What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st- Century French Literature and Thought (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures): 69 1789620651, 9781789620658

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Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DEREK SCHILLING Johns Hopkins University

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 56 Julia Waters, The Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging 57 Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters: Women’s reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque 58 John Patrick Walsh, Migration and Refuge: An Eco-Archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017 59 Ari J.  Blatt and Edward J. Welch, France in Flux: Space, Territory, and Contemporary Culture 60 Nicholas Harrison, Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education 61 Joshua Armstrong, Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel 62 Thomas Baldwin, Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations

63 Lucas Hollister, Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction 64 Naïma Hachad, Revisionary Narratives: Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Actst 65 Emma Wilson, The Reclining Nude: Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin 66 Margaret Atack, Alison S. Fell, Diana Holmes and Imogen Long, What Forms Can Do: French Feminisms and Their Legacies 1975–2015 67 Ruth Cruickshank, Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Re-thinking with Case Studies from Post-war French Fiction 68 Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick and Lydie Moudileno, Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France

PAT R IC K C ROW L EY A N D SH I R L EY JOR DA N

What Forms Can Do The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st-century French Literature and Thought What Forms Can Do

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2020 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2020 Liverpool University Press The right of Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan to be identified as the editors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78962-065-8 cased eISBN 978-1-78962-391-8

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements

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Introduction: What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20thand 21st-century French Literature and Thought

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Part 1: Interrogating Form 1 ‘Fixé par les cris des hirondelles au vol géométrique du désir’ (Picasso, 7 June 1936): Patterns and Permutations in Picasso’s Writing Peter Read 2 A Gaggle of Geese or Technical Rigour: Re-forming the Novel in 1940s France Ann Jefferson 3 ‘Faire ceci ou faire cela?’: Barthes and the Choice of Form Diana Knight

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4 The Eclipse of Form in Roland Barthes’s La Chambre claire 67 Johnnie Gratton 5 Going on, or Achieving Interruption: Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir Mairéad Hanrahan

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Part 2: Form and Life Writing 6 Narratives of Forgetting: Memory and Literary Form Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir 7 The Time of Our Lives: Repetition, Variation and Fragmentation in French Women’s Life Writing Shirley Jordan

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113

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8 Vertical Travel, Listing and the Enumeration of the Everyday 131 Charles Forsdick 9 Eugène Savitzkaya: Fictional Forms of Remembrance Patrick Crowley

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10 A Voice Takes Form: The Sounds of Autobiography in Louis-René des Forêts’s Poèmes de Samuel Wood 161 Ian Maclachlan Part 3: Form and Social Experience 11 Circuits of Reappropriation: Accessing the Real in the Work of Didier Eribon Edward J. Hughes

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12 Metaphor, Parody and Madness: Two Readings of Marie Chauvet’s Folie 195 Celia Britton 13 Aesthetic Form and Social ‘Form’ in À la recherche du temps perdu: Proust on Taste Alison Finch

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14 ‘La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’: Proust with Bourdieu Michael Lucey

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Part 4: Forms and Formless: World, Movement, Thought 15 How to Think Like a Plant? Ponge, Jaccottet, Guillevic Emily McLaughlin

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16 Certeau’s Landscapes: What Can Images Do? Patrick O’Donovan

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17 À la dérive: Drifting in and out of Form in French Literature and Visual Art from Bataille to Bergvall Eric Robertson

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18 Convulsive Form: Benjamin, Bataille and the Innervated Body Patrick ffrench

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19 Form and Energeia in the Work of Barbara Cassin (For M) 303 Michael Syrotinski Index

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Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

Early versions of the chapters in this volume were presented at a conference to mark the retirement of Micky Sheringham from his position as Maréchal Foch Professor of French. It was held at All Souls College, University of Oxford, where Micky was a Fellow. Titled ‘What Forms Can Do: Attending to the Real in 20th- and 21st- century French literature’ it took place 11–13 January 2016 and was an occasion of poignant celebration. We want to acknowledge the unstinting work of our co-organisers Neil Kenny, Emily McLaughlin and Daisy Sainsbury. Micky played an intellectually inspiring role in the early stages of planning the ‘Forms’ project, and brought to it his friendship and enthusiasm throughout. We received an incisive, constructive and informed report from our anonymous reader who had considered so carefully the manuscript and whose comments have greatly contributed to making this volume better. Chloe Johnson and her team at Liverpool University Press have been a pleasure to work with along with Rachel Chamberlain and the Carnegie Book Production company. LUP and its partners continue to set the benchmark for academic publishing. And we would like to express our gratitude to William Smock for allowing us to reproduce his witty, warm portrait of Micky titled ‘Blue-eyed Micky’ in this volume. We are indebted to the contributors of this volume for the generosity of their collaboration, their wonderful scholarship and their very real commitment to this project. Patrick Crowley would like to thank his colleagues in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and its Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Literatures (CASiLaC) at

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University College Cork. Shirley Jordan extends her thanks to colleagues in the School of Modern Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London where she worked in the project’s first stages, and to the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University, which supported her in completing the volume.

Introduction What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st-century French Literature and Thought Introduction

La forme la plus pure reste celle Qu’a pénétrée la brume qui s’efface, La neige piétinée est la seule rose.1 La forme! Tel est le sujet, vaste et sans fond. 2

If the trampled snow is the only rose, then it is because form—here the figure of metaphor—makes us think it so. Bonnefoy’s use of poetic language creates a fragile and inviting link between words and between words and worlds, that of the text and that of the world beyond. The link is tenuous, uncertain and to some extent opaque, for if Bonnefoy’s purest form is that which is penetrated by the mist that fades away, then it shifts with time and draws us into a hermeneutic act that is not easily exhausted. The purpose of this volume is to pursue the question of form, its agency and some of the formal innovations that a range of major twentieth- and twenty-first-century works have put in play in ways that allow us to negotiate the complexity of our worlds. We ask how text The authors would like to acknowledge a debt of thanks to the anonymous reader whose insightful observations are echoed and pursued in this introduction. 1 Yves Bonnefoy, ‘La seule rose’, IV, Début et fin de la neige (Paris: Mercure de France, 1991), p. 50. 2 Jean-Christoph Bailly, Sur la forme (Paris: Manuella éditions, 2013), p. 7.

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and world—including our experience of that world—mutually shape or resist each other. On the one hand, there is the author or artist who seeks to make a form that would give shape to the world even if life beyond the text inevitably exceeds and eludes any kind of representation. On the other hand, the exciting frictions and tensions that can, in the best cases, take shape in the gap between literary form and what it purports to convey can bring readers to focus on and be mindful of the gap, so that form becomes of intense interest in its own right, as it ‘pivots between world and mind’ and signals its own agency. 3 While the text can pre-empt the world and be instrumental in concretizing something new, twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and francophone cultural production has, at the same time, resulted in distinctive semiotic environments that engage powerfully with external realities such as the lives we live, the spaces we inhabit, the impact of the past and apprehensions of change. Sustained attention has been given to form in recent years with a range of scholars returning to explore form in different ways. Angela Leighton (cited above) focuses on poetry and form. Rodolphe Gasché re-examines Kant’s concept of form in terms of its relationship to understanding and reason and, ultimately, a way of thinking the morally good through the beautiful.4 Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois draw upon the rich legacy of Georges Bataille’s notion of the informe as a way of understanding modern and contemporary art. 5 Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network calls for a rethinking of formalist criticism that brings the skills of close reading to bear upon comparable social and political forms. She writes that ‘we encounter so many forms that even in the most ordinary daily experience they add up to a complex environment composed of multiple and conflicting modes of organization—forms arranging and containing us, yes, but also competing and colliding and rerouting one another’.6 Her approach to form converges with Michael Syrotinski’s reading of Barbara Cassin’s work in this volume and asks 3 Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 8. 4 Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 5 Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 6 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 16.

