From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person 9781503625778

Citation preview

from split to screened selves

From Split to Screened Selves French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person

rachel gabara

stanford university press stanford, california 2006

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gabara, Rachel. From split to screened selves : French and Francophone autobiography in the third person / Rachel Gabara. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-10: 0-8047-5356-3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8047-5356-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. French literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Autobiography in literature. 3. Biographical films—History and criticism. I. Title. PQ307.A65G33 2006 840.9’4920904—dc22 2006004626

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii ix

part i: split selves: french autobiography in the first, second, and third persons 1. 2.

Autobiography of Himself: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

1

Internal Conversation: Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood

23

part ii: autobiography in images: from ph otography to film 3. 4.

Seeing Autobiography: From Camera Lucida to the Cinema

45

Screening Autobiography: Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights

72

part iii: francophone autobiography: selves and others, words and images 5. 6.

(Un)Veiling Herself? Assia Djebar in Love, an Algerian Cavalcade

95

AutoBiographical Third Cinema: David Achkar’s Allah Tantou and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: Death of the Prophet

127

Conclusion

156

Notes Index

161 211

Acknowledgments

This book owes much to many. It was while working with Jean-Pierre Morel in Paris that I first began to study reflexive autobiography. Carina Yervasi, Stuart McDougal, Simon Gikandi, David Caron, Jim Porter, Frieda Ekotto, Ross Chambers, and Jessica Silbey, among others at the University of Michigan, provided advice and assistance over a number of years during which my project changed drastically. I am deeply grateful to Carina, Simon, and Frieda for their guidance as my interest in African literature and film developed. And Ross and Jessica prodded me, at a crucial moment, into new ways of thinking about genre in general and autobiography in particular. My former colleagues at Princeton University, especially Sandra Bermann, Eileen Reeves, Maria DiBattista, Michael Wood, and Aissata Sidikou-Morton, were also invaluable. Leave time from Princeton’s “one-insix” program for junior faculty as well as a Christian Gauss Fund University Preceptorship granted me much-needed time to work on revisions as well as the final polishing of the manuscript. My editor, Norris Pope, and the two readers for the Stanford University Press made enormously helpful suggestions and, even more importantly, enthusiastically supported work that brought together media and areas of the world that many prefer to keep not only distinct but separate. Thanks also to my new colleagues at the University of Georgia for their warm welcome. My parents, Uliana and Vlodek Gabara, have been nothing but encouraging throughout. Esther Gabara has done double duty, providing both sisterly and academic support. My grandparents, Mina and Jakob Fischbein and Alina and Edward Gabara, are no longer here to see the book, but would have been very proud. And I am not sure I would have made it to the finish line intact without Claudio Saunt’s love, intelligence, and good humor. I am certain that we will work together on many future projects.

Introduction “Autobiography is impossible, here is mine.”1

The genre of autobiography has been a troubled one in the West at least since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, yet its difficulties threatened to become overwhelming during the second half of the twentieth century when we learned that the author was dead, the self was hopelessly (or hopefully) fragmentary, and autobiography was therefore uncomfortably indistinguishable from fiction. René Wellek and Austin Warren claimed in 1956 that “even when a work of art contains elements which can be surely identified as biographical, these elements will be so rearranged and transformed in a work that they lose all their specifically personal meaning and become simply concrete human material, integral elements of a work.”2 A year later, Northrop Frye, in the one sentence of his Anatomy of Criticism dedicated to autobiography, again challenged the distinctness of the genre, asserting that “autobiography is another form which merges with the novel by a series of insensible gradations.”3 Paul de Man refused the idea that external reality determined the autobiographical text and went so far as to suggest instead the reverse, that “the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life.”4 And for Robert Elbaz, “autobiography is fiction and fiction is autobiography: both are narrative arrangements of reality.”5 Buoyed by the publication and popularity of mountains of autobiographies and memoirs, however, another group of scholars has over the course of the same half-century struggled to define the genre of autobiography and classify texts either within or outside of it. In the same year that Wellek and Warren published their Theory of Literature, an essay by George Gusdorf marked the appearance of a field now often called “autobiography studies.” Ostensibly following a tradition dating to Rousseau and perhaps to Augus-

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tine, Gusdorf maintained that the necessary goal of any autobiography was to present a coherent and continuous image of the author’s life and identity, “the unity of a life across time.”6 Philippe Lejeune’s 1975 definition of autobiography, “a retrospective prose narrative that a real person tells of his own existence, when he emphasizes his individual life, and particularly the history of his personality,” similarly stressed both the unity and not only linear but teleological development of the autobiographical self over time.7 Elizabeth Bruss, in one of the first book-length considerations of autobiography, sought simply to define “a literary category that actually ‘exists.’”8 Yet the difficulty of this task is evidenced by her use of scare quotes and the fact that her definition, like those of Gusdorf and Lejeune, describes relatively few of the autobiographies published today and none of the works I will consider in this book. Further confounding such attempts at definition and categorization, many of the same writers of fiction and theory who had joined in proclaiming the impossibility of autobiography, including Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and virtually all of the French New Novelists, went on in the 1980s and ’90s to write their autobiographies. These unexpected autobiographers and their literary critics sought to extricate themselves from what they had deemed the impasse of autobiography by insisting that their texts differed from traditional life-stories, were instead “new autobiography,” “autofiction,” “romanesque,” “autobiographique,” “autobiographics,” “pseudo-autobiography,” or “fictography.” Lejeune, who concluded that an “autobiographical pact” between author and reader authenticated the genre, has nevertheless asserted the impossibility of autobiographical hybrids; “autobiography is not a question of degree; it is all or nothing.”9 And most critical discussions of autobiography have relied on its self-evidence, on “the fact that we have little difficulty recognizing and so reading autobiographies as opposed to works of fiction.”10 It is surprising, however, just how rarely autobiography is self-evident. Innumerable battles have been waged in scholarly journals as well as in the popular media with respect to the truthfulness of various autobiographies. The autobiographical nature of novels has been debated as well, even, at least once, in a French court. In the 1950s the Editions de Minuit and one of its authors were put on trial and condemned “for having published as a ‘novel’ a book that included too many of the author’s autobiographical experiences to be a true novel.”11 Scholars, like anyone else, tend to recognize what they already know. The

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autobiographies read by most North American and European academics, those texts around which the category of literary autobiography was created, have not only looked quite a bit alike but have been written by people who looked quite a bit alike. One of Gusdorf’s gestures as a founding figure was to maintain that non-Western autobiography was impossible.12 He has been supported in this assertion not only by Western critics but, more unexpectedly and for different reasons, by critics from other parts of the world. Only very recently has self-writing from East and South Asia, Latin America, and Africa entered into theoretical and critical discussions of the genre of autobiography. The only monograph on African autobiography was published thirty years ago. Its author, a North American academic, maintained that African autobiography could not exist, since in Africa autobiography and fiction were one and the same.13 African critics have also for the most part remained silent on the question of African autobiography. The few who have not have adamantly denied its existence, rejecting the genre as the epitome of a non-African individualism characterized as self-centeredness. Traditional autobiographical language has always tended to figure the uncovering of a true self previously hidden beneath masks or misconceptions. The autobiographer, writing in a first-person voice that assured both accuracy and identity, would seek, and find, the truth behind events, the essence of a person or a life, a coherent identity over time. All of the autobiographers I read break away from this model to locate an intimate autobiographical self outside of the convention of the first-person singular. They experiment with narrative strategies to tell their lives differently while nonetheless producing stories that reflect their experiences and uniqueness. Rather than attempt to provide a survey of major autobiographical works from France and Francophone Africa, I have opted instead for close readings of a small group of texts and films. I analyze a group of autobiographies written and filmed in French over the past several decades, all of which attempt to find new ways of reflecting upon and recording their authors’ lives. I do not wish to claim any, much less all, of them as typical of their era or geographical region, nor are they by any means the only examples of their kind. I chart them, rather, as moments in a generic progression over a period of just under twenty years (from 1975 to 1992) and from north to south (from France to North and Sub-Saharan Africa). I investigate what happens when we do not inherently recognize autobiography, when a text is not just

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“new” or “pseudo-autobiography,” but in a different form or medium and from a different narrative tradition. I will not attempt to locate the boundary between autobiography and fiction, nor will I rename the genre, nor even separate “new” from “old” autobiography. Autobiography is always a locus of contact among many genres, at once representation and invention, nonfiction and fiction, in the present and in the past. According to Derrida’s now-famous “counter-law of genre,” just as a conception of genre must always exist, genres cannot ever have been other than mixed: A text cannot belong to no genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always some genre and always some genres, yet this participation is never a belonging. . . . Marking itself with genre, a text demarcates itself.14

The autobiographies I will examine mark themselves off as they participate in genres on all sides of the boundaries of autobiography. They challenge the traditionally conceived limits of the genre, but, as Tzvetan Todorov told us, the transgression of a generic boundary implies the belief that it is there to transgress; “in order to exist as such, the transgression requires a law—precisely the one that is to be violated. . . . [T]he norm becomes visible—comes into existence—owing only to its transgressions.”15 These autobiographies are postmodern in the sense that, to quote Thomas Beebee, “the effect that many identify as postmodern is produced by defeating the generic expectations of the reader”; they force us to reflect upon the boundaries between genres.16 Marginal works ultimately define a genre more than normative ones, and I argue that we must pay a new kind of attention to the formal and geographical margins of autobiography as we enter the twentyfirst century. But let me be clear. “Marginal” here means marginalized by critics within the academy. When the study of autobiography has not been limited to texts by Western European and North American heterosexual white men, it has been largely segmented into categories defined by authorial identity: women’s autobiography, queer autobiography, French autobiography, and African-American autobiography, to name a few.17 Even within this schema, however, autobiographical film and African autobiography have been overlooked when not outright dismissed by scholars. I address this gap in schol-

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arship, but rather than focus exclusively on one or the other category, I bring each into contact with the other as well as with European theories and traditions of autobiography. I address two movements in tandem, autobiography from word to image and from France to Francophone Africa, and conclude with an investigation of African autobiographical film, arguing not only that these new forms of autobiography deserve our critical attention, but that any study of contemporary autobiography is incomplete without them. In an era marked by what has been called a “visual turn,” we must ask what new formal and strategic possibilities for autobiography the visual media offer us. In a global landscape marked by colonial legacies, what might postcolonial autobiographers tell us about the complexities of the politics of identity, rather than simple identity politics? Brent Hayes Edwards, in the context of a discussion of the “politics of interdisciplinarity,” has argued for the importance of an attention to genre and genres other than the novel within postcolonial studies.18 I have chosen to bring together autobiographical texts in words and in images, from Europe and Africa, neither in order to claim that they are all fundamentally the same nor to point to any binary oppositions. The autobiographies I have selected are divided by medium, geography, and history and united by their use of the French language and of a third-person narrative voice. By a strategy of juxtaposition I engage them in conversation, attending to the similarities as well as the differences among them. In this, From Split to Screened Selves has an important ancestor and kindred spirit, Françoise Lionnet’s groundbreaking Autobiographical Voices. Drawing primarily on the work of Edouard Glissant, Lionnet invoked a writing and reading practice of métissage, “a concept of solidarity which demystifies all essentialist glorifications of unitary origins, be they racial, sexual, geographic, or cultural,” daringly reading the autobiographical writings of Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche side by side with those of women from various areas of the African diaspora.19 Along similar lines, Ato Quayson, in his recent Calibrations, has developed a new model of “reading for the social” via primary texts that range from the event of the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa to West African oral histories to literary works by authors including Amitav Ghosh, Chinua Achebe, Yvonne Vera, Keri Hulme, Jose-Luis Borges, and Toni Morrison, from India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, Argentina, and the United States. Quayson describes his method as one that examines “interacting

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thresholds and domains.”20 I undertake such a practice in this book, investigating constructions of autobiographical selves not only across what Mary Louise Pratt has called the “contact zone” of colonial encounter, but across media.21 Doing so, we must remember, as filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha has told us, that “there is no third world without its first world, no first world without its third.”22 Like Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and the other contributors to their Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, I am working against a binary discourse that “pit[s] various Third World cultures against a Western norm.”23 For so long, it has been the “French” that has defined the “Francophone,” a term invented specifically to describe something in French but not quite French.24 The colonial power has defined and redefined the cultural production of colonized and even decolonized people. I take lessons learned from Francophone texts in order to redefine a particular genre in which the norm (and, so far, the theory) has been European. Although split subjectivity, fragmented identity, and problems of narrative reference have forever plagued autobiographers, I have selected works which foreground these aspects of the autobiographical as they nonetheless undertake the task of autobiography. In the first two sections of the book, I read innovative autobiographical works by French novelists and theorists as well as a filmmaker. Part I introduces and expands upon the “split selves” of the title, beginning with an analysis of the narrative strategies of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and continuing with Nathalie Sarraute’s very differently constructed Childhood (1983). In Part II, I return to Barthes with Camera Lucida (1980), using the autobiographical in his essay on photography as the starting point for a discussion of autobiographical film, long considered a logical impossibility by theorists of literary autobiography. My first test case is Cyril Collard’s filmic adaptation (1992) of his autobiographical novel Savage Nights (1989). The third and last section of the book takes up postcolonial Francophone African autobiography in words and images, investigating the intertwined narratives of Assia Djebar’s Love, an Algerian Cavalcade (1985) and the hybrid autobiographical/biographical films of David Achkar (Allah Tantou, 1991) and Raoul Peck (Lumumba: Death of the Prophet, 1992). A hyper-awareness of the impossibility of coherent selfhood heightens the stakes of self-representation, and I argue that the French “new autobi-

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ographers” find themselves in the paradoxical position of affirming some kind of controllable identity through a re-appropriation of their own fragmentation.25 Knowing that we exist as fragmented bundles of selves does not prevent us from striving to find a consistent meaning, a sense rather than non-sense, that would bring these parts together to form a whole. Literary and cultural critic Barthes and novelist and essayist Sarraute begin their autobiographical texts with an awareness that autobiography as the linear and coherent story of the writer’s life is no longer possible. Barthes knows that self-writing cannot reflect extratextual truth, and asks himself, “Do I not know that, in the field of the subject, there is no referent?”26 And of course he does know, but in some sense of course he cannot, not if he is to persist in his autobiographical project. Octave Mannoni’s formulation, “I know, but still . . . ” [“Je sais bien, mais quand même”] to describe disavowal in psychoanalysis aptly describes this position; both Barthes and Sarraute struggle to produce what Derrida might call autobiography sous râture, “autobiography.”27 Seeking to escape from conventional models of autobiography, both create what I characterize as third-person strategies, adding second and third-person voices to the “I” that we expect to find. Both split their narrating voices, resorting to reflexive commentary as they perform a double movement that acknowledges but then ultimately reclaims the pieces of their shattered selves. Autobiographical reflexivity marks all of the autobiographies I examine, taking different forms in different contexts. What begins as introspective commentary in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Childhood is transformed by visual media and by the situation of Francophonie. Via Barthes’s return to autobiography in his writing about photography, I move to a discussion of filmic autobiography, the impossibility of which has been argued on the basis of film’s inability to replicate the first person of writing. Film’s material and visible split between director or filmer and actor or filmed self defamiliarizes our notions of coherent identity, and I argue that it may thus provide us with new ways to explore and represent fragmented autobiographical subjectivity. Collard, however, rejects the third-person distance offered by the filmic form, instead adapting his autobiographical novel of fragmented and dispersed identity into a film that reunifies him for posterity. For examples of radically new autobiography, in which the represented self, not only split but multiply fragmented, is not reunified, I turn to postcolonial autobiog-

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raphy. Francophone autobiography, narrating identities split by the history and legacy of colonialism in a language that is never completely one’s own, epitomizes the “third person-ness” of all autobiography, the very crisis that led French writers and critics to proclaim the theoretical impossibility of the autobiographical enterprise. All of the self-narratives I will discuss are written by somehow marginalized subjects, aware of the impossibility of a “straight” autobiography. There is, however, an important difference between the success of Barthes, Sarraute, and Collard, as opposed to Djebar, Achkar, and Peck, in finding an autobiographical form that can adequately and (in)consistently represent their fragmentation. Djebar, Achkar, and Peck have been pushed by history and medium into the discovery of a form that looks outward rather than inward and incorporates different speaking voices, expanding the boundaries of what has been considered first-person narration. The filmic form and the postcolonial situation, experiences of separation and alienation at the margins or periphery of genre and place, provide autobiographers with what Homi Bhabha has called hybridity as “third space.” Bhabha writes that identification is a process of identifying with and through another object, an object of otherness, at which point the agency of identification—the subject—is itself always ambivalent, because of the intervention of that otherness.28

In this space, speaking about oneself can only happen through an other, a turning outward as well as inward; subjectivity, seen from the farthest edge of autobiography, remains forever incoherent and shifting. The first person, having recognized its second and third person-ness, can never be sure of itself in the same way again, and because of this very uncertainty it may once again be used to speak, write, and film stories of lives.

part i

Split Selves: French Autobiography in the First, Second, and Third Persons

chapter 1

Autobiography of Himself: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes “What is the meaning of a pure series of interruptions?”1

Roland Barthes has been a difficult figure to grasp, a literary critic who began as a structuralist and ended as a self-proclaimed novelist who produced works that did not much resemble novels. Antoine Compagnon’s search for the “true Barthes” is but one of many interventions in the debate about how to, or even whether to, reconcile the different stances adopted by Barthes over the course of his career.2 There does, however, seem to be a consensus that Barthes’s writing underwent a shift toward the personal in the last decade of his life, exhibiting what Jacques Derrida described as “a sort of autobiographical acceleration.”3 Scholars have not been able to agree on the text that would mark the beginning of this acceleration, holding varying opinions according to the version of Roland Barthes they wish to claim for their critical project. Jonathan Culler considers Barthes’s structuralist period to be his most important and has criticized his turn toward “hedonism” in 1973 with The Pleasure of the Text.4 Tzvetan Todorov dated a “change in Barthes’s discourse” to 1975 and the publication of Roland Barthes by Roland 1

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autobiography of himself

Barthes, claiming that this text differed from earlier ones not only because of its subject matter but also Barthes’s renunciation of a “voice of mastery.”5 Susan Sontag asserted that over time Barthes’s voice “became more and more personal,” then looked back to his earlier work and concluded that in fact “much of what Barthes wrote now seems autobiographical.”6 Her retrospective re-evaluation fits with what Steven Ungar has called an anti-structuralist reclaiming of Barthes in the wake of his late work and particularly his autobiography.7 Gerald Kennedy, for example, saw a “tension between personal confession and implacable theory” in Barthes’s writing after 1971 and understood this to be the mark of a recovering and repentant structuralist.8 I will examine this tension between the personal and the theoretical in two examples of Barthes’s later, autobiographical work, but without casting theory in the role of the villain as have Kennedy and, if to a lesser extent, Sontag. Barthes’s autobiographical work continued his lifelong preoccupation with subjectivity and writing, and, more precisely, subjectivity in writing. Although we will see within Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes a struggle with his own critical legacy, Barthes neither denounced nor unraveled his earlier arguments about authorship and subjectivity. Rather than attempt to bring coherence to his development as a thinker, he instead rejected the concept of coherence altogether in an autobiography that proclaimed the fragmentary nature of its subject and, of course, object. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes was published in 1975 by Les Editions du Seuil in a series called “Ecrivains de toujours.” This series had until then consisted of titles of the format X by Himself [“par lui-même”], selections from and critical appreciations of the work of an author, written by someone other than X him or herself, that is to say biographies and not autobiographies. Barthes himself had written Michelet par lui-même for this series in 1954. He knew the series well, then, and made a conscious choice to entitle his book Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes rather than Roland Barthes par lui-même, a fact forgotten or repressed by the striking number of critics who revert to the established title of the series when citing Barthes’s contribution to it.9 Another common error has been to refer to the book simply as Roland Barthes, a shorthand which omits the crucial repetition in the title.10 I insist on this since by calling the text Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes instead of Roland Barthes by Himself Barthes put into question the very possibility of the “par lui-même,” of writing about “oneself.” The placement of “by Ro-

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

3

land Barthes” within the title of the book highlights the question of authorship and its connection to the reflexive nature of autobiographical writing. The author of this text will be writing about the writer writing about the writer; the process of autobiography will be interrogated in the process of autobiography. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes wrestled with his own ideas, walking a tightrope between écriture and commentary, between jouissance and distance, with the desperate goal of escaping the trap of the first person, the imaginary and coherent “I” in the mirror which he knew to be a false image. To do so, he fragmented the autobiographical narrative as well as the autobiographical narrator, adding reflexive commentary in a third-person voice to the first-person narration typical of the genre of autobiography. This strategy ultimately brought with it, as we shall see, its own risks of coherence, both of text and subject. In Camera Lucida, written five years later, Barthes then tried the opposite strategy, throwing himself headlong into the first-person voice of the Imaginary, recounting the discovery of a photograph which revealed to him, via the experience of what he called the punctum, the essence of his mother’s identity, “the impossible science of the unique being.”11 In order to read Barthes’s first attempt at autobiography, we must first trace in his work a progression of the theorization of authorship as linked to conceptions of identity and subjectivity. In his famous (and infamous) 1968 essay “The Death of the Author,” Barthes opposed the auteur, traditional master of what he writes, to the scripteur, producer of écriture.12 The meaning of écriture originates in the reader rather than in the writer of the text: A text is made of multiple writings . . . but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. . . . [A] text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.13

The writing of a scriptor has a unity only of reception and never of origin; only the reader can bring coherence to its multiplicity. Two years later, Barthes divided all writing into two categories: the readerly [lisible], classical texts or products to be read and interpreted, and the writerly [scriptible], “production without product,” which can only be (re)written by the reader.14 Barthes never proclaimed the death of authorship altogether, however, and asserted in a 1970 interview that in the “multitext” of écriture “the author

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could be reinstated—as a paper being.”15 The death of the old Author, now capitalized to emphasize his unity and our understanding of his mastery, was a necessary precondition for the birth of écriture. His death empowered the text’s reader, and Barthes celebrated this transfer of power as equally liberatory for both scripteur and lecteur. He characterized écriture as “that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”16 The writing body, or author (no longer capitalized), is not dead but rather has lost, or escaped from, a singular identity. Whereas the Author had existed prior to his text, the scripteur neither records nor represents an extratextual reality but instead brings a text into being as this text simultaneously creates him; “writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, ‘depiction’ . . . rather, it designates what linguists . . . call a performative.”17 But who performs this performative, this seeming magic trick? Barthes insists that it is language itself and not any subject, or “I,” that speaks; “to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality . . . to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me.’”18 The author has been freed from speaking as, or in, a localizable or single voice. Yet an anxiety will accompany this freedom, this unbearable lightness of the “paper being,” especially when the text over which the scripteur relinquishes authority is that of his own life story. Less generally noted than the “death of the Author” in Barthes’s work, but crucial for an understanding of his shift toward autobiography, is the almost immediate “friendly return of the author” he proclaimed in the preface to his 1971 Sade, Fourier, Loyola. The author who returns is multiple and not singular, discontinuous and not coherent, “a mere plural of ‘charms’ . . . a discontinuous chant of amiabilities,” not behind but in the midst of the text.19 In The Pleasure of the Text, two years later, Barthes introduced the concept of jouissance, opposed to plaisir in a mirroring of the earlier oppositions between scripteur and Auteur and scriptible and lisible. Though the author is dead as an institution, the scripteur of the text of jouissance is alive to and for the reader, and they are connected through reciprocal desire rather than comprehension or interpretation; “I desire the author: I need his face [figure] . . . as he needs mine.”20 In 1972, moreover, Barthes had announced the return, along with the author, of his interest in an investigation of the fragmentation or “éclatement” of the subject.21 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

5

will be an attempt to portray such a subject, the “sujet de jouissance,” dissipated and exploded because of “the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss.”22 Barthes’s conception of the dispersed subject was profoundly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s theses on subjectivity in the fragments of The Will to Power. Nietzsche defined the subject as “the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum,” famously declaring that “the mistake lies in the fictitious insertion of a subject,” and suggested a new understanding of the subject “as multiplicity.”23 When Barthes brings back the author, he drags the subject in its wake, a subject who now takes pleasure in identity as a multiple fiction and no longer as an illusion of coherence; “This fiction is no longer the illusion of a unity; on the contrary, it is the theater of society in which we stage our plural: our pleasure is individual—but not personal.”24 It is this opposition between the pleasurable fiction of individual identity and the illusory unity of personal identity that will ultimately open the door to autobiography for Barthes. He will claim to create such a subject in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, one that is “merely an effect of language” (79).25 Yet if the text creates its scripteur, if writing is performance and not transcription, and if Barthes’s text is to be read as autobiography, we will have to redefine the genre. In a 1971 interview, Barthes said that “what would truly seduce me would be to write within what I have called ‘the novelistic without the novel,’ the novelistic without its characters: a writing of life, which could perhaps rejoin a certain moment of my own life.”26 Two years later, this scriptible new category of writing becomes an “essai”; “what I would like to do is to try out [essayer] novelistic forms, in such a way that none of them would take the name ‘novel,’ but each one would keep, and if possible renew, that of ‘essay.’”27 Both subtractions of the novel from the novelistic allow Barthes to avoid the word “autobiography,” if not, perhaps, the genre itself. In the conventional autobiographical text against which he is composing his own, an Author tells the story of a life already lived, narrating a self that existed and still exists outside of the text. Autobiographers have long bemoaned the impossibility of a perfect, or even adequate, recreation of their unique selves and histories in writing. Yet for Barthes the difficulties and dangers of autobiography were not a function of the correct or incorrect remembering and recording of events and feelings. The dilemma of autobiographical

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accuracy, central to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s self-portrait “painted exactly according to nature and in all of its truth,” is irrelevant to the scripteur, who has no pre-existing life to mimic.28 His autobiography would either always be perfect, identical to since created simultaneously with its subject, a letter which always reaches its destination, or always impossible, since a mere fiction.29 One might think, given the importance of the reader to écriture, that Barthes would agree with Paul de Man that autobiography is “not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts,” that the reader reads the “autobiographical” into the text.30 But we will see that Barthes, on the contrary, moves away from such a position in his autobiographical work. In light of Barthes’s theories of authorship and subjectivity, it is surprising that he would undertake an autobiographical project. Why take himself as his subject? He had already written the fragmentary subject as biography, first in Michelet by Himself, and later in Sade, Fourier, Loyola. In this second biography, or rather triad of biographies, Barthes developed the concept of the “biographeme,” the biographical fragment of the “dispersed subject.” This is the form in which he would like his own life story to be told, by someone else, after his death: Were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to ‘biographemes’ whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion.31

In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the biographeme is redefined as “a factitious anamnesis: the one I lend to the author I love” (109).32 The source of such a biographical fragment is its writer’s desire for someone else (the object of biography) and not the life of this other author. The shift from biographeme to autobiographeme, therefore, is by no means self-evident. Can one write a desire for oneself? Would it be “factitious” in the same way? To approach these questions, we will need to investigate how a Barthesian autobiography can, or should, be read. Written in Barthes’s handwriting inside the front cover of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the reader finds the enigmatic injunction, “All this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.”33 Before we have even begun to read the book, we have been forewarned by the author, in his own

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script, of an instability in its generic classification. But what exactly have we been warned about? Some have understood this to be an affirmation of genre—this book is fiction and not autobiography. Yet it is difficult to read the sentence as a marker of generic belonging, especially given the “as if” on which it turns. What does it mean to consider “all this” (a vague reference to the text itself, devoid of any description, naming, or genre) “as if ” (as if it were, that is to say, it is not but we can pretend) said by a character in a novel? Especially when we know fully well that Roland Barthes is not a character in a novel, but an eminent literary and cultural critic whose name figures twice in the book’s title and who is identified in the series of photographs with which the book begins. The warning refers to the narrating voice of the text, not the text itself—“as if spoken by a character in a novel” and not “as if it were a novel.” Louis Bolle has rightly noted that Barthes sends us back to the “Cretan liar paradox”; if a Cretan says all Cretans are liars, what can we take to be the truth?34 If Barthes says that Barthes is telling his story, but that we should think of Barthes as a fictional narrator, what genre should we be reading? This epigraph is emblematic of an ambivalence with regard to autobiography that leads Barthes to hedge his bets; he provides us with all of the conventional markers of autobiography, all the while asserting that he is not writing an autobiography. Barthes’s autobiographical text is avowedly not an attempt to convey the authentic essence or sense of his life to a reader, nor to reveal the secret meaning at the heart of its subject. His non-coherent subject of autobiography is not merely split, but multiply fragmented, in order to avoid the risk of being read for what Nietzsche called a cause behind the effects: The person divided? For classical metaphysics, there was no disadvantage in ‘dividing’ the person (Racine: I have two men in me); quite the contrary, decked out in two opposing terms, the person advanced like a good paradigm (high/low, flesh/spirit, heaven/earth); the parties to the conflict were reconciled in the establishment of a meaning: the meaning of Man. This is why, when we speak today of a divided subject, it is never to acknowledge his simple contradictions, his double postulations, etc.; it is a diffraction which is intended, a dispersion of energy in which there remains neither a central core nor a structure of meaning: I am not contradictory, I am dispersed (143).35

The main character of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes should have, then,

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no central core of unity and meaning, but only multiple, scattered surfaces which cannot be read into or interpreted. According to Barthes, the autobiographer should not analyze himself but rewrite himself. Autobiography is thus a genre of surface rather than depth and his own is like a patchwork quilt; “Far from reaching the core of the matter, I remain on the surface, for this time it is a matter of ‘myself’ (of the Ego), and depth belongs to others” (142).36 If this is the case, however, what can the reader, in theory so important to Barthes, get out of (or give to) autobiography? We will find a model for Barthes’s ideal reader of autobiography, one who experiences rather than interprets a text, only in the description of his own somewhat mystical experience of being struck by the punctum of a photograph in Camera Lucida, to which I will return in Chapter 3. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes was designed to accommodate and present the kind of authorial subjectivity about which Barthes had theorized, to be a text of jouissance, a scriptible example of écriture. It stages a Nietzschean subject, resurrecting the paper author in which Barthes could believe. The text is kaleidoscopic, to account for the fragmented and changeable nature of the subject: “to this idea of a unitary subject I prefer the play of the kaleidoscope: you give it a tap, and the bits of colored glass reorder themselves.”37 The autobiography begins with approximately forty pages of photographs of the author and his family with accompanying captions and commentary. In one of these captions, Barthes asserts that the process of writing itself renders coherence impossible for him; “Once I produce, once I write, it is the text itself which (fortunately) dispossesses me of my narrative duration” (4).38 These pages are followed by a series of written fragments, which are arranged alphabetically according to their titles. These sub-headings are more or less (and often less) descriptive of the themes of the fragments, rendering the ostensibly arbitrary organization of the text suspect. In addition to this ostentatiously discontinuous style, Barthes splits the narrative voice of his text into the first and third persons, often within the same paragraph, yet another attempt to avoid any fixity of image or identity, any notion of underlying essence. Barthes points to his predilection for the fragmentary as something that has always characterized his writing: To write by fragments: the fragments are then so many stones on the perim-

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eter of a circle: I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the center, what? His first, or nearly first text (1942) consists of fragments; this choice is then justified in the Gidean manner ‘because incoherence is preferable to a distorting order.’ Since then, as a matter of fact, he has never stopped writing in brief bursts: the little scenes of Mythologies and of The Empire of Signs, the articles and prefaces of Critical Essays, the lexias of S/Z, the titled paragraphs of Michelet, the fragments of the second essay on Sade in Sade, Fourier, Loyola and of the Pleasure of the Text (92–93).39

There is something paradoxical about being characterized by the incessant practice of fragmentation, a strategy designed to avoid the trap of coherence and thus slip away from characterizability, and this paradox itself characterizes Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Barthes balances precariously between the risk of coherence in continuous and seamless narration and the risk of coherence in a reflexive and fragmentary récit, and he is aware of this; “In all this there are risks of recession: the subject speaks about himself (risk of psychologism, risk of infatuation), he offers his discourse in fragments (risk of aphorism, risk of arrogance)” (152).40 Barthes so strenuously dodges the risk of coherence in the “I” that he underestimates the risk of coherence in the “he.” Given Barthes’s resistance to any possible coherence for the multiple and fragmented subject, we must ask whether this subject has any fixed locus at all outside of the text. Nietzsche suggested that we abandon the consideration of a false unity of consciousness in order instead to discuss the body: Everything that enters consciousness as a ‘unity’ is already tremendously complex: we always have only a semblance of unity. The phenomenon of the body is the richer, clearer, more tangible phenomenon: to be discussed first, methodologically, without coming to any decision about its ultimate significance.41

Barthes again follows his lead, allowing for the singularity, and locatability, of the sujet de jouissance in a concrete, material body rather than an interpretable and thus meaningful subject. He says of his new lowercase a author, “he is not a (civil, moral) person, he is a body.”42 But how does one write the autobiography of a body? We find one possible answer in a fragment of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes entitled “J’aime, je n’aime pas,” which lists things that Barthes likes and dislikes. The list is deceptively banal, and Barthes

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comments on its signification; “My body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes, a kind of blurry hatchery, gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation” (117).43 But unlike Georges Perec, whose Je me souviens consists entirely of a list, Barthes does not attempt to write his text as the autobiography of a body.44 He in fact describes being confronted with the unrecognizability of even his own body; he can see it, in mirrors or in photographs, only as a coherent image which does not correspond to the multiplicity he theorizes himself to be. Barthes writes à propos two photographs of himself, dated 1942 and 1970 respectively: “But I never looked like that!”—How do you know? What is the “you” you might or might not look like? Where do you find it? . . . You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the imaginary (36).45

He finds that the body, like the subject, cannot escape imaginary unification. Barthes’s posthumously published Incidents lacks any connecting narrative, and Ross Chambers has aptly described it as a “pointless story.”46 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, on the other hand, in which Barthes connects the stories of his life and work through commentary, has several points to make. Seeking recognition, and thus unable to limit himself to his body, Barthes brings together a body of work which then condemns him to unity; “Snare of infatuation: to suggest that he is willing to consider what he writes as a work, an ‘oeuvre’—to move from the contingency of writings to the transcendence of a unitary, sacred product. The word ‘oeuvre’ is already imaginary” (136).47 We know from Roman Jakobson and Emile Benveniste, as did Barthes, that the first-person singular pronoun in language, the “I,” is a shifter and refers only to a “reality of discourse,” to “the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing ‘I.’”48 Benveniste has warned us away from a belief in any transcendent subjectivity that would exist outside of language, replacing the Cartesian cogito, “I think therefore I am,” with “I say I, therefore I become myself ”; “‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego.’”49 Jacques Lacan described a similar process of accession to the first person in his description of the mirror stage,

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which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the illusion [leurre] of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic— and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure its entire mental development.50

The child in his mother’s arms looks into the mirror, misrecognizes himself as the coherent image he sees there, and thus becomes able to constitute himself in language. From the undifferentiated Imaginary of the mirror stage, he or she enters the Symbolic realm and is subjectified in (and split by) language. In the first section of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes presents us with an oval photograph of himself on his mother’s lap that has been mounted on dark paper. We seem to see an image of the two of them looking into a mirror. The caption for the image reads “Le stade du miroir: ‘tu es cela,’” which has been perilously mistranslated in the text’s English version as “That’s you!” (21). Rather, Barthes has written “You are that,” describing the misrecognition and not recognition, “the méconnaissances that constitute the ego,” as, in Lacan’s schema, the child enters the realm of the Symbolic.51 Although Barthes had carefully read his Lacan, he nonetheless framed and wrote what follows as a restaging of the mirror stage, one by which, through the strategies of fragmentation which characterize him as a writer, or rather, a scripteur, he might escape orthopedic totality. Barthes acknowledges that an autobiography is necessarily a book of the Imaginary, that in fact “the vital effort of this book is to stage an imaginary” (105).52 For this reason, his text is like a novel; “nothing is more purely imaginary than (self-) critique. The substance of this book, ultimately, is therefore totally novelistic” (120).53 Yet Barthes at the same time resists the Imaginary because he feels it to be mortally dangerous: Writing myself, I merely repeat the extreme operation by which Balzac, in Sarrasine, has made castration and castrature ‘coincide’: I myself am my own symbol, I am the story which happens to me: freewheeling in language, I have nothing to compare myself to; and in this movement, the pronoun of the imaginary, ‘I,’ is im-pertinent; the symbolic becomes literally immediate: essential danger for the life of the subject: to write on oneself may seem a pretentious idea; but it is also a simple idea: simple as the idea of suicide (56).54

This resistance parallels Barthes’s rejection of autobiography as the revela-

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tion of an interpretable, that is to say authentic, self. He claims to have chosen to recount meaningless memories to the reader of his text; “These few anamneses are more or less matte, (insignificant: exempt of meaning). The more one succeeds in making them matte, the better they escape the imaginary” (109–10).55 As we have seen, Barthes wrote his autobiography as a collection of fragments in an attempt to resist the coherent “I,” the Imaginary image in Lacan’s mirror. He does not want to believe in this “Ideal-I” [je-idéal] which, in Lacan’s words, situates “the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction.”56 Barthes defies the coherence of the Imaginary as if he could avoid the mirror stage, or, more precisely, as if he could get the better of it, as if it were an error on the part of the subject instead of a necessary stage on the path to language and social interaction. Desiring to write a “romanesque” which would somehow not be fictional, he structures his autobiography around a photographic image of the mirror stage which is succeeded, rather than preceded, by fragmentation. He can then get past it, fragmentation intact, to go on “vers l’écriture” (45). In perhaps the most quoted phrase from Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Barthes asks, “Do I not know that, in the field of the subject, there is no referent?” (56).57 Many critics choose to cite only the part of this sentence that is in italics, at the same time omitting the question mark. As a result, the words have often been presented, like the book’s epigraph, as a defiant assertion of the referential fallacy, as a proclamation of non-autobiographicalness rather than as what seems much more like what Johnnie Gratton has called “an effort of self-persuasion.”58 Once we read the entire sentence, including the question mark, we become all too aware of Barthes’s struggle to revive autobiography for his personal use, in the face of and despite his own prior theoretical discourse. Autobiography, in the wake of the author and the subject, has its own friendly return. The central question within Barthes’s autobiographical text, the investigation of this “do I not know,” is that of the correspondence between the writing and written “I”s of the text, between the two Roland Barthes of the title. Barthes compares the experience of listening to a tape recording of himself playing the piano to that of writing about his own writing: When I listen to myself having played—after an initial moment of lucidity in which I perceive one by one the mistakes I have made—there occurs a kind of rare coincidence: the past of my playing coincides with the present

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of my listening, and in this coincidence, commentary is abolished: there remains nothing but the music . . . When I pretend to write on what I have written in the past, there occurs in the same way a movement of abolition, not of truth . . . I abandon the exhausting pursuit of an old piece of myself, I do not try to restore myself (as we say of a monument). I do not say: ‘I am going to describe myself’ but: ‘I am writing a text, and I call it R.B.’ I shift from imitation (from description) and entrust myself to nomination (56).59

Barthes dreams of attaining a perfect coincidence of past and present of writing as of music, but our alienation in language makes this impossible. He therefore must do the next best thing, rewrite rather than overwrite, recreate and rename himself and his past writing rather than describe them. Adjectives are dangerous, since “a relationship which adjectivizes is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death” (43).60 Barthes also resists analogy, which he calls his “bête noire,” similarly because of his fear of the Imaginary; “When I resist analogy, it is actually the imaginary I am resisting: which is to say: the coalescence of the sign, the similitude of signifier and signified, the homeomorphism of images, the Mirror, the captivating bait [leurre]” (44).61 This death by image can be the result of adjectival description, analogy, or visual representation; any fixing of his identity is unbearable. Once again, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes cannot be Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes or Roland Barthes by Himself; the choice between a single piece of fabric and a patchwork is a matter of life and death. In order to save himself from the deadly Imaginary, which becomes in the text’s last fragment “the monster of totality” (180), Barthes tries to produce in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes a Brechtian “alienation-effect.” In Bertolt Brecht’s theoretical writings about his “epic theater,” he advised that the actor present a character “which changes all the time and becomes more and more clearly defined in the course of this way of changing.”62 Fredric Jameson has linked this theory of acting to a conception of selfhood similar to Barthes’s own: Brecht’s positions are better read not as a refusal of identification but, rather, as the consequences to be drawn from the fact that such a thing never existed in the first place. In that case, ‘third-person acting,’ the quoting of a character’s expressions of feeling and emotion, is the result of a radical absence of the self, or at least coming to terms with the realization

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that what we call our ‘self’ is itself an object for consciousness, not our consciousness itself.63

Since Barthes was trying to present precisely this kind of self, one without core or essence, in his autobiography, it is not surprising that he adopted the Brechtian technique mentioned by Jameson, transposition into the third person.64 Brecht’s goal was to produce a reflexive experience for the spectator, who should always remain critical and detached; “the audience identifies itself with the actor as being an observer, and accordingly develops his attitude of observing or looking on.”65 His Verfremdungs-effekt drew on Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie, “the removal of [an] object from the sphere of automatized perception,” and shared the goal of estranging, of making strange, something we take for granted, in this case a conventional notion of coherent character.66 Barthes, having attempted to denaturalize traditional autobiographical subjectivity and thereby escape its Imaginary, suddenly finds himself at the antipodes of écriture and the abandonment to feeling and desire of jouissance, (“pleasure without separation,”) in a space of alienation (as in the mirror stage) that he associates with death.67 In the fragment entitled “Moi, je,” Barthes writes: To speak about oneself by saying ‘he’ can mean: I am speaking about myself as though I were more or less dead, caught up in a faint mist of paranoiac rhetoric, or again: I am speaking about myself in the manner of the Brechtian actor who must distance his character: ‘show’ rather than incarnate him, and give his manner of speaking a kind of fillip whose effect is to pry the pronoun from its name, the image from its support, the imaginary from its mirror (168–69).68

“Moi par moi,” “the very program of the imaginary” (153), had been suicidal, yet “me” as “he” bears the same threat. Barthes is caught in the middle, “forever enclosed within the pronominal cage: ‘I’ mobilizes the imaginary, ‘you’ and ‘he,’ paranoia” (168).69 Barthes grapples in his autobiographical texts with this tension between écriture and jouissance on the one hand and reflexivity through Brechtian distanciation on the other; he can neither pry the pronoun from its name nor accept a connection between the two. Worst of all, it is not even clear that he can break the spell of the Imaginary by the use of commentary, which he calls a signing of his own imaginary:

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If the imaginary constituted a clear-cut piece whose embarrassment was always certain, it would be enough to announce this piece on each occasion by some metalinguistic operator, in order to be cleared of having written it. This is what could be done here for some of the fragments (quotation marks, parentheses, dictation, scene, etc.); the subject, doubled (or imagining himself so), sometimes manages to sign his imaginary. But this is not a surefire practice; first of all, because by splitting up what I say, I merely project the image further, in spite of everything, producing a secondary grimace (105).70

In an autobiography full of self-commentary, dislocation, and quotation, Barthes is nostalgic for écriture, and criticizes what he calls the second degree of language: I write: this is the first degree of language. Then I write that I write and this is the second degree . . . Today there is an enormous consumption of this second degree. . . . The second degree is also a way of life . . . We can even become maniacs of the second degree: reject denotation, spontaneity, platitude, innocent repetition, tolerate only languages which testify, however frivolously, to a power of dislocation: parody, amphibology, surreptitious quotation. As soon as it thinks itself, language becomes corrosive. But on one condition . . . if I take off the brake (of reason, of science, of morality), if I put the speech act into neutral, then I open the way to an endless detachment, I abolish language’s good conscience (66).71

All of the characteristics of the “second degree” that he mentions here, Brechtian strategies for alienation, ultimately lock the subject back up in his imaginary. The only way out of this dilemma is through a second degree to the nth power, a paradoxical endless detachment and free play of distance which Barthes undertook with the writing of a short review of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes entitled “Barthes to the Third Power,” but could obviously never complete.72 Barthes, then, wanted to write his autobiography as a text of jouissance and refuse a deadly adjectivization. In The Pleasure of the Text, he wrote that the text of jouissance could not be interpreted and, moreover, can wring from me only this judgement, in no way adjectival: that’s it! And further still: that’s it for me! This ‘for me’ is neither subjective nor existential, but Nietzschean (‘ . . . basically, it is always the same question: What is it for me? . . . ’).73

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Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, therefore, once again follows Nietzsche, who wrote that one can only (and must always) ask “‘what is that for me?’” since: A ‘thing-in-itself’ is just as perverse as a ‘sense-in-itself,’ a ‘meaning-initself.’ There are no ‘facts-in-themselves,’ for a sense must always be projected into them before there can be ‘facts.’ The question ‘what is that?’ is an imposition of meaning from some other viewpoint.74

If Barthes’s fragmented author-subject can only write from a personal perspective, so as not to impose meaning or reinsert a master-subject, autobiography would seem to provide a perfect frame. In autobiographical writing, however, the “I” is a “that” to be examined and “what is that for me?” becomes “What am I for me?” This objectification of the moi is evident in Barthes’s use of the third person throughout Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, beginning with the title. Barthes ends up writing autobiography as a reflexive, third-person narrative, as commentary not only on his earlier texts, but also on his present self of writing. The third-person voice is characterized by Benveniste as fundamentally opposed to the first and second persons; as “the verbal form whose function is to express the non-person,” it is non-reflexive.75 This linguistic non-reflexivity, however, becomes narrative reflexivity, since the third person is used to refer to “an object located outside direct address,” a reality supposedly outside of the scene of enunciation.76 Barthes himself pointed out this aspect of the third person many times in his theoretical writings, most memorably in his repeated use, from as early as 1953 until the year of his death, of the phrase “Larvatus prodeo”: The passé simple and the third person in the Novel are nothing but the fateful gesture by which the writer points to the mask he is wearing. The whole of literature can say ‘Larvatus prodeo,’ I advance while pointing to my mask.77

This comes from an early text written by René Descartes under the pseudonym Polybius Cosmopolitanus: “Actors, called to the stage, wear a mask in order to hide the redness of their brows. Like them, as I step into this theater of the world where, until now, I have been only a spectator, I go forth masked.”78 Barthes repeatedly mistranslated Larvatus prodeo, always in the same way; not content merely to advance masked, he pointed to the

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mask, never revealing what, if anything, was underneath it. This mask, this pseudonym, is in the case of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes indistinguishable from its double, from what it may or may not cover. Barthes’s autobiography is, as is all literature, “a mask which points to itself,” and in it he writes that the Imaginary, “fatal substance of the novel and the labyrinth of levels in which anyone who speaks about himself gets lost, . . . is taken over by several masks (personae), distributed according to the depth of the stage (and yet no one [personne] is behind them)” (119–20).79 The double meaning of this “personne” epitomizes the way in which Barthes tries to have it both ways, pointing to the mask of fragments and alternating personal pronouns while writing the nothing, or someone, it concealed. The game of autobiography is similar to Barthes’s later description of the play of love: Know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: know that I don’t want to show it: that is the message I address to the other. Larvatus prodeo: I advance pointing to my mask: I put a mask on my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask.80

Love, then, surprisingly sends us back to Brecht and the alienation-effect as well, as Jameson points out (in words close to Barthes’s), since “third-person acting is a way of . . . ratifying the ‘imaginary’ nature of the self by holding it at a distance on the stage and allowing its ventriloquism to designate itself.”81 We can also see in Barthes’s play of masking a coy response to accusations of having obscured his sexuality. In a pun that mirrors Barthes’s method, Gratton writes that “Barthes knows too much . . . to be a straight autobiographer.”82 Ten pages after a fragment entitled “The goddess H,” in which the two “h”s are “homosexuality and hashish” (63), Barthes includes a photograph of a handwritten draft of the fragment, which reads “the goddess Homo, Homosexuality . . . the goddess Homosexuality” (75).83 Larvatus prodeo—he points to his mask as he advances; he signs the Imaginary he has written. Paul de Man’s essay on autobiography, which begins as a reading of William Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs, suggests prosopopeia as the trope of autobiography. Autobiography, like prosopopeia, is “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech.”84 Au-

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tobiography may commence as “a discourse of self-restoration,” but it ultimately “deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores,” due to “the latent threat that inhabits prosopopeia, namely that by making the dead speak, the symmetrical nature of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death.”85 We may understand Barthes’s association of the Imaginary in autobiographical writing with death, and more specifically suicide, along these lines. He writes the mask (the prosopon) of the dead Author-subject and gives voice to an autobiographical persona which then threatens to take (over) his life, freezing him into a mirror image; “He is troubled by any image of himself, suffers when he is named” (43).86 To elucidate further the link between reflection in the mirror stage and the reflexive nature of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, I must return once more to Lacan, who argued in his eleventh seminar that “the privilege of the subject seems to be established here from that bipolar reflexive relationship by which, as soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me.”87 Lacan argued that the subject depends on the gaze and not vice versa, and that it is precisely through the “meta” moment of seeing oneself seeing oneself (“I see myself seeing myself”) that the gaze, “fortunately” for the subject, is elided or misunderstood [méconnu].88 Referring to Parrhasios’s trompel’oeil painting of a veil on a wall, Lacan added that “if one wishes to deceive [tromper] a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that he wants to see beyond.”89 Barthes’s use of the third person in his autobiography veils, or masks, the blank wall he knows the subject to be. If the mirror stage is the misrecognition of the image of a coherent self as the self, reflexivity is then the illusion that since one is reflecting upon oneself, there is a self to be reflected (upon). In both cases, it is reflection which provides coherence. Contrary to Claude Abastado’s assertion that “writing in fragments denounces the principle of self-explication,” it is precisely through the fragmentation of the narrative voice and the resulting dominance of the third-person commentary that Barthes re-creates in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes the coherent self that he had ostensibly been trying to escape.90 Once again, Barthes, always one step ahead of us, was aware of this possibility: I have the illusion of believing that by breaking up my discourse I cease to discourse in terms of the imaginary about myself, attenuating the risk of

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transcendence; but since the fragment (haiku, maxim, pensée, journal entry) is finally a rhetorical genre and since rhetoric is that layer of language which best presents itself to interpretation, by believing that I disperse myself I merely return, quite docilely, to the bed of the imaginary (95).91

An autobiographical text of jouissance seems to be unwriteable. Or, perhaps, Barthes did not want to write it. Michel Beaujour has called Barthes’s autobiography an “autoportrait,” a text which stages “a double postulation toward the imaginary and against the imaginary.”92 Barthes said that, in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, “I wanted to weave a kind of moiré with all of these pronouns in order to write a book that is in fact the book of the imaginary, but an imaginary that is trying to undo and unravel itself.”93 We see Barthes’s creation of an imaginary of himself, or for himself, in the emphasis on his life-long feelings of exclusion. To mention but a few examples: he is left-handed (102), “excluded . . . from the symbolics of the State” (172), always in a “minority situation” (131), and remembers being tormented by other children until his mother came to save him; “they teased me: lost! Alone! Watched! Excluded! (to be excluded is not to be outside, it is to be alone in the hole, imprisoned under the open sky: precluded)” (121– 22).94 He describes his detachment from common language, “from which he is separated” (115), and popular culture in a manner that recalls the Romantic ideal of the estranged and suffering artist: The Doxa speaks, I hear it, but I am not within its space. A man of paradox, like any writer, I am behind the door; I would very much like to pass through, I would very much like to see what is being said, to participate in the communal scene; I am constantly listening to what I am excluded from; I am in a stunned state, cut off from the popularity of language (123).95

These recurrent images of solitude and separation from the rest of the world reveal a desire for a direct and expressive voice: He felt more than excluded; detached; forever assigned the place of the witness, whose discourse can only be, of course, subject to codes of detachment: either narrative, or explicative, or challenging, or ironic: never lyrical, never homogenous with the pathos outside of which he must seek his place (86).96

This opposition of lyric and ironic discourse brings to mind Barthes’s earlier opposition of first-person narrative voice and the Imaginary of the coherent self on the one hand and third-person voice and a Nietzchean multiplicity of

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selves on the other. Distancing and alienation are by-products of the third person, however, and send Barthes back to the Imaginary (and here, paradoxically, to an imaginary of exclusion and alienation). Barthes’s nostalgia for écriture amid his own distancing strategies has been transformed into a nostalgia for lyric discourse, here aligned with homogeneity rather than fragmentation. Joan Copjec has argued that it is in fact the act of looking at oneself objectively, as if from the outside, that produces the illusion of a more real but always-hidden self. Self-surveillance in the third rather than the first person “allows thought to become (not wholly visible, but) secret; it allows thought to remain hidden . . . the very possibility of concealment is raised only by the subject’s objective relation to itself.”97 Whereas Barthes claimed that in the experience of the perfect coincidence of present and past listening to himself playing the piano “commentary is abolished” (56), he chose not to abolish commentary in his autobiographical writing. Writing about himself produced a split between writing and written Roland Barthes, which he of course knew had always already been there, and he tried to use commentary to stitch the two back together. Despite his desire for the “lyrical,” Barthes nevertheless assumed the position of hyper-reflexive third-person autobiographer within Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and fell into the trompe-l’oeil trap. His strategy of introspective commentary, rather than fragmenting his imaginary, has helped it to cohere. Barthes produced exactly what he was trying to avoid, the representation of an inner self, of something that would exist behind the mask he kept pointing to, that would be covered by the patchwork quilt of his text. The third person is the price he paid to resist the mirror image which, he nonetheless knew, was all he could write: Having accepted to write about ‘himself,’ he could only state what belonged solely to him: not the Symbolic, Jouissance, but the Mirror: the varying, layered, delayed, always deceptive modes according to which he imagines himself.98

Whether autobiography is written in the first or the third person, or even a mixture of the two, it always leads back to a mirror. The problem, perhaps, is not that of what sort of self to represent, but of the conception of any self at all. Jane Gallop has observed that the disconnected bundle of fragments that is the child prior to the mirror stage can

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itself only be a construction, retroactively imagined from the position of the coherent je-idéal: The mirror stage is a turning point. After it the subject’s relation to himself is always mediated through a totalizing image which has come from outside. . . . But since the ‘self’ is necessarily a totalized, unified concept—a division between an inside and an outside—there is no ‘self’ before the mirror stage. The mirror stage is thus a turning point, but between what and what? It is a turning point in the chronology of a self, but it is also the origin, the moment of constitution of that self.99

The fragmented pre- or non-mirror stage self that Barthes attempted to portray in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, therefore, is just as imaginary as the coherent one he is trying to resist. Jonathan Loesberg, who follows de Man but takes his ideas in a slightly different direction, concludes that autobiography is always successful since it does not re-present but rather creates a self. Moreover, “the self it inscribes and creates necessitates the concept of that self’s extra-textuality.”100 Barthes, perhaps despite himself, perhaps inevitably, has ultimately inscribed for himself an autobiographical self; the second Roland Barthes has climbed out of the italics of the title. Yet I do not mean thereby to suggest that Barthes somehow erred, or failed, in his choice of strategy and structure for his autobiographical text. We must remember that, in the words of Slavoj Zizek, “the subject is nothing but the failure point of the process of his symbolic representation,” and, furthermore, “the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of its own representation; that is why the failure of representation is the only way to represent it adequately.”101 Self-representation is as impossible and necessary as the mirror stage; to exist as subjects in and of language we must regularly fail at an irresistible task. Barthes recognized that playing with the subject was a dangerous game, since “if it is a question of evading [déjouer] the subject, playing [jouer] is an illusory method, and even contrary in effect to what it seeks to accomplish: the subject of such play is more stable than ever; the real game is not to mask the subject but to mask the playing itself” (142).102 He strategically protected himself, therefore, during his hazardous excursion into autobiography, making it quite difficult for the critic, accustomed to the privilege of the third person, to say anything about the text. The difficulty of any analysis of Barthes, according to Claude Coste, is that “fragmentation, autocom-

