Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women's Autobiography 1611490308, 9781611490305

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SHIFTING SUBJECTS



SHIFTING SUBJECTS Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography

Natalie Edwards

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS Newark

Published by University of Delaware Press Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Natalie Edwards All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-61149-030-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-61149-031-2 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgments THIS BOOK ORIGINATED IN A DOCTORAL DISSERTATION I WROTE AT Northwestern University and I am immensely grateful to Mireille Rosello for her earnest, sensitive and insightful guidance and for the personal and professional examples that she gave to me. Sylvie Romanowski has been a constant source of intellectual support and friendship both during my studies and since. Jean Mainil was a perceptive and provocative reader and interlocuter. Michal Ginsburg also gave me valuable advice throughout my doctoral training, as did Janine Spencer and Claude Tournier. Jumping back further, I would like to mention the debt that I owe to former teachers at the University of Bath, UK: Marion Demossier, Ernie Hampson, Mark Gilbert, Adalgisa Giorgio, and Peter Wag-staff. In my present position, I appreciate the good fortune I have to work with friends and colleagues who have given their generous support and companionship throughout this and other of my endeavors: Erica Johnson, Patricia Moynagh, Anne Schotter, and Kim Worthy. I am grateful for support I have received from the Northeast Modern Languages Association, from the Office of the Provost at Wagner College, and from a generous grant from Maureen Robinson. I am grateful to Cambridge Scholars Publishing for granting me permission to reprint material in chapter 4. My parents have born my transatlantic trotting with warmth, grace, and support, and I appreciate Ron Hogarth’s generosity. This was written in a long, odd, and spectacular journey through Bath, Cardiff, Chicago, Paris, Dakar, Viterbo, and New York and is dedicated to my companion throughout it, Chris Hogarth.



SHIFTING SUBJECTS

Introduction: Writing the Self; From the Individual “I” to the Non-unitary Self Only a critical ideology that reifies a unified, transcendent self can expect to see in the mirror of autobiography a self whose depths can be plumbed, whose heart can be discovered, and whose essence can be definitively known. No mirror of her era, the female autobiographer takes as a given that selfhood is mediated; her invisibility results from her lack of a tradition, her marginality in male-dominated culture, her fragmentation—social and political as well as psychic. At both extremes of subjectivity and publicity, the female autobiographer has lacked the sense of radical individuality, duplicitous but useful, that empowered Augustine and Henry Adams to write their representative lives large. —Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck1

THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT WAYS TO SAY “I.” SOME AUTOBIOG-raphers have written a loud, proud, and forceful “I” that signifies what they deem to be their specific mark on the world. Some authors have written fictional accounts of their lives, using an “I” that is an indistinct marker of identity. Some have preferred to render the self in an epistolary format, writing their “I” from within letters. Others have written “I” from within a memoir, weaving selfrepresentation with references to political and social aspects of the period. Some have published their journals, thus blurring the distinction between the public and private “I.” Still more have written the “I” of somebody else. Nor are such innovative and divergent approaches to writing “I” limited to literary endeavor. As an array of fascinating interventions by contemporary critics of autobiography have shown, authors have written “I” in internet diaries, in blogs, in court documents, in CVs, in job applications, in film, in psychotherapy, and even in literary criticism.2 Despite the variety of, and the preponderance of, self-representation in contemporary society, writing “I” has traditionally been problematic for any individual outside of the dominant group. As Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield so succinctly resume, entry into the coveted realm of autobiography has depended upon “the traditional construction of the ideal autobiographer as a unified, transcendent subject, representative of the age.”3 Many marginalized and dispossessed groups thus lay beyond the scope of these necessary requirements, and women are just one example. Given women’s traditional role in the private sector of the home and family, the transition into the public eye has, for many, been fraught with difficulties. Leah Hewitt has demonstrated that many female-authored autobiographies exhibit the writer’s reluctance to enter the public domain due to the risk of appearing self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing or arrogant.4 Writers of autobiography prior to the nineteenth century were

primarily public figures who published accounts of their lives, their public service, or their travels. Evidently, such public activities could usually only be carried out by men.5 The few women who practiced life writing wrote principally journals, letters, or memoirs that were often published posthumously.6 The explosion in autobiography that occurred in the nineteenth century, largely due to the introspection of the romantic movement, encouraged more women to explore the genre, yet many still felt obliged to preface their writing with an explanation of why they entered a genre with which they felt a clear discomfort.7 Only in the closing decades of the twentieth century have women so often, so clearly, and so daringly written “I,” and only at a time at which, as Nancy K. Miller has identified, “I” no longer has any meaning; now that the author is proclaimed to be dead, and that recent critical theory has mounted an assault upon the self, what does “I” mean anyway?8 For the women who appear in this study, who have struggled to develop modes of representing themselves in words, and who have proceeded to publicize those words, “I” means a lot. Much has been written on the original and innovative narrative techniques that women autobiographers have developed as they strive to engage in self-narrative. In this book, I hope to contribute to these discoveries of the intricacies of authors’ reflections upon selfrepresentation by comparing women autobiographers who write “I” as a plural construction. Many autobiographical texts published by women, both recently and further back in history, display a self that resists the traditional notion of an individual, unitary self at the heart of autobiography and instead inscribes subjectivity as in some measure non-unitary. While all self-narrative is necessarily non-unitary insofar as it is predicated upon a narrating “I,” the self in the present of the narration, and a narrated “I,” the self in the past, there are many examples of self-writing that deliberately play with the notion of an individual “I” that clearly refers to narrator and author. Leslie Bloom has demonstrated that the notion of non-unitary subjectivity has been one of the main foci of feminist scholarship in recent years, and scholars such as Rosi Braidotti, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Toril Moi, and Henriques et al. have all advocated this as one of the hallmarks of subjectivity.9 In a critique of the humanist self, which is based upon a unique, fixed, and unitary essence, these critics have posited the non-unitary subject as a mechanism for understanding the changes in our conception of selfhood and the way in which traditionally powerless subjects experience subjectivity. Bloom states that the idea of a unitary subject as it has been designated by Western rationalism “denies the possibilities of changes in subjectivity over time; masks the critical roles that language, social interactions, and pivotal experiences play in the production of subjectivity; and ignores the multiple subject positions people occupy, which influence the formation of subjectivity.”10 Sidonie Smith underlines the importance of this turn away from a unitary conception of the self by asserting how such a conception constructed a “centrifugal power” must be overcome for the oppressed to realize their selfhood.11 This is not to say, however, that the self should be considered as an endlessly fragmented concept that is based upon inconsistency and instability. The non-unitary self is not equivalent to a loss of self but is rather an appreciation of its intricacies; as Teresa de Lauretis writes, subjectivity is “an ongoing construction, not a fixed point of departure or arrival from which one then interacts with the world” since subjectivity is formed through encounters with

“practices, discourses, and institutions that lend significance (value, meaning and affect) to the events of the world.”12 The reformulization of selfhood as non-unitary, fragmented, and mutable, as opposed to static, coherent, and unitary thus opens the way for women and minorities in general both to express their selfhood and to be interpreted. Non-unitary subjectivity is particularly relevant to the study of women’s autobiography, which is at once, as Nancy K. Miller has commented, an ideal testing ground for feminist theories and a site for experimentation in the construction of selfhood.13 In this book, I examine specifically literary autobiography in terms of this notion of the non-unitary self, since literary autobiography rests upon an interrogation of and a search for new modes of representation of selfhood in narrative. In particular, I analyze literary autobiographies that highlight the nonunitary selfhood of the author by writing “I” as a plural construction. Such writers incorporate numerous voices into their work, multiplying the narrative voice rather than resting upon a single, unitary “I.” Several examples of such writing are evident in recent French autobiographical writing. Nathalie Sarraute, who is well known for her rejection of literary convention and her involvement with—and quarrels with—the exponents of le nouveau roman (new novel), toyed with the plural nature of self-writing in Enfance (Childhood). In this, one of the principal texts that multiplied the autobiographical “I,” Sarraute juxtaposed a firstperson account with that of another voice who frequently interrupts the narrator, interrogating her on the validity of her memories and the accuracy of her present writing.14 The two voices, both the voice of the principal narrator and that of her interlocuter, contribute to the construction of a multifaceted, non-unitary, and fragmented narrative self. Marguerite Duras, also known for her literary experimentation and her interrogations of the representation of the female self, developed a similar technique in L’amant (The Lover). In this partially autobiographical text, Duras switches the narrative voice unexpectedly from the first to the third person and back again with no explanation or justification of her transposition.15 The two voices thus present different versions of a self and move the autobiographer between the positions of subject and object of her text: both speaking (“I”) and spoken of (“she”). Thus Duras’s self-representation occurs through plurivocal, non-unitary narrative. Likewise, the four authors who form the corpus of this study all respond to the question of how to inscribe the female self in writing by creating narrative techniques that represent the self in plurivocal, nonunitary ways. I detail their nuances below. The choice to examine works by female writers emanates from the specific stage at which criticism of women’s autobiography finds itself. The notion of subjectivity, and specifically of non-unitary subjectivity, constitutes one of the main domains of enquiry into women’s autobiography at the present time, as shall be discussed in the following section of this introduction. By limiting my study to female-authored texts, I intend to contribute to the specific terms of this debate and interrogate a number of authors’ responses to the question of how to inscribe the female self in narrative. Since critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have alerted us to the dangers of essentializing “women” as identical irrespective of their differences in a global context, I do not contend that all women writers experience the self in similarly fragmented, non-unitary terms, or that their subjectivity is constructed by similar events or discourses.16 In a similar vein, I do not contend either that the non-unitary self is

never to be found in male-authored autobiographies,- Roland Barthes is a prime example of such writing, as are Georges Perec and Patrick Modiano in the French canon. Indeed, as these examples demonstrate, non-unitary subjectivity opens the way for minorities (homosexuals, Jews, and immigrants, for instance) to narrate the self. Rather, this book is intended as a contribution to one of the main currents in criticism of women’s autobiography, a field that is characterized by what Spivak would call “strategic essentialism.”17 In this introduction, I first discuss the ways in which subjectivity has been formulated within autobiographical criticism, from the unitary models of early scholarship to the more recent theories of non-unitary selfhood, paying particular attention to analyses of female subjectivity. I then explain how this book contributes to this debate.

CHANGING SUBJECTS: The field of autobiographical criticism has moved a long way from the earliest formulations of the immediate post-war period. These early critics, to whom we owe the transition of autobiography from a second-rate literary genre to a valid and rigorous field of intellectual inquiry, began by interpreting the “I” of autobiography as a strictly individual concept. These scholars each attempted to establish precise definitions of the genre of autobiography, and these definitions centered upon an individual approach to self-narration. Philippe Lejeune’s oft-quoted text on the autobiographical pact defined autobiography as “un récit rétro-spectif en prose que quelqu’un fait sur sa propre existence quand il met l’accent principal sur une vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” [retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality].18 The subject of autobiography for Lejeune is clear: a single (male) writer’s articulation of his life and of the development of his “I.” The nature of Lejeune’s autobiographical pact is that the name of the author, character, and narrator must refer to the same person; that is to say, that the identities constructed by these three entities should be reducible to one demarcated and coherent subject. Lejeune famously listed the works that fell into his category of autobiography, from works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jean-Paul Sartre, and included only one female-authored text, Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life) by George Sand. It was Georges Gusdorf who wrote the first essay in French on autobiography, which was later reprinted and translated for an Anglophone audience as part of James Olney’s pivotal volume On Autobiography. In Gusdorf’s essay, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” this critic also lists a set of requirements for a text to be considered as autobiographical, and claims that such a text “reveals the effort of a creator to give the meaning of his own mythic tale.”19 A self is brought to life by the text that he writes, according to Gusdorf, and the autobiographical text is strictly literary in nature. As was the case with Lejeune’s definition, Gusdorf’s theory thus only permits one creator, one meaning, and one tale: the “I” is an individual, unitary construct, and Gusdorf goes so far as to suggest that autobiography is only discernible in societies that view the individual as singular and autonomous. Critical works by John Sturrock, who believed that autobiography is “a process of singularization,”20 Elizabeth

Bruss, and James Olney contain similar assertions; autobiography was supposedly based upon a notion of a conscious, individual subject at the center of his (and only very rarely her) text, and this was the required format to be considered part of this newly legitimated genre.21 More recent interrogations of the representation of subjectivity within autobiography have deconstructed the notion of an individual, complete, and coherent self, demarcated from others by clear boundaries of identity. The closing decades of the twentieth century have forced us to reassess our trusted, comfortable terms of intellectual enquiry. Post-structuralist and postmodern philosophers have exposed many of the categories on which we rested for so long as assumptions at best, fallacies at worst. Suddenly the principal grand narratives of the twentieth century—Freudian psychoanalysis, Russian formalism, and Marxism—were shown to be nothing more than mere narrative. Generic typology and categorical thinking came to be regarded with skepticism. We have reconsidered the functioning of ideology, authority, and representation, and reversed any belief in the universality or essen-tialism of human nature. Words like history, category, identity, agency, and subjectivity now cause consternation. So where is the self placed amidst all of these reformulations, and how have these affected our understanding of autobiography? The recently reformulated “subject” is understood to be constituted by history, language, and culture and is a product of specific discourses and social processes. As subjectivity is posited as a social construct, the subject is necessarily discursive; individuals construct themselves through language and adopt positions available within the language at a given moment. And this process is necessarily in flux, as the intersections between social relations and individual subjects constantly changes, thus creating inconsistent and contradictory subjects. Jacques Derrida, for example, argued that there is no such thing as a “full subject” as the discourses that produce it are constantly in evolution.22 Julia Kristeva, in a similar example, asserted that the Cartesian subject is now “on trial” as we no longer believe in the self as a single, demarcated unit of unified individuality.23 In addition to the challenges that structuralist, post-structuralist, and postmodern thinkers have posed to the notion of the unitary self, the progress of psychoanalysis has cast further doubt over this category of thought. Since psychoanalysis is predicated upon the notion that human beings are split subjects with an unconscious, that which one cannot know of oneself, it necessarily questions the idea of a cohesive, unified, and knowable self. The awareness that there exists a myriad of unconscious processes that combine to create one’s image of self immediately negates any drive towards a continuously stable, comprehensible, and coherent selfhood. And the attempt to know or define any self that is created from, modified by, and subject to such unconscious processes is simultaneously exposed as an illusion. Another important factor in this questioning of unitary identity is an increased awareness of non-Western approaches to subjectivity. The process of globalization has increased our sensibility to the ideas prevalent in other cultures and called many of our assumptions into question. In literary and cultural studies in particular, postcolonial critics have brought our awareness to texts that offer an array of representations of selfhood. Scholars are now confronted by a range of self-narratives, both written and oral, that are based upon group identity, family identity, tribal identity, and community identity rather than any single entity. Such representations force us to admit the ethnocentric character of our thinking about subjectivity and push us to reformulate what is at stake in interpreting the narrative “I.”

These formulations have necessarily impacted upon theories of autobiographical writing, and this area now constitutes one of the most vibrant and exciting fields in literary studies. Looking back over the development of this field since scholars such as Lejeune and Gusdorf first defined it proves how far criticism has evolved. In the 1980s, some critics went as far as to claim that autobiography was dead, since the traditional categories of author, subject, and character had come under scrutiny through structuralist philosophy. Michael Sprinker suggested that autobiography is the “act of producing difference by repetition,” and that such writing is dead since it is the articulation of what has already been said elsewhere, a product of intertextuality rather than a statement of individuality.24 Paul de Man also famously suggested that autobiography is based upon masks, creating a necessarily fictitious self to stand for an identity that may not exist.25 Although such interventions enrich the field, I find it hard to believe that autobiography or autobiographers are dead. Autobiography unarguably constitutes a domain that is extraordinarily prolific; many works of autobiography are currently being published and many writers are producing original and innovative narrative strategies for selfwriting. Autobiography now contains several different subgenres, including testimonial narrative, the self-portrait, and mixed-medium work, and this is a testament to how elastic it is as a genre. Given the extraordinary interest surrounding the self in current popular culture, from internet blogs to reality television, the proliferation in autobiographical narrative is unsurprising. If anything, autobiography is more alive than it ever was; it is simply alive in different forms. As Johnnie Gratton comments, subjectivity has been reformulated since the advance of structuralism, and “the subject which ‘returns’ from structuralist exile is neither pejoratively over-specified nor neutrally unspecified, but a concept and a value open to various forms and degrees of positive re-specification in the light of its preceding critique.”26 Similary, the genre of autobiography that returns from structuralist exile has undergone a rebirth that has opened it up to the development of new forms and to the interrogation of various styles of self-writing throughout the centuries. One of the key concepts in this revitalized field of criticism has been the concept of relationality, or intersubjectivity: the relationship established by the narrator between her/his self and others, and the ways in which these others impact upon her/ his developing selfhood. By interrogating the autobiographer’s choice of others (mother, lover, teacher, for example) and how the interactions between the autobiographer and her/his others are represented textually critics have refined the scope of autobiographical subjectivity. For example, Michael Sheringham’s comprehensive analysis of (largely male) French autobiography argues that autobiography represents “a passage through and a constant negotiation with different forms of otherness.”27 As an autobiographer writes her/his life, Sheringham asserts, s/he is obliged to become a textual other, to imagine the reader as other and to represent the others that have contributed to the present identity. Cosslett, Lury, and Summerfield present a similar idea, that “the narration of a self cannot be understood in isolation from an other it acknowledges, implicitly or explicitly, and with which it is in a constitutive relationship.”28 Paul John Eakin even asserts that only when the construction of self is redefined as relational will our understanding of autobiographical narrative be reformulated.29 Thus the autobiographical self in these formulations does not necessarily rest upon a unitary identity, a named and coherent

self at its heart, representative of a single author who is the definitive authority on her/himself. Closely linked to this idea of the writer as a creator but not as an authority of the self is the notion of fiction in autobiographical criticism. In contrast to Lejeune’s early assertions of the importance of truth in an autobiographical text, a number of critics have posited this as a necessary component of life writing. Developed by Serge Doubrovsky in his pioneering work Autobiographiques: De Corneille à Sartre, the concept of autofiction promotes a deliberate fictionality in autobiography, suggesting that the genre is based not upon fact but a necessary blending of both fact and fiction. The autobiographer, according to Doubrovsky, has an automatically scrambled identity, since s/he incorporates into the text indicators that certain aspects of it are indeed fictional. In a similar vein, la nouvelle autobiographie that was theorized in the mid-1990s also insisted on fiction as opposed to truth. This theory is closely linked to that of le nouveau roman and is based upon the works of writers of this strand of literature who wrote autobiographical narratives in the 1980s and 1990s; Nathalie Sar-raute’s Enfance, Marguerite Duras’s L’amant, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Miroir qui revient are prime examples. As Raylene Ramsay argued, this kind of autobiographical writing emphasizes textuality and narrative experimentation and is based upon fragmented, composite selves.30 Current scholarship in the field is a testament to the variety of innovative approaches to self-writing that have appeared in the last three decades. The most recent criticism in the field approaches autobiography as a perpetually transforming category that incorporates a variety of different genres while refusing any generic definition. The closing years of the twentieth century saw a rise in the publication of testimony narrative, and criticism of this area is now an important part of autobiographical criticism; critics such as Shoshana Felman and Kathryn Robson ask how one can inscribe trauma in narrative and how memory works as a producer of written testimony to horrific events.31 Recent criticism also studies the autobiographies of specific, traditionally underrepresented groups, with critics such as Carole Boyce Davies and Alison Rice examining the struggle for identity of oppressed individuals, and scholars such as Timothy Hazlett proposing new groupings through which to imagine identity.32 Another important strand of current criticism is the interrogation of multi-medium autobiographies, that is to say works that incorporate nontextual elements into self-representation. Linda Haverty Rugg and Timothy Dow Adams have both analyzed primarily textual works that incorporate photographs, appealing to another level of referentiality that includes “something material, the embodied subject, the unification (to recall the autobiographical pact) of author, name, and body.”33 Rachel Gabara has interrogated autobiographical works in the medium of film, insisting on the links between the first and third persons in self-representation and drawing attention to the work of the image in the story of self. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have further widened autobiographical criticism to the realms of art and performance, studying works that portray self-narrative through installations, painting, and works that blend writing with other nontextual mediums. The domain of criticism of autobiography is thus more varied, more expansive, and more innovative than ever before: final proof, perhaps, that it represents a genre that is very far from dead. One of the most consistently vibrant domains of autobiographical criticism, however, and the one with which this book is concerned, is that of women’s autobiography. Beginning with a

book by Estelle Jelinek and an article by Mary G. Mason in 1980, many critics in the last twenty-five years have attempted to define different patterns of narration, different approaches to the self, and different reasons for embarking upon self-narrative in female-authored texts.34 As Sidonie Smith argued in one of the first texts of this vein: “When a specific woman approaches the scene of writing the autobiographical ‘1/ she not only engages the discourses of subjectivity through which the universal human subject has been culturally secured; she also engages the complexities of her cultural assignment to an absorbing embodiment.”35 Thus, according to Smith, women autobiographers are obliged to negotiate the ideological position of women in the contemporary culture and the physical position of writing from within a female body. Such formulations were the impetus for a wealth of studies of women’s selfnarrative, and many are predicated on a similar assertion: that women’s autobiography reveals non-unitary, plural, or collective approaches to writing “I” and that such texts cannot therefore be imprisoned into the individual (male) model of subjectivity. Furthermore, many of these formulations concentrate specifically upon voice; since this is of prime importance in terms of attaining agency, critics have focused upon the ways in which women have incorporated the voices of a variety of others in the telling of their own individual stories. In one of the first volumes of criticism of women’s autobiography, Susan Stanford Friedman argued that the “I” of female-authored self-narrative is necessarily plural. Friedman claimed that “the model of separate and unique selfhood . . . establishes a critical bias that leads to the (mis)reading and marginalization of autobiographical texts by women and minorities in the processes of canon formation.”36 Friedman argues that the model of unitary selfhood does not take into account culturally imposed group identity and that its emphasis on separateness ignores differences in socialization in the construction of gendered identity. Thus in Friedman’s analysis, the intersection of group and individual identity in women’s autobiography is pervasive and female authors feel bound to explore an identity shared with other women. Nancy K. Miller also identifies female-authored autobiographical texts as based upon plural, non-unitary identity. In But Enough about Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives, Miller reads women’s autobiography and memoir as “a rendez-vous with others” as opposed to “terminal moi-ism.”37 In a further example, Francoise Lionnet writes of narrative strategies that belie a braiding of disparate voices and argues on this basis that female autobiography (specifically in postcolonial contexts) is based upon the expression of collective identity by individual social agents. As Lionnet writes, the authors that she assembles “articulate a vision of the future founded on individual and collective solidarities.”38 Jeanne Perrault goes so far as to excise the bios from the triplet autos, bios, and graphia to argue that feminists write “autography” that insists less on the life of the individual and more on her sense of belonging to a feminine collectivity.39 Thus, it is possible to identify a strand of feminist criticism of autobiography that, for the admirable purposes of differentiating male and female identity formation and providing a more nuanced, balanced, and inclusive approach to the genre, promotes non-unitary subjectivity as the hallmark of female-authored life-writing. According to the proponents of this strand of criticism, self and other in women’s autobiography are not separate, distinct units, and the narrative voice is not representative of one single entity that narrates the entire story alone. Instead, a collective or

plurivocal narrative of self in which “I” and “we” are either interchangeable or indis-sociable takes precedence.

POSTCOLONIAL PLURALITIES In addition to the evolution of autobiographical criticism, this book is propelled by postcolonial theory. Such criticism has brought much to bear upon the writing of subjectivity and has theorized concepts such as borders, boundaries, migrancy, and transnationalism as previously unheeded categories of identity. Crucially for this project, postcolonial theory has developed the notion of hybridity, as an in-between category of identity that resists binary oppositions or neat packages of discreet cultural units. Used by Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to the power inherent in multivocal narrative, the term hybridity has more recently been theorized in a postcolonial context by Homi Bhabha. Beginning from the premise that cultural units are not homogenous or pure constructions, Bhabha argues that cultural practices and the construction of cultural identity are produced within the “third space of enunciation.”40 There is thus, according to Bhabha, an in-between space in which culture functions and produces meaning, a space that is both precarious and inspirational; despite its discomfort, it may be the locus of creation and empowerment. Bhabha writes that, “It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory . . . may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.”41 Hybridity, according to this line of argument, can be a site of contestation, of renewal, of understanding, and of mutuality (although geographical, historical, political, and linguistic differences must always be born in mind). Most importantly, it is a site of plurality in which identities coexist and are formed in relation to one another in a continually changing space. The four writers who form the focus of this book both emanate from postcolonial/diasporic spaces and inscribe such hybrid constructions of cultural identity in their work. All find themselves in something akin to a “third space,” and all write the self within a framework of perpetually moving cultural constructs. The fact that they write autobiographically within a hybrid, multivocal, and non-unitary manner is their main point of convergence, and it is to this convergence that we now turn.

BEYOND “I” VERSUS “WE” The four writers that form the subject matter of this book each play with the “I” of their autobiographies in order to write non-unitary selfhood. Furthermore, each offers a unique approach to the question of writing the self nonindividually. Gisele Halimi writes a series of autobiographical works that each tell the same story in a slightly different way and from a slightly different perspective: a series of “I”s that respond to and contradict each other, rather than one single all-knowing identity.42 Julia Kristeva writes her text with two strands of narrative that tell the story from two different perspectives, one in the first person and the other

in the third person; one voice speaks as “I” and the other as “she.”43 Assia Djebar incorporates autobiography, biography, and fiction into her work, writing herself as “I,” writing a fictional account in the third person, and writing the words of her maternal ancestors from their own point of view, passing the “I” to each of them.44 Helene Cixous writes a self as “I,” then writes a series of characters who each take over the narrative voice to the extent that the reader is unsure which character is narrating the tale; “I” is multiplied to include a series of voices who each tell a slightly different version of the autobiographer’s story.45 The writers belong to very different cultural backgrounds, yet they are united by their desire to inscribe their “I” in a way that refutes unitary autobiography and highlights the problems inherent in writing non-unitary selfhood. Writing an individual “I” that is representative of one distinct identity is not possible for them. Yet they also demonstrate the difficulties in writing non-unitary, plural autobiography. Although each writer aims to encompass the self more coherently, more accurately, and more honestly by writing a plural “I,” their attempts do not resolve the trauma at the heart of each text and do not bring any conclusion to the writer’s quest for understanding. Taken together, therefore, they offer modes of writing that point up what is at stake in eulogizing non-unitary subjectivity and take a turn toward recovering the “I” that recent critical theory has questioned. In this way, their writing does not rest upon a unitary self, nor does it exist as a harmonious and cohesive non-unitary self. Instead, the texts create a middle ground, a middle self, in which the subject is neither “I” nor “we” but rather a “more than me.” The women all write in French and are all from broadly the same generation. They have all been variously labeled “feminist” at times, which is a label that most would refuse but which gives an added dimension to their autobiographical writing; following the axiom of “the personal is political,” these women all feel bound to incorportate a collective female other into their self narrative. Yet beyond their similarities, there are marked differences between them on several levels, and it is because of these differences that they provide such rich comparison. The most obvious difference lies in nationality. Julia Kristeva is of Bulgarian origin and moved to France at the age of eighteen. France is the country that she adopted and French is the language is which she writes and teaches, but she shows in Les samourais (The Samourai) that her East European origin is still a salient factor in her sense of selfhood. In this work, Kristeva alludes to her life as an immigrant in France and the way in which her immigrant status has impacted upon her current identity. Gisele Halimi is also an immigrant in France, since she was born in Tunisia to a Jewish family and moved to Paris at the age of eighteen. In her series of autobiographical works, Halimi recounts episodes from her childhood in Tunisia and makes passing references to her early life in a French colony. By contrast, her later experiences of the postcolonial period are the “elephant in the corner” of her texts. While Halimi does not discuss Tunisian independence or her place in the former colonial power, these clearly impact upon her sense of self. Assia Djebar is of Algerian origin and chooses to write in French. In Vaste est la prison (So Vast the Prison), Djebar discusses her struggle with language and fictionalizes the discovery that her native tongue, Berber, did once exist as a written language. Djebar pays close attention to the colonial period and to postcolonial events in all of her writing and describes periods in which she lived as an immigrant in Paris and elsewhere. Helene Cixous also grew up in Algeria but to a German mother and a Sephardic Jewish father and thus claims to have always felt an outsider in

Algeria. Her move to France was also problematic since, as she explains in Les rêveries dela femme sauvage (Reveries of the Wild Woman), the memories of Algeria haunted her and her feeling of existing as an outsider was not assuaged. Despite the fact that they all write in French, the women thus grew up in different parts of the world and had a specific relationship to the idea of the nation in general and to the idea of the French nation in particular. This renders their autobiographical writing all the more interesting since they are forced to handle this in some way: by repressing it, by fictionalizing it, by dramatizing it, or by attempting to understand it and its impact upon their identity. The ways in which they represent the blending of the category of gender with nationality, ethnicity, and colonial/postcolonial identity as they strive to express the self in narrative makes for some fascinating points of convergence and dissimilarity. In addition to their disparate national backgrounds, a second major difference between the women is their professional/educational backgrounds and the ways in which this affects their autobiographical narratives. Kristeva is a professor, writer, and psychoanalyst, and her autobiography reads at times like that of analyst and analysand as the two voices that she creates to represent her own persona engage each other over the self and its story. Kristeva has authored a small number of literary works in recent years, and Les samoura’is stands out as the only partially autobiographical text among them. Halimi is also removed from literary writing in general and autobiographical writing in particular. Halimi has forged a successful career in France as a prominent lawyer and, although a frequent writer, is new to literary writing. Djebar first trained as a historian, a fact that is evident in her literary texts that mingle historical accounts with fiction and autobiography. By contrast to Halimi and Kristeva, however, Djebar is a long-established literary writer, having begun publishing fiction in 1957 and having written many novels and short stories since. In 2005, she became the first African woman to be elected to the Academié Française. Cixous is also a prolific writer of fiction, essays, and drama, having been a professor and writer throughout her career. In this way, the women have different trajectories and different relationships to literary writing, which leads them to approach autobiography in very different ways. Yet, they are joined together by their quest to represent the self as a non-unitary “I” that is aligned with the selves of others and that constitutes a plural, composite notion. Their texts vary in terms of content, style, and audience, and their concept of self emanates from different cultural, religious, and national considerations, yet they each respond to the question of how the female self may represent itself plurally in narration. Furthermore, they all respond in very different ways, and this is the focus of this book. Another reason why I chose to compare the works of these four writers is the way that they subvert strict definitions of autobiography in very different ways. As I have argued above, there can be no exact definition of autobiography, and criticism of this field in the last two decades has therefore asked more interesting and more sophisticated questions of life-writing. I concur with Serge Doubrovsky that life-writing is necessarily partially fictional, and my notion of the genre is therefore very wide. Whereas biography must be written by a third party, and fiction must be imagined or embellished narrative, literary autobiography is primarily concerned with exploring the self in narrative. Thus Halimi’s Fritna is the most obviously autobiographical text discussed here; the author names herself in her text and attempts to

narrate elements of her past in order to reconcile her self in the present. Kristeva’s Les samourais is partially autobiographical in the sense that it contains clear references to the author’s life and the author attempts to explore her identity in text. Djebar and Cixous’s highly poetic texts may also be considered partially autobiographical; although the narrators are unnamed, the whole corpus of these writers constitutes an exploration of written subjectivity insofar as they play with the ways that their memories may be recounted, they include fiction in their narratives, they use different voices and nonlinear structures, and they refer to the work of other autobiographers within their texts. Their primary concern throughout is how to write the self in different ways, and it is for this reason that their works may be considered autobiographical. In order to appreciate fully the differences between their texts, this book is based upon close readings of each text, examining each individual work in terms of the questions of non-unitary subjectivity. Turning to the chapters themselves, the first discusses the series of autobiographical works written by Gisèle Halimi. Beginning with La cause des femmes (The Right to Choose), Halimi has written a number of texts that are partially theoretical and partially autobiographical. I firstly examine the portrayal of the self in La cause des femmes in terms of the way in which Halimi subsumes her narrative of self within her legal/political argument. This first text was an extended argument upon abortion, after the author successfully argued a case in a trial that led to the legalization of abortion in France. Throughout this text, Halimi alludes to parts of her personal life but in a snapshot way that obscures her individual story and places no emphasis upon the story of her developing self. Her self-reflexive writing is in this way inspired by and inseparable from her awareness of belonging to a larger female collective. I compare this early text with the subsequent Le lait de 1’oranger (Milk for the Orange Tree) and Fritna. These texts are Halimi’s autobiographical records of her father’s and her mother’s respective deaths. As such, they signify a recapitulation of the author’s life thus far and offer a changed reflection upon her self-development. What is interesting in this series of texts is the way in which Halimi rewrites the same material in slightly different form and with a different “I” in each volume. In each text, Halimi comes closer to admitting the cause of the main trauma in her life: her mother’s apparent lack of love for her. As the series progresses, the same memories are recounted with more anger and bitterness and the writer becomes more recriminating. By writing this non-unitary autobiography, Halimi comes closer to reformulating her opinion of her mother, to understanding her, and to understanding herself. Yet, the quest is finally unresolved as the mother eventually dies and the series ends, with Halimi concluding that she may or may not continue to keep a notebook of her memories, but that recounting them too often is too painful. In chapter 2, I examine Julia Kristeva’s partial autobiography, Les samouraïs. This text is a roman à clef insofar as it portrays a fictional representation of the author and the social and intellectual circles in which she moved during a period of her life. The text represents the period from the 1960s until the late 1990s, the time at which Kristeva arrived in Paris on a doctoral scholarship and became involved in prominent intellectual debate. It was also the time at which she was aligned with the feminist movement. In Les samoumïs, Kristeva provides us with a glimpse into this time of her life and simultaneously writes a commentary upon it. The “self” of our author is split in two, as Kristeva writes two fictional doubles of her

self: Olga as the young student, and Joëlle as the mature psychoanalyst. From this dual narrative structure, Kristeva writes one version of her involvement in organized feminism and then writes an evaluation of her involvement from the perspective of the older, wiser self looking back on her life. In this way, Kristeva’s “I” is doubled, appearing as two different selves in two different narratives. While this non-unitary “I” is able to comment upon itself from two different perspectives, it does not succeed in resolving the author’s traumatic memories of her split from organized feminism and from intellectual circles shortly after. The final chapter ends with the adult, present self confessing to her loneliness, anger, and bitterness and offers no closure to the trauma of coming to the terms with one’s past actions. Although the technique of writing the self twice may explain Kristeva’s actions and absolve some of her guilt, this non-unitary autobiography does not solidify, aid, or bolster the traumatized self at its core. In chapter 3 I turn my attention to Assia Djebar, who has famously blended fiction, history, and autobiography in the works of her Algerian Quartet. In Vaste est la prison (So Vast the Prison), Djebar returns to this project of plural autobiography begun in L’amour, la fantasia (Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade), and Ombre sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade).46 These first two texts in the series incorporated elements of Djebar’s individual life story and combined them with factual and fictional accounts of the role of Algerian women in history. In particular, in these texts Djebar inscribed the voices of women from her home region in an attempt to write on behalf of those who had been silenced. In Vaste est la prison, the author returns to this project after a pause of ten years, during which she wrote mainly fictional works. In this text, she attempts to write plural autobiography in order to align her self with the women from whom she feels separated as a result of her education. By receiving an education, moving to France, and becoming a writer, Djebar removed herself from her female ancestors, and the trauma of this separation is her avowed reason for returning to collective autobiography. Yet in this text, she questions the extent to which plural autobiography is a possibility and whether it can have a cathartic effect upon the individual narrating self. After attempting to write her voice alongside her mother’s voice, her grandmother’s voice, and her aunts’ voices, thus trying to reunite her self with the selves to whom she feels connected, Djebar seems to conclude that she should stop writing and return to her former pastime: filmmaking. By making films, Djebar recorded her voice and the voices of her female ancestors on tape and was able to carry these with her. Writing them, however, appears futile as the very act of writing, which emphasizes her education and her ability to leave the colony and survive in the colonizers’ language, is the very thing that separates her from her ancestors. Vaste est la prison therefore dramatizes the difficulty of writing autobiography as a negotiation between individual self and collective female other. Djebar’s text is a powerful example of how female autobiography is not simply based upon a self that is fragmented, incomplete, or necessarily subsumed within a collectivity, or upon a mode of writing that is circular, mazelike or nonlinear, but rather it is a struggle at once to make her own self discernible from a collective while feeling a need to inscribe that collective into her writing. I close this book with an analysis of Hélène Cixous’s Les rêveries de la femme sauvage (Reveries of the Wild Woman). This text is an exploration of the trauma experienced by the narrator during her childhood in Algeria, the pain of which continues throughout her adult life.