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that we think of form not simply in terms of the aesthetic object and genre but within a wider context of sense-making and of the ideological systems that shape how we think. Jean-Christophe Bailly’s essay Sur la forme (quoted in the epigraph above) is a philosophical meditation on the idea of form and on the emergence of form in the material world. It is also a vibrant formal experiment in its own right and a powerful response to the question of what forms can do. The author’s interest is in ‘le travail de la forme, le creusement de la forme vers son idée—et donc le travail de conception et de production de la forme’.7 Bailly’s slim volume expresses a fascination with objects, both natural and man-made, that emerge from raw, amorphous matter to achieve their optimum physical incarnation. In turn, his book’s own formal properties are of a piece with what it seeks to tell us about the fragility of form and about form not as fixed but as permanently taking shape, coalescing, unravelling, eroding and open to contingency. The work is characterized by the coexistence of Bailly’s text and drawings contributed ex post facto by students who attended his series of seminars at the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle.8 These include amorphous squiggles, precise geometric grids, patterns that are reminiscent of Op-art, schematic sketches of functional everyday objects that have taken recognizable shape (a chair or a table) and tracings of natural forms such as pebbles, flints and a thumbprint. Bailly remarks that his concern for form has nothing to do with a platonic ideal. He has no interest in ‘une tasse absolue, une poignée de porte absolue, un réverbère absolu’, but instead is preoccupied with what we might regard as a very Pongean assertion: [I]l y a pour chaque objet une possibilité d’existence à la fois plénière et autonome, une sorte de puissance d’affirmation qui n’aurait rien à voir avec quelque chose d’ostentatoire, qui, au contraire—et nous rejoignons là la difficile question de l’intentionnalité—aurait, dans cette puissance d’affirmation même, qui est aussi une puissance d’étrangeté, quelque chose de discret, de discrètement présent.9

7 Bailly, Sur la forme, p. 82. 8 The text was written as the end note to Bailly’s series of lectures ‘Où en sommes-nous avec la forme?’, which took place at the ENSCI-Les Ateliers. Four students, Léa Bardin, Juliette Gelli, Chemsedine Herriche and Alexandre Poisson, suggested prolonging and accompanying the text via drawings that would enter into dialogue with it. 9 Bailly, Sur la forme, p. 76.

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Bailly speaks of the ‘récitatif solitaire de l’objet’10 which any object can produce, under certain conditions, and which we might also attribute to the object in the textual world. He also speaks of intentionality in ways that invite us to become aware of its limits and indeed its capacity to reduce how we think about form. Bailly’s key propositions are repeatedly returned to and explored afresh in the essays collected in What Forms Can Do. He may be referencing the objects of the material world rather than the complex human experiences to which many of the authors studied here seek to give form—experiences such as mourning, joy, terror, shame, boredom or even an entire life—but his observations on form hold good: the writer of human experience, every bit as much as the prehistoric maker of obsidian tools, is subject to ‘un désir d’accomplissement formel’ which is at the same time functional and aesthetic.11 Bailly refocuses us towards what takes shape, what begins to signify and to reach towards meaningful form. He alerts us to the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’. Such foregrounding of form is a preoccupation of many French authors and thinkers in the twentieth and twenty-first century for whom form and formal invention are avowedly core considerations. One could reference Annie Ernaux’s insistence on the primary importance of finding ‘des organisations inconnues d’écriture’12 that will provide readers with a sense of ‘l’épaisseur du réel’;13 Francis Ponge’s idea of formal adéquation (a proposition of which Bailly’s text might be considered a fine example);14 Roland Barthes’s protracted hesitation between the fragmented and the cohesive, ‘la forme brève et la forme longue’;15 and Picasso’s unending 10 Bailly, Sur la forme, p. 78. 11 Bailly, Sur la forme, p. 45. 12 Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, L’Usage de la photo (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 56. 13 Annie Ernaux, L’Atelier noir (Paris: Éditions des Busclats, 2011), p. 17. 14 Ponge’s formal control manifests itself in Le Parti pris des choses as adéquation: a poetic form that looks, feels and behaves like the object to which it seeks to attach itself, such that it becomes the equivalent of the object in the textual world. Thus the relationship between words and what they signify is repeatedly tested and alluded to in his writing. This great formal experimenter then relaxed into the extensive, reiterative, lushly inclusive notebooks that lay behind shorter poems, such as Comment une figue de paroles et pourquoi (Paris: Digraphe Flammarion, 1977). 15 Roland Barthes, La Préparation du Roman I et II: cours et séminaires au Collège de France (1978–1979 et 1979–80), ed. Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2003), p. 46.

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formal inventiveness—including in poetry—are all testimony to the sharp and often intractable dilemmas of form, as well as to form’s pleasures, to which we will return. Many of the works analysed in this volume are chosen for the ways in which they draw attention to their own hard-won form as well as to the work to which it can be put. The scope of What Forms Can Do is deliberately wide. The volume interrogates the reach of formal devices across a range of genres (poetry, the novel, life writing, the essay, travel writing as well as visual/textual experiments) and homes in on key formal experimenters from the twentieth century through to the present day. Readers will find analyses of writings by, among others, Proust, Picasso, Breton, Bataille, Ponge, Guillevic, Certeau, Camus, Barthes, Perec, Roubaud, Chauvet, Savitzkaya, Eribon, Ernaux, Laurens and Akerman. The volume also provides studies of particular formal types or functions, such as ‘convulsive’, ‘vertical’ or ‘evanescent’ form, as well as constituting an ongoing consideration of the tensions between the shaping and the unravelling of form. Each chapter returns us to the agency of form—to the capacity of metaphor, for example, to make the reader rethink what is taken for granted—or to the ways in which forms can actively be used to unsettle patterns and categories of thought. The chapters echo and converse with each other in numerous ways but are arranged here in four clusters concerning, respectively, the forming of form, how form relates to social experience, how it shapes the intimacies of life writing and how forms exist in the world and are important to sense-making as well as challenging how we think. Whilst the holding theme of each cluster highlights what the early formalists might have called a ‘dominant’, every chapter has further currents of thinking that dialogue and intersect with other chapters across the volume. Indeed, we might think of this volume’s own form as a kaleidoscope that begins with a pattern that privileges authorial intention and moves towards the t­ ransitivity of forms before thinking about forms in the world. Interrogating Form Broadly speaking, the essays in the volume’s first section ask ‘which form?’ and ‘to what end?’ In an essay written in 1938, Paul Valéry writes that ‘La France est le pays du monde où des considérations de pure forme, un souci de la forme en soi, aient persisté, et résisté jusqu’ici aux

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tentations d’un temps où la surprise, l’intensité, les effets de choc, sont recherchés et prisés aux dépens de la perfection’.16 The capacity of form to invigorate genre is central to Peter Read’s examination of Picasso’s poetic writings that emerged and evolved between 1907 and the late 1930s (Chapter 1). The artist’s experimental texts were characterized by his own sense of agency in pursuit of a form of ‘inventive improvisation and free association’ that ‘was always matched by a complementary urge to shape, organize and orchestrate’. Read’s chapter is subtended by the question of why Picasso did not remain with one set of aesthetic forms—those of visual art—rather than moving between image and text. Nonetheless, Read tracks Picasso’s exploration of form within the genre of poetry and details how through formal invention he sought to capture both biographical and historical realities—such as the Spanish Civil War—resulting in an exciting exploration of language. What comes to the fore is the artist’s concern to interrogate form, to make it work hard, demonstrably so, in the effort to capture something of the world and the realities of experience. As the social and material world changes, new experiences require new formal solutions and form continues to be driven forwards, propelled into elasticity as authors attempt to convey something of the elusive matter of life while remaining in dialogue with tried-and-tested forms that already harbour cultural meaning. It is frustration with what she perceives as the limited tramlines of novelistic form that led the vibrantly experimental young writer Sophie Divry to produce the essay Rouvrir le roman (2017), an attempt to persuade fellow contemporary writers to become more formally innovative as they seek to express the shifting life experiences of twenty-first-century readers and to ‘mettre à jour cette matière sensible qui nous échappe’.17 The value of the novel has repeatedly been interrogated in France, in assessments which explore its social relevance or its hermetic self-sufficiency or—an apocalyptic and very French 16 The citation, from Paul Valéry, ‘Coup d’œil sur les lettres françaises’ [1938] reprinted in Paul Valéry, Regards sur le monde actuel (Paris: Gallimard, Folios essais, [1945] 1986), pp. 249–52 (p. 251), is put to work in Michael G. Kelly, ‘Model Behaviour: Cocteau, Radiguet and La Princesse de Clèves’, Neophilologus 98.1 (2014), 23–40. Kelly cites Valéry in his examination of the literary individuation process in France, where ‘the thirst for novelty and difference is bound to that figure of past achievement’. Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-013-9347-3 (consulted 29 January 2019). 17 Sophie Divry, Rouvrir le roman (Paris: Noir sur blanc, ‘Notabilia’, 2017), p. 15.