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mentary, and the art of the formula all divert analysis and the scholar must often resist the triple temptation of pastiche, paraphrase, and quotation.”103 Many critics, in fact, do not, or cannot, resist; they produce Barthesian texts about Barthes which repeat Barthes in the style of Barthes, reweaving his own musings into a slightly different web. It is nearly impossible to say anything about Barthes that he has not already said about himself. What is more, since Barthes asserted, in another brilliantly defensive move, that “criticism always deals with the texts of pleasure, never the texts of bliss,” it is clear that by undertaking a critique I have transformed his text of bliss into one of pleasure and am myself the cause of the reunification of his fragmentary self.104 By pointing out contradictions within Barthes’s autobiographical writing I have either confirmed his self-depiction as contradictory or else painted him as a different subject than the one, or those, he claimed (not) to be. “There may be nothing to say about writerly [scriptibles] texts”; such a text “demolishes any criticism which, once produced, would mix with it.”105 One cannot analyze or interpret texts of jouissance, which exist only as the reader reproduces them, erasing any distinction between original text and rewriting. I will conclude for now, then, with the inevitable pastiche, using Barthes’s own words from before, during, and after the writing of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes to recapitulate the dilemma autobiography posed for him. Faced with an autobiographical project, Roland Barthes holds in his hands the reins of both pleasure and bliss; “he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss).”106 He alternately embraces and resists the imaginary, alternately speaks as an “I” and a “he” who steps back to comment on this “I”; “this book is not the book of his ideas; it is the book of the I, the book of my resistances to my own ideas; it is a recessive book (which steps back [recule], but which may also distance itself [prend du recul]” (119).107 “Prisoner of a collection (‘X by himself’) which asked him to ‘tell himself,’ Barthes could only say one thing: that he was the only one who could not speak truly about himself. . . . [A]s an imaginary and ideological subject, misrecognition (not error, but the infinite deferral of truth across language) is his fatal lot.”108

chapter 2

Internal Conversation: Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood

“i always told you, there is no ‘i’ . . . ”1

Like Roland Barthes, Nathalie Sarraute unexpectedly turned to autobiographical writing toward the end of her career as a writer. When she published Enfance in 1983, Sarraute was eighty-three years old and had written nine novels. Again like Barthes, she was also a theorist and, as we will see, returned to the themes and techniques of both her fiction and criticism in her autobiographical writing. Associated with the French Nouveau Roman in the 1950s and 60s, Sarraute aligned herself with the search for new forms for the novel. A fundamental difference, however, set her apart from writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet; she wanted to explore “the deep interior” while they focused on “external description.”2 Whereas Barthes split his autobiographical voice by adding to the traditional autobiographical first person self-commentary in the third person, Sarraute, interested in narrating from the inside rather than from the outside, avoided the third person and instead added a second-person voice. She wrote that all of her experiments in writing sought “to unveil, to bring into existence an unknown reality [ . . . ] that 23

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will not let itself be expressed in known and worn out forms . . . that can only reveal itself in a new mode of expression, in new forms.”3 My analysis of Sarraute’s autobiographical practice will center around this tension between literature as the unveiling of a deeper reality and as the creation of new, non-referential forms, between the “unveiling” and the “bringing into existence.”4 Sarraute, very much unlike Barthes, believed that an extra-textual, deeply buried, and essential reality lies beneath the surface of the everyday world. She strove to access this level of existence in her writing, to go “beyond appearances, underneath appearances,” by means of devices she called tropisms.5 Tropism is the biological term for the turning of an organism toward or away from an external stimulus such as light or heat. Sarraute’s tropisms—“those kinds of instinctive movements that are independent of our wishes, that are provoked by external stimuli”—were both these involuntary and deeply real movements which exist before language and her written evocations of them, first attempted in her first book, Tropisms, published in 1939.6 While Barthes avoided adjectival description and analogy because of their tendency to fix and deaden identity, Sarraute feared what she felt to be the stifling and petrifying effect of all words on this life underneath ordinary (and therefore false) reality. Yet without language to bring them to the surface, tropisms are forever lost to us. This delicate struggle to communicate tropistic reality constituted her task as a novelist: I have always said that there exist sensations, very vague and unexpressed, which without words of course could never come out, but which exist before and drive words. Words allow us to communicate them. Words can also, if thrown right away on vague sensations, fix and suffocate them. All that I try to do, then, is to let these sensations live, until they themselves suggest words. [ . . . ] Language is a rigid instrument and very suffocating [ . . . ] I have tried never to accept words and definitions that come from the outside.7

Sarraute believed that tropisms may be successfully represented as long as the words used to do so are not already overused and thus drained of novelty and power; “words possess the qualities needed to seize upon, protect and bring out into the open these subterranean movements that are at once impatient and afraid.”8 Only experimental forms and uses of language can present these fragile and blurred movements without damaging them. She

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was always balancing between risks at two extremes, banal but safe and conventional writing on one side and impenetrable writing or total silence on the other: It is enough, in fact, for language to lose contact with the unnamed, to move away from that source from which it draws its vitality [ . . . ] and like the horse that returns to the stable, it will return to the safety of the terra firma on which it hopes to run no risks. [ . . . ] And on the contrary if language lets itself be drawn too far into those silent and obscure zones, it gets stuck there, disintegrates, becomes only obscurity and silence.9

The zones of tropisms lie beyond appearance and beneath reality, are internal rather than external, but does this also imply that they are inside of us? Robbe-Grillet once accused Sarraute of fostering “a resurgence of the old myth of interiority,” and this is true, but only in a very specific sense.10 The underlying reality of tropisms, the “unnamed” that Sarraute mythologized, was never the individualized interiority of a person. She considered conventional conceptions of identity to be something imposed from the outside, like a mask, onto undifferentiated and universal matter in movement. This is true of the way others see us—“Myself I am . . . But, precisely, I am not . . . It’s you who . . . yes, you understand, there is no way to coincide with that, with what you have constructed”—as well as our self-conceptions— “the ‘I’ is already something that is constructed from the outside.”11 Sarraute consistently rejected psychologizing in life and in literature, condemning psychoanalysis, both of people and of literary characters, as a stultifying “iron gate [ . . . ] placed over that immense and mobile mass that we call our ‘heart of hearts.’”12 The artificial and convenient construction of the “I,” of personality or of a character, is “a simple trompe-l’oeil, a vestige, an accidental support,” which distances us from the reality of tropisms.13 This trompe-l’oeil is not a veil painted on a wall, as for Lacan and, at least in principle, Barthes, but in fact covers a hidden reality. If we look from the inside rather than in from the outside, we can see this reality and understand that “there is no identity.”14 Sarraute’s theories of character in the novel follow from her theories of selfhood and identity, and both are inseparable from her theory of tropisms. In an early essay entitled “The Age of Suspicion,” she attacked critics of the view that “no novelist is worthy of the title unless he is able to ‘believe in’ his characters, which is what makes it possible for him to make them ‘lifelike’

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and give them ‘novelistic depth.’”15 Similarly, responding to criticism of the Nouveau Roman for not having believable characters, she asked, “what does it mean to say that a character is lifelike? Why do we say they are lifelike?” and concluded that “vivant” here signifies nothing but conventionally written and easily recognizable.16 According to Sarraute, neither New Novelists nor their readers believe in such characters anymore—we are all suspicious. Sarraute’s characters are often not at all recognizable as such, and are lifelike only in the sense that they partake of the living reality of tropisms. She worked to avoid the deadening effect of externally imposed and fixed character on the interior stirrings of tropisms, and for this reason her characters rarely even have names: If I give a name to a character, I place myself at a distance from him: I name him from the outside. Whereas I am inside his consciousness and I try to move like him, to be taken with him in his movements, carried by them.17

Rejecting the conventional characterization based on exterior description practiced by the other New Novelists despite their rejection of old forms, Sarraute would instead build characters from the inside. The interior reality Sarraute sought was anonymous and therefore her characters are neither individuals nor superficial types, but “carriers of states”: What is interesting is not the character but those anonymous and identical things that happen to anybody. [ . . . ] People create characters because they see each other as characters. So they pin on each other what seems to them to be realistic. But these are only appearances, and the anonymous life of tropisms goes on behind them.18

She believed that at the level of the deep reality of tropisms we are all the same, “we resemble each other like two peas in a pod,” to the point that “at the level of tropisms, everyone feels in the same way.” 19 Sarraute constructed her literary theories of character around a theory of identity based on tropisms, but what happens when the main character in her literary text is her childhood self? Is such a text an autobiography? If so, we will need to redefine autobiography yet again, as for the autobiography of the Barthesian scripteur. Sarraute’s theories of character run counter to a long tradition of autobiographical writing as the recording of the coherent life trajectory of a unique protagonist. If at the deep level of tropisms everyone is alike and

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feels the same thing, would all Sarrautean autobiographies be exactly the same? Moreover, if all consistent individual character is false, how would or could one write an autobiographical text? Whereas Barthes’s struggle had been with the auto, or self, of autobiography, Sarraute’s is first with the bio, or life. If no such thing as a distinguishable “bio” exists, to what would the “auto” refer? What would constitute the autobiography of universal states and movements? Sarraute, like Barthes and many other “new” autobiographers, repeatedly denied having written an autobiography; “It is not a question of autobiography. [ . . . ] I have chosen, as for all of my other books, instants for which I can again find feelings.”20 She insisted that Childhood was not a linear and coherent narrative from which a reader could draw the meaning of her life. As had Barthes, Sarraute affirmed the constructed and literary nature of any autobiographical text, which could never be a simple reflection of the author and her experiences. She was all too aware of how easy it is to create different and even deceptive narratives of and meanings for one’s life by a selective arrangement of events. Using the hypothetical (and provocative) example of Landru, a serial killer who stole from and murdered wealthy women he met through classified advertisements, Sarraute illustrated the falsity of all autobiographical rewritings of a life: People who write their adult autobiographies claim to write their whole lives. First of all they deform it completely, we always see ourselves in a certain light [ . . . ] it is as if Landru wrote his memoirs. [ . . . ] He would tell us how much he loved his wife and child [ . . . ] this would be correct. [ . . . ] He would simply leave out the seventeen women in the oven. And this is how autobiographies are made.21

Since tropisms would be destroyed by any narrative linkage into a life story, the recovery of an intact past is impossible. Sarraute chose instead to attempt to recover the past in pieces, in moments particularly rich in tropisms, moments in which “so many pleasures jostle one another.”22 Sarraute, once again like Barthes, if this time for different reasons, could only write autobiography as a fragmented personal history organized by thematic connections rather than chronological linearity. In order to be new, then, to escape falsity and touch reality, Childhood had to be tropistic. And here we return to the most basic difference between Sarraute and Barthes; her carefully fragmented autobiographical form is in

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the service of reality. She wanted to recreate for herself and for her reader the feelings hidden within remembered moments of the past: With Childhood, I just wanted to assemble images pulled out of a sort of cotton in which they were buried [ . . . ] these are very personal events. But which are not connected one to another, which are separate. I did not try to write the story of my life.23

The only meaningful autobiography would be one that accesses these authentic instants of sensation, pulling them from the cottony past in which they had been stuck. The fragmentary impressions retrieved from “the haze” (153) of memory, unlike Barthesian biographemes, are not factitious. Sarraute’s text is full of ellipses and hesitations, of moments “looming up out of that mist” (17) and emerging “as if in a break in a silvery mist” (32).24 The present tense is used more often than the imperfect or pluperfect in reference to past events, in order to immerse the reader in her memories of and through instantaneous feeling. The passé composé appears only occasionally and the formal passé simple, which closes an emphatic door on the past, is completely absent from the text.25 Whereas Barthes had split his autobiographical text between narration in the first and third persons, Sarraute split hers between first persons. The third-person voice, which would require an external authorial stance, is as absent from her autobiography as the passé simple. Brechtian alienation-effects and distancing commentary were diametrically opposed to her project. In an essay entitled “Conversation and Sub-conversation,” Sarraute dreamed of “a technique that might succeed in plunging the reader into the stream of these subterranean dramas of which Proust only had time to obtain a rapid aerial view. [ . . . ] This technique would give the reader the illusion of repeating those actions himself.”26 Dialogue was this technique, over the years replacing more and more often in her work any hint of an omniscient third or first-person narrator, both of which conventionally guarantee meaning through connected and progressive plot development. The novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett had “one absolutely new feature,” in Sarraute’s opinion, “they are nothing but a long series of dialogues.” And although written in the familiar form of X said, Y said, these dialogues “do not recall any conversation we have ever heard” and yet do not seem false. Childhood is also nothing but a long series of dialogues, designed to be both fundamentally

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new and realistic in the way that tropisms are real. Sarraute literalized in her autobiography the “close, subtle, savage play [ . . . ] between conversation and sub-conversation,” the second of which comes from the internal pressure of the movements of tropisms.27 She attributed speaking voices to “conversation” and “sous-conversation” in order to escape the deadening monovocalism she feared from autobiography. Childhood is structured as a dialogue in the present tense between two voices, which are occasionally joined by an “I” from the past, the writer as a child, Natacha or the diminutive Tachok. The text begins with an exchange between these two voices, who address each other using the informal and familiar second-person singular pronoun: —Then you really are going to do that? ‘Evoke your childhood memories?’ . . . How these words embarrass you, you don’t like them. But you have to admit that they are the only appropriate words. You want to ‘evoke your memories’ . . . there’s no getting away from it, that’s what it is. —Yes, I can’t help it, it tempts me, I don’t know why . . . —It could be . . . mightn’t it be . . . we sometimes don’t realize . . . it could be that your forces are declining . . . (1)28

The stock phrases “evoke your memories” and “happy childhood memories” (23, 33) characterize for Sarraute an old and fossilized style of autobiography that could not but destroy the reality of past experience.29 Beginning her autobiography, she nostalgically evokes the memory of the realm of tropisms, which she had reached for until now through fiction; “everything there fluctuates, alters, escapes . . . you grope your way along, forever searching [ . . . ] where? No matter where, so long as it eventually finds some fertile ground where it can develop, where it can perhaps manage to live” (2).30 One voice worries that her memories might be “fixed once and for all, a ‘sure thing,’ decided in advance,” but the other is sure that the necessary material for a tropistic autobiography is still available: —Don’t worry about it having been decided in advance . . . it’s still vacillating, no written word, no word of any sort has yet touched it, I think it is still faintly quivering . . . outside words . . . as usual . . . little bits of something still alive . . . I would like . . . before they disappear . . . let me . . . (3).31

These two voices, whose conversation narrates Childhood, engage each other in many different ways, none of them systematic. One “I” generally plays

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the role of autobiographical narrator, the other of suspicious critic, although these roles are sometimes reversed. We learn in the first few pages that it is the critical voice, precisely by doubting the possibility of an autobiography built out of tropisms, that convinces the other to attempt one, as if on a dare: —[I]t’s hardly believable, but it was you who prompted me, for some time now you have been inciting me . . . —I? —Yes, you, by your admonitions, your warnings . . . you conjure it up, you immerse me in it (3).32

Their relationship often seems adversarial, as when one voice accuses the other of trying to lure it toward conventional autobiographical childhood memories: “don’t try to set a trap for me” (15); “nothing of that has remained with me, and you certainly aren’t going to push me into trying to plaster over that gap” (16).33 The critical voice serves not only as suspicious listener, however, warning the narrating voice that it is getting carried away (“—Be careful, or you’ll be getting pretentious . . . ”), but also as caring and interested analyst, asking probing questions about the relationship with her mother: —How long did it take you to realize that she never tried—unless very absent-mindedly and clumsily—to put herself in your place? . . . —Yes, curiously enough that indifference, that casualness, were part of her charm, in the literal sense of the word, she charmed me . . . (19)34

Together the voices interrogate memories, attempting to understand what they suggest about the past, what they meant and mean in the context of an entire life. Dialogue allows Sarraute to attempt reflexive autobiography “from the inside,” without third-person commentary or other distancing strategies. In Childhood, Sarraute explores the ways in which objects trigger memory and sensation. In a perfectly tropistic and somewhat Proustian memory, Natacha was once tricked into taking medicine that had been mixed into strawberry jam: The rather disturbing impression of something revolting being deceitfully smuggled in, hidden under the appearance of something delicious, has never

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faded, and even today, it sometimes comes back to me when I put a spoonful of strawberry jam in my mouth (37).35

It is the strength and not the pleasure of the experience evoked, for both author and reader, that is important. The autobiographical challenge is to put this nauseating strawberry jam into the text, “hidden under the appearance” of words. Most of the tropisms of Sarraute’s past are organized not around objects, however, but around words and phrases, and she has gone so far as to affirm that “my true characters, my only characters, are words.”36 As a child, she was tormented by phrases which she calls her ideas, all of which were somehow unacceptable to others. She could not dislodge from her mind, for example, the traitorous idea that a doll was more beautiful than her mother and eventually told her mother what she was thinking. “‘A child who loves its mother thinks that no one is more beautiful than she’” (84), her mother retorted, and the remembered phrase brings back the child’s guilt at having driven her mother away.37 Sarraute describes learning to keep her powerful words to herself as she got older, but these “idées” now function as the keys to tropisms. They unlock parts of her past, their meaning residing not in the words themselves but in the events and emotions they signal and replicate. Sarraute often accesses strong feelings linked to memories of her troubled relationship with her family, especially her mother and stepmother, through the direct quotation of words they had spoken. The memory of her father turning to a friend to say, “‘It’s astonishing how like her mother Natasha can sometimes look,’” opens up a tropism; “something had crept into these words, something infinitely fragile, which I hardly dared to perceive, I was afraid of making it disappear . . . it brushed against me, caressed me and then vanished” (114).38 A sentence spoken by her mother, “‘Let go . . . husband and wife are on the same side’” (63), awakens feelings of rejection, of having been a “foreign body” excluded from her mother’s second marriage.39 Many such phrases were originally spoken in the several foreign languages of Sarraute’s childhood, and they are quoted for us in the original and not translated into French, again with the goal of bringing back as strongly as possible past sensations. The first memory of Childhood starts with a phrase in German, “Nein, das tust du nicht” (10), said by Sarraute’s nanny when Natacha was threatening to tear the silk upholstery of a couch with a pair of scissors. From the haze of the past “these words [ . . . ] have come to life” (3) and set off the memory of a feeling; “I can’t see myself, but I can feel it as if

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I were doing it now” (4).40 Sarraute’s much younger half-sister Lili had an English nanny who is quoted in English as saying, twenty years later, “‘I still see your step-mother in my nightmares’” (234). And two words spoken by her stepmother in Russian, Sarraute’s first language and that of her parents, have more force than would have had their French translation: Tyebya podbrossili . . . this is one of the rare occasions when I can remember which language Vera used in talking to me, [ . . . ] in French she would have had to say on t’a abandonnée, which would be a very feeble, anaemic equivalent of the Russian words . . . [ . . . ] —But where was it? Apropos of what? —We were walking side by side in a dreary garden [ . . . ] But apropos of what? that, I can’t remember . . . perhaps apropos of nothing at all, just like that, because it suddenly crossed her mind (161–62).41

The conversing voices cannot remember the exact context of the memory, nor do they know if the child Natacha had understood “all the hidden riches” (162) of the Russian words, but their discussion of its emotional impact makes for an autobiographical tropism. Childhood oscillates between examples of language’s success at evoking tropisms and examples of the potential of words to damage the authentic feeling of an experience. One of the powerful phrases in Sarraute’s past came from Lili’s French nursemaid—“‘What a tragedy, though, to have no mother’” (105). The word “malheur” had a particular effect: —Was that the first time you had been trapped like that, in a word? —I don’t remember it happening to me before. But how many times since, have I not escaped, terrified, out of words which pounce on you and hold you captive. —Even the word ‘happiness’—every time it came quite close, so close, ready to alight, you tried to ward it off . . . No, not that, not one of those words, they frighten me, I prefer to do without them, I don’t want them anywhere near me, I don’t want them to touch anything . . . nothing here, in me, is for them (107).42

“Tragedy” and “happiness,” too often used and thus filled with preconceived meaning, destroy authentic tropistic feeling. They are, like many other words, too strong for the sensations to which they are associated and therefore useless to Sarraute’s autobiographical project; “by their very force

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they have crushed everything” (116).43 The same is true for conventional paradigms of character, as we see when Sarraute recalls another phrase intimately linked to her childhood feelings of exile and abandonment: ‘It isn’t your home’ . . . It’s hard to believe, but this is, nonetheless, what Vera said to me one day. When I asked her if we were going home soon, she said: ‘It isn’t your home.’ —Exactly what the cruel stepmother might have replied to poor Cinderella. That was what made you hesitate . . . —Yes indeed: I was afraid that in reliving all this, I might find myself making Vera and me into characters in a fairy tale . . . —It’s true that Vera, at times, when you make the effort to call her to mind, gives you the feeling of losing touch with reality, of taking off into fiction . . . (115).44

The reader might understand Véra too quickly, as a known quantity, through the easily recognizable and thus exhausted character of the wicked stepmother of fairy tales. If not tropistically real, autobiography is fiction, a mere fairy tale. Childhood contains a curious mixture of tropism-memories and analyses of their truthfulness and authenticity. As we have seen, Sarraute provides the reader with many ostensibly direct quotations, sometimes even entire dialogues, from sixty to seventy years prior to the writing of her autobiography. We have no way of knowing, however, how exact they are or how much has been reconstituted. Sarraute admits many times, in fact, to uncertainty about the past—“I don’t know how many times I went to Madame Bernard’s, whether I went there often . . . it has all melted into a few images” (212)—although one of her two voices always quickly concludes that this is irrelevant.45 The narrating voice wonders if a drawing from one of her favorite childhood books is being recalled correctly: —Is it certain that that picture is in Max and Moritz? Wouldn’t it be better to check? —No, what’s the point? What is certain is that that picture is still associated with this book and that the feeling it gave me has remained intact: a feeling of apprehension, of a kind of fear which wasn’t real fear, but just a funny sort of fear that you could enjoy (38).46

The authenticity of a tropism-memory is judged not on the basis of the

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truth of events as they occurred, but rather on the basis of the authenticity of the sensations evoked. Sarraute’s main concern is that her autobiography be effective, not historically accurate. When the critical voice points out that past events and feelings are being described in terms in which a child could not have perceived them, the narrating voice retorts that “you don’t need to tell me again that I wasn’t capable of conjuring up these images . . . what is certain is that they convey the exact sensation produced in me by my pitiable state” (87).47 There are many instances in Childhood in which a voice admits something along the lines of “this is the first time I have thought about it, it never occurred to me in those days” (177).48 What Sarraute recounts and how she recounts it in language are avowedly rooted in her present understanding of the past. A certain Dr. Kervilly told Natacha, before she went to Russia to visit her father, to chew each bite she ate until it was liquid, and her mother made her promise to follow his instructions. Sarraute is astonished that her memory of this doctor is so vivid, and the voices analyze the memory: —Images, words, which obviously couldn’t have come into your head at that age . . . —Of course not. [ . . . ] It was, as always, an all-embracing feeling, outside words . . . But it is these words and images that enable us to grasp, as best we can, to retain these sensations (9).49

The writing of autobiography brings out a truth to which she did not have access as a child; “It couldn’t have appeared to me as I see it at present, now that I am obliging myself to make the effort . . . which I wasn’t capable of . . . when I am trying to dig down, to reach, to grasp, to release what has remained there, buried” (75).50 The primary goal of autobiography is to evoke past states of feeling, but it accomplishes much more. Sarraute has now grounded her adult understanding of her childhood in these tropistic memories of childhood sensations. She has authenticated her self-analysis. After a description of the feelings Sarraute had as a child while her mother was speaking to her, the critical voice questions the narrator’s fidelity to the reality of tropisms: —Don’t be angry, but don’t you think that there, with that cooing, that chirruping, you haven’t been able to resist introducing something a little bit prefabricated . . . it’s so tempting, you’ve inserted a pretty little piece . . . completely in keeping . . . —Yes, I may perhaps have let myself go a little . . . (12).51

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The other voice nevertheless maintains that the “cooing” and “chirruping” may be exaggerated, “but so far as the little bells as concerned, no, not there, I can hear them” (13).52 It is the author, via her dialoguing voices, who judges both the authenticity and the effectiveness of her tropisms. How could her conclusions be challenged? Although Sarraute includes her own commentary on her memories within Childhood, expressed in the first person of one or the other of the voices, the reader, as Emer O’Beirne has argued, is allowed no recourse to a critical vocabulary.53 The term “tropism” is drawn from biology for a reason; it strengthens Sarraute’s claim of access to a reality that is more basic than language, that is invisible yet scientific. The tropism as unmediated truth of feeling is the perfect defensive strategy for the autobiographer, who gets to decide both what constitutes a tropism and what it means. The tropistic autobiography, like the text of jouissance, leaves no room for outside analysis. One of the main difficulties of staging tropisms in writing is that of consciously producing effects of spontaneity and hesitation.54 For example, Sarraute’s voices stress their uncertainty as to the order of certain events: —This must have taken place, I think, before your grandmother’s visit . . . —Or was it after? —No, before . . . it seems to me that your grandmother came when you were about to begin the certificate year in school (213).55

Philippe Lejeune points out that these hesitations and ellipses lead us, paradoxically, to be more rather than less confident in the narrator.56 With the crafted artlessness of reflexive dialogue, by including challenges and questions which are then resolved, Sarraute encourages her reader to abandon all suspicion, to forget that her autobiographical tropisms are not only carefully written but also rewritten and reordered. Yet there are many aspects of the autobiographical narrative on which the critical voice does not comment, and the narrating voice often defends itself against the critical voice’s objections simply by saying no, as we saw above, without any supporting evidence or argument.57 Some memories and interpretations are interrogated and some are not. Daniel Hayes, having praised the novelty and honesty of Childhood, suggests we learn from our reading of Sarraute to be “suspicious of those authors of autobiography who tell their story without a hitch.”58 Yet it turns out that we may need to be as, if not more, suspicious of autobiographers who stress the hitches in their narratives. Mikhail Bakhtin, developing his theory of dialogism in the novel in an

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early essay entitled “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” maintained that the writer must “become an other in relation to himself, must look at himself through the eyes of another.” Even in the case of autobiography, Bakhtin continued, “the author must be separated from the hero—from himself— . . . in oneself one must come to see another, and do so utterly.”59 This potential or imagined other may take various forms, as will become clear as we move from autobiography in prose to photography to film, from French to Francophone African autobiography. Barthes oscillated between “I” and “he” so that “he” could look at “himself” objectively, from the outside. Sarraute chose quite literal dialogue, narration in the first and second person, which would seem to be the perfect strategy for the representation of oneself as other. Not only would dialogue allow the autobiographer to look at (and talk to) herself as other, it might allow the reader to join in the conversation. And Eileen Angelini claims that the dialogue of voices forces the reader into an active instead of a passive role, since “the questions posed by the voice of the alter ego seem to speak for the reader and give the reader an impression of taking part in the discussion.”60 But this is precisely the problem, since if, as Angelini states, the critical voice within the dialogue “anticipat[es] the very questions the reader would like to ask,” the questions of the reader who exists outside of the text are then foreclosed upon. If one of the autobiography’s voices speaks for the reader, then the reader has no voice, but instead is spoken for. Most critics have, like Angelini, understood the critical voice in Childhood as a reader of the first, narrating, voice and thus a figure for the actual reader of the text. Yet the critical voice is an insider rather than a true alter ego and is privy to much more information than the rest of us. Sarraute’s two “I”s are like conjoined twins, with separate voices but the same experiences and memories of the past: — [ . . . ] Did I dream it? is it possible that you burst into tears and told her . . . —It’s barely believable, but I can see it (168).61

The two voices, who both speak as from within one autobiographical narrator, finish each other’s sentences. Like the fragmented narrator of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, they are the result of a split rather than a doubling.62 For both Barthes and Sarraute, the imagined autobiographical other is finally an internal one, carefully constructed to foster an introspective

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self-analysis. Whereas Barthes looks in from the outside, Sarraute uses the analysis of the dialoguing selves to look in from the inside, to reach deeper than identity, toward the tropisms at the deepest core of her life story. She had already described this kind of internal division in Between Life and Death; “this is the moment when it becomes necessary to split in two. One half of myself detaches from the other: a witness. A judge.”63 In Childhood, otherness is interiorized and integrated into a dual narrating self; “seen from the inside [ . . . ] there is no-one and I am everything.”64 One of the dangers of dialogue for Sarraute is that it involves others, and others see us as fixed personalities, mask us with an identity that we have not even constructed for ourselves.65 Autobiography carries the same risk. Writing the biography of an “auto” or self that could be a Sarrautean character, she avoids the danger of a loss of control by splitting her narrator in two. But is a conversation between halves of a self a dialogue?66 Many critics, consciously or unconsciously wishing to find some alterity within this text, have gendered the two speaking voices of the autobiography as masculine and feminine, relying either on the early use of a masculine adjective by one of the voices or on an assigning of stereotypical gender roles to each voice to differentiate one from the other.67 Because the masculine adjectival form is unmarked in French, however, the fact that a final “e” would indicate a female speaker does not mean that the lack of an “e” indicates that the unnamed speaker is male (nor, of course, that the other speaker is female). Moreover, a reading of the voices as male and female goes against Sarraute’s stated belief that her characters were “neuter,” again because she wrote them from the inside and not the outside.68 Sarraute maintained that in her autobiography she wanted to describe “a child, rather than a little girl,” and often repeated that she, like her characters, had neither a gendered nor a singular identity.69 As a writer, she was as neutre as her characters, since “a writer is, must be, androgynous.”70 There was no single “I,” moreover, that referred to Sarraute—“There is always a multitude within us. [ . . . ] Once I say ‘I,’ I have the impression that I never speak of myself, or very rarely. I never say how I am because it would be false.”71 She claimed for herself the universality and non-identity of tropisms, saying “I have no feeling of identity. I think that inside each of us, very deeply, we are all similar.”72 Yet Sarraute’s Natacha is not only a “carrier of states”; she is particular and singular, not universal. Childhood

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was the most popularly successful of Sarraute’s works, acclaimed by critics and read by a much wider public than her novels. Critics have explained this by contrasting the “cold and cerebral” formalism of the novels to the “humanist transparence” of her autobiography, oppositional praise which recalls Kennedy’s rehabilitation of Barthes in the light of his later work.73 To say that Sarraute “humanized” herself signifies that she has finally created a lifelike and believable character, one which is conventionally written and easily recognizable. There is a disjunction between Sarraute’s claim to want to “free [her]self from subject, characters, and plot,” and her autobiography, in which we find a central, named, character, anchored in time and space, with a developing personality.74 Despite Sarraute’s many protestations of non-autobiography in interviews, Childhood fulfills all of Lejeune’s relatively strict criteria for an “autobiographical pact.” The main character is identified as Natacha, the Russian first name by which Sarraute was called while a child, the narrators claim to be telling, or at least trying to get at, the truth, and the retrospective text proceeds in largely chronological order, structured by Natacha’s moves back and forth between Russia and France and her progression through the French school system.75 Sarraute regularly mentions her age at the time of various events; we learn, for example, that she left the house in Ivanovo at age two, when she and her mother and Kolia left for Geneva and then Paris, where she later lived with her father and Vera. Moreover, Childhood presents a surprisingly authoritative interpretation of Sarraute’s life via the voices’ exchanges about her childhood memories. The major turning points in her life, such as her last “idea” (89) and the sudden illegibility of her handwriting upon her first enrollment at a French school (117) are marked and analyzed. Sarraute emphasizes the split nature of her childhood self, between Russia and France, Russian and French, her mother and her father. Ignored and abandoned by her mother, loved by an often distant father, treated coldly by her stepmother, Natacha ultimately finds comfort at school and in the fairness of her grades there. Childhood ends with the beginning of a new school year, her first year of high school, which provides perfect closure: —Don’t worry, I’ve finished, I won’t take you any farther . . . —Why now, all of a sudden, when you haven’t been afraid to come this far? —I don’t really know . . . I don’t feel like it any more . . . I’d like to go somewhere else . . .

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It may be because I feel that this, for me, is where my childhood ends . . . (245–6)76

This last sentence, which begins the penultimate paragraph of the text, is not marked with the dash which throughout the book has signaled every intervention by a dialoguing voice. The two voices seem to have been reunited; Sarraute is speaking for herself. We learned from Barthes that “the person divided,” as opposed to the fragmented subject, is a classic paradigm which can be easily interpreted in order to discover the core meaning of a life. Sarraute ultimately presents us with a coherent self, albeit one which is suspicious of autobiography. Even though Sarraute has avoided third-person self-surveillance, she has not avoided creating the sense of a whole and discoverable self. She employs reflexive strategies in Childhood to achieve this coherence, but in a split first person instead of the alternating first and third person used by Barthes. One of the memories central to Sarraute’s autobiographical text is that of her first fiction, a memory fabricated for a school assignment on the theme of her first experience of sorrow: —You didn’t start by trying, searching through your own sorrows . . . —To find one of my own sorrows? Of course not, goodness, what are you thinking about? One of my own real sorrows? that I had actually experienced . . . and, besides, what could I call by that name? And which had been the first? I hadn’t the slightest desire to ask myself . . . what I needed was a sorrow outside my own life, that I could consider while keeping myself at a safe distance . . . this would give me a sensation that I couldn’t name, but I can feel it now as I did then . . . a feeling . . . —Of dignity, perhaps . . . that’s what it might be called today . . . and also of domination, of power . . . —And of liberty . . . I keep myself in the background, out of reach, I don’t reveal anything that belongs only to me . . . but I prepare for other people something that I consider to be good for them, I choose what they like, what they might expect, one of those sorrows that suit them [ . . . ] the very model of a real first sorrow of a real child . . . the death of my little dog . . . what could be more imbued with childish purity, with innocence. As improbable as it may seem, I did feel all that . . . (184–85).77

Sarraute again jostles our preconceptions in this episode, which poses the question of what, and how much, should be revealed in autobiography.

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There is clearly a reflexive aspect to this memory, which we are reading in the context of an autobiography that recounts memories in literary form. We learn that the memory she chose to write about was a false one, and that this distance from “one of my own real sorrows” gave her a feeling of freedom and security. Natacha’s writing is described in many ways, however, as the opposite of that of the adult Nathalie Sarraute. Most importantly, the child fled from tropisms; “I liked things that were fixed, determinable, immutable [ . . . ] no risk of seeing anything whatsoever start to fluctuate, to become unstable, uncertain” (190).78 This may imply that the more mature writer, who reaches for the tropistic reality she had avoided as a child, has shared with us memories that are authentic, that we can trust. Yet if this is the case, she has now distanced herself from the child she is recounting by contrasting their literary styles instead of tropistically evoking the memory of a young girl from the inside. What is more, a comment Sarraute made about this passage in a later interview leads us to doubt every memory we have read in her autobiography: But of course I didn’t describe my actual first sorrow; it would have been very immodest to recount that in a French assignment. [ . . . ] This invented example gave me the opportunity to create a pleasing style, a pleasing paper, which was truly important. You don’t think that I was going to begin to talk about myself. [ . . . ] Today like yesterday at primary school, I don’t like these displays of oneself and I don’t have the impression that in Childhood I let myself go.79

Is Childhood a question of “pretty style”? Nothing in what Sarraute has told us about tropisms has prepared us for the idea that distance and the fabrication of memories would be the best strategies for accessing them. Perhaps we must understand her insistence both on tropisms as a reality too deep for conventional ideas of truth and on the universality, that is to say impersonality, of tropistic character as distancing strategies. Sarraute does not seem to have resolved the problem of how to write an autobiographical text based on the tropisms which underlie reality. Although tropisms exist at a deeper and truer level of reality, they are at a huge distance from our everyday life and thus are unlivable; “Between everyday life and literature which, if I may say so, blows barely visible things out of proportion, there is an immense gap. One could not live in the world of my books, nor that of tropisms.”80 Yet Sarraute does much more in Childhood

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than simply translate these otherworldly sensations into our language by means of innovative words and experimental forms. Whereas her descriptions of tropisms locate them as far from reflexivity as one could imagine, she has incorporated a reflexive analysis of the autobiographical process into the dialogue of her tropistic autobiography. Sarraute wrote only one volume of autobiography, as opposed to three each for her fellow nouveaux romanciers Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras. Her ambivalence about the project manifests itself as an oscillation between impossible closeness and awkward distancing and recalls Barthes’s attempt to reconcile jouissance and self-commentary in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Should autobiographical writing be the revelation of a tropistic reality or an independent artistic creation, or can it be both? In Sarraute’s memory of the pleasure she felt at being assigned a grade by her teacher at school, we can see what might constitute the perfect but unwriteable tropistic autobiography: I am nothing other than what I have written. Nothing that I don’t know, that people project onto me, that they foist on to me without my knowledge, as they are always doing there, outside, in my other life. [ . . . ] Everything that happens to me here can only depend on me. I am responsible for it (148–49).81

Such a text would escape from the tension between “dévoiler” and “faire exister” with which we began, and would result in the perfect coincidence of writing and written selves. Despite their declarations that perhaps autobiography is impossible, both Barthes, with his scriptible autobiography of the “subject of jouissance,” and Sarraute, with her tropistic autobiography, have visions of the ideal autobiography. Such a work would not be ambivalent like Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Childhood, conflicted texts in which the authors try to write split selves by turning inward, enacting and commenting on their struggles with their own theories in the face of autobiography. Writing and written “I”s would be equal; I would be what I am and what I write, write what I am, and the split self would be reunified.

part ii

Autobiography in Images: From Photography to Film

chapter 3

Seeing Autobiography: From Camera Lucida to the Cinema

“So I make myself the measure of photographic ‘knowledge.’”1

I have already noted that Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes begins with a series of photographs, as do many personal histories. Yet the role of photographic images in contemporary autobiographical texts has only recently drawn the attention of theorists of the genre.2 Rather than discuss the use of photographic images in autobiographies, however, I wish to explore the relationship between the visual media, specifically photography and film, and the autobiographical project.3 An ever-increasing presence of all sorts of cameras means that more and more of us have still and moving images with which to illustrate the narratives of our lives. Going beyond the illustrative, we must examine how our conception of autobiographical narrative has been changed by such images. Can images not only supplement autobiography but constitute autobiography in themselves? Can the visual have a first, second, or third-person voice? I will begin to address these questions by returning to the late work of Roland Barthes, this time his 1980 Camera Lucida [La Chambre claire], subtitled “A Note on Photography.”4 45

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After the double-edged experiment of what I consider to be his first autobiography, Barthes nevertheless maintained the “autobiographic acceleration” observed in his work by Derrida. In Camera Lucida, the last of his texts to be published during his lifetime, Barthes continued to search for a solution to the dilemma posed by his desire for autobiography, at the same time returning to the analysis of the visual media that he had undertaken in the early 1960s. He wrote that he felt compelled to write the book because, of all of the theorists and sociologists of photography whose work he had read, none had spoken of those photographs that he found interesting, those “which give me pleasure or emotion” (7). These are the images that he wanted to theorize, but theory did not recognize his desire: Each time I would read something about Photography, I would think of some photograph I loved, and this made me furious. Myself, I saw only the referent, the desired object, the beloved body; but an importunate voice (the voice of knowledge, of scientia) then adjured me, in a severe tone: ‘Get back to Photography’ . . . (7).5

This summons “‘back to Photography’” threatened to take Barthes away from the photographs that pleased him. When he obeyed and went back to it, then, he did so in a very different voice from that of most academic discourse about photography. Delivering a lecture on the occasion of his induction into the Collège de France in 1978, Barthes had announced that: Hence I shall be speaking of ‘myself.’ ‘Myself’ is to be understood here in the full sense . . . the one for whom no one else can be substituted, for better or for worse. It is the intimate which seeks utterance in me, seeks to make its cry heard, confronting generality, confronting science.6

He went on, however, to collapse this binary between the first-person intimate voice and science, concluding that “perhaps it is finally at the heart of this subjectivity, of this very intimacy which I have invoked, perhaps it is at the ‘pinnacle of my particularity’ that I am scientific without knowing it.”7 With Camera Lucida, Barthes attempted an intimate science of photography, a text in which there would be no necessary contradiction between the personal and the scientific, the autobiographical and the theoretical. Camera Lucida is dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire, and Barthes called it a book of the Imaginary, though he was not sure such a thing was possible. Whereas in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes he had alternately

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courted and resisted the imaginary, he would now give himself over to it, if to that of Sartre and no longer Lacan. Barthes warns us that, although “phenomenology lent me a bit of its project and a bit of its language,” his will be an affective phenomenology, based in desire and feeling; “I was interested in Photography only for ‘sentimental’ reasons” (21).8 Perhaps not surprisingly, then, it is difficult to take “A Note on Photography” to mean “A Theory of Photography,” as frustrated photographers, critics, and art historians, scouring the text for a useable theory of the photographic image, quickly discovered. And although the transition from Barthes’s early to late work has been viewed as a move from the theoretical to the personal, it is important to note that the later work theorizes the personal in addition to personalizing the theoretical.9 As a theoretical text about photography, Camera Lucida proves to be not particularly innovative; Barthes for the most part restates the arguments of other theorists as well as several made in his own early essays. It is rather for a particular conjunction of photography and the first person that I will read Barthes’s last published text as a critical intervention in the debate surrounding the genre of autobiography. Although Gerald Kennedy, still trying to claim the later Barthes for his anti-theoretical project, asserted that in Camera Lucida “the study of photography furnishes a pretext for the introduction, in Part II, of intensely personal material relating to the death of his mother,” the two are in fact intimately and reciprocally linked.10 Barthes needed photography and, more specifically, Photography, in order to write his personal history, and he needed his personal history in order to write about photographs and Photography. Since Barthes had decided to speak only as “I,” only in the first person, he writes about photography only from the point of view of the spectator and of the subject photographed. The experience and the art of the photographer are irrelevant, since Barthes himself has never been a photographer; “I possessed only two experiences: that of the observed subject and that of the subject observing” (10).11 I will begin, then, with Barthes’s intimate theory of photography as spectator and return later to the “sujet regardé.” In Camera Lucida, Barthes describes himself as always having been “a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical” (8), and, having read Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, we know this to be the case. In the earlier text, Barthes, trying to escape the unified first person which he so feared, represented this split by an alternation between first and third-person voices,

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between a subjective voice and critical commentary. In Camera Lucida he returns to the “I” with a vengeance, writing nothing but the Nietzschean “for me”; “I resolved to start my inquiry with no more than a few photographs, the ones I was sure existed for me” (8).12 The text is made up of two connected narratives in the first person, each divided into twenty-four sections and accompanied by reproductions of the photographs discussed. Even though the text is organized in fragments, its narrative voice and style never approach the strenuous choppiness of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. The first half of Camera Lucida is more or less about Barthes’s relationship with photography and begins, like a fairy tale, “One day, quite some time ago . . . ” (3); the second half is more or less about his relationship with (a photograph of) his mother and similarly begins, “Now, one November evening shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through some photographs” (63).13 At a particular moment in his life, just after the death of his mother (which just preceded his lecture at the Collège de France), Barthes would from the personal deduce the very nature of Photography itself; “Starting from a few personal impulses, I would try to formulate the fundamental feature, the universal without which there would be no Photography” (9).14 Having presented the origins of his project, Barthes begins Camera Lucida with several claims. Photography is “the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This . . . in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real” (4). Moreover, “a specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent” (5); in the photographic image, “the referent adheres” (6).15 In the wake of Barthes’s writing on the use of detail in the construction of a “reality effect” in the nineteenth century realist novel as well as the “referential illusion” in so-called objective history, it is remarkable that he would consider any form of representation capable of pure and absolute reference.16 Although in 1968 Barthes exposed the strategies by which realist writing struggled to hide its art and artifice, he nonetheless claimed, both before and afterward, that there was neither art nor artifice to photography. In the first few pages of Camera Lucida, we read that “Whatever it offers to our sight and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see” (6).17 And, even more surprisingly, we find that Barthes first elaborated such ideas about photography during his structuralist period, and not in the personal writing that critics such as Culler have found so suspicious. The

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assertions that ground Camera Lucida date back to an essay written almost twenty years earlier, in 1961, entitled “The Photographic Message.” Barthes had then argued that the image is not the reality, but at least it is its perfect analogon, and it is just this analogical perfection which, to common sense, defines the photograph. Here appears the particular status of the photographic image: it is a message without a code.18

A good semiologist, we might think, should be immediately wary of the idea of any message without a code. What is more, we know from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes that analogy was Barthes’s bête noire, to be avoided at all costs. Why could Barthes believe in photography as “analogical perfection” in 1961 and, more importantly for our inquiry, why would he continue to do so in 1980? Barthes began “The Photographic Message” by noting that not just photography but all of the arts, including theater, drawing, film, and painting, in some way reproduce reality. All contain two levels of meaning, “a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the way in which the society represents, to a certain extent, what it thinks of the analogon.”19 The denotative message is a direct and codeless “analogy” of a referent, or, in Charles Sanders Peirce’s terminology, an indexical sign, whereas the connotative message, a second meaning, often resides in the style of the reproduction.20 Generalizing from the particular case of the press photograph, Barthes concluded that of all of the arts, only photography may consist of a denotative message without any connotation. At the same time, he allowed that some photographs have a design or message that can be read and analyzed, and therefore: The photographic paradox would then be the coexistence of two messages, one without a code (this would be the photographic analogue) and the other with a code (this would be the ‘art,’ or the treatment, or the ‘writing,’ or the rhetoric of the photograph) . . . how then can the photograph be at once ‘objective’ and ‘encroached upon,’ natural and cultural?21

Barthes resolved the paradox of the coexistence of the natural and the cultural in photography sometimes by treating the cultural as of secondary importance and sometimes by claiming that it existed in some photographs but not in others. He identified several categories of connotative, or “second,”

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meaning in photography, such as “trick effects” and “pose,” but concluded that these were particular to photographs and not characteristic of “Photography.” And, despite his complaint that the voice of science had summoned him from his beloved photographs back to Photography, it is ultimately Photography that Barthes will seek to understand in Camera Lucida; “I was overcome by an ‘ontological’ desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in itself’” (3).22 Nine years after “The Photographic Message,” Barthes returned to the analysis of images in “The Third Meaning” (1970), distinguishing three levels of meaning in stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible. The first, “an informational level . . . of communication” that includes decor, costumes, and narrative moment, may be analyzed but does not interest him. He instead investigated what he called the second and third meanings. The second is “a symbolic level . . . of signification,” which Barthes also called the “obvious meaning” [sens obvie], from the Latin obvius.23 This meaning, taken from a generally known and understood stock of symbols, is intentionally placed in the image by the author for interpretation by the spectator. As a semiologist, in essays such as those contained in his 1957 Mythologies, Barthes analyzed the sens obvie of cultural images. In this essay, however, and another decade later in Camera Lucida, he sought the third level, that of signifying [la signifiance], which is “‘in excess,’ like a supplement.”24 This “obtuse” or “rounded” meaning [sens obtus], from the Latin obtusus, interested Barthes since it was communicated through desire; “the obtuse meaning carries a certain emotion . . . which simply designates what is loved, what is to be defended; it is an emotion-as-value, an evaluation.”25 Barthes had prefaced the forty pages of family photographs which begin Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes with the information that they were chosen after he had written the subsequent text; “they are the author’s treat to himself, for finishing his book. . . . I have kept only the images which enthrall me.”26 The criteria for the inclusion of a photograph in his autobiography, then, were affective, just as for Camera Lucida, in which Barthes’s choice would be guided by “the attraction that I felt for certain photographs” (18). Barthes discovers, however, that photographs attract him for varying reasons. For many thousands of photographs, he feels a kind of general interest, one that is even stirred sometimes, but in regard to them my emotion requires the rational intermediary of an ethical and

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political culture. What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training . . . it is studium . . . application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity. . . . [I]t is culturally . . . that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions (26).27

This lukewarm feeling, the studium, is not an intense one and involves Barthes only at a level of general cultural interest. A very few photographs address him differently, at another level: This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument . . . punctum. . . . A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me) (27).28

The punctum is more extreme than the studium and, like Sarraute’s tropisms, seems to act of its own volition. The opposition between studium and punctum grows out of Barthes’s earlier oppositions, between connotative and denotative messages, between the sens obvie and the sens obtus. Just as it had been the sens obtus that concerned him in 1970 and the photographs that enthralled him which he selected in 1975, it will be the punctum that fascinates him in the years between his mother’s death in October 1977 and his own death in March of 1980. Barthes’s descriptions of the intimate link between photography and reality recall the work of Susan Sontag, who is mentioned several times in the marginal references and bibliography of Camera Lucida. In On Photography, published in 1973, Sontag wrote that “photographs really are experience captured. . . . Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world as much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”29 But if Sontag had already theorized the photograph as denotative and thus unadulterated reality, why would Barthes reprise her argument, much less repeat his own? More curiously, Barthes cites French film theorist André Bazin only as having remarked that the film screen is not a frame (55). Yet Barthes’s assumptions about photography bear a striking resemblance to Bazin’s work on the photographic image’s privileged relationship to reality. In his 1945 essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin wrote that photography, which has an “essential objectivity,” “enjoys

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a certain advantage in virtue of a transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction.”30 An even more specific antecedent to Barthes’s conception of the punctum is to be found in Walter Benjamin’s “Short History of Photography,” first published in 1931. Benjamin argued that painted portraits survive “only as testimony to the art of the person who painted them,” whereas with photography one encounters a new and strange phenomenon: in that fishwife from Newhaven, who casts her eyes down with such casual, seductive shame, there remains something that does not merely testify to the art of Hill the photographer, but something that cannot be silenced, that impudently demands the name of the person who lived at the time and who, remaining real even now, will never yield herself up entirely into art. . . . However skillful the photographer . . . the spectator feels an irresistible compulsion to look for the tiny spark of chance, of the here and now, with which reality has, as it were, seared the character in the picture.31

This spark is similar if not identical to Barthes’s punctum, yet Benjamin is never once mentioned in Camera Lucida. Barthes was certainly aware of Benjamin’s work, if for no other reason than that Sontag’s text was dedicated to “W.B.” Why would Barthes, a scholar who knew how to cite his sources when he so desired, have avoided mentioning those critics whose work was so close to his own? We must suspect, yet again, that Barthes was undertaking neither a history nor a theory of photography. Not interested in situating his ideas about photography in their theoretical context, he rather wished to tell his, and only his, story of photography, which turns out to be a story about himself.32 Barthes’s story, then, which I have not yet even begun to address, will depend on the punctum, which leaps out of a beloved photograph to strike him like an arrow. Whereas “the studium is ultimately always coded” (51), a cultural critic cannot decode the punctum. Barthes had similarly described the sens obtus as a signifier without a signified and thus indescribable; “my reading remains suspended between the image and its description, between definition and approximation.”33 Like the sens obtus, the punctum is a supplement and cannot simply be added to a photograph by interpretation; “it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (55). And like the texte de jouissance, the punctum cannot be accessed through critique; “In

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order to perceive the punctum, no analysis would be of any use to me” (42). In Camera Lucida, then, there can be none of the third-person commentary of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. It is not clear how Barthes should address the photographs which strike him, for “if we remain, you and I, on the level of articulated language in the presence of these images—that is, on the level of my own text—the obtuse meaning will not come into being, will not enter into the critic’s metalanguage.”34 Arguably, in fact, Barthes’s last book is from the outset an impossible one; like the texte scriptible, of which one can say nothing, “the traumatic photograph” for Barthes is “the one about which there is nothing to say.”35 Yet, as many theorists have maintained, whether a photograph itself is a message with or without a code, our only access to it is via the codes of language.36 Barthes knew that once a photograph has been discussed, it is irrevocably situated at the level of the sens obvie or the studium: To describe consists precisely in joining to the denoted message a second message or relay, drawn from a code which is language and which inevitably [fatalement] constitutes, whatever care is taken to be exact, a connotation in relation to the photographic analogue.37

Both Barthes and Sontag claimed that writing and painting were interpretative arts whereas photography was not. Once writing has been attached to a photograph in the form of a caption or an analysis, photography’s purity of denotation is contaminated. The photographs which Barthes chose to include and discuss in Camera Lucida, then, must be seen as both studium and punctum; each is a “co-presence” (42). The punctum comes in the personal, in what Barthes feels for the photographs, yet his insistence on an individual connection to each of the photographs reproduced in the book is undermined by the fact that almost all of them also appeared in Beaumont Newhall’s 1964 History of Photography. What Barthes writes about these images is less about them, or even about his discovery of them, but about himself by way of them. He may have experienced the punctum when he first saw each photograph (while leafing through a single album?), but, according to his own definition, if he describes it, it can in any case no longer exist as anything other than lukewarm cultural interest. What we are reading, then, turns out to be an attempt to write autobiography and jouissance, once again, again differently. And there will be only one pure punctum in Camera Lucida, experienced in front of a photograph that we as readers will never see.

