widespread and everyday consumerism. The early action of the film depicts the struggle of the homeless Isa to counter her defining lack of security as she confronts very practical problems relating to money, accommodation and employment. The alert viewer can only fear for her trajectory: the opening shot of her with her enormous rucksack posits Varda’s young vagabond Mona (Sans Toit ni loi, 1985) as her direct predecessor, and with this the overtones of defeat that Mona connotes. Arriving in a grey and overcast Lille to look for a friend who has in fact abandoned his mobile pancake business in favour of work on a Belgian construction site, Isa finds herself alone, in a strange place, without a social safety net. From the crêpe van where she finds shelter (a blackboard list of food and prices mocks her silently from the background), to her attempts to sell her home-made cards (she cuts pictures from magazines), to the random offer of employment as a


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machinist, we acknowledge that Isa is on the outside of a system, and lives opportunistically on her wits. The cultural topography of the rest of the film confirms the nature of this system for us: nightclubs and bars, shopping centres, department stores, factories are all evidence of a consumerist society which Isa attempts to penetrate, but from which she is excluded. As the film progresses, we learn that Isa is neither willing victim ready to beg to satisfy her needs, nor resentful agitator, but rather a débrouillarde, attracted to the possessions of others and at ease with the transactional aspects of relationships. She is happy to accept food willingly offered by her co-workers in the factory and is equally happy to share Marie’s grudgingly offered joint. When the girls are offered cheap concert tickets she attempts to circumvent the need for payment by cajoling the bouncers. She is not simply genially acquisitive, but is also generous with her own limited possessions, making Marie a gift of something she once was given. Hers is evidently the story of a series of friendships, of which that with Marie is the simply the latest and most immediately preoccupying. However, her place on the margins of a society in which the individual is defined by employment, income and attendant material possessions is unambiguously articulated by the film. Her first encounter with the bouncers Charly and Fredo sees her trying to convince them to let her and Marie into ‘Le Bleu’, the nightclub owned by Chriss. Their response is to send the girls packing with an admonition ‘l’argent, ça se gagne’, and a reminder that all those involved in the concert (artists, technicians, club-owners) are earning their passage, however marginal they may appear to be. Isa swiftly moves into the flat in which Marie is living, a flat which belongs to two women who have been in a car accident: Sandrine, who is in a coma in the hospital, and her mother, who has been killed. Isa begins by sleeping on the sofa in the living room, but progressively takes possession of the space into which she has entered. Sandrine’s possessions come to have a particular attraction for her: Isa moves fully into Sandrine’s room, initially appropriating the young woman’s private space (her personal belongings, photographs and notes are all taken in a subjective panning shot) followed by her unconscious space (the complex emotions verbally articulated

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in the diary Isa finds). From taker, however, Isa soon becomes a giver, as curiosity about the content of the diary gives way to a compulsion to complete Sandrine’s story in her place, entering into a pattern of reciprocity that will somehow contribute to the young woman’s ultimate recovery. Thus the repositioning of Isa as the owner of the diary is less to suggest she is an agent of occupation – one who possesses uncritically and without compassion – than a vehicle for an expression of female solidarity, a solidarity that is achieved through transactional relationships outwith the material domain. The predatory, acquisitive, usurping mode that Isa embodies in her initial foray into Sandrine’s room is unusual in female representation, and here it enhances the position accorded the women by the film of the positive embodiment of a pleasure principle entirely at odds with the material utility that defines those around them. An early scene from the film shows Isa and Marie in a modern shopping complex, surrounded by people visibly engaged in productive social activity: going about their work, or involved in the act of conspicuous consumption. The question ‘croyez-vous à l’amour?’ that Isa and Marie pose to random passers-by explicitly recalls another political text, Rouch and Morin’s cinéma-vérité classic Chronique d’un été (1961) with its refrain of ‘êtes-vous heureux?’,9 while the mise-enscène of the sequence recalls yet another Godard film, Une Femme est une femme.10 As the reactions of those interviewed reveal, the investigation into the personal as opposed to the material aspects of life is perturbing for those for whom life is bound up with an unconscious consumerism: with its appeal to emotion rather than reason, the women’s unsolicited intervention is perceived as intrusive and inappropriate. Their position on the margins of this society is thus

9

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Chronique d’un été, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. This ethnographic film is structured around a series of interviews. The question ‘êtes-vous heureux?’ is put to passing strangers in the streets of Paris by two young women (Marceline and Nadine). In a street scene towards the end of Une Femme est une femme Emile (JeanClaude Brialy) and Angela (Anna Karina) importune passing strangers with the words ‘Pardon Monsieur, est-ce que vous pouvez coucher avec Mademoiselle pour lui faire un enfant?’


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rendered in a complex layering of the visual, the verbal and the spatial, which is reinforced by a knowing intertextuality. While Isa continues to embody the original free spirit in the film, going with the flow rather than railing against it, Marie increasingly expresses dissatisfaction with her situation, a dissatisfaction that is translated into material, physical and ultimately self-destruction. Her response to those who disdain her material inconsequence is to lash out: in the scene described above, the flirty, impromptu interviews on the subject of love are abruptly overshadowed by Marie’s violent emotional transformation. Marie’s frustration at her circumstances are translated into an act of destruction, the destruction of the possessions of another, in this case the headlamp of the car of a young man (Chriss) who refuses to give the women a lift. Her haggling with the concert ticket seller is similarly aggressive, as is much of her interaction with those with a material authority over her: the sexual relationship that she goes on to develop with Chriss is characterized by the adversarial rather than the affectionate, the gladiatorial rather than the playful. Her liaison with Charly, though more tender, is also characterized by notions of possession – as they touch each other playfully after lovemaking, Marie she suggests that she has ‘had’ him, possessed him, rather than shared an experience with him. His suggestion that he too has ‘had’ her is dismissed as naïve – his genuine affection for Marie is all too obvious to her and the viewer alike. Marie’s close association with the materialist, consumerist discourse is reaffirmed by many of the events of the film. Shortly after the shopping centre scene we find Marie alone in a luxury clothes shop, examining leather jackets. She tries one on, and then attempts to leave the shop wearing it. Her attempted shoplifting does not go unnoticed, and she is apprehended by two security guards. In typical anti-authoritarian mode, she strikes out, physically and verbally. The situation is resolved by Chriss, who recognises her from the shopping complex/headlamp incident, and offers to pay for the jacket. Marie is powerless to thwart his generous gesture, but refuses to be grateful: she remains utterly hostile to him, wary and resentful of the confidence and power that money so obviously gives him. This scene marks a transition: from would-be possessor, Marie henceforth assumes the role of the ‘possessed’ in the film. Chriss’s

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exertion of a code of ownership begins with his invitation, then insistence that she join him for a drink: his attempts to buy her are aggressively rejected by her, but his declaration that ‘ça vaut mille balles’ hangs heavily between them: the payment he has proffered for the stolen jacket thus assumes the status of payment for the presence of Marie at his table. Marie immediately finds herself constrained by the transaction, and this notion of the constraining transaction remains key to the flawed, unequal relationship that Marie goes on to develop with Chriss. As the film progresses, Marie attempts again and again to reject this relationship based on proprietorial possession, but she is increasingly drawn into the discourse, compelled to embrace an objectification – visually rendered in her sartorial transformation from jeans and jacket to little black dress and high heels – that can only defeat her. The relationship here is an avowedly perverse one, totally predicated on the act of purchase: it begins with a jacket, continues with a drink, and finishes with the woman herself, a woman who, as the dénouement reveals, is no more significant and no less disposable than the stolen jacket. As the narrative advances, so the material dispossession in which the women exist intensifies. As events takes their course, and Sandrine’s remaining family arrive to deal with the girl’s affairs, so the flat in which the women live is gradually emptied of all goods, and finally repossessed by the owners. Marie envisages a relationship with Chriss rather than Isa as an alternative to this encroaching material insecurity, but she is cruelly disappointed – he tires of her as he would of any possession easily acquired. As she attempts to come to terms with his brutal rejection of her, so the dismantling and gradual erosion of the living space around her underlines visually the ultimate physical and mental abjection towards which Marie has been moving throughout the film. Her realization of her status as object to be possessed by others, as object without self-possession, leads directly to a final loss of self. With her suicide, Marie is revealed as expendable, a used object – disposable, discarded, thrown into a back court with the rest of the detritus of modern domestic life. Like cuckoos, the charismatic protagonists in La Vie rêvée des anges appropriate the space, money and possessions of others they encounter, creating a temporary utopian world of female solidarity and