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alternative—condemn it as a ‘dead’ form. Ann Jefferson (Chapter 2) makes a compelling argument for the 1940s as an ‘important chapter in the modern history of the genre’. She argues that novelists such as Queneau, Sartre and Blanchot made the case for form as ‘the indispensable means of renewing the genre’ of the novel, and examines the novel that came to the fore after the armistice of 1940, as well as its subsequent evolution in the 1950s. As the 1940s progressed, what novels brought to the fore through a focus on form was the question of human existence in general, and of national crisis in particular, resulting in a ‘new realism’ privileging man and his relation to the world. As Jefferson writes, ‘it’s the mind’s form rather than the world’s content that the novel is now concerned with’. Such elements fell away in the 1950s, resulting in greater focus upon formal novelty and on the intransitivity of the novel theorized in the works of Jean Ricardou. The notion of the novel as an intransitive form began to recede in the late 1970s as theorists and writers started to explore the relationship between forms (such as the essay and the novel) in ways that brought the analytical, the personal and the therapeutic to the fore as well as the capacity of form to make sense of the world. The interrogation of form and genre is given explicit treatment in Diana Knight’s acute analysis of Barthes’s deliberations on whether to adopt a literary form and, if so, which one (Chapter 3). Barthes oscillated between fragmentary and non-fragmentary form or, in terms of genre, between the diary and the novel (the Mallarmean opposition between Album and Livre) and this chapter tracks his at times fraught interrogations through his engagement with Pascal and with Ignatius Loyola. Knight helps us to think through Barthes’s views on, and use of, a deliberative rhetoric, and the ways in which he sets up binary distinctions, maintaining them within a balance of forms which, at the end, veers towards the diary read as literary prose. Johnnie Gratton takes the same starting point: Barthes’s confrontation with form and what lies beyond formalism, such as ‘truth’ (Chapter 4). He reflects upon Barthes’s interrogation of photography as a medium that generates an ‘immersive environment utterly foreign to considerations of form’. Barthes’s focus on the referent and on affect are two reasons for this detour around form that Gratton sees at work within La Chambre claire, yet, despite this localized neglect of form by Barthes, Gratton draws on the work of René Thom to suggest that ‘forms can absorb forces, or even become forces’, thus returning us to Barthes and form via force.

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But Barthes’s focus on affect and transitivity in La Chambre claire can bring us to another view on form. Maybe Barthes’s reflections on the Winter Garden Photograph, on his mother’s death and on the surge of emotion that he seeks within the punctum allow us to think about form as a marker of grief.18 What kinds of form are produced by, and are adequate to communicating, extreme experiences such as sudden loss, or mourning which often seem to strip writers of their resources? The notion that the very process of giving shape to what is overwhelming, amorphous and unspeakable constitutes in itself a kind of therapy (scriptotherapy) is a familiar one. Lending form and formulation to extreme experiences can help to contain and account for them, the endeavour itself offering a coping mechanism. And how do such texts allow a balance to be struck between immersion in grief and elevation or emergence from it? Jacques Derrida, in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, notes that mourning is ‘interminable. Inconsolable. Irréconciliable’.19 How then to shape, distil and bring to an end in formal terms a lived experience that has no ending? Barthes’s Journal de deuil explores this problem; it plays a structuring role in Camille Laurens’s (Barthesian) Encore et jamais (Chapter 7), and form’s capacity to palliate grief is central to Mairéad Hanrahan’s illuminating reading of Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir (Chapter 5). Roubaud’s return to poetry after his wife’s death is a return to assessing the possibilities of poetic form. Hanrahan, reading Roubaud, notes that in ‘crystallizing a form, poetry defines what something will have been’ and pursues this through a close reading that brings us not to the determination of an end but to an interruption or aperture through which the shared pleasures of the past may return. Such a return of pleasure carries mourning forward and strengthens the poet’s determination to return to the language of poetry as a way of going on.

18 A form can palliate grief, such as Barthes’s elegiac treatment of his mother’s passing, through her, possibly imagined, transposed photograph in La Chambre claire (1980), as argued by Diana Knight in ‘Roland Barthes, or the Woman Without a Shadow’, in Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 132–43 (p. 138). 19 Jacques Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Paris: Galilée, Coll. ‘La Philosophie en effet’, 2001), p. 145.

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Form and Life Writing The imbrications of death and life are central to writing regardless of form. Barthes’s deliberations on form (and genre), on the referential and the fictional and how the literary status of the novel (fiction) was greater than that of the diary (referential) helped open the way to intriguing forms of cross-over and interference that reached out to life and to the transitive reach of hybrid forms. This interplay saw the emergence of one of the most significant literary forms to emerge in France in the 1980s, where the referent of memory and of the world combined with fiction and the works produced were to be categorized variously as life writing, or autofiction, or biographical fictions. We can think here of Nathalie Sarraute’s autobiography Enfance (1983) with its deliberate meditations on fictional constructs of the past. In this volume, Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir picks up on Gratton’s treatment of Barthes and opens it out as she tracks forms along the thematic pathway of memory and its necessary relationship with forgetting (Chapter 6). Her emphasis is on how form in life writing can put readers in touch with the tension between memory and forgetting; she asks how an author brings us to shuttle between the past and present of their text and how form performs forgetting. Life writing is shown to assume its form through an engagement with family archives and, like the archive, can be subject to any number of groupings and regroupings of its materials, resulting in unanticipated discoveries. Formal devices that keep the reader alert to the complexities of life writing, to its tenuousness, are explored here, including photographs and other archive materials that get folded into the work’s texture, as well as paratextual materials that supplement—or sometimes undermine—the main text. Gudmundsdottir makes the case for forgetting as ‘one of form’s unspoken foundations’ and examines the instability of the relationship between a writing that works on what is remembered yet also seeks what is forgotten. Such instability is also a feature of the archive of personal photographs, she argues, in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) for they serve as an illusion that fosters sense-making and fictions in equal measure. Following Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, the human subject, located within the ‘real’ and the everyday, slowly began to regain a central place in French literature, often in the context of autobiographical or biographical projects that explored these forms anew. Writers either celebrated the role of fiction within autobiographical projects or incorporated biographical and autobiographical elements

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into works of fiction. In doing so, they actively exploited the distinctions traditionally made between the factual truths of history and the imaginative possibilities of fiction. This re-emergence of the autobiographical and biographical subject troubled the boundaries of genre. The distinctions that were deemed to separate the referential genres of biography and autobiography from the purely fictional genre of the novel came to be increasingly blurred. Critics and writers coined a variety of terms (in both French and English) in order to classify these hybrid works generically: autography, life writing, récit de vie, surfiction, faction, autoroman, autofiction and periautobiography. 20 The range of terms indicated a common desire to identify texts, their status and their subjects. And yet, some of these neologisms also suggest critics’ confusion when faced with recent explorations of the relationship between writing and the self. Shirley Jordan’s chapter on women’s life writing addresses the problem of finding formal devices that give an account of time (Chapter 7). She asks what forms can do when faced with the problem of evoking time in life writing and examines the diverse solutions arrived at by Annie Ernaux, Camille Laurens and Chantal Akerman, all of whom give a sharp sense of the temporal shaping of their sense of self, and notably of the centrality of repetition and rhythm to their experience. Jordan explores how time is rendered via intermedial experiments such as phototexts, a collection of mini-essays on the topic of repetition and an art installation. She looks at how repetition, variation and fragmentation give shape to lived experience in writings which underscore the artifice of smooth self-structuring and are deliberately heuristic and raw. If, referring back to Bailly’s text on form, we were to seek geometric terms to describe them, we might say that these authors have us advance through their texts not in a linear fashion but by looping, spiralling and, in the case of Laurens, by thinking about experience, memory and affect through the idea of concentric circles. And to engage with the slow rhythms and reiterative patterns built up by the formal devices of Akerman’s texts, films and installations is to sink into an evocation of the fleeting substance and experiences of our everyday lives. Where Jordan draws out the revelatory potential of Akerman’s patterns and circles, Charles Forsdick examines Perec’s disruption of organized urban forms and categories of knowledge that shape our 20 See Timothy Dow Adams, ‘Life Writing and Light Writing: Autobiography and Photography’, Modern Fiction Studies 40 (1994), 459–92.