In an attempt to heal the present self, the writer returns to a series of painful memories that center upon her difficulties in locating her identity in a hostile environment. This text is a plurivocal autobiography insofar as it braids the voices of different characters into the narrative; the narrator’s brother, mother, and father often take over the narration and their voices recount specific episodes of the narrator’s early development. It is also based upon a non-unitary subject, as the narrating self is often doubled with these characters, identifying her self as “un seul camp multiplié” [a single camp multiplied]47 with the people she describes. Cixous thus both doubles her identity with and separates it from the others that she decides to represent. Yet just as is the case for our other authors, Cixous’s complex and original narrative strategies do not lead to any resolution of the trauma on which the text is founded. Instead, the text follows a cyclical format that returns in the final pages to its point of departure; the words that close the text are an exact repetition of the words that opened it. Although Cixous’s consciousness of her traumatic childhood is undoubtedly changed through the writing process, this technique simultaneously suggests a stasis, a lack of progress, and a continuation of suffering. The catharsis that Cixous suggests to be the reason for her self-exploration is thus denied, and her attempt to heal the self by writing its plurality is once again thwarted. But this is not to say that these women show the futility of writing the self, plurally or otherwise. Instead, taken together their texts create a third space for the female autobiographical self that does not rest upon an “I” or a “we” but that instead constitutes a “more than me.” They carve out a new form of writing the self and call for a more rigorous exploration of voice in women’s autobiographical texts. They concur with critics such as Friedman who suggest that interpreting the female “I” as unitary leads to a misreading, and they similarly point up the problems inherent in interpreting the female “I” as necessarily plurivocal, fragmented, and multiple. These women create a textual self that is in a “neither/nor” position; they are neither “I” nor “we,” and this constitutes a painful position but one that offers a different perspective on subjectivity and the inspiration for creativity. In this way, they recuperate the self as an in-between concept and play with this notion for their own purposes. Lastly, a word on terminology. I use the term autobiography throughout this study to denote first-person narrative that provides a reflection of a self in whatever form the author chooses to write. A variety of expressions such as life-writing, self-narrative, self-reflexive writing, and first-person narration have developed in recent years, and I appreciate critics’ desire to move beyond the rigid definitions that the term autobiography used to connote. Bearing in mind the arguments of the critics discussed above, I thus use the term autobiography in a very different way to that in which critics such as Lejeune and Gusdorf intended it to be employed. As Rachel Gabara writes, “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.”48 Similarly, I do not produce a neologism to encompass the forms of self-writing presented by my authors, as is currently a fashion: autohistoriography, autocritography, autogynography, autography, autothanography, and so on. There are as many forms of autobiography as there are autobiographers, and any attempt by scholars to place texts under a banner that proclaims their own ingenuity is to my mind self-serving. It strikes me as problematic that critics who claim to refuse autobiography due to its prescriptive definition redefine the genre using a different

word. In this study, I strive to emphasize my four authors’ unique, original, and provocative approaches to writing the self, basing my analyses on close readings of their work. I draw links between them and I point to their dissimilarities, but I aim to appreciate each author’s self-writing project as an individual testament to creativity, since it is for this quality that they garner my admiration.

1 Gisèle Halimi’s Self-(Re)Writing Project HOW CAN ONE EVALUATE THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A CHILDHOOD memory? Embarking upon an autobiographical project, writers are obliged to reexamine their lives, identify pivotal moments, and ponder the impact of specific events on the present self. Moments from childhood and adolescence must be selected, ordered, and often imbued with a specific significance as autobiographers question the influence of early experiences, especially traumatic ones, on the adult psyche. And often, they cannot make up their minds. A number of authors who have written such narratives have rewritten them at a later date, altering their interpretation of previously recounted events. Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously wrote his tale of his lasting guilt after having stolen a ribbon and accused a servant girl of the theft in Les confessions. He later retold the tale, emphasizing how the first attempt to exonerate his guilt was unsuccessful and implying that the guilt had only increased with time. In a similar way, Marguerite Duras wrote of a love affair with an older man in the partially autobiographical Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall), then rewrote the story in L’amant (The Lover) several years later, only to revise the tale in a third volume, L’amant de la Chine du nord (The North China Lover).1 Annie Ernaux’s childhood and young adulthood appear over and over again as she writes her tale of gender and class oppression in a succession of volumes, including La place (The Square), L’evénement (The Event) and La honte (Shame).2 As autobiographers rewrite their memories, they necessarily rewrite their “I,” forging an altered identity with an altered voice. Due to the progress of time and experience, the narrating “I” writes the narrated “1” from a changed perspective. Across a series of autobiographical volumes therefore, the author constructs a plural, non-unitary “I” that creates an evolving, unstable subjectivity. As opposed to Julia Kristeva, who, as we shall see in the next chapter, created a non-unitary self by writing two different identities within one autobiographical work, these authors create several different identities over a series of works. What interests me in this notion of reinscribing one’s self in writing is not an author’s personal reasons for reopening chapters from the past but the effects this has upon the representation of a plural self in narrative. In this chapter, I examine the way in which Gisele Halimi writes “I” as a nonunitary, plural, and unstable construct throughout three separate autobiographical texts. Halimi is a prolific writer but is still best known in France for her prominent role in feminist organizations. After having left Tunisia at the age of eighteen, Halimi studied to become a lawyer and became well known for her high-profile feminist cases. She successfully defended Marie-Claire Chevalier in the celebrated Bobigny trial that led to the legalization of abortion in France; she pleaded for Djamila Boupacha, victim of sexual torture at the hands of French paramilitaries; she fought separately for Algerian and Basque militants; and has been a prominent exponent of parite, an electoral process ensuring an equal number of male and

female candidates on ballot papers, in more recent years.3 Halimi has simultaneously been a prolific writer, having published many memoirs of her court cases and a series of semiautobiographical works. It is difficult to distinguish fully these two groups of publications, as there is considerable overlap between them; Halimi often blends autobiographical elements into the legal memoirs in a way that mixes her narrative of self with the story of the collective that she is defending. Thus “I” is often displaced by “we,” as the story of the self, which is supposedly at the heart of the autobiographical narrative, is replaced by the story of a myriad of others to whom Halimi is somehow linked, most often through professional association. Furthermore, this insistence on inscribing both “I” and “we” in the text evolves throughout this writer’s corpus. In this chapter, I analyze the ways in which Halimi writes “I” differently in the series of autobiographical works that she has written. I first discuss the way in which Halimi writes “I” in La cause des femmes (The Right to Choose), her well-known text on the Bo-bigny abortion case. This text was first published in 1973, during the heyday of the feminist movement, and contains many references to organized feminism and to the author’s own feminism in addition to recounting her self-narrative. I contrast this first semiautobiographical text with Le lait de 1’oranger (Milk for the Orange Tree), which appeared in 1988. The way in which Halimi writes “I” in this work, I argue, shows an altered approach to self-writing, as the text continues to play with the boundaries between “I” and “we” but the emphasis that the author places on each pronoun is changed. I then focus my analysis on Fritna, as this work is very distinct from Halimi’s earlier self-reflexive texts, especially with regard to the writer’s perception of her relationship between her individual self, her “I,” and her collective female other, the “we” of this volume. What is interesting in Fritna is the way in which incidents recounted in earlier texts are revisited and rewritten from the point of view of an aging woman who has just lost her mother and who is reappraising her narrative of self and her feminist consciousness. Thus this last text plays very clearly with the notion of a constant, stable, and unitary “I” since it incorporates a variety of “I”s from previous texts, highlighting how the writer’s approach to self-representation has changed. Halimi’s autobiography is written in a style that contrasts to the highly poetic styles of Cixous and Djebar. Nevertheless, the way in which she rewrites material and refers her readers to other texts that she has authored creates a complex, multivolume self-writing project that is unstable and evolving. Halimi’s texts thus dramatize the changing persona of the narrating self as well as that of the narrated self, as her texts evidence the progression in approaching narratives of self-identity, and this in turn impacts upon the writer’s manipulation of her self-as-child and self-as-young-adult. The questions that form the basis of my analysis in this chapter are thus: how does a writer rewrite her “I” in successive narratives? What is at stake in the process of self rewriting? What is altered, repressed, forgotten, or added in the process of rewriting? And what implications does this rewriting have for our understanding of the inscription of non-unitary selfhood in autobiographical narrative? My choice to include Halimi’s work in this study also emanates from a wider concern with the canon of autobiographical studies. As Liz Stanley has identified, scholarship in women’s autobiography has established a metanarrative according to which certain autobiographies are permissible for study but others are rejected, and in particular only “good” works of autobiography by established literary women are deemed appropriate: Virginia Woolf, Colette,

Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Maryse Condé, and George Sand, for example.41 cannot deny that Cixous, Djebar, and Kristeva are also on this list. By contrast, to date only one article has been published on Halimi’s literary writing.5 As Halimi is well known for her work as a feminist lawyer and not as a writer, I intend this chapter not only as an analysis of one woman’s unique contribution to the practice of self-writing, but also as an attempt to incorporate disparate female voices into this study, thus avoiding the canonical limitations that feminist scholarship should be working to undo.

COLLECTIVE INSCRIPTIONS IN La cause des femmes, first published in 1973 and revised in 1992, is an unusual mixture of autobiography, confession, memoir, and political tract. The subject of the text is Halimi’s defense of Marie-Claire Chevalier, prosecuted in 1972 for procuring an abortion, alongside her mother as her accomplice, and the woman who performed the operation. Halimi recounts the events that occurred throughout the case, the details of Marie-Claire’s story, the progression of the trial, and its implications for the French legal system. Much of the text is therefore comprised of historical account, including the texts of legal amendments, a table of information representing abortion rights in the countries of the European Union, and reproductions of graphics produced by the movement Choisir. Throughout this content, Halimi reveals a version of her own self, as she writes her individual self-narrative into the text, detailing her role in the court case, her childhood memories that impacted upon her position, and her feminist actions that resulted from the affair. Yet this autobiographical element is firmly in the background of the text; the narrator’s self is often absent or obscured, removed from the foreground, and displaced by more “important” or “relevant” material concerning certain projects undertaken by organized feminist groups. The opening pages of La cause des femmes recount an episode, later expanded upon in Le lait de 1’oranger, that serves to introduce the reader to the author’s wish to meld her story to her larger feminist concern: the reaction of Halimi’s father to the news of her birth. As an unnamed interlocutor tells Édouard that he has a daughter, he simply answers “merci” (thank you) and replaces the telephone, proceeding for the next two weeks to claim that his wife had not yet given birth: “quinze jours pour se faire à l’idée qu’il a cette malchance: une fille” (a fortnight to get used to the idea that he had had this stroke of bad luck: a daughter).6 Concluding that he already has an elder son, and that therefore no honor has been lost, Édouard finally accepts his misfortune and announces his daughter’s birth. Halimi situates this incident as a formative event in her development, remembering that she heard the story of Édouard’s reaction many times as a young child, and felt it as: un glas, et en même temps comme un appel, un départ. Je crois que la révolte s’est levée très tôt en moi. Très dure, très violente. Sans aucun doute indispensable pour faire face à ce clivage que j’ai retrouvé dans toute ma vie: j’étais une femme dans un monde pour hommes. [a knell, a summons, the start of a journey. I think my rebellion must have begun when I was

very young indeed. It was a stubborn revolt, and violent, and no doubt necessary in that it enabled me to cope with that essential discrimination which I have encountered over and over again, and which comes from being a woman in a world made for men.]7 In this way, Halimi recounts Édouard’s reaction to her birth then adds a commentary that points to her later feminism. From the starting point of the narrative, she chooses a story and then adds an unsubtle, rhetorical commentary to guide her reader to her expressed meaning: the story of how she became a feminist. She describes in detail the pain and discomfort she suffered as she herself endured two illegal abortions,8 as well as the difficulties of pregnancy and motherhood.9 Similarly, Halimi recounts episodes that emphasize her mother’s oppression by the patriarchal system; she tells the story of her mother’s arranged marriage while still very young, how she was forced to live far from her family and how she was forced to answer only to her husband, for example. This choice of material serves to highlight the problems that the narrator perceived due to the fact of being born female, and she furthermore provides the commentary that leads the reader to a specific conclusion with regard to each tale. Such events are recounted and then commented upon, thus emphasizing the specific agenda of Halimi’s selfwriting: first, after describing her mother and father’s financial dealings, she reflects, “la vraie malédiction des femmes, c’est d’avoir à dépenser l’argent gagné par un autre” (“The real curse on women is that they have to spend money earned by someone else”).10 Later, after detailing how she narrowly avoided an arranged marriage at sixteen, Halimi writes, “j’entendais échapper à ce destin de dépendance tracé pour les femmes depuis des millenaries: le mariage” (I intended by this choice to escape from the subjection for which women were and had been destined for thousands of years—marriage.)11 Throughout the entire first chapter, the most autobiographical in the sense that the writer recounts memories of her self-development as opposed to the political or legal commentary of the rest of the text, the narrator is constantly the narrator-as-adult; she is the narrator as present self who is positioned in order to provide a steadfast interpretation of the events that she chooses to recount. In this sense, the self-reflexive element of La cause des femmes is a highly didactic autobiography since the reader is told clearly what to think, how to interpret the material recounted, and what conclusions to draw about the autobiographical self that is its subject. The whole section is written in the past tense, emphasizing the distance between present narrator and the character that she is narrating, thus according herself the status of the omniscient narrator who is in some sense outside or beyond the self that she is narrating, and who has a specific agenda in doing so. Halimi places herself in the position of an all-knowing teacher, didactically instructing the pupil/reader with one specific message: the influence of her early life on her developing social and feminist conscience. Rather than write ambiguous portraits, as we shall see in Djebar’s writing, or seemingly unrelated vignettes as we shall see in Cixous’s, Halimi is very clear about the intended aim of her choice of material. The autobiographical starting point to La cause des femmes is intended as a springboard to the story of the legalization of abortion in France, which comprises the main subject of the text. Throughout, Halimi’s memories of personal or family events subside in order to bring the text closer to a memoir, a narrative that emphasizes political or historical events as opposed to a

developing selfhood. Halimi indeed makes little attempt at creating a narrative of self, whether in a fragmented, incoherent, non-linear, or nontraditional way; instead, the “I” of Halimi and the “we” who she defended are linked so closely in this autobiography that the former eventually becomes subsumed by the latter. Fifteen years later, and after having written several other mainly political texts, Halimi returns to the self-writing project at which La cause des femmes hinted. Le lait de l’oranger, published in 1988, takes as its starting point the death of Halimi’s father a decade earlier, and takes a slightly different approach to autobiography than was evident in the first volume. This later text begins with Halimi’s realization of her father’s descent into death, as he is for the first time unable to wash unaided, yet this memory is written in a very different way to those recounted in La cause des femmes. Rather than choose material solely on the basis of its validity for a narrative of the author’s growing feminism, and providing an all-knowing narrator’s commentary to reinforce the material’s significance, Halimi in this instance writes of her father’s altered persona in greater detail, recounting the minutiae of the image in her memory and including a short dialogue that occurred between father and daughter. She writes of how she sat at her desk later in the day examining an aged photograph of her father, describing the details of the light falling across it and the emotion that the image provokes in her: “le tangage—roulis que j’imposais à la photo me brouillait le cceur, entre mal de mer et difficultés a trouver mon oxygène” (as I jerked the photo to and fro, I was overcome with a feeling of nausea, half seasickness, half dyspnoea).12 As she remembers having wiped her spectacles as she gazed at the photograph, a previous scene in which her father spoke to her on the first day that she ever wore them returns to her: Le jour où je les avais portées pour la première fois, en jouant les dames des magazines, menton levé, sourire engageant, lèvres en cul de poule, l’air stupide, Édouard avait murmuré: “Meziana, belle, tu es belle toujours, meziana . . . —Mais je vieillis, papa ... les lunettes . . . —Mais non, toi, jamais, non!” [The first day I wore them I aped the ladies seen in magazine pictures, tilting my chin, smiling winsomely, pouting, looking rather stupid, while Edouard murmured, “Meziana, beautiful, you are still beautiful, meziana . . .” “But I’m getting old, papa .... the glasses . . .” “No, no! You, never, no, no!”]13 This scene immediately strikes a note of departure from La cause des femmes, as the succinct accounts that were confined as far as possible to factual details of the author’s memories are replaced by secondary details, which point to the emotion behind Halimi’s writing. Furthermore, a striking difference from the earlier work is the inclusion in this section of the author’s voice, that of the narrated self and not the present narrating self, in direct speech. In La cause des femmes the narrative voice remained constant, an outside voice that directed and orchestrated the reader’s interpretation, but in this citation we see evidence of another voice,

as Halimi incorporates her self-as-other into the text. The fact of including the voice of a narrated self in the text, and removing the commentary of an omniscient narrating self, at once negates any constraint upon interpretation and denies the existence of a fixed agenda on the part of the autobiographer; the motive in recounting the self is far less clear than was the case in the earlier text, and this in turn hints at a portrayal of a narrative of self, a story of selfdevelopment, that puts the author’s identity in the foreground at the expense of political tract. This tactic of writing more detailed vignettes of memories that exist in the writer’s mind continues throughout the first chapters of Le lait de 1’oranger. The text recounts the author’s memories of childhood and episodes concerning her family members in a disjointed, nonchronological framework that jumps from incident to incident like a stream of consciousness. The details included in the writing of each scene, along with emotive fragments and dialogue, sketch a far more nuanced image of Halimi as a child and as a young woman. For example, the author recounts her early religious doubts and the way in which she questioned the validity of the Jewish practices to which her family adhered. She tells the tale of the day that she dared not to kiss the mezuzah, symbol of blessing and protection, in an experiment to test her mother’s assurances that God would strike her down if she overlooked the ritual. After she not only survives the day but also scores the highest grade in the class, she concludes that the story of death, cursing, and bad luck were nonsense: Ça y est, Dieu a perdu. La puissance que ma famille lui prête n’existe pas, il ne récompense ni ne punit, sa mezouza, nulle et de nul effet. Elle et toutes les autres babioles, tephilim, chandeliers rituels, à la casse .... Dieu, je le laisse en liberté provisoire. Pour médiocrité. Il existe peut-être, mais c’est un personnage peu recommandable. En tout cas, il doit cesser de nous encombrer. Je viens de le decider. [That’s it, God has lost. The power that my family ascribes to him does not exist, he neither rewards nor punishes, his mezuzah is nulle and void. It and all the other baubles, tephilim, ritual candlesticks, to the scrap-heap .... God himself, I remand on bail. On account of his being a second-rater. Perhaps he does not exist, but he’s rather undesirable. In any case, he should stop bothering us. I’ve just settled the matter.]14 In contrast to memories previously recounted in this text and La cause des femmes, the immediate change in this episode is the transition from past to present tense and the necessary difference in narrative voice that this entails. For the first time, we read Halimi-as-child in this passage, as is conveyed by the childlike language and the present tense narration that reads like a child’s diary entry. In this way, the text incorporates another voice of the autobiographer into the narrative and allows the reader another glimpse of the self that is here both subject and object of its text. This is not to say that Halimi is suddenly turning to writing a narrative that aims at rendering a complete and coherent image of a developing self. But, the fact that the adult, present, narrating self is occasionally displaced by the voice of the narrated self moves the text closer to an autobiography that necessarily involves the reader in a process of interpretation, identification or disidentification, and reflection. This changed relationship between reader and writer, in the sense that the reader is no longer the recipient of a calculated

and didactic narrative and is instead invited to engage with the self of the writer, is mirrored by the changed relationship between autobiographer and self. The autobiographer is at once more daring, more ready to expose her self to the judgment of her reader and more conscious of the complexity of her own narrative of selfhood; rather than selecting material in order to render a one-dimensional image of a self, the writer broadens the text to provide a nuanced, open-ended representation of her self and life. This necessarily implies an altered approach towards the writing of autobiography itself. The autobiographer is reaching back into her memory not only to gather personal evidence to support specific arguments but she is also searching to represent the complexity and richness of her selfhood for no apparent reason other than simply exploring it in writing and recording it. This pattern of differing the narrative voice continues as Halimi turns to other memories from very different times in her life. She writes of her father’s illness in passionate prose that is again written in the present tense, spoken by a different version of Halimi, a different voice and an earlier version of her self. She changes voice again to recount her memories of her younger brother Andrétemporarily displaces that’s death when she was four years old, again in the present tense as she attempts to recreate her voice as it was then. Halimi’s style may not be reminiscent of a literary writer’s complex and crafted use of narrative voice in autobiography, such as Sarraute’s double voice or Roland Barthes’s third-person roman (novel), yet it is an attempt to break from a pattern of life-writing and shows a progression in approach to the self and the negotiation between a series of different “I”s.15 However, as soon as this approach is instilled, Halimi proceeds to reverse the movement; instead of weaving further memories with alternating narrative voices that slowly build a tapestry of a self for a reader to interpret, she returns to the style of the political memoir for most of the remainder of the text. Abruptly, Halimi begins to recount legal battles that she fought, giving details of the defendant’s stories as opposed to her own, and feminist projects that she led. The emphasis is again on her life history, but upon parts of her life in which she engaged in political causes by defending a collective, such as women and Algerian resistors. Although the memories are recounted in the first person, the “I” is no longer the focus of its text and precedence is given to other characters; Halimi’s self recedes into the background as she instead gives biographical sketches of the defendants with whom she is working or women with whom she was aligned during her feminist engagements. Even in a section recounting the way in which Simone de Beauvoir discussed the recent death of her mother in conversation with Halimi, the author does not return to the announced subject of her text, the death of her father. Instead, she continues to extrapolate upon her feminist organization with Beauvoir. The author’s family is completely absent throughout most of the written events. When a personal memory is recounted amidst this political memoir, such as the meeting between author and husband Claude Faux, the reference to her private life is surprising and the material at first seems incongruously placed amongst the legal/political narrative. Indeed, Jean-Paul Sartre has a far more important place in this section than does Halimi’s father, and the intellectual’s decline into death temporarily displaces that of Édouard. Nevertheless, toward the end of the narrative, the personal memory returns to take precedence, as Édouard’s impending and eventual death are written in detail. No reason is given in the text for the large digression and the reader is not forewarned of the change in

choice of material. Instead, one infers that Halimi may feel guilty, disturbed, uncomfortable, or uncertain of the validity of the act of recounting her personal memories. It is as though she believes that the only justifiable choice of material would be that which represents a collective body, or emphasizes the link between self and collective, rather than the egotistical choice of narrating only her self. Thus, Le lait de 1’oranger pays closer attention to the narration of a self and depicts a more detailed image of the autobiographical subject than the author’s previous life-writing. Nevertheless, it also signals a discomfort in the self-writing process, and Halimi is only able to overcome this by enmeshing her narrative of self with the story of a collective other.

FROM “WE” TO Returning to life-writing a decade later, Halimi again changes tactic, but on this occasion the alteration is more marked. Fritna, published in 1999, conveys a change in this author’s approach to self-narration, and adds a further articulation to the story of her feminism.16 Fritna is a poignant account of the death of the author’s mother and the trauma that resurfaced as the mother’s condition worsens. Halimi claims in the opening of the text that her mother “ne m’avait jamais aimée” (had never loved me),17 as her mother always treated her with coldness and distance, as opposed to the affection that her brothers garnered. Faced with her mother’s impending death, Halimi writes of how this lifelong trauma of being unloved by her mother becomes akin to an obsession, as she desperately wants her mother to explain the neglect. The author writes her hesitation between asking her mother for an explanation for her mistreatment and allowing her mother to die without confessing. As Halimi writes the painful memories of her tumultuous relationship with her mother, her text oscillates between asking and not asking, between accusing and forgiving, between resenting and sympathizing. These dual, conflicting impulses are recorded in writing with an honesty, frankness, and intimacy that bring the text close to the genre of confession.18 Gone are the court documents, the life stories of the accused, the political propaganda and the rhetoric. Instead, Fritna is a painful personal interrogation that explores the mother-daughter relationship, as well as relationships women have with each other and with men. Read in correlation with her previous texts, Fritna is a rewriting of previously published memories, as it represents an amalgam of diaries, journals, and autobiographies that rework the same material with a changed emphasis. In this section, I first discuss the changed relationship that Halimi builds with the reader as she moves away from the didactic style of earlier texts. I then examine the ways in which she rewrites previously written accounts to alter the emphasis she laid upon her link with the “we” of her earlier work. The opening pages of Fritna strike a familiar tone, as the present-tense narration renders a factual account of how the author viewed her mother in the morgue immediately following her death. Halimi remembers the events—the attendant removing the cover under which her mother lay, her attempt to shut her mother’s half-open eye and the way in which her husband led her from the building—in the factual detail that is reminiscent of the style of her earlier works. Yet, following this memory is an abrupt temporal shift, announced with “je devais avoir près de neuf ans. Je rentrais de la plage en compagnie de mes parents.” (I must have been almost nine

years old. I was coming back from the beach with my parents.)19 The writer proceeds to recount a memory of her father’s dishonesty regarding Halimi-as-child’s eligibility for a reduced fare on public transport. As the ticket collector appeared, the mother refused to aid the unsettled child. Halimi describes her mother’s cold, austere reaction as the young girl appealed to her for comfort and the distance that the mother insisted on keeping between herself and her daughter: Je la regardai longuement, j’accrochai mes yeux aux siens, je l’implorai, démunie, malheureuse, un “maman” à peine balbutié sortit de mes leèvres. Elle me regarda enfin. Des yeux soudain dev-enus gris, froids, comme la mer où je me noyais. Une jauge d’acier. J’étais trop grande, finalement. Tout éetait ma faute, je dénoncais mes parents par mon allure dégingandée, mon incapacité à me rapetisser quand besoin était. [I looked at her for a long time, I fixed my eyes on hers, I implored her, powerless, unhappy, a barely mumbled “mommy” came out of my mouth. She finally looked at me. Eyes suddenly turned gray, cold, like the sea in which I was drowning. An acid gauge. In the end, I was too tall. It was all my fault, I denounced my parents with my gangling physique, my inability to make myself smaller when needed.]20 Moving back to the present of the text’s narration, Halimi concludes “on l’a compris, ma mère ne m’aimait pas. Ne m’avait jamais aimee, me disais-je certains jours.” (We’ve understood, my mother didn’t love me. Had never loved me, I told myself some days.)21 The usage of the French pronoun “on” is a striking reference to the reader, a “we” that encompasses writer and reader in a complicity of which the mother is the object; both you and I have understood, hints the writer, that I was unloved by my mother and I therefore deserve your sympathy. This signals a change of direction within Halimi’s autobiographical writing, as although she continues to orient the reader in her/his interpretation of the material in a similar way to the commentary that the omniscient narrator gives of her memories in earlier texts, the reader is also the object of an appeal on the behalf of the writer. Whereas the reader was located in a place outside the earlier texts and treated as a nonquestioning entity willing to accept the orienting commentary provided by the narrator, the reader is immediately accorded a place within this text. The reader is accepted by the writer as the recipient of her text instead of being repressed within it, and is treated as the interlocutor who holds a place of reflection and analysis over the text. The fact of appealing to the reader in the third page is striking insofar as it at once obliges a closer engagement with the writer and a relationship in which one’s opinion is desired. It also strikes a note of suspicion in the reader, who may wonder why such sympathy is being demanded. Halimi claims that the reader’s mind is made up on the mother-daughter relationship after recounting one short memory, and claims that she can speak on the reader’s behalf in announcing that “on l’a com-pris” (we’ve understood). The reader will certainly have noted the distance between mother and daughter in the particular episode recounted, but will be most unlikely to have drawn the conclusion that the daughter was unloved by her mother. Instead, one questions Halimi’s motive in drawing the reader into the text through this appeal. Is she

attempting to manipulate her reader by according her/him a privileged relationship as direct recipient of the writing? Is she in need of the reassurance of the reader, as if she were incapable of telling her story without some assurance of the favorable opinion of her listener? Does she need somebody to assure her that her narrative of self makes sense? No matter what Halimi’s motive is, the opening pages of Fritna strike a different tone in that the writer is delving into distant memory in the text and building a more intimate relationship with her reader, whom, as we shall see, is a constant phantom presence in this later work. Whereas Halimi was guiding the reader through the stages of her development of collective consciousness in her early texts, she is here appealing to the reader for consent in the portrayal of her individual self and this augurs a turning point in this author’s mode of writing “I.” From this opening in which she strikes a specific relationship with her reader, Halimi proceeds to draw us into the text. She includes many episodes that recount snapshots of memories of her relationship with her mother in such a way as to demand the reader’s sympathy and good opinion. For example, an important difference between Fritna and Halimi’s earlier autobiographies is the frequent inclusion of direct speech in the later text. In this way, the author quotes her mother verbatim as evidence of the mistreatment she suffered as a child. For instance, the reader hears the mother’s voice naming the youngest son “le petit dernier” (the little youngest one)22 while his sisters were ignored, chastising the child Halimi for wetting the bed,23 and refusing Halimi’s gifts.24 The author thus inscribes her mother’s voice into the text as though she were presenting primary evidence of her case for her reader to judge: my mother was cruel to me, and I list these pieces of evidence against her. This evidence is reinforced by the inclusion of memories involving other relatives, which prove the daughter’s charges of neglect and cruelty on the part of her mother. In one episode, Halimi recounts her son Jean-Yves’s hostility towards herself after she decides to place Fritna in a residential home, quoting him saying to her “tu ne l’as jamais aimée” (you never loved her).25 She juxtaposes this by recording the children’s memories of being brought up by their grandparents while she was working, citing their harsh remarks in the text in direct speech, and thus listing the charges of which her children accused her. Yet Halimi proceeds to recount the birth of Jean-Yves’s daughter Maud, and of how he made a film of her development to show to his bedridden grandmother. Despite his protestations, Fritna refused to view the film or to accept the existence of the child as she was born out of wedlock. This incident placed a rupture between grandmother and grandson, and they soon became permanently estranged. Whereas Jean-Yves berated Halimi for being cruel to Fritna, the writer thus proceeds to show how Fritna was guilty of far greater cruelty, and how this was never resolved. Halimi in this way answers Jean-Yves’s criticism of her by pleading her innocence and juxtaposing the accusation with a far worse example of a lack of filial affection. The subtext is that Halimi was not the perfect mother, but her children have nothing to complain about compared with her own mother’s treatment of her. In this way, the text is an auto-justification, as Halimi attempts to exonerate herself, pleading innocent to the charges made against her, and convicting her mother beyond all reasonable doubt. The text is thus structured according to a legal defense, as Halimi prosecutes her mother on the basis of primary evidence in the form of citations and accusations proven by a third party, in this case Jean-Yves. As Mireille Rosello has argued, the courtroom is a