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opportunistic material security. But this illusory empowerment is progressively undermined by intrusive patterns of ownership, control and loss of self which reach a climax in the dysfunctional Marie/ Chriss relationship. The dominating ‘dream’ of integration (Isa in employment and social structures; Marie emotionally and materially) is ultimately revealed to be ephemeral and unpossessable, with the film bleakly suggesting that the aspirational trajectory of modern urban France can only situate these women as permanent outsiders or as permanent instruments of production, rather than as a key part of the controlling apparatus of consumption and ownership: Marie’s suicide and the cinematic framing of Isa on a factory production line at either end of the film testify to this. At the beginning of the film we witness Isa obtain work as an assembly line machinist in a garment factory, but her evident lack of skills result in her losing the job. The factory itself in which she is first depicted is revealing of the distance covered by the industrial workforces since Godard’s Tout va bien: the factory is populated by women, even through the toilet areas were clearly designed for a male workforce. The factory is in fact less a throwback to pre-1968, than to the nineteenth century: it is an old-style rag-trade sweatshop, a place of insecurity, instability and competitive practices. There is little space for female solidarity other than at meal times, and the unregulated nature of the environment leaves no place for unionisation. The rewards, we must assume, are scant. After her dismissal, Marie and Isa join forces in the search for ‘du boulot’, jobs that will allow them to simply endure, which without work is possible only thanks to the financial generosity of their biker boyfriends. Opportunities do arise: the women audition for the job of waitress in the ‘Hollywood Boulevard’ restaurant, where they do more or less enthusiastic turns as Madonna and Lauren Bacall. Neither gets the job. Instead, in another Godardian echo they are offered temporary employment advertising the restaurant: this involves roller-skating around a shopping centre and train station, distributing flyers, while dressed in a cap, a gold lamé mini-skirt, and a sandwich board. These are energetic, if bleak moments in the film: moments that speak of companionship and versatility, but also of desperation and enforced marginality. The humiliating proximity of female identity, limited

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professional opportunity and comic performance results in a far more dispiriting reflection on the condition of those who are ‘sans’ than any verbose treatise on social exclusion. As the friendship between the women catastrophically fails, Isa once again finds herself alone, and is seen in the last sequence of the film beginning yet another job in yet another factory. At first we seem reassured by what we see: this factory is a sterile, clean place, whose business is the production of components for the information technology industry. The supervisor is a sympathetic and patient boss, who even congratulates Isa for her aptitude for the task in hand: ‘on dirait que vous avez fait ça toute votre vie’. The fact is that she has: her labour in this modern factory is every bit as repetitive and intellectually damaging as that of the women in Godard’s sausage factory or the earlier sweatshop: the almost child-like task mastered, there is nothing to do but repeat it over and over again. This is confirmed for the viewer in a prolonged tracking shot that explicitly references Godard’s final hypermarket sequence in Tout va bien: as the camera moves away from Isa, we see that the workers on the assembly line are all female, and all dressed identically in white overalls. They are seen in a tracking shot that takes us from left to right, stopping briefly on each woman as it progresses; they are visibly engaged in the same action, despite being at separate work-stations. That they are seen in side-profile, rather than from behind, and that the camera stops to linger on the women confirms a degree of individuality on the women that is simply not present in Tout va bien. Furthermore, the focus on their faces rather than their hands is powerfully suggestive of their interior existence, their individual identities, their ‘dream lives’: there is more to these women, it would seem, than their function as automatons in the capitalist system; and indeed that is the message that this film has conveyed by example. And yet, our ultimate vision is of mass activity: women sitting in ordered lines, dressed in the same uniform, attentively engaged in acts of what capitalist society deems to be productive social activity. Our lasting vision is of a modern, but fatally dehumanized body of women, all interchangeable, creating more technological debris which they themselves are not in a position to possess.


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What Zonca demonstrates in his film is that the aspirational trajectory of working women has come full circle: despite the desires expressed in Godard’s celluloid manifesto, and the ground gained by the feminist politics of representation, our cinematic vision of the female workforce at the close of the twentieth-century is as a dispossessed and compromised entity in modern France. The women represented here have not been liberated by social progress, but instead remain permanent instruments of production rather than a key part of the controlling apparatus of consumption and ownership. In an era when statistics reveal that 75% of those who earn the SMIC are women,11 that 30% of young women under 25 are unemployed (against an average of 11.8% for the whole of the active population; Forbes et al 2001, 256), it is clear that the dream life remains as far out of reach for women in 1998 as it ever did in 1968.

References Cahiers du cinéma 218, March 1970 Ferran, Pascal and Desplechin, Arnaud. 1997. ‘Lettre ouverte aux députés français’, Le Monde, 18 February, 13 Forbes, Jill. 1992. The Cinema in France: After the New Wave, London: Macmillan –––––, Hewlett, Nick and Nectoux, François. 2001. Contemporary France: Essays and Texts on Politics, Economics and Society, 2nd Edition, Harlow: Longman Higson, Andrew. 1993. ‘Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film’ in Lester Friedman ed., British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires were Started, London: University College London Press, 109–129 Prédal, René. 1996. Le Cinéma français depuis 1945, Paris: Nathan

11

SMIC stands for ‘salaire minimum interprofessionnel de croissance’, the guaranteed minimum wage in France.

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Sherzer, Dina. 2001. ‘Gender and Sexuality in New Wave Cinema’ in Alex Hughes and James S. Williams eds., Gender and French Cinema, Berg: Oxford, 227–239

LIBBY SAXTON Surrendering Possession? Images and Ethics after Auschwitz

[L]’archive a lieu au lieu de défaillance originaire et structurelle de ladite mémoire. […] L’archive travaille toujours et a priori contre elle-même. Derrida, Mal d’archive In his recent diagnosis of the mal d’archive impregnating contemporary culture, Jacques Derrida writes of a feverish desire to consign to memory, a desire that is simultaneously created and threatened by the impulse to forget and destroy. Derrida argues via Freud that the archive can never be reduced to mneme or to anamnesis because it is infected and inflected by the death drive, and thus, paradoxically, works against itself, abandoning even as it preserves.1 In this account, the trouble de l’archive becomes a figure of the struggle between a longing to repossess the fragmentary traces of an unassimilated past and the self-destructive rifts of death and loss which doom the archival project to failure from its outset. It is precisely this struggle that is compulsively re-enacted by our most sincere attempts to respond figuratively to the unthinkable brutality of the Shoah. The recent debate between Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lanzmann is symptomatic of this struggle: Godard’s provocative claim that cinema has reneged on its ethical obligation to bear witness to the camps produces the obsessive multiplication of archival witness that marks his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), in stark contrast to Lanzmann’s refusal of iconic images in Shoah 1

Designating different forms of memory, the terms mneme and anamnesis are adopted by Derrida from Plato to cast doubt upon the capacity of the archive to aid recollection.