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Barthes begins Part II of Camera Lucida with a description of the painful experience of looking through boxes of family photographs after his mother’s death. He finds all of the images of her to be false in one way or another: I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else. . . . Photography therefore compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false (65–66).38

This recognition only of “morceaux” calls to mind the kaleidoscopic and fragmented selfhood that Barthes had so joyfully proclaimed in The Pleasure of the Text and at the beginning of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Why is a collection of fragments of identity no longer enough? What else is Barthes hoping to find? He examines these photographs going backward in time, from the most recent to those of his mother’s childhood, and finally discovers what he has been looking for, “the truth of the face I had loved”: The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted, the sepia color had faded, and it barely showed two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in Winter Garden. My mother was five at the time (1898) (67).39

He had been seeking, and has found, no less than a timeless essence of his mother; “I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother” (69). To express his feelings upon seeing this photograph, he refers to a passage in which Proust described the sudden recollection of the face of his narrator’s grandmother, “‘whose living reality I was experiencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory’” (70). This magical photograph has seemingly brought his mother back from the dead. Barthes opposes the Winter Garden photograph to other photographs of his mother, which, like a series of inadequate adjectives, had only represented aspects of her identity: These same photographs . . . were merely analogical, provoking only her identity, not her truth; but the Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being” (70–71).40

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The photograph even as perfect analogon of reality no longer suffices. This punctum is more than just a denotative image; more than the referent adheres in this Photograph. Barthes has capitalized the word “photography” prior to this point in the text, but this is the first time that he uses a capital “p” for a single photograph. The intimate science of photography with which Barthes began Camera Lucida has become, via this Photograph, an intimate science of identity. Explaining that “in this veracious photograph, the being I love, whom I have loved, is not separated from itself: at last it coincides” (109), Barthes draws us back to his unrealized dream of a perfect coincidence of “I”s in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.41 The Winter Garden Photograph is, then, a perfect, wordless, non-narrative biography of his mother. Barthes finds in it, in Lacanian terms, his mother’s objet petit a, what Zizek describes as “the phantasmatic ‘stuff of the I,’ . . . that which confers on . . . the ontological void that we call ‘subject’ the ontological consistency of a ‘person.’”42 The objet petit a is what is in us and more than us, what guarantees our coherence and uniqueness at a moment of lack such as that of the mirror stage or, for Barthes, that of autobiography. Barthes revives in Camera Lucida the coherent, consistent, and essential self that he had rejected in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. This time it is not, at least for now, his own, and is seen not in a mirror, but in a photographic image of someone else. His theoretical definitions of the photograph as purely denotative and codeless, as “a message without a code,” have perfectly paved the way to this moment. Barthes’s focus on the Winter Garden Photograph marks the first significant appearance of an other in his autobiographical work. For the first time he is gazing outward as well as inward, yet an image and not a human being is at the core of this experience of the absolute recognition of another’s identity. Camera Lucida is not about Barthes’s mother, nor is it about his relationship with his mother. It instead recounts Barthes’s relationship with Photography and then with a photograph of his mother, who is already deceased. The story does not end with the discovery of this Photograph, moreover, since Barthes’s autobiographical problem is as yet unsolved. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, he had looked at photographs of himself as a child and found not the revelation of his identity but rather the fissure of the subject (the very thing about which he can say nothing)

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. . . The childhood photograph is both highly indiscreet (it is my body from underneath which is presented) and quite discreet (the photograph is not of ‘me.’)43

And although Barthes successfully recognizes his mother in the Winter Garden Photograph in Camera Lucida, he still cannot recognize himself in photographs: All I look like is other photographs of myself, and this to infinity: no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental (at most, I can say that in certain photographs I endure myself, or not, depending on whether or not I find myself in accord with the image of myself I want to give) (102).44

He remains the fragmented subject of his first autobiography. As no longer the “sujet regardant” but the subject photographed, Barthes experiences the opposite of the punctum. He is split anew, back into the first and third persons; “In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art” (13).45 Barthes experiences this objectification of himself as a “micro-version of death” (14), which recalls the suicidal risk of autobiography in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. In an essay published just a year before Camera Lucida, Barthes wrote that he had never been able to continue a journal for long. When he did keep one, “I am disgusted and irritated to find a ‘pose’ I certainly hadn’t intended.”46 Although seemingly spontaneous and informal, the diary’s written “I” feels staged and inauthentic to him. Barthes finds himself posing for the camera as he had for his journal; “once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image” (10).47 There is no longer any sense of jouissance to this posing, the sign of his split self. At the end of the first half of Camera Lucida, Barthes summarizes his process of discovery, writing that he had learned how his desire for certain photographs functioned, but I had not discovered the nature (the eidos) of Photography. I had to grant that my pleasure was an imperfect mediator, and that a subjectivity reduced to its hedonist project could not recognize the universal. I would have to descend deeper into myself to find the evidence of Photography (60).48

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Yet Barthes does not conduct a self-analysis in the second half of the text, which as we have already seen begins with the story of the Winter Garden photograph. What is then the method for this descent deep into himself? In order to discover what Barthes turns to in place of hedonism, we must return to the beginning of Part I, where he asserts that “my body never finds its degree zero, no one can give it to me (perhaps only my mother?)” (12).49 It is in fact Barthes’s mother, or rather a photograph of her, that will give him his degree zero. His mother, we read, put herself in front of the camera lens with “discretion,” but did not pose; “She did not struggle with her image, as I do with mine: she did not suppose herself ” (67).50 It is for this reason that her “unique being” could be visible in a photograph whereas his own was not. Barthes had captioned a photograph of himself as a toddler in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes as follows: “From the past, it is my childhood which fascinates me most . . . it is not the irreversible I discover in my childhood, it is the irreducible: everything which is still in me.”51 This discovery ended only several pages later, however, since he was not able to recognize himself even in these photographs of childhood. Only through the “irreducible” of his mother, then, discovered in the Winter Garden photograph in Camera Lucida, can Barthes hope to find his own uniqueness. Once again, Barthes turns to Proust: I might say, like the Proustian Narrator at his grandmother’s death: ‘I did not insist only upon suffering, but upon respecting the originality of my suffering’; for this originality was the reflection of what was absolutely irreducible in her (75).52

His singular suffering at the death of his mother may somehow transfer to him the core of essential identity that he has discovered in her photographic image; his unique pain at the loss of the irreducible in her may provide him with an irreducible of his own. Barthes wrote in The Pleasure of the Text that the writer maintains a constant relationship to pleasure via a special object; “it is not language [le langage], it is the system of language/the tongue [la langue], the mother tongue. The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body.”53 The mother tongue has now become a mother image, in which Barthes finds, and takes, what he loves. The essence of his mother that Photography has allowed him to discover suggests that a similar imprint of himself may also exist. He does not need to know where the image is or to see it, only to know that something exists to be revealed in it. Barthes needs

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Photography and his mother as autobiographical facilitators; neither suffices without the other. The only photograph in this book that really matters, then, the only Photograph, is the one that is not reproduced on the page for us. Barthes does not show us the magic Winter Garden photograph in Camera Lucida for the curious reason that it exists only for him: (I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’ . . . at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound) (73).54

Yet Barthes has already stated that this book is about a selection of photographs, reproduced within the text, which exist only “for me.” Why is this one photograph different from the other examples of the punctum? Barthes attempts to examine it in all of its detail: Lost in the depths of the Winter Garden, my mother’s face is blurred, faded. In a first impulse, I exclaimed: ‘It’s her! [C’est elle!] It’s really her! It’s finally her!’ Now I claim to know—and to be able to say adequately—why, in what, it is her. I want to outline the loved face by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation; I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth (and sometimes, naively, I confide this task to a laboratory). I believe that by enlarging the detail ‘in series’ . . . I will finally reach my mother’s very being . . . I decompose, I enlarge, and, so to speak, I slow down, in order to have the time to know at last (99).55

Like the photograph of his mother with which Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes begins, this image is blurred. If he enlarges it in an attempt to see more clearly, the denotative message becomes connotative, the punctum becomes a studium, and the sens obtus is lost; “if I enlarge, I see nothing but the grain of the paper: I undo the image for the sake of its substance” (100).56 Photography “cannot say what it lets us see” (100), and neither can we; we must look rather than read or write. Barthes’s “‘C’est elle!’” reminds us of the exclamation which was the reader’s only response to a text of jouissance—“c’est ça!” The photographs reproduced in Camera Lucida serve to set the stage for the Winter Garden Photograph by exemplifying, and allowing Barthes to theorize, the opposition between and co-existence of punctum and

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studium. But Barthes, unable to provide for his reader the direct experience of the bliss of identity that he has discovered, refuses to risk allowing the Photograph of his mother to have a studium. This image is, as I have already hinted, the punctum of Camera Lucida and must exist only as punctum. Barthes not only refuses to let us look at the Photograph of his mother, he does not want anyone to look at any photograph of him. Like Sarraute, he fears that an other’s interpretation would define and therefore objectify him; “what society makes of my photograph, what it reads there, I do not know (in any case, there are so many readings of the same face) . . . others—the Other—dispossess me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object” (14).57 If he is read as studium, in someone else’s scholarly third person, for example, the result would be a “disinternalized countenance” (15). Barthes must renounce his prior interest in the studium of photographs; his semiological approach in Mythologies had involved, after all, reading images, like the Paris Match cover photograph of an African soldier saluting the French flag, for their connotative rather than denotative message. He desires yet also fears the conjunction of subjectivity and science with which he has replaced the alternation between first and third persons in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: I have always wanted to remonstrate with my moods; not to justify them; still less to fill the scene of the text with my individuality; but on the contrary, to offer, to extend this individuality to a science of the subject, a science whose name is of little importance to me, provided it attains (as has not yet occurred) to a generality which neither reduces nor crushes me (18).58

The “intimate science” that Barthes seeks in Camera Lucida is not only one of photography but one of the individual subject as well; his desire for singularity is expressed even more strongly here than in his first autobiographical work. In a masking trope which recalls but reverses his beloved “Larvatus prodeo,” Barthes writes that: Since every photograph is contingent (and thereby outside of meaning), Photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask. It is this word which Calvino correctly uses to designate what makes a face into the product of a society and of its history (34).59

By the time of Camera Lucida, he no longer wants to advance masked, even if he can point to his mask as he advances. Barthes is no longer willing to

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present himself as an interpretable object, a product of his history and society; “From the beginning, I had determined on a principle for myself: never to reduce myself-as-subject, confronting certain photographs, to the disincarnated, disaffected socius which science is concerned with” (74).60 As with Sarraute’s tropistic autobiography and quite against the principles, at least, of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, description and (meta)language threaten to destroy the pleasure of perfect coincidence, which is no longer a dream but an attainable reality. Barthes needed photography, then, since he had long known that a coherent first person was impossible in writing, and he had recently decided that he wanted one. He began Camera Lucida with already formed hypotheses about the nature of photography, but was also engaged in a project of discovery. For photography to help him accomplish his autobiography as punctum rather than studium, he would need to discover the essence or punctum, the support of identity or objet petit a, not only of his mother in a Photograph but of Photography itself. Having recounted the experience of the Winter Garden Photograph, Barthes returns to this project; “I therefore decided to ‘derive’ all Photography (its ‘nature’) from the only photograph which surely existed for me, and to take it somehow as a guide for my last investigation” (73).61 He will once again move from a particular to a universal, this time in order to find what Photography is. In addition to being a message without a code, he concludes that Photography is unique because, although painting can “feign reality without having seen it,” in Photography, I can never deny that the thing has been there . . . What I intentionalize in a photograph (we are not yet speaking of film) is neither Art nor Communication, it is Reference, which is the founding order of Photography. . . . The name of Photography’s noeme will therefore be: ‘That-hasbeen’” (76–77).62

So, have we finally come to the new in Barthes’s “Note on Photography”? Once again, we find a very similar passage in Sontag’s book—“A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened . . . there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture”—as well as another in Barthes’s earlier work—“the photograph institutes, in fact, not a consciousness of the thing’s being-there (which any copy might provoke), but a consciousness of the thing’s havingbeen-there.”63 Some thirty pages of Camera Lucida later, Barthes will claim

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that “the photograph tells me death in the future” (96). Bazin had already written, however, that “photography does not create eternity, as does art, it embalms time, shielding it from its own corruption.”64 Photography as the future tense of death is new, however, because Barthes sees his mother’s death in the Winter Garden photograph; “In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder . . . over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe” (96).65 The essential uniqueness of his mother that he also sees in the photograph is the only solace for the simultaneous reminder of her death. Barthes’s innovation in Camera Lucida is located at the intersection of photography and (auto)biography, within his affective phenomenology. In order to understand better the particular autobiographical use to which Barthes puts Photography, we will have to return once more to Walter Benjamin, and now to the difference instead of similarity between the “spark” he saw in early portrait photographs and Barthes’s punctum. Benjamin argued that the aura of a work of art, its uniqueness and authenticity, was lost with the advent of the reproducible photographic image, since “the technique of reproduction . . . substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”66 Reproducibility, however, is not at issue in Camera Lucida, and Barthes’s punctum results not from the presence of an original work of art, but rather from the past-ness affirmed by the photographic image, the “that-has-been” [ça-a-été] and not the “it’s here” [c’est là]. Derrida, noting that the punctum allows Barthes to speak “the point of singularity, the movement of discourse toward the unique,” concluded that “what adheres in photography is perhaps less the referent itself, in the present effectiveness of its reality, than the implication in its reference of its having-been-unique.”67 Every punctum affirms not a referent, but referentiality: until this day, no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with Photography, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. Photography then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination . . . a mad image, rubbed by reality (115).68

The Winter Garden Photograph affirms the unsayable [indicible], the past existence and future perfect death of Barthes’s mother. In this photographic (and not mirror) image he finds her coherent and particular essence, not the

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Mother, but “a radiant, irreducible core, my mother” (75).69 Photography, for Barthes, has its own aura, as if all photographs, and thereby all those pictured within them, were originals. Barthes describes his discovery of the noeme of photography, the ça-aété, with respect to an image of himself as well as to the Winter Garden Photograph of his mother. A friend of his had exhibited a photograph of him which he cannot remember having been taken, but “because it was a photograph, I could not deny that I had been there. . . . I went to the exhibit as to a police investigation, to learn at last what I no longer knew about myself ” (85).70 Even though Barthes knows that photographs can be altered, he believes them more than he does words: It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself . . . language is, by nature, fictional; in order to render language unfictional, we require an enormous assemblage of procedures: we convoke logic, or, lacking that, sworn oath; but Photography is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentification itself (86–87).71

Photography is real and not fiction, and its power to authenticate is ultimately more important to Barthes than its ability to represent. The only way forward after the autobiographical dilemma posed by Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes was through a medium other than writing, one to which Barthes could attribute a capacity that language lacked. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is autobiography in the present tense, whereas the aura of Photography in Camera Lucida allows Barthes to represent his mother and himself in the past and in the future perfect, proving nothing more and nothing less than that they existed and will have died. At the beginning of Camera Lucida, Barthes notes that the technology of photography is associated with a split self; “Photography is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of the awareness of identity” (12).72 When photographed, as we already know, the separation of his body and his image makes him feel “a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture” (13). This sensation of falsity and distance was an autobiographical problem with which Barthes struggled in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. He seeks resolution in his second autobiography, not an image to match his self, as we might expect, but a body to match his posed image:

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It is ‘I’ who never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society relies on it), and it is ‘I’ who am light, divided, dispersed and who, like a Cartesian devil, won’t hold still. . . . ah, if only Photography could give me a body which signifies nothing (12)!73

Margaret Iversen has quite brilliantly read Camera Lucida as a commentary on Lacan’s critique of classical optics and perspective in the eleventh seminar.74 We recall that Lacan exposed the illusion of “seeing oneself seeing oneself” in order to decenter the subjectivity of he or she who sees, arguing that the subject, seen from all sides, is constituted by the desire of the Other. Iversen suggests that Barthes’s punctum, like Lacan’s gaze, is the spot or stain that has been elided in classical optics: The Real is glimpsed only when the vanity of the world conceived as my representation is renounced. There is, then, a blind spot in the orthodox perceptual field which Lacan calls the stain (la tache), defined, like the gaze, as ‘that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness.’75

Unlike the fullness of vision associated with the Imaginary of the mirror stage, “the gaze or stain does not represent the ego, but rather gestures toward the unrepresentable subject,” the subject of desire.76 Since the punctum, unlike the studium, is not controlled by our sight but rather jumps out at us from a photograph, Iversen concludes that Barthes has presented for us the subject as determined by the gaze. In Lacan’s words, “I am photographed.”77 Although in Camera Lucida Barthes “abandoned [him]self to the Image, to the Imaginary” (75), he rejected the mirror stage model which had plagued Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.78 His coherent identity would not now appear in the mirror, then to be fragmented (and then reunified), but instead would exist as seen by the gaze of the Photograph, or the punctum. Barthes wants to be photo-graphed in order finally to have an autobiography in which “I” and image, Roland Barthes and Roland Barthes, coincide. He accomplishes this by arranging for Photography to give him a body to match his image, rather than continuing the search for an image to match his body. Camera Lucida need only be purely denotative autobiography. Martin Jay claims that Barthes’s association of photography and death in Camera Lucida is the sign of a “thanatology of vision,” going on to argue that

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the book represents a failure, since Barthes looked at photography and found death.79 But this death, discovered in a photograph along with the “irreducible” of Barthes’s mother, has been precisely the sign of his success. The referentiality and authentification of photography not only allow his mother to be restored to him, but allow him to be restored as well. Photography serves as the sublime piece of the Real that supports Barthes’s very identity as subject.80 For John Tagg, who maintains that “the very idea of what constitutes evidence has a history—a history which has escaped Barthes,” Camera Lucida constitutes the “reassertion of a retrospective photographic realism.”81 But this history has not escaped Barthes; he is aware of it and simply no longer cares. He is now interested in the punctum rather than the studium of Photography, in himself as the measure of Photography and Photography as the measure of himself. Camera Lucida embodies a radical realism of the first-person singular: Mad or tame? Photography can be one or the other: tame if its realism remains relative, tempered by aesthetic or empirical habits, . . . mad if this realism is absolute and, so to speak, original, obliging the loving and terrified consciousness to return to the very letter of Time: a strictly revulsive movement which reverses the course of the thing, and which I shall call, in conclusion, photographic ecstasy. Such are the two ways of Photography. The choice is mine: to subject its spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions, or to confront it in the wakening of intractable reality (119).82

Barthes has chosen, of course, the latter, and his response to Tagg can be found within the text; “By a necessary resistance, I get to the point of reconstituting the division between public and private: I want to utter interiority without yielding intimacy” (98).83 Camera Lucida is differently introspective than Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. To avoid a very public writing about himself complete with self-commentary on his writing about himself, Barthes defines the punctum so that Photography may show the inner core of his self, but does not let us see it. I have already argued that Barthes attains an autobiographical goal in Camera Lucida by establishing photography as crucially different from the other representative arts, and particularly written prose. I have not yet, however, mentioned film, photography’s most important other in Barthes’s writing about the visual arts. On the very first page of Camera Lucida, Barthes tells us that “I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which

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I nonetheless failed to separate it” (3). In a contemporaneous interview, Barthes asserted that “if I chose photography as the subject of my book, I did so, in a way, against film . . . paradoxically, I put photography above cinema in my little personal Pantheon.”84 Whereas Benjamin had grouped photography with film as mechanically reproducible art without aura, Barthes attributed an aura to photography that film lacks: In the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not make a claim in favor of its reality, it does not protest its former existence; it does not cling to me: it is not a specter (89).85

Barthes had argued even prior to Camera Lucida that photography and cinema were fundamentally and ontologically different; “the cinema is not animated photography; in it the having-been-there vanishes, giving way to a being-there of the thing.”86 Photography is an art of authentication and of the past, but the narrativity of film proves nothing and brings the cinema, like his first autobiography, into the present tense. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, we were given a reason for Barthes’s “resistance to cinema”: the signifier itself is always, by nature, fluid here, despite the rhetoric of shots; it is, without remission, a continuum of images; the film (the French word for it, pellicule, is highly appropriate: it is a skin without puncture or perforation) follows, like a talkative ribbon.87

Film is relentlessly continuous whereas, as we recall, Barthes characterized himself in this first autobiography by a penchant for writing in fragments. In Camera Lucida, he allies Photography with the fragmentary biographeme of Sade, Fourier, Loyola; “I like certain biographical features which, in a writer’s life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features ‘biographemes’”(30).88 Film, in this new Barthesian opposition, is aligned with conventional biography, since “the story, the anecdote, the plot (with its major consequence, suspense) are never absent.”89 Barthes opposed photography to film in Camera Lucida in order for it to give him what he needed, no less than “absolute subjectivity” (55). Whereas absolute subjectivity can be attained in front of a photograph, in silence, with one’s eyes closed (“shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence”), Barthes finds this to be impossible when watching a film; “in front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again,

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I would not discover the same image” (55).90 Even when Barthes did write about film, he chose to write about it as a series of still images, since “the still dissolves the constraint of filmic time,” allowing us to look at a film at our own pace, as when reading a book.91 In his 1973 essay “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” Barthes considered representation as “découpage,” examining the ways in which all three artists created works which are fragmented into “tableaux.”92 He praised not Eisenstein’s film, but Eisenstein’s stills, as individual and separate works of art: This is Eisenstein’s primary power: no single image is boring, we are not forced to wait for the next one in order to understand and be delighted: no dialectic . . . but a continuous jubilation, consisting of a summation of perfect moments.93

Barthes appreciated Soviet montage because, in his view, it broke up the linear diegesis of filmic narrative. He took this opportunity to create, moreover, yet another opposition, this time between film and the filmic, which mirrored his distinction between photograph and Photography: The filmic is what, in the film, cannot be described, it is the representation that cannot be represented. The filmic begins only where language and articulated metalanguage cease. . . . The filmic is as far from the film as the novelistic is from the novel (I can write novelistically without ever writing novels).94

The filmic, like the sens obtus, is what interested Barthes, and he claimed that it cannot be grasped while the film is in movement. Eisenstein, on the other hand, characterized montage as collision, as “the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other.” Montage film was to be an art of juxtaposition, of dialectical conflict, and shots or “montage-pieces” had no meaningful existence on their own.”95 Barthes stubbornly misunderstood Eisenstein’s theory of montage, valuing the découpage at the expense of the montage in his celebration of the still, which is to say Photography. Like Barthes, Eisenstein recognized that two messages coexist within all representational art, that the nature of art is “a conflict between natural existence and creative tendency.” Barthes, however, wanted to quiet this conflict and chose either to analyze the connotative message or to experience pure denotation, while Eisenstein sought a “dynamism” in the interaction between the two.96 Barthes described his experience as a spectator of film

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as an almost comical passivity that would have horrified both Brecht and Eisenstein: The filmic image (including the sound) is what? An illusion . . . it sustains in the subject I think myself to be the misrecognition [méconnaissance] attached to the ‘I’ and to the Imaginary. In the movie theater, however far away I am sitting, I glue my nose, to the point of crushing it, to the mirror of the screen, to that ‘other’ imaginary with which I narcissistically identify myself. . . . The image captivates me, captures me: I am glued to the representation, and it is this glue which establishes the naturalness (the pseudo-nature) of the filmed scene (a glue prepared with all the ingredients of ‘technique’).97

The non-narrative nature of photography, in addition to its aura and distance, seem to preserve its spectator from the gluey narcissistic entrapment in the Imaginary of the mirror stage of which Barthes is wary, and to which he is vulnerable. In Camera Lucida, then, Barthes kept his autobiographical nose from sticking to the screen by spinning a story out of still images. He could allow himself an Imaginary wholeness of identity, an escape from what he knew to be the inevitable split between telling and told “I”s, in the fragmentary instant of a Photograph. Despite Barthes’s clear preference for photography over film, or rather because Barthes’s preference seems to warrant suspicion, I would like to proceed from Barthes’s autobiography via Photography to a consideration of the possibilities of filmic autobiography. Barthes’s “resistance” to moving pictures has been shared by the surprisingly small number of scholars who have discussed autobiographical film, then often only to deny its existence. We will see that just as Barthes emphasized a certain difference between photography and film in order to use Photography in the service of autobiography, theorists of literary autobiography have emphasized a certain difference between the written and filmic first persons. All have underestimated the potential of the filmic form for the autobiographical representation of fragmented subjectivity. The study of film was on its way to establishing itself as an academic discipline toward the end of the 1950s, when George Gusdorf’s essay renewed critical interest in the genre of autobiography. Given this conjunction, it is remarkable that the question of autobiographical film has so rarely been addressed. The earliest reference I have located to a first-person voice in film

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appears in a 1947 article by Jean-Pierre Chartier, in which he discussed not autobiographical film but first-person narration, which he called interior monologue, in fiction film.98 The few critical discussions of autobiography and film during the 1950s and 60s grew out of French auteur theory. In a 1959 review of François Truffaut’s 400 Blows, for example, Fereydoun Hoveyda asserted that “every film is in some sense autobiographical. For better or for worse, film absorbs and reflects the personality of the auteur.”99 Annette Insdorf similarly pointed to filmic allusions within Truffaut’s entire oeuvre, not claiming any one of Truffaut’s films as an autobiography but judging that “many . . . characters, themes, techniques, and structures are intimate reflections of François Truffaut.”100 Arguing, like Hoveyda, that every film is in some sense an autobiography of its auteur, Insdorf provided no theoretical framework for the analysis of a specific autobiographical film as opposed to the entire body of work of a filmmaker. Nor, more importantly, can we distinguish between a film about a filmmaker making a film, such as Truffaut’s Day for Night or Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, and a film in which a filmmaker makes a direct attempt to recount his or her life. These distinctions were made by two theorists of literary autobiography, Elizabeth Bruss and Philippe Lejeune, both of whom published articles about autobiographical film in the 1980s. Bruss and Lejeune, however, declared the impossibility of autobiographical film, claiming that the concept of autobiography could not be translated from written to filmic narrative. Bruss argued, moreover, not only that autobiographical film could not exist, but that its existence would threaten the existence of autobiography altogether: If film and video do come to replace writing as our chief means of recording, informing, and entertaining, and if (as I hope to show) there is no real cinematic equivalent for autobiography, then the autobiographical act as we have known it for the past four hundred years could indeed become more and more recondite, and eventually extinct.101

Bruss attributed to film, as opposed to written language, qualities that Barthes had reserved for photography; “film makes us impatient for a direct transcription—an actual imprint of the person, unmediated and ‘uncreated.’”102 This meant that autobiographical filmmakers had to choose whether to record the truth or to stage it, whereas literary autobiographers had always been limited to a certain sort of staging. Yet if we were to follow

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this argument through to its logical conclusion, we would have to agree with Michel Mesnil that a true filmic self-portrait could be achieved only by filming oneself every hour of every day for twenty years and then speeding up the film or splicing segments together to see the changes over the years in the space of one hour.103 Yet the earliest of filmmakers were aware that there is no such thing as an unmediated recording of reality, and even Mesnil’s ideal autobiographical film would of course require the mediation of a projectionist or an editor. Bruss maintained, furthermore, that since the same person can never be both behind the camera and in front of it at the same time, the narrating “I” of autobiographical writing could have no equivalent in film; “the autobiographical self decomposes, schisms, into almost mutually exclusive elements of the person filmed (entirely visible; recorded and projected) and the person filming (entirely hidden; behind the camera eye).”104 She allowed film a third but not a first-person voice. But as Benveniste and Lacan, among others, have shown us, and as Bruss well knew, the subject of language is always split. The narrating “I” is never equal to itself, even, or especially, in writing. Kaja Silverman has observed that film merely shows us what has always already been the case in writing, “clarifies for us . . . the distance which separates the speaking subject from the spoken subject.”105 The multiple authorship of film, in Bruss’s opinion, also threatened the autobiographical subject: Even if a single individual should manage to be scriptwriter and director, cameraman, set designer, light and sound technician, and editor to boot . . . the result would be a tour de force and not the old, unquestionable authority of the speaking subject.106

Yet the speaking subject lost its unquestionable authority a long time ago, if it ever had it, and film shares its authorial fragmention with Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Childhood. Bruss, again, knew this and eventually came to the crux of her argument; “The trick comes off in language.”107 Written language tricks us better than film and is therefore more appropriate for autobiography. Although Bruss acknowledged that filmic narration “simply expose[s] certain tendencies already implicit in writing,” she claimed that it goes too far; “the heterogeneity of the edited image goes even further toward expressing a manufactured subjectivity, an artifact that has no single site, no inherent unity, no body where it is ‘naturally’ confined.”108 Is the

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difference between natural and manufactured subjectivity one of degree? And if we have to use scare quotes around naturally, where is the filmic difference? Philippe Lejeune began his brief exploration of autobiographical film with a series of questions: “Can the ‘I’ express itself in the cinema? Can a film be autobiographical? Why not? But is it the same thing as when we speak of literary autobiography? . . . Is autobiography possible in the cinema?”109 He answered in the negative, for the same reasons as had Bruss: The ‘superiority’ of language results from its capacity to make us forget its fictional portion, rather than from any special ability to tell the truth. . . . It is not possible to be on both sides of the camera at the same time, in front of it and behind it, whereas the spoken or written first person easily manages to mask the fact that . . . I am an other (je est un autre).110

Writing can deceive us more effectively, even if we already know that it is deceptive. It seems to be strangely more difficult to theorize autobiographical film than to make one, a peculiarity acknowledged by Lejeune in his exclamation that “autobiographical film is perhaps theoretically impossible, but in practice it exists!”111 Both Bruss and Lejeune in the end shored up an antiquated conception of literary autobiography, one which both had undermined in their earlier work, by a strategy of opposition in which film served as the other of literature.112 Faced with the challenge posed by a new medium, they reverted to a more restrictive generic classification rather than rethink the category of autobiography in the light of the new opportunities film offered. Several scholars of film have, however, suggested ways of thinking about cinematic autobiography which provide a starting point for my readings of French and Francophone African autobiographical films. Three years before Bruss’s essay appeared, John Stuart Katz expressed a similar desire for “an actual imprint of the person,” defining autobiographical film as a very limited subgenre of direct cinema documentary made up of films which “enable viewers to experience, with minimal artifice, the lives of others.”113 But in an analysis of American avant-garde diary films from the 1960s and 70s that appeared in the same year, P. Adams Sitney drew not a stark contrast but a parallel between literary and filmic autobiography. Sitney maintained, remembering instead of trying to forget the difficulties of self-narration in writing, that “film-makers resemble the literary autobiographers who dwell

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upon, and find their most powerful and enigmatic metaphors for, the very aporias, the contradictions, the gaps, the failures involved in trying to make language (or film) substitute for experience and memory.”114 More recently, a few theorists of cinematic autobiography have followed Sitney’s lead by focusing on avant-garde and experimental documentary work produced in the United States and, more rarely, Western Europe. Michael Renov, interested in films which construct “subjectivity as a site of instability—flux, drift, perpetual revision—rather than coherence,” reminds us, against Bruss and Katz, that artifice is a necessary component of autobiographical narration in any medium.115 Jim Lane takes up Renov’s model of flux and revision to point out that the autobiographical documentary, like literary autobiography, always contains at least two voices, always “bears the mark of personal, actual events and a consciousness that bears witness to, and forms an opinion about, these events through documentary representation.”116 And Susanna Egan suggests that an interview-based structure is characteristic of autobiographical film, concluding that “film facilitates development away from linear narrative and singular and authoritative selfhood.”117 Bruss and Lejeune struggled to maintain a strict distinction between written and filmic autobiography that was modeled on the distinction between first and third-person narration. If filmic autobiography proved impossible since in the third person, then perhaps the first person was not irrevocably split, and literary autobiography could remain not only possible but definable. Barthes similarly used both writing and film as photography’s other arts; their failures bolstered his story of Photography’s success. Barthes, Bruss, and Lejeune chose to focus on the differences between autobiographical narration in different media, but I would like to investigate autobiographical film as an extreme and quite literal case of the third-person nature of all autobiography. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Childhood, and Camera Lucida have all shown us that the trick does not always come off in language, either for the autobiographer or for the reader. Filmic autobiography, with its multiple authorship and material, visible, split between director or filmer and actor or filmed self, stretches our knowledge of the fragmented autobiographical “I” to an uncomfortable and extremely profitable extent. This new medium may provide us with new ways to explore and represent fragmented subjectivity.

chapter 4

Screening Autobiography: Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights

“I’m an exhibitionist, but above all I’m a voyeur of myself.”1

Having raised the question of the visual and its relationship to the autobiographical project as well as that of the possibility of filmic autobiography, I will continue with the first of three case studies. Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights is particularly useful to us; the literary autobiography of a filmmaker transformed and translated for the screen, it is the second draft of a life story. Collard adapted the film from his 1989 autobiography of the same title, and it was released in October of 1992, less than six months before he died of AIDS. After beginning his career as an assistant director on two of Maurice Pialat’s films, Loulou in 1980 and À nos amours (in which he also acted) in 1983, Collard made several short films and went on to publish his first novel, Condamné amour, in 1987. Two years earlier, as the first AIDS tests became available, he had discovered that he was HIV positive. As Barthes’s Photographic autobiography centered around his mother, both versions of Collard’s autobiography focus on the three major relationships of the last period of his life: his love affair with a woman, Laura; his love af72

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fairs with men, including Samy and Jamel; and his “nuits fauves,” anonymous sadomasochistic encounters with men under a Paris bridge. In his written autobiography, Collard described himself as fragmented by these romantic and sexual relationships and invaded by the HIV virus. In the film version of Savage Nights, however, shot as he was dying, Collard incorporated these kaleidoscopic aspects of himself into a unifying and unified story, consciously renegotiating an image of identity that he knew would outlast him. We have seen that theorists have not been able to agree on what would constitute a first-person filmic narrative, or even if such a thing could exist. Collard not only wrote and directed his film and played the starring role, he also composed and performed the music within it, addressing at least in part Bruss’s concerns about film’s multiple authorship by taking on as many roles in the film’s production as possible. And Cahiers du cinéma critic Serge Toubiana described Savage Nights as not only autobiographical, but a firstperson film: The author is also the principal actor—thus, he who claims the ‘I.’ But this I functions as a liberating fragmentation of multiple facets which shine, sometimes clear, luminous, sometimes somber, nocturnal, almost troubling.2

Toubiana suggests that a film may be in the first person even if, or perhaps because, its “I” is multiply fragmented. His “liberating fragmentation of multiple facets” recalls the vocabulary of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, for which, we begin to suspect, film could have been an ideal medium. Yet Collard’s self-representation turns out to be, however paradoxically, less fragmented in his film than in his written text. In remaking the text of his life, he tried to stitch himself together and represent the teleological attainment of a unity of self and body. In an interview with Toubiana, Collard expressed dissatisfaction with the voice-over he had used in Savage Nights. It may have been a bad choice artistically, he stated, but he had needed to replace the “I” of his written narrative with something similar in effect; “the book is written in the first person and it made me anxious to think of getting rid of this first person completely.”3 Collard, it would seem, began with some of the same fears as Bruss and Lejeune, and this autobiographical anguish led him to the voice-over as compensation for the lost first person of writing. Jean-Pierre Chartier argued in his discussion of fiction film that an “audio first person,” a voice-

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over spoken by the main character, was more suited to the development of a first person in film than an “I” of the camera, the best-known example (and failure) of which is Robert Montgomery’s 1947 Lady in the Lake.4 Michael Renov has similarly claimed that a voice-over may serve to maintain a unity of speaking and spoken subject in autobiographical documentary, while nonetheless allowing for the representation of an “ineradicably split diaristic subject.”5 The filmic voice-over mimics the written “I,” mitigating the risk of the visual, if not always for long. Whereas the first-person narrator of Savage Nights the novel (acknowledged by Collard to be an autobiographical character) is never named, the hero of the film, acted by Collard, is given the name Jean, a pseudonym that has its origin in two moments in the novel.6 Both novel and film contain a scene in which the main character learns that Jean Genet, a hero and model for Collard himself, has died (48). The novel’s narrator adds that he and Genet share the same birthday. The date given is, in fact, Cyril Collard’s birthday; he thus establishes a transitive autobiographical pact via Genet. There is also a Jean in the novel, but he is the main character in a film that the narrator is planning based on a story developed by his friend Omar. This Jean is a gay French doctor who befriends two young Algerian boys, gets beaten up by a gang led by their older brother, and finally leaves France for Syria, where he bravely cares for the poor and the sick (10–12). Foreshadowing what many will judge to be the incredible narcissism of the film version of Savage Nights, the narrator begins a sexual relationship with Eric, the actor who played Jean, after they have finished shooting the film-withinthe-novel. Collard’s filmic Jean incorporates the role of the narrator of the novel as well as aspects of all of these other Jeans. I have already mentioned that Collard is omnipresent in and behind his film; he claimed to have looked for another actor to play the role of Jean, but it is easy to be suspicious of the possibility of his finding anyone who could play the part to his satisfaction. During an interview with Toubiana, Collard agreed that he “unifie[d] the ensemble, . . . with the risk of narcissism and its excesses.”7 Collard so successfully reinforced the spectator’s impression of autobiographical verisimilitude that the fact that he himself had played the starring role seemed, in retrospect, inevitable to critics, “as if, without doing it on purpose, he was not able to escape the responsibility of assuming everything in the first person.”8 Many declared that only Col-

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lard could have acted his part—“the role of Jean . . . could only have been played by him”9—and innumerable critics and reviewers, reading backward in time and proving Collard’s successful use of a filmic first-person voice, have incorrectly referred to the unnamed narrator of the book version of Savage Nights as Jean. It is not surprising, given Collard’s prior experience directing films and music videos, that his autobiographical novel is written in a strikingly cinematic style, often as if a screenplay. The narrator’s vision, moreover, is that of a filmmaker; “I’m driving through Paris. I hold my video camera in my left hand and the steering wheel with my right. The city and the night are a series of lateral pans, interrupted only by the intersections protected by red lights” (76).10 He not only films his life but watches himself living as if he were an actor in a film: I was driving, but I felt like an American actor playing a scene inside a car on a Hollywood set. I could see the road, the sky, and the landscape rolling by, but they had no more reality than stock images projected on a screen behind the rear panel of a 1950 Plymouth (34).11

Collard’s reflexive style emphasizes the divided identity of his narrator, this voyeur of himself. In a drunken vision, the Expressionist poet (and medical specialist in venereal diseases) Gottfried Benn appears to the narrator and explains his philosophy of “double life,” “a conscious, systematic, tendentious split of the personality’” (29).12 Collard’s narrator feels his double life to be a result of his bisexuality, but even when alone with Laura, the young woman who is his primary heterosexual partner, he feels split; “I’m inside her, idealized by the love she bears me, and around her, like the four walls of the studio, . . . Laura sandwiched between me and me” (117).13 He is torn, moreoever, by his desires for different sexual relationships, all of which are recounted in great detail. His inability to be tender with Laura reappears throughout the novel, but he has no difficulty being loving and affectionate with the men in his life; “I’m still not able to take her in my arms; I imagine it must hurt her. But I only know that kind of hugging with boys” (97–98).14 He associates relationships with women with calmness and security, yet when Laura becomes hysterical and vindictive it is Samy, his primary male partner, who becomes his “security” (109). Incapable of choosing between Samy and Laura, his

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temporary choices are most often based on some sort of mimetic desire and mediated by a third person. He desires Laura, because Samy does, and then desires Samy’s girlfriend Marianne because Samy has recently made love to her (81–83). Every paradigm he sets up to stabilize his division is eventually subverted; even the choice he struggles to make between Laura and Samy is troubled by his continuing desire for the multiple partners of his “savage nights.” He is fragmented, like a text without a unifying theme; “I was living . . . many stories of desires and needs, islands of events that were never linked together” (62–63).15 This fragmentation is paralleled by the quick and choppy rhythm of the text, written in scenes of between approximately ten lines and several pages in length. Collard writes, “I loved Samy, I loved Laura, I loved the vices of my savage nights. Was I born so completely divided? Or had I been cut into pieces, little by little, because I would have been too dangerous, too uncontrollable, if unified?” (59).16 His narrator sees his lack of unity and wonders if it has a cause, wonders if a fundamental or original wholeness ever preceded it. Although nostalgic for an illusion of undivided identity, he appreciates his multiplicity as a rebellion against the pre-constructed social categories among which others expect him to choose. Collard said in an interview that, “when the book came out, I felt that people weren’t able to put me in a box, into a drawer, and that this bothered them. It wasn’t a homosexual writer who was speaking, even though he slept with guys.”17 The outside world tries to fix his sexual identity, as does his narrator’s friend Elsa, who claims,“‘Once a faggot, always a faggot!’” (170), but Collard never wanted to define himself as either strictly homosexual or heterosexual.18 Once he learns that he is HIV positive, the narrator of Savage Nights feels fragmented not only externally, by these relationships with his multiple lovers, but internally as well, by the virus that he perceives as an other living within him. The source of his infection does not matter to him; the lovers who had possibly infected him are replaced in his memory by images of the virus, in a passage that will reappear in Collard’s film; “I wondered who had infected me, but I blamed only myself. I saw blurred faces, quickly replaced by images of the virus: a jagged ball covered with spikes, like a medieval mace” (14).19 Donna Haraway argues that immune system interactions, as visually represented by digitally created images of molecules or viruses, have served in the second half of the twentieth century as “the iconic means for

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maintaining the integrity of the one in the face of the many,” for resisting any denaturing of the concept of the individual.20 Immune system discourse unifies the individual body as fighting against invading otherness. Yet when Collard’s narrator looks within, he sees not his body fighting the image of the virus, but only the virus. He sees that his body has no natural, that is to say uncontaminated, wholeness; “I’m made up of pieces of myself that have been scattered about, then stuck back together anyhow, because after all, you need some sort of body. I’m just a mass of terrorized cells” (83).21 Only the virus that has invaded his body at the cellular level unifies him biologically, and the certainty of his impending death reduces him to nothing but this sickness; “For me, the horizon was only illness. On that unrelieved flatness I saw an image of myself, microscopic in size. On the horizon, I was nothing but a virus” (28).22 HIV, which threatens to become all that he is, provides the only unity for his infected body and, ultimately, for his image of self. The HIV virus becomes an object of exchange and of power between Collard’s narrator and his lovers, and particularly Laura. He refuses to risk infecting her once he has told her that he is HIV positive, once he has acknowledged to himself that he could. She, astonishingly, wants him to infect her; she wants to share his disease and he does not want to give it to her. When their relationship begins to collapse, she declares that he has in fact infected her, that she is HIV positive. Her mother (and later Jean in Savage Nights the film) then asks the doctor in the psychological clinic to which she has been admitted to give her an AIDS test without her knowledge. When the narrator discovers that the test was negative, he feels that “she doesn’t have any hold on me . . . it’s as if she no longer exists” (208).23 The fact that they might share the virus had constituted a link between them that was now dissolved. He understands Laura’s lies about being HIV positive as both a desperate attempt to share his illness out of love and an aggressive attempt to appropriate his identity, to take something special away from him. In the film, Laura will tell Jean that “there is that filthy disease between us. Like a stranger watching us.”24 The disease does indeed separate them, but not as one might expect. HIV gets between them as would a romantic rival, despised yet desired by both. HIV seems to fracture Collard’s narrator, yet also serves to structure his life and define his identity. He knew he would die of AIDS even before he had been tested; “Death . . . had been there ever since I had read the first

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articles about AIDS. I was immediately sure the disease would be a worldwide catastrophe which would carry me off along with other millions of the damned” (7).25 The film version of Collard’s autobiography contains long scenes in which Jean searches for the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions that would be outward signs of the invisible virus inside of him. He is searching because he both fears and wants to find them, wants to see proof that the virus is there and that therefore he is whole and himself. In Lacanian theory, the subject, at a moment of separation (as in, once again, the mirror stage) responds to the sense of absence and lack by filling or suturing the gap.26 The crafting of autobiography, as much for Collard as for Barthes, is such a moment of separation and lack. And Zizek’s definition of the objet petit a as that “strange body in my interior which is ‘in me more than me’ . . . an object which simultaneously attracts and repels us” aptly describes the way in which HIV (like Photography via the Winter Garden Photograph for Barthes) becomes that which provides coherence for Collard’s narrator and, later and more strikingly, for Jean.27 From a disgusting, terrifying, otherness literally inside of him, it turns into a fantasy object that he wants to keep, since it will allow him to present himself as he would like to be remembered. In his seminar on love, transference, and Plato’s Symposium, Lacan described the objet petit a as agalma, the hidden object of desire for which the lover desires the loved one, but which is in fact lacked by both and only retroactively created by desire.28 The HIV virus becomes the narrator/Jean/Collard’s agalma; in him yet more than himself, it is what he has gotten from one or more of his partners in his savage nights, it is what he can give to or keep from Laura, and it will be what he is loved for and what allows him to love. He cannot define himself without it, and, even more radically, will only be able to attain autobiographical coherence because of and through it. This becomes particularly evident in one of Collard’s transformations between the novel and film versions of Savage Nights. In the autobiographical novel, while in his apartment listening to Laura’s innumerable messages on his answering machine, the narrator hears noises coming from the street and looks out of his window. He sees Samy and a group of his friends insulting an elderly Arab man and threatening to castrate and kill him. The owner of a café comes out into the street, however, and they leave (149–50). The narrator has done nothing, but in a later scene he draws his own blood into syringes while looking into a mirror and imagines injecting it into the veins

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of one of Samy’s skinhead friends (209). These two scenes are combined in the film into one which is much more dramatically charged. Jean and Samy’s brother Paco search for Samy and find him with a group of skinheads who have taken a young Arab man out of a bar and are planning to kill him. Jean approaches the leader of the skinheads, Pierre Olivier, and slashes his own hand with a knife, saying, “I have AIDS. If anyone moves, you get it.” 29 Samy affirms that this is true and Pierre Olivier looks at Jean’s hand, terrified, as blood drips on his shirt. Collard has made of an imagined scene a reality, a reality that manifests the power of his virus. He has become like the heroic Jean of the film-within-the-novel, saving the Arab men (to whom he is particularly sexually attracted) from death. In his revision into film of Savage Nights, Collard magnified the effect of his sublime object on his life story. The conclusions of the autobiographical novel and film are completely opposite in tone and message. In the novel, the narrator notices that it is becoming more and more difficult for him to communicate with others; “I was less and less capable of communication, or of any other relationship other than work or sex” (9).30 Laura screams at him in one of her hysterical frenzies that “I’ve got AIDS, I won’t ever be able to love anyone” (189).31 At the end of the novel, the narrator is in Lisbon: The weather is breathtakingly beautiful. I am alive. The world isn’t just something out there, external to me; I participate in it. It is offered to me. I will probably die of AIDS, but that is no longer my life; I am in life (222).32

He then calls Laura; “She says: ‘You only have to say one thing. Just say, “I love you,” and I’ll come back.’ I don’t know how to love” (222).33 He cannot tell her that he loves her since he does not; instead of exchanging vows of love they masturbate on either end of the phone line. In the last paragraph of the novel, the narrator climbs to the top of the Cap Saint-Vincent where, according to legend, one is supposed to smell “the odor of sanctity,” but he smells only urine, “the odor of savage nights” (223). He has not managed to forge a unity among his various desires and selves and is left as fragmented as he began. Both Laura and the narrator’s father are sure that, despite his fatal illness, nothing will happen to him, and he wonders, “Is this total love? Denial? Or a frightening courage?” (101).34 In the film, Laura is equally sure that this disease cannot harm him without her consent, and Jean’s father reacts

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to the knowledge that he is HIV positive with, “Nothing will happen to him.” Those who love him believe that their love can somehow protect him from the virus. Because the narrator believed that he would fall in love with Laura, he did not originally tell her that he was HIV positive. After they have sex for the first time, we read, “I was floating, knowing that I had spit into her my sperm infected with a deadly virus, but thinking that it was all right, that nothing would happen because we were starting what could truly be called a ‘love story’” (53).35 Somewhat similarly, in the film version of Savage Nights, Jean admits to his friend Marc that he made love with Laura without telling her that he was HIV positive; “It was as if in a dream. As if I had forgotten that this virus is part of me. I have the impression that nothing can happen to her because we are going to love each other.”36 This filmic confession, however, relies on a strategic forgetting of the fatal vocabulary (“infected” and “deadly”) of the novel, and the justificatory love story is no longer in quotes. Collard’s sanitized “love as defense” argument is clearly disingenuous, but he will need it in order to provide a proper ending for his life story. In an early scene in Savage Nights the film, a mysterious woman (ironically, perhaps, played by Maria Schneider of Last Tango in Paris fame) says to Jean, “You rebelled using sex because you didn’t find anything else. But you can change if you so desire. Open yourself to others. Expose yourself. Lose control. Let go of your illusions. Benefit from the ordeal of your illness.”37 This message, which follows in a long tradition of using the expression “se mettre à nu” as a metaphor for the autobiographical task, is nowhere present in the novel, but is repeated in the film by Jean’s mother. Collard has adopted for his film a discourse of autobiography as a Sarrautean uncovering or revelation, not of past moments but of his interior psychological reality. AIDS will prove to be beneficial to Jean because it will facilitate communication and love, help him grow and enter into mature relationships with others, and thus give meaning to the madness of his savage life. In the film’s concluding scene, he calls Laura on the telephone and she tells him, exactly as in the novel, that “one word is all it will take for me to come back.”38 Jean then does what the novel’s narrator could not; he tells her that he loves her. We do not, however, simultaneously see and hear this crucial conversation. Collard as Jean has already walked away from the phone, and we see a closeup of his face while we hear him say, in a voice-over, “I love you.” Words

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and image are then once again disarticulated as Jean approaches the edge of a cliff and stares out at the sea as the sun sets. The last thing we hear is another voice-over, accompanying an extreme close-up of his face: “I am alive. The world is not simply a thing out there, external to me. I participate in it. It is offered to me. Perhaps I am going to die of AIDS, but that is no longer my life. I am in life.”39 There is no lingering odor of his savage nights, and Laura as well is quite absent in this final scene. She is a disembodied voice, necessary only as the symbolic addressee of a love destined for Collard’s persona, and designed to provide autobiographical resolution. Collard screened his identity from autobiographical novel to film, sifting through a multitude of desires and love stories to construct one story, a clear image of the life he will want to have led, one which will have progressed in a straight line toward a goal. In order to accomplish this, he represented the bisexuality of Jean in the film quite differently from that of the narrator of Savage Nights. The novel contains many more characters than the film version, and, more specifically, more characters who are the main character’s male lovers: Kader, Jamel, Eric, Olivier, and others. The book is also much more explicit about his sexual experiences with these men. In the process of revision from novel to film, Collard changed the emphasis of his autobiography from the gay to the heterosexual aspect of his bisexuality. One possible reason for this shift can be located in the novel, where we learn that while having sex with Laura the narrator can forget all of the men with whom he has shared his savage nights (53). He takes a certain pleasure in reducing himself to just one of his many identities, and this contributes to his failure to tell Laura that he is HIV positive. A transformation with respect to the question of purity is also evident from one version of Collard’s autobiography to the other. In the novel, the narrator engages in his savage nights under the bridge to ease his fear of death; “Soiled, bruised, at the river’s edge after orgasm, I felt good, graceful and light. Transparent” (8).40 His intimate relationships with men may then cleanse him, in turn, of these nights; “Have my tears and contact with Jamel’s skin washed away the stains of my savage nights?” (183).41 In the film, however, Jean is only purified by his contact with Laura; “When I return to her, I feel clean.”42 Collard needed a woman, or a figure of a woman, to accomplish his final autobiography, to achieve a certain societal ideal of maturity—monogamous heterosexuality or heteronormativity. The relationship with Laura over-

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whelmingly dominates his film, and the only declaration of love within it that qualifies as a sign of growth and progress (and thus an autobiographical conclusion) is one made to her. Much earlier in the film, and also in the novel, Jean told Samy that he loved him, but this seems in no way to have resolved the question of his ability to love. Collard’s self-heterosexualization within the autobiographical film was mirrored by his self-representation outside of the film and in his representation by the media. Much was made, especially in the North American press, of the scene in Savage Nights in which Laura, aware that Jean is HIV positive, has sex with him after refusing to use a condom. Samy makes exactly the same decision, in a scene which also implies that such an act constitutes a proof of love, but, at least partially since the film itself makes less of it as an act, this was never mentioned in polemics about the film. After Collard’s death, Jacques Siclier of Le Monde drew what may seem like a minor, but certainly not innocuous, distinction with respect to his bisexuality, saying he was “attracted to men but loved women.”43 This is the opposite of the case in the autobiographical novel, in which the narrator can be tender only with men. More blatantly, Paris Match illustrated its postmortem celebration of Collard with a cover photograph of him with the actress who played Laura (Romane Bohringer), followed by a series of large photographs of him with his last romantic partner, Corine Blue, who played the role of Laura’s mother in the film. Collard told the reporter that, as he grew older, he got along better and better with women and had “more things to say to them than to men, more communication.”44 We cannot conclude, however, that Collard allowed his final imag(in)ed identity to depend on relationships with women or a woman’s presence in his life story. He is determinedly alone at the end of his filmic autobiography, having learned to love, in fact, not Laura, but his objet petit a in the course of the autobiographical narrative. He has used the unifying symbolic power of the HIV virus to quiet the conflict that had threatened his autobiographical unity. Collard was taken to task by British critic Simon Watney, among others, for the minimization of his homosexuality in the film version of Savage Nights. Watney concluded that France was such a profoundly homophobic culture that “the very idea of a collective social or cultural response to AIDS on the part of homosexuals is all but unthinkable.”45 It is certainly the case that Collard was profoundly and purposefully uninterested in any collective response to AIDS, or in any collectivity whatsoever. By the end of the

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film, in the final extreme close-up, Collard as Jean is solitary and therefore singular. Collard may focus on his relationships within his autobiographical narrative, but these relationships are with others who tell both him and us something about himself. Like Barthes and Sarraute, he ultimately turns inward rather than outward as he attempts to resolve his condition of fragmented selfhood. The HIV virus, we have seen, was already a sublime object for Collard in his autobiographical novel of fragmented identity. In his film, however, Collard tried to eliminate the fragmentation altogether. He has HIV give him political power, in the scene in which he fights racism with his contaminated blood, and maturity, the ability to love. He films for himself, in his emphasis on Laura, a unity of (hetero)sexual object choice. Moreover, Collard not only uses HIV to suture a gap, but sutures the spectator into his filmed image. Ever since Christian Metz described the film screen as “that other mirror,” theorists of film have employed the psychoanalytic concept of suture to designate “the procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer subjectivity on their viewers.”46 The shot/reverse shot operation, which allows the subject to see from the point of view of the camera’s gaze, exemplifies suture; the cinematic spectator experiences the jouissance of plenitude in the first shot of a sequence, followed by the unpleasant realization that what they see is bounded by the gaze of an absent other, who has everything that the viewing subject lacks. The process begins again with shot number two, which shows us what we think we have been missing, until we realize again, with displeasure, that there is still more. In the last scene of Savage Nights, Collard presents us with a series of four shot/reverse shots as Jean watches the sun set. We are sewn into his point of view as we see first a close-up of his face, then a shot of the sun and sea at which he is looking, and then once again a close-up of his face. Suture relies on and produces identification, and in this sequence Collard becomes the coherent object in our mirror; we see him, we see through his eyes, and he controls what we see. Unlike Barthes and Sarraute, Collard does not directly comment on the process of autobiography in either of his autobiographical texts. In the film, furthermore, there is none of the critical commentary that the novel’s narrator occasionally provides about his own actions. For example, we read, “I’m disgusted with myself; I’m like a rusty machine, able to feel only my own pain. And even that has to be artificially created, according to the rituals that

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associate it to pleasure” (75), and the narrator later refers to “the absurdity of my actions” (157).47 Jean, on the other hand, never seems to question what he thinks or does. What is more, Collard does not maintain in his film the “voyeurism of himself ” that, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, constituted a reflexive aspect of the written autobiography. The only reflexivity to be found in the film is filmic; Jean is a filmmaker, of course, and the first time we see him he is filming, the video camera through which he observes the world firmly on his shoulder. When we first see each of his lovers, they appear through his camera lens, doubly framed. Whereas in the novel reflexivity had split the narrator, in the film it makes Jean into he who holds the camera, not only he who sees, but he who frames everything for us. To return to the last scene of Savage Nights, it is important to note that the film does not end with the series of four shot/reverse shots. The fifth close-up of Jean’s face is followed by a long shot from behind where he is standing, in which we see both him and the sea at which he is staring. The film then concludes with spinning shots of the cliff and the water, from a point of view that could not be Collard’s, which provide a sense of both freedom and vertigo. There is a gaze other than Jean’s in the film, but it only serves to confirm his interior state. Collard did not attempt to represent the irrevocably split subject of his novel in his film, but instead, from behind and in front of the camera, quite successfully used film to heal his split self. Collard’s astonishing ascension to pop-stardom is proof of the accomplishment of his autobiographical project, his creation for himself of a coherent identity with which the spectator of his film is complicit. After Savage Nights was released in October 1992 to mostly favorable reviews, it was among the top ten grossing films in France for six weeks. The amount (and the quality) of discussion generated by the image Collard created in his film signals the success of his revision, for mass consumption, of the fragmented and subversive subjectivity of his autobiographical novel. Le Nouvel Observateur signaled the film’s release with a three-page article entitled “Cyril Collard, the Explorer of Life,” and, in a rare convergence, it was chosen as the best film of 1992 by both the Cahiers du cinéma and Télérama.48 The venerable Cahiers quite surprisingly praised Savage Nights as a vital response to the traditionally cold, auteurist, French cinema, and included two articles on Collard as well as an interview in the issue of the journal that coincided with the film’s release.49 Yet not even the critics of Cahiers analyzed Collard’s

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film; almost all of the discussion of both his autobiographical novel and film, in the academy as well as in the mainstream media, has centered instead around his image and role within the cultural politics of AIDS in France.50 Collard died from AIDS-related complications on March 5, 1993, at the age of thirty-five. The César awards were held three days later; Savage Nights won the awards for best film, best first film, best young actress, and best editing, and Collard had been nominated for best director as well. This was the first time in the history of the awards that the same film had won simultaneously for best first film and best film. The film took on a second life after Collard’s death, was re-released and returned to the top ten, grossing eight and a half million of its first seven months’ fourteen and a half million dollar gross between early March and the end of April 1993. At the time of Collard’s death, 900,000 people in France had seen his film, and 1.9 million more would see it by the end of 1993.51 And only posthumously, after the César ceremony, was his mythification complete. Cahiers du cinéma devoted another three articles to Collard in their April issue, and on the first anniversary of his death a memorial television special was aired during which all of his short and long films and video clips were shown.52 After Collard’s death, Le Monde ran a series of articles about him, starting with a short obituary and concluding with a summary of the César awards ceremony. Collard was described in the following terms: Polite and courteous like a young man from a good family, bold and provocative like a delinquent, decked out like a hoodlum and proud like a prince, stubborn and quick to insult, with wild hair and velvet eyes, endowed with the politeness of charmers, with a smile eloquent in irony as well as in kindness, and, in short, extremely seductive.53