phantom presence in this text in terms of both its structure and vocabulary, and Halimi’s personal “I” is hardly distinguishable from the “I” of Maître Halimi, the lawyer.26 Halimi proceeds to stack up evidence against her mother, stating her claim to others’ sympathy on the basis of the undeniable suffering that has been caused to her. By citing the mother’s caustic criticisms in direct speech and introducing as character witnesses other family members, in particular those who have labeled her as a bad mother, Halimi presents a very tightly argued defense case. And in the position of the judge and jury is the reader, the recipient of Halimi’s case and the only person left to pass judgment. Halimi deepens her prosecution case by rewriting episodes of her life that she has previously written and manipulating them to accuse the mother of further atrocities. The reader’s position as judge and jury is solidified, as Halimi’s text becomes a two-pronged legal battle: a defense case in which she pleads her own innocence, and a prosecution case in which she assembles a huge array of material, both new and old, with which to accuse her mother. One of the most striking examples of Halimi’s rewriting of previously written memories in Fritna is the story of the death of her younger brother André. This incident occurred when the writer was five years old and André was two. One evening when their parents had left them in the charge of a young neighbor, the children played together until André disappeared into the kitchen. The writer remembers the child’s scream as he poured a jug of hot coffee over himself, and the pandemonium that ensued. André was to die from his injuries, prompting Fritna and Édouard to move to a different area and forbid any mention of André or of the circumstances of his death. As she reminds the reader in a footnote, Halimi wrote her memory of this event in Le lait de 1’oranger. It is striking upon comparison of the two accounts of the author’s memory of the death that they are not only similar but almost identical. Aside a slightly different structure in the opening paragraphs, which only serves to elucidate more clearly the background to the event, the incident as it is recounted in Fritna is a verbatim repetition of the pages of Le lait de 1’oranger. Halimi has lifted several pages from her former text and incorporated them without alteration into the latter. Yet, the beginning and ending of the later volume include a small number of slight but significant changes that point to a very different conclusion of the effects of this incident on the writer’s narrative of self. The earlier text introduces the memory of the event with sympathy for the family, and especially for the mother and father: Cette tragédie frappa notre famille de plein fouet. Mes parents, dévorés de culpabilité, nous imposèrent la loi du silence. . . . Une terrible tare, une erreur monstrueuse de la nature, telle apparaissait la mort d’André. Elle se devait done d’être effacée. On musela nos mémories, on fit disparaitre victime et accident. Ma mère ne s’en remit jamais. [This tragedy struck our family without warning. My parents, consumed with guilt, imposed a total ban on the subject. . . . André’s death seemed a terrible disgrace, a monstrous error on the part of nature. So it had to be eliminated. Our memories were muzzled, both victim and accident were made to

disappear. My mother never got over it.]27 Despite the regret, and maybe even resentment, that Halimi expresses at the way the children were told to forget about the incident, the main sentiment of her prose is pathos. She describes her parents’ guilt, identifies the responsible party as nothing more than nature, and claims that her mother was never to recover fully. The opening to the tale of Halimi’s memory of André’s death in Fritna is more ominous: Dans les points lumineux qu’elle relie entre eux, la mémoire laisse quelquefois des traces plus réelles que celles de l’instant vécu, car je me sens de nouveau projetée dans cette tragédie familiale que j’ai déjà racontée. Je vais la raconter encore ici, presque dans les mêmes termes. Mais cependant débarrassée de l’auto-censure que je m’étais imposée. Ma mère était alors en vie. Aujourd’hui, je peux tout dire. [In the lucid points that it ties together, memory sometimes leaves traces that are more real than the lived moment, as I feel once again projected into that family tragedy that I have already recounted. I am going to recount it again here, in almost the same terms. But without the selfcensure that I had imposed upon myself. My mother was still alive then. Today, I can say everything.]28 The pathos of the earlier text has been replaced by anger, resentment at the longevity of the trauma, and self-vindication. The reason for revisiting the incident in writing, we infer, is to correct a false impression given in the previous version, and this clearly relates to her mother. The text recounts the memory unchanged from the original words of Le lait de 1’oranger until the very end of the tale. In the earlier version, Halimi highlights that the wicker chair upon which André stood to reach the coffee pot was “mon fauteuil” (my chair),29 and concludes by claiming to have heard a neighbor refer to this: “ ‘c’était le fauteuil de Gisèle,’ avait soupiré une voisine. Lui et moi étions mêlés, plus que d’autres, au drame.” (“It was Gisèle’s chair,” a neighbor had whispered. He and I were mixed up, more than others, in the tragedy).30 This conclusion hints at a perceived culpability on the part of the writer, but this sentiment is subsumed within the pathos of the tale and the allusions to her parents’ guilt and lasting trauma. Halimi’s guilt or responsibility are hurried over as the text opens into a broader questioning of memory, as the writer wonders about the impact of childhood memory upon the adult self and notes how resistant it is to time. In Fritna, by contrast, she is far more direct, expansive, and damning in relation to her mother’s role in the aftermath of the incident. As her mother is in, hospital nearing death, she becomes delirious and talks of a boy named André drowning in the sea. When this period of changed consciousness has passed, Halimi questions her mother about it and is once again silenced. The writer concludes the episode thus: Alors qu’il y a une dizaine d’années j’interrogeais—oh, à peine—Fritna sur la date exacte de

cette mort, elle me rabroua. “Pour-quoi ces questions, si tu crois que je m’en souviens!” Mais elle se souvenait—elle l’a dit deux fois dans sa vie—que “c’était à cause du fauteuil.” Le fauteuil, mon fauteuil, sur lequel André était monté pour atteindre le feu qui allait le dévorer. Le seau que j’allais remplir à la mer et qu’André suivait jusqu’à la vague qui allait l’engloutir. Je suis coupable. Réalité du fauteuil ou délire du seau de plage, Fritna a fabriqué ainsi sa mémoire pour mieux verrouiller l’autre, celle où elle se reprochait d’être sortie le soir du drame. Coupable de la mort atroce de mon petit frère, tel était le verdict prononcé par ma mère à mon endroit. [About ten years ago, when I asked Fritna—oh, very gently—about the exact date of the death, she rebuffed me. “Why all these questions? Do you think I remember?” But she remembered— she said so twice in her life—that “it was because of the chair.” The chair, my chair, on which André had climbed to reach the fire that would consume him. The bucket that I went to fill up in the sea and that André followed until the wave swallowed him. I am guilty. The reality of the chair or the delirium of the bucket, Fritna fabricated her memory this way to shut out the other memory, the one in which she reproached herself for having gone out on the night of the tragedy. Guilty of the atrocious death of my little brother, this was the verdict that my mother gave on me.]31 In contrast to the ending of the story in Le lait de 1’oranger, the text of Fritna stops abruptly at this point, thus highlighting Halimi’s anger and recrimination. In comparing the later text with the earlier version, we see how Halimi interrupted herself and curtailed her story in Le lait de 1’oranger. In that text she admitted her long-lasting trauma and hinted at the responsibility she felt at having been blamed by somebody else, but wrote of the mother only in terms of the guilt that she felt for having left the house that evening. In Fritna, the author goes further and claims that the mother buried this guilt by fabricating another story in which Halimi herself was the guilty party. In the later rendition Halimi admits to the real, profound reason for her resentment: that she was blamed by her mother, who forced the responsibility for the incident onto her daughter as a means of denying her own guilt. Returning to the same memory several years later, and after the death of her mother, Halimi keeps the written record of the memory exactly the same but makes small additions that express openly the extent of her resentment. Furthermore, she lays herself bare in front of the judgment of the reader, writing candidly about the incident and not withholding information as she did in the earlier text. This candid, revelatory style draws a closer relationship between reader and writer, and also deepens the two-pronged legal battle in which Halimi is engaged in this text. On one hand, she pleads her own innocence at having been wrongfully accused, as she states that she was only five years of age and cannot be held responsible. On the other, she amasses further evidence with which to prosecute her mother, accusing her of selfishly burdening her daughter with a lifelong trauma that has never been resolved. This incident shows how this new approach to writing the self is far removed from the one in evidence in Le lait de 1’oranger. The heartfelt, highly personal first-person narrative that described Édouard’s descent into death in the earlier text was

juxtaposed with long passages of collective narrative. The death of André was recounted amongst other personal memories, but the text then became a broader account of the author’s involvement with a series of collectives and the narrative of the father’s death moved to the background. The narrative of the mother’s death, by contrast, stays firmly in the foreground throughout Fritna. And Halimi’s self, rather than being subsumed within a collective voice, is so individual, so prominent, and so intimate that it nears self-obsession. This rewriting of the self in which Halimi is engaged reaches back through her entire corpus. On several occasions in Fritna, the author includes a footnote that refers the reader to an earlier text. Likewise, La cause des femmes, Le lait de 1’oranger and Une embellie perdue all contain such footnotes to works that the author has written previously or since (in the case of La cause des femmes, which was revised in 1992 and includes references to works published since the original edition of 1973). Therefore, Halimi’s texts are best studied as a corpus that evolves, as they constitute an amalgam of autobiographical writing that ranges in style and tone, but that often repeats content in a slightly modified version. This repetition of content also emanates from the way in which parts of Halimi’s work are based upon diary entries and notebook etchings. She repeatedly refers to her “journal” and “cahiers” (notebooks) within her prose. She admits, for example, that certain lines are “reprises pour l’essentiel de mon journal” (taken from the most part from my diary)32 and remembers having written anecdotes in her childhood diary, the “Journal d’une mal aimee” (Journal of one who is unloved).33 She mentions in passing the fact that she writes “notes quotidiennes” (daily notes),34 as though writing is a daily practice that has continued throughout her life. Her texts are therefore enmeshed with present and past ideas, anecdotes and versions of self, and her textual fabrication of her life has been worked and reworked, written and rewritten. But despite having written incidents in different ways, at different times and in different texts, some published and some not, Halimi nevertheless continues to rewrite them. The perceived aim of rewriting her stories in Fritna is to exonerate herself from blame and to come to terms with the way in which her mother treated her. The memories that are freshly expressed in Fritna therefore add a twinge of recrimination to the previously published accounts, and this twinge may well have existed in her diaries and notes all along. As she tussles with her memories, she is trying to understand her mother’s actions, justify her anger in response to them, and somehow form a conclusion to the relationship. Yet, this aim is never fully achieved. Instead, despite her efforts to resolve her understanding of the relationship, she oscillates between sympathy and resentment towards her mother. Halimi writes of her hesitation to broach the subject with her mother and the text becomes a reenactment of this hesitation: “je voudrais et je ne voudrais pas. J’hesité. Vais-je recommencer ma quête, celle commencée dès l’enfance, une fois encore, ou la laisser partir sans avoir ma réponse?” (I want to and I don’t want to. I hesitate. Shall I begin my quest once again, the one begun in childhood, or let her go without getting my answer?).35 She goes backward and forward in an attempt to resolve the issue and heal her self, and writes with discomfort and sometimes trepidation. She is sometimes fearful of reopening old wounds, and is at other times eager to face them. There are times when she is bitter towards her parents, and others in which she sympathizes with them, such as when she claims to understand that Freud did not exist in 1940s Tunisia and that

her parents therefore did not understand their psychologically scarring behavior.36 Most often, however, the text trails off into uncertainty, as the writer frequently fails to conclude the memories she chooses to recount and instead ends them with a string of questions. Even in the last paragraphs of the text, Halimi still questions her project: “Parler? Se taire? . . . Est-ce trahir ainsi le devoir de piété filiale?” (To speak? To be quiet? ... Is this betraying the duty of filial devotion?).37 And as the text reaches its end, there is no closure. Instead, Fritna is cyclical in the sense that the self that it presents is still uncomfortable, still in trauma, still in an ambiguous position in terms of the mother-daughter relationship, just as it was described in the first chapter. She cannot let go of her mother (even in the most literal way, as in the morgue Halimi says “j’y reviendrai demain, je veux la revoir” (I’ll come back tomorrow, I want to see her again)38) but cannot resolve the relationship either. Even though she writes and rewrites, putting the emphasis upon her individual self despite the discomfort she feels in doing so, she cannot heal or even resolve this self. In contrast to Halimi’s previous texts, therefore, Fritna is very concerned with the individual self as opposed to the collective other, but does not write the individual self comfortably. By reading La cause des femmes and Le lait de 1’oranger alongside Fritna, therefore, we view the development of Halimi’s multiple and disparate “I”s, and this is not an emancipatory, liberating development. Instead, the “I” of Fritna is in an isolated, traumatic subject position, and this position appears to be irresolvable. Furthermore, as Halimi concentrates on the “I” of her individual self as opposed to the collective others of her previous texts, she questions the validity of her former alignment with the “we” of a feminist collective. In the chapter entitled “une femme ne devient femme que par une femme” (a woman only becomes a woman through a woman), Halimi comments upon the role of her mother in the development of her identity as a woman and as a feminist. She states that “en définitive, cet amour sans réciprocité pour une mère très atypique m’aura privée de la connaissance de moi-même” (when all is said and done, this unreciprocated love for a very untypical mother deprived me of a knowledge of myself).39 There follow several pages in which Halimi comments upon the lack of emotional bond with her mother and identifies this as a fundamental, lasting absence at the center of her identity. She expresses this thus: Une femme, me semble-t-il, ne parfait cette connaissance que par l’approche—émotionnelle, sensuelle—d’une autre femme. La mère est cette autre, modèle sublime, à la fois mis sur un piéd-estal et mêlé à votre chair, à votre quotidien. Elle est la femme que sera la fille. C’est par l’amour maternel que se construit le rapport au corps. Toute ma vie j’aurai ressenti ce manque, devenir une femme par l’intimité avec une autre femme. Une vie partagée intimement avec l’une d’entre elles m’aurait peut-être apporté ce qui m’a été refusee. Une expérience homosexuelle. Retour—ou premier voyage—vers la sensualité initiatique de la mère. Une autre soi-même, physiquement et psychiquement sem-blable avec ses différences, pour descendre au plus profond de moi-même. Pour sentir ma féminité et l’exprimer en femme. Cette aventure fondamentale, je ne l’ai pas vécue. [A woman, it seems to me, only perfects this knowledge through the approach—emotional and

sensual—of another woman. The mother is this other, the sublimated model, at the same time put on a pedestal and mingled with your own flesh, your daily life. She is the woman that the daughter will be. It is through maternal love that the relationship to the body is constructed. All my life I have felt this loss, becoming a woman through intimacy with another woman. A life shared intimately with another woman may have brought me the experience that I was denied. A homosexual experience. A return—or a first journey—toward the initiatory sensuality of the mother. Another version of oneself, physically and psychically similar and different, to descend into the depths of oneself. To feel my femininity and to express it as a woman. This fundamental experience, I did not live it.]40 The anger, bitterness, and recrimination found elsewhere in the text are laid aside as the writer focuses upon the sadness that has always been a part of her life. The finality is clear, as the mother has gone and the daughter will never be able to explain, understand, or change the lack of a bond that would have awarded her the “sensualité initiatique” (initiatory sensuality). She is instead in a position of incomplete womanhood, as the mother did not initiate her into what she calls the “rapport au corps” (the relationship to the body) into intimacy, or into the sensual or emotional closeness to other women that she identifies in the above citation. Halimi goes on to sketch some of the differences that she sees between men and women. This is not an elaborate attempt to theorize sexual difference, but rather a few subjective observations of men and women’s behavior. She writes about “les hommes” and “les femmes” (“men” and “women”) as two distinct groups, describing the former as unchanging while the latter is able to “inverser les rapports, de ruser ou de combattre” (reverse relationships, to use cunning or to fight).41 As for her own identity in this schema, her conclusion is simply, “tant pis. Il est trop tard. Ma mère est morte et je n’ai vécu—d’ailleurs plutot bien—qu’avec des homes.” (Never mind. It’s too late. My mother is dead and I’ve only ever lived—quite well, nevertheless— with men.)42 This section stands out amongst the scattered memories of the rest of the text not only for its candor, but also for the way in which Halimi locates her self in relation to female others. Although much of her previous autobiographical writing has melded her self with the selves of a collective female other, she here positions herself as outside, or somehow beyond, the realm of this collective. By writing of her self as absent, different, or other from “les femmes,” due to the lack of maternal influence upon her development, she frames herself as a subject who is unable to enter the collectivity that she has always tried to represent. The Utopian construct of allying her individual self with a collective therefore unravels at precisely the point of departure of the mother figure. The death of the mother is thus the catalyst that leads Halimi to separate “I” from “we” in her later autobiographical work. As she revisits parts of her life that she has previously written and rewrites them differently, she necessarily puts more emphasis on her self in an attempt to overcome her trauma. Yet the underlying nature of that trauma proves not only to move the emphasis onto her self but to separate that self from the collective other. In spite of previously writing autobiography in order to demonstrate how her early childhood formed her feminist consciousness, and how her mother in particular pushed her towards feminist action, Fritna

tells a different story. Halimi has possibly been repressing not only her mother’s influence upon her self-development, as we saw in relation to the writer’s anger over her mother’s explanation of André’s death, but also her mother’s effects upon her relationship with the collective other with which she has strived to align herself. Fritna is therefore the painful inscription of both an author’s grief and the questioning of her perceived self to which her grief leads her. As an amalgam of diary, autobiography, confession, and fiction, this text is the author’s most intimate and most personal to date. Although much of the content will be familiar to her readers, Fritna awards us a different glimpse of the author and of her self-narrative. As it signals a departure from her previously published work, it takes us from the known to the unknown in terms of the writer’s self-reflection. The recognizable memories that are rewritten into an angry, tightly argued court case with a wealth of primary evidence render a very different image from the Halimi of La cause des femmes or Le lait de 1’oranger. Yet the project of rewriting the self and the way in which Halimi multiplies her “I” in doing so does not lead to catharsis but instead unearths yet further trauma. Fritna is finally the symbol of Halimi’s inability to align her individual self with the collective female other, and her realization of this is profoundly traumatic. Her multiple autobiography, written in multiple voices, thus unearths her difficulty with finding an adequate identity and even an adequate pronoun to denote her selfhood; neither “I” nor “we” suffice. The plural, non-unitary subjectivity that she has written across her autobiographical volumes thus rests upon a struggle to reconcile the disparate identities that she has narrated. As we shall see with our other authors, Halimi thus writes a non-unitary, plurivocal identity in narrative, yet this attempt does not bring about a reconciled, coherent selfhood, or an atonement for trauma.

2 Fictional Doubles in Julia Kristeva’s Les samouraïs JULIA KRISTEVA IS A WELL-KNOWN MEMBER OF THE TRIO THAT HAS become known as French feminism in the Anglo-American academy. Along with Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, but for different reasons, Kristeva also rejects the label feminist that many have attempted to attribute to her.1 In addition, she is not entirely French either; as she fictionalizes in Les samouraïs, Kristeva arrived in France from Bulgaria on a doctoral fellowship in 1966. Nevertheless, the label of French feminism has been appended to Kristeva due to her prolific and provocative writings of the 1970s on the topics of female subjectivity and sexual difference. In Les samouraïs, French feminism and Kristeva’s involvement with it is one of the author’s main subjects of scrutiny. Writing in 1990, Kristeva looks back on the intellectual developments that have occurred in France since May ‘68 with the hindsight of experience, and reflects upon the direction of intellectual engagement. Les samouraïs is Kristeva’s first novel, and thus marks what Ross Mitchell Guberman identifies as the second of her “two major ‘shifts’ of focus, from linguistics to psychoanalysis and from psychoanalysis to fiction.”2 Although she continues to write cultural criticism, Kristeva has in recent years turned to writing works of fiction that explore the direction of intellectual engagement, the relationship between intellectuals and the populace and the influence of individual and collective histories upon the present human condition. In Les samouraïs, Kristeva comments upon the direction of feminism, the struggle between individual and collective action, the difficulties in assuming one’s (female) identity and the impact of issues such as love, motherhood, and sexuality on subjectivity. Critics of Les samouraïs have thus far concentrated almost exclusively upon its points of convergence with Les mandarins (The Mandarins), Simone de Beauvoir’s 1954 novel which may also be read as a roman à clef. These critical interventions contrast Beauvoir and Kristeva’s representation of the development and direction of intellectual life and of the French intellectuals they choose to depict through thinly veiled fictional characters. In this chapter, I move beyond these critical responses to explore how autobiographical subjectivity is represented within Kristeva’s text, focusing on how this author writes a dual selfhood. Les samourais is comprised of two separate and distinct strands of narrative that create a doubling of the author’s identity. The author develops a narrative strategy that consists of writing a self twice, from different perspectives and in different formats. This dual narrative strategy is reminiscent of Nathalie Sarraute’s double voice in Enfance, which tells the story of a self in two different voices, each with its own separate and distinct “I.” In Enfance, both voices, each speaking as “I,” are reflective of the author’s identity in a way that could be interpreted as self

and alter ego. Yet in Les samourais, Kristeva writes two different characters whose identities are both very developed in the text and who show two very different sides of her own persona. Furthermore, rather than writing a double “I” that gives a different perspective in each strand of narrative, Kristeva writes “I” in one strand and “she” in the other. The resulting text is a blend of bildungsroman and first-person narrative. Yet taken together, I argue, these two narratives subvert the genres of bildungsroman and autobiography, and play with the notion of a fixed, coherent, and individual self. Similarly to all of the works studied here, Kristeva’s text does not fall neatly into any definition of autobiography. The opening section of Les samouraïs, written in the first-person by an unnamed narrator, identifies the text as “une histoire à laquelle je suis mêlée—mais de loin, de très loin” (a story I am involved in myself—but only remotely, very remotely).3 The reader is immediately tempted to ponder whether the “I” of this enunciation is reflective of Kristeva herself. Yet the image that Kristeva uses, that of being “mêlée” to the text is very ambiguous; this could signify that she is mingled into the text, that she is combined or mixed with it, that she is akin to an accomplice to it, or that she is meddling with it. “I” is an other, we understand, but an other to whom Kristeva is related in an unknowable measure. The metaphor of space creates further ambivalence, as Kristeva claims to be far, “loin,” from the text, thus marking a physical barrier between her self and the self represented in her writing. A well-known writer asking the reader to suspend any judgment over the referentiality of her/his first-person narrative is bound to arouse suspicion rather than quell it, as Roland Barthes knew very well when he claimed in the preface to his most autobiographical text that “tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman” (all this must be considered as having been spoken by a character in a novel).4 After such an enticing opening, the reader is immediately curious regarding the possibility of references to the author’s identity and clues as to the definition of the narrating “I.” In the case of Kristeva’s work, such clues are certainly not in short supply. The text’s dual narrative structure is comprised of one strand of narrative narrated in the third person by an Eastern-European character named Olga, and the second strand is narrated in the first person by a psychoanalyst identified as Joëlle Cabarus. Both characters share clear similarities with the life of Kristeva, an Eastern-European immigrant who became a prominent intellectual, scholar, and psychoanalyst. In case the similarities were not clear enough, Kristeva adds an array of fictionalized representations of renowned intellectual and public figures under very thin cover. When Olga arrives in Paris she begins work with Edelman, a linguist who strongly resembles Lucien Goldman. She quickly befriends Armand Bréhal, a controversial scholar who wrote a book entitled C/S/Z and who dies following a road accident. Olga becomes part of the Maintenant group that publishes leftwing articles, is involved with the Communist Party, and makes a prominent visit to China, just as the Tel Quel group did. Many other fictionalized characters and institutions are represented in Les samouraïs, and I shall not list them all here; they include Jacques Derrida (Saïda), Antoinette Fouque (Bernadette), Jacques Lacan (Lauzun), Michel Foucault (Schemer), and Kristeva’s husband, Philippe Sollers (Hervé Sinteuil). The similarities between the characters of Les samourais and prominent figures in French intellectual life are thus very evident and very deliberate. While Les samouraïs cannot be labeled autobiographical therefore, this work falls between the boundaries of fiction, biography and autobiography and seeks to establish a

narrative of self beyond the confines of generic constraints. The juxtaposition of “I” and “she” and its resultant subversion of unitary identity serves to broaden the text to a nonindividual, semiautobiographical work in which Kristeva herself is both in evidence and obscured. This chapter is thus centered around the questions: how can a self be simultaneously inscribed in narrative through the first and third persons, what advantages and inconveniences does this mode of self-writing offer to the author, and what impact does this have upon the construction of a non-unitary textual self?

WRITING AND REWRITING THE SELF In the first strand of narrative that forms Les samouraïs, the main protagonist appears to be a character in a work of fiction, as her story is narrated in the past tense through a third-person narrator. There are several passages of dialogue in which we read the “I” of Olga’s voice, and a small number of letters that she authors in the first person, but her tale is largely told by an unknown third person. This strand of narrative tells Olga’s story over two decades, from 1968 until 1989, in chronological order. Its structure is akin to that of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, in which one follows a central protagonist through the joyous and traumatic moments of her/his personal journey. In Les samouraïs, the reader follows Olga through her arrival in Paris, her negotiations with a new culture, her growing relationships with leading Parisian intellectuals, and her involvement in the events of May ‘68. As the tale progresses, we read of her turn away from collective political and intellectual action, and of her eventual marriage to Sinteuil (Sollers). As the story draws to a close, we learn that Olga and Sinteuil are raising a child and that Olga spends more time strolling around les jardins du Luxembourg with her infant son than engaging in the collective intellectual and political action of her youth. In one of the final lines of this narrative, Hervé concludes that “on est bien chez nous, le reste on s’en fout.” (This is our home—who cares what anyone else thinks?).5 To judge from this conclusion, and from Olga’s trajectory, the lesson that our bildungsroman protagonist has learned is that collective action is the stuff of youth, and maturity leads to individualism. By contrast, the second strand of narrative is written in the first person in the format of a diary. Joëlle Cabarus, its author, is an adult psychoanalyst who looks from afar onto Parisian intellectual life. Some diary entries are dated and some are not, and they do not appear in chronological order; the text opens with an entry dated June 1989 and jumps back as far as the 1970s before closing with the entry from the following September. While we view the development of Olga’s identity and read her in rapidly changing subject positions, Joëlle remains constant as the experienced observer of Parisian life, commenting upon various aspects of intellectual debate from a distance. While Olga is living such tumultuous events, Joëlle is observing, evaluating, and writing them. Joëlle appears to be the “adult self” in the sense that she writes with hindsight, pointing indirectly to Olga’s mistakes and faulty suppositions. Olga is often in the midst of action while Joëlle is the lone voice who talks of her self, her personal experience, and observations, and little else. In this way, the juxtaposition of the two characters serves to double the author’s identity and dramatize the difference between the present, narrating “I” and the narrated “I” of the past. This structure renders Kristeva both

subject and object of her own narration, as she is in some measure both the speaking subject through the “I” of Joëlle and the described object through the “she” of the narrator of Olga’s story. Through this doubling of the author’s identity, Kristeva not only refuses to contain her identity within one self, but also places these two selves in conflict with each other. We read of Olga’s experiences and decisions, and subsequently read Joëlle’s evaluation of them in her diary. Many of these evaluations are critical, or at least point to the errors in Olga’s thoughts and choices that surface with hindsight. In one instance, we read Joëlle’s voice chiding Olga for her romantic involvement with an American intellectual. (It is unknown whether this story accurately reflects Kristeva’s life, or whether it may be an ironic portrayal of Beauvoir’s famed relationship with Nelson Algren.) Olga embarks upon a tour of American universities, teaching and giving public lectures, and in the course of this experience she meets Edward Dalloway. Dalloway, as Kristeva repeats comically in the text, is a Professor of Government who has very little in common with Olga. After recounting the tale of the affair in the thirdperson narration of Olga’s story, the text returns to the diary of the adult psychoanalyst, who wonders: Devine! Olga Montlaur avec notre prof Dalloway! . . . J’imagine un de ces types qui se tiennent droits et se dévouent pour sauver la respectabilité face au désordre du monde. Olga de Montlaur en train de flirter avec l’Ordre établi! . . . Toute relation, quand elle est menée avec goût, est pure. . . . Le goût? Accomplir chacun de nos actes comme s’il était le dernier de notre vie. (“Guess, then! Olga Montlaur, with our own Professor Dalloway!” . . . I see him as one of those upright types who do all they can to save respectability amid a world in chaos. Imagine Olga de Montlaur flirting with the Established Order! . . . Any relationship that’s conducted with good taste is pure.]6 Joëlle speaks ironically regarding Olga’s decision to embark upon her affair with Dalloway and chides her for her seemingly odd, incompatible choice of partner. Yet, this older, wiser self also adds a note of comprehension, perhaps even of justification, to Olga’s story by offering a reasoned explanation for her actions; the relationship was ironically ill-matched, she suggests, but was understandable as the rational decision of an intellectual who is committed to living her life in a certain way. Thus the experienced self of Joëlle, who writes in the present of the text, acts at once as a critical, mocking, ironic voice who is also explanatory, understanding, and accepting of Olga’s decisions. Kristeva in this way dramatizes one of the most difficult issues facing the autobiographer: how to represent one’s past actions in a way that does not excuse oneself but that also explains one’s present opinion based on the reflection and experience of hindsight. As we saw in the previous chapter on Halimi, many writers have written and subsequently rewritten episodes of their lives in order to explore, refine, or nuance their first attempt at self-representation. By writing two composite selves within one autobiographical volume, Kristeva incorporates the rewriting of the story into the story itself, thus emphasizing the instability of her self-narrative and her changing approach to both self and

story.

FROM “WE” TO “I”: REWRITING THE COLLECTIVE A crucial part of this reassessment of self and story is Kristeva’s reassessment of her feminism. Kristeva clearly feels bound to represent her involvement with organized feminism and to comment upon the direction of her feminism as she looks back over it, within her autobiographical writing. In addition to this, she also comments in detail upon her relationship with the group of Parisian intellectuals known as Tel Quel. Mirroring her trajectory with organized feminism, Kristeva was at first an active member of this group, then gradually turned away from it. In Les samouraïs, Kristeva finds a public forum for explaining and justifying her reasons for these developments. What is interesting in this text is how Kristeva recounts an image of her self as subsumed within 1970s feminist and intellectual movements through Olga, and then comments upon the direction of these, and upon the value of this collective action, through the commentary of Joëlle. Before Olga’s involvement with collective groups of feminists or intellectuals is introduced, she is presented as a very solitary character. The opening scene describes Olga leaving her parents and lover in an unnamed Eastern European city, boarding the aircraft, and traveling to Paris. Once there, she is immediately forced to negotiate an unfamiliar culture, and she is portrayed as fragile, insecure, and isolated. Kristeva recounts the unfamiliar-ity of Olga’s environment, and points to the strangeness with which she views innumerable small matters of cultural difference such as cafés, gifts, weather, and transportation. Her main activity upon her arrival, in which she engages in the company of the Parisian intellectuals and with which Edelman (Goldman) is so impressed, is photography. While in meetings in cafes and in other social situations, Olga takes photographs of inanimate objects with which she is unfamiliar, such as glass bottles, meals, and clusters of leaves. Olga’s distance from her surroundings is clear, since she can only engage with her environment though a lens. Photography is Olga’s strategy for coping with the challenges of her new environment but can only be a temporary activity; at the end of the day when Olga was alone and the photography was finished, her hobby gave way to the realization of her solitude: Plus de photos ni de flashes. Depuis longtemps, elle avait appris à pleurer les yeux sees, il suffisait de fixer une forme ou une phrase, et la force nouee remontait en surface. Un masque volontaire cachait le chagrin qui continuait à s’étioler au-dedans invisible et délicieux. Elle s’endormit avec lui. [No more snaps or flashes. She’s learned long ago how to weep dry-eyed. All you had to do was concentrate on a shape or a phrase, and your balked strength rose to the surface again. A deliberate mask hid the pain that went on withering away within, invisible and delicious. She fell asleep with it.]7 From this isolated starting point, Olga begins to align herself with a series of collectives.