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(1985), a film which situates the violence firmly outside the archive, as the ultimately other, unknowable, unarchivable event. Haunted by the spectre of an absence the archive cannot redeem, it is here, in the encounter with trauma, that, as Godard’s project suggests, the desire to repossess the traces of our histories threatens to become an urgent imperative. And yet, as Lanzmann has argued, there is something in the specific historical nature of the event that not only resists such desires, but also renders them unethical – in his terms, ‘obscene’ (1990). As an attempt to stage the perfect possession of alterity, the barbarity of the Nazi genocide is without precedent. The essence of the atrocity lay not only in the physical and psychological appropriation and destruction of Jewish difference, but also in the endeavour to master the narratives of history and memory by destroying every trace, by building a retroactive amnesia and invisibility into the project from the outset. This extreme project raises the ethical stakes of visual representation in its wake by rendering suspect textual claims to transparency, knowledge, even understanding. Our attempts to mourn the losses of Auschwitz would thus appear to require an unpossessive ethic, an ethic which privileges nonacquisitive encounters that demand a painful surrender to the alterity of the historical event. Such an ethic initially appears to sit uneasily with the imperative to testify. My subject here, indeed, is possession with a double object: the attempt to reclaim not only otherness, but also the historical real itself. For, in straining to bear adequate witness, the work of anamnesis presupposes precisely the repossession of history – of memories lost, of narratives untold, of trauma prematurely forgotten – that it ethically prohibits. While psychoanalysis, as the story of a subject suffering serial losses, would rewrite history as the history of trauma, this is a history where traumatic dispossession is always a preface to the lacking subject’s anxious attempts at repossession through introjection, identification, mourning. My concern in what follows is the way cinema can reconfigure the ethics of possession as it enacts this tension, playing out a dialectic of surrender and repossession which fractures and threatens to render ultimately uninhabitable visual narratives of trauma. This is not to target historiography, to conflate its mode of possession (the uncovering of traces) with the

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Nazi project (the attempt to conceal them). Far more I am concerned to question certain forms of representation, those that, unlike the sensitive historian, tend to recuperate history into a coherent and fully visible narrative. Precisely because it resists narrative repossession, traumatized history demands witnesses that bear witness in the name of an impossibility of bearing witness. Locating the moving image as a privileged witness to an unendurable past, I shall suggest that the innately possessive, voyeuristic investments of the medium may – under certain conditions – be resisted. Central is the question of how far films could acknowledge the imperative that inheres in their historical subject to refuse an over-hasty appropriation of the trauma, to avoid the Derridean ‘violence archivale’ (1995, 19). I shall suggest that it is only by privileging the ethical over the epistemological charge of possession that it becomes possible to approach a place of intersubjectivity between spectating subject and suffering victim where the violence of possession is not symbolically recapitulated. For this is a place where possession – of history, and of alterity – is turned against itself, to reveal not only its ethical and epistemological limits, but also the anamnesiac grieving which is its seductive but dangerous other: the possibility that the Holocaust maps the very limits of mourning: L’éthique d’Auschwitz commençait même […] en ce point précis où le musulman, ‘témoin intégral’, détruisait à jamais la possibilité de distinguer entre l’homme et le non-homme. […] C’est pourquoi son ‘troisième règne’ est le fin mot du camp. (Agamben, 1999, 56–57)

Giorgio Agamben’s seminal analysis of ‘la catastrophe du sujet’ that is the industrial product of Auschwitz (1999, 49–112, 194) depicts a being constituted as utterly dispossessed by unbearable suffering; dispossessed because so completely possessed by his or her tormentors. This is the so-called ‘musulman’, the victim who has been reduced by suffering to a living corpse that no longer fights for food or defends itself when struck. While the etymological passage of this term into camp jargon remains opaque (one theory is that the rocking, bowing movement produced by sheer hunger and exhaustion resembled a Muslim at prayer), the musulman bears unique witness to the physical and psychological extent of Nazi possession. It is telling

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that much critical discourse has remained resistant to such a figure, whose empty eyes and emaciated body remain present in most testimonies only as a lacuna. The recent revival of interest in Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine and its sites of impact upon French thought has lingered upon the writer’s subscription to what Colin Davis labels a ‘resilient humanism’ (2000, 135) that posits an irreducible core at the heart of the subject, a core which constitutes the site of ultimate resistance to possession, and which, as such, would seem to deny the musulman. Antelme insists upon the permanence of choice, the inmate’s choice whether to resist or collaborate in the economy of concentrationary violence by consenting to his or her reduction to something less than human in a pure struggle for survival. For Antelme, this choice itself spells the critical failure of the Nazi project by rendering the logic of radical dehumanisation untenable, allowing its victims to ‘rester, jusqu’au bout, des hommes’ (1957, 11). Through this choice, what the camps supposedly produced was precisely the immutable, irreducible residue of a subject who could never be perfectly possessed. It is the recognition of this residue in the other that leads Maurice Blanchot to read L’Espèce humaine – and through its lens the camps, the encounter between victim and torturer – as a revelation of alterity (1969). Davis has cogently criticized Blanchot’s accommodation of the text within a Levinassian framework of responses to alterity as reductive (2000, 138–141). But even if they share these reservations, most critics have remained compelled by the ineradicability, the very residuality, of this fragile ‘homme réduit à l’irréductible’ (Blanchot 1969, 196).2 Seductive as this account may be, positing a world where the other is accorded a sustainable place and a subject whose selfpossession may not falter even at the threshold of the gas chamber, I would argue that it trips up upon the figure it excludes, the musulman, whose spectral absence-presence increasingly haunts testimony and thought. For, as Agamben shows, the musulman is not only a limitcase (‘seuil extrême entre la vie et la mort’) but the true cipher of Auschwitz, the ‘nerf du camp’, and thus a ‘témoin intégral’, the 2

For an intriguing response to Davis’s reading of Antelme through Duras, see Martin Crowley, 2000, 182–186, 192.


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witness par excellence. This is the paradox Agamben discerns in Primo Levi’s writings on the figure: the ‘intémoignable’, the one who represents the absolute impossibility of bearing witness, is simultaneously posited as ‘le seul dont le témoignage aurait une signification générale’ (1999, 57, 49, 105–106, 216). Here is the sense, I would add, in which the musulman might be seen as the ethical paradigm of the Shoah. More disturbing in this light than the paucity of references to such a figure in Antelme’s necessarily personal, particularized testimony is the calculated exclusion of the musulman from accounts such as Tzvetan Todorov’s Face à l’extrême which claim to offer a more truthful perspective on the basis of such an omission: ‘ces situations d’au-delà du seuil’ supposedly have nothing to teach us nothing about ethics (1991, 46). For surely no ethics can be content to exclude a section of humanity. Since the musulman represents the perfect dispossession of subjectivity (‘le sujet […] qui témoigne d’une désubjectivation’, Agamben 1999, 158), s/he exceeds the selective narrative of self-possessed subjects making ethical choices imposed on the camps by Todorov’s sometimes cathartic brand of humanism. But what of Agamben’s contention, reiterated by Slavoj Žižek, that the musulman ‘garde le seuil d’une éthique’ (Agamben 1999, 88; Žižek 2001, 78), that this figure opens up a new ethical space where utter dispossession – perhaps even the collapse of an intersubjective position – becomes the locus of moral theory? Immune to the shame to which Antelme testifies (1957, 240–42, 279), that shame discerned by Jean-Paul Sartre in the simple admission of the other’s gaze (‘honte de soi devant autrui’, 1943, 275–77), the musulman would seem to inhabit a space beyond intersubjectivity, where alterity ceases to be experienced as a threat. Moreover, in the experience of pure terror, the gap between self and other, subject and object, would seem to be elided. Subject and object collapse into the purely biological, into a body moved only by physiological needs, as so painfully described by Marguerite Duras in an account which gives the lie to the humanism that inflects the testimony of Antelme, her then husband: ‘Il a disparu, la faim est à sa place’ (1985, 1456). But even this was not the end: in Shoah, while Lanzmann reads an industrial memorandum that euphemistically