Reviewers glorified the reconciliation, in the persona of Jean, of the many contradictory aspects of Collard’s personality, and this scandalous doubleness became Collard’s trademark (and thus coherent) image, a characterization through fragmentation that recalls Barthes. And in Savage Nights the film and in his own discourse around it Collard also erased the particularities of his life, his sexual orientations, and his illness, to become a universally appealing romantic, and tragic, hero. He said that his film, like a Greek tragedy, represented the archetypal struggle between life and death; “Laura refuses to use a condom because she thinks that love protects her from dan-

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ger, that nothing can happen to her. This act is of an uncompromising romanticism that young people understand.”54 After his death, via the legacy of his film, Collard became a symbol for an entire generation of French youth, irrespective of gender or sexuality: Today, an entire generation, worried about the drift of love and sexuality toward the risk of death, a lucid generation recognizes itself in the romanticism of the pain of love, of passion stronger than sexual confusion, of which Cyril Collard made himself . . . the contemporary painter.55

Collard’s sexuality became a minor detail, one in which he was no different from most of the readers of Le Monde; “Jean is bisexual like others have blue eyes.”56 In all of this heroization, the savage nights which, we must not forget, provide the title for both Collard’s novel and film, seem completely forgotten. Having seen Collard, under a bridge, asking strangers to kick him and urinate on him, one might be amazed to learn that on the day of Collard’s funeral, “the President of the Republic François Mitterand addressed a letter to the parents of the deceased, in which he held Cyril Collard up as an ‘example for French youth.’”57 Collard became a hero because he was an autobiographer, because he wrote, directed, and played himself, and therefore because he was really dying of AIDS. Yet whereas by the end of the book version of Savage Nights the narrator had been showing visible signs of AIDS, such as lesions on his face (210), with the exception of one lesion on his arm, removed in the film’s sole hospital scene, Jean never looks ill. Jean asks Samy, who was showing off for his camera by hanging off the edge of a building and telling him it would be a “good scoop” if he fell, “You think that’s what interests me? Filming death?”58 One of the reasons Collard gave for having decided to play the role of Jean himself was that none of the actors he saw could give the part the lightness he was looking for; “all of them acted seropositivity.”59 While dying, Collard wanted to make an autobiographical film that was not about death. Quite astonishingly, since he was already very ill while filming Savage Nights but had not been while writing the novel, the “I will probably die of AIDS” of the last page of the novel becomes “perhaps I will die of AIDS” in the last words of the film. Zizek, quoting a gay man who told him that “‘when you learn that you are HIV positive, you are finally free,’” reads this freedom as “designating precisely the state between-the-two-deaths [sym-

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bolic and biological] when the subject is ‘alive, although already branded by death.’”60 Collard’s HIV can, paradoxically, free him to live at the same time and because it has condemned him; he can make a film about life when he has already started to die. An important element of the mythic discourse around Collard, then, following his lead, was that Savage Nights was a film about life rather than about dying or death. After Collard’s death, “in theaters . . . there is applause after every screening. Young people, and those less young, rise and cry, and speak. All speak of a hymn to life, a hymn to love. The Collard effect.”61 From a film “about life,” however, and as if this were a somehow logical progression, we quickly arrive at a film “not about AIDS.” The HIV and AIDS that made Collard whole and made him famous were subtracted from the final equation once his autobiographical lesson was learned by all. Collard’s obituary in Le Monde described the film as “less a film about AIDS than an extraordinary lesson about life and loves,” and Frédéric Strauss asserted in Cahiers that, “by way of illness, the transmission of a virus, Cyril Collard was speaking first of all, again, and always, about communication.”62 Yet why can a film not be about both AIDS and love, a virus and communication, death and life? Fabienne Worth claims that whereas in the United States the result of generalized homophobia has been that AIDS is seen only as a gay disease, in France it has been rather its complete universalization.63 Interestingly, however, in the American response to Jonathan Demme’s contemporaneous film Philadelphia, we find a similar “not about AIDS,” and thus universalizing, strategy.64 Yet even though Savage Nights wants to be about life and love, it has not been able to avoid being about AIDS. The film generated a great deal of controversy about moral responsibility in Britain and in the United States; some characterized Collard as a “star martyr” and others as an irresponsible narcissist.65 Although Collard always maintained that his film was not political, and many gay activists emphatically agreed with him, it ended up playing a very political role in France, and has even been called “the key film of the AIDS years.”66 Le Nouvel Observateur chose to introduce a series of articles about AIDS with a reference to Collard: On March 5, 1993, a boy died, a myth was born. Cyril Collard was not the first famous victim of AIDS, . . . yet his wasn’t just another death, . . . because he was young and handsome, because he was himself, ambiguous and

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sincere, angel and demon, happy and despairing, and above all, prodigiously alive, he gave destiny his face.67

Collard’s death now haunts the ending of his film; it is no longer possible to hear its “perhaps I will die of AIDS” without also hearing “I died of AIDS.” Despite Collard’s best efforts, another of his biographers repeats that “Cyril gave a face—his face—to AIDS.”68 It is important, though, that Collard ended up defining AIDS rather than AIDS defining him. The strength of his self-construction is evident in Claude Weill’s “because he was himself,” the most powerful claim of autobiographical singularity imaginable. Both the image of the romantic hero constructed by Collard and that which was constructed around him, however universalizing, depended on the HIV virus and the fact that he was dying of AIDS. Philippe Delannoy, in his hagiography of Collard, both understood and re-presented this perfectly, claiming that “Success is at the end of life, in death. Death takes Cyril’s physical beauty. The HIV positive lover becomes the modern symbol of absolute romanticism.”69 Even the episode of unsafe sex with Laura, which Collard later said he would have removed had the film been set in 1992 instead of 1986, has become an essential aspect of Collard’s mythmaking.70 In Delannoy’s opinion, at least, Collard “realized that if he took out the condom episode, there is no love story. Without AIDS, there is no love.”71 Savage Nights seems to have solidly refuted Susan Sontag’s claim that, unlike syphilis, “AIDS, like cancer, does not allow romanticizing or sentimentalizing.”72 Once again, however, extrafilmic events haunt our viewing of Collard’s film in ways that he could not have predicted. The revelation that he had infected Erica Prou with the HIV virus in 1984, and that she had died of AIDS nine years later, stands as concrete proof of the consequences of Collard’s romantic linking of love and AIDS. Collard dedicated his autobiographical novel to his parents, a dedication that has been left out of the book’s English translation: “For my children, which they will probably never have.”73 It was a replacement child, the only child he would produce, because of his inevitable death from an as yet incurable disease, one linked to a particular sexual identity, one that did not guarantee him an heir. Collard was searching for a legacy, a destiny; he wanted to connect the events and stories of his life into a life story which he could then leave behind after his death. The film accomplishes this by concluding with an acceptance of an identity based on his unwilling participation in the

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phenomenon of AIDS, an acceptance that provides the link between the multitude of stories that he has lived and been. Lee Edelman has described AIDS as “the mirror in which the gay subject is being rewritten,” and this is undeniably true for Collard.74 Collard, however, chose to rewrite AIDS, in order to make his reflection in this mirror a coherent one. Although Derrida said that AIDS “deprive[s] us henceforth of everything that a relation to the other, and first of all desire, could invent to protect the integrity and thus the inalienable identity of anything like a subject,” Collard used his AIDS to accomplish just the opposite.75 He is not deprived of but instead provided with integral subjectivity, ending up with a less rather than more fragmented conception of his identity. He has revised himself, but from a queer subject to a unified and ultimately heterosexual one. Collard’s film transformed him into a pop icon and universalized him through a strategic framing of HIV as his particular, as what constituted his selfhood. He paradoxically attained the heteronormative ideals that he desired by means of a virus which he acquired through non-normative, rebellious sex. By the end of the film, which is Collard’s final testament and legacy, he has actively transformed the virus into something that is intimately connected to him, which has allowed him to develop in a way that he ostensibly wanted and needed to develop, has allowed him to learn how to love. In a discussion of the last scene of the film, Collard claimed that HIV had made him a better person: If I look at myself seven years ago, I would of course prefer never to have caught this disease. At the same time, I think that in human terms, I am better today. My relationships with others, with the outside world, give me the impression of being better now. Perhaps these are things that you tell yourself as reassurance. It’s very difficult to know what truly comes from this threat and what comes from something you invent to make yourself believe that everything isn’t horrible.76

Through this disease, communicated through acts of love, he has perhaps learned to communicate with those he cares about, yet, he realized, this may also be an illusion, a self-deception. I am not interested in making any judgments one way or another, but rather in asking why Collard rewrote the ending of his autobiographical novel for his autobiographical film, his last autobiography.

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Collard was faced with a crisis of agency with respect to the HIV virus. How could he assert his subjecthood in the face of a disease that threatened to redefine his identity from both within and without? The only solution was what Hayden White, following Sigmund Freud, has called “willing backward,” “when we rearrange accounts of events in the past that have been emplotted in a given way, in order to endow them with a different meaning.”77 By writing and rewriting, from novel to film, the virus into his life story and autobiography, Collard could control it, giving it a positive twist that we initially find surprising. Part of the life and freedom he claimed to have gained through AIDS was the ability to let go of himself, to love and to be close to others. He could do this only if AIDS became his life and identity, rather than his death. Collard was in search of a unity for his self, discovered that the only possible source for this unity was the HIV virus that had lodged itself inside of him, and then appropriated the virus as a positive thing, as what had allowed him to learn how to love. He took responsibility for his virus even though, or especially because, it had been thrust upon him without any choice.78 In the last scene of the film, as Collard pronounces its last words (“I am in life”), the sunset he is watching is literally reversed, the film is rolled (or willed) backward into a seeming sunrise from the west. He thus concludes his autobiography with life, not death, a life that can be preserved eternally through the technology of film. Collard’s self-representation in Savage Nights manifests an overwhelming narcissism that was only magnified by his representation in the media after his death. Copjec, building on the work of Lacan and Zizek, has written of narcissism that “what one loves in one’s image is something more than the image (‘in you more than you’).”79 This something is, once again, the objet petit a or sublime object, the HIV virus without which not only Laura, but Jean as well, could not fully exist. It is this otherness within described by Collard in the course of his autobiographical narrative that ends up serving as his only guarantee of coherent selfhood; he used it to his autobiographical advantage. Somewhat paradoxically, given Bruss’s worry that film may split the subject so far as to make autobiography impossible, Collard’s identity becomes more unified in the transition from written text to film. He explored his own fragmentation in his autobiographical novel, but then brought it all together in an image of himself as someone who could say “I love you” to a woman. Even the rhythm of the film progresses from syn-

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copated, jumpy speed to the calmer movement of the last scene. He tried to make a coherent image of himself and in a sense succeeded, becoming a heroic cultural figure, a rebel, “un fou d’amour,” in the words of the authors of Cyril Collard: The Passion.80 Collard fell into the filmic trap feared and predicted by Barthes, fell head over heels into the Imaginary, using the technological and narrative capacities of the medium to smooth out the edges of his image. Yet Collard also escaped himself; even having ended his film with a shot of his face accompanied by hopeful words, even having learned to love a woman, he would speak to an interviewer of “this multiplicity I have in me.”81 The tensions within his own work subvert the very possibility of a unified identity and self, for he has left too many seams showing ever to convince us completely.

part iii

Francophone Autobiography: Selves and Others, Words and Images

chapter 5

(Un)Veiling Herself? Assia Djebar in Love, an Algerian Cavalcade

“‘I only have one language; it is not mine.’”1

Bruss and Lejeune argued that the medium of film was incapable of narration in the first person. Although critics such as Sitney and Renov have shown that the filmic form, to the contrary, can be used to translate and further explore the split first person of writing, Cyril Collard has also shown us that film can be used to create a coherent autobiographical monument in the first person. Collard, in the reflexive moment of choosing how to adapt his written autobiography for the screen, chose to master rather than investigate his fragmentation. We have moved from one medium to another without having found an example of experimental autobiography which allows for the coexistence of multiple voices and selves. What will happen, then, if we move from a third-person medium to a third-person space? My examination of autobiographical representations of fragmented subjectivity continues with an analysis of the dilemmas of, and the solutions offered by, postcolonial Francophone African autobiography. Assia Djebar’s 1985 L’Amour, la fantasia (the title has been oddly trans95

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lated into English as Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade) is the first volume of a projected quartet of which Ombre sultane (translated as A Sister to Scheherazade) (1987) and So Vast the Prison (1995) have thus far appeared. Djebar was born Fatima-Zohra Imalayène in Cherchell, Algeria, and chose her pseudonym for the publication of her first novel, Thirst, in Paris in 1957. Since then, she has lived in France, Algeria, and the United States, publishing prolifically, not just novels but short stories, essays, and récits which blur the line between fiction and nonfiction writing. For Barthes, Sarraute, and to a certain extent Collard, the obstacles in the way of autobiography, upon which they reflected in the course of autobiography, involved questions of selfhood, identity, and language’s access to reality. Djebar’s autobiographical writing, in the first, second, and third-person voices, is equally reflexive, and addresses these same issues. She places them, however, within the framework of domination based on gender, language, and colonial power that has structured her life. In L’Amour, la fantasia Djebar alternates between personal narrative and historical narrative, the latter derived from both oral traditions and archival research. In the interweaving of her own story and the stories of her people, a hybrid textual form mirrors the construction of an autobiographical self that is itself hybrid, made up of self and others. Before writing L’Amour, la fantasia, Djebar had always been reticent with information about herself and her life. In an article published in a French journal in 1968, we find the terse description, “Married. Two children.”2 In the mid-1970s, Djebar refused to talk about her origins and family, saying, “I cannot face such frankly autobiographical questions and you can see by my other interviews that I’ve never been good at answering them.” She added, moreover, that she had begun writing “as a wager, almost a dare, to keep as far away from my real self as possible . . . all through my first three novels, my writing consisted in systematically turning my back on my own life—in short, in refusing the autobiographical dimension of writing.”3 After the 1967 publication of her novel Les Alouettes naïves, feeling that her fiction had for the first time come close to being autobiographical, Djebar stopped writing completely. This initial brush with autobiography left her doubly vulnerable, “first, because as an Algerian, but one living—or so it seemed—as a Westerner, I was somewhat exposed already. Second, because writing about my innermost self felt like exposing myself further.” 4 Before undertaking a personal history, Djebar would need to find a language and

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form in which to express this “innermost self” in writing, without the fear of self-destruction. By 1967, Djebar had written four novels in French which, although not her first language or “mother tongue” [langue maternelle], had been the language of all of her secondary and higher education. From French colonial schools in Algeria, she went on to become the first Algerian woman admitted to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Despite, or perhaps because of, her striking success in and with the colonizer’s language, Djebar’s relationship to French has always been an ambivalent one. Her inadvertent shift toward the autobiographical brought along with it a crisis of language; she stopped writing for a period of just over ten years in order to stop writing in French: I refused to let the French language enter into my life, into my secrets. . . . I felt it to be an enemy. To write in this language, but write what is near to me without writing myself, with a separation, became a dangerous undertaking for me.5

Although Djebar has said that she chose silence, she did not stop working and in fact continued to work with sound, with spoken rather than written language. Written, literary Arabic is, according to long-standing tradition, reserved for men; most Arab women prior to Djebar’s generation were not taught (and not allowed) to write. In order to explore the spaces of Arab women to which she had belonged as a child, spaces of spoken dialects of Arabic and Berber, Djebar made a film based on interviews with women from her native region west of Algiers. This film, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoa [The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoa], completed in 1977, would ultimately enable her to return not only to writing, but specifically to autobiographical writing.6 The historical events that Djebar chose to intercalate with her personal history in L’Amour, la fantasia occurred near Mount Chenoa, in her native region and that of the women interviewed for the film. Moreover, Djebar felt that her first experience as a filmmaker, during which she discovered a “sound-image connection,” prepared her for her autobiographical quartet, in which she often uses cinematographic language.7 Although La Nouba is not an autobiographical film, the medium of film facilitated for Djebar the process of autobiography, allowing her to work in Arabic, with the oral and

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the visual, before returning to writing.8 Although she expected her experience with film to prepare her to begin writing in Arabic, she realized that written Arabic could not belong to her any more than could French: I understood that this written language still was not the language of women; this language, for centuries, in an official culture, functioned as a dominant language, just as French functioned as a dominant language during the hundred and thirty years of colonization.9

Men had been excluding women from written Arabic for even longer than the French had been imposing their language on Algerians. Djebar had no mother tongue in which to write, and chose to transpose the shared spoken voices of film into written French. In 1967, having come so close to autobiography in her fiction, Djebar felt that to continue writing would constitute “suicide.”10 Barthes used exactly the same word to describe his sense of the dangers of autobiography, yet Djebar had very different reasons to be wary. Jean Déjeux stresses that the Islamic tradition rejects any individualist use of the “I,” citing an exemplary proverb from the work of novelist Mohammed Kacimi—“‘Only the devil says ‘I’; only the devil eats alone; only the devil sleeps alone.’”11 Djebar’s mother and the other women in her family taught her two strict rules; “one, never talk about yourself; and, two, if you must, always do it ‘anonymously,’ . . . one must never use the first-person pronoun.”12 If it is a “scandal” for a woman to write, and if the first-person singular is generally condemned, a woman’s autobiography is then doubly taboo.13 And yet writing for Djebar seems inextricably linked to self-narration. In an imagined address to her father in L’Amour, la fantasia, responding to his disapproval of love letters she had written and received in French, Djebar exclaims; “‘You see, I’m writing, and there’s no harm in it, no impropriety! It’s simply a way of saying I exist, pulsating with life! Is not writing a way of telling what “I” am?’”14 Alienated from written Arabic both as an autobiographer and as a woman but desiring to write herself, Djebar turned to autobiography in French. In addition to the women’s stories that make up its “Voices,” L’Amour, la fantasia shares with La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoa its montage technique as well as an organization into musical movements. A nouba is a musical composition of Andalusian origin in several movements, but also “a story that each person tells, taking turns.”15 In both senses, Djebar’s autobiogra-

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phy is a nouba in which Djebar fulfills the role of translator as well as mediator of histories and cultures. Like Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Childhood, and the written version of Savage Nights, then, L’Amour, la fantasia is fragmented. The narrative voice oscillates between the first, second, and third persons and the text alternates between segments of personal and historical narrative, which are thematically rather than chronologically linked. Djebar goes back and forth between the past and present tenses as she references multiple pasts: the 1830 French invasion of Algeria, the 1954–62 Algerian war for independence from France, and different moments of her childhood. Although she describes herself as split between Arab and European selves, between the Arabic and the French languages, Djebar also emphasizes the interconnectedness of selves, histories, and time periods. This simultaneous fragmentation and interlacing is evident in the carefully crafted form of L’Amour, la fantasia. Each of its three major parts is subdivided into sections. Part I of the autobiography, “The Capture of the City or Love-letters [L’Amour s’écrit],” alternates between subtitled autobiographical segments and numbered historical segments describing the 1830 invasion of Algiers. The personal and historical subsections are tied together both by literary style and themes. The autobiographical “A Little Arab Girl’s First Day at School,” for example, which begins the entire book, ends with the words, “I set off at dawn.” The first historical segment follows, beginning with “Dawn on this thirteenth day of June 1830.”16 We then continue to “Three Cloistered Girls,” which ends with “an unprecedented women’s battle,” and on to II, which begins with “The battle of Staouéli is fought on Saturday 19 June,” and so on throughout the entire first section. An italicized page of poetic reflection or commentary follows, a pause, entitled “Deletion.” In part II, “The Cries of the Fantasia,” the order switches; we begin with a descriptively titled historical segment, and alternate with numbered autobiographical segments. We see similar thematic connections here; the story of Djebar’s marriage night in Chapter III of Part II, for example, “The couple moved to celebrate their wedding,” is connected both to the revolution-era wedding of the preceding story and to the interrupted nineteenth-century marriage ceremony of Badra from Part I. There is another reflective, italicized, pause, entitled “Sistrum,” between parts II and III. Part III, “Buried Voices,” bears as one of its epigraphs Beethoven’s “Quasi una fantasia,” and is divided into five movements, each of which al-

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ternates between a first-person autobiographical segment and a “Voice” in which the “I” is that of an Algerian woman who tells her story of the period of the war for independence. Djebar, like Barthes, refuses to abide by the narrative conventions of autobiography, in this case that autobiography should be told in the first person and biography and history in the third. She begins her text with a memory told in the third person, the first sentence of which later becomes a refrain: A little Arab girl going to school for the first time, one autumn morning, walking hand in hand with her father. Wearing a fez, he stands tall and erect in a European suit, carrying a satchel; he is a teacher at the French primary school. A little Arab girl in a village in the Algerian Sahel (3).17

Djebar’s father’s role in her schooling and francophonie will become a major autobiographical theme, the doubleness of his position (as an Algerian employed by the French colonial government) reflected in his European suit and fez. This refrain then reappears in the first person—“my father held my hand on the way to school. A little Arab girl, in a village in the Algerian Sahel” (217)—and by the end of the book returns once again in the thirdperson voice.18 Djebar, again like Barthes, is both narrator and commentator, in the separate sections in italics as well as within the personal and historical narrative segments. Her double role parallels her divided identity; like her father (and because of him), she can neither be completely Algerian nor completely French. As a woman, Djebar’s language is spoken Arabic or Berber and both written Arabic and French are other. As an Algerian, French is the language of the conquering other and Arabic is the language of the self. As a woman writer, French is the only language which welcomes her and frees her from confinement and illiteracy. Wherever she writes, she is “dépaysée,” in linguistic exile. As Djebar weaves stories together, she goes back and forth between narrating voices. For example, in part III of the text, the segment entitled “The Two Strangers” alternates between the first and the third persons (129–31), and in the following “Voice,” the “I,” which had referred to Djebar, now refers to a resistance fighter (maquisarde) who tells a story of hiding in a tree in the late 1950s, which echoes the story of the daughter of the Agha who hid in a tree in 1830, told in part I. Whereas Sarraute literalized her split

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self, deploying dialogue in the service of an introspective dissection of her childhood memories, Djebar reaches outward, incorporating other stories, histories of others as well as herself, into the text of her life. L’Amour, la fantasia is evidence that autobiography may accomplish what Bakhtin described as the polyphonic “living mix of varied and opposing voices,” as opposed to monologic or totalitarian discourse, in the novel. This is perhaps not surprising if we remember that, according to Bakhtin, “the ideological becoming of a human being . . . is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others.”19 We have seen, however, that even those most aware of their multiplicity risk allowing a single autobiographical voice to dominate. Djebar’s difference lies in that she never fully assimilates the other voices in her autobiographical text, allowing them to remain intact in various ways. Djebar consulted a range of historical sources while doing research for her multivocal autobiography. She mentions reports, diaries, and letters written in several languages by witnesses of the battles that she recounts, including Amable Matterer, Barchou de Penoën, J. T. Merle, Colonel de Bartillat, Captains Bosquet and Montagnac, Pélissier, Hadj Ahmed Effendi, Ahmed de Constantine, and El Gobbi. The vast majority of documents available for study, however, are in French: Thirty-seven witnesses, possible more, will relate the events of this month of July 1830, some fresh from their experiences, some shortly afterwards. Thirty-seven descriptions will be published, of which only three are from the viewpoint of the besieged: . . . there still remain thirty-two chronicles in French of this first act of the occupation drama (44).20

Djebar links the feverish writing of French officers, who “write, and kill as they write—in the act of writing,” to their colonizing mission; “words will become their most effective weapons” (45).21 She is all too aware of what Claude Lévi-Strauss, writing at the height of the Algerian war for independence, had to say about historical narrative: Historical facts are no more given than any others; it is the historian, or the agent of historical becoming, who constitutes them by abstraction. . . . [T]he historian and the agent of history choose, sever and carve them up, for a truly total history would confront them with chaos. . . . History is therefore never history, but history-for.22

What few Arabic documents may have existed have been lost, enduring only

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as traces within other documents. History is always partial, since it is for the most part written history that remains, for the most part as written by the historians of the victors. Djebar emphasizes how little the French historical texts tell us. Since they have strategically occulted aspects of history, she will need to reconstruct what they have left out. She judges her sources (“Merle’s fiction”) and fills her narration with commentary uncharacteristic of conventional historical narrative, such as “we may imagine that he did” (100) and “let us suppose so” (166).23 Djebar quotes, paraphrases, and invents from her sources, most of which are described but not cited; the reader never knows exactly when she is quoting and when she is imagining history. Although Clarisse Zimra refers to Djebar’s “clearly referenced colonial sources,” only two of the more than thirty-seven are footnoted in the almost three hundred pages of this text.24 The first note gives only the author and title of a text she mentions several times, French painter Eugène Fromentin’s travel narrative A Summer in the Sahara (165). The second is a complete scholarly reference to Pierre Leulliette’s Saint Michel and the Dragon (209). Yet Leulliette is not one of Djebar’s sources; he appears merely for having quoted someone whom Djebar also quotes. The existence of these two footnotes makes us more aware of the absence of others, and the formality of the second, combined with its irrelevance, frustrates and mocks our expectations of historical reference. Djebar’s reflexive commentary on her own writing of history, both personal and national, reminds us of the choices made in any historical narrative. In order to write against the partial histories of Algeria written by those who have dominated the country, Djebar must find new ways to use traditional sources, but also new historical sources. Djebar meditates on her relationship to her sources as an Arab woman historian. She reflects on the kind of history she can or should write and what it will allow her to tell that has never before been told. One of the major historical events from the 1830 invasion and conquest that she recounts is the burning alive of an entire tribe, the Ouled Riah, in the caves that were their refuge, by the French army under the command of Pélissier. She has read and uses Pélissier’s own narrative of the event, and tells us how: I linger over Pélissier’s order: ‘Bring them out into the sun! Count them!’ Perhaps, losing control, he may have added, in a brusque and determined tone: ‘Bring the savages out, even if their bodies are stiff or rotting, and we

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will have won, we will have attained our goal!’ . . . I don’t know, I am guessing based on the language of the orders (73).25

Djebar reads behind and beyond the text that is available to her, working against the grain to reconstruct, and in fact reenact, what happened or might have happened (“I, in turn, reconstruct that night” [70]).26 She has learned in the course of her research that although Pélissier carried out this brutal mass murder as an officer in the invading French army, he was criticized by a lieutenant colonel for having written “‘an eloquent and realistic—much too realistic—description of the Arabs’ suffering’” (75). Pélissier had written that the odor of the rotting bodies was so strong that the French had to move their camp, and Djebar continues, “The corpses exposed in the sun have become words. Words travel” (75).27 Pélissier, however unintentionally, has preserved these bodies from being forgotten, and Djebar may now write her own historical narrative over and around his. In a trope that will return in the text, she describes this as a passing on or a handing off; “Pélissier . . . hands me his report and I receive this palimpsest on which I now inscribe the charred passion of my ancestors” (79).28 Djebar calls her historical method a “speleology,” the discovery of the interior caves hidden within French historical discourse: Nearly one and a half centuries after Pélissier and Saint-Arnaud, I am practising a very special kind of speleology, since . . . I grab onto the edges of French words—reports, narration, accounts of the past. . . . I am moved by an impulse that nags me like an earache: to thank Pélissier for his report which unleashed a political storm in Paris but which also returns to me our dead, to whom I weave my pattern of French words. . . . Pélissier ‘the barbarian,’ the military leader who was later so maligned, becomes for me the foremost chronicler of the first Algerian War! (78)29

Pélissier himself becomes a surprising ancestor for Djebar as she appropriates his text for her side of the (hi)story, only able to rewrite thanks to his text to rewrite.30 Djebar’s method as historian and autobiographer is much like that of Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur, who uses “the remains and debris of events: ‘odds and ends’ in English, or, in French ‘des bribes et des morceaux,’ fossilized evidence of the history of an individual or a society.”31 Her odds and ends are the partial histories of war in Algeria written by French colonizers as well

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as the fragmented memories of her individual past. Historical writing can only be a palimpsest, and although these French sources are not the ideal ones on which to base her history, Djebar does so for lack of other options.32 Hayden White has noted that, paradoxically, “the more we know about the past, the more difficult it is to generalize about it,” and Djebar suggests that this might be a good thing.33 Clear presentations of the facts of history and simple interpretations of them are often calculated to be misleading. The French language is Djebar’s “butin,” or war booty, and it is now her turn to use her facility with it, both with the help of and against various French texts.34 In her description of the first face-off between French and Arab armies in Algiers in 1830, Djebar asks, “Who will tell? Who will write it?” (7).35 The question, however, is not only who will write the story of this battle, but also how they will write it. Djebar links Algerian history that predates her birth to her own story and writes her voice into the historical narrative itself. She describes herself as walking through the past she is representing: “I slip into the antechamber of this recent past, an importunate visitor, removing my sandals according to the customary ritual, holding my breath in an attempt to hear everything again” (8).36 Djebar has added to personal narrative, normally in the first person, a third-person historical voice, and to historical narrative, normally in the third person, a first-person personal voice. Historicizing the personal and personalizing the historical, she brings them together in a text that is autobiographical, but is not only autobiography. If Sarraute’s new autobiography was a fellow traveler of the Nouveau Roman, Djebar’s new autobiography is allied with the “New History.” White has distinguished between narration and narrativization, between “a discourse that openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it and a discourse that feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story,” on the basis of the insertion of the first-person voice into historical narrative.37 Djebar, who was trained as a historian, violates the conventions of traditional historical writing in the omniscient third person; she has chosen to narrate rather than narrativize. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes broke the traditional rule of the use of the first-person voice in autobiography by adding to it a third person. Fifteen years earlier, he had addressed the addition of a first-person voice to the conventional third person of historical narration. In the 1967

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essay “The Discourse of History,” Barthes argued that the so-called objective historian wishes to “‘absent himself’ from his discourse” so that “history seems to tell itself.” All traces of an “I” are eliminated from discourse, “since the historian claims to let the referent speak for itself.”38 Such narration participates in what Barthes called the “referential illusion.” Djebar’s strategy is quite the opposite; again like the bricoleur she puts “something of [her]self” in her text—“It is my turn to speak. To transmit what was said, and then written. Words from more than a century ago, like those that we, women of the same tribe, exchange today” (165).39 She makes herself present in her historical narration, breaking the spell of the referential illusion constructed by French histories of the wars in Algeria. The French wrote their conquest of Algeria, whereas their Algerian enemy was mute since “without writing” (56).40 Djebar not only adds her first-person narration to the third person, but interweaves the two to arrive at a “we,” a first-person plural that signals her sense of belonging to a community that had hitherto been erased from written history. Djebar wishes to pass on the “funereal ululation” of Algerian women, their as yet unwritten stories of war, within her autobiography. In the italicized commentary of “Whispers,” Djebar questions the standard definition of a historical source: Today the old woman speaks and I prepare to transcribe her tale. . . . When ‘the saint’ was a child, she listened to her grandmother who was the daughter-in-law of old Berkani. Historians lost sight of him just before the Emir was forced to surrender. Aïssa el Berkani left with his ‘deira’ for Morocco. Beyond Oudja, his trace disappears in the archives, as if ‘archives’ meant imprint of reality! (177)41

The information obtained during her interviews with the women of Mont Chenoa is not present in any Western or Algerian archive. Oral history has only recently begun to be accepted as historical evidence and only in particular cases, but for Djebar these women themselves constitute archives. She will translate and write down their stories alongside her rewritings of history written by men. Expressing this desire, she shifts to the second person, but a second person that is radically different from that employed by Sarraute in the dialogue of Childhood. Djebar addresses others whose stories are linked to her own, instead of talking to herself: Once again, a man speaks, another listens, then writes. I stumble against

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their words which circulate, then I speak, I speak to you, the widows of that other mountain village, so distant or so near to El-Aroub! . . . Twenty years later, I bring the scene back to you, you the widows (210–11).42

She is speaking for these widows, but also to them. This is a painfully paradoxical address, however, since it is in French, the language of those who sacked the village of El Aroub in 1956, a language most of their victims do not understand. Playing on the double meaning within the phrase “‘L’amour, ses cris’ (s’écrit’)” (214) in her autobiography, Djebar points to the elusive relationships between love, the oral, and the written, and hints at the possibility of bringing orality into writing. Yet many critics have emphasized only the importance of orality in this text, rather than the back and forth of love between “its cries” (ses cris) and “writes itself” (s’écrit).43 In the section of L’Amour, la fantasia entitled “Enlaced Bodies,” Djebar describes telling Lla Zohra, her grandmother’s cousin, the story of Fatma and Mériem told by Fromentin in his account of his 1853 visit to the Sahel. Lla Zohra does not know the story and asks suspiciously, “Where did you hear that?” Djebar responds, in terms that her interlocutor will understand, “‘I read it! . . . A witness told it to a friend who wrote it down’” (166).44 In Fromentin’s story, after Fatma and Mériem are killed by a soldier, Mériem gives a button torn from his uniform to a witness, her former lover, who then tells the story to Fromentin, passing on the button as well. Djebar writes in her turn; “Mériem’s dying hand still holds out the button from the uniform: to the lover, to the friend of the lover who cannot now help but write. And time is abolished. I, your cousin, translate the story (relation) into our mother tongue and I bring it back to you” (167).45 The double meaning of “relation,” both a recounting and a relationship or connection, is crucial to Djebar’s project. She has translated Fromentin from written French into spoken Arabic for Lla Zohra, but has then translated her story of telling Fromentin’s story to Lla Zohra back into written French for her autobiography.46 We can no longer identify either a pure strand of written French history or a pure strand of Arabic oral tradition. Djebar creates for herself in L’Amour, la fantasia a symbolic ancestry; she relates relationships to other women, both Algerian and French. We read the story of a woman who, exiled from Algeria in 1843, left for France from Bône and endured a miscarriage during the voyage:

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I imagine you, the unknown woman whose tale has been handed down by storytellers over the century that led up to my childhood years. For now I too take my place in the fixed circle of listeners near the Menacer Mountains . . . I recreate you, you the invisible woman, . . . I resurrect you during that crossing that no letter from any French soldier would describe (189).47

Recording this other woman’s life within her own life story, Djebar seals their connection as ancestor and descendant, as kindred exiles. Another woman kin to both of them is French socialist revolutionary Pauline Rolland, sent to Algeria in 1852. Rolland does finally return home, also from Bône, but only to die: Our country became her grave: her true heiresses—Chérifa in her tree, Lla Zohra wandering among the brush fires, today’s chorus of anonymous widows—could pay homage to her with that ancestral cry of triumph, the ululation of convulsive sisterhood! . . . I met this woman on the ground of her writings, she and I are now enlaced in the earth of French vocabulary (223).48

All of these women, Francophone and not, speak to each other with Djebar’s text to mediate. In the same month of October that Rolland left Bône, Fromentin began his visit to Algeria. In another conjunction through reverse trajectory, Djebar will discover yet another ancestor: Eugene Fromentin holds out to me an unexpected hand—the hand of an unknown woman that he was never able to draw. In June 1853, when he left the Sahel to travel down to the edge of the desert, he visited Laghouat, which was occupied after a terrible siege. He describes a sinister detail: leaving the oasis which, six months after the massacre, still stinks, Fromentin picked up from the dust the severed hand of an anonymous Algerian woman. He threw it down again along the way. Later, I seize this living hand, hand of mutilation and of memory, and I try to make it hold the ‘qalam’ (226).49

This woman, like Fatma and Mériem, resisted being painted, so Fromentin, in a moment that transcends historical time, throws to Djebar the hand he does not consider worth keeping. But it is only because he has picked it up before throwing it away that Djebar can in turn collect it, as she has Pélissier’s account of the genocide of the Ouled Riah. Qalam means pen in

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Arabic; Djebar writes for this dead woman who could not write, writes that she gives the pen to this dead hand so it may write through her. She does so in French, and only knows this story because of a French man, but she keeps the Arabic word, separate and inviolate, in her text. “Qalam” is not the only word to resist French. The word “hannouni” appears when Djebar writes a short chapter about her brother, imprisoned by the French for his participation in the struggle for independence; “How to translate this hannouni, by ‘tender,’ by ‘tendrelou’? Not ‘my dearest,’ not ‘my heart’” (80).50 The last section of the text, entitled “Tzarl-rit (final),” is preceded by two different and contrary French dictionary definitions, translations, for this Arabic word: cries of joy and cries of sorrow (221). Like hannouni, this other untranslatable word, which refers to the ululating cries of women, must remain intact within L’Amour, la fantasia. One of Djebar’s goals was to “Arabize French,” and this task becomes particularly important in an autobiographical text.51 Autobiography, which must adequately both recount and express its author’s life story, brings with it problems of translation between languages, bodies, inside and outside, past and present: This evocation [of the past] must be brought from the mother tongue toward the father tongue. For French is also for me a father tongue. The language of yesterday’s enemy has become for me a father tongue because my father was a teacher in a French school; at the same time there is death in this language, in the testimonies of the conquest which I recover. But there is also movement in it, the liberation of the woman’s body since, for me, a little girl going to the French school, it was how I was able to avoid the harem.52

As is by now clear, Djebar’s autobiography is built around her complex and paradoxical relationship with the French language.53 French conquers and liberates while Arabic is intimate but imprisons and, consequently, autobiography, which we think of as intimate, must be the result of a process of distancing. When first gripped by the desire for autobiography, Djebar found her Francophone childhood to be inextricable from the imposition of French on Algeria as a result of colonial warfare: Before diving into my present life and sounding my own inner self, I had to describe the childhood of this language that structures me. So, in L’Amour,

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la fantasia, I evoke the language of the nineteenth-century conquest in conjunction with that of the little girl learning to write it for the first time.54

The colonization of her country of birth by France parallels her colonization by French; “from childhood, because I was in the place of the colonized, I was embedded in the French language, because I was colonized.”55 The links Djebar goes on to trace between her personal history and the Algerian histories she tells culminate in the following assertion: I was born in 1842, when General Saint-Arnaud came to destroy the zaouia of the Beni Menacer, the tribe from which I am descended, . . . It is by the light of this fire that I manage, a century later, to leave the harem; it is because its glow surrounds me that I find the strength to speak (217).56

Taken literally, this version of the canonical autobiographical statement “I was born in . . . ” is of course false. Yet for Djebar to be able to write her life story in French, this history had to have happened, and therefore her story begins with it. In Vast Is the Prison, another volume of her autobiographical quartet, Djebar recounts an exchange she overheard while at the public baths. A friend of her mother-in-law said that she could not stay and talk, but needed to return home since “the enemy” was there. Djebar’s mother-in-law explained that the women of her village among themselves used the term “the enemy” to designate their husbands.57 French is a similarly intimate enemy for Djebar. It is the only language in which her first-person voice is sanctioned in writing, and, at the same time, it is a language that her autobiography resists. When planning L’Amour, la fantasia, she has said: I openly announced that I was going to write an autobiography. I try to understand why I resisted this surge of autobiography. I resisted perhaps because my education as an Arab woman was never to talk about oneself, and at the same time perahps because I was speaking in French.58

Djebar was alienated from the French language not (only) because she was wrenched from the Imaginary of the mirror stage into the Symbolic realm, like Barthes, nor (only) because language separates us from a deep and prelinguistic reality, like Sarraute, but above all as a result of the French conquest of Algeria and its consequences for her family, education, and adult

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career. The alienation she experiences in this language is tangible, since the history that brought French to her and her to French was a brutal one. If the relationship between Algeria and France in L’Amour, la fantasia is one of intimate war, Djebar’s connection to both languages makes everything she writes a war story; “when I compose the most banal of sentences, the signs of an ancient war between two peoples are intertwined in the curves of my writing” (216).59 The two languages are in fact at war inside of her; “the French language, body and voice, establishes itself within me like a proud presidio, while my mother tongue, all orality, in rags and tatters, resists and attacks, between two moments of breathlessness” (215).60 In this interior war each language has its defined side: Arabic as orality, intimacy, and interiors, French as writing, distance, and the outside world. Djebar describes the layers of her bilingualism in spatial terms: “French becomes the language of the outside; when one returns home, Arabic again takes up its role as language of intimacy, of maternal and ancestral relationships.”61 Spoken Arabic, as we have already seen, is the language of women not allowed to write and, since Arab women have traditionally been restricted from leaving the houses of their fathers or husbands, it is also a language of the inside or the home. French is of the exterior and outsiders, and associated with freedom of movement. Until the age of ten or eleven, Djebar attended two schools, one in each language. Learning Arabic at the Koranic school was a bodily experience—“When I study like this, my body curls up, finding again the secret architecture of my native town” (184)—but when she reads and writes French, “my words have no carnal reality” (185).62 Translation between languages, when both reading and writing, entails a transformation not only of words but of the body; “I must turn my body upside down” (46).63 As a child, Djebar realized that she could only express intimate feelings and speak words of love in Arabic. While watching the daughter of a local French official and her fiancé engaging in a public display of affection: I decided that love must necessarily reside elsewhere, beyond public words and gestures. . . . [T]he French language could offer me all its inexhaustible treasures, but not a single one of its words of love would be available to me (27).64

French will be for Djebar the language not of love, then, but of love letters; her first love story began with a letter written to her in French by a young

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suitor and torn up by her enraged father (4). Since French is not a language of the body, love letters can never touch her deeply; “passion, once written, is forever distanced from me” (59).65 Yet despite this lack of passion, Djebar describes her relationship to French in the language of familial ties; “I cohabit with the French language: my quarrels and my sudden or violent silences are part of normal family life. . . . French is my stepmother tongue” (213–14).66 French is in fact everything but her mother tongue: a father tongue, since she was given to it and it was given to her in as if in a “forced marriage” (213), and a “stepmother tongue” that has coldly provided her with the freedom to escape from restrictive gender roles. Djebar remembers the outburst of her youngest cousin, about to take the veil and caught writing love letters in French to various pen pals; “I’ll never, never let them marry me off to a stranger who, in one night, will have the right to touch me! That’s why I write!” (13).67 Djebar has the freedom to write and to “circulate,” but in exchange she has been exiled from the oral and closed world of Arab women; she has exchanged one arranged marriage for another. It is from this embattled position “between two languages” that Djebar reaches out in writing to her estranged women ancestors; “Writing in a foreign language, outside of the orality of the two languages of my native country, . . . writing has brought me to the stifled cries of rebellion of the women of my childhood, to my true origin” (204).68 Two memories of her parents’ relationship recounted by Djebar in L’Amour, la fantasia exemplify the freedom that French can provide from oppressive tradition. The women in her mother’s village referred to their husbands in the third-person singular; it was considered immodest to address the men directly using their first names. Djebar’s mother began to learn French after her marriage, and this enemy language provided her with the possibility of referring directly to her husband as “my husband,” for the first time. Over time she was even able to translate this freedom back into Arabic and use his first name, and Djebar remembers seeing “a rare distinction” (36) light up her mother’s face. French also allows her father to refer directly to her mother in a way that their traditional culture would not have permitted. While away on a trip, he sent a postcard to her mother, addressed to her rather than to his household: The revolution was clear: my father had, in his own handwriting and on a postcard that would travel from one town to another, that would be seen by

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so many masculine eyes, including, eventually, those of our village postman, a Muslim postman to boot, my father, then, had dared to write the name of his wife in the Western manner (37).69

French, then, a language of distance, has allowed for a new and different intimacy between her parents; “both of them referred to each other by name, my father in writing, my mother in the conversations during which she henceforth identified her spouse without false shame; in other words, they loved each other openly” (38).70 Djebar shows us how an imposed foreign language may structure even the closest relationships. Djebar needed French to write her life story just as her mother needed it to say her father’s name and her father to write to her mother. French, a language given to her by her father via a colonial educational system, is at the same time the best and the worst language in which to write the autobiography of an Algerian woman. Djebar calls French her “tunic of Nessus”; “the coagulated language of Others has enveloped me, since childhood, in a tunic of Nessus, a gift of love from my father who, every morning, held my hand on the way to school” (217).71 The centaur Nessus was killed by Hercules, with an arrow poisoned by the blood of the Hydra, for having tried to kidnap his wife Deianira. Before dying, he took revenge by telling Deianira to save his blood-soaked tunic, since it would cause he who wore it to love her forever. Deianira later became afraid that Hercules would leave her for Iole and sent him Nessus’s tunic, unwittingly killing him. Hercules, unable to stand the pain, tore the poisonous tunic from his back and “stripped with it the great muscles from his limbs, leaving his huge bones bare.”72 Nessus avenged his death by passing off his poisonous blood as a love potion. Djebar, like Hercules, was poisoned by a loved one, given a gift of love and war by her father. French is an antagonistic other that lies within her; writing autobiography in French, she is not laying herself bare (“se mettre à nu”) in the traditional sense of self-revelation, but painfully exposing the bare bones underneath her skin. Djebar compares her situation as Francophone autobiographer to that of Augustine, also North African, who “after five centuries of Roman occupation . . . undertook to write his own biography in Latin” (215), as well as to that of Ibn Khaldoun, of Berber origin, who wrote an autobiography in Arabic a thousand years later:

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As for Augustine, it mattered little to him that he wrote . . . in a language brought to the land of his fathers by bloodshed! . . . He suddenly obeyed a yearning to turn inward: here he is, for himself, object and subject of a cold autopsy (216).73

Autobiography in what Djebar calls the “opposite” or “enemy” language [“la langue adverse”] resembles not only Hercules’s self-flaying, but also an autopsy; “Your flesh seems to peel off, in strips of a childhood language that is no longer written” (156).74 To accept French as the language of her autobiographical writing is to welcome the enemy into her most intimate interior; “laying myself bare in this language puts me at constant risk of exploding” (215).75 The French colonizers planted their language in her like a bomb which autobiography could detonate; she must face this danger and risk the consequences. Like the porteuses du feu, women who during the Algerian war for independence carried bombs underneath their veils, Djebar is engaged in a potential suicide mission. French has allowed her to write and to say “I,” but in liberating her from the harem has also expelled her from its warmth, has placed her in individualist, or solitary, confinement. The term unveiling, like se mettre à nu, has been common in French as a trope for the autobiographical enterprise. Barthes rebelled against this conception of autobiography, claiming that his autobiographical fragments were only a patchwork quilt, one that did not cover any hidden self. His introspective autobiographical commentary, however, nonetheless ended up creating the impression of a self beneath the veil (or patchwork) of representation. Sarraute’s Childhood exhibits an ambivalence about the nature of tropistic autobiography, which would be both the unveiling of a deeper reality and an artistic creation at the same time. Once again, Djebar has been presented with a literal version of their autobiographical dilemma. At the heart of L’Amour, la fantasia lies her escape from the veil as a result of French schooling. Although Djebar’s autobiographical writing has been described by some critics as a process of unveiling, she in fact manipulates tropes of veiling as well as unveiling, complicating both, just as she had the oppositions between the oral and the written, Arabic and French. In his essay “Algeria Unveils Itself,” written during the war for independence, Frantz Fanon analyzed the role of the veil in the relationship between France and colonized Algeria. During the colonial period, the French administration cast itself in the role of the emancipator of Algerian women,

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trying to convince them to take off the veil and thus free themselves from an oppressive indigenous tradition. Employees of the colonial government, including schoolteachers such as Djebar’s father, were pressured to help the French change the fate of “their” women. Fanon demonstrated that this attempt to convert women to what he considered to be foreign values was not altruistic, but rather an element of the French strategy of colonization; “‘If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women.’”76 What truly lay behind the French desire to unveil Arab women was the until-then frustrated desire to see what the veil keeps hidden: Every rejected veil disclosed to the eyes of the colonialists horizons until then forbidden, and revealed to them, piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare. . . . Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the haïk, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer.77

Unveiling women, therefore, was a strategy for breaking their resistance and, metonymically, all Algerian resistance. The European wanted to see the Arab woman, but could not as long as she kept the veil, from under which she could see without in turn being seen. Malek Alloula has similarly emphasized this aspect of the French attitude toward the veil in his analysis of postcards from the colonial era; “Draped in the veil that cloaks her to her ankles, the Algerian woman discourages the scopic desire (the voyeurism) of the photographer.”78 Djebar herself in 1975 noted the difference between “la femme enfermée,” who cannot leave the house at all, and the veiled or masked woman; “the veiled woman sees the street through a triangle. . . . [T]he most important thing is to go unnoticed, to take advantage of the mask in order to see.”79 The veil keeps out as much as it keeps in; it denies the French spectator access to the woman, who thus has the power of being what Djebar calls in L’Amour, la fantasia a “seer” [“voyeuse”] (203). The veil became an important symbol before and during the war for Algerian independence, a gauge of commitment to the struggle for political and cultural autonomy; “To the colonialist offensive around the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil, . . . the attitude of a given Algerian woman with respect to the veil will be constantly related to her overall at-

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titude with respect to the foreign occupation.”80 Women who wore the veil were considered to be patriots resisting the colonial oppressor; women who did not were considered to be in collusion with the French. In her autobiography, Djebar calls Algeria “a woman whom it is impossible to tame” and recounts how, after the 1830 invasion, Algerian women both covered their faces and refused to look at their conquerors: The women prisoners could be neither spectators nor spectacle in the pseudo-triumph. What is more serious, they would not watch. . . . They masked themselves as well as they could, with their own blood, if need be . . . the native, even when he seemed submissive, was not vanquished (56).81

Their refusal, by veiling themselves, to name and thus recognize the French victory resonates bitterly with Djebar’s mother’s naming of her husband in the same French language which has allowed Djebar to remain unveiled. Fanon’s analysis of the veil and of unveiling for Algerian women worked against, of course, the patronizing French narrative of the liberation of the colonized from the bondage of their own culture. He argued that the veil served as a positive protection from the gaze of the colonizer and from the outside world in general, and that without it the Algerian woman felt that she had no control over her own body; “The unveiled body seems to escape, to dissolve, to break into pieces. She has a impression of being improperly dressed, even of being naked . . . She has to create for herself an attitude of woman-unveiled-outside.”82 Djebar supports Fanon’s claim that the veil may serve as a protective covering, allowing women to leave the harem and move about in public, if covered: ‘I no longer go out protected (that is to say, veiled, covered up),’ the woman who casts off her sheet will say, ‘I go out undressed, or even denuded.’ The veil that shielded her from looks is in fact experienced as ‘a piece of clothing in itself,’ and to no longer have it means to be totally exposed.83

Yet Fanon also acknowledged that unveiling could be liberatory for the Algerian woman: The unveiled Algerian woman . . . developed her personality, discovered the exalting realm of responsibility. The freedom of the Algerian people from then on became identified with woman’s liberation, with her entry into history.84

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Both the veiling and the unveiling of women may be identified with the anticolonial struggle for liberation. The fact that Djebar did not take the veil at age twelve separated her from the comfort and protection of the world of veiled women and exiled her from her native language. Although Djebar values her freedom to write and to circulate in the outside world very highly, she is conscious of having paid a very high price for it. We read in L’Amour, la fantasia a conversation between her mother and a disapproving neighbor: ‘Doesn’t your daughter wear the veil yet?’ asked one or another matron . . . questioning my mother during one of the summer weddings. I must have been thirteen or maybe fourteen. ‘She reads!’ my mother replied stiffly. The whole world is swallowed up by the embarrassed silence. And my own silence. . . . ‘She reads,’ that is to say, in Arabic, ‘she studies.’ . . . ‘She reads,’ you might as well say that writing to be read . . . is always a source of revelation: in my case of the mobility of my body, and thus of my future freedom (179–80).85

Separated from most of the women in her family by her freedom, Djebar does not even know how to ululate like her mother. When she was sixteen years old, “since I had escaped the veil thanks to the French language, . . . when outside, I thought of myself as much as like a boy as like a girl.”86 Unveiled, exposed, is she still an Algerian woman? Djebar repeats several times that the experience of writing autobiography leaves her dangerously unprotected: “naked—since I am shedding my memories of childhood” (142); “writing is an unveiling, in public, in front of snickering spectators” (181).87 Laying oneself bare leaves one exposed; “writing in the first-person singular and about singularity, with a naked body and a voice hardly altered by the foreign tones, brings together all of the symbolic dangers.”88 So does Djebar unveil herself in her autobiographical work? She describes attempting to do so, comparing the veil, like French, to Nessus’s tunic and asking “how shall I find the strength to tear off the veil, if only because I need it to cover the unhealable wound oozing words nearby” (219).89 Writing about herself in French is a painful if liberating unveiling, but: This laying bare, expressed in the language of the former conqueror, he

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who for more than a century was able to take everything but women’s bodies, this laying bare sends me strangely back to the plunder of the preceding century (157).90

She is left as vulnerable, as open to violation, as Algiers in 1830. Yet since Djebar is unveiling herself in her autobiography and not being unveiled by others, she is able to use French to reveil herself at the same time. The distancing from intimacy, love, and the body that Djebar experiences in French (“to write about my own life in French is to take an inevitable distance”) allows her to take back the veil that had been taken from/spared her; it functions as a “symbolic retaking of the veil” (127).91 The language of her nonveiling can be a veil in writing and can protect Djebar from the nakedness of the first-person singular. Djebar said to Zimra in 1976 that, while “some write to unveil themselves, I write to hide myself.”92 In her early work, the fact that she wrote in French had helped her to veil or cover herself; “twenty or twenty-five years after my literary debut, I can say that the French I used from the beginning was a veil for me. A way to hide.”93 Yet Djebar advances veiled in her later autobiographical texts as well. Although we learn her father’s first name (Tahar), neither her mother’s name nor her own are to be found within the text of her autobiography. French, moreover, provides an automatic autobiographical veiling, just as the love letters she wrote in French as a preadolescent “veiled love more than they expressed it” (58).94 Djebar remembers watching the women of her family rush to hide when they saw a man approaching, but stop when they saw that he was French. They do not need to veil themselves for Europeans, whose gaze, “beyond the taboo” (126), cannot touch them. In her autobiographical writing, French similarly protects her, “as if the French language blinded the peeping-toms of my clan and, at this price, I could circulate, race down all of the streets, annex the outdoors for my cloistered companions” (181).95 Djebar’s autobiographical writing is a process, then, of simultaneous revelation and secrecy, like composing love letters, surveyed by her watchful father, “an attempt—or a temptation—to set limits on my own silence . . . to unveil and at the same time to keep secret that which should remain secret” (61–62).96 French covers her as she circulates naked because of it. It proves to be impossible for Djebar to lay herself bare; “believing I would ‘examine myself,’ I only chose another veil” (216–17).97 A veil provides pro-

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tection, however, by making its wearer an invisible seer, and this turns out to be a double-edged gift. The problem with Fanon’s as well as Djebar’s praise of the veil is that, as both realize, along with the veiling of the face and body comes a veiling of women’s voices which cannot be considered a resistance to colonial power. The veil frees women to see, but not to speak or to write, and Djebar identifies this as their true imprisonment: I recall, in everyday language, a condemnation whose seriousness made it irrevocable; . . . the only really guilty woman . . . was ‘the woman who shouts.’ . . . To refuse to veil one’s voice and begin ‘to shout,’ there lay the indecency, the dissidence. For the silence of all of the other women suddenly lost its charm to reveal the truth: that of a prison without reprieve (203–4).98

We have come full circle, for Djebar described the experience of filmmaking as one of veiling, an experience which made her a voyeuse. Returning to writing after La Nouba, “I defined myself as a gaze, a way of looking upon my very own space.”99 But even more than an experience of vision, filmmaking is an experience of voice: Films made by women—from the Third World as well as from the Old World—are an expression of a desire to speak. It is as though film-making means for women a new mobility of voice and body, of a body unobserved and therefore unsubordinated, with a rediscovered autonomy and innocence. As a result, the voice takes wings and dances. At last the outsider is seeing with her own eyes.100