Firstly, the author describes meetings between Olga and renowned feminists, and with peers who were intellectually engaged in feminist debate. Olga agrees in the early stages with many of the assertions of these feminists, and the text includes examples of dialogues in which Olga defends feminist points of view. In these instances, we read the “I” of Olga herself, as she speaks at length about the traditional oppression of women and the naïveté of current approaches to sexual difference. In contrast to her initial solitude, Olga is rapidly presented as undoubtedly part of a group, belonging to a collective in which she believes and with whom she shares a common perspective and a common consciousness. Yet, predictably if we bear in mind Kristeva’s own trajectory, this alignment with organized feminism begins to unravel due to a series of differences in opinion. This would hold no surprises for the reader of Les samouraïs who had any previous knowledge of Kristeva or her thought. Nevertheless, in Kristeva’s portrayal of this in Les samouraïs, she writes her adhesion to the collective, writes it floundering, and then evaluates this as the present writing self. Olga’s break with official feminist groups is evidenced by the story of her trip to China and the resulting book that she wrote about the experiences of Chinese women. Chinese society is something to which Kristeva had alluded many times in the course of extrapolating her theory of the subject in process. In Révolution du langage poétique (Revolution in Poetic Language), for example, she makes references to the Chinese language to exemplify the genotext, and to classical Chinese society to explain “textual practice,” one of the four signifying practices that she identifies.8 Readers who are aware of Kristeva’s work will also be aware of her book Des chinoises (About Chinese Women), a text that was inspired by Kristeva’s trip to China with the Tel Quel group.9 In this text, Kristeva discusses Chinese women throughout history, detailing their role in society, notions of maternity and matriarchy, and Confucian and Taoist views on women. She also contrasts this story of the developing role of women in Chinese society to the position of women in Western society. In Les samouraïs, Kristeva fictionalizes the story of her writing and publishing this text and alludes to the debate over how “feminist” the book was. This tale is emblematic of the rupture between Kristeva and organized feminism, namely the Psych et Po group. Bernadette is styled as the leader of the main Parisian feminist group and is remarkably similar in character and in factual detail to the self-proclaimed leader of Psych et Po, Antoinette Fouque. Fouque herself came under attack during the 1970s feminist debates for allegedly fragmenting feminist groups and emphasizing their differences rather than their common aims. During discussion between Bernadette and Olga, the dogmatic feminist leader commands, “Tu vas en Chine? Rapporte-nous un livre sur les femmes chinoises. Ce sera pour nous. Tiens, je te paie le voyage, pas question de le donner aux Éditions de L’Autre.” (“You’re going to China? Write a book about Chinese women then, and we’ll publish it. I’ll pay your fare—I don’t want you to go offering it to Editions de L’Autre.”)10 References to Éditions de L’Autre recur throughout the text and the company bears similarities to Éditions du Seuil, with whom Fouque’s own publishing house competed. As a result of Olga and Bernadette’s discussion, Olga researches the subject, reads widely about matrilineal society in Chinese history, and writes the book on the return from her trip. She hands the manuscript to Bernadette and waits several weeks before receiving an invitation to discuss it with the feminist group, all members of which have received copies of the manuscript since this is “la démocratie”

(democracy).11 The meeting is recorded in the text as dialogue, thus enabling Olga’s voice to be heard in the first person as she answers the criticisms of the group. Olga is surprised at first that none of this supposedly democratic group has read the manuscript. It follows that Bernadette is Olga’s only interlocutor, and the leader takes it upon herself to speak on behalf of all the women gathered in the meeting. Criticizing Olga for portraying women in a bad light and for rejecting matriarchy, she concludes “en réalité, tu n’aimes pas vraiment les femmes, puisqu’il ressort de ton bouquin que l’amour entre femmes les rend assommantes et même suicidaires.” (The fact is, you don’t really like women—your book suggests love between women makes them boring, if not suicidal!)12 Bernadette’s assistant even suggests that the problem with Olga’s book is not its ideas at all: “ce qu’on veut dire, c’est que tu devrais ajouter une préface pour expliquer ce que tu dois à Bernadette et au mou-vement” (all we mean is, you ought to add a foreward saying what you owe to Bernadette and the movement).13 The irony with which Kristeva portrays organized feminism is obvious, as she suggests that Bernadette/Fouque is the recipient of hero worship by her ill-thinking followers and that the movement as a whole is blind to debate and to differences of opinion. Olga even states that there must be other feminists with whom she can align herself, only to receive the blunt answer “non” (No, there aren’t!).14 At the root of this collective initiative, Kristeva suggests, lay the ambitions of one individual to obtain self-aggrandizement and access to an array of sexual partners (as we read of Bernadette openly engaging in homosexual acts with her followers). By writing this section in the format of a dialogue, thus allowing Olga to speak in her own voice, Kristeva provides what appears to be primary evidence of how she was mistreated by the feminist group and how she felt cast out from their ranks unnecessarily. The reader feels Kristeva’s attempt at retribution, as she writes at length about how her break from organized feminism was the responsibility of the feminists themselves, not from her own arrogance or pomposity. Over a decade after the rupture, Kristeva for some reason finds it necessary to justify her own stance to those who may not have been fully aware of it, due to the way in which the feminist group silenced her (stealing her manuscript to brush away any differences of opinion). The way in which the writer follows on from this episode further shows her desire for justification. Kristeva writes immediately of how Olga was undaunted by the episode and how she continued to research the subject of sexual difference, specifically her idea of the development of the role of women in Chinese society as a comparison to that of Western women. Kristeva also includes a short passage in which Olga and Hervé, the fictional representation of Kristeva’s husband and fellow intellectual Philippe Sollers, mock organized feminism in their personal conversations. While touring an unnamed cultural site, Olga and Hervé ironically discuss the representations of women shown on the artifacts, such as works of pottery, and make critical references to the way in which they would be interpreted by Bernadette and her followers. Hervé comments, “tiens, je vois de pétits penis graves sur la poterie. Célébrait-on le dieu Phallus dans le matriarcat?” (I can see little penises engraved on the pottery. Was the god Phallus worshiped under matriarchy?).15 When instructed by the group’s Chinese guide that the shapes represent mere fish, Herve contends in a repetition of Bernadette’s charge against Olga, that this is an “interprétation simpliste” (a very simplistic explanation).16 Kristeva is clearly intent on justifying her separation from organized feminism,

on correcting false assumptions made of herself as a result of this separation, and on having the last laugh over Bernadette/Fouque and her allies. The version of events that we read through the strand of narrative that tells Olga’s story is ridden with self-justification and narcissism; Kristeva’s implicit aim is to answer her critics and detractors in a public forum in the form of a barely disguised, denunciatory autobiography. Yet, Kristeva proceeds to comment upon this narrative through the second narrative of Joëlle Caba-rus. In this way, we read Olga’s story of the separation from organized feminism and then read Joëlle’s diary entries on a similar theme, written from the point of view of the adult self looking back on past experience. Joëlle’s narrative is far more nuanced regarding the value of feminist action than Olga’s tale; rather than commenting directly upon any previous commitment, the diary entries contained in Joëlle’s narrative allude to two different women, both of whom, I argue, may be read allegorically as vehicles for evaluating the value and longevity of adherence to a feminist collective. The first figure to whom Joëlle alludes is Carole, who appeared in Olga’s narrative as a fellow student and who became her personal friend. Carole is also active in the main feminist organization and defends the movement to Olga as the latter begins to see hypocrisy and inconsistencies within it. After this introduction to Carole, this character enters Joëlle’s narrative as a patient; years later, Carole suffers from a psychosis that leads her to seek help from the psychoanalyst. Carole is first presented as very unstable, unresponsive to conventional treatment and near suicide. Rather than speaking to the analyst of herself, her past trauma or her present suffering, Carole evokes only isolated images that are in some way emblematic of her distress; “elle parle par images” (she talks in images),17 explains Joëlle. Carole is unable to explain or to formulate the reasons for her suffering. Instead, we read Joëlle’s notes of Carole’s thumbnail sketches of her past experience and brief impressions of her present self. The common element of these images is Carole’s isolation. The analyst includes citations from Carole in which this character claims to have been “abandonnee depuis toujours” (abandoned from the beginning) and in which she feels “des rayons, mais pour moi seule; les rayons du desert” (rays, but only for me, rays of the desert).18 In this sense, the juxtaposition of the character of Carole in the two narratives portrays the woman who once adhered to a collectivity as so isolated that she is nearing suicide. Carole does not allude to this passage, nor does she comment upon the state or direction of the collectivity with which she was aligned. Instead, the collectivity is completely absent. Carole even admits in a letter to Olga on the subject of her adherence to the feminist movement that “je me laisse porter par les vagues, et, quand elles se retirent, je me sens un petit poisson meme pas rouge, tout gris, tout triste, rejete sur le sable” (I let myself be carried along by the waves, and when they ebb away I feel like a little fish, not even a goldfish, just a sad little gray fish thrown up on the sand).19 Thus, Carole is presented as having participated in organized feminism not as a result of a political consciousness, but as a means of survival in an isolating society. Once that collective dissolves, however, the psychosis of separation and loneliness subsumes her. This allegory situated around the character of Carole may be read as a harsh condemnation of those who adhered to the feminist movement as guilty of a false belonging, a mauvaise foi (bad faith) that enabled them to repress their self-doubt. Moreover, it enables the reader to read the former

feminist (Kristeva as Joëlle) analyzing the former feminist (Carole). After equating Carole’s feminist belonging as self-delusion, and showing how this later gives way to isolation, Kristeva proposes a simple solution to the problem: “j’essaie de lui faire raconter son histoire” (I tried to make her tell her life story).20 And this is, of course, exactly what Kristeva is doing. She is not writing the story of her feminist consciousness, or the story of a group mentality, or the story of a movement; instead, Kristeva turns from the feminist collective of her past to writing her own, individual story. Collective action is a fiction, we infer, since the only possible strategy for survival in contemporary society is to tell yourself your tale. The second woman to whom Joëlle refers is Thérésa Cabarrus, with whom the name of our character, Joëlle Cabarus, shares a clear resonance. Joëlle recounts how she has fallen in love with her husband’s assistant, and how this unexpected circumstance leads her to wonder whether she needs to begin a second analysis. In place of this, she decides upon a different strategy: Je me cherche dans les livres, des livres rares. Des manuscrits, des archives, des documents interdits, considérés comme dangereux pour les bonnes mceurs. Je cherche des témoignages de Thérésa Cabarrus: une parente? Une homonyme? Une autre coquette? Un prétexte pour revivre 1789, époque autrement trouble à côté de laquelle les escarmouches actuelles ne soutiennent certes pas la comparaison.’ [I look for myself in books—rare books. In manuscripts, archives, forbidden documents regarded as a danger to morals. I’m looking for evidence about Thérésa Cabarrus: a relative? a namesake? another coquette? It’s an excuse for living through 1789 over again, a time much murkier than today, and one beside which the present skirmishes are as nothing.]21 The strategy of the psychoanalyst who needs to cure herself is to turn to stories; she tries to find her self in the stories of another’s self, that of Thérésa Cabarrus. The choice of Theresa Cabarrus is presented as random, as we read Joëlle wondering about the relationship between her and Thérésa (relative or homonym, for example), and claiming that Thérésa is merely “un pretexte” (an excuse) to reflect upon another era. Yet this comparison with Thérésa is not merely perfunctory. The reference to Theresa Cabarrus adds a further nuance to Kristeva’s tale and provides comparison with the character of Carole. Thérésa Cabarrus achieved notoriety during the French Revolution due to her marriage with the revolutionary Jean Lambert Tallien. She was rumored to have influenced the policies of her husband significantly and became known as Notre Dame de Thermidor due to his involvement in the bloody 9 Thermi-dor revolution. Yet, Thérésa turned away from the collective of revolutionaries following an incident that presumably exposed to her the reality of their loyalty to fellow adherents. Thérésa was arrested in Paris following her marriage and incarcerated at the La Force prison, which was renowned for its brutality. She wrote several notes to her husband as the date at which she was scheduled to die at the guillotine approached, yet none were answered. On what was supposed to be the eve of her death, Thérésa finally wrote a bitter letter to Tallien, renouncing any link with him and enclosing a

dagger. By coincidence, the death of Robespierre that night spared her; she was released from prison and eventually remarried, led a famous salon, and had a series of admirers and romantic affairs. The way in which Kristeva incorporates a reference to this little-known figure into her partially autobiographical text adds another dimension to her self-representation. Kristeva does not write at length of Thérésa, she does not describe her life or explain the reason for her inclusion in the text. Instead, she simply writes of her, through the first person narration of Joëlle: “jouir non pas à mort, mais avec ruse et modération. Sournoisement, perversement, mais avec determination et fougue, Thérésa Cabarrus incarne la force de la vie plaisante contre celle de l’héroïsme à mort.” (Enjoying to the death, but enjoying with dash and determination. Thérésa Cabarrus stood for the power of a pleasant life as against that of heroism to the death).22 Joëlle clearly admires Cabarrus’s determination and strength, and applauds her decision to please herself in the face of her abandonment by the group of revolutionaries. One surmises that to Thérésa Cabarrus, the collective action of the revolutionaries was certainly important, yet her personal satisfaction was more so; once the bonds that tied the collectivity of revolutionaries was exposed as fictitious, Thérésa turned her attentions to herself. To Joëlle, Thérésa embodies the image of a woman who placed her sensual pleasure and individual interests above her adherence to a collective conscience. Compared to other feminist predecessors, Joëlle feels a far stronger resemblance with her: “Thérésa restera toujours une figure de courtisane, rien à voir avec la grandeur qu’on découvre à présent au féminisme d’Olympe de Gouges. ... A moi, elle me convient bien, notre ancêtre.” (Theresa will always be just a courtesan, no connection with the greatness they see nowadays in Olympe de Gouge’s feminism. . . . But she suits me well enough, our ancestor).23 Thus, Thérésa Cabarrus transcended the collectivity to follow her own desires, and appeared to have triumphed as a result, and Joëlle appreciates the strategy of her ancestor. While Thérésa was not a member of a feminist collectivity, Kristeva compares her to other feminists and emphasizes that her specifically female sexuality and desire for sensual pleasure flourished as she turned away from collective action. By looking for her story in the story of another prominent woman who moved from a collective stance to one of increased individualism, Joëlle provides a parallel of Kristeva’s transition. Thus, while Olga’s narrative tells the tale of Kristeva’s separation from organized feminism in denunciatory, angry, self-justifying tones, Joëlle’s narrative emphasizes the hypocrisy and false loyalty of those who adhere to collectivities; Carole belongs due to self-doubt and Thérésa belongs due to an erroneous impression of the group’s loyalty. Adhering to a collective brings no individual progress at all in Kristeva’s representation. Instead, to survive intact within society, the necessary skill is to be able to tell one’s story: an individual, narcissistic story.

FROM PHILOSOPHY TO FICTION Following the tale of the feminist collective that Kristeva tells through Olga and then recounts through Joëlle, Kristeva extends her reflections to encompass her past involvement with intellectual groups in general. In this way, the text becomes a meditation on Kristeva’s

alignments with collectives as she looks back over the course of her life and thought from 1968 to 1990 against the backdrop of historical and intellectual developments. Such historical, factual details form the background to Olga’s story, as Kristeva makes references to such events as the Vietnam War, governmental changes, and the advancement of capitalism. From the starting point of the collective action of the 1960s, Kristeva writes her story through the period of growing individualism, consumerism, and right-wing political agendas. Josiane Leclerc Riboni has charted these developments in detail, and Margaret Atack has pointed to links between such historical/political events and shifting intellectual paradigms.24 Atack argues specifically that Les samouraïs is set against verifiable historical events to highlight the portrayal of the intellectual development of structuralism as a movement that challenged and superseded existentialism. According to Atack, Kristeva emphasizes her alignment with the collective of the Tel Quel group (Maintenant in the text) and structuralist intellectuals in order to emphasize their opposition to, and even their triumph over, the existentialists who preceded them. Atack identifies this desire to show adherence to one collective in order to prove the lack of validity of another as the main problematic of Les samouraïs. It is true that the structuralist intellectuals stood in opposition to the ideas of existentialism, as they viewed the subject as a product of ideologies and discourses, influenced by psychoanalysis and the workings of language.25 Yet although Kristeva writes her adhesion to the collective of structuralist intellectuals, she also writes her disillusionment with the notion of collective belonging that her involvement firstly entailed. Just as she used a dual narrative strategy to discuss and then comment upon her involvement with organized feminism, Kristeva exploits the distinctions between the third-person narration of Olga and the firstperson narration of Joëlle to nuance her representation of collective intellectual engagement. This aspect of the text also provides an important articulation to Kristeva’s representation of the value and purpose of formulating and writing one’s selfhood. The collective of structuralist thinkers are presented very early in the text, as Olga is introduced to Bréhal/Barthes and Sinteuil/Sollers in a café in the opening chapter. Olga soon becomes enraptured by the lectures of Brehal, who becomes Olga’s unofficial professor in place of Edelman. She is invited to gatherings in which the early stages of structuralist thought are established, and develops friends of her own age from among Bréhal’s students. Her growing romantic attachment to Hervé, whom she later marries, solidifies her access into the group. She publishes in the journal of the Maintenant group and becomes a proponent exponent of their ideas. Nevertheless, as the text progresses this collective is exposed as imaginary, as Kristeva writes its gradual implosion. From believing in it utterly, Olga turns to considering it as a thing of the past. For example, we read Olga and the narrator who tells her story criticizing members of the group, and others who have been in some way aligned with it. For example, a long passage is devoted to discussing the career of Saïda, who closely resembles Derrida. While Derrida’s thought cannot be reduced to any movement, structuralist or any other, some of his ideas find their origin in structuralism and he is presented in this text as involved in the group’s mobilization. Yet the narrator breaks off from a discussion of Brehal to write suddenly of Saïda’s trajectory in very critical terms. The narrator accuses Saida of taking advantage of the events of May ‘68 to advance theories that would not have been taken seriously at any other time. Saïda’s lectures are compared to religious meetings (“la messe”)26

and they are described as very poorly received. The narrator concludes caustically: Le naguère timide Saïda dispersait chaque mot en d’infimes com-posantes, et, de ces grains, faisait pousser des tiges de caoutchouc flexibles avec lesquelles il tissait ses propres rêves, sa littérature à lui, un peu lourde, mais d’autant plus profonde qu’inaccessible. Ce fut le début de son aura de gourou, qui allait submerger les États-Unis et ses féministes, toutes “condestructives” par affection pour Saïda et par mécontentement endogène. [The formerly timid Saïda broke down every word into its minutest elements, and from these seeds produced shoots so flexible he could weave them into his own dreams, his own literature, rather ponderous but as profound as it was inaccessible. This was how he started to acquire his reputation as a guru, which was to overwhelm the United States and the American feminists, who all became “condestructivists” out of affection for Saïda and endogenous dissatisfaction.]27 Kristeva’s opinion could not be clearer, nor could her disenchantment with the notion of a group of intellectuals working within a common theoretical framework. Such criticisms, although far less malicious, resurface during the tale of the trip to China. The ostensible reason for Olga’s visit to China, which formed the basis of her manuscript about Chinese women, was her involvement with the Maintenant (Tel Quel) group. As part of their reassessment of Marxism and their consequent dissatisfaction with the French Communist Party, the group decided to visit the People’s Republic in order to view for themselves the reality of the Communist regime. Yet, according to the narrator of Olga’s story, small differences arise among members of the group. Olga makes negative comments about the ideas of Strich-Meyer (Levi-Strauss), for example, and Brehal (Barthes) retreats into himself, thus refusing to participate in the group discussions that he previously led. When they return from the trip, the group slowly begins to disintegrate. There is no tumultuous, culminating event, such as the disagreement between Olga and Bernadette that symbolized the rupture with organized feminism. Yet, Olga and Hervé lead their lives very separately from the rest of the group and the lively meetings in cafés and lecture halls no longer occur. Alex Hughes writes that the trip “unbound the cohesive synergy of the collective they constituted back home” and that the attempt to connect to the Chinese in a substantive, corporeal way leads to a growing isolation from both the Chinese and each other.28 Indeed, following the trip, the group scatters and the narration turns to the lives of Olga and Hervé as its only remaining characters. Their isolation from the rest of the group is evident, as they seem to turn away from collective intellectual endeavor to concentrate on their own individual pursuits. This intellectual collective is again discussed from the perspectives of both Olga and Joëlle. In a similar pattern, Olga’s narrative contains caustic comments, accusations and selfjustification, whereas Joëlle, as the reflective adult voice, provides a more subtle representation. Joëlle’s diary entries contain references to her self, to her love for her husband’s young assistant, and to the patients who are in analysis with her. Parisian intellectual life of any period is almost entirely absent, as Joëlle’s “I” concentrates almost entirely on her

interior life. Yet on one occasion, Joëlle records her impressions of the seminar given by Lauzun (Lacan): Tout ce monde intellectuel, littéraire, qui fréquente son sémi-naire: je me demande ce qu’ils entendent. Surtout, comment peut-on écrire des romans, done construire du faux, un monde tel qu’on le désire, et non pas tel qu’il est, alors que chacun est malade de mensonges? On croit guérir le mensonge par un beau mensonge. Voila une fausse idée par excellence . . . Alors que je suis moi-même en train de rédiger ce carnet. [All those intellectuals and literary people who come to his seminar: I wonder what they’re after. Above all, I wonder how people can write novels, and thus create untruth, a world as they’d like it to be and not as it is, while everyone is sick with lies. They think to cure lies with a lie that is beautiful. A false notion if ever there was one . . . And yet here am I, writing these notes.]29 The way in which Joëlle represents the group of Parisian intellectuals shows more wonderment and miscomprehension than condemnation. Although the group is presented as naïve in the sense that they follow Lauzun like a shepherd, this diary entry is far more ambiguous than any of Olga’s assertions. Joëlle asks how such intellectuals can write novels, as she equates them with falsehood. Writing a novel is presented as akin to writing a nonexistent, dreamlike world that only serves to cover up lies. Intellectuals, according to this argument, are engaged in a project of self-deception, not one of advancing truth, knowledge, or understanding. By cocooning themselves in fiction, Kristeva hints, intellectuals deny themselves access to the reality of the world and confine themselves in an impossible position. Novels, presumably, are distinct from the stories that we tell ourselves: the stories that Joëlle advises Carole to develop in order to combat her isolation. These stories may not be true, but are not as fictional as novels. As she advised Carole, the only way in which to survive in current society is to tell oneself one’s story, and doing so in terms of fiction is not sufficient; instead, although one cannot be true or accurate, one must emphasize one’s individual life and individual story.

STORY OF A SEPARATION The text ends with a portrait of Olga that could hardly be more individualistic. She and Hervé are engaged in a completely independent relationship, in which their own individual concerns are paramount. This is something to which the voice of Joëlle hinted in the diary entry that forms the preface to the text. Joëlle recounts having seen Olga and Hervé in the jardin du Luxembourg thus: Ils sont ensemble parce qu’ils sont séparés. lis appellent amour cette adhésion mutuelle à leur indépendance respective. Cela les rajeunit, ils ont l’air adolescents,- infantiles, même. Qu’est-

ce qu’ils veulent? Être seuls ensemble. Jouer seuls ensemble et se passer parfois le ballon, histoire de montrer qu’il n’y a pas de chagrin dans cette solitude-là. [They’re together because they’re separate. What they call love is this shared fidelity to their individual independence. It keeps them young; they look like teenagers, children almost. What do they want? To be alone together. To play at being alone together, tossing the ball back and forth between them now and again to show there isn’t any resentment in their solitudes.]30 This could well be the epigraph of the text, as it hints at its overall subject: finding new ways of formulating one’s adhesion to collectives in the present day, and articulating this differently to how one understood this adhesion in the past. Kristeva announces this predicament in the preface to her text, and proceeds to fictionalize her trajectory from individual actor in society to member of several collectives to an individual who seems resolved upon the end of collective action. As Les samouraïs draws to a close, the lonely immigrant has vanished, and the feminist intellectual who published provocative texts from within a controversial intellectual group has become a wife and mother. Just like Kristeva herself, Olga has a son with Hervé, and took the decision to become a mother after her trip to China. The baby occupies all of Olga’s intellectual pursuit, as she refigures the world around her according to her new state and observes her son’s development in detail, just like the psychoanalyst researching human development. As Les samouraïs draws to an end, this transformation of Olga into a mother for purely emotional reasons is emblematic of her position as a social actor who behaves according to individual motives and has left collective action behind her. Similarly, Joëlle is also in a very isolated subject position by the end of the text. She is distanced from her husband and daughter, her personal relationships are very strained and her patients seem beyond her reach. Joëlle is just as isolated as Olga was at the beginning of the text, and the trauma of their isolation is the primary link that connects the two characters. Thus Kristeva’s attempt to write her self plurally, from two different perspectives, ends in a portrait of complete isolation, and furthermore this isolation is both traumatic and irresolvable. The conclusion that the text has presented, I have argued, is that one must develop the ability to tell oneself one’s story, and to resist falling into fiction in doing so, in order to survive with one’s psyche intact in contemporary society. Yet, telling oneself one’s story is precisely what Kristeva is doing, and not once but twice, due to the dual narrative structure of the text. It is ironic that despite this attempt to tell her story twice, the text presents no closure to the quest for a narrative of identity and ends very pessimistically. Thus Les samouraïs is an example of an autobiographical text predicated upon non-unitary, plural subjectivity that does not present this strategy of narrating the self as liberating, conclusive, or cathartic. Kristeva’s style of inscribing her self in narrative through an “I” framed by an “I” leads to a doubly traumatic, fragmented, and isolating position, despite its attempt to incorporate first-person narrative and third-person bildungsroman. By inscribing the self in narrative doubly, Kristeva’s writing overcomes some of the obstacles inherent to autobiographical writing, such as choosing, explaining and justifying one’s past actions. Nevertheless, the “I” and “she” of the two strands

of narrative find no reconciliation and nor does the unstable, evolving autobiographical subject to which they allude.

3 Archive and Autobiography in Assia Djebar’s Vaste est la prison ASSIA DJEBAR HAS BECOME WELL KNOWN FOR HER FICTIONAL, autobiographical and theoretical texts detailing the history of women’s subjugation in the specific space of colonial and postcolonial Algeria. She is a prolific writer who has incorporated complex representations of female subjectivity into novels, poetry, short stories, essays, films, and a series of autobiographical texts. In a similar way to the other writers discussed in this book, Djebar represents in her autobiographical writing the problematic shift between individual and plural autobiographical subjectivity, as her texts shuttle from personal recollection to collective cultural inscription. Djebar feels bound to negotiate plural female subjectivity within her autobiography, and there results a series of texts in which an impulse towards collectivity permeates the writing of the self. In this way, Djebar’s works contain a series of different “I”s who are each presented as distinct identities, and who are also a necessary composite part of the author’s construction of her self. Thus we turn from Halimi, who wrote a series of different “I”s over several volumes, to Kristeva, who wrote “I” and “she” in one volume, to an author who writes a series of different “I”s within one text. Here, I concentrate my analysis on one of Djebar’s autobiographical volumes. Vaste est la prison appeared in 1995, a full ten years after this author began the autobiographical project she named the Algerian Quartet. L’amour, la fantasia announced the beginning of this project in 1985, followed by Ombre sul-tane three years later. The third autobiographical volume was not forthcoming for several years; rather than continue with the quartet, Djebar broke away from it with the fictional Loin de Medine, Les nuits de Strasbourg, and Chronique d’un ete al-gerien: Id et la-bas.1 In Vaste est la prison, Djebar finally returns to the Algerian Quartet project, and this time in what Mildred Mortimer identifies as the writer’s most autobiographical text to date.2 In a similar vein to L’amour, la fantasia and Ombre sultane, this text combines autobiography with different genres: confession, fiction, historical narrative, and plural autobiography. As Patricia Geesey has illustrated, in L’amour, la fantasia Djebar “recognizes that in order to facilitate her act of life-writing, she must renew her ties to the female collective and situate her discourse within the circle of Algerian women.”3 The polyphonic text that resulted intertwined individual and collective subjectivity as it called forth episodes from the writer’s personal memory and explored the erasure of women from official accounts of Algerian history. Ombre sultane continued to explore individual and collective selfhood through the lens of the mythic tale of Sheherazade. Years later, Vaste est la prison takes up the quest again, but this time Djebar’s writing is tinged with doubt as the writer questions the purpose of her collective “I” more overtly. Djebar

opens the text with a tale that she identifies as having demonstrated to her the futility of her enterprise, and proceeds to pepper her text with episodes in which she questions, more or less explicitly, the writing in which she is engaged. The text is therefore tense, fraught, and often uncomfortable. Winifred Woodhull, for example, describes its overall tone as melancholy and at times bitter, as the writer expresses more acutely the alienation from Algeria to which she had previously alluded.4 The text is composed of five sections: a short preface explaining the author’s reluctance to resume writing; a confession recounting the narrator’s uncon-summated affair with a younger man; a search for an unknown alphabet that is eventually identified as Berber; interwoven narratives of the filming of La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua and stories of the author’s maternal ancestors, and a final section detailing recent violence against women in Algeria and a poem about writing itself.5 In this chapter, I first discuss the difficulty in writing plural autobiography that Djebar announces in the preface to Vaste est la prison. I then examine each section of the text in terms of the author’s discomfort in approaching a plural self because each section, I argue, adds a different articulation to her discussion. Beginning with individual memory in the first section of the text, I analyze how Djebar represents memory and the value of writing it. I then move to a discussion of the second section of text, in which Djebar writes of collective memory and selfhood. I point to the similarities between the representation of individual and collective memory, in order to interrogate how the text presents the act of writing in the name of a collective, plural other. Vaste est la prison, I argue, debates the issue of writing individual and collective memory in a way that questions the utility of writing plural selfhood within autobiography. In the final part of this chapter, I discuss the way in which Djebar concludes the text with a series of female narrators who each take over the narrating “I.” The questions that guide this chapter are therefore: how can an author create a collective textual self, to what extent can a series of disparate “I”s represent a “we,” and how does the attempt to align an individual self with a collective other in narrative impact upon the narrating identity?

THE FUTILITY OF PLURAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY? The first section of Djebar’s text, “Le silence de l’ecriture,” announces a questioning, even a rejection, of writing as a means of capturing memories of past experience. Such an opening is surprising, as many autobiographers, and particularly those writing prior to the twentieth century, have elected to include a preface that gives some account of their motivations for embarking upon autobiographical expression.6 By comparison, an opening section that discusses a turn away from writing and the pointlessness of the enterprise is very striking, as an autobiographical project would seem to be the opposite, an anti-effacement tactic that prevents one’s disappearance from memory, or records one’s experiences for posterity. Djebar opens Vaste est la prison thus: Longtemps j’ai cru qu’ecrire, c’etait mourir, mourir lentement. Deplier a tatons un linceul de sable ou de soie sur ce que Ton a connu piaffant, palpitant. L’eclat de rire—gele. Le debut de

sanglot—putrefie. Oui, longtemps, parce que, ecrivant, je me rememorais, j’ai voulu m’appuyer contre la digue de la memoire, ou contre son envers de penombre, penetree peu a peu de son froid. Et la vie s’emiette,- et la trace vive se dilue. [For a long time I believed that writing meant dying, slowly dying, groping to unfold a shroud of sand or silk over things that one had felt trembling and pawing the ground. A burst of laughter—frozen. The beginnings of a sob—turned into stone. Yes, for a long time I wanted to lean against the dike of memory, or against the shadowy light of its other side, to be gradually penetrated by its cold, because as I wrote I recalled myself. And life dissipates,- its living trace dissolves.]7 Here, Djebar alludes to the way in which she previously approached writing as a way to recapture her memories, possibly in reference to her earlier partially autobiographical works, L’amour, la fantasia and Ombre sultane. Yet, this citation suggests that her approach has changed as she has come to consider the process of writing as equivalent to halting the present, burying it, and thereby slowly killing it. By recording experience in the written word, she appears to argue, one isolates it, covers it up, puts something over it and obscures what it once was. As the title of the passage suggests, writing is silence; it does not call out, it does not change, it produces no effect. It is, as Djebar writes later in the preface, a “vent du desert qui tourne sa meule inexorable” (the desert wind turning its inexorable millstone),8 a desert wind that nobody sees, that occurs in a lifeless landscape and that leaves no lasting change as the sand is whipped up and then simply replaced, covering layers of sand rather than exposing them. In an allusion to the voices of the women of her homeland, Djebar writes that she hears the “murmure affaibli des aieules loin der-riere” (the faint murmur of ancestors)9 and the “plainte hululante des ombres voilees” (the ululations of lament from veiled shadows”)10 as she writes, but states that the result of inscribing them in writing is merely “silence d’ecriture” (the silence of writing).11 The string of metaphors included in this section, such as the desert wind covering the sand, the shroud covering something that was previously living, the frozen laughter and the crumbled life, all point to an equation between writing and death, symbolizing how ineffectual the act of writing is. Writing something, an event or an emotion for example, is presented as freezing it into one instance, isolating it, and removing it from the reality in which it took place: imposing death upon it and not the life with which it was originally imbued. According to this line of argument, writing and lived experience are separate and irreconcilable; lived experience cannot be simply translated into written words without these losing their meaning. As Priscilla Ringrove states, Djebar presents writing as a “site of uncertainty” and highlights how it represents “not only the conflict between past and present, but also the conflict between her reluctance to write, on the one hand, and the compulsion to write on the other.”12 Following these opening pages that announce a questioning of the writing process, the author recounts the precise incident that led her to question the utility of words and writing.

The text abruptly switches to a sensuous and lyric account of a visit to a hammam. Every Saturday afternoon, we read, the narrator would visit the hammam with her mother-in-law, yet on one occasion an incident occurred that proved to be a turning point in the narrator’s consciousness. As a result of this, she writes that “je vecus alors des annees non vraiment de silence, ni de marasme: l’ecorchure dans l’oreille et le cceur, ce f ut la le don de l’inconnue dont la voix me tarauda.” (Those years were not really years of silence or depression: Inside my ear and heart grated the gift of the unknown woman whose voice tormented me.)13 On this occasion, a friend of her mother-in-law’s approaches to say goodbye, and in the course of the farewell she states that she has to leave, as she is “entravee” (fettered).14 When the mother-inlaw presses her friend as to why, the latter replies that “l’ennemi est a la mai-son” (the enemy is at home).15 The young narrator, overhearing this conversation, does not understand so asks her mother-in-law for an explanation. The latter replies: —Oui, “l’ennemi,” murmura-t-elle. Ne sais-tu pas comment, dans notre ville, les femmes parlent entre elles? . . . (Mon silence durait, charge d’interrogation.) L’ennemi, ehbien, ne comprends-tu pas: elle a ainsi evoque son mari! —Son mari l’ennemi? Elle ne semble pas si malheureuse! Mon interlocutrice, sur le coup, parut agacee par ma candeur: —Son mari, mais il est comme un autre mari! . . . “L’ennemi,” c’est une facon de dire! Je le repete: les f emmes parlent ainsi entre elles depuis bien longtemps . . . Sans qu’ils le sachent, eux! . . . Moi, bien sur. [“Yes, ‘the enemy,’” she whispered. “Don’t you know how women in our town talk among themselves?” (My silence continued thick with questions.) “Don’t you understand? By enemy, she meant her husband.” “Her husband, the enemy? She doesn’t seem so unhappy!” My naivete suddenly seemed to irritate my mother-in-law. “Her husband is no different from any other husband! ‘Enemy’ is just a manner of speaking. Women, as I said before, have called them that for ages . . . without the men knowing it. I, of course—”]16 The passage is recounted in French but the author notes that the Arabic word was used to distinguish the enemy: l’e’dou, which is repeated throughout this section. The narrator hears this word in a place of transition and of change, in “la moiteur de ce vestibule d’ou, y debouchant presque nues, les f emmes sortaient envelop-pees de pied en cap” (the damp of the vestibule from which women arrived almost naked and left enveloped head to toe):17 a feminine place in which women transform themselves, in which they enter in one state and exit in another, in which they enter naked and exit shrouded, thus highlighting the change in the narrator as she enters with one consciousness and exits with another. It is the word itself, “ce mot” (this word),18 that immediately strikes a note of pessimism in the narrator: “En verite, ce simple vocable, acerbe dans sa chair arabe, vrilla indefiniment le fond de mon ame, et done la

source de mon ecriture.” (In truth the simple term, bitter in its Arab flesh, bored endlessly into the depths of my soul, and thus into the source of my writing.)19 It is at first unclear why this word would have such a profound effect upon the narrator. One could even imagine that she may view the existence of a coded language that women understand amongst themselves as a tactic that they use to subvert the patriarchy in which they are bound. Instead, she writes that “cette parole non de la haine, non, plutot de la desesperance depuis longtemps gelee entre les sexes, ce mot done installa en moi, dans son sillage, une pulsion dangereuse d’effacement” (this word—not one of hatred, no, rather one of despair long frozen in place between the sexes —this word left in its wake within me a dangerous urge to self-erasure).20 Hearing the word is a moment in which the narrator recognizes the state in which relations between men and women are held and the lack of progress that has been made in terms of their communication. The word “gele” (frozen) is used again, for the second time in this short section, in relation to writing and language. Its first occurrence referred to laughter as “gele” (frozen) when written, as if its vitality is lost when put into words. Here we read it once more, and it reinforces the idea of stasis, of the inability of words and writing to go beyond themselves and effectuate change. The “pulsion dangereuse d’effacement” (dangerous urge to self-erasure)21 is also a striking phrase to read in an autobiographical preface. Is the writer tempted to efface or erase the reality of sexual inequality, or the language in which it is expressed, or even her own previous writing? Whatever her unexplained reaction is, the result of this episode is that the writer feels “sans voix, et durant les quelques annees qui s’ecoulerent ensuite, depouillee, noyee dans un deuil de l’inconnu et de l’espoir” (speechless and, as the next few years would show, stripped bare, drowned mourning for things unknown and for hope).22 The incident in the hammam is thus presented as the catalyst for Djebar’s understanding that the sort of writing in which she was engaged was ineffectual and that it was “une ecriture sans ombre” (writing with no shadow),23 an image that expresses the lightness, the lack of importance, the transparency and rapid erasure of writing; it is effaced so quickly that it cannot produce even a shadow and the words simply evaporate. The author closes the preface by writing of how she should maybe resign herself, “mendier, plongee dans la nuit de la langue perdue de son coeur durci, comme en ce jour de hammam” ( beg, plunged into the darkness of the lost language and its hardened heart that I had found at the hammam that day),24 suggesting that she should maybe give up and live off charity, asking others silently for help rather than helping others to find their voices. But she does not, as the fact that the rest of the text is still to follow testifies. Moreover, there is also a hint of optimism evident in this section, as shown by the usage of the past tense to render the writer’s feeling. For example, she states that “longtemps j’ai cru qu’ecrire, c’etait mourir” (for a long time I believed that writing meant dying)25 rather than depuis longtemps je crois qu’ecrire, c’est mourir (for a long time I have believed that writing meant dying) and “moi, sans voix, et durant les quelques annees qui s’ecoulerent ensuite, depoillee” (I, speechless and, as the next few years would show, stripped bare)26 rather than moi, sans voix, et depuis cet evene-ment... (I, speechless and, since this event. . . ). The belief that writing is akin to halting or killing past experience is therefore presented as something from Djebar’s past, from which her current position differs. Although the preface ends ambiguously, with no closure or conclusion to the discussion, it does not rule

out the possibility of the utility of writing but strikes a note of interrogation. Thus, I contend that the preface does not identify, as Ronnie Scharfman argues, Djebar’s realization that “although painful, writing is a necessary act”27 but rather augurs a questioning of this very mode of self-inscription, and that this is the crux of Djebar’s text. Such is the conundrum for any writer of autobiography: to what extent can one construct past selfhood in present writing, and how accurate can the referentiality between text and life ever be? What is interesting about the conundrum that Djebar creates is that it is firstly gendered and secondly collectivized; Djebar interrogates the utility of autobiography both as a source of recapturing in the present an erased female past, and as a means of relating a text to a multiplicity of lives. In contrast to the first two volumes of Le quatuor algerien, therefore, Vaste est la prison heralds a questioning of the utility of delving into personal and collective archives and recording what has been overlooked in writing; what is the point, the writer seems to be asking, of writing the archive at all?