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refers to the Jews to be gassed in the vans as ‘freight’, ‘cargo’, or ‘items to be loaded’, Motke Zaïdl and Itzhak Dugin testify to a Naziimposed ban on the terms ‘corpse’ or ‘victim’. The bodies they were burying had to be called Figuren, neither subject nor object but ‘puppets’; simulacra whose renaming claimed them as Nazi property even beyond the grave. Stripped of the means to moral or physical self-possession, and subject to an exclusion often only repeated in artistic and philosophical discourse, the musulman returns to disrupt the dialectic between self and other as an absence haunting text and image. How, then, and why, are we to make visible and mourn this place beyond subject and object, even beyond the possibility of intersubjectivity, this dwelling place of the musulman? How could cinema bear witness to, without repossessing, this privileged but absent witness? At first, the picture looks particularly bleak for filmic representation. For it seems that the musulman presents an intrinsic resistance to visual figuration: impossible to look at (as many witnesses have testified), this figure produces only a ‘face-à-face aveugle’, for s/he is ‘dé-visag[é] par le regard de la tête de mort’ (Jean-Luc Nancy, 2001, 31). Indeed, Levi’s suggestive depiction of musulmen as ‘those who saw the Gorgon’ (1988, 64) has provoked both Agamben and Žižek to reflect on the impossibility of returning the gaze of this subject, and its positioning of us as viewers. While for Agamben the musulman – and the demand s/he makes on us to bear witness – brings us face to face with our own blindness (‘s’efforc[e] de contempler l’impossibilité de voir’, 1999, 66), for Žižek, the figure’s ‘desubjectivized, transfixed gaze’ disturbingly ‘star[es] at the unnamed source of horror whose position coincides with that of ourselves, the spectators’ (2001, 79, 80). The uncomfortable implications of the musulman’s gaze for the one who dares to meet it point to more deep-seated anxieties regarding the redemption of the camps from invisibility, anxieties to which I shall return. But besides the surrender of cinematic witness that this figure would seem to demand, in the musulman, representation may confront a more profound risk through what Gillian Rose labels its essential ‘fascism’ (1996, 50): the possibility that the very condition of our response and responsibility towards the violence might be a repossession of all that has been taken. The musulman, as we have


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seen, cannot be recuperated within a Levinassian model of ethics that persists in according its subjects ethical choices precisely because s/he has been so thoroughly constituted as dispossessed. Logically, then, for the musulman to re-emerge as an ethical subject would require a repossession of subjectivity. Likewise, the work of anamnesis and mourning would appear to rely on a reclaiming of the traumatic past on the mnemic plane. The specific circumstances of the historical violence would seem to fuel the appetite for repossession – of history and of subjectivity – even as we begin its mourning. In this light, it is not surprising that so many filmic testimonies articulate themselves through and around a struggle for narrative ownership of historical trauma, where the need for narrative closure precludes any sustained adoption of – or surrender to – the place of the other. Moreover, in cinema the possessive anxieties of the anamnesiac narrative are compounded by a desire to possess that is invoked by and inheres in a visual medium, contaminating the gaze of a spectator encountering an imaged other. The intrinsically acquisitive investments of the spectatorial gaze raise the uncomfortable possibility that cinema is born out of a desire to repossess the real; that it is epistemophilia and scopophilia that fuel the very will to image. Historically preoccupied with the play of identificatory bonding, particularly as it elucidates the problem of spectatorship, film theory has turned to psychoanalysis for an account that defines identification as the transformation of the self via the incorporation of the other, situating possession at the heart of the negotiations by which the subject is constituted. That this constitution is precipitated by a series of traumatic losses not only places possession at the centre of the work of mourning (and of melancholia, its pathological other) but also suggests the irresistibility of identification in cinema which seeks to respond to the trauma of the Shoah. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1915), Freud summons and remodels the concept of identification as compensation for loss and death in the trope of endo-cannibalistic ingestion. In this model, figured elsewhere by the parricidal narrative of the totem meal, identification probes the very limits of possession as the other is resurrected in its devouring. The metaphorical violence of this encounter reveals a fatal threat to the other at the core of every identification. As Diana Fuss has argued in a passage punctuated by

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the vocabulary of morbidity, identification may be rethought as ‘an endless process of violent negation, a process of killing off the other in fantasy in order to usurp the other’s place, the place where the subject desires to be’. This is the profoundly disturbing sense in which ‘to be open to identification is to be open to a death encounter’ (1995, 9, 1). These risks are compounded when the object of the gaze is historical trauma. If identification is inextricably bound up with the repetition of death, if, indeed, to use Fuss’s label, it is an act of ‘serial killing’ (1995, 93), then in cinematic presentations of the Shoah, to identify might seem to imply a cruel repetition of the historical violence on the symbolic plane. Certainly, identification operates uneasily in such a context (as unforgettably modelled by Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange, 1971, where a nauseous, agonized Alex is physically compelled to view harrowing archive images from the liberation of the camps). But beyond the alienation produced by the shock of the unimaginable made visible – the sight of the musulman – and beyond the media-induced indifference symptomatic of compassion fatigue, filmic testimony continues to solicit the viewer’s identification in the form of empathy. While Andrea Liss, in her otherwise lucid deconstruction of the seamless identifications invited by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, epitomized by its Identity Card Project, retrieves the possibility of empathy as a pacifically mournful bond (1998, especially 13–38),3 I would suggest that, even in such a seemingly innocent form, this pretension to share the place of the other becomes ethically presumptuous, unsustainable in the context of such incommensurable loss. For the empathetic gaze conditioned by contemporary media is burdened with a prefabricated other whose suffering it has no choice but to fictionalize. This refusal to detour through the real of alterity surely recalls instead the response

3

The Identity Card Project controversially allocates each visitor to the museum with a card carrying the name and photographed face of a Holocaust victim, together with some information that is progressively added to in the course of the visit, culminating in the revelation of the victim’s fate. Liss discusses the empathetic identification that the project aims to solicit.


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that Sommer defines as ‘the ultimate violence, […] appropriation in the guise of an embrace’ (1994, 543). The ambivalent status of identification in cinema on the Shoah may well be a reason for the virtual absence of theoretical thinking on many such films. Beyond the identificatory possessions cinema spawns and satiates, however, it is the burden of voyeurism that Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey have famously associated with narrative film that seems to corroborate suspicions of the cinematic economy as an innately possessive one. And, like the fascination of fascism that Sontag finds in the sexual allure of Nazi iconography (1975), the voyeuristic gaze becomes ethically suspect when the spectacle is impregnated with violence, when the other is exposed in pain. Precisely in exploiting the lure of the spectacle of the hidden revealed – and repossessed in its revelation – film risks compounding the historical violence. And nowhere more so than when the referent is marked historically by the absence of visible evidence, where cinema’s voyeuristic self-possession is called into question and undone by the ‘invisibility’, the retroactive concealment of every visual trace built into the Nazi project from its very conception. What repeatedly arises in testimony to an atrocity that rendered human vision a realm of the fallible – or of the unbelievable – is a desire for the evidence of our own eyes (whence Elie Wiesel’s obsessive and self-corroding protest ‘je l’avais vu, de mes yeux vu...’, 1958, 55). But this is an event that throws our very notions of visibility, and thus visual representation, into crisis. As such, it casts doubt upon the possibility of a scopic intersubjective space that does not merely recapitulate the traumatic encounter of the suffering body exposed to the gaze of the Nazi voyeur, as figured by the view through the spyhole into what we are encouraged to identify as a gas chamber provocatively offered by Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List (1993), a view to which we shall return. Jacques Rivette, in vocabulary uncannily prophetic of the terms in which critics would couch their response to the release of Schindler’s List over thirty years later, writes in his seminal critique of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapo (1960) that ‘toute approche traditionnelle du “spectacle” [des camps] relève du voyeurisme et de la pornographie’ (1961, 54). For both voyeurism and pornography share a discourse of