In order to be veiled yet still have a voice in writing, Djebar had first to film, in Arabic, and then to write, in French. Her symbolic reveiling in French distinguishes between the two aspects of the veil; she veils her body but not her voice. In 1986 Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o announced his intention to abandon English in order to write solely in Gikuyu, proclaiming that the choice of the colonizer’s language for self-expression signals a “continuing neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit.”101 Having read L’Amour, la fantasia, it is clear that this is not the case for Djebar; her Francophone autobiography is an adamantly anti-colonial project. She has written in French against the histories written by the colonizer as well as against the use of both foreign and native traditions to oppress Algerian women. And only in French has she been able write the link to the women whose stories she must tie to

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her own. Djebar is not the only Francophone North African writer to experience this paradoxical phenomenon of access to the intimate through distance. Déjeux maintains that it was contact with, that is to say conquest by, foreign cultures of the West and particularly France that brought an introspective and individualist “I” to Algerian letters. He supports his argument with the case of Kacimi, who distinguishes between the Arabic he learned at the Koranic school, a divine language, and French, his “native language of the ‘I,’ the language of the painful emergence of the self.”102 Rachid Mimouni observes that, since the 1950s, Algerian writers who choose to publish in French have been accused of a lack of patriotism, even if they are strong supporters of national and anticolonial movements, “since it is difficult to admit that they could tell what is intimate and secret in the language of the other.” He continues that, although this Francophone Algerian literature seemed destined to fade away after independence, it has instead thrived, an indication that although Algerian writers were forced into French, it has also given them something in return.103 For Djebar, as for Abdelkebir Khatibi, it is precisely the lack of intimacy in French that enables autobiography; “he also needed the other language/tongue—your language/tongue (langue), foreign in me—to tell himself the tale of how unadapted he was to the world.”104 Autobiographical distanciation, a form of the third person, if we recall Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Jameson’s reading of Brecht, may allow for a critical representation of the fragmentation of selves and life stories. Djebar utilizes, as had Barthes, a third-person voice both to write about herself and to comment on her historical writing. And in addition to the literal third-person voice that alternates with the first person in L’Amour, la fantasia, French serves as a veil from behind which she may look at herself and tell her history without fear of exposure. Djebar’s autobiographical anguish, in addition to that of which language to choose for her personal history, was that of finding a way to write “I” as an Algerian woman. Much of the scholarship on her autobiographical texts has claimed that her solution was to write a collective history rather than an individual one. Because of the multiple voices present in L’Amour, la fantasia, Patricia Geesey calls it a “collective autobiography” which expresses a “collective feminine subjectivity” or “plural subjectivity.”105 According to Mary Jean Green, “the first-person narrator of the autobiography joins her voice with that of other Algerian women, and the novel becomes collective auto-

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biography as she finds their story to be her own.”106 And Katherine Gracki invokes Lejeune’s definition of autobiography in order to say that Djebar does not fulfill it, does not write “her individual life,” but rather writes “in the plural” and therefore not autobiographically.107 These critics suggest that Djebar has rejected an individualist and unveiled Western “I” in order to return to the communal, veiled, “we” of the harem. Thus far, however, we have seen that such a return is by no means simple or even possible for Djebar, even should we conclude that this is the goal of her autobiographical writing. French is what separated Djebar from her veiled women ancestors, relatives, and contemporaries; she feels guilty for having had an opportunity that was denied them [“‘Why me? Why do I alone, of all of my tribe, have this opportunity?’” (213)] and wants to use this opportunity to liberate them as well. She has left the harem, and suffers this exile for a reason; “I have been expelled from there to hear and to bring the traces of freedom back to the women of my family” (218), a paradoxical liberty in a language they cannot understand.108 Following her narration in the first person of the story of Chérifa, Djebar switches to the second person, directly addressing her “strange little sister whom henceforth I inscribe in a foreign language, or whom I veil” (141).109 She writes to and for Chérifa, desiring to give her words as well as protect her in whatever way possible: Chérifa! . . . Your voice was caught in a trap; my French disguises it without clothing it. I barely brush the shadow of your footsteps! The words that I thought to give you are enveloped in the same mourning cloth as those of Bosquet and Saint-Arnaud. . . . Torch-words which light up my female companions, my accomplices; words which forever separate me from them. And weigh me down as I go into exile (142).110

Djebar’s attempt to write these discovered sisters in French exiles her yet again. She cannot return to a communal bond that was broken without her assent. As I have pointed to the veiling within Djebar’s autobiographical unveiling, I would like to point to the individual voice within her polyphonic autobiography. I do not wish to argue that Djebar conforms to Lejeune’s or anyone else’s definitions of autobiography, but rather to urge that we widen the genre of autobiography to include self-narratives that themselves

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include others.111 Djebar consistently complicates, in fact, any easy opposition between individuality and collectivity. Although her autobiography encompasses the stories of other Algerian women, Djebar quite insistently designates her singularity; their story is not Djebar’s story, and hers is not theirs. The trauma of this difference underlies the entire text. Djebar remembers the collective gatherings of women at which “the first-person ‘I’ would never be used” (154) and asks: How can a woman say ‘I,’ since this would scorn the blanket formulae which ensure that the individual journeys through life in a collective resignation? . . . How can she undertake to look at her childhood, even if it was different? (156).112

She has said of L’Amour, la fantasia that “I thought of the interwoven polyphony of all the women’s voices in La Nouba. They formed a chorus—a choir into which I wanted to plunge myself, but without completely dissolving, losing my own sense of self. I wanted to remain myself, yet become one of their voices.”113 Although French is the cause of Djebar’s difference from the veiled women to whom she nonetheless feels a close kinship, and has made of her autobiography a “solitary song” (217), she does not reject this solitude. Writing about her “forlorn loneliness” [esseulement] living in exile from Algeria, she rejects a “we” to proclaim an “I”: No, you will not say ‘we,’ you will not hide yourself, you, singular woman, behind ‘Woman’; you will never be, neither at the beginning nor at the end, a ‘spokesperson.’ . . . No, you will say ‘I’—I (je), a game (jeu) for you alone—, you will sing, you will dance, and it is precisely this that you will want to write down.114

The risk of collectivity for Djebar is that of a silencing comparable to the loss of voice associated with the veil. She struggles against this within L’Amour, la fantasia; “wanting at every step to reach transparency, I am progressively engulfed by the anonymity of my female ancestors” (217).115 Like Barthes and Sarraute, she affirms that autobiography, and specifically autobiography in the enemy language, “is woven like fiction” (216).116 It is like fiction and not the same as fiction; this is, like Savage Nights, an autobiographical novel. Djebar chose a literary style which has allowed her to weave her voice together with those of other voices from Algerian history. Her voice remains

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intertwined with these other voices, but not indistinguishable; “This ‘fantasia’ structure allowed me to intertwine my own voice with the voices of other women. That gave me the courage to talk about myself, intimately.”117 Djebar’s autobiographical positioning parallels Benveniste’s linguistic description of the first-person plural pronoun; “‘we’ is not a multiplication of identical objects but a junction between ‘I’ and the ‘non-I’ . . . the presence of ‘I’ is constitutive of ‘we.’”118 Like those who have read L’Amour, la fantasia as strictly “collective autobiography,” many cultural and literary theorists, not only in the West but in Africa as well, have relied on the strict opposition of an African collectivity to a Western individuality in order to argue that African autobiography does not and cannot exist.119 Avrom Fleishman notes, using the examples of Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese texts, that a viewpoint he calls “Autobiography as a Distinctive Phenomenon of Western Culture” (“often coupled with claims for its invention by Augustine”) relies on the invention of various reasons to exclude the many and varied examples of non-Western self-writing from the genre of autobiography.120 But Djebar has already reminded us that Augustine is not only the father of a Western European tradition of literary autobiography; as a North African writing autobiography in a European language, he is her ancestor as well. George Gusdorf claimed in his 1956 essay that the concept of individual identity “expresse[d] a concern particular to Western man,” and that therefore “authentic” non-Western autobiography was impossible.121 In the early 1970s, James Olney wrote what is still the only book-length study of African autobiography. He asserted, following Gusdorf’s lead, that African autobiography is “less as an individual phenomenon than . . . a social one,” since an African subject, unlike a Western one, is not individually but rather socially determined.122 Olney, who in his extensive work on Western autobiography always affirmed the existence of a generic boundary between autobiography and fiction, argued that in Africa autobiography and fiction were one and the same.123 The novels of Nigerian Chinua Achebe were “something like a supra-personal, multi-generational autobiography of the Ibo people,” and Malian Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence was “a symbolic autobiography of the entire continent and community of Africa.”124 Paul John Eakin also insisted, thirty years after Gusdorf and without much additional explanation, that “the very idea of African autobiography sounds paradoxical,

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and so it is.”125 Either Africans would not be able to write autobiography (or biography), since they could not conceive of an individual as distinct from the collective, or they would only be able to write collective autobiography, even when they said they were writing fiction. This strict opposition of African collectivism to Western individualism has not been limited to discussions of autobiography. Charles Larson, seemingly discounting, among others, the heroes of oral epics, has asserted that “the hero concept—the belief in the individual who is different from his fellowmen—is almost totally alien to African life.”126 And Fredric Jameson has famously maintained that all “third world” texts “necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public thirdworld culture and society.”127 Olney called all African texts autobiographies and Jameson called them all national allegories, but both argued the impossibility of African self-writing. In the light of L’Amour, la fantasia, however, it is clear that the construction of an individual autobiographical subject is itself crucial in a postcolonial perspective. Autobiography can be as important as the retelling of history from the point of view of the previously silenced colonized people, and, most importantly, it can exist alongside such a retelling. Albert Memmi described the ways in which the colonizer unilaterally defined the colonized, did not allow him or her to exist as an individual but only as depersonalized by “the mark of the plural”; “The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity (‘They are this.’ ‘They are all the same.’).”128 And Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks both addressed and exemplified the power of a first-person narrative in the self-construction of the colonial subject face to face with, or in reaction to, the colonial other. Fanon recounted the burden of the black subject forced to define himself in relation to the white colonizer; “I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the degree that the white man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a colonized native, robs me of all worth, all individuality.”129 Through autobiographical narration in the singular, the colonized may reject being “overdetermined from without,” may speak as an individual and refuse to be only spoken about (“The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro

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is ugly”).130 For, as Fanon reminded us, “Negro experience is not a whole, for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes.”131 In a 1984 lecture, now an essay entitled “The Writer and His Community,” Chinua Achebe stepped back from his discussion of the collective authorship of Igbo mbari art to clarify his terms: We may have been talking about individualism as if it was invented in the West or even by one American, Emerson. In fact individualism must be, has to be, as old as human society itself. From whatever time humans began to move around in groups the dialogue between Mannoni’s polarities of ‘social being’ and ‘inner personality’ or, more simply, between the individual and the community must also have been called into being. It is inconceivable that it shouldn’t. The question then is not whether this dialectic has always existed but rather how particular peoples resolved it at particular times.132

Achebe urges us to question the established opposition between Western individual and African collective within both Western and African theories of African cultural production. We may now ask how the individual is represented both in alliance and in conflict with his or her community. How does this representation contribute to our understanding of individual, national, and African history? Déjeux wrote of an “I-we” with respect to the literature of the Maghreb: “the ‘we’ hidden in the ‘I’ is opposed to the Western ‘we.’ There are ‘us’ and the others.”133 This is certainly the case for Djebar, who, as I have shown, uses French and autobiography to write against the French conquest of Algeria through war and writing. But her “I-we” is not just one of opposition; it is also a linking. Djebar brings herself together not only with her Algerian ancestors, but with her French ancestors as well, including Pélissier, Fromentin, and Rolland. Autobiographical narrative provides a form in which the formerly colonized may re-personalize herself, no longer only as nonwhite, but in relation with her hero(ine)s, no longer drowned in, but still participating in, a collective. L’Amour la fantasia constitutes postcolonial narration in the singular as well as the plural; its autobiographical strands are as significant as its biographical and historical ones. Monique Gadant has argued that Djebar’s Francophone autobiography is necessarily a failure, that Djebar should have narrated her “I” in song or “even in shouts,” “since the ‘I’ cannot narrate itself in a foreign language . . . cannot in both senses, that of ‘does not have the right’ and that of ‘is incapable of.’”134 Yet we know, first of all, that it is in Arabic and not French

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that Djebar “does not have the right” to tell her life story. We also know that the successful autobiography envisioned by Gadant is always impossible. Barthes, a virtuoso performer of the French that was his native and mother tongue, could not achieve a coincidence of his past and present, written and writing “I”s, in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Only by stepping outside of language altogether, into the Imaginary magic of Photography, could he find a body to accompany his image. Mildred Mortimer asks in regard to L’Amour, la fantasia, “Does the autobiographical process comfort and heal the fragmented narrating self?”135 But to assume that this should be the goal of any autobiographical endeavor is to accept Gusdorf’s model of autobiography as the “unity of a life over time,” a model to which, moreover, he denied non-Westerners access. With obstacles in the way of an autobiographical project in both Arabic and French, Djebar chose to write a reflexive text, one which would illuminate not only her childhood, but the personal and historical factors which over time constructed her relationship to the French language; “I understood that there was a rupture between my voice and my writing, and that it was about this that I should henceforth think and speak.”136 Sarraute, who also grew up exiled in France and in French, used the French language and her French education to provide successful closure for her autobiography, pulling her diasporic self together. Djebar’s great accomplishment is that of not having healed her self, having presented in writing, in French, a fragmented self. Unlike Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Childhood, and Savage Nights, L’Amour, la fantasia never cedes to an autobiographical desire for coherence. There is a fragmented first person underneath Djebar’s veil; “Autobiographical writing is necessarily retrospective writing, in which your ‘I’ is not always I, or it is an ‘I-we’ or a multiple ‘I.’”137 That Djebar accomplished a formal fragmentation in her autobiography which allows for the coexistence of multiple voices, something which Barthes, Sarraute, and Collard worked toward but were never able to maintain, is by no means a reason to exclude her work from the genre. L’Amour, la fantasia, in which Djebar speaks as “I” and as “she” in an other language, is autobiography in the third person of French, and tells an always already fragmented self. A complexly narrated network of autobiography, biography, and history allows Djebar to escape from the autobiographical introspection that traps Barthes, Sarraute, and Collard. Barthes, seeing him-

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self becoming coherent in writing, chose to repeatedly tell us that he was trapped. Sarraute broke her text into fragments of dialogue, but it was an internal conversation. Collard refilmed his multisexual self as a pop hero, reducing himself to singularity with the help of a sublime object and a heterosexual love story. All excluded any external otherness as well as any historical context from their self-representations, but Djebar is fiercely aware of herself as constituted by a particular history and split not just within herself, but from others. Confronted with the same problem, the representation of fragmented subjectivity, she manages not to reinsert (and then hide) a plot in her story, manages not to narrativize herself. White comments that, when [many contemporary historians] say that they are artists, they seem to mean that they are artists in the way that Scott or Thackeray were artists. They certainly do not mean to identify themselves with action painters, kinetic sculptors, existentialist novelists, imagist poets, or nouvelle vague cinematographers.138

Scott and Thackeray, of course, stand in here for the tradition of the realist historical novel, which parallels for White, as for Barthes, the tradition of positivist historical narrative. Djebar, like David Achkar and Raoul Peck, with whose work I will continue and conclude, not only means to be but insists on being not a “New Autobiographer,” but a New Wave personal historian.

chapter 6

AutoBiographical Third Cinema: David Achkar’s Allah Tantou and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: Death of the Prophet

“A story has to be about someone else even if it is about the one telling it.”1

In L’Amour, la fantasia, Djebar wrote equal parts autobiography, biography, and history, reaching out to others as she told her own story. From this example of veiling and unveiling in a distant yet intimate language, I would like to return to the third person of film, this time Francophone African autobiographical film—the third person squared—with David Achkar’s 1991 Allah Tantou [God’s Will] and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: Death of the Prophet [Lumumba: La Mort du prophète], released one year later. Both films mix documentary and fictional genres, layering autobiographical, biographical, and historical (both national and international), first, second and third-person narratives.2 They combine photographs, newspapers, newsreels, and home movies with reenacted scenes and interviews in order to retell colonial and postcolonial African history, not only mixing genres but interrogating genre itself, exploring the nature of historical narrative, the relationship of autobiography to biography, and of both to history. Achkar slips back and forth between personal and national historical narrative, recounting the history 127

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of postcolonial Guinea through the story of his father, Marof Achkar, who served as the ambassador and representative of newly independent Guinea to the United Nations until his imprisonment by Sékou Touré’s government. Peck similarly interweaves the story of Patrice Lumumba’s role in the struggle for and after Congolese independence with that of his own family, Haitians who moved to the Congo to participate in the building of a postcolonial national administration. I will discuss these two experimental documentary films, which are strikingly different from Collard’s feature-film adaptation of his autobiographical novel, in relation to a tradition of Third Cinema and as reflexive documentary, focusing on their use of different voices and visual evidence of the past in their fragmented (auto)biographical revisions of history. We have already seen that arguments have been made for the impossibility not only of autobiographical film but of African autobiography in general. Theorists of African and African diasporic cinema, moreover, working within a critical tradition that originated with Third Cinema in Latin America, have also deemed African autobiographical film impossible. The New Latin American Cinema movement, which arose in the wake of Italian Neorealism, began in Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba in the 1950s and 60s; the term “Third Cinema” was first used in a Cuban film journal in 1969.3 In early theoretical texts, Third Cinema filmmakers advocated a revolutionary cinema that was both art and action, a transformational social practice, an instrument of change and consciousness raising.4 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino declared in their manifesto that this cinema of the struggle of third-world peoples against first-world imperialism was “the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time” and represented “the decolonization of culture.”5 Julio Garcia Espinosa coined the term “imperfect cinema” to signify a new “consciously and resolutely ‘committed’ cinema,” which avoided the slick perfection of classical Hollywood seamless editing and character-driven narrative.6 Documentary was the privileged genre for these filmmakers, who were dedicated to developing a new cinema “committed to national reality . . . which creates works permeated by realism.”7 As a cinema of decolonization, the Third Cinema was set in opposition to a dominant and capitalist First Cinema and a Second Cinema which was artistic, intellectual, and auteurist. In the 1980s and ’90s there has been a return to theorizing Third Cinema as a “cinema of subversion,” in

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the Latin American and African contexts as well as with respect to minority filmmaking within countries such as the United States.8 Teshome Gabriel, one of the foremost theorists of Third Cinema over the past two decades, has aligned the movement with popular memory and folklore against history as told by dominant cinemas, writing that it can “redefine and redeem what the official versions of history have overlooked.”9 He and other contemporary theorists and filmmakers have emphasized three characteristics of Third Cinema: first, that it rewrites colonial and neocolonial history from the perspective of decolonized peoples; second, that it has a collective hero as opposed to an individual one; and last, that it rejects aesthetic formalism in favor of a certain realism. Allah Tantou and Lumumba: Death of the Prophet, both postcolonial and anticolonial documentaries, demystify colonial history’s claim to a privileged perspective on the truth of history and counter it with their own versions. We will see that they are admirable examples of Third Cinema not only for their assertion of an African perspective on the colonial and postcolonial periods, but for their revelation of the complications and crimes of African politics after independence as well. These films would be open to a Third Cinema critique, however, for how they tell their stories, both for for their focus on individuals and for an excessive concern with form. My purpose is not to defend the filmmakers, but rather to analyze their use of a first-person autobiographical voice within their biographical and historical narratives in the context of their experimentation with filmic form. Third Cinema theorists, like those critics who have proclaimed African autobiography to be impossible, have maintained that the “third-world subject” is radically different from the Western individual. Clyde Taylor, for example, strictly opposes the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” to the Xhosa proverb, “A person is a person only because of other people,” and characterizes African Third Cinema as a “hero-less narrative.”10 Taylor and others, associating the heroic individual protagonist of Hollywood with Western individualism, have set up against it a strictly collective protagonist somewhat reminiscent of Eisenstein’s mass proletarian hero. Tahar Cheriaa states that “the main character in African films is always the group, the collectivity, and that is what is essential,” while Elizabeth Malkmus and Roy Armes hold that there can be no individual hero in African cinema because “an emphasis on a broad issue (such as the anti-colonial struggle) as the primary set of a

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narrative . . . shifts focus away from the individual (who would be helpless in such a struggle) to the collectivity (which alone has the potential to embody power or to offer viable resistance).”11 Gabriel allows for the possibility of autobiography in Third Cinema, but only if we redefine autobiography as the story of a collective protagonist: I do not mean autobiography in its usual Western sense of a narrative by and about a single subject. Rather, I am speaking of a multi-generational and trans-individual autobiography, i.e. a symbolic autobiography where the collective subject is the focus . . . (perhaps hetero-biography).12

This last neologism recalls the many critical characterizations of L’Amour, la fantasia as “collective autobiography.” It is surprising to find such differently situated theorists in agreement (and, more astonishingly, in agreement with Gusdorf, Olney, and Jameson) that there is no place for narration in or of the singular in postcolonial texts and films, at the same time that we find a group of African filmmakers who disagree, mixing autobiography and biography, articulating the individual, the personal, the singular, the first person, into history. We will see, moreover, that questioning the nature of the protagonist of anti-colonial cinema leads us to question the nature of documentary realism. A tension exists within Third Cinema theory with regard to the political value of formal innovation and experimentation. The First and Second Cinemas have been denounced in terms again reminiscent of the history of Soviet film, this time of 1930s condemnations of counter-revolutionary formalism in the name of Socialist Realism. In the 1960s, in fact, Guinean President Sékou Touré proclaimed the need for a Marxist revolutionary realism in film, writing that the cinema should never be anything but “an instrument, a means, a tool used to work for the Revolution,” that it should not create or innovate, but rather remain a “sub-creation . . . an adaptation of what has existed.”13 Cuban filmmaker and theorist Tomás Gutierrez Alea, however, reflecting on the New Latin American Cinema over a decade later, stressed in a 1988 essay the importance of a critical and interpretative distance on the part of the filmmaker, who transmits meaning by arrangement: Cinematic realism does not lie in its alleged ability to capture reality ‘just like it is’ (which is ‘just like it appears to be’), but rather lies in its ability to reveal, through associations and connections between various isolated

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aspects of reality—that is to say, through creating a ‘new reality’—deeper, more essential layers of reality itself.14

Gabriel seems divided on this issue. He has praised radical content in conventional form, claiming that “Third Cinema film-makers rarely move their camera and sets unless the story calls for it.”15 At the same time, he has stated that Third Cinema films “try to expand the boundaries of cinematic language and devise new stylistic approaches appropriate to their revolutionary goals,” and that revolutionary filmmakers seek “the demystification of representational practices as part of the process of liberation.”16 And this is precisely what Achkar and Peck have accomplished; both, like Djebar, demystify not only colonial versions of history but colonial realism as well, as they create a new style for documentary in Africa. Following the call to realism, and to a particular kind of realism, Third Cinema theorists and filmmakers in Latin America preferred documentary to feature film. Yet filmic realism has particular stakes in Africa, which, like other parts of the so-called third world, has long been defined by the images created of it and its people by exploring, conquering, and colonizing outsiders. From as early as 1905, documentary films were used as propaganda and colonizing tools by the French, Belgians, and British; cameramen, anthropologists, and ethnographers came to Sub-Saharan Africa, their realism another arm in the colonial weaponry. After independence, African filmmakers with very few exceptions avoided documentary for three decades, focusing instead on the historical fiction film as the vehicle for revolutionary cinema. Allah Tantou and Lumumba: Death of the Prophet mark a new turn to documentary in postcolonial West and Central Africa. As experimental films, they differ from early African ethnographic documentaries, such as Blaise Senghor’s 1962 Grand Magal in Touba and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s 1963 Lamb. As documentaries, they differ from historical and political features such as Ousmane Sembène’s Camp of Thiaroye and Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen, both from 1987. And as autobiographical documentaries, we will see, both films are worlds away from Collard’s blockbuster feature Savage Nights. Like Renov, I have chosen to examine films which “couple a documentary impulse—an outward gaze upon the world—with an equally forceful reflex of self-interrogation” and manifest “an embroiling of subject in history.”17 Achkar and Peck, like Djebar, look outward as well as inward in their

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explorations of personal identity and narrative form. Bill Nichols has identified five modes of documentary film: expository, observational, interactive, reflexive, and performative. Just as I have focused on autobiographical reflexivity, on what I have called third-person autobiographical strategies, from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes to L’Amour, la fantasia, it is the reflexive mode, in which “the representation of the historical world becomes, itself, the topic of cinematic meditation,” the filmmaker engages in “metacommentary” and speaks about “the process of representation itself,” which will interest me with respect to autobiographical documentary.18 Whereas conventional documentary realism “provides unproblematic access to the world,” reflexive documentary, according to Nichols, problematizes “realist access to the world, the ability to provide persuasive evidence, the possibility of indisputable argument, the unbreakable bond between an indexical image and that which it represents.”19 Interrogating the conventions of documentary realism within a postcolonial context, as Djebar had those of historical narrative, Achkar and Peck demonstrate the political potential of aesthetic experimentation in film. Allah Tantou begins with a dedication in white letters against a black background—“To my father, and to all of the prisoners of Camp Boiro and elsewhere”—followed by 8mm home movie footage of a family decorating their Christmas tree.20 These images, which then shift to footage of a father picking up and holding his young son, are accompanied by David Achkar’s first-person voice-over, stating that “Many sons admire their fathers. I hardly knew my father. What I know of him, I know from what my mother or his friends have told me. But also from what he wrote to us.”21 The title credits to the film follow, over an image of a man writing while sitting on the floor of a prison cell. We gather from the credits and subsequent narration that this is an actor, Michel Montanary, playing the role of the filmmaker’s father, Marof Achkar, who died in 1971, and that the boy in the home movies is his son David. The next images are of the letters that Marof Achkar wrote to his family from prison, which are then replaced by more 8mm footage, now of a government ceremony. We hear another voice-over, but this time it is “Marof Achkar,” that is to say, the actor playing the role of David Achkar’s father, who speaks in the first person and in the present tense.22 He tells us of the hero’s welcome he received upon his return from abroad, just before his arrest and imprisonment at Camp Boiro during one

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of President Sékou Touré’s purges of his own government. Achkar then cuts from the 8mm footage to a series of photographs of Marof Achkar in his official capacity at the U.N. and newspaper headlines from articles about him: “Achkar Calling Tune,” “That New African Bombshell,” “Africa’s Clark Gable Warns Denmark.” I have as yet described only the first three minutes of Allah Tantou, but the fragmented and polyphonic nature of this unconventional documentary is already evident. David Achkar, Marof Achkar’s son, speaks in a first-person autobiographical voice-over in the film, sometimes addressing the spectator and at other times addressing his father. “Marof Achkar” also uses the first person, both in voice-overs and in diegetic dialogue within the scenes that imagine and reenact his time in prison. Third-person narration within David Achkar’s voice-over and the incorporated newsreel footage is occasionally joined to the two first-person voices. These layered voices together narrate the story of Marof Achkar’s political career: the son provides both personal and historical information; the “father” tells his personal and political experiences and realizations while in prison, from the inside; the newspapers and newsreels document his political life prior to his imprisonment, from the outside. Achkar tells an autobiographical and biographical story of two individuals, challenging the impossibility of African autobiography, and tells it in filmic form, challenging the impossibility of autobiographical film. “Marof Achkar”’s voice-over continues as Achkar cuts to another reenactment scene, during which Montanary is sitting on a stool in an large, empty cell. As the camera circles over “Achkar”’s head, we learn that it has been “197 days since my arrest on October 17, 1968,” and that he still does not know the charges brought against him by a special court, composed of Sékou Touré’s friends and family. As the voice-over progresses, the reenactment image is replaced by 8mm footage of crowds cheering at the side of a road, welcoming Marof Achkar home. “Achkar”’s voice-over is then replaced by that of the filmmaker, who accompanies more home movie footage with “it is here in Coyah,” a village fifty-four kilometers from the Guinean capital of Conakry, “that you were born.” He then jumps to the beginning of his father’s political career: 1958. Guinea, your country, led by Sékou Touré, your president, says ‘no’ to the constitution proposed by General de Gaulle, becoming the first in-

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dependent francophone African country. Sékou Touré becomes a myth, Africa’s providential man. A singer and dancer with the Ballets Africains, you, like so many others, put yourself at the service of your country and begin a brilliant career at the U.N.23

Achkar speaks to us of his father, but at the same time speaks to his father. As Djebar had used the second-person voice to address the Algerian women whose stories she interwove with her own, Achkar apostrophizes his absent father, bringing him to life in and by means of his film. Achkar further traces his father’s political trajectory via newsreel footage of him speaking about human rights in South Africa in his role as ambassador to the United Nations. The narrator of the newsreel identifies “Achkar Marof, of Guinea, chairman of the United Nations Special Committee on the policies of apartheid in South Africa,” and provides information both about apartheid in South Africa and the ways in which the U.N. was working against it, mentioning a special meeting of this U.N. committee in Stockholm. The members of the committee, including Marof Achkar, are listed for us as we see footage of him shaking hands with other dignitaries in Sweden. Achkar then cuts abruptly to a reenactment scene showing “Marof Achkar” asleep on the floor of his prison cell. This strategy of juxtaposition emphasizes the cruel shock of Marof Achkar’s fall from international renown to miserable isolation and imprisonment. Achkar stresses the irony of his father’s transition from investigator of human rights violations in apartheid South Africa to political prisoner of the black African government of his own country. Achkar, like Barthes and, to a certain extent, Djebar, uses alienation effects to keep us at a critical distance from his very personal text. David Achkar reflexively manipulates, then, the multiple visual media—still and moving images, documentary evidence and fictional reenactments—that make up Allah Tantou. He links the different image-fragments of his narrative through both conjunctive and disjunctive uses of sound. The dialogue and voice-overs often overlap or bleed over from one type of image to another, continuing over a cut, for example, from a reenactment to 8mm home movie footage. This mixing of diegetic levels serves various purposes. The conjunction of a reenactment voice-over with images from home movies often produces an effect of focalization as a result of which the footage seems to constitute the memories of “Marof Achkar.” This could function to add depth to his character, to make him seem more lifelike, yet Achkar

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consistently juxtaposes the documentary photographs and footage of Marof Achkar with the “Marof Achkar” of the reenactments. The two quite simply look like two different people. No attempt has been made to trick the spectator into confusing father and actor and believing that this is an “unmediated recording of reality”; Achkar explained that “I shot [the film] with my cousin. He doesn’t really look like my father—he’s my mother’s nephew. He didn’t even see the home movies.”24 At the same time, however, the transitions back from reenactment to footage clearly marked as documentary remind us that Marof Achkar and his son David had off-camera lives. The film rejects generic categorization either as only documentary or only fiction. The mainstream documentary tradition has been one of coherent thirdperson narration (the infamous “voice of God”) rather than of Achkar’s fragmented first person. When Achkar went to Amnesty International and requested funding to finish his film, “they said I shouldn’t have made a film about my father. I thought that was nonsense.”25 A proper Amnesty human rights film should speak in the third person and not the first, about a group or collective and not an individual, and especially not about a member of one’s family. Nichols, drawing on Barthes’s “Discourse of History” as well as White’s distinction between narration and narrativization, has noted that, according to filmic conventions, “subjectivity, rather than enhancing the impact of a documentary, may actually jeopardize its credibility.”26 Achkar has included not just one but several first-person voices in his biographical and historical narrative; it is clear that, like Djebar, he is narrating and not narrativizing. He does not want history to seem to tell itself, but rather makes us aware of the fact that it is being told. Achkar complicates conventional documentary narration not just by his use of the first person, but also by drawing attention to the fact that his, like any history, is a narrative reconstruction of the past. We know that “Marof Achkar”’s words are either drawn directly from his letters and prison writings or scripted by his son based on what his mother and his father’s friends have told him, but, again like Djebar, Achkar keeps us off balance, nowhere specifying whether, or when, he is citing a source as opposed to extrapolating or imagining. Achkar was not faced with the choice Bruss associated with autobiographical film, that of whether to record or stage reality. Investigating not the present but the past, he was obliged to reenact his father’s

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time in prison since no documentary images of this period of his life exist. These reenactments do not belong to any recognizable filmic genre, are neither realistically documentary nor realistically fictional, and disconcert the spectator. In several of the reenactments, we simultaneously hear “Marof Achkar” participate in dialogue and speak in a voice-over and are jolted into remembering that the scene, as we are watching and hearing it, could not possibly have taken place. The scenes which recreate “Marof Achkar”’s torture in prison are the starkest of the film; we see him hanging on a bar suspended from the ceiling, hands and feet tied, alone against a black background which cloaks even the walls of the cell. The camerawork is heavily stylized and makes no attempt to convey documentary authenticity; Achkar said that “for the mise-en-scene of this drama, I decided to stay away from any realism.”27 The most crucial reenactment scene, however, is that of the confession that this torture was designed to extract. In December of 1969, after seven months in prison, “Marof Achkar” finally learns that the charges against him are of financial mismanagement and his captors type a confession for him to read while they record it as his statement. They tell him to read with conviction—“You were an actor. You know the routine.” The spectator knows not only that Marof Achkar was an actor and dancer by training, but that “Marof Achkar” is here being played by an actor, as are his captors. These words have been scripted by the filmmaker for ironic effect, and our awareness of this reflexivity precludes any sense of realism in a scene that could have easily been written and filmed to grip the spectator through identification and suspense. “Marof Achkar” then continues, “My name is Marof Achkar. Born in 1930 in Coyah, son of Moustapha Achkar and Damaë Camara. Married, four legitimate children, artist, ex-Ambassador.”28 This first-person autobiographical narrative is followed by the false confession which has been scripted for him, in which he claims to have been part of a French colonial network and a traitor to his country. In another reflexive voice-over, “Marof Achkar” states that “It’s a script, a bad script,” and Achkar cuts from the reenactment to a series of photographs of Marof Achkar in Paris and on a world tour with the Ballets Africains in the 1950s.29 These documentary images combine with the preceding scene and the voice-over to inform the spectator that this, in fact, is what Marof Achkar had been doing in Europe, to remind us once again of the ridiculous nature of the con-

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cocted confession. Achkar then cuts back to the prison reenactment scene, to “Marof Achkar”’s confession that in 1964, when he became ambassador, he went on the C.I.A. payroll and recruited other Guineans to betray their country. He reads that he received $10,000 for his treasonous acts, at which point his captors stop him and ask him to change this sum to $500,000, since “It’s a much more serious sum. . . . The People must think that you earned a lot.”30 An elderly Imam who has been watching the proceedings tells “Marof Achkar” to be sure to include his participation in Nazi networks as well. The script, written by those who imprisoned Achkar and rewritten by his son for this reenactment, has gone from ridiculous to patently ludicrous. Not only is Marof Achkar’s innocence affirmed without a doubt in the mind of the spectator, but Touré’s strategy of deceiving “the People” for their own good is unmasked in all of its hypocrisy. David Achkar sets Allah Tantou as a document against the confession represented within it, rewriting its false rewriting of his father’s political work and commitment. Nichols has observed that another “risk of credibility” is involved in the use of reenactments in documentary film; the supposedly indexical bond between image and reality is ruptured, because the spectator knows that “what occurred occurred for the camera” and is thus an “imaginary event.”31 Unlike Bruss and Lejeune, however, he has again drawn on White’s work to remind us that this is a false problem, since all history depends on reenactment; “History . . . is always a matter of story telling: our reconstruction of events must impose meaning and order on them.”32 Written nonfiction also contains reenactment scenes, in which dialogue is attached to historical accounts and characters in order to acquire more and not less narrative credibility. This is certainly the case for autobiographical writing, although Sarraute attempted to get around the problem via the concept of the tropism. The difference, according to Nichols, is that writing, unlike film, is not “burdened with the problem of an actual actor who would approximate without being the historical personage.”33 Once again, writing can trick us more easily than film, and it is film that may teach us that we have been tricked. Yet David Achkar not only bears but brandishes this burden of the need for a “stand-in” for his father in his autobiographical documentary. As a result of the obvious inauthenticity of these reenactments, the spectator is never allowed to forget that “Marof Achkar” is not and cannot be Ma-

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rof Achkar, since Marof Achkar was shot and killed, was permanently taken away from his son after suffering for many years in prison. The reflexivity of Achkar’s film, an analysis internal to the film that is totally absent from the filmic version of Savage Nights, breaks the illusion maintained by classical Hollywood cinema by means of invisible editing. Analyzing suture in film, Kaja Silverman has noted that classic film narrative works not only to “activate the viewer’s desire and transform one shot into a signifier for the next, but . . . to deflect attention away from the level of enunciation to that of the fiction.”34 Even though documentary filmmakers have often set themselves against Hollywood, documentary, like fiction film, has its own narrative conventions which shift attention away from the level of enunciation in order to convince the spectator that the world is simply being presented “as it is.” In Silverman’s reading of Louis Althusser, “interpellation” is a form of ideological suturing and, although the subject can never transcend ideology, he or she can become “aware of its operations.”35 In order to subvert suture, which as we remember depends on a moment of displeasure followed by the jouissance of the “reverse shot,” a cinematic text must then refuse to stitch up the “wound.” Achkar, unlike Collard, refuses to let his spectator be drawn into identification with either his character or the camera. His stylized reenactments and more general reflexivity with respect to the sequencing of images and the sound-image connection point to the problematic nature of visual historical narrative instead of masking it. In Allah Tantou, Achkar uses juxtaposition to teach the spectator how to read, never telling us what to think in his voice-over commentary, but forcing us to interpret the fragments with which we are presented. He refuses to give us what we expect from documentary, never letting the images of history seem to tell their own story. Allah Tantou makes evident the extent to which Marof Achkar’s life, both as a dancer and a politician, was publicly recorded. Yet even with all of this visual evidence, a public hero’s life can be rewritten, and he will be disgraced or forgotten. How can his son use the images of his father which have survived him? How can he put them together to resurrect his father both for himself and in the public mind and eye? How can Achkar accomplish an intimate biographical documentary of a dead man—a man, moreover, whom he barely knew? Oliver Lovesey has claimed that despite the problems with Jameson’s formulation of all “third-world” literature as national allegory,

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the genre of the prison diary is “one of the defining genres of African literature and one of the best examples of ‘national allegory.’”36 As written by Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Kwame Nkrumah, among others, the African prison diary is a reflexive genre which “brushes against the grain of official histories of the prisoner’s activities; it rewrites official ‘master narratives’ of national history.”37 In Allah Tantou, David Achkar films his father’s prison diary for him, in his absence, telling his father’s untold story against the false confession, Touré’s master narrative, that had been his official biography. He then reflects upon the link between his father’s fate and his nation’s history. Over 8mm footage of Marof Achkar speaking at a government congress, “Marof Achkar”’s voice-over from his prison cell continues: My son. Insults are the weapons that remain at the disposition of the weak when it seems that nothing more is to be gained with a conciliatory attitude. I was so well integrated into his regime that I was not able to sense what was about to happen. I saw things as if a student; I could neither see nor understand what was hiding behind each of their attitudes, each of their words. I will never be so naive again.38

Addressing his son, the “father” recounts, from beyond the grave, the realization of having participated in a government to whose crimes he had been blind. He had been too close, had not been able to take the reflexive distance which would have allowed him to see behind the false image. In 8mm footage from another congress, a banner proclaims that “The Revolution is Exigency,” quoting the title of a poem published by Touré in 1978, which begins “Let us resolutely destroy / Any betrayer of the nation.” The filmmaker then reciprocates his father’s address in another voice-over: Victim of a purge. Every three or four years, politically weak governments that have experienced failures must accuse and condemn some of their members in order to justify themselves. You were among the first. Your voice and your personality, which had become too strong abroad, frightened them. Once the Revolutionary Committee got what it wanted, a signed, recorded, and filed deposition, it could be used at any moment. This was how the regime functioned. No-one was safe from it.39

We hear overlapping and fragmentary meditations on the past, present, and future of Africa: “Illusion, deception, realism, efficiency, these are the stages the young African diplomat goes through . . .,” “It is too early to judge

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democratic evolution in Africa . . .,” “Marxist theory, which is a leftist ideology. . . .”40 Over newsreel footage of Cuba, juxtaposed with footage of African women dancing as well as of Nelson Mandela giving a speech, different voices claim that African countries are too weak and too underdeveloped, that Marxism encourages a cult of personality as evidenced by Stalin, Mao, and Castro, that the colonized still need their ex-colonizers, that colonization was a crime against humanity. These chaotic theories and images present, but do not resolve, the dilemmas facing not just Guinea, but all African countries—democracy versus socialism, Christianity and/or Islam versus indigenous religions, tradition versus modernity. In a very real sense, then, Marof Achkar’s story is a national allegory; his tragedy, and the tragedy of the son who grew up without him, is not only the tragedy of many other Guineans, but of many other Africans. Moreover, an essential aspect of the tragedy is that his murderer was a hero of African independence who then turned on the people of his country. We must examine, however, the way in which David Achkar concludes the story of his father’s odyssey through politics and the reenactment of his experience in prison. “Marof Achkar” physically and mentally deteriorates into blindness and delirium, considering suicide before reaching a state of calm resolve. As he writes in his cell, he says that: I hope that I will learn more, since I hope to find freedom and personal fulfillment through this ordeal. . . . I have never felt as free as I do now. Of course it is difficult to be in prison, but this is only physical subjugation. My mind has never been as free as it is now. Because I know exactly who I am and what I want, where I am going and why. I know precisely my ideal. . . . I hope to be able to begin everything again very soon. I regret having participated in this government.41

This personal resolution stands in contrast to the non-resolution of the collage of images and quotations which allegorized Marof Achkar’s experience. In this segment of voice-over, “Marof Achkar” has come to certain realizations as an individual, and not as a participant in a government or nation. David Achkar’s voice-over then provides most of the last chapter of his father’s story. We learn that in November 1970, after a pact was signed between Touré and Amilcar Cabral, a commando sent by the Portuguese Army (then at war with neighboring Guinea-Bissau) landed in Conakry to liberate their men from Camp Boiro. Marof Achkar was free for a few hours

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but was easily recaptured because of his blindness. In the following years, Touré accused half of his population and nine-tenths of his government of treason; there were hangings in Conakry, “but no news of you.”42 We are shown photographs of other Camp Boiro prisoners, one by one, in silence. In 1971, David Achkar and his mother were sent into exile, and in 1984, after Touré died of a heart attack in Cleveland, Ohio, the camp was opened following a military coup. Not until 1985 did Achkar and his mother receive a death certificate, of which we see a close-up, stating that Marof Achkar had been shot on January 26, 1971. The last words of the film, however, are in “Marof Achkar”’s voice, over 8mm footage of cars traveling along a dirt road: “It was on a morning such as this, on a road like this one, that I was shot, in January 1971.”43 Achkar cuts to white and the image of a handwritten letter signed by Marof Achkar fades in, its last words “Dedicated to my son F. M. David Achkar on his tenth birthday.”44 The dedication from son to father which began the film has reciprocated this one. Through the medium of film, in another joltingly reflexive moment, David Achkar has allowed his father to pronounce an impossible autobiographical statement—“I was shot.” The film ends, as it began, in a first-person voice that has been passed from son to father. Marof Achkar’s political trajectory was one of an individual destroyed in the name of a collective, of a person murdered by a People’s revolution. His son has used a formally reflexive text, which combines first-person autobiography and biography in the second and third person, to resist his father’s erasure from history. Lisa McNee, in a discussion of Wolof autobiography and, more specifically, women’s oral performances of autobiographical poetry [taasu] in Senegal, has rightly pointed out that Jameson’s notion of all “third-world” literature as national allegory does not allow a writer to resist the collective; “Assigning a wholly collective subject position to African autobiographers . . . obviates all discussion of political relations between individuals and collective political institutions.”45 Touré, in his own writings, linked an un-African individualism to an un-socialist realist art: Africa is essentially ‘communocratic.’ Collective life and social solidarity provide its customs with a humanist basis that many peoples could envy. . . . Yet who has not observed the progression of personal egoism in the social circles contaminated by the spirit of the colonizers? Who has not heard the defense of the theory of art for art’s sake, . . . the theory of every man for himself?46

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It is therefore not surprising that David Achkar would choose to address the relationship between his father and Touré’s collective and repressive political institution in a formally reflexive film. And by now it is clear that his film, although it rejects socialist realism, is not formalist for the sake of formalism. Allah Tantou, a documentary which has been carefully edited to bring meaning out of juxtaposition rather than linearity, is a reflexive autobiography, biography, and political statement. In “Marof Achkar”’s voice-over following his discovery of inner peace, he says that he loves his wife and children and that “One wants to be continued after one’s children. Who wants to be forgotten, afterwards?”47 What can save one from being forgotten? Raw documentary evidence is not enough, not if it is denied by a dictator or lies hidden in archives and, in any case, no one life is ever completely recorded. David Achkar has made meaning from a combination of evidence and artifice, from the public documentary images of his father and the only testament left by him, the letters, books, and memoirs written in prison. He has not only “continued” Marof Achkar, saved him from “l’oubli,” but also denounced Touré’s reign of terror in Guinea. Like Achkar in Allah Tantou, Raoul Peck speaks in a first-person voiceover throughout Lumumba: La Mort du prophète. Peck begins with an address to his mother, quoting a poem by Henri Lopes; “In Katanga, they say that a giant fell in the night, . . . it was a giant, Mother, who fell in the night, that night, in Katanga.”48 He then cuts to silent newsreel footage of Patrice Lumumba, the fallen giant, and continues: A prophet foretells the future. But the prophet died, and the future with him. Today his sons and daughter cry without even knowing it, without even knowing him. His message has been lost, his name has remained. Should the prophet be resuscitated? Should he be given the chance to speak one last time?49

The credits to the film which answers these questions follow. Achkar first identified himself in his film as the son of his father and then gave his firstperson voice to his father; Peck will speak both as his mother’s son and as voice for Lumumba. Peck cuts from a photograph of himself and his classmates at school in Haiti in 1960 to 8mm footage of a city we are told is Leopoldville, the capital of the former Belgian Congo, and then back again to more family photographs. As he weaves together these images of people

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and places, Peck tells the beginning of the story of how his life intersected with that of Patrice Lumumba: In 1962, I joined my father in the Congo with the rest of my family. My father was one of a first contingent of Haitian professors, doctors, and engineers recruited for the Congo. Someone had imagined that blacks who spoke French would better make up for the shortage of white-collar workers that the Belgians left behind them. We were housed in one of those neighborhoods of abandoned villas, where most of the new Congolese bourgeoisie had also moved. I was eight years old, and I was learning a new world, a new language. Today the Congo has become Zaire and Leopoldville Kinshasa, and my mother, who has died, is no longer here to see these images.50

Via his voice-over, Peck, like Achkar, seals a form of Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, one which is based on a shared story. Also like Achkar, Peck has made a film dedicated to resurrecting the memory of a great man whose life was linked to his own and of the woman who provided that link. Whereas Achkar had apostrophized and brought to life his dead father, Peck speaks both of and as his mother, resurrecting her together with Lumumba. After introducing the viewer to Lumumba through newsreel footage, Peck says that it was his mother who had first told him about Lumumba: “One day, my mother brought home a photo found in a dusty drawer in her office in the Hôtel de Ville. Patrice Lumumba—I was hearing this name for the first time.”51 He then tells the story of Lumumba and the Congo as told by his mother. Peck begins his often ironic revision of history at the beginning, over a drawing of Belgian King Leopold II: My mother says . . . Once upon a time there was a king who dreamed of a realm eighty times larger than his own. He made such a racket at the Berlin Conference that his colleagues gave him the Congo as a gift, hoping that the cake, too heavy to digest, would choke him. Seventy five years later, his great-grandson Baudouin the 1st had to give this territory back to its proprietors.52

Peck, like Djebar, reminds us of the oral sources of history, introducing a number of the segments of his historical narrative and analysis with “ma mère raconte.” He speaks in the style of a griot, or oral storyteller, to inform us of Belgian colonial strategy, for example, “My mother says . . . The Belgians’ rule of domination was simple. The Negroes should be treated well.

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They must remain fools. But the fools got tired of it and became nationalists.”53 There is a telling contrast here between Peck and Barthes, both of whose deceased mothers play a central role in their autobiographies. Peck displaces his narration, saying “ma mère raconte,” whereas Barthes says in Camera Lucida, in effect, “je raconte ma mère.” So who is narrating here? Peck’s mother tells the story of Lumumba and the Congo, but in Peck’s voice. Peck allows Lumumba to speak (“lui redonne la parole”), yet it is Peck who holds the camera, seeks out the remaining images of Lumumba, and edits them together with images from his own life. Speaking for two dead, if not mute, witnesses, Peck tells his story using first, second, and third-person voice-over narration. He combines photographs from his family history and Lumumba’s public history, 8mm home movies (filmed both by his father and himself), 16mm newsreel footage, and interviews he conducted in 1991 with former Belgian colonial officials, former colleagues of Lumumba, and journalists who were in the Congo in 1960–61. Oral history in the first person alternates and sometimes merges with thirdperson “objective” history, as Peck brings Lumumba to life as a historical figure for the Congo, Africa, and Belgium, as the connection between Peck’s family and the Congo (and ultimately Belgium), and as alter ego for Peck himself. Like L’Amour, la fantasia and Allah Tantou, Lumumba: Death of the Prophet employs multiple narrative voices in order both to personalize the historical and to historicize the personal. Peck’s portrait of Lumumba contributes to his understanding of his family history, which can be read alongside his exploration in film of the difficulties of all historical narration. Having established his family connection to Lumumba, Peck tells the political history of the Congo from the period just prior to independence until Lumumba’s death in 1961. He begins with a ceremony held on the day of Congolese independence from Belgium. We see newsreel footage of the speech given by Baudouin I, the king of Belgium, in which he stated that The independence of the Congo constitutes the culmination of the work conceived by the genius of King Leopold II, undertaken by him with a tenacious courage and continued with perseverance by Belgium. It marks a decisive work in the destiny not just of the Congo . . . but of the whole of Africa.54

Peck then replaces the newsreel sound with his own voice-over as he cuts to a photograph of those on the podium during the ceremony. As we see a

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close-up of Lumumba scribbling on a piece of paper, Peck warns that “On the other side of the podium, someone is putting the finishing touches on a speech that is not on the program. He is going to say what must not be said.”55 He then cuts back to the newsreel footage, and we hear Lumumba’s speech, his response to Baudouin: Fighters for independence, today victorious, I salute you in the name of the Congolese government. To all of you, my friends, who fought resolutely at our sides, I ask you to make today, June 30, 1960, an illustrious date that you will keep forever engraved in your hearts, a date whose significance you will proudly teach to your children, so that they in turn will teach the glorious history of our fight for freedom to their sons and grandsons.56

Addressing not the Belgians but his own people, Lumumba refused to accept Baudouin’s version of history and claimed independence as a victory in the battle for liberty against the Belgian colonists. Peck similarly counters not only the Belgian history of colonization and decolonization, but the story of Lumumba as told by Belgian and other Western journalists as well. Peck, like Lumumba, says what one is not supposed to say; he offers his documentary of Lumumba’s brief political career against the continuation of what Adam Hochschild calls Leopold II’s policy of “officially decreed forgetting.”57 Leopold had his archives in the Congo burned in 1908, before he turned his private colony over to Belgium, removing what evidence he could from future histories and paving the way for Baudouin’s outrageous claim that Congolese independence was the culmination of his grandfather’s work. A 1959 manual for Congolese soldiers studying to be officers in the Force Publique explained, like Baudouin, that “history ‘reveals how the Belgians, by acts of heroism, managed to create this immense territory.’”58 Peck, who knows how easily missing and misleading documents can lead to false histories, reminds us that there is no such thing as objective history by asking the former Belgian officials and journalists he interviews whether the press had been objective in its portrayal of Lumumba. Jacques Brassinne, who in 1960 worked in the Belgian Embassy in Léopoldville, replies that the major reporters could not possibly have been objective, since they were all from the West. Pierre Devos, one of these former journalists, maintains that even had journalists been sympathetic to Lumumba, they could not have written positively about him for their newspapers, all of which supported a continued Belgian presence in Africa.