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everyday through an emphasis on a vertical exploration of space by means of list (Chapter 8). Attending to the vertical allows for a critique of the everyday in the sense that it breaks up and fragments the quotidian smooth surfaces that have been colonized by the signifying systems of consumerism. Lists—enumerations that burrow down into the everyday space we inhabit—defamiliarize that space by reminding us of what has escaped our attention, which too often quickly moves on in its linear, sequential sweep of the familiar. The practice and form of Perec’s lists, argues Forsdick, disrupt totality and enclosure by creating a sense of the inexhaustible. Our everyday remains as an unfinished project of discovery—like an ideal form of open-ended travel—such that it cannot be sutured through the consumption of desired objects, or contained through a strategic mapping of space, and it resists translation because there is always a remainder that requires further translation (see Syrotinski on Barbara Cassin in this volume). The poetics of enumeration and of the temporal folds we inhabit are also characteristics of the work of Eugène Savitzkaya, whose novels— at least since his playful non-biography of Elvis Presley, Un jeune homme trop gros (1978)—are also imbrications of autobiographical and biographical forms made up of scatterings of what Barthes called biographèmes. Reading Savitzkaya’s 1977 novel Mentir in parallel with Fraudeur (2015), Patrick Crowley tracks this elusiveness of form within the writer’s inscription of his mother as figure and as biographical constellation, but also as the source of the writer’s coming to writing (Chapter 9). The ‘mother’ is figured in her absence through metonymic objects, lists, fragments of narrative and the fictional turning point that brings the novel Fraudeur to an end. In this, Savitzkaya is motivated by the idea that auto/biographical narratives might be better served by fiction and judicious lies than by any attempt to ‘tell the truth’. But if that is the case, and this is the question Crowley asks, how does the autobiographical retain its mark or become remarkable within the embrace of the novel’s fiction? Such an exploration of autobiography and other literary forms is pursued in Ian Maclachlan’s analysis of Louis-René des Forêts’s ‘Ostinato’ autobiographical project Poèmes de Samuel Wood (Chapter 10). In this distinctive autobiographical poetry, the poise of traditional French versification is destabilized and dislodged as the poet conveys something of his inner life through an avatar, and draws us in to reflect on the forms of human language by setting our own communicative capacity beside that of the natural sounds of non-human animals such

12

What Forms Can Do

as birds and wolves. There is here a willed unsettling of form; nothing is comfortable about it and our ability to know self and other through forms and formulations is called into question. In other words, as Maclachlan notes, form here throws into question the genre of autobiography itself. The reader is confronted with unresolved questions about form and what it can do, as the life writer conducts an adventure towards endowing life with form. This sense of form as process and as dynamic thinking tool, of writing towards, is especially salient in Maclachlan’s analysis, which suggests with great subtlety that while form does not contain the world, it may lightly draw parts of it towards us. The conclusion puts pressure on Lejeune’s formalist view of autobiography even as it returns us to the significance of signature to the autobiographical ‘contract’. Instead of the countersignature of the name, we are asked to listen out for ‘the scratchings of someone in search of a voice’. Form and Social Experience This volume’s third section continues the exploration of voices in search of a form by shifting the focus to forms in the world, forms that shape social and political experience such as that of Didier Eribon’s workingclass upbringing, of political and social upheaval in Haiti, or in the social world recovered and examined by Marcel Proust. Placing an emphasis on form as literary or rhetorical strategy, the chapters in this section attend to the workings of figurative language as form rather than form as genre. Edward Hughes argues that Eribon’s access to his workingclass origins is mediated by rhetorical strategies that take the form of the detour (Chapter 11). Such strategies include screening devices, circumlocution, intertextual references that draw from sociology (Pierre Bourdieu), theory (Michel Foucault) and complementary examples of autobiography (John Edgar Wideman). This detour is not, then, one of avoidance but a complex reappropriation where the ideological heft of class must be considered and filtered and where a working-class background—powerfully interpellated and ideologically determined— may be reclaimed by a gay man. Form, in this reading, is composite, multifaceted, yet enables a reconsideration of the past and an identity that he had disavowed. Form, here, is a tool to examine the sedimentation of citations that shape our access to the real. Hughes remains alive to the ambiguities of mediation and to the attentiveness required to draw meaning from ideological currents

Introduction

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through the work, often ethnographic, of form. Celia Britton (Chapter 12) pursues the relationship between form and life in Marie Chauvet’s novel Folie. The novel draws from Chauvet’s understanding and experience of Haitian politics during the period of the Duvalier regime (1957–1986) and follows the character René, a poet and alcoholic, who is also the narrator. Revisiting interpretations of René’s mental state by other critics, Britton argues that formal devices of metaphor and parody offer themselves as interpretative tools for an understanding of Chauvet’s text and her narrative representation of madness through the character. What Britton argues and demonstrates is that these formal devices invite us to read madness but madness resists a simple interpretation. Maybe the character of René is hallucinating, maybe the reality is worse than hallucination. But in the end, figurative language gives way to the literal. René slips into madness but not without making us take an interpretative detour through these two literary figures that intensify ambiguity before receding in the wake of actual madness. Form is seductive and, as both Hughes and Britton demonstrate, it requires critical vigilance. Through Alison Finch’s chapter we can continue to probe the possibilities of the relationship between aesthetic form and social form (Chapter 13). Finch reminds us of the physical, aesthetic and social connotations of taste or goût and pursues them through a reading of À  la recherche du temps perdu that delineates Proust’s fine interlacing of each connotation. The tracery of semantic meaning that she uncovers possesses a hermeneutic value to which Finch grants a pivotal role in the multivolume work. She notes that the jellyfish scene in Sodome et Gomorrhe, itself an intratextual reference to other scenes within the œuvre, occurs at almost the precise centre of the work and compacts the three notions of taste listed above into one and, in doing so, performs a prompt to the value of tolerance over rejection. In this way, wonders Finch, might the condensation of form’s meanings and possibilities occasion a reconsideration of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu? We can see how Finch’s chapter, along with those of Hughes and Britton, converges in significant ways with Michael Lucey’s reading of Proust alongside Bourdieu (Chapter 14). His argument foregrounds how an experience of social reality comes to be communicated in a literary work. Lucey starts with a citation from Bourdieu on how the work of form brings out ‘un réel plus réel’ in relation to social reality. Lucey’s perceptive reading delineates the shaping effects of the social world on Proust’s narrator and his evolving reception of the Vinteuil Septet ‘as he explores or realizes his own taste’. On the basis of this reading, Lucey