WRITING INDIVIDUAL MEMORY The first section of the text, “L’effacement dans le coeur,” (“Ef-facement in the Heart”) is the story of the effacement of an individual’s memory. One of the most interesting aspects of this section is Djebar’s representation of the notion of “effacement”: what it means for one’s memory to be effaced, how traces of memory persist as their effacement is only partial, and whether the act of writing such memories can work against their effacement. The narrative resembles that of the genre of confession, as it is an intimate first-person account told by an unidentified narrator who recounts the story of a perceived wrong-doing: her relationship with a man referred to as 1’Aime (my Beloved), and her husband’s violent reaction upon his discovery of the liaison. Recounting the story retrospectively, the narrative begins with a long description of the narrator’s awakening from a deep sleep and this is represented as exerting a definitive change in her consciousness. The awakening is described as having worked an erasure or ef-facement, since “treize mois s’effacerent dans mon sommeil de ce jour de novembre” (thirteen months were effaced in my sleep that November day),28 and the narrator claims to be somehow altered: “justement parce que en cet instant, je me sens nouvelle. Je decouvre en moi une surprenante, une brusque reviviscence.” (in that instant I feel new. I discover an amazing and abrupt rev-itilization within.)29 In sensuous terms, the narrator evokes the enormity of the alteration that has occurred within her during the siesta, unable to identify or explain it fully: “quelque chose de neuf et de vulnerable a la f ois, un commencement de je ne sais quoi d’etrange—en couleur, en son, en parfum, comment isoler la sensation?—que ‘cela’ est en moi et cependant m’enveloppe. Je porte en moi un changement et j’en suis inondee” (Something both new and vulnerable, a beginning of something, I don’t know what, something strange. Is it a color, sound, odor? How can I isolate the sensation? And this “something” is inside me and at the same time it envelops me. I am carrying some change inside me, and it floods through me.)30 Precisely what has been erased is unclear to the reader; it could be the memory of l’Aime, the narrator’s passion for him or the guilt that she felt because of their relationship. Whatever the nature of the effacement operated by the siesta, it is

portrayed positively, as the narrator describes in quotation marks as the “avant” (the “before”),31 the thirteen months prior to the siesta, as painful, traumatic, and stifling, whereas she declares after the siesta that “il fait bon exister!” (It’s good to be alive!)32 Yet this effacement in the narrator’s consciousness, greeted by her as a positive experience that remedies or atones for the previous trauma, is also questioned on a textual level. Immediately after stating that “treize mois s’effacerent dans mon sommeil” (thirteen months were effaced in my sleep),33 the narrator begins a new chapter with the abrupt assertion that “non, l’image de l’autre ne s’altera pas. Seul son pouvoir sur moi (...) se dissipa” (No, the image of the other will not change. Only his power over me (...) dissolved.)34 A remnant or trace of the experience is still present in the narrator’s consciousness even after she claims the experience to be effaced. Furthermore, it exists within her body as much as her consciousness, as she describes the effects of the siesta on her body as “comme si les nerfs de l’organisme entier etaient hantes par une memoire inversee” (as if the fibers and nerves of the whole organism were haunted by a memory turned inside out).35 There is clearly a tension between believing that experience is finite and complete, and admitting that this is not the case, as the text oscillates between insisting upon effacement but then undercutting this with the avowal of the trace. In one telling moment, the narrator links this tension to the notion of writing itself: Et la sieste deroule sa dentelle suspecte, sa trame incertaine, sa duree d’organza. Ainsi mon corps de dormeuse, livre et libere, evacua inexorablement le poison instille en lui durant treize mois. La chimie de cet effacement, dois-je l’eclairer a rebours, ris-quer de faire reapparaitre, de la memoire pas encore putrefiee, quelque toile d’araignee friable, un enchevetrement de soie ou de poussiere, a effet melancolique? [And the siesta unfolded like old lace, its weave uncertain, sheer its whole length. And thus my sleeping woman’s body, released and abandoned, rid itself inexorably of the poison instilled inside it for thirteen months. Must I explain the nature of this effacement, risking in the process that some powdery spider’s web will reemerge, some tangle of silk or dust with its melancholy effect?]36 As soon as the narrator states that the poison has been expelled, she admits in the next sentence that it is not yet “putrefie” (putrefied, rotted away) and that it risks resurfacing. Experience has been effaced, she states on one hand, but something still exists partially in her consciousness on the other. And by writing it, she risks forcing it to reappear and thus creating pain and melancholy. She is uncertain of whether to write it or not for fear of unearthing painful memories, thereby admitting that the poison has not been exhausted after all. In this way, the awakening introduces the idea of the push-and-pull between forgetting experience and using writing in order to remember traces of it, and this heralds the central motif of this section. As the story of the narrator’s affair with l’Aime unfolds, the narrator points to how she aims to highlight the traces of her experience and in this way prevent their eventual disappearance. In this section we see the writer scrambling to resuscitate what has been lost

through writing, but this effort is tinged with her realization of the futility of the enterprise. The narrator often ruptures the narrative with short digressions that comment upon the urgency of transferring memories into written words, thereby ensuring the trace of experience and preventing the obliteration of memory. For example, the narrator in one instance breaks off to speculate upon the details of her first encounter with l’Aime, and writes her concerns thus: Malgre mon effort de reminiscence, se brouille l’exact premier jour de la premiere rencontre, anodine ou importante, pour ces deux personnages que j’esquisse (...) Non, ne m’enserre que la peur paralysante ou l’effroi veritable de voir cette fracture de ma vie disparaitre irremediablement: si par hasard je deviens soudain amnesique, si demain je suis renversee par une voiture, si j’agonise sans preparation un pro chain matin! Vite tout tran-scrire, me rappeler le derisoire et Pessentiel, dans l’ordre et le desordre, mais laisser trace pour dix ans encore . . . dix ans apres mon propre oubli. [Despite my efforts at remembering, I have only a blurry notion of the specific first day of the meeting, and whether the encounter was insignificant or important between these two characters I describe. . . . No, I am only gripped by a paralyzing fear, the actual terror that I shall see this opening in my life permanently disappear. Suppose it were my luck suddenly to have amnesia,-suppose tomorrow I were hit by a car,- suppose some morning soon I were to die! Hurry! Write everything down, remember the ridiculous and the essential; write it, orderly or muddled, but leave some record of it for ten years from now . . . ten years after my own forgetting.]37 The approach to writing, therefore, is one of a hasty recording of as many memories as possible in order to guard against their effacement, thus enabling the narrator to look back upon a record of the forgotten events in years to come. As this quotation suggests, the narrative structure of the story of the relationship with lAime is nonchronological and nonlinear as the text jumps from one memory to another in a scrambled, nonsensical fashion, reflecting the hastiness with which the memories have been transcribed. On occasions the narrative is even ruptured to guard against digression, with comments such as “Revenons aux faits. lis vont risquer de se dissoudre, ne devenir que lacis miserable.” (Let us get back to the facts, because they are in danger of dissolving, fraying into shabby threads.)38 Memories are recounted in detail as the narrator attempts to recapture as much of the past as possible, recreating in words as much of her experiences as she can, pausing to add sensuous elements to the story, such as the sights, smells, and sounds that recreate in the narrator the complete memory of individual experiences. For example, she describes the earliest memory she has of lAime firstly in terms of the sensuousness of the summer evening: “Un ete flamboyant aux aubes fraiches, aux crepuscules de douceur et aux nuits, surtout aux nuits populeuses d’echos: spectacles et danses, de groupes multiples qui deambulent sur les plages infinies et sou-vent desertes d’une station balneaire nouvellement a la mode.” (A blazing summer with cool dawns, gentle twilights, mild nights. The nights above all were densely populated with echoes: shows and dances, lots of people walking in groups along the unending and often deserted beaches that had recently

become fashionable for swimming.)39 Yet, despite this intention of capturing past experience in writing as quickly and as accurately as possible, there is a tension on a textual level that underscores this aim. The tale of the relationship between narrator and lAime is a story of an effacement, and as a story of effacement it necessarily becomes a de-effacement, as by writing detailed accounts of memories, they are recorded and to some extent achieve longevity. However, the de-effacement that the writing performs is punctuated by a lacuna, and this is something of which Djebar is very aware. This lacuna is the gap that exists between experience and the written record of it, as although Djebar attempts to record as much of her experiences as possible, including detailed, sensuous descriptions in order to recreate the background to her memories, there is necessarily a limit to the capabilities of the written word to recreate lived experience. Late twentieth-century literary theory has indeed made us wary of realism in literature, casting doubt upon the authority of omniscient narrators, upon the possibility of emulating reality in narrative, and upon the limits of language as a system of representation. Apparently writing with this in mind, Djebar is aware of the limitations upon her writing, and furthermore incorporates this doubt into her narrative. The narrator often pauses to question the veracity of her memories, to regret their incompleteness as they are rendered in the text and to berate herself for the limitations of her writing. In particular, there is one salient metaphor of this lacuna, which evidences Djebar’s inability to overcome the gap between lived experience and writing. The face of l’Aime is a recurrent image in the narrator’s attempt to write her memory of their relationship. A chapter is devoted to “le visage” (the face) of l’Aime as the narrator attempts to recreate the image of the lover’s face through detailed descriptions of it in different guises, different expressions, and different situations. The narrator writes of how she used to study the lover’s face before every separation, aiming to notice and remember every detail of it during his absence, and it is to this that she returns as she attempts to remember the relationship ten years later. The face takes on a central importance to her as she identifies it as a deciding factor in whether she can remember the experience of the relationship. The key to remembering the relationship is remembering the face and rendering this accurately in writing; the narrator in one instance claims to be able to envisage the lover’s face again as she writes it, stating that “Dans ce deblayage de ruines, le visage de l’autre, pendant treize mois, me parut irremplacable. Il se ranime devant moi a l’instant ou j’ecris, probable-ment parce que j’ecris.” (For thirteen months, in this excavation of ruins, the face of the other had seemed irreplaceable to me. He springs back to life before me the moment that I write—probably because I am writing.)40 Other memories of the relationship, she admits here, are ruins, but the lover’s face is something that she can hold on to, due to the fact of writing it; without the accurate record of the face as memory aid, the relationship would disappear from memory and return to the ruins in which most of it currently lies. Yet despite the importance the narrator accords to the lover’s face, the text once again proceeds to undermine her stated aim. There are indeed several episodes recounted in which narrator and lover are “face-a-f ace” (face to face), but these generally occur at night, as they drive silently side by side in the dark; the lover’s face is hardly visible. During the summer in which the two meet, they see each other mainly in a succession of “nuits blanches” (all-night

parties / sleepless nights) in which one or both of them are dancing in the dark, faces invisible in the blackness. In one particular episode, the text turns to recounting how the narrator had a job as a researcher and worked in the same building as l’Aime, in the office three floors directly above his. The two would frequently converse by telephone, often continuing into the evening in darkness, having forgotten to turn on the lights. The lover’s face was therefore not visible to the narrator for a large part of the affair, and she is obliged to imagine it as she sits in the office above. She imagines herself opening the window and floating down to the outside of his: “me voici devant sa fenetre a lui, invisible qui l’espionne, ou plutot qui m’emplis les yeux de son image” (I’d be there outside his window, invisible, to spy on him or rather fill my eyes with the image of him),41 in a dreamlike sequence in which the lover’s face is merely a phantomized image as opposed to a concrete object that can be memorized and recorded. It is also important in the inscription of the memory of the face that when husband and lover confront each other in the nightclub after the narrator’s confession, the lover’s face is obscured from the narrator, because although she attempts to see his face, he merely turns his back to her and flees the scene. The narrator remembers her grandmother’s stories that a man is “quelqu’un dont on ne voit pas le dos!” (someone whose back one does not see!),42 someone who should be fearless, courageous, and never concede, and as a consequence “je fixais devant moi le dos de l’Aime—et je me disais ‘autrefois l’Aime,’ puisque j’avais vu son dos” (I was staring at my Beloved’s back before me—and because I had seen his back, I said to myself he was “my formerly Beloved).43 As the narrator recalls the scene in the restaurant, she remembers that although she looked for the lover’s face, the only memory she has is her husband’s: “je vois, je revois aussi la face tordue de haine de l’epoux” (I see also, and again, the face of the husband twisted in hatred).44 And finally, on the two occasions in which the narrator sees the lover again years later, the face is again the subject of questioning; in one meeting she remembers thinking that his face, cheeks, and shoulders are altered, and in another she does not at first even recognize the face.45 Although the narrator attempts to describe the lover’s face in detail, the memories that the text proceeds to recount question this, casting doubt upon the reliability of the narrator’s memory and showing the impossibility of rendering images from one’s memory accurately in words. She tries again and again to describe the details of the face, but ultimately the memories of the relationship convey the futility of the attempt; the memory of the image of the lover that the text portrays is ultimately faceless. The story of the effacement of memory that Djebar performs here becomes a de-effacement device: a de-facement. But this defacement stays exactly this and cannot become a reappearance, precisely because the appearance that the text performs is incomplete, faceless. The details are missing, as the writer searches to render the details of the face in writing, but cannot possibly succeed. By writing an effacement therefore, the writer prevents its obliteration, but cannot stage its reappearance, and the faceless apparition of the lover’s face, the factor that determined whether or not she would be able to piece together the remnants of her memories, is symbolic of this. This incomplete rendering of past events, and the emphasis that the writer places on the phantomization of memory as it is expressed in writing, is broadened to include other relationships and other memories from different periods of her life. The narrator tells us that at

the end of every relationship “il y a toujours un adieu” (there is always a goodbye)46 and recounts the adieu between herself and l’Aime as well as those between herself and other lovers. Throughout these sketches of separation, the subtext is that the memory lives on; the experience stays within her and, not wanting to forget it, she aims to recapture it in writing and record it for posterity. Indeed, there are two “adieux” with l’Aime rather than just one, and during the course of the banalities that the two speak to each other, the narrator thinks to herself: “Je l’aime, me dis-je, comme une jeune mere! Comme si, bien qu’il fut loin de moi, j’avais contribue a le transformer, a l’amener a cet etat de maturite!” Ainsi, mon amour silencieux, auparavant si dif ficilement mai-trise, changeait de nature,- il subsistait en moi, toujours secret, depouille de sa fragilite qui m’avait si longtemps troublee. [I love him, I said to myself, like a young mother! As if, even though he was far away, I had contributed to transforming him, to bringing him to this mature state! Consequently, my silent love, formerly so hard to control, changed in nature,- it was still there within me, still secret, but it no longer had the fragility that had troubled me for so long.]47 Anna Rocca perceptively comments that the narrator feels that her love is forbidden and she instead “transforme . . . cet amour passionne en amour maternel” (transforms the passionate love into maternal love).48 In this powerful description of the narrator’s thoughts as she sees him for what she knows will be the last time, it is important that the narrator draws attention to the lasting consequences for each of them, both herself and l’Aime, of their relationship; it may now be akin to a maternal love, but it persists nevertheless. Rather than show an effacement that is akin to obliteration, this section finally shows how the effacement is only partial, as part of the experience stays with her; some of the memories are unable to be captured and she finds it impossible to write his face exactly as it was, but nevertheless she admits in this final section that concerning her love, tenderness, and affection for him, “il subsistait en moi, toujours secret” (it was still there within me, still secret).49 The effacement of the experience is incomplete, as this passage shows that there is no erasure of an experience, that the results of it are still present in the subject’s consciousness as it impacts upon the developing self and leaves a trace in the memory. But by writing it, Djebar cannot re-create it, as by writing the metaphor of facelessness as discussed above in the phantom image of l’Aime, Djebar emphasizes that there is always a disjuncture between experience and the recording of it in writing. There is therefore no closure to this confession, no conclusion that offers any explanation of what has been achieved by attempting to inscribe memory in writing. Rather, the tone of the final pages of this section is melancholy as the narrator highlights her loneliness and hints at how her search for recording memory, the perceived aim of this section, has been thwarted. The final passage even begins by returning to the point of departure of this section, the siesta from which the narrator awoke:

Je reviens a ces jours d’avant la sieste, a ces treize mois: je ne sais pourquoi avec tant de circonvolutions, en desordre volontaire-ment non chronologique, j’ai fait egoutter ces fontaines de moi-meme, alors qu’il fallait les tarir, ou tout au moins les endiguer. [I go back to those days before the siesta, to those thirteen months. I do not know why I have drained these springs of self, with so many convolutions, in a disorder that is willfully not chronological, when I should have let them wither on the vine, or at least kept their growth in check.]50 By returning to her experiences as she remembers them, the narrator has managed to “egoutter les fontaines” (drained these springs) of her memory, but has been unable to go further in providing closure, answers, or reliable records due to the impossibility of representing lived experience accurately in writing. Djebar’s sentiment after having attempted to retrieve her memory through written words is that she should have dried up or held back (“tarir,” “endiguer”) the fountain as her attempt was futile. The written records of the memories testify to their impact upon the developing self and the longevity of the effects of past experiences on present subject consciousness, due to the text’s insistence upon the way in which the effacement of memories is only partial. Yet, the tension between recording durable written accounts of memory and the futility of this enterprise is finally unresolved, as Djebar’s writing produces mere phantomizations of memories rather than accurate records of them.

WRITING COLLECTIVE MEMORY Vaste est la prison presents the tension between the will to record memory and the impossibility of retrieving the past through writing not only on an individual level, as is the case in the first section. As has been evident in the previous partially autobiographical texts by this author, the narrative moves from an individual to a collective stance. Rather than simply exploring the validity of the act of writing in order to record one’s own memories, attempting an ideal of self-preservation or posterity, Djebar in Vaste est la prison writes of the tension between remembering in writing and its impossibility by broadening the narrative to allude to collective memory. Thus, she does not deny the specificity of her own experience, but links it with that of a larger female collective. This movement is performed by the second section of the text, “L’effacement sur la pierre” (“Effacement in Stone”)51 which is a fictional account based upon historical research carried out by the author. The term “effacement” appears once again in the title of this section, and is repeated throughout it. Here, I analyze this notion of effacement as it is in this section represented on a collective level; the memories that the narrator recounts are collective ones, and the text ponders how such collective memories may become effaced, what traces of them may remain, and whether the process of writing them may guard against their effacement. As we shall see, this is an important articulation of Djebar’s representation of the possibility and validity of writing plural, non-unitary autobiography. The text recounts the discovery of a bilingual inscription in a mysterious alphabet on a mausoleum in Carthage. This alphabet is eventually identified as Berber, the language of Assia Djebar’s

home region and a language that currently exists only in oral form. Throughout this section of the text, Djebar writes the exploration of the archeo-logical sites and how the discovery affects current consciousness, insofar as it corrects inaccuracies and fills the gaps left by official accounts of history. However, once again, there is within the text a tension evident between remembering the past in writing and discarding the writing process as ineffectual. This tension exists firstly on the level of the choice of written language itself. We read of a succession of male archeologists who find the mausoleum and guess at the origins of the mysterious alphabet. One considers it to be Punic, another assumes it to be “un vieil africain” (some form of old African),52 others “un alphabet disparu et une langue perdue” (some vanished alphabet, some lost language).53 None seriously consider the possibility of the alphabet belonging to the Berber language. As Djebar explains, those who have tried to write Berber assume that one should use Arabic script; she cites for example the case of the foreign explorer Venture de Paradis, who “avait pris soin d’apprendre le berbere, mais croyait naturel de l’ecrire en caracteres arabes” (made a point of learning Berber but thought it normal to write it in Arabic characters).54 Djebar corrects this erroneous assumption by writing of the alphabet’s former existence and of the way in which it was effaced. Yet although her text pieces together the story of the lost alphabet, she cannot write in the alphabet itself; she cannot reproduce the inscription, nor can she return the lost written language to life. Instead, she is obliged to write of the discovery of the language in a different language, which serves to reinforce the distance between recovering the past and conserving it in writing. Even the title of the text itself is a reference to the Berber language but it appears in translation; as is explained in the epigraph of the text, Vaste est la prison qui m’ecrase, D’ou me viendras-tu, delivrance? So vast the prison crushing me, Release, where will you come from? is part of a Berber song, but may be rendered only in French in this text. It is even transcribed phonetically in the Roman alphabet towards the close of the text: Meqqwer lhebs.55 Anne Aubry writes of the pain that Djebar feels as a result of writing in French and contends that the author reclaims her right “de ne pas choisir entre une langue ou l’autre, mais de preferer un entre-deux” (not to choose between one language or another, but to prefer the in-between).56 While I concur with Aubry’s argument insofar as Djebar melds vocabulary and expressions from Arabic into her French writing, thus creating in some sense an in-between language, the author here is explicit that Berber is unavailable to her as a language in which to write. The fact of writing the story of an effacement, here of the alphabet, offers a historical correction, but the fact that the author is writing the reappearance in French is evidence enough that the alphabet remains merely a phantom that the writer cannot recreate. Although Djebar insists at once upon the trace of what has been effaced, she simultaneously highlights that there remains no more than a trace and that writing does nothing to alter this. The desire to uncover the past, to discover remnants of former lives and publicize one’s

findings, is at once conveyed by the metaphor of archaeology itself. The succession of archaeologists who are described arriving at Dougga are all aiming to unearth remnants of the past, for whichever reason they may have, as is Djebar by writing plural autobiography. In a striking parallel to the previous section of the text, “L’effacement dans le cceur,” Djebar highlights the necessary incompleteness of the archaeologists’ work by insisting upon the partial erosion of the stones that they find; just as the narrator’s individual recollections had partially faded in the first section of the text, so have the collective recollections symbolized by the stone ruins in the second section. This is apparent not only in relation to the alphabet that the archaeologists discover, but also of the other stone ruins to which Djebar alludes: the statues of women discovered in the site surrounding the Dougga mausoleum. Djebar pauses amidst the narrative of the mysterious alphabet to pay particular attention to these icons, describing the statues, their place, the details of their form, and recounting how they captivated the imaginations of the successive archeologists who discovered them. The first consists of the statue of a woman surrounded on either side by an elephant and is described from the point of view of the explorers thus: La belle inconnue de pierre apparait: immuable idole paienne, preservee, parce que installee en bas, tout en bas contre le ravin. Au-dessus de sa tete, en ces jours d’octobre ou les deux etrang-ers, PAnglais et le Danois, ne sont venus que pour le passe, la fureur et la mort en marche se deploient devant eux mais ils ne s’inquietent que d’elle, l’inconnue au visage erode par les siecles, qui leur annonce quoi, desormais, sinon la destruction? [The beautiful unknown woman in stone materializes: an immutable pagan idol, preserved because it was placed down low, set way down against the ravine. Although rage and death on the move spread out now above her head in these October days, the two foreigners, the Englishman and the Dane, have come only for the past. These men are only concerned with her, the unknown woman whose face has been eroded by the centuries, foreshadowing for them what if not destruction from now on?]57 It is unclear what this statue represents, what its purpose was, or whom it commemorated. The head of the statue is inclined as if she were overseeing something, looking over something, or perhaps guarding something; she may have been a famous figure, an interpretation of a mythical figure, or a symbol to be worshipped or venerated. Regardless of who she was or what her statue represented, the text recuperates this lost figure, as well as the lost alphabet, but this “belle inconnue” (beautiful unknown woman) remains a mysterious unknown, an ungraspable object that is interpreted by the archeologists as a symbol of destruction. In a similar way, Djebar refers specifically to the two statues of women that surround the stele on which the bilingual inscription was carved. The text describes how Victor Guerin, a French explorer, visited the site and reportedly wrote of it: Dans le tas pele-mele, j’ai apercu le tronc d’une statue de femme ailee (mais sans tete, sans bras et sans jambes). Sur un bloc sub-sistant, on peut voir un char traine par quatre chevaux,-

le con-ducteur, lui, est mutile, ainsi qu’une deuxieme statue de femme ailee. [In the jumbled heap I caught sight of a statue of a winged woman (but with no head, arms or legs). On one of the remaining blocks a chariot pulled by four horses can be seen,- the driver of it is mutilated, as is a second statue of a winger woman.]58 The statues, unrecognizable as they are in their eroded state, were originally, as we learn later in the text, of two “deesses ailees” (winged goddesses).59 Yet Djebar stops to recognize these female statues, symbols of female power, beauty, and idealization as they presumably once were, alongside the lost alphabet. Both the alphabet and the female figures are lost and eroded, having once had symbolic power but stripped of this over time. Moreover, Djebar points to the fact that the bilingual inscription was transported to the British Museum as it was deemed to be the most valuable of the objects discovered, but that the female statues were merely gazed upon and then discarded. The statues were left to be forgotten, erased from the records of the discovery and from the archive to which the archeologists contributed. Yet Djebar’s text, as a written record of the statues’ existence, serves to recover them, in a sense reversing their erasure from the official archive and reconstituting the female symbol that had been overlooked. Djebar in this way insists upon the traces that the statues leave, and how these can be reconstituted; although the female figures and the role that they once represented has disappeared, they both leave a trace in the stone, so despite their partial erosion, there are still signs of their former existence. Yet, as much as she is able to write of the trace that such objects leave, they are ultimately, as shown in the citations above, faceless. The first statue with the elephant has a “visage . . . erode par les siecles” (face . . . eroded by the centuries)60 and the second is decapitated, “sans tete, sans bras et sans jambes” (with no head, arms or legs).61 With these allusions, Djebar emphasizes the retrieval that archeological work performs but simultaneously points to its incompleteness. As in the first section of the text, in which the attempt to record an individual experience in writing resulted only in the capturing of this experience in a faceless, incomplete manner, this second section of the text performs a similar movement; just as l’Aime is faceless in the individual recollection, so are the statues in the collective reinscription. The author portrays at once the advantages of digging into the past, uncovering objects that have left a trace and that can be in some way retrieved for the present, but at the same time she insists that this work is necessarily incomplete, that the traces are tantamount to ghosts that cannot be fully restored to life. And simultaneously, through the metaphor of facelessness, Djebar allies her own individual consciousness with that of a broader collective as she moves the autobiography beyond a unitary model of individual selfdevelopment, but closely links her own narrative to the narrative of Algerian women throughout history. Furthermore, in addition to the linkage of individual and collective memory that Djebar performs in this text, it is important to note that this is deeply gendered. It is the female statues who are gazed upon by the male explorers and then left to erode, who were separated from the language that they surrounded (as Thomas Reade, the British diplomat, removed the stone containing the alphabet and transported it to Tunis), and who now appear faceless in the site of

the monument. The symbols of female power that they represent, and the way in which they link women and writing through their proximity to the alphabet, is widened by the inclusion of the story of Tin Hinan, the ancient princess who has become a mythic figure in North African contes. It is this story that closes the section, “L’effacement dans la pierre” (Effacement in stone), and provides an appropriate metaphor for the section as a whole. Tin Hinan was a mythical figure, known as “une silhouette aussi evanescente qu’une fumee” (a fleeting silhouette as evanescent as smoke)62 due to the fact that she was only referred to in stories, but her existence was proved during an archaeological dig in 1925. Tin Hinan was to leave her Berber homeland and travel to Hoggar with a group of her countrywomen in the fourth century BC. What is interesting to Djebar in Tin Hinan’s story is not the circumstances of her life but of her death; she was discovered in a tomb with a statue of a woman looking over her, “pas tout a fait disparu” (not completely vanished) and surrounded by inscriptions of an “ecriture libyque an-terieure meme a celle de Dougga.” (Libyan writings. Earlier even than the writing at Dougga.)63 In addition to a partially effaced but recognizable woman, the inscriptions are very pertinent to this text as Djebar writes that she imagines Tin Hinan stealing the alphabet from her homeland and trusting it to her female friends at her death. In this sense, the language is passed from woman to woman and is buried in an all-female burial chamber. The author describes the story of Tin Hinan thus: Tin Hinan des sables, presque effacee, nous laisse heritage—et cela, malgre ses os helas aujourd’hui deranges—: notre ecriture la plus secrete, aussi ancienne que Petrusque ou que celle des “runes” mais, contrairement a celles-ci, toute bruissante encore de sons et de souffles d’aujourd’hui, est bien legs de femme, au plus profond du desert. [Tin Hinan of the sands, almost effaced, leaves us an inheritance—and does so despite her bones that, alas, have now been disturbed. Our most secret writing, as ancient as Etruscan or the writing of the runes, but unlike these a writing still noisy with the sounds and breath of today, is indeed the legacy of a woman in the deepest desert.]64 Tin Hinan’s language was an inherently female language, and although it died centuries ago, its discovery proves the power women previously had over language. Between Tin Hinan and the statues that could be interpreted as overlooking or guarding alphabets, this section presents an image of women as guardians of writing. Despite their “effacement dans la pierre” (effacement in stone) Djebar shows how they are still recognizable and retrievable as such. Yet, the recollection that she creates does not undo the effacement, it does not bring Tin Hinan’s female collective with their female language back to life or reconstitute what has been eroded from stone or memory. Further to the linkage between individual and collective memory and the gendered portrayal of the collective, Djebar also makes an important movement in this section of text; she introduces the act of writing as a performance. This is first evident on the level of the bilingual inscription itself, which is recorded in stone in order to achieve its longevity. Djebar disrupts the narrative of “L’effacement dans la pierre” to include a fictionalized section that

imagines a possible origin of the monument, creating a ceremony held in order to commemorate the death of King Mas-inissa, and the monument with its bilingual inscription flanked on either side by winged statues of women serves as his memorial. As the company remembers the destruction of Carthage, the mausoleum is intended to ensure the continued life of their language, as although they identify Latin as “la langue de l’avenir” (the language of the future), the bilingual monument records both “la langue des Autres” (the Others’ language) and their own, “la langue des Ancetres” (the language of our ancestors).65 This notion of writing as a gesture that performs a resurrection, that reverses a destruction or prevents an omission is broadened by the numerous references to the series of explorers who visit the site at Dougga and who not only uncover the monument but make written records of it, incorporating them into diaries, letters, or travel narratives. And in the same way as the performance of writing the dying alphabet on the mausoleum leaves a trace but ultimately cannot reverse its disappearance, the writing of the archaeologists does likewise. The tale of one of these pieces of writing, that of Thomas d’Arcos, refers to the work Relation de 1’Afrique that d’Arcos wrote while in North Africa. He sends the completed manuscript to a friend in Aix-en-Provence and awaits his critique, but nothing arrives. Djebar insists upon the life of dArcos’s writing, highlighting how it lives on as a text and how it ensures survival of the memory of the man himself. DArcos is identified by Djebar as “une silhouette inseparable de ‘notre’ histoire des rives de l’Atlantique au rivage des Syrtes ou jusqu’au desert du Fezzan” (a silhouette that is inseparable from ‘our’ story, from the shores of the Atlantic to the beaches lining the gulfs of Libya and Tunis, and all the way to the desert of Fezzan),66 and after his death his writing is said to prolong his existence: “ainsi, sur les rivages definitivement quittes, il existera certes, mais par ses ecrits” (in this way he will indeed continue to exist, if only in his writings, on the shores he has left behind for good).67 Yet, despite this insistence of writing breathing life into an individual, the text also states in an about turn that there is “plus de trace” (no further trace)68 of d’Arcos after his death, as though his writing were worthless, that it does not contribute to his longevity, or contribute to knowledge or collective memory. His letter and manuscript are, as far as we know, never answered, and the last we hear of his writing is that it “sera range dans des papiers d’archives. Y dormira” (Is put away in the paper archives. Lies dormant there.)69 DArcos’s writing in this sense “does” nothing, on an individual level or a collective, and his writing is purely ineffectual. A similar portrayal follows the writings of the Neapolitan count, Camille Borgia, who also explored North Africa and made copies of the mysterious alphabet. Borgia wrote letters to his wife regarding his discoveries, and she in turn read them aloud to their circle of friends, thus publicizing his writings in an albeit very restricted environment. The count made copious, detailed drawings of the Dougga site and amassed papers recounting his travel experiences. His intention was to “publier au plus vite le recit de ce voyage si riche qui l’enthousiasme” (publish as quicky as possible the chronicle of his wonderful journey that so inspired him)70 but instead he died suddenly before doing so. His widow proceeds to sell them to a French “amateur” who promised to publish them, but sold them instead to a museum, where “tout ce corpus inedit va dormir, non publie, jusqu’en . . . 1959” (this entire unpublished body of work will remain dormant, unpublished, until. . . 1959).71 Meanwhile, others have