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As we approach the crucial moment of Lumumba’s independence day speech, Peck cuts to black, saying that “The images have been lost, the voice remains.”59 A recording of Lumumba’s voice accompanies the black screen: We have known the ironies, the insults, the blows that we were subjected to morning, noon, and night, because we were Negroes. Who will forget that to a black man, one said ‘tu,’ certainly not as to a friend, but because the honorable ‘vous’ was reserved only for whites.60

Thirty years later, this radical truth of colonial racism exists only as a documentary fragment, as sound without an accompanying image. Peck, however, does not attempt to mask the fragmentary nature of his evidence. He instead emphasizes this as well as the other gaps which necessarily exist throughout his attempt at historical narration, as had Djebar her imaginings of unrecorded history and Achkar the inauthenticity of his reenactments. Peck’s reflexive strategy reminds the spectator to think critically about how sound and image are conjoined to create filmic narrative, as well as about how all historical narratives are constructed. Like Djebar and Achkar, Peck refuses to let history seem to tell itself; he proclaims that a story is being told and that he is telling it, using the materials available to him. One of the goals of his documentary is to demonstrate, as he says, that “There are images, and those who create them.”61 Peck presents us with a black screen at one other point in Lumumba: Death of the Prophet. This time his voice-over refers not to the Belgian colonizers, but to the dictator they left in their place, Joseph Mobutu, whose secret police have become very interested in his film: Black holes. Images in my head. Forbidden, but inoffensive images. The Marshal of Zaire will perhaps let me film in his country, but his secret service is irritated and restless. Could these black holes be more corrosive than the images they are supposed to hide?62

Peck’s film, built around the dual absence of Lumumba and of Peck’s mother, exists in the shadow of another absence. His film about his past and its relationship to Congolese history contains no contemporary images of the former Congo, renamed Zaire by Mobutu. Manthia Diawara has written that it is the allegorical power of Peck’s voice-over “that makes the viewer believe that Brussels is Kinshasa.”63 This would suggest that Peck is trying to fill in the blanks, the black holes, in his narrative. Yet quite to the contrary, Peck

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reminds us that he was not able to film in Kinshasa, emphasizing via a recurrent disjunction between sound and image the disjunction between any historical reality and its narrative representation. If we believe that Brussels is Kinshasa, we cannot fully understand either Peck’s or Lumumba’s story. Lumumba: La Mort du prophète is reflexive, then, with respect both to the history it tells and the images it uses to tell. Peck interrogates the way in which we read images, beginning with the photograph of Lumumba that his mother brought home from work: The scene intrigues me. What are these people doing together? Some seem bored, others are there by accident, others by force. An unusual Dutch painting—the press conference. A farewell scene, perhaps, without the participants’ knowledge. Only the man in the middle appears to know what he’s doing there. Like Christ, he is surrounded, yet alone. Perhaps they’re not even listening to him anymore. Perhaps they are actors placed there, as extras. A director has said to them, ‘Be objective.’64

The camera circles around the photo, giving us a closer look at the various men at the press conference and focusing on Lumumba when his name is pronounced. Just as “Marof Achkar”’s captors spoke of actors and scenarios, Peck compares the men pictured in this photographic evidence of the past to extras in a film and then cuts to his first interview with the words, “The director said—Action.”65 Peck does not seek uncritical acceptance of his new history of Lumumba, but rather encourages in his viewer the same critical attitude that he takes toward received history. He reminds us that factors beyond his control, an African dictator’s secret service on one side and a European capitalist control of history through high prices on the other, have shaped his film. When newsreel footage complete with sound is available for clips, we learn, “In the archives of British Movietone News in London, these images cost 3,000 dollars a minute. You get used to it. Everything passes. Images remain. A Congolese earns 150 dollars a year. Murdered memory costs dearly.”66 In addition to speaking of the images that are missing from his film, Peck also wonders aloud about the people pictured in the images he is able to show us. For example, in a voice-over which accompanies a colonial-era photograph of black and white workers in the Congo, he says: Looking at these photographs, I wonder what these faces might hide. What

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dream, what secret, what do these men have in common? This one beats his wife. That one too. This one is deeply Christian, but an incorrigible gambler. That one loves music, but prefers to get drunk on palm wine. He dreams of a long boat trip to the land of these white people that he admires. He would like to be a great cook, or at least a soldier. He still doesn’t know how to read but is paying for his eldest son’s studies at the University of Louvain the hard way. And then the others . . . They also have their dreams, their illusions, their destinies. All brought together by accident in this yellowed photograph. Brought together by the ambition of a king.67

Images do not tell their own stories. It is from historians and documentary filmmakers that we usually get the background information for what we see; they tell us why certain people are pictured together and what meaning we should draw from this fact. Peck’s creative whimsy forces us to be aware of the role of imagination and storytelling in any historical narrative. He cuts from this photograph to a shot of a man smoking on the street in 1991 Belgium, but continues speculating; “He is perhaps named Ramon, like a friend of mine. And Marie-Claire still hasn’t arrived.”68 And later in the film, employing this strategy in reverse, Peck slowly zooms in on a photograph of Mobutu with his wife and three children, with the words, “A family. A family like any other. No, you cannot read ambition on faces. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. He will take the hand and everything else. And then one day, he will name himself Marshal.”69 Even when we know the story hidden in the photograph, we cannot see it. Peck asks in Lumumba, “What is there to say about a thirty year old murder story?”70 One of his answers, and one of the important things he has to say about this murder story, is that, like all history, it is a global and not merely a local story. Peck points out the interconnection, via colonial and capitalist networks, of national tragedies, wondering “And if there had not been the Katanga uranium to build the Hiroshima bomb?”71 Multiple images of various means of transportation in the film, including buses, trains, and cars, reinforce this theme. The most important geographical and historical relationship in the film, however, is the one between the Congo and Belgium, its former colonizer. Peck is shooting Lumumba only in Belgium because Mobutu’s secret police were too interested in his film, but he also takes care to emphasize that Lumumba’s story is not just a Congolese one— it is inextricably tied to Belgium and Belgians. Like Djebar, Peck highlights

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the lasting bond between colonizer and colonized created by the violence of colonial history, stressing the reciprocity within this relationship. Home movies of his family visiting Belgium as tourists are accompanied by another reflexive voice-over, describing this trip as a gesture of reverse colonization; “In 1877, the British explorer Stanley left to explore the Congo River. Almost a century later, my family and I explore Europe. . . . We can’t manage to get rid of the feeling of surprising actors backstage.”72 Peck begins his film with images of the Place des Martyrs in Brussels, where he says Lumumba’s ghost wanders; “The prophet roams in this city. He comes back to tickle the feet of the guilty while they sleep. Well done! They are forever linked to his fate.”73 In a later scene at the Brussels airport, Peck films against the current of people walking through the hallways and says: I wanted to find the pieces of the puzzle. I left to look for the traces of the prophet. Why look for him in Brussels and not elsewhere? Why elsewhere? I looked for the soul of the prophet, that which travels without returning, that which can no longer rest. Stuck, lost, he is far from home. Won’t the Marshal of Zaire let him come back either?74

The culmination of his film, the recounting of the brutal murder of Lumumba, begins with a shot of the central square in Brussels, accompanied by a repetition of the assertion that “the prophet roams on the Grande Place. He comes back to tickle the feet of the guilty.”75 Peck then cuts to an elegant official reception in Brussels, as white men and women in formal attire pull uncomfortably back from the camera. He says that “the prophet does not want to be forgotten. He seeks a bit of warmth, and bothers everyone.” 76 Peck is not only giving voice to Lumumba, channeling him, if you will, but also embodying him, as the prophet with a movie camera. It is not only Peck’s mother who has brought them together, but also their kindred status as exiles from the former Congo, both kept away by Mobutu. In striking contrast to the opulent Brussels ballroom setting, then, we hear the gory details of the obliteration of Lumumba’s body: They had to try twice to make the bodies disappear. It seems that two white men were seen in the savannah, both in police uniforms. It seems that they had driven all night. In the public works van, it seems that there was a metal saw, two butcher knives, twenty-five liters of sulfuric acid, gas, a huge empty

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barrel, and some whiskey. . . . The commissioner and his brother worked all night. They dug up the bodies, they sawed, they burned, they got drunk on whiskey. The acid made most of the pieces disappear.77

Lumumba’s ghost has been wandering in Brussels, neither properly buried nor mourned. The well-dressed people at this reception, these guilty Belgians, all turn to look at the camera as “the prophet, polishing his image, drops by to say hello.”78 Peck then reverses chronological direction to tell the story of Lumumba’s death from the beginning, in a scene which approaches, but never becomes, a historical reenactment. As he tells the story, we see drawings of a house and trees: They say that they did not want to pray. They say they died with dignity. They say that only Okito trembled slightly, before walking in front of the firing squad. It was undoubtedly the cold weather. . . . They say that even today, the trees of the savannah are riddled with bullets.79

The camera zooms in to a close-up of a tree trunk in which holes seem to be visible. All of our training in classical film spectatorship tempts us to assume that we see what is being described. Yet since we know that Peck did not go to Zaire while making his documentary and see, moreover, that this is not a photograph but a drawing, we also know that these are not the trees in front of which Lumumba, Okito, and the others were shot. Peck plays with our expectations, never allowing us to have a complete conjunction between on-screen image and storytelling. He keeps us where Brecht wanted us, at a critical distance. Peck reflects not only on Lumumba’s life and political career in his film, but on his own life as well, weaving autobiographical and biographical stories together. After saying that “I gradually decode my memories of the Congo,” he cuts to 8mm home movie footage of himself as a child playing with other children and his parents in front of their house: We were coming to help our colored brothers, they told us. But two hundred years of a different destiny separated us. We were black, but we were white. We were different. We were Mundele. With my friends, I exploited the ambivalences of the time. I was Congolese when it was convenient and Mundele when it got me out of a chore in the group.80

Peck, like the roaming ghost of the prophet Lumumba, has the hybrid iden-

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tity of an exile. He exists not only between countries, between Haiti and the Congo, and therefore Belgium, and then France and Germany where he attended schools, but between skin colors as well. Toward the end of Lumumba, Peck links three generations of his family through a reflexive moment of filmmaking. We watch 8mm footage of a toreador fighting a bull, and after a moment of silence hear Peck’s voice: One day, my father imprudently let me hold his camera. My first images. Today, my daughter, who is watching them with me, asks about my reaction at the time to the bull that was being killed. I didn’t dare tell her that my biggest problem was to keep it in focus.81

Here, and only here, do we see Peck’s work as that of an objective documentary filmmaker, as only the capturing of images, hopefully in focus. Achkar appeared on screen in Allah Tantou only as a small child in old home movies, and it is only in one of the very last scenes of Lumumba: Death of the Prophet that we see Peck as an adult clearly for the first time. Up until this point, we have merely glimpsed the back of his head as he conducts interviews. In a medium shot and head-on, we watch Peck sleep in a bus on a Belgian highway. We could not be farther away from the series of shots which conclude Savage Nights, constructing Collard as coherent subject who sees all. Peck then once again flouts a conventional conjunction of sound and image by matching a voice-over to his sleeping image; “I know, it’s not a pretty one, my story. But it is Patrice’s story . . . They says that the son of Tolenga is dead. But those who say it have never been able to produce his body.”82 Peck for the first time calls Lumumba by his first name in this film which he dedicates in the ending credits “For Zaire.” As Lumumba refused to let the Belgian story of independence stand, as Achkar had not allowed Sékou Touré’s account of his father to stand, Peck has refused to let either the Belgian or Mobutu’s story of Lumumba stand. Soon after finishing Lumumba: Death of the Prophet, Peck announced that he would make a second documentary film about Lumumba, this time without including autobiographical material. He produced instead, eight years later, a fictional feature film that reenacted Lumumba’s last months.83 Moreover, even though Mobutu was no longer in power and Zaire had once again become the Congo, Peck’s second Lumumba was filmed in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. “Patrice’s story” seems to resist not only being filmed on location, but monovocal third-person documentary narration as well.

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In Allah Tantou and Lumumba: Death of the Prophet, then, we see once again that postcolonial interrogations of identity may lead to complex negotiations of the possibilities for self-representation. Laura Marks has used Gilles Deleuze’s film theory to create a category of “intercultural cinema,” composed of films “characterized by experimental styles that attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge, or living as a minority in the the still majority white, Euro-American West.”84 She places Peck’s film in this category, yet Peck’s self-representation is even more complex. He is not simply a black minority in the white West, but has also been a black Haitian immigrant to black Africa. Peck is not only split but multiply fragmented, or, to return to the vocabulary of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, he is not contradictory but dispersed. Attempting to represent this experience, he has created a hybrid documentary form, a reflexive (auto)biography, which incorporates elements of traditional Caribbean and African storytelling as well as of European and American experimental filmmaking. He tells the stories of two men whose life stories were tied to the relationship between the Congo and Belgium, who have been both at home and in exile both in Africa and in Europe. Olney praised those autobiographies, such as Nkrumah’s, in which the individual presents himself as “representative” of African experience.85 Jameson, responding to the criticism of Aijaz Ahmad, once again defined the national allegory as “the coincidence of the personal story and the ‘tale of the tribe’”86 His use of “coincidence” recalls for us Barthes’s desire, expressed in both of his autobiographies, for a match between writing and written selves, between “I” and my Photograph. But just as David and Marof Achkar’s history does not coincide with that of Guinea, there is no simple coincidence between the stories of Peck and the Congo, or Lumumba and the Congo, or even Peck and Lumumba. This interrogation of identity takes place on the battlefield of language as well; Achkar and Peck, like Djebar, chose to produce African (or Afro-Caribbean) autobiographies in French, the language of the former colonizer. I have argued that post-independence Francophone African autobiography, the use of the oppressor’s language for the most intimate self-expression, can be seen as an extreme example of autobiography in the third person. Without discounting the pressures of European funding and international distribution, we may still understand the choice of French as something other than what Ngugi has called “colonial alienation,” defined as a siding

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and identifying with the colonizer.87 We might instead read in Francophone autobiography a postcolonial alienation, a rejection both of colonial myths of Africans and African history and of myths of an uncomplicated and undifferentiated African collectivity. Djebar, Achkar, and Peck have all refused to represent themselves as split between foreign exterior and authentic interior. Using the filmic form, which provides an additional alienation of autobiographical subjectivity due to the literal separation between filming and filmed self, Achkar and Peck have told doubly distanced and multiply fragmented autobiographical histories. Whereas Collard used the possibilities offered by film to re“write” his autobiography into a first-person testament to coherent and united selfhood, they have employed an experimental film style that is based on disjunctive filmic techniques and incorporates first and third-person voices into a version of autobiography which emphasizes the gaps in any attempt at knowledge and narration of history or self. By an attention to form and editing, they achieve an endless oscillation between autobiography, biography, and historical narrative, and their autobiographies represent fragmented subjectivity without sewing the fragments together into a whole. Catherine Russell, who conceives of autobiographical film as a form of experimental ethnography, has analyzed a subsection of postcolonial documentary cinema that she calls filmic “autoethnography.” These films in the form of travel diaries manifest a “dispersal of representation, subjectivity, experience, and cultural history” in which “the film- or videomaker understands his or her personal history to be implicated in larger social formations and historical processes.”88 Allah Tantou and Lumumba: Death of the Prophet would seem to fit the description, yet neither is a travel diary, and, more importantly, neither is an attempt at ethnography, even from the inside. We learn nothing about the daily lives of Guineans or Congolese, although we do learn about one or two of each. In his theorizing about Third Cinema, Gabriel seems to be as ambivalent about the possibility of an individual hero as about questions of style. He has both affirmed and denied the existence of singular protagonists within a single book, and even in the very same sentence; “the individual hero in Third Cinema is a trans-individual or collective subject; he/she is not endowed with individuality.” Yet Djebar’s autobiography as well as Achkar’s and Peck’s autobiographical films exemplify his claim that “where a central character is used, the viewpoint goes beyond

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that of the individual to develop a sense of the relationship between the individual and the community, of the collective, and of history.”89 The shift of focus from the individual to the collective was an essential element of Third Cinema’s reaction against the First and Second Cinemas; it was crucial to create a revolutionary cinema which would recount the history and stories of the People. It is equally important, however, to allow for portrayals of persons and, moreover, to recognize what autobiographies of singular postcolonial subjects have to teach us about the narrative representation of fragmented subjectivity. Homi Bhabha, writing about Fanon, has coined the expression “stereotype-as-suture.”90 Bhabha argues that colonial discourse is dependent on a mirror-stage–like “concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness,” and that therefore he or she who has been stereotyped desires not only originality but the possibility of difference.91 An aspect of this colonial stereotyping is the orientalism that Edward Saïd claimed was “a form of radical realism” in the sense that it claims simply to designate reality.92 Achkar and Peck have chosen to create reflexive documentaries which disrupt such a conception of documentary realism, subverting colonial suture. Like Achebe, Burkinabé filmmaker Gaston Kaboré has replied to those who speak of traditional cultures “as monolithic, as if there were no personal ideals,” that “I show [in Wend kuuni] that the personal exists, though perhaps not expressed in the same way as in other societies.”93 Any genre of autobiography we decide to construct needs to be open to such other ways. The autobiographical films I have been discussing attempt to negotiate the established binary opposition between individual and collective. Achkar and Peck structure their histories around their relationships to individual heroes, whose stories are inextricably linked to the stories of the communities and nations within which they have lived and acted. They blur the boundaries between individual story and collective historical narrative, achieving an imbrication of the personal within the historical without any dissolution or deprecation of the individual. In fact, the individual is glorified and memorialized in connection with his role in a collective struggle. Their autobiographies are both literal and symbolic, both personal and public, made of both documentary images and reenactments. Both films are narrated and edited to present overlapping and multiple autobiographical and historical voices. Randy Pitman, reviewing both Allah Tantou and Lumumba: Death of

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the Prophet, criticized Lumumba for being influenced by the French New Wave and for the fact that “Patrice Lumumba the man . . . is as much of a cipher at the film’s close as he is at the beginning.”94 Like Djebar and Achkar, Peck has rejected positivist history to be a “nouvelle vague historian.” He reminds us that, although “Lumumba” becomes “Patrice,” he will always be a cipher, since so many details have been lost, since only a few iconic images remain, since no historical narrative could tell his whole story, since no film could bring him back to life. Both Allah Tantou and Lumumba: Death of the Prophet mix autobiography and biography and articulate the personal or private into history. Not only do they show the personal to be political, but the political personal as well. Achkar and Peck have perhaps produced national allegories, but with a crucial difference. They intertwine private story and history, the personal and the historical, and place their families at the center of national and international, colonial and postcolonial, history. Lovesey notes that even in his prison diary as national allegory, Ngugi exults: ‘I am part of a living history of struggle.’ Therefore, his writing about detention represents the culmination of his own allegory of postcolonial history. In the ‘web of relations’ between the act of his detention and his revolutionary aesthetics and practice, Ngugi writes himself into history.95

Peck said to me after a screening of his film that its autobiographical elements were designed to draw the viewer into the history personally. 96 Though this may be part of the case, it seems that Peck, like Ngugi, is also drawn into history, as well as history into him, in and through the film. Allah Tantou and Lumumba: Death of the Prophet place an emphasis on the individual which cannot and should not be allegorized away. Individual here in no way implies the stereotypical Enlightenment model of the unitary, coherent subject; the complex narrative construction of these films precludes any such risk. If it is possible to use a narrative rack focus, as it were, to delineate both the individual and the collective, then the politicized choice between individual and collective subject of either autobiographical or fictional, written or filmic narrative, may be a false one.

Conclusion

The six authors and filmmakers whose work I have engaged have addressed the dilemma of autobiographical otherness within fragmented autobiographies. All have experimented with narrative voice in the attempt to tell their personal histories in unconventional forms. Roland Barthes and Nathalie Sarraute used first, second, and third-person voices in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Childhood, voices which questioned not only their own memories and analyses of past events, but the possibility of autobiographical narrative itself. Barthes split his narrative between first-person exposition and third-person commentary whereas Sarraute split her first person in two, but both looked toward inner selves, ultimately recounting their identities and lives as if in the third person. In Camera Lucida, Barthes rejected commentary in his search for the perfect autobiography, strategically using an idea of Photography in order to create a possibility for the representation of unique and coherent selfhood. He discovered “the impossible science of the unique being” in his mother’s image, and in the process found a means of at156

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taining his own irreducible identity. And in his film Savage Nights, similarly a second attempt at autobiography, Cyril Collard gained a unity of self from the HIV virus that had infected him, erasing the otherness and others which troubled his written text of dispersed identity. I have discussed third-person narration as both a literal and a metaphoric phenomenon, as the use of “he” or “she” instead of “I,” and as a strategy of narrative distancing and reflexivity. Although most autobiography has been and still is narrated in the first person, the third-person voice is not new to autobiography. Robert Folkenflik has pointed to a Western tradition of third-person autobiography which includes works by Giambattista Vico and Henry Adams.1 Adams, for example, narrated his entire life in an omniscient third-person voice, as if his own biographer. Lejeune states that in such texts “the author speaks of himself as if it were another who was speaking, or as if he was speaking of another,” and Shirley Neuman, along similar lines, has explained the phenomenon of self-commentary as a “metaphoric third person” of autobiography.”2 Like Barthes, Sarraute, and Collard, these theorists have understood the third-person voice of autobiography as one that would refer back to the self, whether coherent or split, of the autobiographer. Jessica Benjamin, however, in a discussion of gender and intersubjectivity, has stressed the importance of “concrete” others precisely to ward against such a referring back, since, “in the absence of intersubjectivity, the subject of reflection can only reflect upon itself.”3 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Childhood, Savage Nights, and even Camera Lucida prove Benjamin’s point; the lack of concrete or external otherness within these autobiographies ultimately results in the reunification of the split subjectivities with which they begin. Assia Djebar, David Achkar, and Raoul Peck are in many ways the heroes of my story of autobiography. Starting from the same problem faced by Barthes, Sarraute, and Collard, that of the representation of fragmented subjectivity, they solved it by not resolving it. At the moment of crisis that is autobiography, confronted with their own lack of unity, they refused to locate an interior sublime object to serve as guarantor of uniqueness and coherence. They found autobiographical anchors, in the plural and not the singular, and outside rather than inside themselves. Djebar, like Barthes, chose to narrate herself in the first and third persons in her autobiography, but did so while creating a dialogue with other first and third-person voices.

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This polyphony stands in stark contrast to both Barthes’s and Sarraute’s metaphoric dialogues, in which they talk among themselves. Achkar and Peck, using the resources of the filmic medium to their fullest extent, like Djebar allowed other voices and stories of others to coexist with their own stories. What is more, they opened their life stories to the reader, giving us the tools to participate in the interpretation of both stories and storytelling, instead of using the third person to shut us out. I do not mean to essentialize Africanness as collectivity nor capacity for dialogue, not the least because the Francophone autobiographers I have written about have all been raised in elite families and educated in French and in Europe. In their particular historical and political context, they have chosen to craft autobiography in a certain way. All three have literalized an autobiographical third person, going, again in Benjamin’s words, “beyond a conception of a self-enclosed self, to recuperate difference and respect for otherness along with agency.”4 They have used reflexive strategies not to create the illusion of a veiled and coherent self, but to resist the closure of suture. Although the primary works on which I have based my analysis were written and filmed in French, the lessons I have drawn from them are relevant to contemporary autobiographical work from around the globe and in many languages, in prose and images, and from the so-called first and third worlds. The space of the contact zone, within which Djebar, Achkar, and Peck have all come to autobiography, “emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other.”5 Joseph and Rebecca Hogan reasonably conclude that a subject formed in such a space of foreignness, displacement, and diaspora must consciously confront different cultural models of identity, and Françoise Lionnet reminds us that such confrontations are “mediated by a single and immensely powerful symbolic system: the colonial language, and the variations to which it is subjected by writers who enrich, transform, and creolize it.”6 Not only has the formerly colonized autobiographer been deprived of the illusion of autonomous and omnipotent selfhood and coherent identity, but his or her autobiographical text must also navigate among languages as well as narrative models. Reflexive strategies of distanciation which “disidentify” allow autobiographers to avoid the traps of reconstructive nostalgia and (re)unified subjectivity, while nonetheless narrating fragmented but singular autobiographical selves.7

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It is important to note, moreover, that the biographical neither necessarily dilutes nor destroys the autobiographical. Although Richard Butler claimed almost forty years ago that “if [a] book is not self-centred it falls into the class of what I will describe as allobiography and not real autobiography,” Djebar, Achkar, and Peck show us that stories of self and other(s) are necessarily interwoven.8 Their work is both autobiography and biography, yet no less autobiographical for it. Speaking about his film Life on Earth, Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako has said that “when you do this job, you have a deep desire to say things and I think that the best way to do so is to talk about oneself or around oneself. It’s the best way to approach the Other.”9 Conversely, speaking about the Other may be the best way to approach oneself. Critics have been stymied in their approaches to innovative autobiographical work from outside of Europe and North America by a reliance on conventional ideas about autobiography, all based on a European norm. Mineke Schipper notes the critical consensus that autobiography is a uniquely Western phenomenon and goes on to investigate first-person narrative in African literature, beginning with indigenous oral traditions. From the outset, however, she defines autobiography as narrative only in a strictly first-person singular, which she opposes to a third-person voice associated with radio and television news. Within these limits, Schipper is unable to locate a genre of autobiography in Africa; she concludes instead with an examination of literary texts with fictional first persons, diary novels and epistolary novels.10 Hamid Naficy has discussed the autobiographical “motif ” of a group of postcolonial films of deterritorialization that he calls “accented cinema,” claiming that in these films “every story is both a private story of an individual and a social and public story of exile and diaspora.”11 Yet by limiting himself to Lejeune’s definition of autobiography requiring identity of author, narrator, and protagonist, which he invokes not once but three times, Naficy limits the participation of accented films in the genre.12 I do not wish to argue for the entrance of new texts into a closed category of autobiography as only stories of “I”s, but instead for a widening of the possibilities for the genre as well as, perhaps, consequently and over time, of the ways in which we conceive of individual subjectivity. In order to escape the critical impasse that has resulted from a restrictive model of autobiography, we must instead choose to conceptualize a genre that has flexible and

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porous borders, one that includes rather than excludes works such as the ones I have discussed. Declarations of the impossibility of autobiographical film have ignored the global proliferation of autobiographical films and videos. Declarations of the impossibility of African autobiography have denied African writers and filmmakers the individual expression previously denied them by colonial powers. Impossible to theorize according to our existing generic frameworks for understanding autobiographical as well as African narratives, Love, an Algerian Cavalcade, Allah Tantou, and Lumumba: Death of the Prophet show us our shortcomings and dare us to account for them.

Notes

introduction 1. Philippe Lejeune, “Nouveau Roman et retour à l’autobiographie,” L’auteur et le manuscrit, ed. Michel Contat (Paris: PUF, 1991) 58. Unless an English translation is cited, all translations from the French are mine. 2. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace and World Inc., 1956) 78. 3. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) 307. 4. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” Modern Language Notes 94:5 (December 1979): 920. 5. Robert Elbaz, The Changing Nature of the Self (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987) 6. 6. George Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) 37. Translation of Gusdorf, “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie,” Formen der Selbstdarstellung (Berlin: Duncker Humblot, 1956). 7. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 14. 8. Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 1. 9. Lejeune, Pacte 25. 10. Louis Renza, “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography,” New Literary History 9.1 (Autumn 1977): 4. 11. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Je n’ai jamais parlé d’autre chose que de moi,” L’Auteur et le manuscrit, ed. Michel Contat (Paris: PUF, 1991) 45. 12. Gusdorf 29. 13. James Olney, Tell Me Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). 14. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronnell, Glyph 7 (1980): 212. I have slightly modified Ronnell’s translation.

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15. Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 14. 16. Thomas Beebee, The Ideology of Genre (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) 9. 17. Examples include, but are by no means limited to: Domna Stanton, The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Women, Autobiography, Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Paul Robinson, Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999); Raylene Ramsay, The French New Autobiographies (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996); Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (London: Oxford University Press, 1993); William Andrews, ed., African-American Autobiography (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1993); Roland Williams, African-American Autobiography and the Quest for Freedom (Westport: Greenwood, 2000). 18. Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Genres of Postcolonialism,” Social Text 78, 22.1 (Spring 2004): 1–15. 19. Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 9. 20. Ato Quayson, Calibrations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) xvi. 21. Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Rouledge, 1992) 4. 22. Cited in Robert Stam, “Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, Polycentrism: Theories of Third Cinema,” Otherness and the Media, ed. Hamid Naficy and Teshome H. Gabriel (Langhorne: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993) 245. 23. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003) 4. 24. There has been much debate about the use of the term “Francophone” with respect to France’s former colonies. France puts the concept of Francophonie to good neocolonialist use, and I do not mean to suggest that both Barthes and Achkar, for example, belong to an happy intellectual family rooted in the reason of Descartes, itself rooted in the French language. Their common use of French, however, allows us to examine their very different relationship to the task of personal narrative in a particular language. 25. Cf. Ramsay for the category of “French new autobiographies.” 26. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) 56. “Ne sais-je pas que, dans le champ du sujet, il n’y pas de référent?” Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 60. 27. Octave Manonni, Clefs pour l’Imaginaire ou l’Autre scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969)

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11. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 19. 28. Homi Bhabha, “The Third Space,” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990) 211.

chapter 1 1. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) 94. All further references will be within the text, with the French original of substantial citations in the endnotes. “Que veut dire une suite pure d’interruptions?” Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 98. 2. Antoine Compagnon, “Lequel est le vrai?” Magazine littéraire 314 (1993): 26–28. 3. Jacques Derrida, “Les morts de Roland Barthes,” Poétique 47 (1981): 282. 4. Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 78, 91. 5. Tzvetan Todorov, “Le dernier Barthes,” Poétique 47 (1981): 325–26. 6. Susan Sontag, “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,” A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) xvii, xxxii. 7. “Barthes, post–Roland Barthes [sic], is no longer a suitable straw man for critics of structuralism.” Steven Ungar, Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) 64. 8. J. Gerald Kennedy, “Roland Barthes, Autobiography, and the End of Writing,” Georgia Review 35.2 (1981): 381. 9. For one of many examples of this, see Murray Pratt, “From ‘Incident’ to ‘Texte’: Homosexuality and Autobiography in Barthes’ Late Writing,” French Forum 22.2 (1997): 222. 10. See the very title of Louis Bolle, “Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, ou l’Autonymie,” Les Lettres romanes 39.1–2 (1985). See also Seàn Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) 57; and Ungar 65. 11. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 71. 12. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 143–47. 13. Barthes, “Death of the Author” 148. “Un texte est fait d’écritures multiples . . . mais il y a un lieu où cette multiplicité se rassemble, et ce lieu, ce n’est pas l’auteur, comme on l’a dit jusqu’à présent, c’est le lecteur. . . . [L]’unité d’un texte n’est pas dans son origine, mais dans sa destination.” Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984) 69. 14. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) 5.

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15. Roland Barthes, “On ‘S/Z’ and ‘Empire of Signs,’” The Grain of the Voice: Interviews, 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985) 80. “On pourra reprendre l’auteur, comme être de papier.” Barthes, “Sur ‘S/Z’ et ‘L’empire des signes,’” Le grain de la voix (Paris: Seuil, 1981) 80. 16. Barthes, “Death of the Author” 142. “Ce neutre, ce composite, cet oblique où fuit notre sujet, le noir-et-blanc où vient se perdre toute identité, à commencer par celle-là même du corps qui écrit.” Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur” 63. 17. Barthes, “Death of the Author” 145. “Ecrire ne peut plus désigner une opération d’enregistrement, de constatation, de représentation, de ‘peinture’ . . . mais bien ce que les linguistes . . . appellent un performatif.” Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur” 66. 18. Barthes, “Death of the Author” 143. “Ecrire, c’est, à travers une impersonnalité préalable . . . atteindre ce point où seul le langage agit, ‘performe,’ et non ‘moi.’” Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur” 64. 19. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) 8. 20. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 27. “Je désire l’auteur: j’ai besoin de sa figure . . . comme il a besoin de la mienne.” Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973) 45–46. 21. Roland Barthes, “Pleasure/Writing/Reading,” Grain of the Voice 166. 22. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text 7. “La faille, la coupure, la déflation, le fading qui saisit le sujet au coeur de la jouissance.” Barthes, Plaisir du texte 15. Miller has translated Barthes’s “fading” as dissolve; it is interesting, however, to note that Jacques Lacan used the same cinematic language to speak of the “fading” of the subject in “Position de l’inconscient,” Ecrits II (Paris: Seuil, 1971) 200. 23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) 268–69 [fragment 485], 337 [fragment 632], 270 [fragment 490]. 24. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text 62. “Cette fiction n’est plus l’illusion d’une unité; elle est au contraire le théâtre de société où nous faisons comparaître notre pluriel: notre plaisir est individuel—mais non personnel.” Barthes, Plaisir du texte 98. 25. “N’est qu’un effet de langage.” RB par RB 82. 26. Roland Barthes, “Interview: A Conversation with Roland Barthes,” Grain of the Voice 130. I have slightly modified Coverdale’s translation. “Ce qui vraiment me séduirait, ce serait d’écrire dans ce que j’ai appelé ‘le romanesque sans le roman’ . . . le romanesque sans les personnages: une écriture de la vie, qui d’ailleurs pourrait retrouver peut-être un certain moment de ma propre vie.” “Entretien (A Conversation with Roland Barthes),” Grain de la voix 123–24. 27. Roland Barthes, “The Adjective Is the ‘Statement’ of Desire,” Grain of the Voice 176. I have modified Coverdale’s translation. “Ce dont j’ai envie, c’est d’essayer des formes romanesques, dont aucune ne prendrait le nom de ‘roman,’ mais dont chacune garderait, si possible en le renouvelant, celui d’essai’.” Barthes, “L’adjectif est le ‘dire’ du désir,” Grain de la voix 169. Réda Bensmaïa has written about four of

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Barthes’s works, including Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida, as examples of a genre of essayistic writing. See The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 28. “Peint exactement d’après nature et dans toute sa vérité.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions: tome 1 (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1968) 39. 29. See Jacques Lacan, “Le séminaire sur ‘La lettre volée,’” Ecrits I (Paris: Seuil, 1966) 53. 30. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 920–21. 31. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola 9. 32. I have corrected an error in Howard’s translation. “Une anamnèse factice: celle que je prête à l’auteur que j’aime.” RB par RB 114. 33. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman.” 34. Bolle 16. 35. “La personne divisée?: Pour la métaphysique classique, il n’y avait aucun inconvénient à ‘diviser’ la personne (Racine: ‘J’ai deux hommes en moi’); bien au contraire, pourvue de deux termes opposés, la personne marchait comme un bon paradigme (haut/bas, chair/esprit, ciel/terre); les parties en lutte se réconciliaient dans la fondation d’un sens: le sens de l’Homme. C’est pourquoi, lorsque nous parlons aujourd’hui d’un sujet divisé, ce n’est nullement pour reconnaître ses contradictions simples, ses doubles postulations, etc; c’est une diffraction qui est visée, un éparpillement dans le jeté duquel il ne reste plus ni noyau principal ni structure de sens: je ne suis pas contradictoire, je suis dispersé.” RB par RB 146. 36. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Loin d’approfondir, je reste à la surface, parce qu’il s’agit cette fois-ci de ‘moi’ (du Moi) et que la profondeur appartient aux autres.” RB par RB 145. 37. Roland Barthes, “The Play of the Kaleidoscope,” Grain of the Voice 204. I have modified Coverdale’s translation. “A cette idée d’un sujet unitaire, je préfère le jeu du kaléidoscope: on donne une secousse, et les verreries se mettent dans un autre ordre.” Barthes, “Le jeu du kaléidoscope,” Grain de la voix 193. 38. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Dès que je produis, dès que j’écris, c’est le texte lui-même qui me dépossède (heureusement) de ma durée narrative.” RB par RB 6. 39. I have added several phrases omitted in Howard’s translation. “Écrire par fragments: les fragments sont alors des pierres sur le pourtour du cercle: je m’étale en rond: tout mon petit univers en miettes; au centre, quoi? Son premier texte ou à peu près (1942) est fait de fragments; ce choix est alors justifié à la manière gidienne ‘parce que l’incohérence est préférable à l’ordre qui déforme.’ Depuis, en fait, il n’a cessé de pratiquer l’écriture courte: tableautins des Mythologies et de l’Empire des signes, articles et préface des Essais critiques, lexies de S/Z, paragraphes titrés du Michelet, fragments du Sade II et du Plaisir du texte.” RB par RB 97. 40. “Dans tout ceci il y a des risques de récession: le sujet parle de lui (risque de

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psychologisme, risque d’infatuation), il énonce par fragments (risque d’aphorisme, risque d’arrogance).” RB par RB 155. 41. Nietzsche 270 [fragment 489]. 42. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola 8. 43. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Mon corps n’est pas le même que le vôtre. Ainsi, dans cette écume anarchique des goûts et des dégoûts, sorte de hachurage distrait, se dessine peu à peu la figure d’une énigme corporelle, appelant complicité ou irritation.” RB par RB 121. 44. Georges Perec, Je me souviens: les choses communes I (Paris: Hachette, 1978). 45. This is the only use of the second-person singular pronoun in the text, but it foreshadows the address of Fragments d’un discours amoureux, published two years after Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. I have modified Howard’s translation wherever he has translated “imaginaire” as “image-repertoire.” “Mais je n’ai jamais ressemblé à cela! Comment le savez-vous? Qu’est-ce que ce ‘vous’ auquel vous ressembleriez ou ne ressembleriez pas? Où le prendre? . . . Vous êtes le seul à ne pouvoir jamais vous voir qu’en image, vous ne voyez jamais vos yeux, sinon abêtis par le regard qu’ils posent sur le miroir ou sur l’objectif (il m’intéresserait seulement de voir mes yeux quand ils te regardent): même et surtout pour votre corps, vous êtes condamnés à l’imaginaire.” RB par RB 40. 46. Ross Chambers, “Pointless Stories, Storyless Points: Roland Barthes Between ‘Soirées de Paris’ and ‘Incidents,’” L’Esprit Créateur 34.2 (1994): 12, 14. See also Françoise Gaillard, “Roland Barthes: le biographique sans la biographie,” Revue de sciences humaines 224 (1991): 100. 47. “Piège de l’infatuation: donner à croire qu’il accepte de considérer ce qu’il a écrit comme une ‘oeuvre,’ passer d’une contingence d’écrits à la transcendance d’un produit unitaire, sacré. Le mot ‘oeuvre’ est déjà imaginaire.” RB par RB 139. 48. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971) 218. “La personne qui énonce la présente instance de discours contenant je.” Benveniste, Problèmes de la linguistique générale 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) 252. 49. Benveniste 224. “Est ‘ego qui dit ‘ego.’” Benveniste, Problèmes I 259–60. 50. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977) 4. I have slightly modified Sheridan’s translation. “qui . . . machine les fantasmes qui se succèdent d’une image morcelée du corps à une forme que nous appellerons orthopédique de sa totalité,—et à l’armure enfin assumée d’une identité aliénante, qui va marquer de sa structure rigide tout son développement mental.” Lacan, “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je,” Ecrits I 93–94. 51. Lacan, “Mirror Stage” 6. 52. “L’effort vital de ce livre est de mettre en scène un imaginaire.” RB par RB 109. 53. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Pas de plus pur imaginaire que la

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critique (de soi). La substance de ce livre, finalement, est donc totalement romanesque.” RB par RB 124. 54. “En m’écrivant, je ne fais que répéter l’opération extrême par laquelle Balzac, dans Sarrasine, a fait ‘coïncider’ la castration et la castrature: je suis moi-même mon propre symbole, je suis l’histoire qui m’arrive: en roue libre dans le langage, je n’ai rien à quoi me comparer, et dans ce mouvement, le pronom de l’imaginaire, ‘je,’ se trouve im-pertinent; le symbolique devient à la lettre immédiat: danger essentiel pour la vie du sujet: écrire sur soi peut paraître une idée prétentieuse; mais c’est aussi une idée simple: simple comme une idée de suicide.” RB par RB 60–62. 55. “Ces quelques anamnèses sont plus ou moins mates (insignifiantes: exemptées de sens). Mieux on parvient à les rendre mates, et mieux elles échappent à l’imaginaire.” RB par RB 114. 56. Lacan, “Mirror Stage” 2. “L’instance du moi, dès avant sa détermination sociale, dans une ligne de fiction.” Lacan, “Le stade du miroir” 91. 57. “Ne sais-je pas que, dans le champ du sujet, il n’y pas de référent ?” RB par RB 60. 58. J. Gratton, “Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes: Autobiography and the Notion of Expression,” Romance Studies 8 (1986): 57–58. 59. “Lorsque je m’écoute ayant joué—passé un premier moment de lucidité où je perçois une à une les fautes que j’ai faites—, il se produit une sorte de coïncidence rare: le passé de mon jeu coïncide avec le présent de mon écoute, et dans cette coïncidence s’abolit le commentaire: il ne reste plus que la musique . . . Lorsque je feins d’écrire sur ce que j’ai autrefois écrit, il se produit de la même façon un mouvement d’abolition, non de vérité . . . je renonce à la poursuite épuisante d’un ancien morceau de moi-même, je ne cherche pas à me restaurer (comme on dit d’un monument). Je ne dis pas: ‘Je vais me décrire,’ mais ‘J’écris un texte, et je l’appelle R.B.’ Je me passe de l’imitation (de la description) et je me confie à la nomination.” RB par RB 60. 60. “Un rapport qui s’adjective est du côté de l’image, du côté de la domination, de la mort.” RB par RB 47. 61. “Lorsque je resiste à l’analogie, c’est en fait à l’imaginaire que je résiste: à savoir: la coalescence du signe, la similitude du signifiant et du signifié, l’homéomorphisme des images, le Miroir, le leurre captivant.” RB par RB 49. 62. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 56. 63. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998) 53–54. 64. Brecht 138. Brecht also advocated the strategies of transposition into the past tense and speaking stage directions aloud. 65. Brecht 93. 66. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990) 6. 67. Roland Barthes, “De l’oeuvre au texte,” Bruissement 79. My emphasis. 68. “Parler de soi en disant ‘il,’ peut vouloir dire: je parle de moi comme d’un peu mort, pris dans une légère brume d’emphase paranoïaque, ou encore: je parle de moi

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à la façon de l’acteur brechtien qui doit distancer son personnage: le ‘montrer,’ non l’incarner, et donner à son débit comme une chiquenaude dont l’effet est de décoller le pronom de son nom, l’image de son support, l’imaginaire de son miroir.” RB par RB 171. 69. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Enfermé à jamais dans la lice pronominale: ‘je’ mobilise l’imaginaire, ‘vous’ et ‘il,’ la paranoïa.” RB par RB 170. 70. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Si l’imaginaire constituait un morceau bien tranché, dont la gêne serait toujours sûre, il suffirait d’annoncer à chaque fois ce morceau par quelque opérateur métalinguistique, pour se dédouaner de l’avoir écrit. C’est ce qu’on a pu faire ici pour quelques fragments (guillements, parenthèses, dictée, scène, redan, etc.): le sujet, dédoublé (ou s’imaginant tel), parvient parfois à signer son imaginaire. Mais ce n’est pas là une pratique sûre; d’abord parce qu’il y a un imaginaire de la lucidité et qu’en clivant ce que je dis, je ne fais malgré tout que reporter l’image plus loin, produire une grimace seconde.” RB par RB 109–10. 71. I have modified Howard’s translation. “J’écris: ceci est le premier degré du langage. Puis, j’écris que j’écris: c’en est le second degré . . . Nous faisons aujourd’hui une énorme consommation de ce second degré . . . Le second degré est aussi une façon de vivre . . . Nous pouvons même devenir des maniaques du second degré: rejeter la dénotation, la spontanéité, le babil, la platitude, la répétition innocente, ne tolérer que des langages qui témoignent, même légèrement, d’un pouvoir de déboîtement: la parodie, l’amphibologie, la citation subreptice. Dès qu’il se pense, le langage devient corrosif. A une condition cependant . . . si j’ôte le cran d’arrêt (de la raison, de la science, de la morale), si je mets l’énonciation en roue libre, j’ouvre alors la voie d’une déprise sans fin, j’abolis la bonne conscience du langage.” RB par RB 70–71. 72. Roland Barthes, “Barthes puissance trois,” Quinzaine littéraire 205 (1975): 3–5. 73. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text 13. “Ne peut m’arracher que ce jugement, nullement adjectif: c’est ça! Et plus encore: c’est cela pour moi! Ce ‘pour-moi’ n’est ni subjectif, ni existentiel, mais nietzschéen (‘ . . . au fond, c’est toujours la même question: Qu’est-ce que c’est pour moi? . . . ’).” Barthes, Plaisir du texte 24. 74. Nietzsche 301 [fragment 556]. Barthes cites this fragment in “Le discours de l’histoire,” Bruissement 174. 75. Benveniste 198. “La forme verbale qui a pour fonction d’exprimer la non-personne.” Benveniste, Problèmes I 228. 76. Benveniste 229. “Un objet placé hors de l’allocution.” Benveniste, Problèmes I 265. 77. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967) 40. I have modified Lavers’s and Smith’s translation. “Le passé simple et la troisième personne du Roman ne sont rien d’autre que ce geste fatal par lequel l’écrivain montre du doigt le masque qu’il porte. Toute la littérature peut dire ‘Larvatus prodeo,’ je m’avance en désignant mon masque du doigt.” Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1972 [1953]) 32.

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78. “Les comédiens, appelés sur la scène, pour ne pas laisser voir la rougeur sur leur front, mettent un masque. Comme eux, au moment de monter sur ce théâtre du monde où, jusqu’ici, je n’ai été que spectateur, je m’avance masqué.” René Descartes, “Préambules,” Oeuvres philosophiques: tome 1 (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1963) 45. My translation. Also cited in Jean-Luc Nancy, “Larvatus Pro Deo,” Glyph 2 (1977): 15. 79. Roland Barthes, “Literature and Metalanguage” [1959], in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972) 98. “Matière fatale du roman et labyrinthe des redans dans lesquels se fourvoie celui qui parle de lui-même, . . . est pris en charge par plusieurs masques (personae), échelonnés selon la profondeur de la scène (et cependant personne derrière).” RB par RB 123. 80. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978) 42–43. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Sachez que je suis en train de vous cacher quelque chose, tel est le paradoxe actif que je dois résoudre: il faut en même temps que ça se sache et que ça ne se sache pas: que l’on sache que je ne veux pas le montrer: voilà le message que j’adresse à l’autre. Larvatus prodeo: je m’avance en montrant mon masque du doigt: je mets un masque sur ma passion, mais d’un doigt discret (et retors) je désigne ce masque.” Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977) 52–53. 81. Jameson, Brecht and Method 54. 82. Gratton 63. 83. Since the question of Barthes’s representation of his homosexuality is not my main focus, I have limited myself to these brief remarks. There is, however, much more to be said. See Chambers, Pratt, and Andreas Bjornerud, “Outing Barthes: Barthes and the Quest(ion) of (a Gay) Identity Politics,” New Formations 18 (1992): 122–41. 84. de Man 927, 926. 85. de Man 925, 930, 928. 86. “Il supporte mal toute image de lui-même, souffre d’être nommé.” RB par RB 47. 87. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977) 81. “Le privilège du sujet paraît s’établir ici de cette relation réflexive bipolaire, qui fait que, dès lors que je perçois, mes représentations m’appartiennent.” Lacan, Le Séminaire: livre XI (Paris: Seuil, 1973) 76. 88. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 80, 83. 89. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 112. I have modified Sheridan’s translation. “A vouloir tromper un homme, ce qu’on lui présente c’est la peinture d’un voile, c’est-à-dire de quelque chose au-delà de quoi il demande à voir.” Lacan, Séminaire XI 102. 90. Claude Abastado, “‘Roland Barthes’ de Roland Barthes: le vertige de l’écriture de soi,” Cahiers de sémiotique textuelle 4 (1985): 168. 91. “J’ai l’illusion de croire qu’en brisant mon discours, je cesse de discourir

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imaginairement sur moi-même, j’atténue le risque de transcendance; mais comme le fragment (le haiku, la maxime, la pensée, le bout du journal) est finalement un genre rhétorique et que la rhétorique est cette couche-là du langage qui s’offre le mieux à l’interprétation, en croyant me disperser, je ne fais que regagner sagement le lit de l’imaginaire.” RB par RB 99. 92. Michel Beaujour, “Théorie et pratique de l’autoportrait contemporain: Edgar Morin et Roland Barthes,” Individualisme et autobiographie en Occident, ed. Claudette Delhez-Sarlet (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1983) 283. 93. Roland Barthes, “Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes,” Grain of the Voice 215. I have modified Coverdale’s translation. “J’ai voulu tisser une espèce de moire de tous ces pronoms pour écrire un livre qui est effectivement le livre de l’imaginaire, mais d’un imaginaire qui essaie de se défaire.” Barthes, “Vingt mots-clé pour Roland Barthes,” Grain de la voix 203. 94. “Ils me narguaient: perdu! seul! regardé! exclu! (être exclu, ce n’est pas être dehors, c’est être seul dans le trou, enfermé à ciel ouvert: forclos).” RB par RB 125. 95. I have modified Howard’s translation. “La Doxa parle, je l’entends, mais je ne suis pas dans son espace. Homme du paradoxe, comme tout écrivain, je suis derrière la porte; je voudrais bien la passer, je voudrais bien voir ce qui est dit, participer moi aussi à la scène communautaire; je suis sans cesse à l’écoute de ce dont je suis exclu; je suis en état de sidération, frappé, coupé de la popularité du langage.” RB par RB 126–27. 96. “Il se sentait plus qu’exclu: détaché: toujours renvoyé à la place du témoin, dont le discours ne peut être, on le sait, que soumis à des codes de détachement: ou narratif, ou explicatif, ou contestataire, ou ironique: jamais lyrique, jamais homogène au pathos en dehors duquel il doit chercher sa place.” RB par RB 89. 97. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 27. 98. “Ayant accepté d’écrire sur ‘lui,’ il ne pouvait énoncer que ce qui lui appartient en propre: non pas le Symbolique, la Jouissance, mais le Miroir: les modes, variés, échelonnés, reportés, toujours décevants, sous lesquels il s’imagine.” Barthes, “Barthes puissance trois” 5. 99. Jane Gallop, “Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’: Where to Begin,” SubStance 37/38 (1983): 120–21. 100. Jonathan Loesberg, “Autobiography as Genre, Act of Consciousness, Text,” Prose Studies 4.2 (1981): 182. 101. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989) 173, 175. 102. I have modified Howard’s translation. “S’il s’agit de déjouer le sujet, jouer est une méthode illusoire, et même d’un effet contraire à ce qu’elle recherche: le sujet d’un jeu est plus consistant que jamais; le vrai jeu n’est pas de masquer le sujet, mais de masquer le jeu lui-même.” RB par RB 145. 103. Claude Coste, “Le secret de l’oeuvre,” Magazine littéraire 314 (1993): 31.

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104. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text 21. “La critique porte toujours sur des textes de plaisir, jamais sur des textes de jouissance.” Barthes, Plaisir du texte 37. 105. Barthes, S/Z 4–5. 106. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text 14. “Il jouit de la consistance de son moi (c’est son plaisir) et recherche sa perte (c’est sa jouissance).” Barthes, Plaisir du texte 26. 107. “Ce livre n’est pas le livre de ses idées; il est le livre du Moi, le livre de mes résistances à mes propres idées; c’est un livre récessif (qui recule, mais aussi, peut-être, qui prend du recul).” RB par RB 123. 108. “Prisonnier d’une collection (‘X par lui-même’) qui lui proposait de ‘se dire,’ Barthes n’a pu dire qu’une chose: qu’il est le seul à ne pouvoir parler vraiment de lui. . . . Comme sujet imaginaire et idéologique, la méconnaissance (non l’erreur, mais le report infini de la vérité à travers le langage) est son lot fatal.” Barthes, “Barthes puissance trois” 5.

chapter 2 1. “Je vous l’ai toujours dit, il n’y a pas de ‘je’ . . . ” Nathalie Sarraute, “disent les imbéciles,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 870. 2. Pierre Boncenne, “Interview: Nathalie Sarraute,” Lire (June1983): 92. 3. “A dévoiler, à faire exister une réalité inconnue [ . . . ] qui ne se laisse pas exprimer par les formes connues et usées . . . qui ne peut se révéler que par un nouveau mode d’expression, par de nouvelles formes.” Nathalie Sarraute, “Nouveau roman et réalité,” Revue de l’institut de sociologie 36.2 (1963): 432. 4. Emer O’Beirne notes that Sarraute’s ambiguity is reflected in many of the critical articles written about her. For example, Valerie Minogue writes that it is “with words that Sarraute the mature writer attacks glittering verbal surfaces to uncover and create the real.” Valerie Minogue, “Fragments of a Childhood: Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance,” Romance Studies 9 (1986): 73. Emer O’Beirne, Reading Nathalie Sarraute: Dialogue and Distance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) 80. 5. “Au-delà des apparences, sous les apparences.” Boncenne 91. 6. “Ces sortes de mouvements instinctifs qui sont indépendants de notre volonté, qui sont provoqués par des excitations venant de l’extérieur.” Interview with Serge Fauchereau, “Conversation avec Nathalie Sarraute,” Digraphe 32 (1984): 9. 7. “J’ai toujours dit qu’il y a des sensations très floues, inexprimées, qui sans les mots bien sûr ne sortiraient jamais, mais qui existent avant et poussent les mots. Ceux-ci nous servent à les communiquer. Ils peuvent aussi, si on les jette tout de suite sur les sensations floues, les figer et les étouffer. Tout ce que j’essaie donc, c’est de laisser vivre les sensations, jusqu’au moment où elles-mêmes suggèrent des mots. [ . . . ] Le langage est un instrument rigide et très étouffant [ . . . ] J’ai essayé de ne jamais accepter les mots et les définitions venus de dehors.” Boncenne 90–91. 8. Nathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: George

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Braziller, 1963) 96–97. “Les paroles possèdent les qualités nécessaires pour capter, protéger et porter au-dehors ces mouvements souterrains à la fois impatients et craintifs.” Sarraute, L’Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard [Folio], 1956) 102. 9. “Il suffit, en effet, que le langage perde ce contact avec le non-nommé, qu’il s’éloigne de cette source d’où il tire sa vitalité [ . . . ] et comme le cheval qui retourne à l’écurie, il reviendra à la sécurité de cette terre ferme sur laquelle il espère ne courir aucun risque. [ . . . ] Et au contraire s’il arrive au langage de se laisser attirer trop loin dans ces zones silencieuses et obscures, il s’y enlise, s’y désintègre, ne devient lui-même qu’obscurité et silence.” Nathalie Sarraute, “Ce que je cherche à faire,” Oeuvres complètes 1700–1701. 10. Cited in Tony Cartano, “L’ère lointaine du soupçon,” Magazine littéraire 195 (1983): 26. 11. “Moi je suis . . . Mais justement je ne suis pas . . . C’est vous qui . . . oui, vous comprenez, il n’y a pas moyen de coïncider avec ça, avec ce que vous avez construit . . . ” Sarraute, “disent les imbéciles” 870. “Le ‘je’ est déjà quelque chose qui est constitué du dehors.” Interview with Simone Benmussa, Entretiens avec Nathalie Sarraute (Tournai: La Renaissance du Livre, 1999) 156. 12. Sarraute, Age of Suspicion 130. I have modified Jolas’s translation. “Grille [ . . . ] posée sur cette immense masse mouvante qu’on nomme notre ‘for intérieur.’” Sarraute, Ère 134. 13. “Un simple trompe-l’oeil, une survivance, un support de hasard.” Sarraute, “Ce que je cherche à faire” 1695. 14. “Il n’y a pas d’identité.” Benmussa 122. 15. Sarraute, Age of Suspicion 53. I have modified Jolas’s translation. “Un romancier n’est digne de ce nom que s’il est capable de ‘croire’ à ses personnages, ce qui lui permet de les rendre ‘vivants’ et de leur donner une ‘épaisseur romanesque.’” Sarraute, Ère 59. 16. “Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire qu’un personnage est vivant? Pourquoi dit-on qu’il est vivant?” Sarraute, “Nouveau roman et réalité” 436–37. 17. “Si je donne un nom à un personnage, je me place à l’écart de lui: je le nomme du dehors. Or, je suis à l’intérieur de sa conscience et j’essaye de me mouvoir comme lui, d’être prise avec lui dans ses mouvements, portée par eux.” Fauchereau 14. 18. Sarraute, Age of Suspicion 39. “Des porteurs d’états.” Sarraute, Ère 43. “Ce qui est intéressant ce n’est pas le personnage mais ce qui se passe d’anonyme et d’identique chez n’importe qui. [ . . . ] On fait des personnages parce qu’ils se voient les uns les autres comme des personnages. Alors ils plaquent les uns sur les autres ce qui leur paraît vraisemblable. Mais ils ne sont qu’apparences, par derrière se déroule la vie anonyme des tropismes.” Benmussa 127–28. 19. “Nous nous ressemblons tous comme deux gouttes d’eau.” Interview with Lucette Finas, “Nathalie Sarraute: ‘Mon théâtre continue mes romans . . . ,’” Quinzaine littéraire 292 (1978): 4. “Au niveau où se trouvent les tropismes, tout

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le monde sent de la même façon.” Cited in Gretchen Besser, “Sarraute on Childhood—Her Own,” Autobiography in French Literature, French Literature Series 12 (1985): 157. 20. “Il ne s’agit pas d’une autobiographie. [ . . . ] J’ai sélectionné, comme pour tous mes autres livres, des instants dont je pourrais retrouver la sensation.” Interview with Viviane Forrester, “Portrait de Nathalie,” Magazine littéraire 195 (1983): 19. 21. “Les gens qui écrivent leur autobiographie d’adulte prétendent écrire toute leur vie. D’abord ils la déforment totalement, on se voit toujours sous un certain jour [ . . . ] c’est comme si Landru écrivait ses mémoires. [ . . . ] Il raconterait combien il adorait sa femme et son enfant [ . . . ] ce serait exact. [ . . . ] Il omettrait simplement les dix-sept femmes dans le four. Eh bien c’est comme ça que sont faites les autobiographies.” Interview with François-Marie Banier, “Un anti-portrait de la romancière,” Le Monde des livres 15 April 1983: 16. 22. Nathalie Sarraute, Childhood, trans. Barbara Wright (New York: George Braziller, 1984) 147. All further references will be within the text, with the French original of substantial citations in the endnotes. “Tant de plaisirs se bousculent.” Sarraute, Enfance (Paris: Gallimard [Folio], 1983) 166. 23. “Avec Enfance, j’ai juste voulu assembler les images tirées d’une sorte de ouate où elles étaient enfouies. [ . . . ] il y a des événements très personnels. Mais qui ne sont pas rattachés entre eux, qui sont espacés. Je n’ai pas essayé d’écrire l’histoire de ma vie.” Boncenne 89–90. 24. “Surgiss[ent] de cette brume”; “comme dans une éclaircie [ . . . ] d’une brume d’argent.” Sarraute, Enfance 25, 41. 25. Gratton compares this to Paul Ricoeur’s “historical present.” Johnnie Gratton, “The Present Tense in Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance,” French Studies Bulletin 52 (1994): 16. 26. Sarraute, Age of Suspicion 110–11. “Une technique qui parviendrait à plonger le lecteur dans le flot de ces drames souterrains que Proust n’a eu le temps que de survoler [ . . . ] une technique qui donnerait au lecteur l’illusion de refaire lui-même ces actions.” Sarraute, Ère 116–17. 27. Sarraute, Age of Suspicion 113–14. I have modified Jolas’s translation. “Ceci d’absolument neuf [ . . . ] ils ne sont qu’une longue suite de dialogues”; “ne rappellent aucune conversation entendue”; “jeu serré, subtil, féroce [ . . . ] entre la conversation et la sous-conversation.” Sarraute, Ère 119–20. 28. “—Alors, tu vas vraiment faire ça? ‘Evoquer tes souvenirs d’enfance’ . . . Comme ces mots te gênent, tu ne les aimes pas. Mais reconnais que ce sont les seuls mots qui conviennent. Tu veux ‘évoquer tes souvenirs’ . . . il n’y a pas à tortiller, c’est bien ça.—Oui, je n’y peux rien, ça me tente, je ne sais pas pourquoi . . . —C’est peutêtre . . . est-ce que ce ne serait pas . . . on ne s’en rend parfois pas compte . . . c’est peut-être que tes forces déclinent . . . ?” Sarraute, Enfance 7. 29. “Les beaux souvenirs d’enfance.” Sarraute, Enfance 31, 42. 30. “Là-bas tout fluctue, se transforme, s’échappe [ . . . ] tu avances à tatons, tou-