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What Forms Can Do

suggests that we, through the form of Proust’s novel, can experience an aesthetic object in ways that reveal the social world we negotiate daily. We can read this insight not only back into Proust but into the work of Eribon and Chauvet. Formless/Beyond Form, Movement, Thought The volume’s fourth section extends the reflection on form to the non-human world, to art and to thought. Emily McLaughlin offers readings that press us to consider life forms more broadly, through an examination of responses to nature—notably plants—in the poetry of Francis Ponge, Philippe Jaccottet and Eugène Guillevic (Chapter 15). If the three poets are all intrigued by plant life and by human relationships with it, each one finds a very different formal response to that connection. Guillevic decentres the anthropocentric assumptions of form and hypothesizes on the sentience of plants, creating a humble space of interrogation about what it might be like for a plant to be a plant. He finds that the most appropriate formal response is one of disjointed, tentative propositions, hypotheses, questions and questions about questions that unsettle our preconceptions about what forms can do. As he dislodges our anthropocentric insistence on knowing the world in our own terms, the poet imperils the efficaciousness of form as affirmed by a poet like Ponge, whose assertions of adéquation between poem and object and whose celebration of the effective man-made coincidence between forme and fond do not ask us to pause to consider profoundly enough the natural, non-human world as a world that expresses itself in its own terms. 21 Ultimately, the poet’s formal devices are intended to provide avenues that invite the reader ‘to encounter the world-without-us’. 22 The conclusion conjectures that Guillevic’s meditations on plants provoke an interrogation of the world, a world made up of forms that exceed the human but which inflect our thinking and invite us to interrogate that world further. 21 Ponge’s celebratory metaphors for the poem’s accomplishment of a successful intermeshing with its object are emphatic and exorbitant. They include that of the poem going into orbit, and of orgasm. See Le Savon (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 126–27. 22 Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 66.

Introduction

15

McLaughlin’s final sentence is a claim for form’s agency, its capacity to press us into thought, and it is this notion of form’s agency that Patrick O’Donovan explores and prolongs through a close reading of Certeau’s use of the image as mediator of the unpredictability of everyday life (Chapter 16). Echoing McLaughlin’s conclusion, O’Donovan argues that form invites anthropological enquiry. Indeed, for O’Donovan, Certeau projects into a future that has already come, has already moved on. As a result, we can better understand Certeau’s thought on the image through the mediation of thinkers of the anthropological who have reflected on his legacy either explicitly (Tim Ingold) or indirectly (Philippe Descola and Eduardo Kohn). Through the filter of their work, we can further interrogate the murmuring of the everyday and imagine slightly different forms of the future—in some cases, one that outlasts us. Again there are echoes that return us to McLaughlin. O’Donovan writes that Certeau and Kohn aim ‘to expand the range of conceptual tools on which we can draw in understanding environments encompassing humans and non-humans’. As such, our encounter with form, and with ‘the set of formal relations in which a specific form, here the image, can be said to be embedded’, provokes interrogations and practices which have what O’Donovan calls ‘an emancipatory as much as a cognitive impact’. O’Donovan notes the mobility of forms in Certeau’s work and their dialogical interactions. And Bailly’s self-conscious positioning of all form, including his own book, within a dynamic between smoke (formlessness) and crystal (form)23 expresses the very dynamic of textual or visual creation as it attempts to capture and cradle such complex, fluid experiences and nudges us towards conceptualizing form not as fixed structure but as process. This dynamic motion of form is taken up and developed, again largely in relation to the image, by Eric Robertson (Chapter 17). He examines form’s relationship to what exceeds it through consideration of a range of unstable forms in French literature and visual art. Robertson’s essay begins with Georges Bataille’s informe (or formless)—‘informe n’est pas seulement un adjectif ayant tel sens mais un terme servant à déclasser’24 —and from there his analysis follows a trajectory that brings us to the interlingual, intermedial poetry of Caroline Bergvall’s Drift. Here Robertson identifies a striking example of the recent resurgence of intermedial works, texts that straddle and 23 Bailly, Sur la forme, p. 24. 24 Georges Bataille, ‘Informe’, in Documents: Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, Variétés, 7 (Paris, 1929, repr. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991), p. 382.

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What Forms Can Do

invite us to read across written and visual forms and that are becoming increasingly numerous and inventive. Barthes, Ernaux, Akerman and Roubaud, for instance, explore how photographs and written text create productive narrative form. Robertson picks up on points raised by other chapters in the collection but, crucially and exclusively, brings the relationship of form to formlessness to the fore. He concludes insightfully that it is the ‘very confrontation with the formless, and its never-ending va-et-vient with form, that most vividly summons forth what it means to be alive in the world’. Patrick ffrench (Chapter 18) asks what kinds of form emerge from the convulsive body. His close analysis of convulsive form contrasts Walter Benjamin’s view of the experience of innervated form by cinema spectators where energies are mediated by play (that of Mickey Mouse or Charlie Chaplin) with that of Georges Bataille’s closely related notion of the convulsive body as inscribed within sacrifice. Benjamin, though aware that cinema can be appropriated by fascism, sees its potential as revolutionary and cathartic. Bataille is less optimistic and seeks to undermine fascist appropriations through depictions of the abject, which, nonetheless, bring him back to the first technologies of myth and human sacrifice. ffrench ends with an acknowledgement that further work needs to be done in order to think beyond the limiting constraints of Benjamin’s play and Bataille’s notion of sacrifice, but the chapter itself has already done much to make us think about the relationship between convulsive form, the mass energies released by the innervated form and their relationship to politics and technologies. For in reflecting on the innervated body, ffrench reminds us of forms that are produced by the technologies that can shape us. It seems fitting that Michael Syrotinski’s essay on form’s effectivity (Chapter 19) brings the volume to a close. Syrotinski puts the evanescence of form in play through a reading of the multiple ways in which Barbara Cassin engages with form, such as the information technology put to work by Google. His essay offers a reflection on form through discrete yet interconnected approaches—linguistic, philosophical, social, political and literary—that return us to linguistic effects and acts of translation in the widest sense. To think of form in this expanded sense, and in conjunction with the Levine quotation at the beginning of this introduction, invites us to read form not simply in terms of the nature of aesthetic objects but as a term that can be linked to translation and to social and ideological constructs that work to pattern and shape the ways we act and think. And, as with Robertson and others in this

Introduction

17

volume, Syrotinski lays emphasis, necessarily, on form as a ‘slippery and polysemic concept’ arguing that it ‘never settles definitively into an “ergon”, a finished form, but is rather energeia, endlessly generating new meanings, and new forms, within and between languages’. Here form is about the potential for transformation and of an unceasing translation of what surrounds us. As such, form transforms us and also serves to transform how we see and read the world.

*** The reader of this volume will note how many of its chapters cite and dialogue with the work of Professor Michael Sheringham. His erudite research and inspiring teaching were crucial in prompting many of us to rethink and see the world differently and to reflect on subjects such as surrealism, poetry, autobiography, the archive, the project and the everyday. The inspiration for the current volume came from Michael and its pages reflect his intellectual generosity and his unceasing conversation with, and about, forms whether literary or more broadly cultural. These essays also constitute a tribute to a man whose scholarly insight, warm friendship and great wit are sorely missed. ***

Blue-eyed Micky. With kind permission of the artist, William Smock.

part 1

Interrogating Form

chapter one

‘Fixé par les cris des hirondelles au vol géométrique du désir’ (Picasso, 7 June 1936) Patterns and Permutations in Picasso’s Writing Peter Read Patterns and Permutations in Picasso’s Writing

‘Ce n’est pas la matière dont la flèche est faite qui la fait voler— qu’importe le bois ou l’acier—mais sa forme, la façon dont elle est taillée et équilibrée qui font qu’elle va au but et pénètre et, bien entendu aussi, la force et l’adresse de l’archer’ (Pierre Reverdy, 1950).1 Pablo Picasso and Pierre Reverdy first met in 1911, and the artist drew several portraits of the poet, including a zinc engraving used as a frontispiece for his 1922 collection Cravates de chanvre. Picasso later provided 125 lithographs for Reverdy’s Le Chant des morts, published in 1948, with a print run of 270 copies. Deeply committed to that project, Picasso worked on it from November 1945 until its completion in March 1948, developing his designs, surrounding and infiltrating Reverdy’s facsimile black-ink manuscript with broad, blood-red streaks, loops and drops. By integrating his painted patterns into the calligraphy, Picasso turned pages of poetry into pictorial compositions. Eschewing figurative illustration, he prioritized formal effects, but still matched graphic form to literary content. His chromatic contrasts and fluidly linear decorations are indeed perfectly attuned to Reverdy’s poem, which invokes a wind 1 ‘Cette émotion appelée poésie’, in Pierre Reverdy, Sable Mouvant (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Poésie’, 2003), pp. 91–109 (p. 108).