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domination, born out of the desire to know and possess, to know by possessing and possess by knowing. If the essence and fascination of pornographic images, in their repossession of what is habitually concealed, lies in their violation of the border between private and public, then the double exposure staged by films such as Il Portiere di notte (1974) becomes a double violation. Liliana Cavani’s explicit narrative of a sadomasochistic relationship between Nazi torturer and Jewish victim conflates the horror of the Shoah and sexual violence by uncovering both for public display, and, most problematically, spectatorial pleasure. This sinister affinity is explored reflexively by Godard when he intercuts archive images from the Holocaust with excerpts from a German porn movie in his Histoire(s) du cinéma. Like the juxtaposition of advertisements for women’s underwear and images from Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (1955) in Une Femme mariée (1964), such montage points to parallels between two economies of possession: in Godard’s terms, ‘la pornographie comme faisant partie du totalitaire et le totalitaire faisant partie de la pornographie’ (1980, 309). In totalitarian ideology, as in pornographic images, a pleasure in looking espouses a pleasure in knowing. These are the pleasures which justify Rose’s provocative postulation of the spectator as ‘the ultimate predator’ (1996, 47) (or Alexander Kluge’s term Kinotier, 1990, 12). For embedded in these promises of pleasure lies the less seductive possibility that the movie screen is symbolically bottling up the violence it purports to mourn. Enmeshed in the acquisitive structures of identification, voyeurism and spectacle, the impulse to possess its imaged subject, then, would seem to inhere in all the materials of cinema. But what of the mal d’archive, of the amnesiac impulse, aggravated by the specific circumstances of the violence, which threatens to render our repossession of visual traces unstable and unsustainable? Even as they are haunted and questioned by the spectre of the musulman, Levinas’ insights into the pathologies of possession remain invaluable in this context. Inscribing his entire output within the discursive legacy of the Shoah, identified as an ethical breach, the philosopher has diagnosed our search for what Lyotard would later call grands récits to forge a meaning out of suffering. In Levinas’ account, this attempt to take narrative possession of the other’s pain constitutes not only the


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scandal of theodicy but also the suspension of ethics (1982). In the face of these dangers, then, what the violence would seem to demand of art is precisely a surrendering of possession, an audience willing to forgo the temporary catharsis of imposing premature meanings on the image of senseless pain, to risk opening themselves instead to its very alterity. What is most compelling about this imperative as it is explored by filmmakers is that it requires a conceptual shift from epistemology to ethics. For if mourning is truly to become a moral act, then the possessive anxieties of anamnesis would have to surrender instead to a generosity of testimony that refuses to recuperate alterity in its figuration. Crucial here is the recognition that to ethicize the Freudian epistemology of mourning also entails an acknowledgement of its limits in its encounter with the limit-violence of the Shoah. Derrida’s eloquent reconfiguring of the Freudian account as sustainable only in the form of an aporia, an (im)possibility of mourning, culminates in an appeal for the ‘tender rejection’ of the other which offers crucial resistance to the subject’s violent desire to possess through introjection: [l’]aporie du deuil […] fait de l’autre une partie de nous, entre nous – et l’autre paraît alors n’être plus l’autre précisément parce que nous le pleurons et le portons en nous […] Inversement, […] l’intériorisation qui avorte, c’est à la fois le respect de l’autre comme autre, une sorte de tendre rejet, un mouvement de renoncement qui le laisse seul, dehors, là-bas, dans sa mort, hors de nous. (1988, 54)

Recasting the subject’s response to trauma in explicitly ethical terms, this rethinking of identification as an ethical betrayal fuels the suspicion that incommensurable trauma exceeds the possibility of mourning. Fuss, citing Dori Laub’s contention that the Holocaust erased the second person, the possibility of naming or invoking the other (Fuss 1992, 81–82), has argued that ‘trauma, defined as the withdrawal of the Other, marks the limit case of a loss that cannot be assimilated’ (Fuss 1995, 39). Could it be that, in the case of the Shoah, this effacement of alterity – of an other to be loved and lost and repossessed – will keep us from even beginning to complete our mourning?

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And what, then, of the place of images in such a legacy of unmournable loss: how could cinema mournfully acknowledge the fraught impossibility of mourning the musulman? The surrender of mourning as a path to healing figures a movement beyond possession that also lies at the heart of Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s interpretation of the dream of the burning child (1973, 53–62). As Cathy Caruth has argued, Lacan’s shift of emphasis onto the father’s traumatic awakening in response to the voice of the dead child within his dream embeds trauma in the negotiation of identity between self and other, revealing ‘not so much an epistemological, but rather what can be defined as an ethical relation to the real’ (1996, 92). For Caruth, reading the interpretation as a parable of psychoanalytic theory, Lacan’s crucial insight is the revelation of an address from beyond the grave that binds father and child, grieving self and absent other, thus incurring an urgent responsibility. Since the reception of the child’s address occurs beyond empirical sight or knowledge, it is the father’s surrender of visual possession, his repeated failure to see in time, indeed, his missing of the traumatic encounter, which allows his awakening into responsibility. As an ethical imperative to be passed on to others, I would offer the traumatic awakening, in its very blindness, as a model for spectating as an ethical (because infinitely unpossessive) encounter with the horrific real. As we wake to the real of the Shoah, the command to open the eyes of others becomes the command to bear witness. But this imperative is not to be understood in its ritual sense, emptied of meaning by overuse. For inscribed in this Lacanian ethics of the real is the very impossibility of its demand, the impossibility of an adequate response to the plea of the other whose death has been missed, whence a second aporia. Viewing as an act of testimony, as an act of surrender, as ‘tendre rejet’, would thus involve bearing witness not only to the trauma, but also to our failure to see it, such that a missing becomes an encounter. Indeed, it is this missing, this yielding of visual possession, and its refiguring as encounter, that is the troubling subject of some of the most sensitive films on historical trauma as they reflect on the status of the eye-witness and of testimony itself. In Resnais and Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the Japanese man’s often-cited denial of the French woman’s visual witness (‘Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima.


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Rien’) in the context of his own missing of the trauma suggests a refusal of sight as false possession, a falsification repeated by the film within the film upon which the woman is working. In the case of the Shoah, however, cinema’s capacity to betray trauma is compounded by the resistance to sight historically shrouding the event. It is out of respect for this invisibility, this absence of images of the killing itself, that Lanzmann refuses to illustrate the testimonies of Shoah with archive images from the liberation, yet also that he takes pains to seek out members of the Sonderkommandos. Unlike the survivor of Hiroshima who ‘missed’ the death of his family, these men, forced to empty the gas chambers, daily witnessed the core of the horror. This was a prolonged encounter with an unbearable real, a real by whose image each is possessed. Such possession is habitually represented through the flashback, as a cinematic figure of what Caruth, echoing the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, has called ‘the repetition at the heart of catastrophe’ (Caruth 1996, 2). But in Lanzmann’s most radical departure from the aesthetics espoused by narrative film, this is an image, the image, that Shoah refuses to repossess through redisplay: the view through the spy-hole into the gas chamber; what Manuel Köppen terms ‘the climax of the unimaginable […] the traumatic-perverse “primal scene” of the Holocaust’ (1997, 160, 162; my translation). Lanzmann’s refusal of the view so confidently offered by Spielberg is less a missing of the trauma than an appeal to cultivate a certain blindness. In line with Lacan’s dream interpretation and Agamben and Žižek’s reflections on the musulman, when facing the spy-hole it is ‘ces œillères, cet aveuglement’, identified by Lanzmann as ‘la condition vitale de la création’, that become ‘le mode le plus pur du regard’ (1990). And yet it is simultaneously this ‘primal scene’ that haunts every moment of the oral testimonies as they try and fail to mourn it, and that the film, in a process often close to psychoanalysis, constantly strives to articulate. For Lanzmann, then, while the image is inherently possessive, cinema can surrender visual possession through a continuous withdrawal from the consolatory space of representation; the more realistic the representation, he believes, the more it falsifies the Irreprésentable that marks the heart of the atrocity. Like Caruth, who draws attention to the paradox that the direct vision of trauma may only produce an