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jours cherchant [ . . . ] où? n’importe où, pourvu que ça trouve un milieu propice où ça se développe, où ça parvienne peut-être à vivre.” Sarraute, Enfance 8. 31. “Fixé une fois pour toutes, du ‘tout cuit,’ donné d’avance”; “—Rassure-toi pour ce qui est d’être donné . . . c’est encore tout vacillant, aucun mot écrit, aucune parole ne l’a encore touché, il me semble que ça palpite faiblement . . . hors des mots . . . comme toujours . . . des petits bouts de quelque chose d’encore vivant . . . je voudrais, avant qu’ils disparaissent . . . laisse-moi . . . ” Sarraute, Enfance 9. 32. “—On ne le croirait pas, mais c’est de toi que me vient l’impulsion, depuis un moment déjà tu me pousses . . .—Moi?—Oui, toi par tes objurgations, tes mises en garde . . . tu le fais surgir . . . tu m’y plonges . . . ” Sarraute, Enfance 9–10. 33. “N’essaie pas de me tendre un piège”; “rien ne m’en est resté et ce n’est tout de même pas toi, qui vas me pousser à chercher à combler ce trou par un replâtrage.” Sarraute, Enfance 23, 24. 34. “—Fais attention, tu vas te laisser aller à l’emphase . . . ” Sarraute, Enfance 166. “—Combien de temps il t’a fallu pour en arriver à te dire qu’elle [ta mère] n’essayait jamais, sinon très distraitement et maladroitement, de se mettre à ta place . . . —Oui, curieusement cette indifférence, cette désinvolture, faisaient partie de son charme, au sens propre du mot elle me charmait . . . ” Sarraute, Enfance 27. 35. “L’impression un peu inquiétante de quelque chose de répugnant sournoisement introduit, caché sous l’apparence de ce qui est exquis, ne s’est pas effacée, et parfois même aujourd’hui elle me revient quand je mets dans ma bouche une cuiller de confiture de fraises.” Sarraute, Enfance 46. 36. “Mes véritables personnages, mes seuls personnages, ce sont les mots.” Finas 4. 37. “‘Un enfant qui aime sa mère trouve que personne n’est plus beau qu’elle.’” Sarraute, Enfance 95. 38. “‘C’est étonnant comme par moments Natacha peut ressembler à sa mère’”; “dans ces mots quelque chose d’infiniment fragile, que j’ai à peine osé percevoir, je craignais de le faire disparaître . . . quelque chose a glissé, m’a effleurée, m’a caressée, s’est effacé.” Sarraute, Enfance 129. 39. “‘Laisse donc, femme et mari sont un même parti,’” Sarraute, Enfance 75. 40. “Ces paroles [ . . . ] se sont ranimées”; “je ne peux pas me voir, mais je le sens comme si je le faisais maintenant.” Sarraute, Enfance 10, 11. 41. “‘Tiebia podbrossili’ . . . c’est une des rares fois où je me souviens dans quelle langue Véra m’a parlé, [ . . . ] en français elle aurait dû dire ‘on t’a abandonnée,’ ce qui ne serait qu’un mou, exsangue équivalent des mots russes . . . [ . . . ]—Mais où était-ce? A quel propos?—Nous marchions côte à côte dans un jardin morne [ . . . ] Mais alors à quel propos? cela, je ne le retrouve pas . . . peut-être à propos de rien, comme ça, parce que ça l’a traversée tout à coup.” Sarraute, Enfance 182. 42. “‘Quel malheur quand même de ne pas avoir de mère’”; “—C’était la première fois que tu avais été prise ainsi, dans un mot?—Je ne me souviens pas que cela me soit arrivé avant. Mais combien de fois depuis ne me suis-je pas évadée terrifiée

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hors des mots qui s’abattent sur vous et vous enferment.—Même le mot ‘bonheur,’ chaque fois qu’il était tout près, si près, prêt à se poser, tu cherchais à l’écarter . . . Non, pas ça, pas un de ces mots, ils me font peur, je préfère me passer d’eux, qu’ils ne s’approchent pas, qu’ils ne touchent à rien . . . rien ici, chez moi, n’est pour eux.” Sarraute, Enfance 121, 122. 43. “Elles ont par leur puissance tout écrasé.” Sarraute, Enfance 131. 44. “‘Ce n’est pas ta maison’ . . . On a peine à le croire, et pourtant c’est ce qu’un jour Véra m’a dit. Quand je lui ai demandé si nous allions bientôt rentrer à la maison, elle m’a dit: ‘Ce n’est pas ta maison.’—Tout à fait ce que la méchante marâtre aurait pu répondre à la pauvre Cendrillon. C’est ce qui t’a fait hésiter . . .—En effet, je craignais qu’en revivant cela, je ne me laisse pousser à faire de Véra et de moi des personnages de contes de fées . . .—Il faut dire que Véra, par moments, quand on s’efforce de l’évoquer, donne le sentiment de décoller du réel, de s’envoler dans la fiction . . . ” Sarraute, Enfance 130–31. 45. “Je ne sais pas combien de fois je suis allée chez Madame Bernard, si j’y suis allée souvent . . . tout se fond dans quelques images.” Sarraute, Enfance 240, 46. “—Est-il certain que cette image se trouve dans Max et Moritz? Ne vaudraitil pas mieux le vérifier?—Non, à quoi bon? Ce qui est certain, c’est que cette image est restée liée à ce livre et qu’est resté intact le sentiment qu’elle me donnait d’une appréhension, d’une peur qui n’était pas de la peur pour de bon, mais juste une peur drôle, pour s’amuser.” Sarraute, Enfance 48. 47. “Tu n’as pas besoin de me répéter que je n’étais pas capable d’évoquer ces images . . . ce qui est certain, c’est qu’elles rendent exactement la sensation que me donnait mon pitoyable état.” Sarraute, Enfance 98–99. 48. “C’est la première fois que j’y pense, jamais dans ce temps-là cela ne me venait à l’esprit.” Sarraute, Enfance 200. 49. “—Des images, des mots qui évidemment ne pouvaient pas se former à cet âge-là dans ta tête . . .—Bien sûr que non. [ . . . ] C’était ressenti, comme toujours, hors des mots, globalement . . . Mais ces mots et ces images sont ce qui permet de saisir tant bien que mal, de retenir ces sensations.” Sarraute, Enfance 17. 50. “Cela ne pouvait pas m’apparaître tel que je le vois à présent, quand je m’oblige à cet effort . . . dont je n’étais pas capable . . . quand j’essaie de m’enfoncer, d’atteindre, d’accrocher, de dégager ce qui est resté là, enfoui.” Sarraute, Enfance 86. 51. “—Ne te fâche pas, mais ne crois-tu pas que là, avec ces roucoulements, ces pépiements, tu n’as pas pu t’empêcher de placer un petit morceau de préfabriqué . . . c’est si tentant . . . tu as fait un joli petit raccord, tout à fait en accord . . .—Oui, je me suis peut-être un peu laissée aller . . . ”; “pour ce qui est des clochettes, des sonnettes, ça non, je les entends.” Sarraute, Enfance 20–21. 52. Sarraute also used “roucoulements” and “pépiements” in her novel Portrait d’un inconnu (Paris: Gallimard, 1956) 84. For other examples of such repetitions, see Bruno Vercier, “(Nouveau) Roman et Autobiographie: Enfance de Nathalie Sar-

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raute,” Autobiography in French Literature 168. Sarraute herself does not comment on the reappearances of events from her earlier work within her autobiography as do many novelists turned autobiographers, including Robbe-Grillet. For a more extensive analysis of Enfance in the context of Sarraute’s entire oeuvre, see chapter 7 of Ann Jefferson, Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 53. “Sarraute’s views on language hamstring the reader by condemning critical discourse as intrinsically contrary to the spirit of her writing.” O’Beirne 63. 54. Jefferson notes that “the denial of artifice in [Sarraute’s] writing, and the insistence on the spontaneity and naturalness of the ‘impressions’ which it seeks to convey are a way of claiming authenticity both for the represented experience (the ‘movements’) and for the means of that representation (the ‘form’).” Ann Jefferson, “Autobiography as Intertext: Barthes, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet,” Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, ed. Michael Worton (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990) 116–17. 55. I have modified Wright’s translation. “—Je pense que c’est avant le séjour de grand-mère que cela devait se situer . . .—Ou est-ce après?—Non, avant . . . il me semble que grand-mère est venue quand tu allais entrer dans la classe du certificat d’études . . . ” Sarraute, Enfance 241. 56. Philippe Lejeune, “Paroles d’enfance,” Revue des sciences humaines 217 (1990): 26–27. 57. See Monique Gosselin, “Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute: les mots de la mère,” Revue des sciences humaines 222 (1991): 128. 58. Daniel Hayes, “Autobiography’s Secret,” Auto/biography Studies 12.2 (1997): 258. 59. M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990) 15, 17. 60. Eileen Angelini, “And the Voice of Natacha Makes Three: A Study of the Dialoguing Voices in Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance,” Romance Languages Annual 6 (1994): 8–9. Valerie Minogue also argues that “the questioning dialogue of the two voices . . . encourag[es] the reader’s critical participation.” Minogue 82 n.4. 61. “Est-ce que je rêve? est-il possible que tu aies fini par fondre en larmes et que tu lui aies dit . . .—C’est à peine croyable, mais je le revois . . . ” Sarraute, Enfance 189–90. 62. Rachel Boué aptly calls the Sarrautean dialogue a “dialogued soliloquy.” Boué, Nathalie Sarraute: La Sensation en quête de parole (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997) 131. 63. “C’est le moment où il faut se dédoubler. Une moitié de moi-même se détache de l’autre: un témoin. Un juge.” Cited in Vercier 163. 64. “Vu du dedans [ . . . ] il n’y a personne et je suis tout.” Benmussa 122. 65. See Jean Pierrot, Nathalie Sarraute (Paris: José Corti, 1990) 89. 66. Michael Sheringham says no, that “Enfance effectively fails to do more than

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ape the dynamics of exchange and transference.” Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 163. 67. “Oui, ça te rend grandiloquent. Je dirai même outrecuidant.” Sarraute, Enfance 8. Françoise van Roey-Roux has described their roles in alarming accordance with gender stereotypes; the feminine narrator provides the “emotional and factual memory” and an “emotional consciousness” whereas the critical voice is masculine, with a “reflexive consciousness” that seeks to know and explain in “a more assertive, . . . rarely hesitant style.” “Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute ou de la fiction à l’autobiographie,” Etudes littéraires 17.2 (1984): 280. 68. See Benmussa 149–50. 69. “Un enfant, plutôt qu’une petite fille.” Forrester 20. 70. “Pour moi un écrivain est, doit être androgyne.” Besser 154. 71. “Il y a toujours une multitude en nous. [ . . . ] Dès que je dis ‘je,’ j’ai l’impression de ne jamais parler de moi, ou très rarement? Je ne dis jamais comment je suis parce que ce serait faux.” Benmussa 86. 72. “Je n’ai pas de sentiment d’identité. Je pense qu’à l’intérieur de chacun de nous, très profondément, nous sommes pareils.” Benmussa 85. 73. See, for example, Bettina Knapp, “Chef-d’oeuvre et art poétique: Enfance,” L’Esprit Créateur 34.3 (1994): 49–50. Given the theoretical positions Sarraute expressed in essays and interviews, she would have vigorously discouraged such a response from her readers and would surely have been horrified by one critic’s celebration of her autobiography as a text in which “every reader can identify and empathize with this vivacious, vulnerable, tender, tragic, by turns rash and rueful little girl.” Besser 158. It is significant, however, that her autobiography, despite her theories, inspired such reactions. 74. Sarraute, Age of Suspicion 140. I have modified Jolas’s translation. “Se délivrer du sujet, des personnages, et de l’intrigue.” Sarraute, Ère 144. 75. See Lejeune, Pacte autobiographique. 76. “—Rassure-toi, j’ai fini, je ne t’entraînerai pas plus loin . . .—Pourquoi maintenant tout à coup, quand tu n’as pas craint de venir jusqu’ici?—Je ne sais pas très bien . . . je n’en ai plus envie . . . je voudrais aller ailleurs . . . C’est peut-être qu’il me semble que là s’arrête pour moi l’enfance . . . ” Sarraute, Enfance 277. 77. “—Tu n’as pas commencé par essayer, en scrutant parmi tes chagrins . . .—De retrouver un de mes chagrins? Mais non, voyons, à quoi penses-tu? Un vrai chagrin à moi? vécu par moi pour de bon . . . et d’ailleurs, qu’est-ce que je pouvais appeler de ce nom? Et quel avait été le premier? Je n’avais aucune envie de me le demander . . . ce qu’il me fallait, c’était un chagrin qui serait hors de ma propre vie, que je pourrais considérer en m’en tenant à bonne distance . . . cela me donnerait une sensation que je ne pouvais pas nommer, mais je la ressens maintenant telle que je l’éprouvais . . . un sentiment . . .—De dignité, peut-être . . . c’est ainsi qu’aujourd’hui on pourrait l’appeler . . . et aussi de domination, de puissance . . .—Et de liberté . . . Je me tiens dans l’ombre, hors d’atteinte, je ne livre rien de ce qui n’est qu’à moi . . . mais

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je prépare pour les autres ce que je considère comme étant bon pour eux, je choisis ce qu’ils aiment, ce qu’ils peuvent attendre, un de ces chagrins qui leur conviennent [ . . . ] une modèle de vrai premier chagrin de vrai enfant . . . la mort de mon petit chien . . . quoi de plus imbibé de pureté enfantine, d’innocence. Aussi invraisemblable que cela paraisse, tout cela je le sentais . . . ” Sarraute, Enfance 208–9. 78. “J’aimais ce qui était fixe, cernable, immuable [ . . . ] aucun risque de voir quoi que ce soit se mettre à fluctuer, devenir instable, incertain.” Sarraute, Enfance 214–15. 79. “Bien évidemment je n’avais pas décrit mon véritable premier chagrin: il aurait été très impudique de raconter cela dans un devoir de français. [ . . . ] Cet exemple inventé m’avait donné l’occasion de faire du joli style, de la jolie copie, ce qui était vraiment important. Vous ne pensez pas que j’allais commencer à me raconter. [ . . . ] Aujourd’hui comme hier à l’école communale, je n’aime pas ces étalages de soi-même et je n’ai pas l’impression qu’avec Enfance je me suis laissée aller.” Boncenne 90. 80. “Entre la vie courante et la littérature qui, si je puis dire, monte en épingle des choses à peine visibles, il y a un immense abîme. On ne pourrait pas vivre au milieu de mes livres, ni des tropismes.” Benmussa 73. 81. “Je ne suis rien d’autre que ce que j’ai écrit. Rien que je ne connaisse pas, qu’on projette sur moi, qu’on jette en moi à mon insu comme on le fait constamment là-bas, au-dehors, dans mon autre vie. [ . . . ] Tout ce qui m’arrive ici ne peut dépendre que de moi. C’est moi qui en suis responsible.” Sarraute, Enfance 168.

chapter 3 1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 9. All further references will be within the text, with the French original of substantial citations in the endnotes. “Me voici donc moi-même mesure de ‘savoir’ photographique.” Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/Gallimard/ Seuil, 1980) 22. 2. Recent studies of photographs in North American and European autobiography include Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 3. I have limited myself to photography and film, but among the fastest-growing avenues for contemporary autobiographical expression have been video and interactive multimedia as well as the Internet. There has been a significant amount of scholarly interest in autobiographical video, although almost exclusively on work produced within the United States. See the following edited collections in the Visible Evidence Series from the University of Minnesota Press: Resolutions: Contempo-

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rary Video Practices (1996), Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, and Gay Documentary (1997), and Feminism and Documentary (1999). Lejeune, who has been a tireless investigator of autobiographical expression in different forms and media (excluding, oddly enough, film), has studied Web autobiography in “Cher écran . . . ”: Journal personnel, ordinateur, internet (Paris: Seuil, 2000). 4. The English translation gives the subtitle as “Reflections on Photography,” which has no precedent in the original. 5. “Chaque fois que je lisais quelque chose sur la Photographie, je pensais à telle photo aimée, et cela me mettait en colère. Car moi, je ne voyais que le référent, l’objet désiré, le corps chéri; mais une voix importune (la voix de la science) me disait alors d’un ton sévère: ‘Reviens à la Photographie’ . . . ” Barthes, Chambre 19. 6. Roland Barthes, “‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure,’” [1978] The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986) 285. 7. Barthes, “Longtemps” 290. 8. “La phénoménologie me prêtait donc un peu de son projet et un peu de son langage”; “Je ne m’intéressais à la Photographie que par ‘sentiment.’” Barthes, Chambre 40, 42. 9. Steven Ungar observes that “Barthes’s writings on the image internalize what others might designate as theory. His semiotics of the image evolves toward a dynamic of figuration that is increasingly personal.” “Persistance of the Image: Barthes, Photography, and the Resistance to Film,” Signs in Culture: Roland Barthes Today, ed. Steven Ungar and Betty R. McGraw (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989): 154. 10. J. Gerald Kennedy, “Roland Barthes, Autobiography, and the End of Writing,” Georgia Review 35.2 (1981): 389. 11. “Je n’avais à ma disposition que deux expériences: celle du sujet regardé et celle du sujet regardant.” Barthes, Chambre 24. 12. “Je résolus donc de prendre pour départ de ma recherche à peine quelques photos, celles dont j’étais sûr qu’elles existaient pour moi.” Barthes, Chambre 21. 13. “Or, un soir de novembre, peu de temps après la mort de ma mère, je rangeai des photos . . . .” Barthes, Chambre 99. 14. “Je tenterais de formuler, à partir de quelques mouvements personnels, le trait fondamental, l’universel sans lequel il n’y aurait pas de Photographie.” Barthes, Chambre 22. 15. “Le Particulier absolu, la Contingence souveraine, mate et comme bête, le Tel . . . bref, la Tuché, l’Occasion, la Rencontre, le Réel”; “Telle photo, en effet, ne se distingue jamais de son référent.” Barthes, Chambre 15, 16. 16. See Barthes, “The Discourse of History” and “The Reality Effect,” Rustle of Language. 17. I have slightly modified Howard’s translation. “Quoi qu’elle donne à voir et quelle que soit sa manière, une photo est toujours invisible: ce n’est pas elle qu’on voit.” Barthes, Chambre 18.

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18. Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message” [1961] The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 5. For an excellent (and much more detailed) summary of Barthes’s work on photography, see chapter 8 of Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 19. Barthes, “Photographic Message” 6. 20. See Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) 120–24. 21. Barthes, “Photographic Message” 7–8. 22. “J’étais saisi à l’égard de la Photographie d’un désir ‘ontologique’: je voulais à tout prix savoir ce qu’elle était ‘en soi.’” Barthes, Chambre 13. 23. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” [1970] Responsibility of Forms 41–44. 24. Barthes, “Third Meaning” 44. 25. Barthes, “Third Meaning” 50–51. 26. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 3. “Elles sont la part du plaisir que l’auteur s’offre à lui-même en terminant son livre. . . . Je n’ai retenu que les images qui me sidèrent.” RB par RB 5. 27. “Une sorte d’interêt général, parfois ému, mais dont l’émotion passe par le relais raisonnable d’une culture morale et politique. Ce que j’éprouve pour ces photos relève d’un affect moyen, presque d’un dressage . . . c’est le studium . . . l’application à une chose, le goût pour quelqu’un, une sorte d’investissement général, empressé, certes, mais sans acuité particulière. . . . [C]’est culturellement . . . que je participe aux figures, aux mines, aux gestes, aux décors, aux actions.” Barthes, Chambre 48. 28. “Cette fois, ce n’est pas moi qui vais le chercher (comme j’investis de ma conscience souveraine le champ du studium), c’est lui qui part de la scène, comme une flèche, et vient me percer. Un mot existe en latin pour désigner cette blessure, cette piqûre, cette marque faite par un instrument pointu . . . je l’appellerai donc punctum. . . . Le punctum d’une photo, c’est le hasard qui, en elle, me point (mais aussi me meurtrit, me poigne).” Barthes, Chambre 49. 29. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1973) 3–4. 30. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) 14. Colin MacCabe, who does not mention the passing reference I have noted above, has also expressed surprise at the fact that Barthes never mentions Bazin. MacCabe, “Barthes and Bazin: The Ontology of the Image,” Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) 73–74. 31. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” Screen 13.1 (1972): 6–7. 32. We can perhaps understand the otherwise inexplicable omission of La Chambre claire’s notes and bibliography by the editors of the English translation as an unwitting continuation of this aspect of the work. 33. Barthes, “Third Meaning” 55.

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34. Barthes, “Third Meaning” 55. 35. Barthes, “Photographic Message” 19. 36. See, for example, Mary Price, The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) 8. 37. Barthes, “Photographic Message” 7. 38. “Je ne la reconnaissais jamais que par morceaux, c’est-à-dire que je manquais son être, et que, donc, je la manquais toute. Ce n’était pas elle, et pourtant ce n’était personne d’autre. . . . La photographie m’obligeait ainsi à un travail douleureux; tendu vers l’essence de son identité, je me débattais au milieu d’images partiellement vraies, et donc totalement fausses.” Barthes, Chambre 103. 39. I have modified Howard’s translation. “La photographie était très ancienne. Cartonnée, les coins mâchés, d’un sépia pâli, elle montrait à peine deux jeunes enfants debout, formant groupe, au bout d’un petit pont de bois dans un Jardin d’Hiver au plafond vitré. Ma mère avait alors cinq ans (1898).” Barthes, Chambre 105–6. In a curious coincidence (perhaps), the never-mentioned Benjamin’s “Short History of Photography” includes a reproduction and discussion of a photograph of Franz Kafka as a young child in a Winter Garden. 40. “Ces photos-là . . . n’était qu’analogiques, suscitant seulement son identité, non sa vérité; mais la Photographie du Jardin d’Hiver, elle, était bien essentielle, elle accomplissait pour moi, utopiquement, la science impossible de l’être unique.” Barthes, Chambre 110. 41. “Sur cette photo de vérité, l’être que j’aime, que j’ai aimé, n’est pas séparé de lui-même: enfin il coïncide.” Barthes, Chambre 168. 42. Slavoj Zizek, “‘In His Bold Gaze My Ruin is Writ Large,’” Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, ed. Slavoj Zizek (New York: Verso, 1992) 262. 43. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 3. “La fissure du sujet (cela même dont il ne peut rien dire) . . . La photographie de jeunesse est à la fois très indiscrète (c’est mon corps du dessous que s’y donne à lire) et très discrète (ce n’est pas de ‘moi’ qu’elle parle).” RB par RB 5–6. 44. “Je ne ressemble qu’à d’autres photos de moi, et cela à l’infini: personne n’est jamais que la copie d’une copie, réelle ou mentale (tout au plus puis-je dire que sur certaines photos je me supporte, ou non, selon que je me trouve conforme à l’image que je voudrais bien donner de moi-même).” Barthes, Chambre 157–58. 45. “Devant l’objectif, je suis à la fois: celui que je me crois, celui que je voudrais qu’on me croie, celui que le photographe me croit, et celui dont il se sert pour exhiber son art.” Barthes, Chambre 29. 46. Roland Barthes, “Deliberation” [1979], Rustle of Language 359. 47. “Dès que je me sens regardé par l’objectif, tout change: je me constitue en train de ‘poser,’ je me fabrique instantanément un autre corps, je me métamorphose à l’avance en image.” Barthes, Chambre 25. 48. “Mais je n’avais pas découvert la nature (l’eïdos) de la Photographie. Il me

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fallait convenir que mon plaisir était un médiateur imparfait, et qu’une subjectivité réduite à son projet hédoniste ne pouvait reconnaître l’universel. Je devais descendre davantage en moi-même pour trouver l’évidence de la Photographie.” Barthes, Chambre 95. 49. “Mon corps ne trouve jamais son degré zéro, personne ne le lui donne (peutêtre seule ma mère?).” Barthes, Chambre 27. 50. “Elle ne se débattait pas avec son image, comme je le fais avec la mienne: elle ne se supposait pas.” Barthes, Chambre 105. 51. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 22. “Du passé, c’est mon enfance qui me fascine le plus . . . ce n’est pas l’irreversible que je découvre en elle, c’est l’irréductible: tout ce qui est encore en moi.” RB par RB 26. 52. “Je pouvais dire, comme le Narrateur proustien à la mort de sa grand-mère: ‘Je ne tenais pas seulement à souffrir, mais à respecter l’originalité de ma souffrance’; car cette originalité était le reflet de ce qu’il y avait en elle d’absolument irréductible.” Barthes, Chambre 117–18. 53. Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text 37. “Ce n’est pas le langage, c’est la langue, la langue maternelle. L’écrivain est quelqu’un qui joue avec le corps de sa mère.” Barthes, Plaisir du texte 60. 54. “(Je ne puis montrer la Photo du Jardin d’Hiver. Elle n’existe que pour moi. Pour vous, elle ne serait rien d’autre qu’une photo indifférente, l’une des mille manifestations de ‘quelconque’ . . . tout au plus intéresserait-elle votre studium: époque, vêtements, photogénie; mais en elle, pour vous, aucune blessure).” Barthes, Chambre 115. 55. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Perdu au fond du Jardin d’Hiver, le visage de ma mère est flou, pâli. Dans un premier mouvement, je me suis écrié: ‘C’est elle! C’est bien elle! C’est enfin elle!’ Maintenant, je prétends savoir—et pouvoir dire parfaitement—pourquoi, en quoi c’est elle. J’ai envie de cerner par la pensée le visage aimé, d’en faire l’unique champ d’une observation intense; j’ai envie d’agrandir ce visage pour mieux le voir, mieux le comprendre, connaître sa vérité (et parfois, naïf, je confie cette tâche à un laboratoire). Je crois qu’en agrandissant le détail ‘en cascade’ . . . je vais enfin arriver à l’être de ma mère . . . je décompose, j’agrandis, et, si l’on peut dire: je ralentis, pour avoir le temps de savoir enfin.” Barthes, Chambre 154–55. 56. “Si j’agrandis, ce n’est rien d’autre que le grain du papier: je défais l’image au profit de sa matière.” Barthes, Chambre 155–56. 57. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Ce que la société fait de ma photo, ce qu’elle y lit, je ne le sais pas (de toute façon, il y a tant de lecteurs d’un même visage) . . . les autres—l’Autre—me déproprient de moi-même, ils font de moi, avec férocité, un objet.” Barthes, Chambre 31. 58. “J’ai toujours eu envie d’argumenter mes humeurs; non pour les justifier;

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encore moins pour emplir de mon individualité la scène du texte; mais au contraire, pour l’offrir, la tendre, cette individualité, à une science du sujet, dont peu m’importe le nom, pourvu qu’elle parvienne (ce qui n’est pas encore joué) à une généralité qui ne me réduise ni ne m’écrase.” Barthes, Chambre 36–37. 59. “Puisque toute photo est contingente (et par là même hors sens), la Photographie ne peut pas signifier (viser une généralité) qu’en prenant un masque. C’est ce mot qu’emploie justement Calvino pour désigner ce qui fait d’un visage le produit d’une société et de son histoire.” Barthes, Chambre 61. 60. “Je m’étais fixé au début un principe: ne jamais réduire le sujet que j’étais, face à certaines photos, au socius désincarné, désaffecté, dont s’occupe la science.” Barthes, Chambre 115. 61. “Je décidai alors de ‘sortir’ toute la Photographie (sa ‘nature’) de la seule photo qui existât assurément pour moi, et de la prendre en quelque sorte pour guide de ma dernière recherche.” Barthes, Chambre 114. 62. “Dans la Photographie, je ne puis jamais nier que la chose a été là . . . Ce que j’intentionnalise dans une photo (ne parlons pas encore du cinéma), ce n’est ni l’Art, ni la Communication, c’est la Référence, qui est l’ordre fondateur de la Photographie. . . . Le nom du noème de la Photographie sera donc: ‘Ça-a-été.’” Barthes, Chambre 119–20. 63. Sontag, On Photography 5. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image” [1964], Responsibility of Forms 35. 64. Bazin 14. I have modified Gray’s translation. “La photographie ne crée pas, comme l’art, de l’éternité, elle embaume le temps, elle le soustrait seulement à sa propre corruption.” André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma (Paris: Cerf, 1999) 14. 65. “Devant la photo de ma mère enfant, je me dis: elle va mourir: je frémis . . . d’une catastrophe qui a déjà eu lieu. Que le sujet en soit déjà mort ou non, toute photographie est cette catastrophe.” Barthes, Chambre 150. 66. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969) 220–21. 67. “Le point de singularité, la traversée du discours vers l’unique”; “ce qui adhère dans la photographie, c’est peut-être moins le référent lui-même, dans l’effectivité présente de sa réalité, que l’implication dans la référence de son avoir-été-unique.” Jacques Derrida, “Les morts de Roland Barthes,” Poétique 47 (1981): 285. 68. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Jusqu’à ce jour, aucune représentation ne pouvait m’assurer du passé de la chose, sinon par des relais; mais avec la Photographie, ma certitude est immédiate: personne au monde ne peut me détromper. La Photographie devient alors un médium bizarre, une nouvelle forme d’hallucination . . . image folle, frottée de réel.” Barthes, Chambre 177. 69. “Un noyau rayonnant, irréductible, ma mère.” Barthes, Chambre 117. 70. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Parce que c’était une photographie, je ne

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pouvais nier que j’avais été là. . . . [J]’allai au vernissage comme à une enquête, pour apprendre enfin ce que je ne savais plus de moi-même.” Barthes, Chambre 134. 71. I have modified Howard’s translation. “C’est le malheur (mais aussi peutêtre la volupté) du langage, de ne pouvoir s’authentifier lui-même . . . le langage est, par nature, fictionnel; pour essayer de rendre le langage infictionnel, il faut un énorme dispositif de mesures: on convoque la logique, ou, à défaut, le serment; mais la Photographie, elle, est indifférente à tout relais: elle n’invente pas; elle est l’authentification même.” Barthes, Chambre 134–35. 72. I have modified Howard’s translation. “La Photographie, c’est l’avènement de moi-même comme autre: une dissociation retorse de la conscience d’identité.” Barthes, Chambre 28. 73. I have modified Howard’s translation. “C’est ‘moi’ qui ne coïncide jamais avec mon image; car c’est l’image qui est lourde, immobile, entêtée (ce pour quoi la société s’y appuie), et c’est ‘moi’ qui suis léger, divisé, dispersé et qui, tel un ludion, ne tiens pas en place. . . . ah, si au moins la Photographie pouvait me donner un corps qui ne signifie rien!” Barthes, Chambre 26–27. 74. Margaret Iversen, “What Is a Photograph?” Art History 17.3 (1994): 456. I would like to thank Esther Gabara for calling this article to my attention. 75. Iversen 457. 76. Iversen 458. 77. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 106. “Je suis photo-graphié.” Lacan, Séminaire XI 98. 78. “Je m’abandonnais à l’Image, à l’Imaginaire.” Barthes, Chambre 117. 79. Jay 456. 80. See Zizek, Sublime Object 169. 81. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) 1, 4. 82. I have again modified Howard’s translation, for what I believe to be a recurrent mistranslation of “la Photographie” as “ the Photograph” at moments when Barthes seems to be talking about Photography. “Folle ou sage? La Photographie peut être l’un ou l’autre: sage si son réalisme reste relatif, tempéré par des habitudes esthétiques ou empiriques, . . . folle, si ce réalisme est absolu, et, si l’on peut dire, originel, faisant revenir à la conscience amoureuse et effrayée la lettre même du Temps: mouvement proprement révulsif, qui retourne le cours de la chose, et que j’appellerai pour finir l’extase photographique. Telles sont les deux voies de la Photographie. A moi de choisir, de soumettre son spectacle au code civilisé des illusions parfaites, ou d’affronter en elle le réveil de l’intraitable réalité.” Barthes, Chambre 183–84. 83. I have modified Howard’s translation. “J’en viens à reconstituer, par une résistance nécessaire, la division du public et privé: je veux énoncer l’intériorité sans livrer l’intimité.” Barthes, Chambre 153.

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84. Roland Barthes, “On Photography” [1977, 1979], Grain of the Voice 359. 85. “Au cinéma, sans doute, il y a toujours du référent photographique, mais ce référent glisse, il ne revendique pas en faveur de sa réalité, il ne proteste pas de son ancienne existence; il ne s’accroche pas à moi: ce n’est pas un spectre.” Barthes, Chambre 140. 86. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image” 34. 87. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 54–55. I have modified Howard’s translation. “Le signifiant lui-même y est toujours, par nature, lisse, quelle que soit la rhétorique des plans; c’est, sans rémission, un continuum d’images; la pellicule (bien nommée: c’est une peau sans béance) suit, comme un ruban bavard.” RB par RB 59. 88. I have modified Howard’s translation. “J’aime certains traits biographiques qui, dans la vie d’un écrivain, m’enchantent à l’égal de certaines photographies; j’ai appelé ces traits des ‘biographèmes.’” Barthes, Chambre 54. 89. Roland Barthes, “On Film” [1963], Grain of the Voice 17. 90. “Fermer les yeux, c’est faire parler l’image dans le silence”; “devant l’écran, je ne suis pas libre de fermer les yeux; sinon, les rouvrant, je ne retrouverais pas la même image.” Barthes, Chambre 87–88, 90. 91. Barthes, “Third Meaning” 61. Benjamin, once again, had used a similar distinction in his discussion of film, medium of mass entertainment, as opposed to painting; “The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. . . . A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. . . . In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.” Benjamin, “Work of Art” 238–39. 92. Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” [1973], Responsibility of Forms 90–91. 93. Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” 92. 94. Barthes, “Third Meaning” 58–59. 95. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949) 37, 60. See also Ungar, “Resistance of the Image” 145. 96. Eisenstein 46. 97. Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater” [1975], Rustle of Language 348. I have modified Howard’s translation. “L’image filmique (y compris le son), c’est quoi? Un leurre . . . elle entretient dans le sujet que je crois être la méconnaissance attachée au Moi et à l’Imaginaire. Dans la salle de cinéma, si loin que je sois placé, je colle mon nez, jusqu’à l’écraser, au miroir de l’écran, à cet ‘autre’ imaginaire à qui je m’identifie narcissiquement. . . . L’image me captive, me capture: je colle à la représentation, et c’est cette colle qui fonde la naturalité (la pseudo-nature) de la

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scène filmée (colle préparée avec tous les ingrédients de la ‘technique’).” “En sortant du cinéma,” Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 410. 98. Jean-Pierre Chartier, “Les ‘films à la première personne’ et l’illusion de réalité au cinéma,” La revue du cinéma 1.4 (1947): 32. 99. Fereydoun Hoveyda, “The First Person Plural,” Cahiers du cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) 55. 100. Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 173. 101. Elizabeth Bruss, “Eye for I: Unmaking Autobiography in Film,” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) 296–97. 102. Bruss, “Eye for I” 308. 103. Michel Mesnil, “Cinémasque,” Corps écrit 3 (1983): 189 104. Bruss, “Eye for I” 297. 105. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 198. 106. Bruss, “Eye for I” 304. 107. Bruss, “Eye for I” 307. 108. Bruss, “Eye for I” 317, 319. 109. Lejeune, “Cinéma et autobiographie: problèmes de vocabulaire,” Revue belge du cinéma 19 (1987): 7–8. 110. Lejeune, “Cinéma et autobiographie” 8–10. 111. Lejeune, “Cinéma et autobiographie” 8. 112. See Bruss’s extended analysis of autobiographical narration in Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Lejeune, Pacte autobiographique. 113. John Stuart Katz, “Autobiographical Film,” Autobiography: Film/Video/Photography, ed. John Stuart Katz (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978) 10. 114. P. Adams Sitney, “Autobiography in Avant-Garde Film,” Millenium Film Journal 1.1 (1977–78): 61. Jay Ruby has similarly found “personal art films” to be the filmic equivalent of literary autobiography. Jay Ruby, “The Image Mirrored: Reflexivity and the Documentary Film,” New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 72. 115. Michael Renov, “The Subject in History: The New Autobiography in Film and Video,” Afterimage 17.1 (1989): 5. Renov, who cites Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes as a model of the kind of autobiographical subjectivity expressed in the films he mentions, has published a collection of his writings on documentary film and video as The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 116. Jim Lane, “Notes on Theory and the Autobiographical Documentary Film in America,” Wide Angle 15.3 (1993): 32. See the first chapter of Lane’s more recent The Autobiographical Documentary in America (Madison: University of Wiscon-

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sin Press, 2002) for a concise and lucid overview of the history of autobiographical documentary film in the United States. 117. Susanna Egan, “Encounters in Camera: Autobiography as Interaction,” Modern Fiction Studies 40.3 (1994): 613.

chapter 4 A version of this chapter was published as “Screening Autobiography: Cyril Collard’s Nuits fauves” in French Cultural Studies 16.1 (2005). Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications. 1. Cyril Collard, Savage Nights, trans. William Rodarmor (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1994) 77. All further references will be within the text, with the French original of substantial citations in the endnotes. “Je m’exhibe mais, surtout, je suis voyeur de moi-même.” Collard, Les Nuits fauves (Paris: Flammarion [J’ai lu], 1989) 89. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. 2. “L’auteur en est aussi l’acteur principal—, donc qui revendique le ‘je.’ Mais ce je fonctionne sur un éclatement libérant de multiples facettes qui scintillent, tantôt claires, lumineuses, tantôt sombres, nocturnes, presque inquiétantes.” Serge Toubiana, “Carpe diem and night,” Cahiers du cinéma 460 (1992): 22. 3. “Le livre est écrit à la première personne et il y a une angoisse à se débarrasser complètement de cette première personne.” Serge Toubiana, “Entretien avec Cyril Collard,” Cahiers du cinéma 460 (1992): 29. 4. He claimed, moreover, addressing at least one of Barthes’s concerns about film, that the first-person voice “opens a new possibility for the cinema: film in the past tense.” Chartier 37. 5. Renov, “The Subject in History” 6. 6. Collard’s 1985 short film Alger la blanche is the story of a love affair between another main character named Jean and a young beur named Farid. 7. “Ce qui unifie l’ensemble, c’est vous, . . . avec le risque du narcissisme et son débordement.” Toubiana, “Entretien” 27. 8. “Comme si, sans le faire vraiment exprès, il n’avait pu échapper à la responsabilité de tout prendre à la première personne.” Danièle Heymann, “L’hymne à la vie,” Le Monde 21 Oct. 1992: 1. 9. Jacques Siclier, “La Mort du cinéaste et romancier Cyril Collard,” Le Monde 7–8 March 1993: 11. 10. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “Je roule dans Paris. Je tiens ma caméra vidéo de la main gauche et le volant de la main droite. La ville et la nuit ne sont qu’une suite de travellings latéraux, seulement interrompus aux carrefours protégés par un feu rouge.” Collard, Nuits 88. 11. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “Je roulais mais je me faisait l’effet d’un acteur américain jouant une scène d’intérieur de voiture dans un studio

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d’Hollywood. Je voyais défiler une route, un ciel, des paysages; mais ils n’avaient pas plus de réalité que ceux des ‘pelures’ projetées sur un écran derrière la custode d’une Plymouth 1950.” Collard, Nuits 42. 12. “‘Une scission consciente, systématique, tendancieuse de la personnalité.’” Collard, Nuits 36. 13. “Je suis à l’intérieur d’elle, idéalisé par l’amour qu’elle me porte, et autour d’elle, comme les quatre murs du studio, . . . Laura prise en sandwich entre moi et moi.” Collard, Nuits 134. 14. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “Je ne sais toujours pas la prendre dans mes bras; j’imagine qu’elle en souffre; mais cet enlacement-là, je ne le connais qu’avec des garçons.” Collard, Nuits 112. 15. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “Je vivais . . . des multitudes d’histoires d’envies et de désirs, îlots d’événements jamais reliés les uns aux autres.” Collard, Nuits 74. 16. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “J’aimais Samy, j’aimais Laura, j’aimais les vices de mes nuits fauves. Suis-je né à ce point divisé? Ou bien m’a-t-on coupé en morceaux peu à peu, parce que unifié, d’un seul bloc, je serais devenu trop dangereux, incontrôlable?” Collard, Nuits 70. 17. “Quand le livre est sorti, j’ai senti qu’on n’arrivait pas à me ranger dans une case, dans un tiroir, et que cela dérangeait. Ce n’était pas un écrivain homosexuel qui parlait, bien qu’il couche avec des mecs.” Danièle Heymann, “Rencontre avec Cyril Collard: Filmer la fureur de vivre,” Le Monde 30 April 1992: 25. 18. “‘Un pédé sera toujours un pédé!’” Collard, Nuits 193. 19. “Je me demandais qui m’avait contaminé, mais je n’en voulais à personne qu’à moi-même. Je revoyais des visages brouillés, vite remplacés par l’image du virus: une boule hérissée de pointes, un fléau d’armes médiéval.” Collard, Nuits 20. 20. Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse,” differences 1.1 (1989): 24. 21. “Je suis fait des morceaux de moi-même éparpillés puis recollés ensemble n’importe comment, parce qu’il faut bien avoir l’apparence d’un corps. Je ne suis qu’un amas de cellules terrorisées.” Collard, Nuits 97. This description of the relationship between the virus and the cells of his body parallels the infection strategy of the HIV virus as narrated by Mirko Grmek. After the viral DNA enters the nucleus of a cell, it becomes part of its chromosomal material; the virus “loses its individuality,” tricking its host into thinking that it is a part of him or her, stealthily taking over from the inside rather than attacking as an overt enemy. History of AIDS (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) 78. Alexander García Düttmann refers to this passage in his At Odds with AIDS (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) 99–100. 22. “Pour moi l’horizon n’était qu’une maladie. Sur cette ligne plate, je voyais une image de moi-même devenue microscopique. A l’horizon je n’étais plus qu’un virus.” Collard, Nuits 35–36. 23. “Elle n’a plus aucune prise sur moi . . . c’est comme si elle n’existait plus.” Collard, Nuits 237.

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24. “Il y a cette saloperie de maladie entre nous. Comme un étranger qui nous régarde.” Les nuits fauves, dir. Cyril Collard, perf. Cyril Collard, Romane Bohringer, Carlos Lopez, Ban Film Ter/La Sept Cinéma/SNC, 1992. All further references will be within the text, in my translation, with the French original in the endnotes. 25. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “La mort . . . était là depuis que j’avais lu les premiers articles sur le sida. J’avais eu la certitude immédiate que la maladie serait une catastrophe planétaire qui m’emporterait avec des millions d’autres damnés.” Collard, Nuits 11–12. 26. See Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) 76. For Jacques-Alain Miller, suture “names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse, . . . it figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in.” Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier),” Screen 18.4 (1977–78): 25–26. 27. Zizek, Sublime Object 180. 28. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire: livre VIII (Paris: Seuil, 1991) 176–77. 29. “J’ai le sida. Si quelqu’un bouge, tu le refiles.” 30. “J’étais de moins en moins capable de communication, d’autres relations que celles du travail ou du sexe.” Collard, Nuits 14. 31. “J’ai le sida, je pourrai plus jamais aimer personne.” Collard, Nuits 215. 32. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “Il fait beau comme jamais. Je suis vivant; le monde n’est pas seulement une chose posée là, extérieure à moi-même: j’y participe. Il m’est offert. Je vais probablement mourir du sida, mais ce n’est plus ma vie: je suis dans la vie.” Collard, Nuits 252. 33. “Elle dit: ‘Tu n’as qu’un mot à dire . . . Dis-moi ‘Je t’aime’ et je reviens.’ Je ne sais pas aimer.” Collard, Nuits 253. 34. “Est-ce de l’amour absolu? Une fuite? Un courage effrayant?” Collard, Nuits 116. 35. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “Je flottais, sachant que j’avais craché en elle mon sperme infecté par le virus mortel, mais pensant que ça n’était pas grave, que rien ne se passerait parce que nous étions au début de ce qu’il me fallait bien nommer ‘une histoire d’amour.’” Collard, Nuits 64. 36. “C’était comme dans un rêve. Comme si j’avais oublié que ce virus fait partie de moi. J’ai l’impression qu’il ne peut rien lui arriver parce qu’on va s’aimer.” 37. “Tu t’es revolté par le sexe parce que tu n’as rien trouvé d’autre. Mais tu peux changer si tu le désires. T’ouvrir aux autres. Te mettre à nu. Lâche prise. Laisse tomber tes illusions. Profite de l’épreuve de ta maladie.” 38. “Il suffira d’un mot pour que je revienne.” 39. “Je suis vivant. Le monde n’est pas seulement une chose posée là, extérieure à moi-même. J’y participe. Il m’est offert. Je vais peut-être mourir du sida, mais ce n’est plus ma vie. Je suis dans la vie.” 40. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “Souillé, martyrisé, au bord du fleuve après l’orgasme, j’étais bien; fluide et clair. Transparent.” Collard, Nuits 13.

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41. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “Mes larmes, le contact de la peau de Jamel m’ont-ils lavé des souillures des nuits fauves?” Collard, Nuits 209. 42. “Quand je reviens vers elle je me sens propre.” 43. “Attiré par les hommes et aimant les femmes.” Siclier 11. 44. “Plus de choses à leur dire qu’aux hommes, plus d’échanges.” Jean-Michel Gravier, “Cyril Collard: L’enfer des nuits fauves,” Paris Match 2286 (1993): 50. 45. Simon Watney, “The French Connection,” Sight and Sound 3.6 (1993): 24–25. 46. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975) 4. Silverman 195. See Copjec, Read My Desire, for a critique of film theory’s equation of screen and mirror. 47. I have modified Rodarmor’s translation. “Je me dégoûte; je suis une machine bloquée, sensible seulement à ma propre souffrance. Encore faut-il que celle-ci soit créée artificiellement, selon des rites qui l’associent au plaisir.” Collard, Nuits 88. 48. “Cyril Collard, l’aventurier de la vie,” Le Nouvel Observateur 15–21 Oct. 1992: 138–40. 49. The film journal positif provided one of the few negative opinions of Savage Nights in France, stating in a brief review that “le film de Cyril Collard montre à quel point la sincérité, et la spontanéité, sont encombrantes en matière d’expression dramatique.” positif 381 (1992): 51. 50. For an exception, see Carolyn Durham, “Codes of Contagion: Cyril Collard’s Les Nuits fauves,” French Forum 24.2 (1999): 233–50. 51. Alan Riding, “Discovering a Film Idol’s Feet of Clay,” New York Times 28 Apr. 1994: C20. 52. Cahiers du cinéma 466 (1993) and 476 (1994). 53. “Poli et courtois comme un jeune homme de bonne famille, hardi et provocant comme un loubard, sapé comme un voyou et fier comme un prince, cabochard et prompt à l’insulte, les cheveux fous et l’oeil de velours, doué de la politesse des charmeurs, d’un sourire éloquent tant dans l’ironie que dans la gentillesse, et, en deux mots, extrêmement séduisant.” Siclier 11. 54. “Laura refuse de mettre une capote parce qu’elle pense que l’amour la préserve du danger, que rien ne peut lui arriver. Cet acte, c’est du romantisme pur et dur que les jeunes comprennent.” Damien Ettori, “Cyril Collard: ‘Je ferai d’autres films,’” Paris Match 2286 (1993): 53. 55. “Aujourd’hui, toute une génération inquiète des dérives de l’amour et de la sexualité dans le danger de mort, une génération lucide se reconnaît dans le romantisme du mal d’amour, de la passion plus forte que la confusion sexuelle, dont Cyril Collard s’est fait . . . le peintre contemporain.” Siclier 11. 56. “Jean est bisexuel comme d’autres ont les yeux bleus.” Heymann, “L’hymne à la vie” 18. 57. “Le président de la République François Mitterand adresse une lettre aux parents du défunt où il élève Cyril Collard en ‘exemple pour la jeunesse française.’” Philippe Delannoy, Cyril Collard: L’ange noir (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1995) 168.

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58. “Tu crois que c’est ça qui m’interesse? filmer la mort?” 59. “Tous jouaient la séropositivité.” Toubiana, “Entretien” 28. 60. Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment (New York: Verso, 1994) 83 n.7. See also Zizek, Sublime Object 135. 61. “Il y a dans les salles . . . des applaudissements à chaque séance. Des jeunes, des moins jeunes se lèvent et pleurent, et parlent. Parlent tous d’un hymne à la vie, d’hymne à l’amour. L’effet Collard.” Danièle Heymann, “Nuit des Césars: la vie des morts,” Le Monde 10 Mar. 1993: 18. 62. “Moins un film sur le sida qu’une extraordinaire leçon de vie et d’amours.” Le Monde 6 Mar. 1993: 26. “A travers la maladie, la transmission d’un virus, Cyril Collard parlait d’abord, encore et toujours, de la communication.” Frédéric Strauss, “Cyril Collard, un art neuf,” Cahiers du cinéma 466 (1993): 6. Carolyn Durham argues that the fact that Collard and his audience in France “have repeatedly rejected any attempt to classify Les Nuits fauves as a work about AIDS” is “in keeping with French tradition.” Durham 235. 63. Fabienne A. Worth, “Le Sacré et le sida: Les Représentations de la sexualité et leurs contradictions en France 1971–1996,” Les Temps modernes 592 (1997): 80–81. 64. Star Tom Hanks said that the film “isn’t about AIDS, it’s not about being gay, it’s not about something that’s ripped out of today’s headlines. It’s simply about the injustice of being fired in this fashion,” and his costar Denzel Washington that “this is not a movie about AIDS, really. It’s an emotional self examination.” See Brad Gooch, “A Philadelphia Story,” Advocate 644 (1993): 47; and Richard Alleva, “Arias and Giggles,” Commonweal 121 (1994): 16. Mike Medavoy, the chairman of TriStar Pictures, almost comically insisted that “The film isn’t about AIDS. It isn’t an examination of somebody who has AIDS. We’re not sending the public to look at people who have AIDS.” See Frank Rich, “The Other Quake,” New York Times 23 Jan. 1994: E17. 65. Keith Reader, “Star Martyr,” Sight and Sound 7 (1993): 64. Howard Feinstein, “Savage Nights,” Cineaste 20.4 (1994): 50–51. 66. “Le film phare des années sida.” Gilles Anquetil, “Le tourbillon Collard,” Le Nouvel Observateur 11–17 Mar. 1993: 4. 67. “Le 5 mars, 1993, un garçon est mort, un mythe est né. Cyril Collard n’était pas la première victime célèbre du sida . . . pourtant [il] n’est pas un mort de plus, . . . parce qu’il était jeune et beau, parce qu’il était lui, ambigu et sincère, ange et démon, gai et désespéré, et par-dessus tout prodigieusement vivant, il a donné un visage au destin.” Claude Weill, “SIDA: une génération accuse,” Le Nouvel Observateur 18–24 Mar. 1993: 88–89. 68. “Cyril a donné un visage—son visage—au sida.” Gilles Médioni, Cyril Collard (Paris: Flammarion, 1995) 12. 69. “Le succès est au bout de la vie, dans la mort. La Mort prend la beauté physique de Cyril. L’amant séropositif devient le symbole moderne du romantisme absolu.” Delannoy 13–14.

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70. Toubiana, “Entretien” 32. 71. “Il se rend compte que s’il enlève l’épisode de la capote, il n’y pas d’histoire d’amour. Sans le sida, il n’y a pas d’amour.” Delannoy 139. 72. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1990) 111–12. 73. “Pour les enfants de moi que, sans doute, ils n’auront jamais.” 74. Lee Edelman, “The Mirror and the Tank,” Writing AIDS, ed. Timothy F. Murphy and Suzanne Poirier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 30. 75. Jacques Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf et. al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 251. “Nous prive désormais de tout ce que le rapport à l’autre, et d’abord le désir, pouvait inventer pour protéger l’intégrité et donc l’identité inaliénable de quelque chose comme un sujet.” Derrida, Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1992) 263–64. 76. “Si je me regarde il y a sept ans, j’aurais bien sûr préféré ne pas attraper cette saloperie. En même temps je pense qu’humainement, je suis mieux aujourd’hui. Mes rapports avec les autres, l’extérieur, me donnent l’impression d’être meilleur maintenant. Peut-être est-ce que ce sont des choses qu’on se raconte pour se rassurer. C’est très difficile de savoir ce qui vient vraiment de cette menace et ce qui vient de quelque chose qu’on s’invente pour se faire croire que tout n’est pas horrible.” Toubiana, “Entretien” 30. 77. Hayden White, Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) 150. 78. This can be seen as an ethical move in the psychoanalytic sense, as “the way ‘substance becomes subject’: when, by means of an empty gesture, the subject takes upon himself the leftover which eludes his active intervention.” Zizek, Sublime Object 221. 79. Copjec, Read My Desire 37. 80. Jean-Philippe Guerand and Martine Moriconi, Cyril Collard: La Passion (Paris: Editions J’ai lu, 1993). 81. “Cette multiplicité que j’ai en moi.” Toubiana, “Entretien” 30.

chapter 5 1. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 1. “‘Je n’ai qu’une langue, ce n’est pas la mienne.’” Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre: ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996) 13. 2. Assia Djebar, “Le Romancier dans la cité Arabe,” Europe 474 (1968): 114. 3. Interview with Clarisse Zimra, afterword, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) 168–69.

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4. Zimra, Women of Algiers 169. 5. “Je refusais à la langue française d’entrer dans ma vie, dans mon secret. . . . J’ai senti celle-ci comme ennemie. Ecrire dans cette langue, mais écrire très près de soi, pour ne pas dire de soi-même, avec un arrachement, cela devenait pour moi une entreprise dangereuse.” Interview with Marguerite Le Clézio, “Assia Djebar: Ecrire dans la langue adverse,” Contemporary French Civilization 9.2 (1985): 238. 6. Djebar made a second film, La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli, in 1982. 7. Zimra, Women of Algiers 183. Examples include: “Qui dès lors constitue le spectacle, de quel côté se trouve vraiment le public?” (14); “pan oblique de la montagne” (15). For a comparative study of L’Amour, la fantasia and La Nouba, see Anne Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001), 51–62. 8. Many African filmmakers have noted the ability of film not just to record but to continue oral traditions. Ousmane Sembène, for example, has famously described his role as that of a griot. See, among others, Manthia Diawara, “Popular Culture and Oral Traditions in African Film,” Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham, ed. African Experiences of Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 209–18. 9. “J’ai compris que cette langue écrite n’était même pas la langue des femmes; cette langue pendant des siècles, dans une culture officielle, a fonctionné comme langue dominante, comme le français a fonctionné en langue dominante pendant les cent trente ans de colonisation.” Le Clézio 242. 10. In interview with Zimra, Women of Algiers 169. See also another interview with Clarisse Zimra, “When the Past Answers Our Present,” Callaloo 16.1 (1993): 124. 11. “‘Seul le diable dit ‘je’; seul le diable mange seul; seul le diable dort seul.’” Cited in Déjeux, “Au Maghreb” 185. See also “L’attribut du diable.” Jean Déjeux, La Littérature féminine de langue française au Maghreb (Paris: Karthala, 1994) 64. 12. Zimra, Women of Algiers 172. 13. Le Clézio 232. The only exception to this will be the case of what Déjeux calls témoignage. We will see, however, that Djebar is not writing solely in order to bear witness to historical events. 14. Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1985) 58. All further references will be within the text, with the French original of substantial citations in the endnotes. I have found it necessary to modify many of Blair’s translations. “—Tu vois, j’écris, et ce n’est pas ‘pour le mal,’ pour ‘l’indécent’! Seulement pour dire que j’existe et en palpiter! Ecrire, n’est-ce pas ‘me’ dire?” Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia [1985] (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 72. 15. “Une histoire que chacun raconte, à tour de rôle.” Assia Djebar, “J’ai recherché un langage musical,” CinémAction (1981): 107. For an analysis of the “aesthetic of the fragment” in La Nouba which resonates with my readings of both Camera Lucida and L’Amour, la fantasia, see Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) 90–97.