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blowing in from a flaming horizon, ‘Noir ou blanc / Mais il est rouge au front’, and a narrative voice that proclaims, ‘Je rôde entre les traits de sang / Qui dessinent le corps du monde’. 2 Roland Penrose recalled how passionately Picasso still felt about the book in September 1954, when he produced a copy one Saturday night at the house in Perpignan where he had spent the summer: ‘P. brought out the copy of Reverdy’s “Chant des morts” decorated by him that he had just given to host & hostess. We went through it on the floor, page by page, reading most of the poems. “Ça, quand même vous rend plus heureux et vous fait plus de bien que de lire les journaux” said P. and went on to praise the powers of poetry’. 3 Picasso’s love of literature expressed itself early. ‘What is literature if not the stuff of grey matter and bone marrow?’ he wrote from Paris in 1900, at the age of 20, in a letter to the writer Ramon Reventós in Barcelona.4 Ambroise Vollard gave him his first Paris exhibition in June 1901, he befriended Max Jacob during that event and for the rest of his life, Picasso continued to nurture the company of poets. 5 Eventually he himself became a profusely productive writer. As early as 1917, in an article for his magazine Nord-Sud, Reverdy explained that in a cubist painting, Picasso did not seek to represent objects but to make their schematized shapes serve his main priority, which was to create an autonomous, self-referential composition. Reverdy also suggested a parallel between cubism and the work of some contemporary poets, who were similarly seeking to prioritize the anti-mimetic and formal resources of language.6 Reverdy was essentially asserting that rather than representing an event or an object, a painting or a poem could itself become both the event and the object. Acutely sensitive to the phonic and visual qualities of words and language, 2 Pierre Reverdy, Le Chant des morts, preface by François Chapon, illustrated by Pablo Picasso (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Poésie’, 2016). On Reverdy, Picasso and Le Chant des morts, see also Peter Read, ‘Dans La Cuisine du peintre: connotations littéraires et politiques d’une œuvre de Picasso’, Revue du Louvre 4 (October 2003), 75–84. 3 Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), p. 90. 4 Picasso to Ramon Reventós, 11 November 1900, in Picasso and Reventós: A Correspondence among Friends, ed. Marilyn McCully (Barcelona: Fundació Museu Picasso de Barcelona, 2015), p. 32. 5 See Serge Linares, Picasso et les écrivains (Paris: Citadelles et Mazenod, 2013). 6 Pierre Reverdy, ‘Sur le cubisme’, Nord-Sud 1 (15 March 1917), 5–7.

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Picasso, for his part, produced literary works which match the formal and creative imperatives defined by Reverdy. His gift for irrepressibly inventive improvisation and free association was always matched by a complementary urge to shape, organize and orchestrate. Picasso’s writing also persistently reflects personal preoccupations and often engages with historical reality, but the resulting semantic networks contribute not only thematic content but also a layer of cohesive connections and patterning. In order to explore and appreciate the fluctuating interplay of these creative strategies and contrasting impulses, this chapter will focus on Picasso’s first French poem, unimposing at first glance but already reconciling formal concerns and contingent circumstance, before considering his later literary manuscripts, in which threads of symmetry and anaphora reach between texts and across time in ways that recall the parallel testing and development of ideas in his sketchbooks, paintings and sculptures. Picasso’s earliest known poem, of which he kept a manuscript, is entitled ‘Poesie pour te remercier de ton desin [sic]’.7 Jotted in pencil on a thin sheet of paper, this is an epistolary poem, a type of expression he rarely used, and it is also stranded chronologically, dating from a time when Picasso transcribed and illustrated Verlaine’s ‘Cortège’, from Fêtes galantes in a 1905 sketchbook (MP 1855),8 but was not otherwise writing poetry. That insular position partly explains why in the compendious 1989 edition of Picasso’s writings these lines are relegated to a closing section headed ‘Phrases et extraits isolés’.9 The poem runs as follows: Poesie pour te remercier de ton desin S’et dimanche soir che Guillaume et j ai mis mon pantalon de velour blan ma grose chandaille roujee et ma veste noir je suis pres du feu la pipe dans la main et je pense a toi au riz de 7 This discussion of Picasso’s first French poem is developed from part of a paper on ‘Picasso’s art and literary contacts during his early years in Paris’, which I gave at a research seminar organized by Michael Sheringham at the Maison Française, Oxford, 19 October 2011. 8 MP stands for Musée Picasso Paris. 9 Pablo Picasso, Écrits, ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Christine Piot, preface by Michel Leiris (Paris: Gallimard/Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1989), p. 372. Henceforth E; subsequent citations in the main text.

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What Forms Can Do l’autre soir a te lignes logiques Moise et Stendhal.10

The opening statement ‘S’et dimanche’ prefigures Picasso’s prose poems which, like his drawings and paintings, would all be dated, the moment of composition sometimes inscribed within the text itself. The spelling and syntax in this early poem suggest that it dates from early 1905 or from the following winter. From 1906 onwards, Picasso’s command of French progressively improved, thanks to the company of his partner Fernande Olivier and the new French friends, mostly poets, who from early 1905 gathered most days in his studio. The poem is very probably addressed to Max Jacob, a hypothesis confirmed by the penultimate line, which refers to ‘te lignes logiques’. Max, originally from Brittany, was a part-time magus, adept at palmistry and fortune telling, and indeed he established an ‘Étude de chiromancie’ mapping and interpreting the lines of Picasso’s hand, a document the artist kept for many years before donating it to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.11 The poem places its author between two poets: ‘che Guillaume’, so at Guillaume Apollinaire’s place, writing to Max Jacob. The exchange of a poem for a drawing typifies the interdisciplinary emulation that defined the relationships between Picasso, Max and the other Bateau-Lavoir poets. The fireside mentioned here is probably at 8, boulevard Carnot, in Le Vésinet, ten miles west of Paris, where Apollinaire’s mother rented a house and which was his official address until he took his own flat, near Montmartre, in April 1907. ‘Poesie pour te remercier de ton desin’ evokes a cosy interior and most of Picasso’s later poetic outpourings would be similarly set in a domestic space, with its furnishings and daily events, shared with friends, lovers and the lives reborn every day in his studio. When his writing ventures beyond this space, the subjects addressed are related to essential aspects of his Iberian identity, such as bullfighting or the Spanish Civil War. Food, a unifying leitmotif in Picasso’s later poetry, appears here in the ‘riz de l’autre soir’, a shared paella. In his study of the lines in Picasso’s 10 The manuscript is reproduced and transcribed in Laurence Madeline, ‘On est ce que l’on garde!’ Les archives de Picasso (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2003), p. 74. Our transcription differs from those given in both Madeline and in Picasso’s Écrits. 11 See Max Jacob, ‘Etude de chiromancie: la main de Picasso’, in Hélène Seckel, Max Jacob et Picasso (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994), p. 13.