explored the site, copied the alphabet, and begun the process of deciphering it; Borgia’s explorations, and the written accounts that result from it, are entirely ineffectual. The series of explorers who follow d’Arcos and Borgia and who write their own accounts of the site meld into each other’s stories as their tales are interwoven. One writer stands out from them, however, and this is the writer mentioned in the fictionalized account of the ceremony dedicating the mausoleum. During the ceremony, the young Jugurtha reads the inscription in the two languages, and we follow a little of his story in the subsequent pages. Whereas the boy takes the decision to leave the area and thus “Jugurtha et sa passion de la lutte ne seront pas inscrits . . . dans l’alphabet punique,” (Jugurtha and his passion for battle will not be inscribed in the Punic alphabet),72 his teacher pursues a different tactic. Polybe, the deported exile, writes. Furthermore, he starts to write “sur la destruction; a ecrire a partir de la destruction” (about the destruction; destruction is his point of departure).73 Polybe’s decision to write is presented as ambiguous, as he has written historical accounts that record a version of events for posterity, such as the end of Carthage, for example, but it is only when all hope is lost for his own nation that he begins to write about it: Polybe, revenu ensuite dans son pays, subit, l’automne de cette memeannee, le spectacle du sac de Corinthe, “perle de l’Attique.” Il a tente de gerer, en tant que negociateur, la defaite des siens. Malgre lui, il assisteune seconde fois a la decheance irremediable de l’autonomie acheenne sous les bottes et la brutalite des soud-ards romains. Il voit la lumiere de la Grece d’un coup pourrir, il accepte et il ecrit. [Once back in his own country, in the autumn of the same year, Polybe must then bear the sight of the sack of Corinth, “pearl of Attica.” He would try to act as a negotiator and arrange better terms for his people, but a second time he is present, helplessly, at an irreversible fall of Achaean autonomy beneath the boots and brutality of savage Roman soldiers. He watches the light of Greece suddenly flickering out; he accepts it and writes.]74 Polybe may have previously written about events simply in order to record them, but writes about his own country only when it is doomed and he can do nothing more to save it. Writing is equated with a resignation to being destroyed, and is presented as something one can do for oneself when there is no more concrete action to take. But Djebar also speculates upon Polybe’s reasons for writing: Pour lui, en effet, Pecriture de l’histoire est ecriture d’abord: il instille dans la realite mortifere dont il s’obstine a saisir trace un obscur germe de vie . . . Lui qui devrait etre fidele aux siens, jus-tifie, console et tente de se consoler: surtout, voici qu’il brouille les points de vue, que son ecriture s’installe au centre meme d’un etrange triangle de la destruction, dans une zone neutre qu’il decouvre, qu’il n’attendait pas, qu’il ne recherchait pas. [In fact the writing of history is writing first of all. Into the deadly reality that he descries he instills some obscure germ of life. This man who should be faithful to his own people justifies,

consoles, and tries to console, himself. We see him, especially, confusing points of view. The destruction of his writing sets itself at the very center of a strange triangle, in a neutral zone that he discovers, though he did not expect it or seek it out.]75 Polybe, according to Djebar’s interpretation, is therefore breathing life into the destruction, creating “un obscur germe de vie” from the story. She also points to how his endeavor is a collective one, as he not only consoles himself through writing, but also consoles his countrymen (“les siens”). Moreover, as a result of his writing, he finds himself in an altered, presumably a privileged, position: a neutral zone that is similar to a third space between conqueror and conquered. Yet, despite the author’s insistence upon the positive effects of Polybe’s writing, on an individual and collective level, she then points to its futility: Est-ce pourquoi son ceuvre comme la stele de Dougga, apres avoir alimente, plusieurs siecles, l’appetit de savoir et la curiosite des successeurs, d’un coup, inopinement, par larges plaques, s’efface? Car, du temoignage de Polybe sur Carthage, sur Corinthe, sur Numance, ne restent desormais que des debris epars. . . . Comme si cette poussee scriptuaire secretait un risque, une acceleration vers l’inevitable effacement! [Is that why his work, like the stele of Dougga, after having fed the appetite for knowledge and the curiosity of his successors for several centuries, all at once, unexpectedly and in great slabs, is erased? Because Polybe’s accounts of Carthage, of Corinth, and of Nu-mantia, exist henceforth only in scattered scraps. . . . As if this literary ascendance exuded some danger, some acceleration toward its own erasure that would prove inevitable!]76 After having outlined the uses of Polybe’s writing, therefore, the text immediately underscores this by emphasizing its effacement; although it produced an effect at the time that it was created, Polybe’s written account of a soon-to-be-forgotten archive is ultimately lost. As a writer performing the same action as Djebar, writing a partially effaced archive in order to correct historical error and preserve evidence for future generations, Polybe serves as a damning metaphor for the author’s own writing project. The figure of Polybe is particularly significant because Djebar specifically links herself as a writer to him, describing herself in his trace as “moi, l’humble narratrice d’aujourd’hui” (I, today’s humle narrator).77 In this way, she inscribes herself into a series of writers who have each written history in different ways (linking it with destruction and recording it for posterity), who have thought about why it is important to write history, and who have dedicated their lives to doing so. While some have been more interested in archaeology, some in the alphabet, and some in historical events, they are all writers of history, of some form or another: Thomas d’Arcos, Count Borgia, Micipsa who ordered the inscription of the alphabet in the

first place, Polybe, Lord Temple, Tin Hinan who was from Djebar’s homeland and wrote for and with her female friends and relatives, and others. These are all portraits of other historical writers, explorers, teachers, historians, who have traveled overseas, feared lost friendships, feared criticism of their work, who have been forced to reflect on the purpose of their activity, but search all the same. After Djebar has opened Vaste est la prison with a preface in which she doubts the utility of writing, and records how she has wondered whether to continue the project, the metaphors in this section of historical writers and historical alphabets point to how writing, performed by so many over a period of centuries, is ultimately futile; it does not guard against destruction, violence or upheaval, and it leaves no lasting trace throughout history, as all the historical writings alluded to by Djebar are all simply effaced over time. (

RE)WRITING THE ARCHIVE

Djebar in Vaste est la prison therefore at once performs an act of retrieval by writing of things that have been lost, but she simultaneously emphasizes the phantomization of written accounts of individual and collective memory, pointing to the faceless images of people, to eroded language in the form of the alphabet, and to forgotten writings through the series of historical writers. In the third section of the text, “Un silencieux desir” (“A Silent Desire”), Djebar does the archaeology herself, but through the process of writing, as the autobiography becomes a recovery of a forgotten archive and a performance of a collective reinscription. It is here that she embarks upon the most autobiographical part of the text, writing passionate, heartfelt, and often painful reminiscences of her childhood, and of other women in her life, or more precisely before her life. It is also here that Djebar writes a series of different “I”s into the text. The section is split into two interwoven strands of narrative, the first of which recounts in great detail memories, family tales, and fictionalized accounts of Djebar’s maternal ancestors, through her grandmother, aunts, and mother. The different women take over the narrative voice and thus the text becomes polyphonic as Djebar mingles her “I” with the “I”s of her ancestors. Djebar herself only appears halfway through this section when she recounts her own birth, and her story is thus buried within the stories of these other women. As Rita Faulkner writes, this narrative becomes an anamnesis, the piecing together of one’s tale, on several levels; Djebar writes the story of her self, of her ancestors, and ultimately of her nation and culture as a cure for her present trauma.78 The narrative with which this is interspersed is an account of the making of Djebar’s 1976 film, La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua. This film was a revindication of Algerian female subjectivity through a reversal of the dynamic of male subject versus female object, since it accorded the gaze to the Algerian female protagonist and voice to the Algerian women who recorded the atrocities of war on film in their own language. In this section, we read a more overt questioning of the role of writing in the author’s life, how it affects her individually, and how she sees the connection between herself and a broader community of women through the act of writing. Djebar introduces her most autobiographical section by recounting the story of Zoraide, a character in Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, whom Djebar describes as the “entree de l’Algerienne dans le premier grand roman de la modernite” (entrance of the Algerian

woman into the first great novel of modern times).79 Zoraide, she reminds us, wrote a note to her lover while he was imprisoned, and lowered it to him through the window tied to a rose. Djebar writes that “cette ecriture en langue auto ch tone, que traduira un renegat mis dans le secret, vient d’une femme cachee” (this writing in the native language, translated for him by a renegade who is in on the secret, comes from a mysterious woman).80 Zoraide deceives her father to flee with this lover, traveling to Spain to become a cultural and linguistic outsider, where “elle se verra, pour finir, reduite au role de sourde-muette eclatante de beaute, c’est vrai—mais alors, elle n’ecrira plus” (in the end she will see herself reduced to the role of stunningly beautiful deaf-mute—but then she will write no more).81 Although Djebar refers to Zoraide as the first Algerian woman to have appeared in literature, the importance of this figure for Djebar is that she is the first Algerian woman writing to appear in literature. Djebar emphasizes the fact that Zoraide wrote and describes how “son ecriture, devenue illisible, s’avere par la meme inutile et s’efface.” (Her writing is effaced. No one can read it, so now it is useless.)82 The writing, written in the woman’s mother tongue, is effaced since it is ineffectual and nothing comes of it; although her writing allows her to flee with her lover, Zoraide is transported into an unfamiliar environment and is alone and cut off from her people. What is interesting in this tale of Zoraide is that it introduces the idea of women performing the act of writing, and in the strand of narrative that concentrates upon Djebar’s genealogy, we see the author inscribing her self through a series of women writers, beginning with Zoraide. Zoraide, the first Algerian woman to write, did so in secret, out of love, and had to flee as a result of it. Furthermore, her writing was effaced, in the sense that it dissolved or disappeared; it was read once and was discarded, only to bring trauma upon her. The figure of Zoraide is therefore an introduction to the notion of Algerian women engaged in the process of writing and hints at its negative effects, and this discussion introduces the idea of lineage, of writing being passed down as a legacy from woman to woman. From Zoraide, Djebar introduces her own mother, whom we learn is also in a sense an Algerian woman writer. We read of how Djebar’s mother penned two significant pieces of writing, both of which are partially effaced. The first of these is her transcription of the poetry of noubas from Andalusia that she had copied down in her own handwriting and kept since she was fifteen years old. Although she knew them by heart, the fact that they were written documents, written by the mother herself who could not write Arabic but could only copy it, is very significant. While in France visiting her son during the war of Algeria, French soldiers broke into the apartment and tore up the mother’s poems, believing them to be nationalist propaganda. Writing of her mother’s tears at the “ecriture violentee” (violent attack on this writing)83 her “ecriture de femme” (woman’s writing),84 Djebar describes how “ma mere, porteuse de ce legs ancestral, en voyait soudain l’effacement” (my mother, the bearer of this anecestral legacy, suddenly saw the legacy effaced and felt an ineffable sadness).85 Djebar’s mother is in this sense the holder of a legacy, a written legacy amongst women, and it is described as being effaced. Furthermore, the reason why the mother was not present while the house was ransacked was that she was in France visiting her son, who was imprisoned as a conspirator in the Algerian war. This travel is also linked to her writing and provides a direct parallel with Zoraide. The mother once attempted to visit her son, making the journey across .

the Mediterranean and on to Strasbourg, only to be thwarted in her attempt. Instead, she goes to Germany and writes him a postcard; in a parallel with Zoraide, she writes a note in her own language to a man she loves and who is in prison. As a result, she travels across the Mediterranean and into a place, a culture, and a language with which she is not familiar; she encounters prejudice and is marked as an outsider. Both Zoraide and the mother write, and their writing is described as being effaced, and as a result of having written, they necessarily become “fugitive et ne le sachant pas” (a fugitive without knowing it).86 It is the fact of writing that leads them to travel, and in a way that dislocates them from their home, plunges them into a foreign culture that marks them as outsiders, and ultimately separates them from their kin. It is through this allusion to Zoraide and the mother figure that Djebar places herself in a trajectory of women writing: “L’histoire de Zoraide ... est bien la metaphore des Algeriennes qui ecrivent aujourd’hui, parmi lesquelles je me compte” (Zo-raide’s story ... is indeed the metaphor for Algerian women writing today—among them myself).87 Yet this inscription is far from comfortable. Instead, Djebar writes that any Algerian woman who writes necessarily becomes “fugitive et ne le sachant pas” (fugitive without knowing it).88 She writes that she herself feels that she is a fugitive: du moins jusqu’a cet instant precis ou je relate ces allees et venues de femmes fuyantes du passe lointain ou recent... A l’instant ou je prends conscience de ma condition permanente de fugitive— j’ajouterai meme: d’enracinee dans la fuite—, justement parce que j’ecris et pour que j’ecrive. . . . J’ecris pour me frayer mon chemin secret, et dans la langue des corsaires francais qui, dans le recit du Captif, depouillerent Zoraide de sa robe endiamantee, oui, c’est dans la langue dite “etrangere” que je deviens de plus en plus transfuge. Telle Zoraide, la depouillee. Ayant perdu comme elle ma richesse du depart, dans mon cas, celle de l’heritage maternel, et ayant gagne quoi, sinon la simple mobilite du corps denude, sinon la liberte. Fugitive done, et ne le sachant pas. Car, de trop le savoir, je me tairais et l’encre de mon ecriture, trop vite, secherait. [At least up to this precise instant in which I am relating these comings and goings of women in flight from the long-ago or recent past. Up to the moment in which I become conscious of my permanent condition as a fugitive—I would even say: as someone rooted in flight—just because I am writing and so that I write. . . . I write to clear my secret path. I write in the language of the French pirates who, in the Captive’s tale, stripped Zoraide of her diamond-studded gown, yes, I am becoming more and more a renegade in the so-called foreign language. Like Zoraide, stripped. Like her I have lost the wealth I began with—in my case, my maternal heritage—and I have gained the simple mobility of the bare body, only freedom. A fugitive therefore, without knowing it. Because knowing this too well would make me silent, and the ink of my writing would dry too soon.]89 The fact of writing, according to this citation, is something that Djebar has gained by sacrifice,

that she has achieved at the expense of something else. She has won the mobility of her body, but she has lost her maternal heritage. Like Zoraide, and like Djebar’s mother, both of whom were stripped of their belongings and marked as outsiders due to their writing, for Djebar the process of writing is equated to losing irretrievably something of her origins, something significant in her early formation of identity: in her case the link with her maternal ancestors. Writing wrenches her away from these ancestors and obliges her to flee, necessarily becoming a fugitive. A fugitive is one who is “on the run,” a criminal, somebody who runs away and cannot settle, somebody who is homeless and constrained to pass through unfamiliar places. In this way, Djebar links her writing to that of her female fore bears, her mother and Zoraide, but emphasizing the desperation, isolation, and trauma that writing brings to each of them. By writing, the Algerian woman cannot avoid separation from her home and her people, so even if, as she writes in the passage cited above, she is writing of other women in the recent and distant past, the fact of writing cuts her off from these women. And while she is aware of this effect of her writing upon her consciousness, if she were to become too aware of it, if she were to pause to reflect upon it for too long, she would cease to write. Yet, Vaste est la prison is precisely a reflection upon the process of writing, upon how effectual it is, upon how collective it may be, and upon its effects upon the individual writer. If Djebar feels that her writing is really effaced, and feels constrained as a fugitive as a result of it, then why write? Furthermore, why write something that is as personal as an autobiography? In this last section of text, with its two interweaving narratives of women from her homeland, Djebar brings us closer to an answer to this conundrum. The first narrative is peppered with sketches of female ancestors and of general female groupings. Much of the plot occurs between groups of women, such as excursions between mother and daughter or mother and daughter-inlaw, and conversations and outings between female friends, thus highlighting female collectivity and interdependency within the heavily patriarchal society. Moreover, much of the narrative of these groupings of female ancestors is narrated by other female family members. For example, the long section describing the grandmother’s life as the child bride of an elderly man and the suffering and loneliness that her situation must have entailed is written from the point of view of the author’s aunt; the aunt enters the narration to tell the grandmother’s story as Djebar manipulates the narrative point of view in order for a variety of women’s voices, recounting their own stories and each other’s stories, to take over. A long series of women take over the narration through large sections of dialogue that often comprise several pages of text without interruption. Rather than simply destabilizing an omniscient narrator by incorporating multiple points of view, Djebar here includes multiple voices as a series of women take over the narration of key parts of the text, thus discarding the notion of a single writer/autobiographer with a definitive version of the text. Yet, although female ancestors are described and imagined, and in spite of the way in which they enter the narration and inscribe their voices in writing, the narrative is far from a eulogy of female collectivity. Instead, Djebar’s position is always that of the outsider, mirroring those of Zoraide and the mother as writer. Djebar pays particular attention in this autobiographical section to events that separate her from the women of her homeland, and particularly of her family, as a result of her reading and writing. For example, she recalls an episode in which the mother questions the young protagonist, aged about ten years old, after

having seen her crying as she read a book: Hier, tu etais dans notre chambre, assise par terre, aupied de notre lit: tu lisais ce livre de bibliotheque que tu venais d’apporter. Moi, de la cuisine, je t’ai entendue ensuite pleurer . . . . Tu sanglotais, mais doucement, un peu comme si tu chantais! Je suis venue voir en catimini, pour comprendre . . . Explique moi, 6 ma fille, je crois qu’il y a un mystere: moi, je lis en arabe mes paroles de chansons anciennes, je les chante et les pleure quelquefois dans mon coeur .... Mais je chante! Un peu plus tard, elle avoua, troublee: —Tu m’as fait regretter de ne pas savoir lire le francais! . . . [Yesterday you were in our room, sitting on the floor at the foot of our bed: you were reading that library book you had just brought home. Then, from the kitchen, I heard you crying. . . . You were sobbing, but softly, a bit as if you were singing! I sneaked in to see, to understand. . . . Explain this to me, my daughter. I think there is something mysterious going on. I read the words to the old songs in Arab, I sing them and sometimes weep to them in my heart. . . . But still I am singing! She admitted a little later, disturbed, “You made me regret I cannot read French!”]90 Although the mother has learned spoken French, she is still unable to read it, and it is this written language, to which the daughter has access, that cuts the daughter off from her mother, that separates her experience from her mother’s experience. The mother cannot understand the different effect that the writing has on the child, judging from her own experience of reading the Arabic language. The mother is aware that there is something mysterious about this written language to which her daughter is privy but she herself is not. The way in which the mother asks the child for enlightenment and education is a reversal of the parent-child dynamic and emphasizes the break with tradition that Djebar as female child represented, precisely through being able to read and write the language of the colonizer. The way in which Djebar locates her subject position as separate from her female ancestors is further emphasized in her relation to her maternal grandmother, who views her granddaughter as somewhat strange, in one instance remarking to the mother for no clear reason, “Eh bien quoi, vous en ferez un garcon peut-etre?” (Well, so, are you perhaps going to make her be a boy?)91 The grandmother appeals to the mother, who in turn looks upon the daughter, with a half-smile that could signify admiration, discomfort, protection, or even envy; whatever the reason for the mother’s reaction, the incident serves to highlight the disjuncture between generations and the daughter’s position as alien to the group. Simultaneously, the other strand of narrative that comprises this third section of Vaste est la prison also negotiates the author’s relationship with a female collectivity, and in a broader sense as it refers not simply to ancestors but to the women of Djebar’s homeland. In La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, Djebar recuperated the women’s memories and voices, in order for their voices to be heard for the first time. Here, Djebar writes her memories of making the film, of the women whom she encountered, of her aims for the film, and of her role

in mediating between families. She immediately announces her intention of the film as a collective endeavor, stating that “T’ai dit: ‘Moteur.’ Une emotion m’a saisie. Comme si, avec moi, toutes les femmes de tous les harems avaient chuchote: ‘moteur’. . . . Ce regard, je le revendique mien. Je le percois ‘notre” (I said: “Action.” I was gripped by an emotion. As if all the women of all the harems had whisped “action” with me. .. . This gaze, I claim it as mine. I see it as “ours”).92 As she remembers different episodes within the making of the film, Djebar regularly pauses to highlight the aim of what she was doing as collective, but also emphasizes that she intended the film to forge a link between her as an individual and the wider body of Berber women as a collective. She describes a woman she encounters during the making of the film as “tout mon passe au feminin” (all my feminine past)93 and explains the link between individual and collective thus: Au cours de ces mois de tatonnements, a la suite de mon person-nage, j’apprenais que le regard sur le dehors est en meme temps retour a la memoire, a soi-meme enfant, aux murmures d’avant, a l’oeil interieur, immobile sur l’histoire jusqu-la cachee, un regard nimbe de sons vagues, de mots audibles et de musiques melanges. . . . Apprendre a voir, je l’ai decouvert, c’est se ressouvenir certes, c’est fermer les yeux pour reecouter les chuchotements d’avant, la tendresse murmurante d’avant, c’est rechercher les ombres qu’on croit mortes .... [Throughout these months of groping after my character, I learned that looking at the outside in this way is simultaneously a return to memory, to oneself as a child, to earlier whispers, to the inner eye that has not moved from the heretofore hidden story, a gaze suffused with vague sounds, inaudible words and a mixture of various musics. . . . Learning to see, I found out, is indeed recalling. It is closing one’s eyes to hear gain the earlier whispers, the earlier murmuring affection,- it is hunting for shadows one believed had departed.]94 Remembering her feelings as she made her film, and thinking back to the effects of her collective project on her own sense of self, Djebar is clearly struck by how the experience of filming other women in some measure healed the disjuncture between herself and the collective of female ancestors and countrywomen to which she alludes in the other strand of narrative. What is important to note here is that it is the medium of film, enabling her to see and enabling others to see, that somehow atoned for her pain of separation. Djebar even states that it was through these women whom she came across while making the film that “je retablis la couture avec les femmes de mon enfance” (I stitched it (the film) together with the women of my childhood).95 Amidst this reflection upon the utility of writing, it is the film that she returns to as having made a connection with the collective as it somehow undid the wounds of separation from her maternal ancestors: the film, that is, and not writing. Although she has previously written of collective subjectivity in plural autobiographies, references to these works are curiously absent as it is the film that Djebar identifies as having succeeded where the writing presumably failed; by writing images of one’s past, all one achieves is phantom appearances, whereas by filming them, one restores the gaze, the voice, and ultimately the link between individual and collective female selfhood. Thus in this final

section of the narrative, Djebar melds the voices of her ancestors as they each write their “I” in her text, and she also melds the record of the voices of her countrywomen as they each speak their “I” in her film. And the format that she valorizes as an appropriate, efficient mode of mingling disparate voices and establishing plural self-narrative is the latter. Whereas Ringrove contends that the end of Vaste est la prison shows that “writing is no longer paralysed by its relationship to the past but dynamised by the presence of the voice,” this reader finds that the questioning of a plural writing strategy is here even more acute.96 There is no closure to this autobiographical section as the narrative instead trails off into allusions to death and violence in present-day Algeria, amidst which the writer asserts: Ce sont eux que je veux ecrire—pas les victimes, pas les meurtris! Car derriere chacun de ceux-ci, il y a dix meurtriers et je vois, oh oui, j’entrevois des cascades de sang derriere un seul homme, une seule femme aujourd’hui assassines. Je ne peux pas. Je ne veux pas. Je veux fuir. Je veux m’effacer. Effacer mon ecriture. Me bander les veux, me baillonner la bouche. Ou alors que le sang des autres, des notres, m’engloutisse toute nue! Me dilue. Me fige, statue vermilion, l’une des statues de Cesaree pour plus tard, bien plus tard, etre fracassee et tomber en ruine. [They are the men I want to write about—not the victims, not the murdered ones! Because behind each of the latter there are ten murderers, and I see, oh yes, I can make out the cascades of blood behind the one man, the one woman, assassinated today. I cannot. I do not want to. I want to run away. I want to efface myself. Erase my writing. Blindfold my eyes, gag my mouth. Or else, let the blood of the others and of our people swallow me up naked! Dilute me. Root me to the spot, a crimson statue, one of the statues of Caesarea that later, much later, will be smashed to pieces and fall into ruin.]97 In this way, the text comes full circle, returning to its point of origin in which Djebar stated her desire to efface her writing. Similarly to the incident in the hammam, which made Djebar aware of the futility of words, so does the occurrence of violence, death, and blood make her aware of the futility of writing. What good is writing, she seems to ask, amid so much carnage? Rather than write, she may as well transform herself into one of the female statues, who were closely linked to writing through the alphabet, but who were eventually separated from it and eroded to leave faceless, phantom images of a more peaceful past. As she writes in the opening line of the poem that closes Vaste est la prison, Djebar asks “Comment inscrire traces avec un sang qui coule, ou qui vient juste de couler?” (How can one inscribe with blood that flows or has just finished flowing?).98 And the poem, and the text, closes thus:

Fugitive et le sachant, desormais La trace de toute migration est envoi rapt sans ravisseur ligne d’horizon inepuisable S’efface en moi chaque point de depart Disparait l’origine meme recommence. Fugitive et le sachant au milieu de la course Ecrire pour cerner la poursuite inlassable Le cercle ouvert a chaque pas se referme La mort devant, antilope cernee L’Algerie chasseresse, en moi, est avalee. [Fugitive and knowing it, henceforth, The trail all migration takes its flight, Abduction with no abductor, No end to the horizon line, Erasing in me each point of departure, Origin vanishes, Even the new start. Fugitive and knowing it mid-flight, Writing to encircle the relentless pursuit, The circle that each step opens closes up again, Death ahead, antelope encircled, Algeria the huntress, is swallowed up in me.]99 The writer views herself in a position in which she is constrained to be a fugitive, to migrate, and to move so far from her origins that these eventually disappear. Yet, although she knows that she is a fugitive, she still wants to write in order to “cerner la poursuite inlassable” (encircle the relentless pursuit), as if she feels that she is part of a race and that she must keep up her pursuit. The final three lines are very ambiguous. In one possible interpretation, “l’Algerie chasseresse” is in the position of the antelope, pursued and eventually trapped in a circle and swallowed, overcome by the writer as her writing takes effect. In the other, it is the writer herself who is the antelope, and in spite of her writing, the circle closes in and Algeria is triumphant. Vaste est la prison therefore dramatizes the difficulty of writing autobiography as a negotiation between individual and plural self. The text points to the phantomization of memories recorded in writing on both an individual and a collective level through its metaphors of facelessness, and questions the utility of recording history and subjectivity in writing through its metaphors of lost language and lost writing. The text is an amalgam of a series of effacements, and as a story of effacement, it necessarily becomes a de-effacement, but the text insists that both effacement and reappearance in writing can only ever be incomplete. As Djebar reflects upon her own writings, she makes no conclusions as to their effect but

points to their futility in linking her individual selfhood with that of a wider female collective and hints at how her film was more successful in this aim. Writing an individual autobiography akin to those of the male writers of the Enlightenment is far from Djebar’s objective, yet her text is also far from an idealized, comfortable, or fulfilling model of a collectivity of braided female voices. Indeed, Djebar’s “I” cannot be subsumed within a collectivity of a female “we” as easily as the oft-cited phrase “plural autobiography” would have us believe. As Jane Hiddleston has written, Djebar “reveals her skepticism regarding notions of a unified feminine identity” in this text, which “revolves around the desire for a collective feminine voice and the failure to locate and access such a voice.”100 Vaste est la prison thus provides us with a powerful example of how female autobiography is not simply based upon a self that is fragmented, incomplete, or necessarily subsumed within a collectivity, or upon a mode of writing that is circular, mazelike, or nonlinear. Rather, this example shows a female autobiographer struggling to at once make her own self discernible from a collective while feeling a need to inscribe that collective into her writing.

4 The Displaced Autobiographical Subject in Hélène Cixous’s Les rêveries de la femme sauvage I never ask myself :who am I?” (qui suis-je!) I ask myself “who are I?” (qui sont-je?) an untranslatable phrase. Who can say who I are, how many I are, which I is the most of my Is?” —Cixous 1

THE INTERROGATION OF SUBJECTIVITY, ITS MULTIPLICITIES AND inconsistencies has always been a prominent feature of Cixous’s work, throughout the many works of fiction, theater and essays that she has written. Cixous is better known in the Anglo-American academy for her theoretical writings on ecriture feminine than for her fiction but, as Mireille Calle Gruber has suggested, it is maybe within her fictional writing that Cixous’s work is most original, thought provoking, and subversive.2 Her innovative style is very evident in her recent partially autobiographical writing. Just as she urged women to find the self and the body through coming to writing in her early theoretical work, her later autobiographies dramatize both the necessity and the complexity of inscribing one’s self in writing. Cixous is well versed in the history of autobiography, as her regular seminars in the College Internationale de Philosophie frequently discuss the genre and its canon from Saint Augustine, through Rousseau, to James Joyce, Jean Genet, and Jacques Derrida.3 In her own writing, Cixous plays with the ways in which her predecessors have written “I” as representative of both unitary and non-unitary identity. As I show here, her works represent an interrogation of the possibility of inscribing one’s self individually in narrative and an exploration of subjectivity as a relational concept. Cixous has recently published a series of texts that deal with her childhood experiences in colonial Algeria in essays, short prose, and semiautobiographical works.4 This is not to say that the writer’s childhood in Algeria is absent from her earlier writing, but rather that in these later works she explores this aspect of her self-narrative more explicitly.5 Indeed, Elissa Marder claims that these texts represent “an auto-analysis or even an auto-odyssey.”6 In this chapter, I examine the subjectivity she constructs in Les rêveries de la femme sauvage, a text that is written in the first person about the experiences of a writer looking back upon herself, the narrator-as-child, growing up in Algeria.7 Many aspects of the content of the work correspond to details of the writer’s life, such as a father who died of tuberculosis while the writer was aged eleven, a brother, a German mother and grandmother, incidences of antiSemitic violence, and a home in Clos-Salembier. Furthermore, and more importantly than

factual correspondence, this text is predicated upon a recit de soi (story of a self) due to its emphasis on rêveries (reveries) and scenes primitives (primitive scenes), as well as its subtitle, and it constitutes an attempt to write a self through a first-person narrative that questions narrated events and the identities of narrating selves. The text is of particular interest to this book as it is predicated upon a multiple, unstable “I.” The work is arranged nonchrono-logically as though it were a series of dreams or visions, and several different voices of the narrator are distinguishable, such as the present, narrating self, the narrator-as-child, and the narrator-as-adult. Cixous manipulates her “I” to correspond not only to the narrator at different times of her life but also to a host of other characters, thus rendering the text a plurivocal, non-unitary autobiography. Simultaneously, she also casts doubt upon the identity that “I” represents. The narrator recounts painful memories of her attempts to gain access to Algeria while an outsider there, and the text becomes a meditation upon the difficulty of assuming any identity in such a subject position; she was a female Jewish immigrant who could not, and furthermore whose parents could not, lay claim to being French, Arabic, Catholic, Muslim, colonizer, or colonized. In this chapter, I firstly discuss Cixous’s presentation of her autobiographical project and how this immediately casts doubt upon the notion of unitary, individual selfhood. I then examine how Cixous writes “I” plurally, mingling voices as she ponders the relationship between self and other. I then turn to her representation of the identity of the principal narrating “I,” analyzing the way in which she undoes existing categories of identity and paying particular attention to the way that she quotes other writers in her quest for selfhood. Writing “I,” Writing Who? Les rêveries de la femme sauvage begins with what first appears as a desire to search for one’s roots or origins, as is often the point of departure for an autobiographical text. Cixous’s text opens with her avowal that “tout le temps ou je vivais en Algerie, je revais d’arriver un jour en Algerie, j’aurais fait n’importe quoi pour y arriver” (the whole time I was living in Algeria I would dream of one day arriving in Algeria, I would have done anything to get there).8 The writer recounts how she is alone one night, and suddenly writes five pages about her experiences in Algeria: Je voulais que la porte s’ouvre, maintenant et pas plus tard, avais-je note tres vite, dans la fievre de la nuit de juillet, car c’est main-tenant, et probablement pour des dizaines ou des centaines de raisons, qu’une porte vient de s’entrebailler dans la galerie Oubli de ma memoire, et pour la premiere fois, voici que j’ai la possibility de retourner en Algerie, et done l’obligation . . . [I longed for the door to open, now not later, I had scribbled, in the fever of the July night, for it is now, and probably for dozens or hundreds of reason that a door has cracked opened in the Oblivion Wing of my memory, and now for the first time I may be able to return to Algeria, therefore I must…]9 Yet this seemingly conventional opening that announces a journey into the author’s past in order

to heal a present trauma, in this case the painful memories of her childhood, is soon subverted. The pages that the narrator wrote about her memories of Algeria, pages that we do not read but are merely informed of, have disappeared by the following morning. There begins a maddening search for the missing pages, leading to the narrator/writer frantically sorting through piles of papers, examining files and folders, confusing the pages with her “cahier de reves” (dream notebook) and even contemplating suicide. This twist heralds an exploration into the author’s unconscious, emphasizing the role of the unconscious in her memories, the free play of signifiers on a linguistic level, and a blurring of the distinction between dream and reality. As the title of the work suggests, dreams are an important element in this exploration of the self and the words “rêve” and “reveries” (dream and reveries) pepper the text and are linked metonymically to “ravin,” “rabbin,” “reviens,” “rêveuse” (ravine, rabbi, return, dreamer). Such allusions to the unconscious move the writing far from the notion of autobiography as narrative based upon a conscious, individual subject and her/his conscious appreciation and evaluation of the development of the self. While Kristeva wrote a story of her self and revised that story in the same volume, and Halimi rewrote her story in successive volumes, Cixous begins her self-narrative with the premise that the story can never be fully known or rendered in writing in the first place. Furthermore, the first pages of Cixous’s text also cast doubt upon the origin, the writer, of the autobiography. The text recounts the tale of the lost five pages, then questions who or what was responsible for their production. In two sentences that last a page and a half with no punctuation, Cixous describes the arrival of the pages from an unknown source, a “don des dieux dont je ne connais meme pas le nom” (gift of gods whose names I don’t even know”),10 how they flow through her body and are present in her dreams like a “flot abondant” (abundant flow)11 for the rest of the night. The pages that the narrator writes during the night merely come to her, arrive on her page, are even dictated to her, by “le Venant” (the Comer).12 As opposed to arevenant (a ghost, from the verb revenir, to come back), it is rather a first coming that precludes any previous entry point, the writing does not come from a ghost because it was never there in the first place. In this way, after having introduced this semiautobiographical work with a seemingly conventional opening, Cixous at once displaces the notion of a conscious subject as the basis of the text and removes the written text from an identifiable authorial source. Which self is being written, we are left to ask, and by whom?