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absolute inability to know it, that visual ‘immediacy […] may take the form of [epistemological] belatedness’ (1996, 92), Lanzmann suggests that iconic images of the Shoah would betray its legacy of incomprehensibility in a realm where understanding has become a mark of obscenity (1990). Instead, his refusal of representation and narrativisation becomes both a warning against our sense-making projects and a call to cultivate art’s capacity to unravel them, to surrender instead to a margin of incomprehension. Beyond the crisis of vision precipitated by a trauma that cannot be epistemologically reclaimed, however, the testimonial imperative remains, yet not in its original form. In the light of its ethical risks, the role of the witness might be reformulated to suggest an engagement of subjectivity that goes beyond simple recollection and narration, towards a form of surrendering. Indeed, as I have already implied, it seems that surrendering to the alterity of the event is precisely what bearing witnessing is. Rethought in this light, testimony would inscribe and preserve a certain distance in its encounter with the real. This is an ethical distance that – consciously, rather than out of indifference – spurns the presumptuous bridging of the chasm dividing incommensurable realities by refusing the lure of smooth identifications. Often it is the image of the face, identified by Levinas as the site of ‘résistance absolue à la possession’ (1963, 21), that operates as vulnerable but inviolable mark of this distance, as in the look back at the camera that ruptures the diegesis of certain documentaries by deflecting attention onto a face-à-face that directly implicates the viewer. In contrast to Lanzmann’s presentation of the face – his two most recent films, Un Vivant qui passe (1997) and Sobibor (2001), consist of little more than endless shots of a single face, whose non-verbal signals often undercut the verbal narratives – the seamless montage of talking heads offered by James Moll’s The Last Days (1998), for example, abolishes the distance that, under Lanzmann’s lens, allows the face to resist identificatory possession. Gérard Wajcman’s reading of The Last Days condemns it for having substituted a ‘pédagogie de l’émotion’ – the catharsis of tears and empathy that invites to consolatory identifications – for any sustained encounter with the truth of the distance, the ‘éloignement terrible’


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between victim and viewer (2000, 23, 14). Of its enmity with identification, the appropriation of alterity, Wajcman writes: En somme, tout appel à l’identification à un autre vient précisément abolir l’autre, comme autre, l’altérité de cet autre, dénier toute différence, aveugler tout simplement le fait réel que, irrémédiablement, je ne suis pas lui. (2000, 14– 15)

This is why, although Lanzmann’s witnesses often move us profoundly, we are confronted always with the otherness of a suffering we can never fully know. And this, I would argue, is the sense in which traumatized images can yield cinematic possession, can redeem the musulman from invisibility without recuperating the invisible core of the event into positive meaning. Recalling the Levinassian allegory of ethics as caress, an open hand that traces rather than grasping the contours of the other, the plea to tolerate the distance injected between subjects by suffering allows a rethinking beyond possession of the intimate and dark encounter with the other. What Derrida, discussing Rousseau’s notion of pitié, articulates as a paradox of this relationship, becomes a testimonial imperative: Plus on s’identifie à l’autre, mieux l’on ressent sa souffrance comme la sienne […]. L’identification par intériorisation ne serait pas morale. Elle ne reconnaîtrait pas la souffrance comme souffrance de l’autre. La moralité, le respect de l’autre, suppose donc une certaine non-identification. (1967, 269–70)

In its refusal to seize possession of the other’s trauma, then, nonidentification, the surrender to alterity, becomes the condition of our testimony. If the limits of mourning and identification are to be healing limits, then their cinematic disclosure must hold us at a tender distance from the irreducible real of unendurable suffering. For it is only in the painful confrontation of this distance as distance that our witnessing, our surrender may begin to take place.

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz: L’archive et le témoin – Homo Sacer III, trans. Pierre Alferi, Paris: Payot et Rivages Antelme, Robert. 1957. L’Espèce humaine, Paris: Gallimard Blanchot, Maurice. 1969. ‘L’Espèce humaine’, in L’Entretien infini, Paris: Gallimard, 191–200 Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press Crowley, Martin. 2000. ‘Il n’y a qu’une espèce humaine: Between Duras and Antelme’, in Andrew Leak and George Paizis, eds., The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 174–92 Davis, Colin. 2000. Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction: Killing the Other, Basingstoke: Macmillan Derrida, Jacques. 1967. De la grammatologie, Paris: Minuit –––––. 1988. Mémoires: pour Paul de Man, Paris: Galilée –––––. 1995. Mal d’archive: Une impression freudienne, Paris: Galilée Duras, Marguerite. 1985. La Douleur, Paris: P.O.L. Freud, Sigmund. 1954–1974 [1915]. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols, London: The Hogarth Press, XIV, 239–58 Fuss, Diana. 1995. Identification Papers, New York and London: Routledge Godard, Jean-Luc. 1980. Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma, Paris: Albatros Kluge, Alexander. 1990. ‘The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time’, New German Critique, 49, 11–22 Köppen, Manuel. 1997. ‘Von Effekten des Authentischen – Schindler’s List: Film und Holocaust’, in Köppen and Klaus R. Scherpe, eds., Bilder des Holocaust: Literatur, Film, bildende Kunst, Cologne: Böhlau, 145–170 Lacan, Jacques. 1973. Le Séminaire, livre XI: Les Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil Lanzmann, Claude. 1990. ‘Hier ist kein Warum’ in Michel Deguy, ed., Au sujet de Shoah, le film de Claude Lanzmann, Paris: Belin, 279 Laub, Dori. 1992. ‘An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York and London: Routledge, 75–92


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Levi, Primo. 1988. The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Joseph Levinas, Emmanuel. 1963. Difficile liberté: essais sur le judaïsme, Paris: Albin Michel. –––––. 1982. ‘La Souffrance inutile’, Giornale di Metafisica, 4, 13–26 Liss, Andrea. 1998. Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. ‘La Représentation interdite’, in Nancy, ed., ‘L’Art et la mémoire des camps: Représenter exterminer’, Le genre humain, 36, 13–39 Rivette, Jacques. 1961. ‘De l’abjection’, Cahiers du cinéma, 120, 54–55 Rose, Gillian. 1996. Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’Être et le néant: essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris: Gallimard Sommer, Doris. 1994. ‘Resistant Texts and Incompetent Readers’, Poetics Today, 15:4, 523–552 Sontag, Susan. 1975. ‘Fascinating Fascism’, The New York Review of Books, 22, 6 February, 23–30 Todorov, Tzvetan. 1991. Face à l’extrême, Paris: Seuil Wajcman, Gérard. 2000. ‘Oh Les Derniers Jours’, Les Temps Modernes, 608, 2–29 Wiesel, Elie. 1958. La Nuit, Paris: Minuit Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Essays in the (Mis)Use of a Notion, London and New York: Verso


Contributors

COLIN DAVIS is Professor in the Department of French Studies at the University of Warwick. His recent publications include Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction: Killing the Other (Macmillan, 2000) and (with Elizabeth Fallaize) French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire (OUP, 2000). JÉRÔME GAME is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of French at University College London. He works on philosophy, contemporary French literature and cinema and is the author of articles on, amongst others, Deleuze, Bakhtin, Prigent, Fourcade and Duras. He is currently working on two books: A Poetics of the Virtual: New Approaches to Contemporary French Literature; and The Cinema of Jean Eustache. KATHERINE GRIFFITHS has recently submitted a Ph.D. thesis entitled ‘The Ghosts of Naturalism. Zola and Maupassant: Sight, Self, Fiction and the Feminine', and has taken up a post as Lecturer in Romance Studies at the University of Wales, Bangor. She is about to begin a new research project on George Sand. SUSAN GRIFFITHS is in the final year of a Ph.D. at King’s College, Cambridge. Her thesis deals with the author Crébillon fils and the representation of the body in eighteenth-century France. FIONA HANDYSIDE has recently completed a Ph.D. at Queen Mary, University of London on the relationship between American and French female cinema stars in French cultural discourses of the 1950s and 1960s. She is now Lecturer in French Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast.