Patterns and Permutations in Picasso’s Writing

27

hand, Max wrote, ‘Aptitude à tous les arts. Gourmandise’.12 Picasso’s writing would indeed constantly proclaim a splendidly avid appetite, displayed, for example, in a long stream-of-consciousness text dated 18 April 1935, where he writes, ‘je n’en peux plus de ce miracle qui est de ne rien savoir dans ce monde et de n’avoir rien appris qu’à aimer les choses et les manger vivantes’.13 Jaime Sabartés, Picasso’s old friend appointed personal assistant in 1935, noted that ‘les pommes frites, les omelettes et le fromage sont, en littérature, sa “nature morte”’, adding that specific meals and food represent particular events and places he has experienced.14 The style of dishes he creates will vary, however, between tasty and disgusting, to communicate positive or negative emotions. He will be the hungry Minotaur and, as Nanette Rissler-Pipka has suggested, his writings will be the labyrinth in which the reader is lost.15 The last line of ‘Poesie pour te remercier de ton desin’ mentions ‘Moise et Stendhal’ and Max Jacob later recalled that when in 1903 he shared a room with Picasso, he used to recite him poems by Alfred de Vigny that moved them both to tears.16 A drawing from around that time depicts a distraught woman and is annotated in Picasso’s hand with bibliographical details of an edition of Vigny’s Œuvres complètes and the words ‘poeme-Moise’ (MPB 110.520).17 So Picasso particularly appreciated Vigny’s ‘Moïse’, no doubt personally identifying with the romantically heroic example of a visionary leader who presses forward without being himself assured of reaching the Promised Land. In her memoirs, Fernande Olivier, an omnivorous reader, recalls that when she arrived in Picasso’s studio, the only book she found there was De l’Amour, Stendhal’s collection of thoughts and aphorisms dating from 1853.18 12 Jacob, ‘Etude de chiromancie’, p. 13. 13 ‘ya no puedo más de este milagro que es el no saber nada en este mundo y no haber aprendido nada sino a querer la cosas y comérmelas vivas’. Text in Spanish, dated Boisgeloup, 18 April 1935, Écrits, pp. 1–13 (p. 9). 14 Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: portraits et souvenirs, afterword by Brigitte Léal (Paris: l’École des lettres, 1996), pp. 122–23. 15 Nanette Rissler-Pipka, ‘Picasso et la poétique de la métamorphose’, in Pablo Picasso, ed. Laurent Wolf and Androula Michaël (Paris: Édition de l’Herne, 2014), pp. 300–06 (p. 303). 16 Max Jacob, ‘Souvenirs sur Picasso contés par Max Jacob’, Cahiers d’art 2.6 (1927), 200. 17 MPB stands for Museu Picasso Barcelona. 18 Fernande Olivier, Souvenirs intimes écrits pour Picasso (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988), p. 231.

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What Forms Can Do

Picasso was still a struggling bohemian in 1905 and ‘Poesie’ confirms that his literary tastes, coached since 1901 by Max Jacob, were then mainly Romantic. This poem opens and closes with reference to four writers (including the adressee, Max Jacob), and that engagement with literature would later translate into a literary strategy that is concerned less with what is being described and more with the act and effects of writing, a tendency defined by Michel Leiris, in his ‘Picasso écrivain’, as ‘danse du langage plutôt que danse des choses auxquelles les mots font allusion’.19 Max Jacob, the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and others who knew Picasso during his early years in Paris, when his command of French was still rudimentary, commented on his intuitive ear for literature. 20 The series of six nasal vowels set into the opening three lines of his first ‘Poesie’ confirms that phonic sensibility and contributes to a gently repetitive rhythm, supported by appropriately soft fricatives and sibilants. Similar vowels recur less often later in the poem, but persistently enough to maintain the atmosphere of Sunday relaxation. A sharper [i] sound now also intervenes, however, repeated four times in the last three lines, confirming Max Jacob’s penetratingly lucid clairvoyance and establishing a complementary pattern of phonic progression and contrast. After a title that refers to a drawing, this first poem unsurprisingly centres on clearly defined visual imagery, constructing the image of a man with a pipe seated next to a fireplace, a scene which would recur in Picasso’s later cubist paintings, such as his 1916 canvas Homme à la cheminée (MP 54). The poem also offers a striking series of contrasting colours, with white, red and black appearing in lines 2, 3 and 4, highlighted by being consistently placed at the end of the line. Red and black, colours of the bullfight and of revolution, are also inevitably associated with Stendhal. The novelist’s presence, implied by colours, then spelled out, links the start and finish of the poem, contributing a cyclical unity. The placing of the three colours creates emphasis, symmetry and cumulative impact. A fourth colour, yellow, may also be implied by the closing reference to important literary works. French books from the 19 Michel Leiris, ‘Picasso écrivain ou la poésie hors de ses gonds’, in Pablo Picasso, Écrits, ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Christine Piot, preface by Michel Leiris (Paris: Gallimard/Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1989), pp. vii–xi (p. x). 20 See for example, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Mes Galeries et mes peintres. Entretiens avec Francis Crémieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p. 65.

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turn of the century were bound in the yellow covers which in Britain inspired the most distinguished artistic and literary journal of the 1890s, The Yellow Book. In chapter X of his autobiographical novella ‘Le Poète assassiné’, Apollinaire provides a dramatic recollection of his own first visit to Picasso’s studio, early in 1905, describing a space, ‘semblable à une étable’, which contains not only blue and pink paintings, but also piles of books: ‘Sur une étagère, des livres jaunes empilés simulaient des mottes de beurre’.21 If the poem is indeed coloured white, black, red and yellow, this is significant. The painter Christian Hidaka has written on Picasso’s revival of the ‘tetrachromatikon’, or tetrachrome palette, invented by the Greeks, reputedly used by Apelles, neglected in the Middle Ages, then rediscovered by Renaissance artists, notably Titian, after its earliest description, in Book 36 of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, became available. According to Hidaka, this system, long considered the basic tool of painting, ‘makes use of just four basic pigments: red earth, yellow earth, white and black’.22 André Salmon perspicaciously described the chromatic transition undertaken by Picasso in 1907, after he had assimilated the lessons of African sculpture, completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and embarked on a tough new creative adventure that proved too challenging for some of his erstwhile friends: ‘Un peu délaissé, Picasso se retrouva dans la société des augures africains. Il se composa une palette riche de tous les tons chers aux anciens académiques: ocre, bitume et sépia, et brossa plusieurs nus redoutables, grimaçants et parfaitement dignes d’être exécrés’.23 Picasso and Braque knowingly deployed that restricted palette in their cubist paintings, but its use in some of Picasso’s earliest works, including his Fillette aux pieds nus of 1895 (MP 2), confirms that this colour system already featured in the very classical art education he received in Spain and in the lessons he learned from his father, who was a painter and art teacher. Don Pavey in his Colour and Humanism charts a history of the tetrachrome palette and points out that in Picasso’s 1906 Autoportrait à la palette (Philadelphia Museum of Art), he pointedly depicts himself holding a palette on which just four blobs of paint display 21 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Le Poète assassiné’, in Œuvres en prose, I, ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1977), p. 255. 22 Christian Hidaka, ‘Cubism and Non-linearity’, Revoir Picasso, conference at Musée Picasso-Paris, March 2015, available online: http://revoirpicasso.fr/processuscreatifs/christian-hidaka-cubism-and-non-linearity/ (consulted 5 October 2016). 23 André Salmon, La Jeune peinture française (Paris: Société des Trente/Albert Messein, 1912), p. 51.

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the essential tetrachrome pigments.24 That charismatic canvas is therefore a technical manifesto and was probably, as Hidaka suggests, a challenge to Matisse, the modern master of bright, contemporary colours. Dating from shortly before that self-portrait, Picasso’s ‘Poesie’ is shaped by the same palette, verbally presented in a way that the insider Max Jacob will have understood. Picasso uses everyday vocabulary in ‘Poesie pour te remercier de ton desin’, a quality retained in his later writings, even as he extended and diversified his French language skills. The word ‘chandail’, which Picasso feminizes here, belongs nowadays to a refined and rather dated register, but it began life as a common abbreviation of marchand d’ail. Used from 1894, the word first designated workers from the Paris vegetable market in Les Halles, before being metonymically applied to woollen jumpers they usually wore. 25 So in 1905, when he writes ‘chandaille’, Picasso is choosing a modern word which was originally a form of slang associated with a specific social class and environment. His ‘chandaille’ is a winter counterpart to the blue electrician’s outfit he wears the rest of the year to demonstrate his libertarian credentials and his view of the artist as artisan. His use of ‘chandaille’ implies a lexical and sartorial rejection of bourgeois thinking and academic art, prefiguring his more extensive literary expressions of social and aesthetic revolt during the Spanish Civil War. Finally, the disjunctive rhythms, irregular line lengths, random interruptions and enjambement in his free-verse poem demonstrate how Picasso blithely ignores, and is probably unaware of, the rules of French prosody. He seems already to be limbering up for his later free-flowing prose poems, in which semantic, grammatical and syntactical inconsistencies are carried on waves of powerful and paradoxical imagery. To Sabartés, Picasso would be unapologetic about such linguistic contraventions, insisting that, ‘C’est aux erreurs qu’on reconnaît la personnalité, mon vieux’. 26 After his first brief foray into writing poetry, Picasso apparently abandoned his literary ambitions for three decades. Between 1935 and 1957, however, he wrote hundreds of prose poems in French and 24 Don Pavey, Colour and Humanism (1956), ed. Roy Osborne (London: Micro Academy, 2009), quoted in Hidaka, ‘Cubism and Non-linearity’. 25 Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. Alain Rey (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1992). 26 Sabartés, Picasso: portraits et souvenirs, p. 154.