ERASING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN SELF AND OTHER Les rêveries de la femme sauvage is not a conventional autobiography with beginning, middle, and end, but is rather an assortment of seemingly unrelated vignettes. Isolated memories are recounted in nonlinear fashion, as the text jumps from one memory to another, with little investment in creating a cohesive self over time; the narrative often breaks off into streams of consciousness as the author refrains from sorting and organizing memories in order to provide them with a specific significance in a development of a coherent self. Instead, the series of vignettes present thumbnail sketches of the relationship between the narrator and other characters, places, and objects. The characters themselves constitute one of the most striking

features of Les rêveries de la femme sauvage as, I argue, they work on a textual level to displace the identity of the narrating subject. The main character is the narrator’s brother, who was the main witness to the trauma that the narrator experienced as a child in Algeria, and with whom she was at times complicit in her bitterness towards her mother and her grief for her father. The narrator describes the intensity and proximity of their relationship thus: “je suis a cote de mon frere a son cote et a ses cotes d’un cote en tant que soeur de frere et de l’autre cote en tant que frere supplemental.” (In the armchairs I am next to my brother at his side and by his side on the one hand as the sister of a brother and on the other hand as an extra brother.)13 In this instance, brother and sister are presented as doubles, bound by a common identity that is hardly distinguishable as representative of two separate entities. They form “mon-frere-et-moi” (my-brother-and-I),14 “un seul camp multiplie”15 (a single camp multiplied),14 “le premier couple” (the first couple)16 and are thus presented as self and alter ego, as two sides of the one coin. Yet in a twist to this doubled identity, the writer presents Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as a metaphor for their relationship: “nous sommes l’un le Crime l’autre le Chatiment, en ce cas, sans aucun doute, le Crime c’est moi” (one of us is the Crime the other the Punishment, in which case, without a doubt, I am crime).17 Narrator and brother are thus presented as two halves of a single entity, yet this is complicated by the fact that the family only owned a second-hand copy of the “Chatiment” (Punishment) volume, and not a copy of the “Crime” half. Thus, the narrator’s identity depends on that of her brother’s but her identity is at once absent from the equation. Through these frequent allusions to the doubling of brother’s and narrator’s identities, the autobiographical subject is displaced, hidden in two separate selves and indistinguishable as a coherent and complete self. From the outset of the text, Cixous therefore defies a unitary model of subjectivity by conflating her identity with that of another protagonist. The boundaries between “I” and “other” are thus obfuscated to the extent that the identity of the narrating “I” is wholly indistinct. This challenge to the unitary model of autobiography is also present on the level of the narrative voice. The voices of other characters often enter the narration, signalling a rupture in the writing of the narrator’s memories. These interruptions serve to question the narrator-aspresent over the way in which she has rendered details of her experience. The brother’s voice in particular often questions the veracity and reliability of the narrator’s memory, such as when the narrator recounts in detail how her father invited a pair of hitchhikers into the car, only to be answered by the brother: Selon mon frere les deux hommes ne faisaient pas du stop, cela n’aurait eu aucun sens dit-il, qui, sinon mon pere se serait arrete Chemin des Cretes et mon pere est un etre ephemere, qui s’est arrete de lui-meme, il s’arretait toujours de lui-meme dit mon frere. . . . Dit mon frere en 2000. . . . Les deux hommes etaient deux vieux en gandoura, qui attendaient le trolleybus a l’arret facultatif et ils descendaient dit mon frere, sur Alger, ils ne mon-taient meme pas. [My brother claims the two men were not hitchhiking, it doesn’t make sense he says, who but my father would have stopped on Crest Road and my father is an ephemeral being, who

stopped all by himself, he was forever stopping all by himself. . . . Says my brother in the year 2000. . . . The two men were oldsters in gandouras, who were waiting at the stop to flag down the trolley and they were going down says my brother, down into Algiers, they were not even going up.]18 The brother in this sense fulfills a role similar to that of Sarraute’s double narrating voice: a second level of narration that may be interpreted as an alter ego.19 Yet the brother in the case of Cixous’s text is supposed to be another subject, distinct from the self at the heart of this autobiography. His “I” proceeds to enter the narration in order to suggest modifications not only to the veracity of the narrator’s experiences but also in her choice of expression. For example, when the narrator recounts her memory of the ticket controllers on the trolleybus K who would touch the children inappropriately, the narrative is broken by the brother’s voice: “enleve fesses dit mon frere, enleve fesses du livre dit mon frere, mais comment faire? Alors je laisse seulement les fesses de fille dis-je et j’enleve celles de mon frere.” (Take out ass says brother, take ass out of the book says my brother, but how to do that? So I’m just leaving the girls’ asses in I say and I remove my brother’s.)20 Elsewhere, his voice comments “Je te suggere d’appeler ce livre le Paradis Perdu dit mon frere. C’est-a-dire l’Enfer Perdu dis-je. Tout ce que nous perdons est paradisiaque dit mon frere. C’est infernal dis-je. L’enfer du paradis.” (I suggest you call this book Paradise Lost says my brother. You mean Hell Lost I say. Everything we lose is paradisiac says my brother. It’s hellish I say. The hell of paradise.)21 And it is even his voice that defines the narrator in a phrase that is echoed in the title of the work: “comme le dit mon frere je m’enfoncai de mon cote dans mes Reveries solitaires” (as my brother says I for my part burrowed deeper and deeper into my solitary reveries).22 All of these incursions into the text by the voice of the brother displace the notion of a stable and coherent author to this semiautobiographical text, as not only is the veracity of the narrator’s memory questioned but so is her writing itself. By making suggestions on the level of the writing, the voice of the brother within the narration moves the text towards a plurivocal autobiography, but, in which the identities of narrating self and narrated other are indistinguishable. Cixous’s text goes even further in subverting the unitary, mon-ovocal narration of early definitions of autobiography. In addition to incursions into the writing by other characters, Les rêveries de la femme sauvage also includes large sections of text that are narrated by another character, thus displacing the “I” of the autobi-ographer. The characters of the brother and the mother in particular frequently assume the narrative voice for several paragraphs at a time, thus rendering the autobiographer the object (“tu”) of their narration, rather than the subject (“je”) of her own autobiography Furthermore, the distinction between these disparate narrative voices is often unclear. For example, the mother narrates some of the main character’s earliest memories of Clos-Salembier. The mother is at first communicated as narrator through phrases such as “encore ‘une histoire juive’ dit ma mere, a ne pas repeter devant l’etranger dit-elle” (another “Tewishstory” says my mother, and not to be repeated in front of strangers she says”).23 Yet her voice at other times displaces that of the narrator as indicators such as “dit ma mere” (says my mother) disappear and the narrative point of view belongs solely to the

mother, with no further indication of this transposition of narrative voice accorded to the reader. For example, the mother’s voice begins to recount that “nous n’avons habite au ClosSalembier que par hasard, une insistance de hasards, qui nous ont conduits finalement au ClosSalembier un endroit qui m’a tout de suite beaucoup plu a premiere vue” (we only ended up in the Clos-Salembier by chance, a series of chances, which finally led us to the Clos-Selembier a place which at first glance greatly appealed to me).24 After several lines, an abrupt and unexpected change in narrative voice is announced by “mon pere voulait le bonheur” (my father wanted happiness),25 signalling that the narrator has once again resumed the point of view. Yet, after several more sentences we read “il est alle la-bas pour la louer il me faut payer un acompte dit la dame et tonpere a oublie son carnet de cheques” (he went there to rent it you have to make a deposit says the lady and yourfather has forgotten his checkbook).26 The narrative point of view has ostensibly switched back from the narrator to the mother, as “tonpere” (yourfather) indicates that the “I” of this sentence must belong to the latter. What is unclear is where the change in point of view occurred, at which point the “I” was transposed from narrator back to the mother. Sometimes Cixous is clear in establishing who is narrating, and at other times she is not. The subject of this partial autobiography is thus often undistinguishable, and as other characters narrate at length events in which she plays an important role, the narrator furthermore becomes not the subject of her own text but the object of others’ speech. The role of the brother and the mother is therefore to stand as partial narrators who displace the narrating self and objectify the narrator, thus moving the autobiographical self yet further from a model of unitary and conscious self-reflexive narration. A further subversion to the genre occurs as Cixous plays not only with the pronoun “I” but also with “we.” The narrator often uses the pronoun “nous” (we), to refer to herself and her brother, but this introduces a further level of ambiguity in the narration and this “nous” is itself unstable. On occasion, the “nous” clearly signifies brother and sister and emphasizes the doubling between them, such as when the narrator comments, “lorsque enfin nous avons eu le Velo—oui, nous puisque ce Velo qui etait suppose etre le mien, mon Velo” (when finally we got the Bike—yes we since this Bike which was supposed to be mine, my Bike).27 Yet “nous” is also employed variously throughout the text in order to refer to different groupings of characters, and the precise grouping that it represents is often not identified. Sometimes “nous” refers to the narrator, the brother, and their pet dog, sometimes it refers to the narrator and her father, sometimes it refers to narrator and mother, and sometimes it is a floating referent that could apply to any and all of the text’s characters. Long sentences of which an unidentified “nous” is the subject appear frequently in the text and the identity of “nous” can often alter within paragraphs without explanation. For example, when the narrator is attacked by her dog, she comments: Nous nous battions. Mais Le Chien est pris en otage. Nous ne le laissons pas se battre, ce serait un carnage. Nous l’attachons, nous le releguons dans la cage. . . . Nous sommes enfermes et la-dessus nous l’enfermons. Il subit le double malheur d’etre nous et de ne pas etre nous.

[We fought back. But the Dog is taken hostage. We don’t allow him to fight, that would be a massacre. We tie him up, consign him to his cage. .. . We are shut in, whereupon we shut him in. He suffers the double misfortune of being us and of not being us].28 The “nous” that begins this citation refers to narrator and dog, who fight one another on the floor of the kitchen in the family home. Yet “nous” passes from narrator and dog to narrator and another identity with “nous l’attachons” (we tie him up); this second identity could possibly be Aicha, the housekeeper who is present at the time of the attack, or brother or mother. And finally the “nous” of the last two sentences, in which the dog is “nous” and not “nous,” would seem to represent narrator and brother due to the reference to being confined. This device draws the narrative closer to a plural, non-unitary autobiography, but a particularly unstable plural autobiography as the “nous” is not representative of a coherent, constant, and clearly demarcated set of subjects. The subject of our semiautobiographical text is in this sense not a singular character, not an “I” that stands alone and that is object and subject of its own text, but rather an obscured character whose identity is frequently linked to and hinged upon somebody —or something—else’s identity. In this way, the characters are not written into the text as conventional others against which the autobiographical self has defined its own identity over time, nor are they characters within a novel that are sketched or described to the reader. Instead, they represent vehicles for narrative strategies that displace the autobiographical subject, which show how it is indissoluble from other identities and which refute the notion of a clearly demarcated and coherent self within autobiographical narrative. The characters, including the narrator, are even referred to on many occasions as characters in a work of art, which are not real but are creations in an unknown writer’s mind. In one example, the narrator writes: Des que je suis seule je suis touchee par les fantomes, je suis doublee, je suis double, tout est double, toutes les personnes qui s’assemblent et se separent au Lycee sont doubles, et sont des doubles, toutes sont elles-memes et simultanement des figurantes. On joue une piece. Un film est tourne. Toutes sont deja retrospectives. Toutes les personnes etaient deja passees. Les remplacantes etaient des futures remplacees. Mais quand? quand viendra le remplacement? . . . Je suis un livre d’apocalypses ecrites dans une langue que je ne parle pas et je n’ai pas d’auteur. [As soon as I am alone I am touched by the ghosts, I am doubled, double, everything is double, all the people who come together and draw apart in the Lycee are double, are doubles, all of them at the same time themselves and a stand in. The play begins. The film starts to roll. They are all already retrospective. All these people have gone by already. The understudies would one day be replaced. But when? when will the replacement come? ... I am a book of apocalypses written in a language I don’t speak and I have no author.]29 The characters are variously described, here and elsewhere, as characters in a film, a play, or a novel, rather than family members or close friends with whom the narrating self shares a

degree of familiarity. The narrator even writes, in reference to herself and her brother, that “il m’apparait aujourd’hui que nous etions dans un livre sans le savoir” (it seems to me today that we were in a book without knowing it).30 The names of the characters are furthermore modified and transcribed phonetically in a way that changes them from identifiable people to nonnamed entities that resound as characters in somebody else’s text: “tonpere,” “tamere,” and “monfrere” (yourfather, yourmother, and my-brother), for example. This representation of the narrator’s others as characters in an unknown text shows on one level that they are removed from any significance in a reality, as the reality of one’s history and the people and events one has experienced normally form the backdrop of autobiography, and it further questions the role of the writer. If they are all characters in a remote text, then who is writing them? The writer, the source of the autobiography, has evaporated and the “I” is moved a further step away from the writing, thus displacing both narrated and narrating selves.

CIXOUS’S UNIDENTIFIABLE IDENTITY In addition to the role of the characters in displacing the autobiographical self, the text also subverts the notion of a coherent, unitary self by casting doubt upon the very identity of the autobiographer. Cixous refutes any model of coherent, complete, or definable identity as she inscribes the elements of her developing selfhood in narrative. Cixous accomplishes this through writing a series of vignettes that each explore elements of her developing identity. As Michael Sheringham identifies, autobiography is generally structured around a series of events or turning points that form the narrator’s narrative of the development of her/his self: Rousseau stole a ribbon, Sartre discovered his grandfather’s library, Sarraute stabbed a sofa, and Gide traveled to North Africa, for example.31 As we saw in Halimi’s autobiographies, the autobiographer is obliged to sift through her/his memories and make a choice over which material to include, and that material is most often chosen according to the meaning with which the autobiographer can imbue it; that is to say, it is selected on the basis of its contribution to a specific representation of the self. Yet in Cixous’s text, this chain of formative events derived from a selection of remembered material is absent, and is instead replaced by a linking of inanimate objects. It is difficult to discern any isolated events or incidents that form any turning points or decisive moments in the narrator’s developing self. Instead, a chain of objects, mostly capitalized in the text to emphasize their importance, replaces the chain of events.32 The first one of these, as mentioned above, is “Le Velo” (the Bike), followed by, among others, “Le Chien” (the Dog), “Le Lycee” (the School), “La Ville” (the City), and “La Clinique” (the Clinic), the maternity hospital run by her mother and attached to the house in Clos-Salembier. In this way, the text becomes a series of vignettes centered upon a series of objects, and more precisely the narrator’s position in relation to them. One such formative object is the narrator’s school. She explains that the fact that she attended Le Lycee was in itself a mistake, as the Jewish students attended “l’autre lycee le Delacroix je crois” (the other school, Delacroix I believe)33 but she was enrolled in Le Lycee as a result of an error made by her father. Le Lycee constituted an entirely French environment in the sense that it was run by French women and was attended by French students, and as a

result the narrator became “la jeune fille qui fait ses etudes au lycee croit faire ses etudes au Lycee considere comme le sien, et porteur d’un nom aussi typiquement francais que le sien ou celui du Clos-Salembier” (the girl who studies in the lycee believes she is studying in the Lycee she considers her own, bearer of a name as typically French as her own or that of the Clos-Salembier).34 Any sign of Algeria was effaced within Le Lycee, and the narrator comments that the school’s secret program was “un plan d’effacement de l’etre algerien” (the plan to efface the Algerian being).35 Yet the narrator belongs neither to France nor to Algeria, and the existence of Le Lycee as a metaphor succinctly conveys this subject position. Through Le Lycee the narrator is forced to come into close contact with France for the first time through her friendship with fellow pupil Francoise. As her name suggests, Francoise represents the embodiment of France; she lives in “la maison haute blanche toute fermee dressee a la pointe francaise du Clos-Salembier ou se rassemblent l’ecole la bibliotheque et le commissariat” (the high white shut-up house that sits on the French tip of the Clos-Salembier where the school the library and the police station gather).36 Francoise is situated differently from the narrator in terms of her geographical position in the town, her religion, her social class, and her milieu. Moreover, Francoise brings an awareness to the narrator of her in-between identity through contact between the narrator and Francoise’s mother. The narrator recalls speaking to her thus: J’entends une voix bien habillee les cheveux tires en arriere, jamais de maquillage, pas de faute de grammaire le grain serre bas nylon une horrible horrible politesse, c’est a la France que je parle m’effraye-je c’est la premiere fois et je ne l’oublierai jamais que je telephone a la France elle-meme et je reconnais sa voix que j’entends pour la premiere fois. [I hear a well-dressed voice hair scraped back, no makeup ever, no grammatical errors smooth-textured nylon stockings a horrible horrible politeness, I am speaking to France I gulped it is the first time and never shall I forget that I am telephoning to France herself and I recognize her voice that I am hearing for the first time.]37 Thus the function of the character of Francoise’s mother is to represent France and French women in such a way that the narrator cannot possibly identify with them, placing her in a position of polar opposite to their embodiment. Yet, this opposition further highlights her liminality as she is equally estranged from the Algerian woman embodied by Ai-cha, the Algerian housekeeper. Aicha is the narrator’s sole means of knowing Algeria, and the closest she can come to Algeria is through the presence of Aicha: “c’est la seule Algerie que j’aie jamais pu toucher” (that is the only Algeria that I was ever able to touch).38 Yet observing Aicha brings the narrator to the realization that she is also in a position of polar opposite to this character and cannot establish a common identity from the relationship. In this sense, she is the polar opposite of both the French and the Algerian women, as she is comparable to neither. The narrator even remarks that “a cette epoque je me suis mesuree tous les jours d’une part avec la porte algerienne en la personne dAicha d’autre part avec la porte francaise visible en la personne de Francoise” (in those days I pitted myself daily against the Algerian door personified by Aicha for one thing, for another against the

French door visible in the person of Francoise).39 Thus the self-definition of the narrator is irreconcilable with the categories of identity available to her, since the categories of French woman and Algerian woman are unrepresentative of her identity. Therefore, in the absence of other available categories, she is situated in an uncomfortable, in-between position in which her identity is definable only in terms of neither one category nor its opposite. The narrative of the formative object, in this case Le Lycee, can thus once again be read as an allegory for the narrator’s liminal identity and the disidentification with which the autobiographical subject is forced to negotiate unsuccessfully. Such is the pattern of the narrator’s subject position in this text, based upon a series of binary oppositions in which the narrator belongs to neither side. This is the case with Le Chien, a symbol of her position as neither free nor in captivity, and neither human nor beast, with Le Lycee that communicates her status as neither French nor Algerian, Le Velo that places her as neither male nor female, neither sister nor brother, and La Ville that identifies her as neither insider nor outsider. Her identity is seen to develop as a series of oppositions, which she cannot reconcile with her experience, as an identity system based upon binary oppositions is not sufficient to represent her subjectivity. She cannot be fully French, nor can she be Algerian. She cannot be fully female, nor can she be male. She does not understand the word “Jewish” but knows that she is not Muslim in the street, and not Catholic in the school. She can access neither the female Oran nor the male Algiers. She cannot be the French woman Francoise and nor can she be the Algerian woman Aicha. The writer thus simultaneously casts doubt upon the stability of her self by doubling the narrator’s identity with a series of characters who objectify her and displace her voice in the narration, and she further portrays this identity as inexpressible within existing categories of thought.

CIXOUS’S LITERARY OTHERS The dog Fips that the narrator’s father buys for his children shortly before his death represents a formative object and adds a further level of reference to Cixous’s quest for selfhood. The narrator perceives Le Chien as a replacement child and at times identifies with it as a brother or sister, viewing it as a mirror of her self as a child. She describes Le Chien as “l’enfant que notre pere nous donne” (the child our father gives us),40 thus placing the dog in the same position as her self and brother within the family unit. Le Chien is both a mirror of the narrator and is alienated from her, and is symbolic of her liminal position within Algerian society: Au Clos-Salembier, je ne voyais pas de fin, ni de pain, ni de paix, je ne savais pas, je ne croyais pas, mon cceur hurlait dans ma cage, Le Chien comme moi. Je me disais si jamais elle s’ouvre je fuirai, je ne connaissais ni courage ni esperance. Et Le Chien comme moi, ni pain, ni paix, ni esperance. La haine et l’absurdite. Nous etions tous des chiens enrages les uns contre les autres mais des chiens en liberte. [In the Clos-Salembier, I saw no ends, no bread, no peace, I didn’t know, I didn’t believe, my heart howled in my cage. The Dog like me. I told myself if ever it opens I’ll flee, I knew

neither courage nor hope. And the Dog like me, no bread, no peace, no hope. Hate and absurdity. All of us were mad dogs, each against the other but we were dogs left free.]41 Thus the narrator is neither human nor animal, neither child nor pet, and similarly the dog mirrors the narrator’s position as neither free nor captive, neither mobile nor imprisoned; he is held in a position of captivity but also roams free and bites the narrator. In one telling instance, the dog himself takes over the narrative voice and asks: “mais qu’est-ce que ca veut dire juif, se demandait Le Chien, et arabe, et chien, ami, frere, ennemi, papa, liberte il n’y a qu’injustice et brutalite” (but what does Jewish mean wondered the Dog, and Arab, and dog, friend, brother, enemy, Papa, liberty nothing exists save injustice and brutality).42 The figure and the voice of the dog therefore question the meaning of defined categories of identity and draw attention to the way in which the narrator does not fit neatly into any. The list of nouns and adjectives pronounced by Le Chien emphasizes the insufficiency of language in creating the narrator’s identity and casts doubt over the narrator’s ability to arrive at any stable form of self-representation.43 Moreover, the character of Le Chien is an important inter-textual reference. Immediately after the dog takes over the narration in the passage cited above, Cixous cites in italics Rousseau’s opening phrase from Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire, to which the title of her text clearly refers.44 Yet, Cixous departs from Rousseau’s text by modifying it to conform to her own tale, and still in italics, as though she were citing Rousseau but the words are no longer his. Whereas Rousseau’s work begins “Me voici done seul sur la terre, n’ayant plus de frere, de prochain, d’ami, de societe que moi-meme” (I am now alone on earth, no longer having any brother, neighbor, friend or society other than myself),45 Cixous writes: Me voici done seul sur la terre, n’ayant plus de frere, de sceur, de pere prochain, d’ami de societe que ma solitude. Leplus sociable et le plus aimant des etres est proscrit d’un accord unanime. fe suis dans cette position de cage comme dans un reve et je ne dors plus jamais. Et moi, detache d’eux et attache au fil de fer, que suis-je moi-memel [Here I am, alone on the earth, having no more brother, sister, no father nearby, no friend only my solitude for company. The most sociable and loving of beings is unanimously outlawed. I am caged as in a dream and I don’t sleep anymore. And I, detached from them and tied to a strand of wire, what am I?]46 As this italicized section directly follows the passage narrated by Le Chien cited above, it is unclear to whom the narrative voice belongs. To Rousseau, to begin with, then possibly to the narrator herself, as she feels as though she were in a cage, and then to Le Chien as it is he who is attached to the iron chain. The plurivocal nature of this text is once again in evidence as Cixous here repeats her play with narrative voice. The way in which Rousseau’s citation is incorporated immediately emphasizes the solitude to which he referred and highlights the detachment to which the narrating voice is subject. Furthermore, this citation points to another episode of Rousseau’s text, with which Cixous’s text shares a clear intertext: in both texts, the

narrator is attacked by a dog, and these attacks prove to be revelatory of the narrators’ identities. In the second promenade, Rousseau recounts being attacked in the street by a dog, falling unconscious, and awakening to a feeling of renewal: “cette premiere sensation fut un moment delicieux. Je ne me sentais encore que par la. Je naissais dans cet instant a la vie, et il me semblait que je remplissais de ma legere existence tous les objets que j’apercevais.” (This first sensation was a delicious moment. I still had no feeling of myself except as being “over there.” I was born into life at that instant, and it seemed to m e that I filled all the objects I perceived with my frail existence.)47 Yet as he recovers, this feeling is superseded by feverish agitation. Perturbation is aroused in Rousseau as he hears conflicting reports of the incident, culminating in his discovery of the widespread belief that he died in the attack and that a volume of unpublished manuscripts attributed to him had been prepared for publication. The result is that Rousseau witnesses the extent to which his identity is questioned by those who believe him to be dead, and he discovers the variety of opinions that were held of him. In a parallel to the way in which Le Chien is a metaphor for the narrator’s liminal identity, neither free nor mobile, neither human nor animal, so too does Rousseau’s incident with the dog lead to a profoundly troubling tension in perceptions of his identity he is neither one identity nor another and it is the widespread belief that the uncontrollable dog killed him that lay this bare for him to observe while still alive. The inclusion of this intertext in Cixous’s text therefore highlights the narrator’s precarious subject position, isolated as she is between sets of binary oppositions; she is neither Algerian nor French, neither colonizer nor colonized, neither male nor female. Such intertextual references are not in short supply in this text. Cixous’s text includes an incident involving two pigeons which occurs toward the end of the text. A patient gives the narrator’s father two pigeons in lieu of payment, and the mother takes them to be killed by an old rabbi and prepared according to the rules of kosher. As the rabbi takes the first pigeon and removes the feathers from its neck in order to cut it, the second pigeon flies away. The mother enters the narration to recount the episode: A ce moment-la il dit: —Je regrette le deuxieme pigeon doit partir aussi. C’est-a-dire le premier auquel il enlevait juste avant quelques plumes. Je dis: qu’est-ce qui se passe? dit ma mere. Il dit: les pigeons on ne peut pas les separer. Ce sont des couples qui vivent ensemble et meurent ensemble. Il n’y a qu’un pigeon, dit-il, dit ma mere, c’est le deuxieme. Tous les deux ou pas du tout dit-il. Je suis rentree sans pigeon dit ma mere. J’ai dit: le pigeon s’est envole. Le deuxieme qui est aussi le premier. Je n’ai pas regrette dit ma mere, n’ayant jamais mange de pigeon. [Whereupon he said: —Sorry but the second pigeon has to go too. Which is to say the first from which he had just plucked a few feathers. I say: what do you mean? says my mother. He says: you can’t separate pigeons. They are couples that live and die together. There is only one pigeon, he says, says my mother, the second one. Both or none he says. Back I went with no pigeon says my mother. I said: the pigeon flew away. The second

this is also the first. I didn’t feel any regret says my mother, never having eaten pigeon.]48 The two pigeons are not only tied together as one, but are also indissociable from each other since the terms “premier pigeon” (first pigeon) and “deuxieme pigeon” (second pigeon) are exchanged to the extent that we do not know which is the first and which is the second pigeon. The rabbi dictates that the pigeons can only exist as two, and these two are indivisible; to separate the pigeons is impossible since it is only together that they form a logical, identifiable, and coherent entity. A single entity can only be formed by plurality as a distinct unit can only be formed by the coming together of two; they can exist as neither one nor the other, but only together. The narrator later refers to herself as one of the pigeons as she recalls leaving Algeria for France: Le deuxieme pigeon est parti. Le vieux qui tue ouvre les mains. Je me suis envolee comme un trait, le cou deplume, sans savoir si je suivais l’autre dans la vie ou dans la mort. La ou la mort a deja commence pensai-je, commence la vie. J’arrivai en France, le cou nu, il faisait tellement froid partout, dedans, dehors, en haut en bas et tout le long, je cherchai partout ou me trouver et en vain. [The second pigeon is gone. The old man who kills turns up his empty hands. I flew away in a single stroke, neck plucked, not knowing whether I was following the other one in life or in death. There where death is already at work I thought, life begins. I arrived in France, barenecked, it was so cold everywhere, inside, outside, up down and all along, I searched for myself everywhere and in vain.]49 The narrator here compares herself to the pigeon that is released by the rabbi after its mate has escaped. The figure represented by the escaped pigeon is unspecified and this causes unease in the narrator, who does not know whether she is following this “other” into life or death. The escaped pigeon could for example represent her dead father, her brother who departed from Algeria, or her mother who followed soon after. The narrator is attached to this “other,” she is indivisible from it and obliged to follow it, and this choice is made by somebody else, not of her own free will; she does not choose her subject position but is rather assigned it. And this subject position is an uncomfortable one, as she is neither an individual nor a collective; she cannot exist alone but she is also separated from the “other” upon whom her existence depends. The narrator’s identity can therefore only be understood as based upon a neither-nor model that is between individuality and plurality and that refuses relationality between self and other as the cornerstone of identity formation. Instead, the other against whom her identity should be formed is absent; she does not have one identifiable self and she is unidentifiable within existing binary categories of identity. Moreover, the metaphor of the pigeons represents another example of the intertextuality that figures prominently in Cixous’s work. “Les deux pigeons” (“The Two Pigeons”) is the title of a fable by La Fontaine, and the subject of this fable is separation. The two pigeons in La Fontaine’s tale are lovers, and one of them decides to undertake a journey. The remaining

pigeon expresses reticence at this idea as it has concerns for the traveller’s safety, and questions the motive for leaving as it believes that the two have all that they could want together: Helas, dirai-je, il pleut / Mon frere a-t-il tout ce qu’il veut, / Bon soupe, bon gite, et le reste ?” (Alas, I will say, it is raining / My brother has all he wants / Good food, good shelter, and the rest?).50 Such concerns are unheeded and the pigeon departs, promising such vivid tales of adventure when it returns that its mate will believe that the two journeyed together. Yet, the pigeon’s hopes of adventure are short-lived, as he narrowly survives a storm, escapes being caught by poachers, and fends off an attack by a child before returning “demi-morte et demi boiteuse” (half-dead and half-lame) to its point of departure.51 La Fontaine concludes with an appeal to lovers to appreciate their good fortune and to consider the risks of disrupting relations unnecessarily with dreams of novelty: Amants, heureux amants, voulez-vous voyager? Que ce soit aux rives prochaines; Soyez-vous l’un a l’autre un monde toujours beau, Toujours divers, toujours nouveau; Tenez-vous lieu de tout, comptez pour rien le reste.52 [Lovers, happy lovers, do you wish to travel? Let it be to nearby banks; Be to one and another an always beautiful world, Always different, always new; Be all to each other, do not count the rest.] The fable therefore creates a portrait of togetherness that is based upon sacrifice, as La Fontaine suggests that one may indeed be uninterested in one’s present situation but should always choose to sacrifice the temptation of adventure for fear of unsettling one’s hearth. The image of travel that the fable portrays is negative, threatening, and personally damaging, as opposed to the positive, nurturing boredom of togetherness. In the case of Cix-ous’s text, this intertextual reference serves to highlight the precarious, foreboding picture of travel that the journey from Algeria becomes, yet also points to the lack of togetherness at the center of the text. The allusion to the two pigeons who share a comfortable if uneventful partnership reinforces the absence of such a relationship anywhere in Cixous’s work. La Fontaine’s fable is too neat an image of togetherness for this text based upon enforced separation, and in which self and other are both linked and inextricably divided in a painful, traumatic situation. This intertext therefore highlights the painful, unresolved situation in which the narrator of Les

rêveries de la femme sauvage finds herself, and points to the hopelessness of her situation, constrained as she is between binary categories of identity that are not adequate formulations of her subject position. The final intertext that I will mention here is probably the most evident due its position in the text’s title: Baudelaire’s prose poem from Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen), “La femme sauvage et la petite maitresse” (“The Wild Woman and the Little Mistress”). In this poem, the implied male narrator berates his maitresse for her self-obsession, since she complains seemingly irrationally about her very contented and easy life. He compares her to the “femme sauvage” who is kept in a cage and brought into the public as a freak exhibition, as her crazed, bestial nature renders her capable of devouring live rabbits, thrown to her by her captor, her husband. The narrator of Baudelaire’s poem entreats his maitresse to reflect upon the sort of this pathetic creature, described as “hurlant comme un damne, secouant les barreaux comme un orang-outang exaspere par l’exil” and moreover, threatens to treat her like the femme sauvage if she continues her self-obsessed melancholy. Drawing parallels between the two women and emphasizing their proximity, Baudelaire blurs the boundary between the human and the bestial, the rational and irrational, sane and insane. Cixous, writing her “rêveries de la femme sauvage” thus situates herself in the position of this femme sauvage, this caged woman who is exasperated by exile. She is hemmed in, tormented, controlled by a hostile outsider, and the binary categories of her in-between identity are ultimately irreconcilable. Since the text abruptly stops at the moment of her immigration to France, this is indeed a particularly negative final image of her identity and exile. Cixous thus aligns herself with previous generations of writers as she explores her identity in writing. As she wrote in Photos de racine, regarding when she left Algeria for France in 1955, “j’ai adopte une nationalite imaginaire qui est la nationalite litteraire” (I adopted an imaginary nationality that is literary nationality”).53 This seems particularly true of this text in which she relies upon literary writers for her own identity perhaps a literary identity is all that this writer can imagine.