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16. This analysis is based on the sentence structure of the original French text, and not the English translation, when these differ. 17. “Fillette arabe allant pour la première fois à l’école, un matin d’automne, main dans la main du père. Celui-ci, un fez sur la tête, la silhouette haute et droite dans son costume européen, porte un cartable, il est instituteur à l’école française. Fillette arabe dans un village du Sahel algérien.” Djebar, Amour 11. 18. “Mon père . . . me tenait par la main sur le chemin de l’école. Fillette arabe, dans un village du Sahel algérien.” Djebar, Amour 243. 19. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 49, 341. 20. “Trente-sept témoins, peut-être davantage, vont relater, soit à chaud, soit peu après, le déroulement de ce mois de juillet 1830. Trente-sept descriptions seront publiées, dont trois seulement du côté des assiégés: . . . il reste tout de même trente-deux écrits, en language française, de ce premier acte de l’occupation.” Djebar, Amour 55. 21. Zimra, Women of Algiers 184. “Le mot deviendra l’arme par excellence.” Djebar, Amour 56. 22. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) 257–58. I have slightly modified the translation. “Le fait historique n’est pas plus donné que les autres; c’est l’historien, ou l’agent du devenir historique, qui le constitue par abstraction. . . . [L]’historien et l’agent historique choisissent, tranchent et découpent, car une histoire vraiment totale les confronterait au chaos. . . . L’histoire n’est donc jamais l’histoire, mais l’histoire-pour.” Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon [Presses Pocket], 1962) 306–7. 23. Blair has strangely translated “la fiction de Merle” (Djebar, Amour 44) as “the drama which Merle has thus constructed” (32). “Il est loisible de l’imaginer” and “Supposons-le.” Djebar, Amour 116, 188. 24. Clarisse Zimra, “Disorienting the Subject in Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia,” Yale French Studies 87 (1985): 170. 25. “Je m’attarde, moi, sur l’ordre de Pélissier: —Sortez-les au soleil! Comptezles! Peut-être, perdant son contrôle, aurait-il pu ajouter avec la brusquerie de l’acharnement: ‘Sortons ces sauvages, même raidis ou en putréfaction, et nous aurons alors gagné, nous serons parvenus au bout!’ . . . Je ne sais, je conjecture sur les termes des directives.” Djebar, Amour 87. 26. “Je reconstitue, à mon tour, cette nuit.” Djebar, Amour 84. 27. “‘Une description éloquente et réaliste, beaucoup trop réaliste, des souffrances des Arabes.’” “Les corps exposés au soleil; les voici devenus mots. Les mots voyagent.” Djebar, Amour 89. 28. “Pélissier . . . me tend son rapport et je reçois ce palimpseste pour y inscrire à mon tour la passion calcinée des ancêtres.” Djebar, Amour 93. 29. “Près d’un siècle et demi après Pélissier et Saint-Arnaud, je m’exerce à une spéléologie bien particulière, puisque je m’agrippe aux arêtes des mots français—rap-

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ports, narration, témoignages du passé. . . . une pulsion me secoue, telle une sourde otalgie: remercier Pélissier pour son rapport qui déclencha à Paris une tempête politique mais aussi qui me renvoie nos morts vers lesquels j’élève aujourd’hui ma trame de mots français. . . . Pélissier ‘le barbare,’ lui, le chef guerrier tant décrié ensuite, me devient premier écrivain de la première guerre d’Algérie!” Djebar, Amour 91–92. 30. See also H. Adlai Murdoch, “Rewriting Writing: Identity, Exile and Renewal in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia,” Yale French Studies 83 (1993): 75. 31. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind 21–22. I have slightly modified the translation. “Des résidus et des débris d’évènements: ‘odds and ends,’ dirait l’anglais, ou, en français, des bribes et des morceaux, témoins fossiles de l’histoire d’un individu ou d’une société.” Lévi-Strauss, Pensée sauvage 36. 32. As Emmanuelle Riva’s character in Hiroshima mon amour says of the reconstitutions and reenactments found in the Hiroshima museum, “faute d’autre chose.” Hiroshima mon amour, dir. Alain Resnais, 1959. 33. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) 89. 34. Assia Djebar, “Du français comme butin,” La Quinzaine littéraire 436 (1985): 25. 35. “Qui le dira, qui l’écrira?” Djebar, Amour 15. 36. “Je m’insinue, visiteuse importune, dans le vestibule de ce proche passé, enlevant mes sandales selon le rite habituel, suspendant mon souffle pour tenter de tout réentendre.” Djebar, Amour 16. 37. Hayden White, Content of the Form 2. 38. Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 131–32. “‘S’absenter’ de son discours”; “l’histoire semble se raconter toute seule”; “puisque l’historien prétend laisser le référent parler tout seul.” Barthes, “Le Discours de l’histoire” [1967] Bruissement 168. Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” Rustle of Language 148. 39. Lévi-Strauss 21. “Dire à mon tour. Transmettre ce qui a été dit, puis écrit. Propos d’il y a plus d’un siècle, comme ceux que nous échangeons aujourd’hui, nous, femmes de la même tribu.” Djebar, Amour 187. 40. “Sans écriture.” Djebar, Amour 68. 41. “La vieille aujourd’hui parle et . . . je m’apprête à transcrire son récit. . . . Quand la ‘sainte’ était enfant, elle écoutait sa grand-mère qui fut la bru du vieux Berkani. Les historiens perdent celui-ci de vue, juste avant que l’Emir soit contraint de se rendre. Aïssa el Berkani partit avec sa ‘deira’ au Maroc. Au-delà d’Oudja, sa trace disparaît dans les archives—comme si ‘archives’ signifiait empreinte de la réalité!” Djebar, Amour 201. 42. “A nouveau, un homme parle, un autre écoute, puis écrit. Je bute, moi, contre leurs mots qui circulent; je parle ensuite, je vous parle, à vous, les veuves de cet autre village de montagne, si éloigné ou si proche d’El Aroub! . . . Vingt ans après, je vous rapporte la scène, à vous les veuves.” Djebar, Amour 236.

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43. Hafid Gafaiti suggests that this exclusive focus on orality by the dominant critical discourse on Djebar is Orientalist. See “The Blood of Writing: Assia Djebar’s Unveiling of Women and History,” World Literature Today 70.4 (1996): 822 n.2. 44. “—Je l’ai lu! . . . Un témoin le raconta à un ami qui l’écrivit.” Djebar, Amour 188. 45. “La main de Mériem agonisante tend encore le bouton d’uniforme: à l’amant, à l’ami de l’amant qui ne peut plus qu’écrire. Et le temps s’annihile. Je traduis la relation dans la langue maternelle et je te la rapporte, moi, ta cousine.” Djebar, Amour 189. 46. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that this episode hints at an autobiography that Djebar shares with Lla Zohra in Arabic but withholds from the reader of her French text. See Spivak, “Acting Bits/Identity Talk,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 771. 47. “Je t’imagine, toi, l’inconnue, dont on parle encore de conteuse à conteuse, au cours de ce siècle qui aboutit à mes années d’enfance. Car je prends place à mon tour dans le cercle d’écoute immuable, près des monts Ménacer . . . Je te recrée, toi, l’invisible, . . . Je te ressuscite, au cours de cette traversée que n’évoquera nulle lettre de guerrier français.” Djebar, Amour 214. 48. “Notre pays devient sa fosse: ses véritables héritières—Chérifa de l’arbre, Lla Zohra errante dans les incendies de campagne, le choeur des veuves anonymes d’aujourd’hui—pourraient pousser, en son honneur, le cri de triomphe ancestral, ce hululement de sororité convulsive! . . . J’ai rencontré cette femme sur le terrain de son écriture: dans la glaise du glossaire français, elle et moi, nous voici aujourd’hui enlacées.” Djebar, Amour 250–51. 49. “Eugène Fromentin me tend une main inattendue, celle d’une inconnue qu’il n’a jamais pu dessiner. En juin 1853, lorsqu’il quitte le Sahel pour une descente aux portes du désert, il visite Laghouat occupée après un terrible siège. Il évoque alors un détail sinistre: au sortir de l’oasis que le massacre, six mois après, empuantit, Fromentin ramasse, dans la poussière, une main coupée d’Algérienne anonyme. Il la jette ensuite sur son chemin. Plus tard, je me saisis de cette main vivante, main de la mutilation et du souvenir et je tente de lui faire porter la ‘qalam.’” Djebar, Amour 255. 50. ‘“Comment traduire ce ‘hannouni,’ par un ‘tendre,’ un ‘tendrelou’? Ni ‘mon chéri,’ ni ‘mon coeur.’” Djebar, Amour 94–95. 51. “Arabiser le français. “Djebar, “Le romancier” 119. Djebar opposes this strategy to the Algerian nationalist “Arabization from above,” which she says is an “authoritarian language that is simultaneously a language of men.” Zimra, Women of Algiers 176. 52. “Il faut ramener cette évocation [du passé] à travers la langue maternelle vers la langue paternelle. Car le français est aussi pour moi la langue paternelle. La langue de l’ennemi d’hier est devenue pour moi la langue du père du fait que mon père était instituteur dans une école française; or dans cette langue il y a la mort, par les

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témoignages de la conquête que je ramène. Mais il y a aussi le mouvement, la libération du corps de la femme car, pour moi, fillette allant à l’école française, c’est ainsi que je peux éviter le harem.” Mortimer, “Entretien” 201. 53. For a brief discussion of this aspect of Djebar’s autobiographical work as an example of “métissage” or transculturation, see Françoise Lionnet, “‘Logiques métisses’: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Representations,” College Literature 19/20.3/1 (October 1992–February 1993): 109–10. 54. Zimra, Women of Algiers 184. 55. “J’ai été dès mon enfance, de par ma situation de colonisée, installée dans la langue française, parce que je fus colonisée.” Le Clézio 233. Rachid Boudjedra has similarly written, “Pour moi, Algérien, je n’ai pas choisi le français. Il m’a choisi, ou plutôt il s’est imposé à moi à travers des siècles de sang et de larmes et à travers l’histoire douloureuse de la longue nuit coloniale.” Lettres algériennes (Paris: Grasset, 1995) 30. 56. “Je suis née en dix-huit cent quarante-deux, lorsque le commandant de SaintArnaud vient détruire la zaouia des Beni Ménacer, ma tribu d’origine, . . . C’est aux lueurs de cet incendie que je parvins, un siècle après, à sortir du harem; c’est parce qu’il m’éclaire encore que je trouve la force de parler.” Djebar, Amour 243. 57. Assia Djebar, So Vast the Prison, trans. Betsy Wing (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999) 13–14. Originally in Vaste est la prison (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) 13–14. 58. “J’annonçais ouvertement que je vais écrire une autobiographie. J’essaie de comprendre pourquoi je résiste à cette poussée de l’autobiographie. Je résiste peutêtre parce que mon éducation de femme arabe est de ne jamais parler de soi, en même temps aussi parce que je parlais en langue française.” Interview with Mildred Mortimer, “Entretien avec Assia Djebar, écrivain algérien,” Research in African Literatures 19.2 (1988): 203. 59. “Tandis que j’inscris la plus banale des phrases, aussitôt la guerre ancienne entre deux peuples entrecroise ses signes au creux de mon écriture.” Djebar, Amour 242. 60. “La langue française, corps et voix, s’installe en moi comme un orgeuilleux préside, tandis que la langue maternelle, toute en oralité, en hardes dépenaillées, résiste et attaque, entre deux essoufflements.” Djebar, Amour 241. 61. “Le français devient la langue de dehors; quand on rentre à la maison, l’arabe reprend son rôle de langue d’intimité, du rapport à la mère, aux ancêtres.” Le Clézio 233. 62. “Quand j’étudie ainsi, mon corps s’enroule, retrouve quelle secrète architecture de la cité”; “mes mots ne se chargent pas de réalité charnelle.” Djebar, Amour 208. 63. “Il me faut renverser mon corps.” Djebar, Amour 58. 64. “Je décidai que l’amour résidait nécessairement ailleurs, au-delà des mots et des gestes publics. . . . [L]a langue française pouvait tout m’offrir de ses trésors in-

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épuisables, mais pas un, pas le moindre de ses mots d’amour ne me serait réservé.” Djebar, Amour 38. 65. “La passion, une fois écrite, s’éloignait de moi définitivement.” Djebar, Amour 72. 66. “Je cohabite avec la langue française: mes querelles, mes élans, mes soudains ou violents mutismes forment incidents d’une ordinaire vie de ménage. . . . Le français m’est langue marâtre.” Djebar, Amour 239–40. Déjeux cites Boudjedra as another Algerian who refers (in his 1969 novel La Répudiation) to French as his “stepmother tongue.” Jean Déjeux, La Littérature Maghrébine d’expression française (Paris: PUF, 1992) 103. 67. “Jamais, jamais, je ne me laisserai marier un jour à un inconnu qui, en une nuit, aurait le droit de me toucher! C’est pour cela que j’écris!” Djebar, Amour 22. 68. “Ecrire en langue étrangère, hors de l’oralité des deux langages de ma région natale, . . . écrire m’a ramenée aux cris des femmes sourdement révoltées de mon enfance, à ma seule origine.” Djebar, Amour 229. 69. “La révolution était manifeste: mon père, de son propre écriture, et sur une carte qui allait voyager de ville en ville, qui allait passer sous tant et tant de regards masculins, y compris pour finir celui du facteur de notre village, un facteur musulman de surcroît, mon père donc avait osé écrire le nom de sa femme qu’il avait désignée à la manière occidentale.” Djebar, Amour 48. 70. “L’un et l’autre, mon père par l’écrit, ma mère dans ses nouvelles conversations où elle citait désormais sans fausse honte son époux, se nommaient réciproquement, autant dire s’aimaient ouvertement.” Djebar, Amour 49. Andrea Page, with reference to these passages of L’Amour, la fantasia, has criticized Djebar for having fallen unawares, as a result of her schooling, into a Western ideal of love. This accusation, which not only ignores Djebar’s earlier association between Arabic and the body, but also denies a love based on equality between partners to any “nonWesterner,” seems not only unjustified but condescending. Page, “Rape or Obscene Copulation?: Ambivalence and Complicity in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia,” Women in French Studies 2 (1994): 42–54. 71. “La langue encore coagulée des Autres m’a enveloppée, dès l’enfance, en tunique de Nessus, don d’amour de mon père qui, chaque matin, me tenait par la main sur le chemin de l’école.” Djebar, Amour 243. 72. Ovid, Metamorphoses book 9, lines 166–67. 73. “Après cinq siècles d’occupation romaine, . . . entreprend sa biographie en latin.” “Comme Augustin, peu lui importe qu’il écrive . . . une langue installée sur la terre ancestrale dans des effusions de sang! . . . Il obéit soudain à un désir de retour sur soi: le voici, à lui-même, objet et sujet d’une froide autopsie.” Djebar, Amour 241–42. 74. “Sa chair se desquame, semble-t-il, en lambeaux du parler d’enfance qui ne s’écrit plus.” Djebar, Amour 178. 75. “Me mettre à nu dans cette langue me fait entretenir un danger permanent de déflagration.” Djebar, Amour 241. 76. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York:

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Grove Press, 1965) 37–38. Translation of L’An V de la révolution algérienne (Paris: François Maspero, 1962). In 1958, while living in exile in Tunisia, Djebar wrote for the FLN newspaper run by Fanon, El Moudjahid. Rita Faulkner sets Djebar’s conception of the veil against Fanon’s, but we will see that there is no easy dichotomy to be drawn. See Faulkner, “Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Women, Veils, and Land,” World Literature Today 70.4 (1996): 847–55. 77. Fanon, Dying Colonialism 42. 78. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 7. Alloula, Le Harem colonial (Images d’un sous-érotisme) (Paris: Garance, 1981) 11. Alloula was Djebar’s second husband. Although Alloula dedicated this book “to the memory of Roland Barthes” and prefaces several of his chapters and counter-readings of colonial photographs of Algerian women with citations from Camera Lucida, these readings are concerned with the studia (rather than the puncta) of the photographs. 79. “La femme voilée voit la rue à travers un triangle. . . . Le premier principe, c’est de passer inaperçue, de profiter du masque pour voir.” Wadi Bouzar, “Entretien avec Assia Djebar,” Lectures Maghrébines (Publisud, 1984) 156. 80. Fanon, Dying Colonialism 47. 81. “Une Algérie-femme impossible à apprivoiser.” “Les femmes prisonnières ne peuvent être ni spectatrices, ni objets du spectacle dans le pseudo-triomphe. Plus grave, elles ne regardent pas. . . . Elles se masquent toutes comme elles peuvent, et elles le feraient avec leur sang, si besoin était . . . L’indigène, même quand il semble soumis, n’est pas vaincu.” Djebar, Amour 69. 82. Fanon, Dying Colonialism 59. I have restored a clause, “to break into pieces,” that was left out of the English translation. 83. Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. Majolijn de Jager (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) 139. I have modified de Jager’s translation. “‘Je ne sors plus protégée (c’est-à-dire voilée, recouverte)’ dira la femme qui se libère du drap; ‘je sors déshabillée ou même dénudée.’ Le voile qui soustrayait aux regards est de fait ressenti comme ‘habit en soi,’ ne plus l’avoir, c’est être totalement exposée.” Assia Djebar, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Paris: des femmes, 1980) 152. 84. Fanon, Dying Colonialism 107. 85. “—Elle ne se voile donc pas encore, ta fille? interroge telle ou telle matrone . . . qui questionne ma mère, lors d’une des noces de l’été. Je dois avoir treize, quatorze ans peut-être. —Elle lit! répond avec raideur ma mère. Dans ce silence de gêne installée, le monde entier s’engouffre. Et mon propre silence. . . . ‘Elle lit,’ c’est-àdire, en langue arabe, ‘elle étudie.’ . . . ‘Elle lit,’ autant dire que l’écriture à lire . . . est toujours source de révélation: de la mobilité du corps dans mon cas, et donc de ma future liberté.” Djebar, Amour 202–3. 86. “Du fait que j’aie pu échapper au voile grâce à la langue française, . . . je me concevais dehors autant en garçon qu’en fille.” Interview with Lise Gauvin, “Terri-

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toires des langues: Entretien avec Assia Djebar,” L’Ecrivain francophone à la croisée des langues (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1997) 30. 87. “Corps nu—puisque je me dépouille des souvenirs d’enfance”; “L’écriture est dévoilement, en public, devant les voyeurs qui ricanent.” Djebar, Amour 161, 204. 88. “Écrire à la première personne du singulier et de la singularité, corps nu et voix à peine déviée par le timbre étranger, rameute tous les dangers symboliques.” Djebar, “Du français comme butin” 25. 89. “Comment trouver la force de m’arracher le voile, sinon parce qu’il me faut en couvrir la plaie inguérissable, suant les mots tout à côté?” Djebar, Amour 245. 90. “Cette mise à nu, déployée dans la langue de l’ancien conquérant, lui qui, plus d’un siècle durant, a pu s’emparer de tout, sauf précisément des corps féminins, cette mise à nu renvoie étrangement à la mise à sac du siècle précédent.” Djebar, Amour 178. 91. “Ecrire en français sur ma propre vie, c’était prendre une distance inévitable.” Gauvin 23–4. “Une reprise du voile symbolique.” Djebar, Amour 144. 92. “Certains écrivent pour se dévoiler; moi, j’écris pour me cacher.” Interview with Clarisse Zimra, “Not So Far from Medina,” World Literature Today 70.4 (1996): 833 n.12. 93. “Vingt ou vingt-cinq ans après mes débuts en littérature, je peux dire que le français que j’utilisais, en fait, dès le départ, pour moi est un voile. Une façon de se dissimuler.” Le Clézio 236. 94. “Voilaient l’amour plus qu’elles ne l’exprimaient.” Djebar, Amour 71. 95. “Comme si la langue française aveuglait les mâles voyeurs de mon clan et qu’à ce prix, je puisse circuler, dégringoler toutes les rues, annexer le dehors pour mes compagnes cloîtrées.” Djebar, Amour 204. 96. “Tentative—ou tentation—de délimiter mon propre silence . . . Dévoiler et simultanément tenir secret ce qui doit le rester.” Djebar, Amour 75. See Laurence Huughe, “‘Ecrire comme un voile’: The Problematics of the Gaze in the Work of Assia Djebar,” World Literature Today 70.4 (1996): 867–76. Huughe reads the play of the veil in Djebar’s work as a game of seduction. 97. “Croyant ‘me parcourir,’ je ne fais que choisir un autre voile.” Djebar, Amour 243. 98. “Dans le langage quotidien, me revient une condamnation que la gravité rendait définitive: . . . la seule réellement coupable . . . était ‘la femme qui crie.’ . . . Refuser de voiler sa voix et se mettre ‘à crier,’ là gisait l’indécence, la dissidence. Car le silence de toutes les autres perdait brusquement son charme pour révéler la vérité: celle d’être une prison irrémédiable.” Djebar, Amour 228–29. 99. Zimra, Women of Algiers 173. 100. Assia Djebar, “Behind the Veil: Women on Both Sides of the Camera,” UNESCO Courier (1989): 37. 101. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (London: James Currey, 1986) 26.

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102. “Langue natale du ‘je,’ langue de l’émergence pénible du moi.” Déjeux, Littérature féminine 63. “Au Maghreb, la langue française ‘langue natale du je,’” Littératures autobiographiques de la francophonie, ed. Martine Mathieu (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996) 182, 181. 103. “Car on admet mal qu’ils puissent dire l’être intime et secret dans la langue de l’autre.” Mimouni, “L’Algérie sans la France,” L’Algérie des Français, ed. Charles Ageron (Paris: Seuil, 1993) 340. 104. Abdelkebir Khatibi, Love in Two Languages, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) 46. “Aussi avait-il besoin de l’autre langue—la tienne étrangère en moi—pour se raconter son inadaptation au monde.” Khatibi, Amour bilingue (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1983) 54. 105. Patricia Geesey, “Collective Autobiography: Algerian Women and History in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia,” Dalhousie French Studies 35 (1996): 153, 156, 157. Valerie Orlando also considers the text to be a “collective autobiography.” Orlando, Nomadic Voices of Exile (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999) 119. 106. Mary Jean Green, “Dismantling the Colonizing Text: Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia,” French Review 66.6 (1993): 963. 107. Katherine Gracki, “Assia Djebar et l’écriture de l’autobiographie au pluriel,” Women in French Studies 2 (1994): 55. 108. “‘Pourquoi moi? Pourquoi à moi seule, dans la tribu, cette chance?’” “Je suis expulsée de là-bas pour entendre et ramener à mes parentes les traces de la liberté.” Djebar, Amour 239, 244. 109. “Petite soeur étrange qu’en langue étrangère j’inscris désormais, ou que je voile.” Djebar, Amour 160. 110. “Chérifa! . . . Ta voix s’est prise au piège; mon parler français la déguise sans l’habiller. A peine si je frôle l’ombre de ton pas! Les mots que j’ai cru te donner s’enveloppent de la même serge de deuil que ceux de Bosquet ou de Saint-Arnaud . . . Mots torches qui éclairent mes compagnes, mes complices; d’elles, définitivement, ils me séparent. Et sous leur poids, je m’expatrie.” Djebar, Amour 161. 111. Susanna Egan has invoked Bakhtin to argue not only that diasporic experience always “foregrounds the conflict of cultures, languages, memories, and desires in the process of self-invention and self-construction,” but that “diaspora writing is quintessentially autobiographical.” She continues, however, in the vein of the “collective autobiography” argument I have sketched above, diluting what I believe to be the strength of truly dialogic autobiography such as Djebar’s by concluding that the diasporic author is “more concerned with the situation than with the self.” Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) 157, 226. 112. “Jamais le ‘je’ de la première personne ne sera utilisé.” “Comment dire ‘je,’ puisque ce serait dédaigner les formules-couvertures qui maintiennent le trajet individuel dans la résignation collective? . . . Comment entreprendre de regarder son enfance, même si elle se déroule différente?” Djebar, Amour 176, 177.

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113. Zimra, “When the Past Answers Our Present” 125. 114. “Que non, vous ne direz pas ‘nous,’ vous ne vous cacherez pas, vous femme singulière, derrière la ‘Femme’; vous ne serez jamais, ni au début, ni à la fin, ‘porteparole.’ . . . Que non, vous direz ‘je’—je et jeu pour vous toute seule—, vous chanterez, vous danserez et c’est cela justement que vous désirez inscrire.” Assia Djebar, “Ecrire, sans nul héritage,” Trans-européennes 5 (1994–95): 27–28. 115. “Voulant, à chaque pas, parvenir à la transparence, je m’engloutis davantage dans l’anonymat des aïeules!” Djebar, Amour 243. 116. “Se tisse comme fiction.” Djebar, Amour 243. 117. “Cette structure ‘en fantasia’ me permettait d’entrelacer ma propre voix avec les voix des autres femmes. Cela m’a donné peu de courage pour parler de moi, intimement.” Mortimer, “Entretien” 203. 118. Benveniste 202. “‘Nous’ est, non pas une multiplication d’objets identiques, mais une jonction entre le ‘je’ et le ‘non-je’ . . . la présence du ‘je’ est constitutive du ‘nous.’” Benveniste, Problèmes I 233. 119. A recent exception is Michael Syrotinski, who in his analysis of subjectivity in Francophone African literature maintains that Guinean Laye Camara’s 1953 autobiographical novel L’Enfant noir [Black Child] “testifies not only to an individual life but also to the life of a community.” See Syrotinski, Singular Performances: Reinscribing the Subject in Francophone African Writing (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002) 44. 120. Avrom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) 472, 13 n.14. 121. Gusdorf 29. See also Gusdorf’s “De l’autobiographie initiatique à l’autobiographie genre littéraire,” Revue de l’histoire littéraire de la France (1975): 957–94. 122. James Olney, Tell Me Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) viii. 123. See, for example, James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: An Introduction,” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical 25. 124. Olney, Tell Me Africa 17. 125. Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 200. 126. Charles Larson, “Heroic Ethnocentrism,” The Post-colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995) 65. 127. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 69. 128. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967) 85.

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129. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967) 98. 130. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 116, 113. 131. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 136. 132. Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments (London: Heinemann, 1988) 38. Achebe’s caveat is a response to Octave Mannoni’s very Jamesonian analysis of the Merina of Malgasy: “‘We do not find in him that disharmony almost amounting to conflict between the social being and the inner personality which is so frequently met with among the civilized.’” 133. “Le ‘nous’ caché dans le ‘je’ est opposé au ‘nous’ de l’Occident. Il y a ‘nous’ et les autres.” Déjeux, Littérature féminine 66. 134. “Puisque le ‘je’ ne peut se dire dans une langue qui lui est étrangère . . . ne peut au double sens de ‘n’a pas le droit,’ ‘est incapable de.’” Monique Gadant, “La permission de dire ‘je’: Réflexions sur les femmes et l’écriture,” Peuples méditerranéens 48–49 (1989): 97. 135. Mildred Mortimer, “Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet: A Study in Fragmented Autobiography,” Research in African Literatures 28.2 (1997): 103. 136. “J’ai compris quelque part qu’il y avait une rupture entre ma voix et mon écrit, que c’était sur cela qu’il fallait dorénavant réfléchir et parler.” Le Clézio 243. 137. “L’écriture autobiographique est forcément une écriture rétrospective où votre ‘je’ n’est pas toujours le je, ou c’est un ‘je-nous’ ou c’est un ‘je’ démultiplié.” Gauvin 33. 138. White, Tropics of Discourse 42.

chapter 6 A version of half of this chapter was published as “Mixing Impossible Genres; David Achkar and African AutoBiographical Documentary” in New Literary History 34.2 (Spring 2003). I would like to thank Ralph Cohen for his support as well as the permission to reprint. 1. Nuruddin Farah, Maps (New York: Penguin Books, 1986) 148. 2. I have chosen to focus on two films rather than one in order to provide a sense of what I believe to be an important genre (which itself consciously mixes genres) within contemporary Francophone African cinema. Other examples include Jean-Marie Teno’s Africa, I Will Fleece You and Vacation in the Country (1992 and 2000, Cameroon), Mweze Ngangura’s The King, the Cow, and the Banana Tree (1994, Congo), Samba Félix Ndiaye’s Letter to Senghor (1997, Senegal), and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda (1997, Mauritania). 3. Octavio Getino, “Some Notes of the Concept of a ‘Third Cinema,’” New

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Latin American Cinema, ed. Michael Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997) 99. 4. Michael Martin, “The Unifinished Social Practice of the New Latin American Cinema: Introductory Notes,” New Latin American Cinema 18. Ana M. López, “An ‘Other’ History: The New Latin American Cinema,” New Latin American Cinema 139. 5. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” New Latin American Cinema 34, 37. 6. Julio Garcia Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” New Latin American Cinema 79. 7. López, “An ‘Other’ History” 147, 149 8. Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: An Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982) 95. 9. Teshome Gabriel, “Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics,” Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemin (London: British Film Institute, 1989) 57. 10. Clyde Taylor, “Black Cinema in the Post-aesthetic Era,” Questions of Third Cinema 90, 106. 11. Tahar Cheriaa, “Le groupe et le héros,” Camera nigra: Le Discours du film africain, ed. Victor Bachy (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1984): 109. Elizabeth Malkmus and Roy Armes, Arab and African Film Making (London: Zed Books, 1991) 210. 12. Gabriel, “Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory” 58. 13. Ahmed Sékou Touré, La Révolution culturelle (Conakry: Imprimerie nationale ‘Patrice Lumumba,’ 1969) 360, 364. 14. Tomás Gutierrez Alea, “The Viewer’s Dialectic,” New Latin American Cinema 122. 15. Gabriel, “Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory” 60. 16. Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World 24, 95. 17. Renov 4, 5. Renov, as I noted in Chapter 3, has worked primarily on avantgarde and experimental documentary films made in the United States. Kathleen McHugh has recently addressed similar questions with a wider North American range in an essay on Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory and Ramiro Puerta and Guillermo Verdecchia’s Crucero/Crossroads, which she deems “transnational cinematic autobiography.” See “Giving ‘Minor’ Pasts a Future” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 155–77. 18. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) 56. 19. Nichols, Representing Reality 57, 60. Frank Ukadike has briefly examined Allah Tantou and Africa, I Will Fleece You in relation to Nichols’s category of reflexive documentary. See “African Cinematic Reality: The Documentary Tradition as an Emerging Trend,” Research in African Literatures 26.3 (Fall 1995): 88–96.

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20. “A mon père, et à tous les prisonniers du Camp Boiro, et d’ailleurs.” Allah Tantou, dir. David Achkar, perf. Michel Montanary, Archibald Films, 1991. All translations mine. Achkar died suddenly in 1998 at the age of 38, having completed a second film, Kiti: Justice in Guinea (1996), but leaving a third unfinished. 21. “Beaucoup de fils admirent leurs pères. J’ai très peu connu mon père. Ce que je sais de lui, c’est ce que ma mère ou ses amis m’en ont dit. Mais aussi au travers de ce qu’il nous a écrit.” 22. I will use quotation marks when referring to David Achkar’s father as reenacted in his son’s film in order to distinguish between “Marof Achkar” as acted by Montanary and the historical Marof Achkar as represented in photographs, newsreels, and home movies. Without a first name, Achkar will always refer to the filmmaker, David Achkar. 23. “1958. La Guinée, ton pays, au travers de Sékou Touré ton président, dit non au projet de constitution proposé par le général de Gaulle, et devient ainsi le premier pays d’Afrique francophone indépendent. Sékou Touré, lui, devient un mythe, l’homme providentiel de l’Afrique. Toi, alors chanteur et danseur dans les Ballets Africains, tu te mets comme tant d’autres, au service de ton pays, et commence une brillante carrière à l’ONU.” 24. Pat Aufderheide, “Memory and History in Subsaharan African Cinema: An Interview with David Achkar,” Visual Anthropology Review 9.2 (Fall 1993): 112. It is interesting in this regard that several critics, including Frank Ukadike and Stephen Holden, have incorrectly asserted that David Achkar himself is playing the role of his father, either not noticing or resisting Achkar’s reflexive strategy. See Ukadike’s “African Cinematic Reality” as well as his “The Other Voices of Documentary: Allah Tantou and Afrique, je te plumerai,” Iris 18 (1995): 81–94; and also Stephen Holden, “Independence in Africa and Death in High Places,” New York Times 30 Sept. 1992: C18. 25. Aufderheide 112. 26. Nichols, Representing Reality 29–30. 27. “Allah Tantou,” Le Film africain 2 (May 1991). 28. “Je me nomme Achkar Marof. Né en 1930 à Coyah, fils de Moustapha Achkar et de Damaë Camara. Marié, quatre enfants reconnus, artiste, ex-Ambassadeur.” 29. “C’est un scénario, un mauvais scénario.” 30. “C’est beaucoup plus sérieux. . . . Il faut que le Peuple croie que tu gagnais beaucoup.” 31. Nichols, Representing Reality 21. 32. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 32. 33. Nichols, Representing Reality 22. 34. Silverman 214. 35. Silverman 217.

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36. Oliver Lovesey, “The African Prison Diary as ‘National Allegory,’” Nationalism vs. Internationalism (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1996) 210. 37. Lovesey 214. 38. “Mon fils. Les outrages sont les armes qui restent à la disposition du faible, quand il lui apparaît qu’il ne peut plus rien espérer des attitudes conciliantes. J’étais si bien inséré dans son régime que je n’ai pas pu sentir ce qui allait se passer. Je voyais des choses comme un étudiant, je ne pouvais voir ni comprendre ce qui se cachait derrière chacune de leurs attitudes, derrière chacun de leurs mots. Naïf, plus jamais.” 39. “Victime d’une purge. Tous les trois ou quatre ans, les gouvernements politiquement faibles, qui ont connu des échecs, doivent pour se justifier, accuser et condamner certains de leurs membres. Tu étais parmi les premiers. Ta voix et ta personnalité, devenues trop fortes à l’étranger, leur faisaient peur. Une fois que le Comité Revolutionnaire avait obtenu ce qu’il desirait, une déposition signée, enregistrée, et repertoriée, elle pouvait être utilisée à tout moment. Ainsi fonctionnait le régime. Personne n’était à l’abri.” 40. “Illusion, déception, réalisme, efficacité, ce sont les étapes par lesquelles passent le jeune diplomate Africain . . .,” “Il est trop tôt pour juger de l’évolution démocratique en Afrique . . .,” “La théorie marxiste, qui est une idéologie de gauche . . ..” 41. “J’espère que j’apprendrai plus, parce que j’espère trouver la liberté et la réalisation personnelle au travers de cette épreuve. . . . Je ne me suis jamais senti aussi libre qu’en ce moment. Bien sûr c’est difficile d’être en prison, mais ce n’est que l’asservissement physique. Mon esprit n’a jamais été aussi libre qu’en ce moment. Parce que je sais exactement qui je suis et ce que je veux, où je vais et pourquoi. Je connais précisément mon idéal. . . . J’espère bientôt tout recommencer. Je regrette d’avoir participé à ce gouvernement.” 42. “Mais de toi, aucune nouvelle.” 43. “C’était un matin comme celui-ci, sur une route comme celle-ci, que j’ai été fusillé, en janvier 1971.” 44. “Dédié à mon fils F. M. David Achkar à l’occasion de sa 10ème anniversaire.” 45. Lisa McNee, “Autobiographical Subjects,” Research in African Literatures 28.2 (1997): 84. See also Carol Boyce Davies, “Private Selves and Public Spaces: Autobiography and the African Woman Writer,” Neohelicon 17.2 (1990): 187–88. 46. Ahmed Sékou Touré, L’Afrique en marche, t. X (Conakry: Imprimerie nationale ‘Patrice Lumumba,’ 1967) 520. 47. “On désire être continué après ses enfants. Qui désire être oublié, après?” 48. “Du coté du Katanga, on dit qu’un géant dans la nuit est tombé, . . . c’était un géant, Maman, qui dans la nuit tomba, cette nuit-là, du côté du Katanga.” Lumumba: La Mort du prophète, dir. Raoul Peck, Velvet Film, 1992. All translations mine. I would like to thank Carina Yervasi both for introducing me to Peck’s film and for sharing her work on it with me.

notes

207

49. “Un prophète prédit l’avenir. Mais le prophète est mort, et l’avenir avec lui. Aujourd’hui ses fils et ses filles pleurent sans même le savoir, sans même le connaître. Son message est perdu, son nom est resté. Faut-il ressusciter le prophète? Faut-il lui redonner la parole une dernière fois?” 50. “En 1962, je rejoins mon père au Congo avec le reste de ma famille. Mon père faisait partie de ce premier contingent de professeurs, de médecins, d’ingénieurs haitiens, recrutés pour le Congo. Quelqu’un avait imaginé que des noirs parlant français seraient plus aptes à combler le déficite des cadres que laissaient les Belges derrière eux. On nous logea dans un des ces quartiers des villas abandonnés, où une grande partie de la nouvelle bourgeoisie Congolaise avait elle aussi amenagé. J’avais huit ans, et j’apprenais à connaître un nouveau monde, un nouvelle langue. Aujourd’hui le Congo est devenu Zaire, et Léopoldville Kinshasa, et ma mère, décédée, n’est plus là pour voir ces images.” 51. “Un jour, ma mère ramène à la maison une photo trouvée dans un tiroir poussièreux de son bureau à l’Hôtel de Ville. Patrice Lumumba—j’entendais ce nom pour la première fois.” 52. “Ma mère raconte . . . Il était une fois un roi, qui rêvait d’un royaume quatrevingts fois plus grand que le sien. Il fit tellement de tapage à la conférence de Berlin que ses collègues lui firent cadeau du Congo, en espérant que le gâteau, trop lourd à digérer, l’étouffe. Soixante-quinze ans plus tard son arrière petit-fils Baudouin I doit rendre ce térritoire à ses propriétaires.” 53. “Ma mère raconte . . . La règle de domination de Belges est simple. Il faut bien traiter les nègres. Il faut les garder sots. Mais les sots en ont marre et voilà devenus nationalistes.” 54. “L’indépendence du Congo constitue l’aboutissement de l’oeuvre conçue par le génie du roi Léopold II, entreprise par lui avec un courage tenace et continué avec persévérance par la Belgique. Elle marque une oeuvre décisive dans les destinées, non seulement du Congo . . . mais de l’Afrique toute entière.” 55. “De l’autre côté de la tribune, quelqu’un fignole un discours non prévu au protocole. Il va dire ce qu’il ne faut pas dire.” 56. “Combattants de l’indépendence, aujourd’hui victorieux, je vous salue au nom du gouvernement congolais. A vous tous, mes amis, qui avaient lutté sans relâche à nos côtés, je vous demande de faire, de ce 30 juin 1960, une date illustre, que vous garderez, ineffaçablement gravée dans vos coeurs, une date dont vous enseignerez avec fierté la signification à vos enfants, pour que ceux-ci, à leur tour, fassent connaître à leurs fils et petit-fils l’histoire glorieuse de notre lutte pour la liberté.” 57. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998) 299. 58. Hochschild 299. 59. “Les images ont été perdus, la voix est restée.” 60. “Nous avons connu les ironies, les insultes, les coups que nous devious subir au matin, midi et soir, parce que nous étions des nègres. Qui oubliera qu’à un noir,

208

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on disait ‘tu,’ non certes comme à un ami, mais parce que le ‘vous’ honorable était reservé aux seuls blancs.” 61. “Il y a les images, et ceux qui les créent.” 62. “Des trous noirs. Des images dans ma tête. Des images interdites, mais inoffensives. Le maréchal du Zaire me laissera peut-être filmer dans son pays, mais ses services de renseignement sont irrités et s’agitent. Ces trous noirs seraient-ils plus corrosifs que les images qu’ils sont supposés cacher?” 63. Manthia Diawara, “The ‘I’ Narrator in Black Diaspora Documentary,” Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, ed. Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) 316–67. 64. “La scène m’intrigue. Que font ces gens ensemble? Les uns paraissent s’ennuyer, les autres sont là par hasard, d’autres y sont contraints. Un tableau flamand insolite—la conférence de presse. Une scène d’adieu peut-être, à l’insu des participants. Seul l’homme au milieu a l’air de savoir ce qu’il fait là. Tel un Christ, il est entouré, mais il est seul. Peut-être ne l’écoute-on même plus. Peut-être des acteurs placés là, comme figurants. Un metteur en scène leur a dit, ‘Soyez objectifs.’” 65. “Le metteur en scène a dit—Action.” 66. “Aux archives de la British Movietone News à Londres, ces images ont coûté 3.000 dollars la minute. On s’habitue. Tout passe. Les images restent. Un Congolais gagne 150 dollars par an. La mémoire meurtrie coûte cher.” 67. “En regardant ces photos, je me demande ce que peuvent bien cacher ces visages. Quel rêve, quel secret, qu’ont donc ces hommes en commun? Celui-ci bat sa femme. Celui-là aussi. Celui-ci est profondément Chrétien, mais un joueur incorrigible. Celui-là aime la musique, mais préfère se saoûler au vin de palme. Lui, rêve d’un long voyage en bateau au pays de ces blancs qu’il admire. Lui voudrait être un grand cuisinier, ou au moins un soldat. Lui ne sait toujours pas lire mais paie durement les études de son fils aîné à l’Université de Louvain. Et puis les autres . . . Eux aussi ont leurs rêves, leurs illusions, leurs destins. Tous réunis par hasard sur cette photo jaunie. Réunis par hasard par l’ambition d’un roi.” 68. “Lui s’appelle peut-être Ramon, comme un ami à moi. Et Marie-Claire qui n’arrive toujours pas.” 69. “Une famille. Une famille comme les autres. Non, ambition ne se lit pas sur les visages. Ne mords pas la main qui te nourrit. Il prendra la main et tout le reste. Et puis un jour, il se nommera lui-même maréchal.” 70. “Que dire d’une histoire de meurtre vieille de 30 ans?” 71. “Et s’il n’y avait pas eu l’uranium du Katanga pour construire la bombe d’Hiroshima?” 72. “En 1877, l’explorateur anglais Stanley part à la découverte du fleuve Congo. Près d’un siècle plus tard, ma famille et moi découvrons l’Europe. . . . On n’arrive pas à se débarrasser de cette impression de surprendre les acteurs derrière les rideaux.” 73. “Le prophète rode dans cette ville. Il revient chatouiller les pieds des coupables endormis. C’est bien fait. Ils sont liés à jamais à son destin.”

notes

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74. “J’ai voulu retrouver les morceaux du puzzle. Je suis parti chercher les traces du prophète. Pourquoi le chercher ici à Bruxelles et pas ailleurs? Pourquoi ailleurs? J’ai cherché l’âme du prophète, celui qui voyage sans retour, celui qui n’arrive plus à trouver son repos. Bloqué, perdu, il est loin de chez lui. Le maréchal du Zaire ne le laisserait-il pas rentrer, lui non plus?” 75. “Le prophète rôde sur la Grande Place. Il revient chatouiller les pieds des coupables.” 76. “Le prophète ne veut pas se faire oublier. Il cherche un peu de chaleur, et embête tout le monde.” 77. “On a dû s’y prendre à deux fois pour faire disparaître les corps. Il paraît qu’on a vu deux blancs dans la Savanne, deux hommes en uniforme de police. Il paraît qu’ils ont roulé toute la nuit. Dans la camionnette des travaux publiques, il paraît qu’il y avait une scie à métaux, 2 couteaux de boucher, 25 litres d’acide sulfurique, de l’essence, un gros tonneau vide, et du whiskey. . . . Le commissaire et son frère travaillent toute la nuit. Ils déterrent les corps, ils scient, ils brulent, ils se saoûlent au whiskey. L’acide fait disparaître la plupart des morceaux.” A documentary entitled Who Killed Patrice Lumumba, shown in 2000 on Belgian television, includes an interview with former Belgian police commissioner Gerard Soete, in which he describes using acid to dissolve Lumumba’s body in January of 1961. 78. “Le prophète soigne son image et vient dire bonjour en voisin.” 79. “On raconte qu’ils n’ont pas voulu prier. On raconte qu’ils sont morts dans la dignité. On raconte que seul Okito a légèrement tremblé, avant de se placer devant le peloton d’execution. C’était sans doute le froid. . . . On raconte qu’aujourd’hui encore, les arbres dans la Savanne sont criblés de balles.” 80. “Mes souvenirs du Congo, je les déchiffre peu à peu.” “On venait aider nos frères de couleur, nous avait-on dit. Mais 200 ans de destin différent nous séparait. Nous étions noirs, mais nous étions blancs. Nous étions différents. Nous étions des Mundele. Avec mes camarades, j’exploitais les ambivalences du moment. J’étais Congolais quand cela m’arrangeait, et Mundele quand cela me dispensait d’une corvée dans le groupe.” 81. “Un jour, mon père me laisse imprudemment tenir sa caméra. Mes premières images. Aujourd’hui, ma fille, qui les regarde avec moi, me demande ma réaction à l’époque devant ce taureau que l’on tue. Je n’ai pas osé lui dire que mon plus grand problème c’était de garder la mise au point.” 82. “Je sais, elle n’est pas belle, mon histoire. Mais c’est l’histoire de Patrice . . . On dit que le fils de Tolenga est mort. Mais ceux qui le disent n’ont jamais pu montrer son corps.” 83. Lumumba, dir. Raoul Peck, Velvet Film, 2000. 84. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) 1. 85. Olney, Tell Me Africa 37. 86. Fredric Jameson, “A Brief Response,” Social Text 17 (1987): 26. 87. Ngugi 26, 28. See also chapter 5, n.63.

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88. Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) xv, 22, 276. 89. Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World 7–8, 24. 90. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) 80. 91. Bhabha, Location of Culture 66, 75. 92. Cited in Bhabha, Location of Culture 72. 93. Michael Martin, “‘I am a storyteller, drawing water from the well of my culture’: Gaston Kaboré, Griot of African Cinema,” Research in African Literatures 33.4 (Winter 2002): 168. 94. Video Librarian 9.1, 1994 . 95. Lovesey 215. 96. Response to a question from the author after a screening of the film at the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, American Museum of Natural History, November 1998.

conclusion 1. Folkenflik, “The Self as Other,” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self Representation, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) 220. 2. Philippe Lejeune, Je est un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1980) 34. Shirley Neuman, “The Observer Observed: Distancing the Self in Autobiography,” Prose Studies 4.3 (1981): 329. 3. Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998) 82, 93. 4. Benjamin 94. 5. Pratt 6–7. 6. Joseph Hogan and Rebecca Hogan, “Autobiography in the Contact Zone: Cross-cultural Identity in Jane Tapsubei Creider’s Two Lives,” True Relations: Essay on Autobiography and the Postmodern, ed. G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998) 83. Lionnet, “‘Logiques métisses’” 100. 7. “Disidentify” is Benjamin’s term. See Benjamin 106. 8. Lord Richard Butler, The Difficult Art of Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) 19. 9. “Entretien avec Olivier Barlet,” Africultures (September 1998). 10. Mineke Schipper, “‘Who Am I?’: Fact and Fiction in African First-Person Narrative,” Research in African Literatures 16.1 (Spring 1985): 66–70. 11. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 277, 31. 12. Naficy 35, 147, 278.

Index

Achebe, Chinua, 122, 124, 154 Achkar, David: Allah Tantou, 127–28, 132– 42, 143, 146, 147, 151, 152–55, 157–59; and reenactments, 135–38 Achkar, Marof, 132–42 Alea, Tomás Gutierrez, 130–31 Alloula, Malek, 114 Angelini, Eileen, 36 Augustine, xiii, 112–13, 122 Autobiography: African, xi, 95, 119, 122– 24, 127–31, 153, 158–60; definitions of, ix-x, xii, 130, 159; filmic, xiii, 45, 67–71, 72–74, 91, 95, 127–28, 130, 152–55, 157, 159–60; on video, 178–79n3; reflexivity in, xv, 3, 9, 14, 16, 18, 20, 30, 35, 39–41, 75, 84, 95–96, 102, 125, 132, 134–36, 139, 141–42, 146–47, 149, 151–52, 158; and third-person voice, xv-xvi, 3, 13, 16, 18, 20, 23, 28, 53, 56, 71, 95, 100, 104, 119, 125, 127, 132, 133, 141, 144, 151–53, 156–58 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 35–36, 101 Barthes, Roland: on authorship, 2–6; Camera Lucida, 3, 8, 45–71, 144, 156– 57; on film, 50, 51, 64–67; and homosexuality, 17, 169n83; Incidents, 10; “Larvatus prodeo,” 16–17, 59; Michelet By Himself, 2, 6, 9; on photography, 45–67, 71, 156; Pleasure of the Text, 1, 4, 9, 15, 57; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, xv, 1–22, 41, 45–48, 53–54, 55, 60, 62–65, 73, 104, 119, 125, 152; Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 4, 6, 9, 65; Winter Garden photograph, 54–62, 78

Bazin, André, 51–52, 61 Benjamin, Jessica, 157–58 Benjamin, Walter, 52, 61, 65, 181n39, 185n91 Benveniste, Emile, 10, 16, 69 Bhabha, Homi, xvi, 154 Bolle, Louis, 7 Brecht, Bertolt, 13–14, 17, 119, 150 Bruss, Elizabeth, x, 68–71, 73, 90, 95, 135, 137 Butler, Richard, 159 Chambers, Ross, 10 Chartier, Jean-Pierre, 68, 73–74, 187n4 Cheriaa, Tahar, 129 Collard, Cyril: and HIV/AIDS, 76–83, 86–90; and homosexuality, 76, 81–82, 89; media image of, 84–88; Savage Nights, 72–91, 138, 151, 157; transformation of autobiographical novel to film, 73–74, 78–84, 86, 90–91 Compagnon, Antoine, 1 Copjec, Joan, 20, 90 Coste, Claude, 21–22 Culler, Jonathan, 1, 48 De Man, Paul, ix, 6, 17, 21 Déjeux, Jean, 98, 119, 124 Derrida, Jacques, x, xii, xv, 1, 46, 61, 89, 95 Diawara, Manthia, 146 Djebar, Assia: and bilingualism, 97, 100, 108, 110–13, 116–17, 120; on film, 97– 98, 118; and historical sources, 101–5; and individual versus collective, 98, 101,

212

index

105, 111, 119–22, 124; and orality, 96– 98, 105–6, 110–11; Love, An Algerian Cavalcade, 95–126, 127, 132, 134, 135, 143, 146, 152–53, 155, 157–59; Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoa, 97–99, 118, 121; Vast is the Prison, 96, 109; and veiling, 113–18; and writing, 97–98, 102–4, 108, 116–19 Documentary film, 131–52 Eakin, Paul John, 122–23 Edelman, Lee, 89 Edwards, Brent Hayes, xiii Egan, Susanna, 71, 201n111 Eisenstein, Sergei, 50, 66–67, 129 Espinosa, Julio Garcia, 128 Fanon, Frantz, 113–15, 118, 123–24, 154 Fellini, Federico, 68 Folkenflik, Robert, 157 Francophonie, xiv, xv-xvi, 95, 108–9, 112, 118–19, 124, 152–53, 158, 162n24 Fromentin, Eugène, 102, 106–7, 124 Gabriel, Teshome, 129–31, 153 Gadant, Monique, 124 Gallop, Jane, 20–21 Geesey, Patricia, 119 Gracki, Katherine, 120 Gratton, Johnnie, 12, 17 Green, Mary Jean, 119 Gusdorf, George, ix, x, xi, 67, 122, 125, 130 Haraway, Donna, 76–77 Hayes, Daniel, 35 Hochschild, Adam, 145 Hogan, Joseph and Rebecca, 158 Hoveyda, Fereydoun, 68 Insdorf, Annette, 68 Iversen, Margaret, 63

Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 119 Lacan, Jacques, 18, 25, 48, 63; and the mirror stage, 10–12, 20–21; and objet petit a, 55, 60, 78 Lane, Jim, 71, 186n116 Lejeune, Philippe, x, 35, 38, 68, 70–71, 73, 95, 120, 137, 143, 157, 159 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 101, 103 Lionnet, Françoise, xiii, 158, 197n53 Loesberg, Jonathan, 21 Lovesey, Oliver, 138, 155 Lumumba, Patrice, 142–55, 209 n.77 Malkmus, Elizabeth and Roy Armes, 129–30 Mannoni, Octave, xv, 124 Marks, Laura, 152 McNee, Lisa, 141 Memmi, Albert, 123 Metz, Christian, 83 Mimouni, Rachid, 119 Mobutu, Joseph (Mobutu Sese Seko), 146, 148–49, 151 Mortimer, Mildred, 125 Naficy, Hamid, 159 New Novel [Nouveau Roman], x, 23, 26, 41, 104 Newhall, Beaumont, 53 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 118, 139, 153, 155 Nichols, Bill, 132, 135, 137 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiii, 5, 7, 9, 15–16, 48 O’Beirne, Emer, 35 Olney, James, 122–23, 152 Peck, Raoul: and exile, 150–52; Lumumba: Death of the Prophet, 127–28, 142–55, 157–59; and orality, 143–44 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 49 Perec, Georges, 10 Proust, Marcel, 28, 30, 54, 57

Jameson, Frederic, 13–14, 17, 119, 123, 138–39, 141, 152 Jay, Martin, 63–64, 180n18

Quayson, Ato, xiii

Kaboré, Gaston, 154 Kacimi, Mohammed, 98, 119 Katz, John Stuart, 70 Kennedy, Gerald, 2, 38, 47

Renov, Michael, 71, 74, 95, 131, 186n115 Rolland, Pauline, 107, 124 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, ix, 6 Russell, Catherine, 153

index Saïd, Edward, 154 Sarraute, Nathalie: Age of Suspicion, 25–26, 28–29, 38; on character and identity, 25–27, 37, 40, 50; Childhood, 23–41, 51, 60, 80, 105, 113, 125, 126, 137, 156; on dialogue, 28–30, 35–37, 41, 101, 105, 126, 158; on tropisms, 24–29, 31–35, 37, 40–41, 51; Tropisms, 24 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 46–47 Schipper, Mineke, 159 Sembène, Ousmane, 131, 193n8 Silverman, Kaja, 69, 138 Sissako, Abderrahmane, 159 Sitney, P. Adams, 70–71, 95 Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino, 128 Sontag, Susan, 2, 51–53, 60, 88 Suture, 83, 138, 154, 158, 189n26

213

Tagg, John, 64 Taylor, Clyde, 129 Third Cinema, 128–31, 153–54 Todorov, Tzvetan, xvii, 1 Toubiana, Serge, 73, 74 Touré, Sékou, 128, 130–31, 133–34, 137, 139, 141–42, 151 Truffaut, François, 68 Ungar, Steve, 2, 179n9 Voice-over, in film, 72–74, 80–81, 132– 35, 140–41, 143–49, 151 White, Hayden, 90, 104, 126, 135, 137 Worth, Fabienne, 87 Zimra, Clarisse, 102, 117 Zizek, Slavoj, 21, 55, 78, 86–87