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Contributors

JOSEPH HARRIS has just completed a Ph.D. at Trinity Hall, Cambridge on cross-dressing in seventeenth-century French literature and culture. He is the author of several articles dealing with issues of gender and sexuality in Molière, Jacques Duval and Isaac de Benserade and is coeditor of Exposure: Revealing Bodies, Unveiling Representations (Peter Lang, forthcoming). SUE HARRIS, Senior Lecturer in French at Queen Mary, University of London, is the author of Bertrand Blier (MUP, 2001), co-editor of France in Focus: Film and National Identity (Berg, 2000), and is Associate Editor of the journals French Cultural Studies and Studies in French Cinema. JULIA HORN is completing a Ph.D. at Wolfson College, Cambridge on Christianity and chivalry in the sixteenth-century French romance Amadis de Gaule and is the author of two forthcoming articles on this subject. FRANCESCA NICHOLSON is in the final year of a Ph.D. at Christ’s College, Cambridge, working on trobairitz and troubadour poetry alongside modern theory. She is the author of forthcoming articles on troubadour chansonniers and performative space and on the question of feminist poetics in trobairitz poetry. LYNSEY RUSSELL-WATTS is completing a Ph.D. at Newnham College, Cambridge, working on modern French women’s cinema, writing and photography, specifically on Catherine Breillat, Sophie Calle, Claire Denis and Marguerite Duras. She is the co-author of an article on Breillat’s Romance. LIBBY SAXTON is Lecturer in French and Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She is co-editor of Seeing Things: Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French Studies (Peter Lang, 2002), and is the author of several articles on the intersection of trauma and ethics in film.

Contributors

219

SIOBHÁN SHILTON is completing a Ph.D. at the University of Liverpool, working on an AHRB-funded group project entitled ‘New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French’. She is the author of articles on travel writing and postcolonial theory, Ousmane Socé and Azouz Begag. JAMES R. SIMPSON is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, working mainly on Old French literature. He is the author of Animal Body, Literary Corpus: The Old French ‘Roman de Renart’ (Rodopi, 1996), and Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition in Medieval French Narrative (Peter Lang, 2000). VALERIE WORTH-STYLIANOU holds a Research Chair of French at Oxford Brookes University. Her research interests span the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and her recent work has covered: women writers (critical edition and introduction on Marie de Gournay’s translation of the 1200 quotations in Montaigne’s Essais, in Œuvres Complètes of Marie de Gournay, Honoré Champion, 2002); seventeenth-century theatre (Confidential Strategies, Droz, 1999); and sixteenth-century poetry. She is currently working on a project on images of pregnancy and motherhood c. 1470–1650.


Index

adultery 27, 28, 44–6, 136 Alien (Ridley Scott) 23 Alien: Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet) 23 Althusser, Louis 106–7, 112 Anne de Bretagne 40(n) Auster, Paul 17 Austin, John L. 110–4 auteur 151–5, 158, 161, 162, 183, 184(n) authorship 12, 129, 133 autobiography 38, 121, 130

childbirth, see birth chronicles 43 Claude de Lorraine 41–2 Clifford, James 87–95, 97–101 cœur 140–2, 145–7 cogito 75 convulsionnaires 139 Corneille, Pierre, Polyeucte 127, 129 Crébillon fils, Claude Prosper Jolyot de 135–48 cross-dressing 122, 124(n), 126, 133 and see transvestite/transvestism

baptism 37 Bardot, Brigitte 162 Baudelaire, Charles 156–7 Bazin, André 152 beauty 121–5, 131–3, 144, 154–7, 159, 160 Bennington, Geoffrey 116(n) Bergson, Henri 76 birth 37, 38, 40–47, 139(n) Blanchot, Maurice 69, 202, 203 body 51, 78(n), 123, 131, 135–49, 151, 157, 158, 170, 171, 180, 190, 197, 202, 204, 208 de Botton, Alain 167, 169 Bourgeois/Boursier, Louise 38, 39 Brantôme 43, 47 breastfeeding 45 Butler, Judith 127, 135, 143, 147 Byatt, Antonia S. 11, 21

deconstruction 113, 114, 116 Demy, Jacques 152 Deneuve, Catherine 162 Derrida, Jacques 69, 78(n), 81, 105, 108, 110–5, 199, 200, 201, 209, 213 Descartes, Réné 137, 140 diaries, see journals Diderot, Denis 148 divorce 136–7 Docherty, Thomas 106 Duplessis-Mornay, Charlotte 38, 39(n)

Cahiers du cinéma 152, 159, 183(n) Cavell, Stanley 110 Chabrol, Claude 152(n) chiasmus 169, 174, 181

education 93, 123, 138 enjoyment, see jouissance Enlightenment 106, 136, 140, 143 esprit 135, 137, 138, 140–2 femininity 51–64, 136, 137, 143–4, 147, 151(n), 152, 155–7, 161 feminist film criticism 13, 151, 152, 162, 197 feminist theory 105, 110 femme fatale 159–60 flâneur/flâneuse 153–5

222 Foucault, Michel 69 François Ier 40–3 Freud, Sigmund 24, 107–8, 125, 205, 209, 210, 211 Fuss, Diana 121, 205–6, 209 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 106, 112–3, 116 gaze (film theory) 151–2, 162 gaze (psychoanalysis) 51–8, 62, 170, 179, 204, 205–7 gender 51–6, 110, 123, 126–7, 130–1, 168, 181, 186(n) gift 13, 71–2, 125, 174, 176 Godard, Jean-Luc 152, 153, 159, 161, 200, 208 Graff, Gerald 114 Hegel, G. W. F. 69, 74(n), 81, 84(n) Heidegger, Martin 69, 78(n), 81, 108 Henri II 136 Henri III 43, 46 Henri de Navarre/Henri IV 43, 44, 46 Hollywood 151, 153 hooks, bell 88, 90, 94, 98–9 identification 109, 113–4, 125, 129–33, 201, 205–14 identity 51–6, 63, 88–94, 97, 98, 100, 113–4, 155, 180–1, 188, 196 (in)vraisemblance 60–1 Irigaray, Luce 13, 52, 53, 54, 58, 60, 61 Jeanne de Bourbon 38, 39(n) jouissance 21, 24–26, 30, 31, 35, 114 journals 38, 40–3, 97, 192 Kant, Immanuel 108 Karina, Anna 151, 162 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve 158 Lacan, Jacques 24, 51–3, 59, 69, 106, 113, 169–70, 172, 177, 178, 210–2 Laclau, Ernesto 109, 116

Index Laclos, Choderlos de, Les Liaisons dangereuses 140 de Lafayette, Madame 37(n) Lanzmann, Claude 199–200, 203, 211– 2 law 28, 30, 32, 136–7, 176, 188 Leibnitz, G. W. 79 Levi, Primo 203, 204 Levinas, Emmanuel 202, 205, 208, 212, 213 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 13, 158 libertine/libertinage 135, 139, 140, 143, 144 Louis XII 41 Louis XIV 136 Louis XV 136 Louise de Savoie 38, 39, 40–3, 47 Lyotard, Jean-François 107–9 Malebranche, Nicolas 138 Malle, Louis 154 L’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud 154 Mandelstam, Nadezhda 13 Mandelstam, Osip 13 Margeurite de Valois 38, 39, 42–8 Marie de Medici 38 marriage 43, 126, 128, 131, 132(n), 136, 139–40 masculinity 51, 55, 57, 61, 63, 64, 144, 168 masochism 84(n), 208 masquerade 123, 126, 129 Mauss, Marcel 71 medicine 44, 136–7, 139, 144, 146 memoirs 38–40, 42–8, 121–3, 126, 129, 130 memory 199–200 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 169–70, 178–9 midwives 38 mirror stage 51–3 Moi, Toril 110 Molière, J.-B. P., L’École des femmes 130