UNITARY OR NON-UNITARY AUTOBIOGRAPHY? As Les rêveries de la femme sauvage draws to a close, there is very little conclusion to the autobiographer’s search for identity. Instead, one of the final vignettes of the text recounts a memory that provides a salient metaphor for the narrator’s identity. She recounts how her father had owned a camera and upon his death the mother intended to discard it as it no longer worked. The narrator, however, decides to take the camera and use it strategically for her own purposes. Although it no longer takes photographs, she aims it at a subject and clicks as if to do so, but as the camera does not record what is seen, the narrator pretends that it is a machine of unseeing. That is, rather than record what is seen, it unrecords it and undoes the seeing, removing people’s images rather than capturing them. She describes her invention as “un outil fantomatisant” (a tool for fabricating ghosts)54 and explains her game thus: Je ne peux pas m’empecher d’entrer dans une intrigue terroriste caverneuse, je descends dans

mes profondeurs inquietantes. Je me prends seule pour complice dans la lutte contre les intrigues to-talitaires et terrifiantes du Lycee. J’inventai le plan excavateur le plus extraordinaire. Je vais saisir le systeme d’annulation de l’etre algerien reel dans sonpropre piege. J’en vins a la fantomisation.... Avec l’appareil inhabite je prenais des photos des professeurs. Des dizaines de cliches. Des dizaines de photos inexistantes. Par ce moyen je les inexistais. Toutes. L’une apres l’autre. Je les regardais du point de vue de l’absence de regard. (I can’t keep myself from getting involved in a cavernous terrorist plot, I descend into my disquieting depths. I take myself as sole accomplice in the battle against the terrifying totalitarian Lycee plots. I dreamed up the wildest of excavation pins. I am going to catch the plan to annihilate the real Algeria being in its own trap. This is where phatomization comes in. . . . With the vacant camera I snapped pictures of the teachers. Dozens of snapshots. Dozens of nonexistent snapshots. So I inexisted them. All. One after another. I gazed at them from the point of view of the absence of a gaze.55 In this way the narrating subject erases the distinction between self and other by erasing the other from its part in her identity. The text therefore refutes the development of self in terms of relational subjectivity, according to which selfhood is “relational, produced through shifting yet enduring encounters and connections, never fully captured by them.”56 Critics of women’s autobiography have frequently applied this notion to female-authored self-reflexive texts in an attempt to overcome what they view as the rigid, individual model of subjectivity present in many male-authored texts.57 In contrast, Cixous in Les rêveries de la femme sauvage writes a subjectivity that refutes such theorizations, as rather than basing identity upon relations with an other, she does exactly the opposite and writes a self that deliberately erases the other against which it should form its identity. Thus Les rêveries de la femme sauvage aims at catharsis for the narrating self, as each of the vignettes that constitute this text recounts the trauma caused to the narrator by her liminal position in Algerian society. Each vignette is a site of inner struggle on the part of the writing self, and this struggle has continued into the present. As the narrator recounts each site of trauma, the vivid description of actions and emotions render an image of unresolved suffering, and the reader assumes that the writer has embarked upon this partially autobiographical project in order to overcome or somehow atone for the pain caused by her experiences of Algeria. One perceives an attempt by the writer to understand her position in Algeria now that she has the vision of hindsight, to return to the site of trauma that one assumes to have plagued her adult life and to unravel the mysteries of the unresolved suffering. The vignettes that comprise this text are therefore not intended as a representation of a complete, unitary, developing self within a coherent autobiographical narrative, but are instead a series of points of entry into a discussion of a specific trauma. Taken together, they are an exploration in writing of the succession of liminal positions to which the narrator-as-child was subjected, and her resulting difficulty in forming an identity from amongst the binary oppositions that were available to her. As she states in the opening lines, “tout le temps ou je vivais en Algerie je revais d’arriver un jour en Algerie” (the whole time I was living in Algeria I would dream of

one day arriving in Algeria),58 in an admission of the pain that she experienced in her position of permanent outsider and hinting at the catharsis she aimed to derive from writing it. Nevertheless, after recounting a series of intimate memories in such vivid detail, the text returns in its final lines to its point of departure, with a word-for-word repetition of the opening lines. Yet this return to the point of origin of the writing does not signify that the narrator perceives herself to be in the same position as she was at the beginning and that the exploration of her trauma has therefore been ineffectual. On the contrary, in the final pages the writer evokes her reluctance to broach the topic of Algeria and how her experiences finally became unavoidable in her writing, and then points to the positive effects of having expressed them: “Mais maintenant plus j’en parle et plus j’y reviens sur tout avec mon frere plus je me sens chez moi au Clos-Salembier maintenant et retrospective-ment.” (But now the more I talk about it and the more I go back there especially with my brother the more I feel at home in the Clos-Salembier now and retrospectively.)59 There is no conclusion to Les rêveries de la femme sauvage and no closure to the discussion of the author’s trauma, but this citation conveys a note of optimism in the narrating self. She may not be healed from her experiences, but neither does she find herself in the position in which she began her writing. The text is therefore nonlinear due to its rejection of chronological narrative of developing selfhood, and is also noncircular insofar as the writing returns to its point of departure, but at the end of the text the narrating self is located in a changed subject position. In this way, Cixous approaches autobiography in a way that is radically different from the writers of coherent, individual, unitary subjectivity against which the authors in this book are compared, and plays with the genre in such a way that refuses any possible generic definition. Cixous’s text therefore presents to the reader a cartography of the passage from an “I” to a narrative, from past to present, or from 1’oubli a la memoire (from forgetting to remembering), which shows at once the desire for quest into one’s past and the refusal to imprison it in a linear narrative in which a subject that is present to herself examines, explores, and “finds” her self. The narrated self that should conventionally be at the center of this semiautobiographical work is displaced through the doubling of identity that occurs with the other characters, and the narrating self is equally displaced through these characters’ intrusion into the narrative voice. In contrast with the other writers examined in this book, therefore, Cixous’s contribution to the writing of individual and collective selfhood is altogether unique as Les rêveries de la femme sauvage becomes a rejection of both unitary and non-unitary self-writing. This text is a multifaceted autobiography that braids different voices into its narrative, but it cannot be defined as a plurivocal autobiography as the voices who enter the narration are precisely narrative functions that displace the narrating self rather than characters themselves. While it is plurivocal therefore, the work is not a written representation of a non-unitary selfhood. And furthermore, the way in which the narrating self is itself displaced within its own text constitutes a rejection of the unitary writer, narrator, and owner of autobiographical narrative. Therefore this book ends with an autobiographer who writes not just the tension between inscribing individual and collective selfhood in self-reflexive texts, but writes beyond them in a way that rejects them both. Just like the position of the narrator in the text itself, so is Les rêveries de la femme sauvage in a position of neither-nor: neither individual nor collective, neither singular nor plural, and neither unitary nor non-unitary.

Conclusion: New Textual Identities THIS BOOK HAS ARGUED THAT NON-UNITARY SUBJECTIVITY MAY indeed be a hallmark of contemporary women’s autobiographical writing in French, but that it is not necessarily a simple, cathartic, or liberating mode of self-writing. Instead, this study suggests that women may feel bound to write their selfhood in a non-unitary way, but that this approach to life writing is fraught with difficulties. Writing “I” in a unitary way is not possibile for these authors who all experiment with voice in their work, yet writing a plural “I” rarely enables the writer to reconcile her self with her story. The introdution to this book gave an overview of non-unitary subjectivity and showed how critics of women’s autobiography in particular have pointed to this notion as a defining characteristic of women’s life writing. This study thus agrees with these arguments, yet adds a note of caution to any celebratory assertions. The thesis of this work is ultimately that women’s autobiography may rest upon non-unitary subjectivity but that closer attention must be paid to the linguistic play in such works: these texts do not rest upon “we” but neither do they rest upon “I.” These four authors make a move toward recovering the “I” that has been questioned in recent critical theory, since “I” is clearly a powerful and meaningful marker of identity to them, yet it is not enough for them to encapsulate their identity. Their autobiographies thus exist in the margins between the individual and the plural, rather like any autobiography exists in the margins between public and private, life and death, remembering and forgetting. The four women whose works constitute this study are testaments to the breadth and diversity of autobiographical writing in the present day. As writers experiment with the traditional limits of the genre, first-person narrative has, gladly, become steadily more difficult to define. The same may be said for the terms that have comprised our definitions. The texts written by the four authors in this book, for example, pose several questions to the critic. Each refuses the single, unitary “I” of traditional definitions of autobiography, but cannot arrive at a “we” that accurately represents their textual identity. Each refuses the individual model of selfwriting, but points to the difficulties in and the ultimate impossibility of plural or collective autobiography. Each multiplies the narrative voice in order to write the subject in several different positions, but does not resolve the relationship between self and other. We saw in Halimi’s work that her autobiographical writing is a life-long project of volumes of work that overlap, intersect, and respond to each other. Halimi’s “I” changes as her work evolves and as she blends previous writing into new texts. Her “I” is therefore multiplied both across and within her texts in the sense that she writes with a different “I” in subsequent texts and includes citations of her previous works, written in a different voice, in later texts. Despite such a long and multifaceted exploration into the ways in which one can write one’s self, Halimi’s autobiographical volumes lead to a harsh conclusion. As we saw in relation to Fritna, this author had previously selected material that hinted at the root of her

trauma, but only realized this in words in this text. The distance that Halimi felt from her mother and the way that she organized her professional life in order to make up for this lack is the author’s sad realization as this text nears its close. By reexamining her life and rewriting previously written memories in a new “I” in light of her mother’s death, Halimi uncovers trauma but does not atone for it. The self that she has constructed in narrative is fragile, pained, and isolated, rather than reconciled with an other through plural self-writing. A similar unresolved isolation is in evidence at the end of Les Samouraïs. Kristeva’s characters who speak as “I” and “she” both tell different aspects of this author’s story in a series of thinly veiled references to the author, her life, and the lives of the prominent people who surrounded her. The character of Olga, who is narrated in the third-person “she,” functions as a response to Kristeva’s critics, painting a portrait of a highly intelligent but sometimes naively optimistic young woman. By contrasting Olga’s story with Joëlle’s firstperson voice, Kristeva’s text explains and goes some way toward justifying her trajectory. This lengthy text explores pivotal moments in Kristeva’s life from two different viewpoints and sets her younger and older selves in playful opposition with each other. Yet “I” and “she” do not ultimately reconcile, just as the individual feminist/psychoanalyst never reconciled with the organized groups, and the precarious position of her final solitude is an abrupt conclusion to the work. We explored in chapter 3 Djebar’s complex use of multiple “I”s in Vaste est la prison, part of an ongoing exploration of female subjectivity in writing, and in autobiography in particular. Returning to her Algerian Quartet after a ten-year hiatus, Djebar continues to write the self in a non-unitary way, but this work shows a change of direction compared to her previous life writing. Djebar blends fiction, historical narrative, and autobiographical narrative in the three strands of her book, thus incorporating a variety of narrators, only one of which is the autobiographical “I,” into the work. As she returns once again to the trauma of receiving an education and simultaneously distancing herself from her female ancestors as a result of this, she hints that plural autobiography is not the solution for which she is searching. The autobiographical strand of this text may be interpreted as the author’s comment that film is a more appropriate medium for plurivocal narrative than writing; Djebar writes her experience of filming, suggesting that writing alone is an insufficient means of reconciling the autobiographical self with its others. Once again, the work ends in isolation rather than any resolution or reconciliation. Cixous’s shifting pronouns expose the continuing trauma of her multiple identity struggles. The way in which she incorporates other characters’ voices and other writers’ voices into her text, to such an extent that the reader is unsure of the distinction between autobiographical self and other, is a complicated non-unitary récit de soi. This author’s search for origins leads her through a series of explorations of subjectivity in narrative. Cixous’s whole corpus revolves around the notion of reinventing language in order to locate the self and its position, and Les rêveries de la femme sauvage is a pivotal part of this jigsaw. Its cyclical structure, in which the first-person narrator returns to the point of departure but in a slightly different subject position, demonstrates the lasting effect of trauma and the difficulty in reconciling past and present. The final isolation is reminiscent of the conclusions of the three other major works studied here; non-unitary subjectivity is a necessary mode of self-writing for her, yet not one

that leads inexorably to catharsis. The dichotomy between self and other, I and we, subject and object, narrating and narrated, singular and plural, are thus all problematized in these works. By pointing both to their discomfort with unitary autobiography and their difficulty in writing non-unitary autobiography, these women thus carve out a new mode of writing the female self, beyond the confines of “I” and “we.” Taken together, they demonstrate an ethical imperative to experiment with voice, hinting at the difficulty in expressing the female autograph in current language. They posit a new construction of identity that lies beyond “I” and “we,” in a space of perpetual selfrenewal in which the relationality between self and other is fluid, moving, and powerfully unstable. The proof of this, perhaps, is in the continuation of their experimental self-writing projects. Apart from Kristeva, all of these authors have written subsequent autobiographical texts in which they ponder the exchange between “I” and “we” in different ways. Cixous’s autobiographical experimentations have continued in all of her works, from essays on her relationship with Derrida to partially fictional pieces to her writing notebooks and accounts of her dreams.1 Djebar’s plurivocal writing has also continued and she has written, among many other things, of a historical figure in the Algerian resistance movement whose body was never found following her arrest and torture; in La femme sans sépulture, Djebar writes in the first person of what she learns of Zoulikha and how this episode influences her personally, and inscribes both Zoulikha and her daughter’s voices as “I” within her text.2 Halimi writes in La Kahina of the powerful female ruler of the same name in North African history, hinting at how her story is inseparable from those of the powerful women who have preceded her. She even begins by quoting her earlier text, Le lait de 1’oranger and explaining the link between her story and the story of the historical figure thus: Ces quelques lignes sont extraites du Lait de l’oranger ecrit en 1988, et qui continue mon récit autobiographique initié avec La Cause des femmes. J’ai voulu clore le cycle par la Kahina, par la recherche des origines. Dans son contexte historique—mais les dates, versions et interpretations different, on le sait—, j’ai fait vivre, aimer, guerroyer, mourir. Comme mon père Édouard-le magnifique l’aurait peut-être imaginee. La Kahina etait-elle son ancêtre? Peut-être. L’ai-je aimée en la faisant revivre? Oui. Passionément. [These few lines are taken from Milk for the Orange Tree, written in 1988, which continues my autobiographical account begun with The Right to Choose. I wanted to close the cycle with Kahina, with a search for origins. In her historical context—but the dates, versions and interpretations differ, we know—I made her live, love, battle, die. Like my father Edouard-themagnificent would perhaps have imagined her. Was Kahina his ancestor? Maybe. Did I love her as I made her live again? Yes. Passionately.]3 Thus these authors continue to write autobiography in plural, non-unitary ways, experimenting with a variety of narrative strategies that problematize the genre and its various components. Just as feminist theorists in the 1970s, especially Cixous, wrote of the need to break free of the binary oppositions that structure language and that work to disempower women, these

writers hint that the binary of “I” and “we” also needs to be reconsidered. The binary oppositions that Cixous listed in La jeune nee (The Newly Born Woman), such as “soleil/lune, culture/nature, jour/nuit, logos/pathos” (sun/moon, culture/nature, day/night, logos/pathos) could well be extended to the supposed binary opposition between I/we, singular/plural.4 Cixous argues that the binary oppositions that structure language are all reducible to the binary of male/female and that only by understanding and subverting it through writing can women break from the oppressive structure of language. In a similar way, the four writers in this study suggest that “I” and “we” are not simple binaries from which one can choose at will. Thus, these writers extend the field of autobiography to new avenues that break open existing notions of female selfhood. The proliferation of autobiography that mingles a textual “I” with image, photography, film, performance, and art, for example, shows the extent to which the unitary “I” is at an impasse. In addition to such interdisciplinary inquiry, the concept of the non-unitary autobiographical “I” may be further explored in terms of writing by minority groups and by colonial and postcolonial subjects, to which this book has alluded through its comparison of writers who each emanate from beyond the Hexagon. Finally, this is by no means a theory of purely female-authored autobiography; this study is written in response to a major debate within the field of women’s autobiography but there is no reason not to apply its arguments to male-authored texts. Indeed, there are examples of non-unitary autobiography written by male authors in the French language and beyond; Georges Perec wrote dual narrative in W ou le souvenir d’enfance, Jean Genet wrote a shifting autobiographical “I” in Journal d’un voleur and Azouz Begag wrote a series of autobiographical/coming-of-age novels in which his “I” changes from text to text. Amid the self-obsession of our turn-of-thecentury, or rather our turn-of-the-millenium era, the four writers discussed in this book, and many others, push us to reconsider our formulations of the self and what is at stake within them, and encourage writers constantly to invent new ways of critiquing the dominant power from within.

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, eds., Life Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1. 2. Examples of critical works that have explored these uses and interpretations of the genre include Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Nancy K. Miller, But Enough about Me: Why We Read Other Peoples Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Everyday Uses of Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3. Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield, Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000), 3. 4. Leah Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Conde (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 4. 5. This is not to say that men have only written of their exploits in their autobiographical texts; more recent writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre in Les mots and Andre Gide in Si le grain ne meurt seem to write in a way that deliberately obfuscates their public achievements. Likewise, female autobiographers such as George Sand and Simone de Beauvoir have penned tales of their exploits within their autobiographical works. This distinction is rather a comment upon autobiographical texts published prior to the nineteenth century. 6. Philippe Lejeune in his survey of French autobiography Le pacte auto-biographique includes only one example of a female-authored autobiography: George Sand’s Histoire de ma vie. Michael Sheringham in his survey, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires from Rousseau to Perec, only includes two female authors: Nathalie Sarraute and Violette Leduc. 7. Examples of female autobiographers who wrote prefaces that justify their decision to write autobiography, often justifying this decision by claiming that they write for their children, include George Sand in Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life), Germaine de Stael in Dix Annees d’exil (Ten Years’ Exile), Daniel Stern in Souvenirs d ‘enfance (Memories of Childhood). 8. Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 9. Leslie Rebecca Bloom, Under the Sign of Hope: Feminist Methodology and Narrative Interpretation (New York: SUNY Press, 1998). 10. Ibid., 3. 11. Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 155. 12. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 159. 13. Nancy K. Miller, “Persepolis and Autobiography,” in Women’s Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation, and Legacy, ed. Adalgisa Giorgio and Julia Waters (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). 14. Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance (Paris: Folio, 1983). 15. Marguerite Duras, L’amant (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984). 16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988). 17. I use Spivak’s notion here in terms of women’s autobiography since it presents a useful model for theorizing the specificities of women’s life-writing, while bearing in mind the precarious essentialism that any strict division between male and female authored autobiography would denote. Ibid., 12. 18. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” translated by Katherine Leary, in On Autobiography, ed. James Olney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 14. 19. Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Autobiography, Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 20. John Sturrock, “Theory versus Autobiography,” in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 27. 21. Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), and Olney, Autobiography, Essays Theoretical and Critical. 22. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967). 23. Julia Kristeva, La revolution du langage 24. Michael Sprinker, “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography,” in Autobiography, Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. Olney. 25. Paul de Man, “The Masks of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. Olney. 26. Johnnie Gratton, “Introduction: The Return of the Subject,” in Subject Matters, ed. Johnnie Gratton and Paul Gifford (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 5. 27. Sheringham, viii. Although this book discusses mainly male authors, Sheringham has also studied female autobiographers, such as in “Changing the Script: Women Writers and the Rise of Autobiography,” in A History of Women’s Writing in France, ed. Sonya Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 185-203. 28. Cosslett, Lury, and Summerfield, 4. 29. Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 65. 30. Raylene L. Ramsay, The French New Autobiographies: Sarraute, Duras, and RobbeGrillet (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). Mounir Laouyen in her preface to the later “Les Nouvelles Autobiographies/New Autobiographies,” a special edition of Esprit createur, gives an overview of other writers of this proposed subgenre. 31. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises in Witnessing in Literature,

Pschoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1991); Kathryn Robson, Writing Wounds: The Inscription of Trauma in Post-1968 French Women’s Life Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). 32. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1994); Alison Rice, Time Signatures: Con-textualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006). John Downton Hazlett, My Generation: Collective Autobiography and Identity Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 33. Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 13; Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 34. Estelle Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986). Mary G. Mason, “The Other Voice: The Autobiographies of Women Writers,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. Olney. 35. Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 22. 36. Susan Stanford Friedman, Practice,” in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 35. 37. Miller, But Enough about Me, 2. 38. Francoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 11. 39. Jeanne Perrault, Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 40. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 37. 41. Ibid., 38. 42. Gisele Halimi, La cause des femmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Le lait de 1’oranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1988); and Fritna (Paris: Plon, 1999). 43. Julia Kristeva, Les samourais ( 44. Assia Djebar, Vaste est la prison (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995). 45. Helene Cixous, Les rêveries de la femme sauvage (Paris: Galilee, 2000). 46. Assia Djebar, L’amour, la fantasia (Paris: Lattes, 1985) and Ombre sul-tane (Paris: Lattes, 1987). 47. Cixous, Les rêveries de la femme sauvage, 21. All translations are taken from Reveries of the Wild Woman, trans. Beverly Bie Brahic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 10. 48. Rachel Gabara, From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), xii.

CHAPTER 1. GISELE HALIME

1. Marguerite Duras, Un barrage contre le Pacifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1950); L’amant (Paris: Gallimard: 1984); L’amant de la Chine du nord (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). 2. Annie Ernaux, La place (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); L’evenement (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); La honte (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). 3. See for example her works Djamila Boupacha (Paris: des femmes, 1975) and La parite (Paris: des femmes, 1995). 4. Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 99. 5. Mireille Rosello, “Gisele Halimi entre plainte et plaidoyer: ‘On nait avocate, on ne le devient pas.’” Modern and Contemporary France 12 (2004). 6. Halimi, La cause de femmes, 23. All translations are taken from The Right to Choose, trans. Rosemary Morgan (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977), 1. 7. Ibid., 24; 2. 8. Ibid., 54. 9. Ibid., 56. 10. Ibid., 43; 16. 11. Ibid., 42; 15. 12. Gisele Halimi, Le lait de 1’oranger, 13. All translations are taken from Milk for the Orange Tree, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Quartet, 1990), 19. 13. Ibid., 14; 19-20. 14. Ibid., 28; 32-33. 15. Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance (Paris: Folio, 1983); and Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 16. Gisele Halimi, Fritna (Paris: Plon, 1999). 17. Ibid., 15. All translations of Fritna are my own. 18. For a definition of the genre of confession, and particularly how women writers have manipulated it, see Rita Felski’s article “On Confession,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 19. Halimi, Fritna, 12. 20. Ibid., 15. 21. Ibid., 15. 22. Ibid., 97. 23. Ibid., 96. 24. Ibid., 131. 25. Ibid., 30. 26. Rosello, “Gisele Halimi entre plainte et plaidoyer. 27. Halimi, Le lait de 1’oranger, 30; 34. 28. Halimi, Fritna, 37. 29. Halimi, Le lait de 1’oranger, 32. 30. Ibid., 35; 37. 31. Halimi, Fritna, 44. 32. Ibid., 72.

33. Ibid., 46. 34. Ibid., 72. 35. Ibid., 22. 36. Ibid., 32. 37. Ibid., 219. 38. Ibid., 19. 39. Ibid., 202. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 203. 42. Ibid., 204.

CHAPTER 2. JULIA KRISTEVA 1. As Toril Moi remarks, “Kristeva’s relationship to feminism has always been that of a somewhat critical fellow-traveller.” 9. Although she values some of the questions that feminism has raised, Kristeva rejects what she sees as its insistence upon sexual difference that precludes any understanding between men and women, and she criticizes the French feminist movement in particular for shying away from radical ideas. 2. Ross Mitchell Guberman, Julia Kristeva, Interviews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xi. 3. Kristeva, Les samourais (Paris: Folio, 1991), 11. All translations are taken from The Samourai: A Novel, trans. Barbara Bray, (London: Columbia University Press, 1992), 3. 4. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 5. My translation. 5. Kristeva, Les samourais, 443; 331. 6. Ibid., 371-72; 278-79. 7. Ibid., 31; 20. 8. Kristeva, Revolution du langage poetique (Paris: Seuil, 1974). 9. Kristeva, Des chinoises ( 10. Kristeva, Les samourais 238; 178. 11. Ibid., 241; 180. 12. Ibid., 241-42; 180-81. 13. Ibid., 242; 181. 14. Ibid., 244; 182. 15. Ibid., 245; 183. 16. Ibid., 245; 183. 17. Ibid., 372; 279. 18. Ibid., 372, 283. 19. Ibid., 267; 200. 20. Ibid., 372; 279. 21. Ibid., 175; 131.

22. Ibid., 181; 135. 23. Ibid., 453; 337. 24. Josiane Leclerc Riboni, Des “Mandarins” aux “Samourais”: La fin d’un mythe (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); and Margaret Atack, “The Silence of The Mandarins: Writing the Intellectual and May ‘68 in Les samourais,” Paragraph: The Journal of the Modern Critical Theory Group 20 (1997). 25. For a detailed comparison of these two works, see Riboni Des “Mandarins” aux “Samourais” and Paul Renard “Des Mandarins aux Samourais, ou de l’engagement existentialiste a l’individualisme post-moderne,” Roman 20-50 13 (1992). 26. Kristeva, Les samourais, 144. 27. Ibid., 145; 109. 28. Alex Hughes, “Bodily Encounters with China: On Tour with Tel Quel,” Modern and Contemporary France 14, no. 1 (2006), 59. 29. Kristeva, Les samourais, 87; 64. 30. Ibid., 10; 2, my emphasis.

CHAPTER 3. ASSIA DJEBAR 1. Assia Djebar, Loin de Medine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991); Les nuits de Strasbourg (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997); and Chronique d’un ete algerien: lei et la-bas (Paris: Editions Plume, 1993). 2. Mildred Mortimer, “Reappropriating the Gaze in Assia Djebar’s Fiction and Film,” World Literature Today 70 (1996), 861. 3. Patricia Geesey, “Collective Autobiography: Algerian Women and History in Assia Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia,” Dalhousie French Studies 35 (1996), 153. 4. Winifred Woodhull, ‘Ecrire, sans nul heritage’: Literature and Feminism Today,” in >Assia Djebar, ed. Ernstpeter Ruhe (Wiirzburg: Konigshausenand Neuman, 2001), 25. 5. Assia Djebar, La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978), film. 6. See for example George Sand’s Histoire de ma vie, Daniel Stern’s Mes souvenirs, Chateaubriand’s Memoires d’outre-tombe, and Rousseau’s Confessions. 7. Assia Djebar, Vaste est la prison, 11. All translations are taken from So Vast the Prison, trans. Betsy Wing (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 11. 8. Ibid., 11; 11. 9. Ibid., 11; 12. 10. Ibid., 11; 12. 11. Ibid., 11; 11. 12. Priscilla Ringrove, Assia Djebar: In Dialogue with Feminisms (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 102-103. 13. Djebar, Vaste est la prison, 15; 15. 14. Ibid., 14; 13. 15. Ibid., 14; 13. 16. Ibid., 14; 14.

17. Ibid., 15; 14. 18. Ibid., 14; 14. 19. Ibid., 14; 14. 20. Ibid., 14-15; 14. 21. Ibid., 15; 15. 22. Ibid., 15; 15. 23. Ibid., 15; my translation. 24. Ibid., 15; 15. 25. Ibid., 11; 11. 26. Ibid., 15; 15. 27. Ronnie Scharfman, “Regards du sujet, sujets du regard: Vaste estla Prison d’Assia Djebar,” Studien zur Literatur und Geschichte des Maghreb 5 (2001): 132. 28. Djebar, Vaste est la prison, 24; my translation. 29. Ibid., 21; 21. 30. Ibid., 20; 20-21. 31. Ibid., 22; 22. 32. Ibid., 23; 23. 33. Ibid., 24; my translation. 34. Ibid., 25; 25. 35. Ibid., 25; 25. 36. Ibid., 25; 26. My translation of the French term effacement; the English translation reads “clearing away.” 37. Ibid., 49-50; 50. 38. Ibid., 56; 55. 39. Ibid., 50; 49. 40. Ibid., 26; 26. 41. Ibid., 39; 38. 42. Ibid., 104; 106. 43. Idid., 104; 105. 44. Ibid., 107; 109. 45. Ibid., 115; 110. 46. Ibid., 109; 111. 47. Ibid., 116; 118. 48. Anna Rocca, Assia Djebar, le corps invisible: Voir sans etre vue (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 138. 49. Ibid., 116; 118. 50. Ibid., 116; 118. 51. My translation. 52. Ibid., 135; 137. 53. Ibid., 144; 146-47. 54. Ibid., 148; 150. 55. Ibid., 237. 56. Anne Aubry, ‘“Idiome de l’exil et langue de l’irreductibilite’: L’utilisation de la langue

francaise dans deux romans d’Assia Djebar; L’amour la fantasia et Vaste est la prison: instrument d’oppression coloniale ou Instrument de liberation?” Dalhousie French Studies 7475 (2006): 126. 57. Ibid., 138-39; 141. 58. Ibid., 142; 144. 59. Ibid., 153; 155. 60. Ibid., 139; 141. 61. Ibid., 142; 144. 62. Ibid., 161; 164. 63. Ibid., 163; 167. 64. Ibid., 164; 167, my emphasis. My translation of efface-, “obliterated” is used in the published translation. 65. Ibid., 154; 156. 66. Ibid., 125; 127. 67. Ibid., 124; 126. 68. Ibid., 125; 127. 69. Ibid., 128; 130. 70. Ibid., 131; 134. 71. Ibid., 132; 134. 72. Ibid., 156; 159. 73. Ibid., 158; 161. 74. Ibid., 158; 161. 75. Ibid., 159; 162. 76. Ibid., 159-60; 163. 77. Ibid., 158; 161. 78. Rita A. Faulkner, “Psychoanalysis and Anamnesis in the National Allegory of Nawal El Saadawi and Assia Djebar,” Esprit createur 48, 4 (2008). 79. Ibid., 167; 171. 80. Ibid., 167; 171. 81. Ibid., 168; 172. 82. Ibid., 168; 173. My translation of efface-, the English translation reads “erased.” 83. Ibid., 171; 175. 84. Ibid., 171; 176. 85. Ibid., 171; 176. My translation of efface. 86. Ibid., 172; 177. 87. Ibid., 169; 183. 88. Ibid., 172; 177. 89. Ibid., 172; 176 -77. 90. Ibid., 290; 298. 91. Ibid., 304; 312. 92. Ibid., 173-74; 178-79. 93. Ibid., 223; 228. 94. Ibid., 298; 306-307.

95. Ibid., 223; 228. 96. Ringrove, Assia Djebar, 154. 97. Djebar, Vaste est la prison, 330-31; 341. 98. Ibid., 346; 357. 99. Ibid., 347-48; 359. 100. Jane Hiddleston, Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 94, 101.

CHAPTER 4. HELENE CIXOUS Published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing; part of this chapter appeared in Women’s Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation, and Legacy, edited by Adalgisa Giorgio and Julia Waters. 1. Helene Cixous, in The Helene Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers (London: Routledge, 1994), xvii-xviii. 2. Mireille Calle-Gruber, Helene Cixous, croisees d’une CEuvre (Paris: Galilee, 2000). 3. As Emma Wilson has written in reference to Cixous’s seminar, “Cixous has created around herself a conceptual space and a tightly woven seminar group whose responses and papers reflect and enhance Cixous’s own reading practice.” Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 101. 4. These works involving the author’s experiences of Algeria are: OR, Les Lettres de mon pere (Paris: des femmes, 1997); “Pieds nus,” which appeared in Leila Sebbar’s edited collection Une enfance algerienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); “Stigmata, or Job the Dog” (trans. Eric Prenowitz), which was first published in Philosophy Today Spring 1997; “Mon Algeriance,” Les Inrockuptibles 115, 20 August-2 September 1997; and Osnabriick (Paris: des femmes, 1999). 5. Algeria and Cixous’s early experiences of it form the background of several of this author’s fictional texts, beginning with her very first novel, Dedans, which was published in 1969. 6. Elissa Marder, “Birthmarks (Given Names),” Parallax, 13. 3 (2007): 52. 7. Helene Cixous, Les rêveries de la femme sauvage (Paris: Galilee, 2000). Reveries of the Wild Woman, trans. Beverly Bie Brahic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). 8. Ibid., 9; 3. 9. Ibid., 9; 3. 10. Ibid., 10; 3. 11. Ibid., 10; 4. 12. Ibid., 9; 3. 13. Ibid., 21; 10. 14. Ibid., 31; 22. 15. Ibid., 21; 10.

16. Ibid., 24; 14. 17. Ibid., 83; 46. 18. Ibid., 47-48; 25-26. 19. Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance (Paris: Folio, 1983). 20. Cixous, Reveries, 120; 68. 21. Ibid., 121; 69. 22. Ibid., 53; 30. 23. Ibid., 101; 59, my emphasis. 24. Ibid., 65-66; 37. 25. Ibid., 66; 37-38. 26. Ibid., 66; 38. 27. Ibid., 22; 11. 28. Ibid., 76; 44. 29. Ibid., 125; 71. 30. Ibid., 72; 42. 31. Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires; Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 47. 32. Maribel Pefialver Vicea lists some of these objects, which she calls “les signes cixousiens de l’Algerie” in “Langue plurielle et alterite identitaire: Rester ‘inseparabe’ de l’Algerie,” Dalhousie French Studies 74-75 (2006): 55. 33. Cixous, Reveries, 122; 70. 34. Ibid., 124; 71. 35. Ibid., 124; 71. 36. Ibid., 121; 69. 37. Ibid., 129; 73. 38. Ibid., 90; 51. 39. Ibid., 123; 70. 40. Ibid., 74; 43. 41. Ibid., 78; 45. 42. Ibid., 77; 44. 43. Marta Segarra studies the recurrent figure of the dog and its connections to Cixous’s identity in other texts by this author in “Helene Cixous’s Other Animal: The Half-Sunken Dog,” New Literary History 37 (2006). 44. Alison Rice points out the incorporation of Rousseau’s text into Cixous’s in her article “Reveries d’Algerie: Une terre originaire a perte de vue dans l’oeuvre d’Helene Cixous.” Expressions Maghrebines 2, no. 2 (2003). 45. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Paris: Li-brairie Generale Francaise, 1983), 3. 46. Cixous, Reveries, 77; 44. 47. Ibid., 33; 12. 48. Ibid., 141-42; 79. 49. Ibid., 157; 89. 50. Jean de La Fontaine, CEuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 427. My

translation. 51. Ibid., 427. 52. Ibid., 427. 53. Helene Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Photos de racine (Paris: des femmes, 1994), 207. My translation. 54. Cixous, Reveries, 149; 84. 55. Ibid., 149, 84. 56. Kathy E. Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 154. 57. Jane Marcus, “Invincible Mediocrity: The Private Selves of Public Women,” in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 58. Cixous, Reveries, 9; 3. 59. Ibid., 166; 93.

CONCLUSION 1. Helene Cixous, Portrait de Derrida en jeune saint juif (Paris: Galilee, 2005); Reve, je te dis (Paris: Galilee, 2006); and Cahiers de reve (Paris: Galilee, 2005). 2. Assia Djebar, La femme sans sepulture (Paris: Albin Michel, 2006). 3. Gisele Halimi, La Kahina (Paris: Plon, 2006), 18. My translation. 4. Cixous and Catherine Clement, La jeune nee (Paris: Union Generale d’Editions, 1975), 114.

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