223

Index Monroe, Marilyn 153 Montmorency-Fosseuse, Françoise de 45–7 money, see wealth Moreau, Jeanne 151–63 Mulvey, Laura 151(n), 207 Narcissus/narcissism 52, 55, 57, 59, 123, 129, 132 Naturalism 51, 56, 60, 62–3 New Historicism 13 New Wave 151–63, 183, 189 Nietzsche, F. 69, 70, 76, 81–3, 84(n), 108 objet a 170–1, 178 Ovid, Metamorphoses 21 passions 127, 137, 138, 140–6 performance 98, 112, 123, 126–7, 131, 133, 196 performative 111–3, 127 phenomenology 81, 169, 170 Philippe d’Anjou (‘Monsieur’) 122 Philippe d’Orléans 126 Plato 70, 78, 81, 108, 199(n) pleasure principle 107–8 postcolonialism 87–101, 105 postmodernism 89, 109 postructuralism 69, 105, 107–15 posttheory 109–10, 112–5 pregnancy 30, 37–39, 42–46, 137 psychoanalysis 51, 69, 70, 106, 107, 116, 169–73, 177, 200, 206, 210, 211 Rabelais, François 37 Real, the 23, 105, 114, 177–8, 180, 200, 205, 206, 210–3 Resnais, Alain 152

rhetoric 145, 170, 189 Rivette, Jacques 152 Rohmer, Eric 152 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 213 Said, Edward 87–100 Sartre, Jean-Paul 77(n), 203 Searle, John 110–2, 114 Seberg, Jean 151, 162 Shakespeare, William, Hamlet 24 Sollers, Phillipe 69 spectator 13, 131, 190, 205, 208 Spielberg, Steven, Schindler’s List 207, 211 Spinoza, B. de 82, 108 Stendhal 52 structuralism 69, 105, 106, 114 Symbolic 178 Symbolic Father 24 symptom 23, 24 transvestite/transvestism 121–33 and see cross-dressing trauma 23, 24, 84, 105, 169, 172, 175, 177, 181, 199–213 trobairitz 167, 168, 176–81 troubadour 167, 168, 171–6, 180–1 Truffaut, François 151–63 Urbain, Jean-Didier 89 uterus 137, 148 Varda, Agnès 152, 184, 190 wealth 121, 122, 125–6, 179, 188–91, 193–5 wedding, see marriage Žižek, Slavoj 23, 25, 169, 171, 178, 203–4, 211


Modern French Identities Edited by Peter Collier This series aims to publish monographs, editions or collections of papers based on recent research into modern French Literature. It welcomes contributions from academics, researchers and writers in British and Irish universities in particular. Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone writing of the twentieth century, whose formal experiments and revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of literary forms, from the thematic autobiographies of Michel Leiris and Bernard Noël to the magic realism of French Caribbean writers. The idea that identities are constructed rather than found, and that the self is an area to explore rather than a given pretext, runs through much of modern French literature, from Proust, Gide and Apollinaire to Kristeva, Barthes, Duras, Germain and Roubaud. This series reflects a concern to explore the late-century turmoil in ideas and values that is expressed in the works of theorists like Lacan, Irigaray and Bourdieu and to follow through the impact of current ideologies such as feminism and postmodernism on the literary and cultural interpretation and presentation of the self, whether in terms of psychoanalytic theory, gender, autobiography, cinema, fiction and poetry, or in newer forms like performance art. The series will publish studies of individual authors and artists, comparative studies, and interdisciplinary projects, including those where art and cinema intersect with literature.

Volume 1

Victoria Best & Peter Collier (eds.): Powerful Bodies Performance in French Cultural Studies 220 pages. 1999. ISBN 3-906762-56-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4239-9

Volume 2

Julia Waters: Intersexual Rivalry A ‘Reading in Pairs’ of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet 228 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906763-74-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4626-2

Volume 3

Sarah Cooper: Relating to Queer Theory Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig and Cixous 231 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906764-46-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-4636-X

Volume 4

Julia Prest & Hannah Thompson (eds.): Corporeal Practices (Re)figuring the Body in French Studies 166 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906764-53-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4639-4

Volume 5

Victoria Best: Critical Subjectivities Identity and Narrative in the Work of Colette and Marguerite Duras 243 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906763-89-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4631-9

Volume 6

David Houston Jones: The Body Abject: Self and Text in Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett 213 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906765-07-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5058-8

Volume 7

Robin MacKenzie: The Unconscious in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu 270 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-38-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5070-7

Volume 8

Rosemary Chapman: Siting the Quebec Novel The Representation of Space in Francophone Writing in Quebec 282 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-85-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5090-1

Volume 9

Gill Rye: Reading for Change Interactions between Text and Identity in Contemporary French Women’s Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant) 223 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906765-97-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5315-3

Volume 10

Jonathan Paul Murphy: Proust’s Art Painting, Sculpture and Writing in A la recherche du temps perdu 248 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-17-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5319-6

Volume 11

Julia Dobson: Hélène Cixous and the Theatre. The Scene of Writing. 166 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906766-20-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5322-6

Volume 12

Emily Butterworth & Kathryn Robson (eds.): Shifting Borders Theory and Identity in French Literature VIII + 208 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-86-1 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5602-0

Volume 13 Victoria Korzeniowska: The Heroine as Social Redeemer in the Plays of Jean Giraudoux 144 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-92-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5608-X Volume 14

Kay Chadwick: Alphonse de Châteaubriant: Catholic Collaborator 327 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906766-94-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5610-1

Volume 15

Nina Bastin: Queneau’s Fictional Worlds 291 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-32-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5620-9

Volume 16

Sarah Fishwick: The Body in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir 284 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-33-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5621-7

Volume 17 Simon Kemp & Libby Saxton (eds.): Seeing Things. Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French Studies. 287 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-46-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5858-9 Volume 18

Kamal Salhi (ed.): French in and out of France. Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogue. 487 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-47-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5859-7

Volume 19

Genevieve Shepherd: Simone de Beauvoir’s Fiction. A Psychoanalytic Rereading. 260 pages. (forthcoming) ISBN 3-906768-55-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5867-8

Volume 20

Lucille Cairns (ed.): Gay and Lesbian Cultures in France. 290 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906769-66-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5903-8

Volume 21

Wendy Goolcharan-Kumeta: My Mother, My Country. Reconstructing the Female Self in Guadeloupean Women’s Writing. 236 pages. 2003. ISBN 3-906769-76-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5913-5

Volume 22

Patricia O’Flaherty: Henry de Montherlant (1895–1972). A Philosophy of Failure. Forthcoming. ISBN 3-03910-013-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6282-9

Volume 23 Forthcoming. Volume 24 Julia Horn & Lynsey Russell-Watts (eds): Possessions. Essays in French Literature, Cinema and Theory. 223 pages. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-005-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-5924-0

Possessions: Essays in French Literature, Cinema, and Theory (Modern French Identities, V. 24)

Studies in French Cinema

Gender and French Cinema

Translation in French and Francophone Literature and Film. (French Literature)

Stars and Stardom in French Cinema

French Theory

Masterpieces of French Literature

French Cinema: A Student's Guide

The Early Sartre and Marxism (Modern French Identities)

French Cinema: A Student's Guide

French National Cinema (National Cinemas)

Stars in Modern French Film

Stars in Modern French Film

The Modern French Tarrasch

Modern French Grammar

Modern French Philosophy

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge Studies in French)

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge Studies in French)

French Social Theory

French

Helene Cixous and the Theatre: The Scene of Writing (Modern French Identities, V. 11.)

Castle to Castle (French Literature)

Castle to Castle (French Literature)

Royalist Identities (Early Modern Literature in History)

Castle to Castle (French Literature)

The Collaborators (French Literature Series)

Castle to Castle (French Literature)

Castle to Castle (French Literature)

The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature

Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature

Possessions: Essays in French Literature, Cinema, and Theory (Modern French Identities, V. 24)

Studies in French Cinema

Gender and French Cinema

Translation in French and Francophone Literature and Film. (French Literature)

Stars and Stardom in French Cinema

French Theory

Masterpieces of French Literature

French Cinema: A Student's Guide

The Early Sartre and Marxism (Modern French Identities)

French Cinema: A Student's Guide

French National Cinema (National Cinemas)

Stars in Modern French Film

Stars in Modern French Film

The Modern French Tarrasch

Modern French Grammar

Modern French Philosophy

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge Studies in French)

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge Studies in French)

French Social Theory

French

Helene Cixous and the Theatre: The Scene of Writing (Modern French Identities, V. 11.)

Castle to Castle (French Literature)

Castle to Castle (French Literature)

Royalist Identities (Early Modern Literature in History)

Castle to Castle (French Literature)

The Collaborators (French Literature Series)

Castle to Castle (French Literature)

Castle to Castle (French Literature)

The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature

Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature

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