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in Spanish, for a while preferring poetry to painting. He also wrote two plays, Le désir attrapé par la queue (1941) and Les quatre petites filles (1947–48), and the dramatic prose piece El entierro del Conde de Orgaz (L’enterrement du Comte d’Orgaz) (1957–59). The 1989 edition of his writings includes nearly 350 prose poems (of which about 200 are in French), many reproduced in manuscript form, as well as the plays and other texts. 27 Most of the prose poems are dated segments, with no punctuation or paragraphing. Some manuscripts are embellished with pastels, crayons, pencils, coloured inks, occasional drawings, a scissors-and-paste collage, but most sheets are filled with Picasso’s distinctive calligraphy, usually in black ink, sometimes in coloured pencils. Graphic flair energizes the extrovert handwriting, so every manuscript stands at the crossroads of legibility and visibility, between the book and the look. In his cubist paintings, Picasso was always concerned by peripheral space, the margins of his compositions, and by the difficulty of reconciling multifaceted, polyfocal perspective with the pictorial territory imposed by a rectangular frame. Dissatisfaction with that conventional enclosure led him to resort to the oval format used on, for example, his 1912 Nature morte à la chaise cannée (MP 36). Similarly, Picasso’s early sketchbooks are brimming with graphic ideas and possibilities, doodles and caricatures and are much more diverse, spontaneous and expressively uninhibited than his early paintings, where his education and technical skills were more assertively present. It was in his sketchbooks that Picasso first broke loose from his academic training. The written page offered him an equally privileged, alternative and intimate space within which all restrictions dissolved and he could give free rein to his imagination. According to Sabartés, in 1935 Picasso was in a state of emotional disarray, exclaiming, ‘Ne vois-tu pas la vie que je mène? Il faut faire autre chose …’, writing all the time in notebooks, avoiding his studio, neither painting nor drawing. 28 Sabartés also thought, however, that Picasso had already been writing like this in secret, probably in Normandy, at 27 Picasso, Écrits. For a good paperback selection of Picasso’s writing, see Pablo Picasso, Poèmes, ed. Androula Michaël (Paris: le cherche midi, 2005). See also Pablo Picasso, ed. Laurent Wolf and Androula Michaël; Androula Michaël, Picasso poète (Paris: Beaux-arts de Paris, 2008); Kathleen Brunner, Picasso Rewriting Picasso (London: Black Dog, 2004); Emmanuel Guigon, Androula Michael et al., Alphabet. Picasso Poet (Barcelona: Fundació Museu Picasso de Barcelona, 2019). 28 Sabartés, Picasso: portraits et souvenirs, pp. 136–37.

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his house in Boisgeloup, ‘depuis quelques années’. 29 It is generally agreed that his decision to move from painting to writing was triggered by the collapse of his relationship with Olga Kokhlova, the Russian dancer he had married in 1918. 30 The art dealer and critic Adolphe Basler, who first met Picasso early in the century, provides another possible explanation. In 1926, Basler recounts a recent encounter with Picasso on rue de la Boétie in Paris, a street lined with expensive art galleries. The two men enter the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, where Picasso gives a running commentary on the paintings displayed and finally summarizes for Basler his attitude to the market: ‘“Vous savez, je ne travaille plus depuis plusieurs mois. Peindre pour les marchands, pour l’Hôtel des Ventes, pour la spéculation? Ah! j’en ai soupé! […] Où sont-ils les amateurs d’autrefois? Où va-t-il le tableau de maintenant? … Travailler pour le plaisir de fabriquer de la marchandise? Tout ça me dégoûte, croyezmoi!” Et Picasso s’en fut déjeuner’. 31 Since the war, Basler had become a disenchanted and jaundiced commentator, but if we are to believe his story, Picasso was feeling alienated by the commodification of his art, recuperated by marketeers. Material success and Olga’s influence had also changed his appearance and lifestyle, taking him away from the bohemian existence he had previously enjoyed. Resentment over these developments may have been another factor pushing Picasso away from art and into literature. Picasso’s prose poems are nevertheless constantly haunted by thoughts of artistic practice and techniques. He had created the first collage in 1912 by inserting a piece of printed oilcloth into Nature morte à la chaise cannée and he would include newsprint in many subsequent collages and papiers collés. He produced literary counterparts of this technique in December 1935, for example, when he copied into a prose poem passages transcribed from newspapers (E, 14 December 1935, 61–65, 390–91), or an extract from a small ad describing a holiday let, where he intervenes to subvert estate agent clichés: ‘salle à manger meublée très simplement mais ayant une belle vue sur les entrailles 29 Sabartés, Picasso: portraits et souvenirs, p. 149. Picasso acquired his country house in Boisgeloup in 1930 and often stayed there with his girlfriend Marie-Thérèse Walter while his wife Olga remained in Paris. 30 Pierre Daix, ‘Poèmes de Picasso’, in Dictionnaire Picasso (Paris: Laffont, ‘Bouquins’, 1995), pp. 726–27. 31 Adolphe Basler, La Peinture … religion nouvelle (Paris: Librairie de France, 1926), p. 13.

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du cheval pourrissant sur la pelouse depuis des siècles à louer pour la saison’ (E, 26 March 1938, 190). He acknowledged these trans-medial exchanges by also evoking materials from cubist collages such as ‘toile imprimée’ and ‘papier peint’ (E, 20 and 26 March 1938, 190). In other texts, written when he had begun painting again, he enjoyed describing the colours and creamy consistency of his oil paints, spread with a palette knife (E, 30 March 1938, 192), the process of engraving a ‘figure géométrique fondue dans l’acide corrosive’ and ‘la plaque que mord l’acide’ (E, 13 April 1937, 163; 29 April 1939, 200), and other tricks of the trade, including a ‘ciel peint en faux bois’ (E, 14 January 1940, 213). Set among other semantic threads, these recurring images of texture, craft and material create proliferating networks that Jaime Sabartés compares to spiders’ webs, 32 woven into the writing and poetically reinforcing formal coherence. Picasso’s prose poems could probably not have existed without the example of automatic writing, pioneered by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. In 1923, Picasso provided a frontispiece for André Breton’s Clair de terre, and his personal collection of rare documents and signed first editions included the original manuscript of Breton and Paul Eluard’s L’Immaculée conception, published in 1930. 33 When Picasso’s prose poems first appeared in print, in a special issue of Cahiers d’art in 1935, they came with a preface by Breton suggesting that this writing extended (‘prolonge’) his work as an artist and was engendered by ‘le besoin d’expression totale qui le possède et lui impose de remédier de la sorte à l’insuffisance relative d’un art par rapport à l’autre’. 34 Tristan Tzara later characterized Picasso’s writing as a ‘flot verbal’ expressing his ‘imagination torrentielle’. 35 Picasso’s writing does indeed flood the page, overstepping marks, transgressing formal conventions, producing a distinctive brand of turbocharged surrealism. Just as Breton’s automatic writing imposes its own intuitive links, associations, rhythms and sound patterns, so in Picasso’s writing, inventive improvisation is balanced by 32 Sabartés, Picasso: portrais et souvenirs, p. 218. 33 André Breton and Paul Éluard, L’Immaculée conception. Édition fac-similé du manuscrit du musée Picasso, ed. Paolo Scopelliti, preface by Henri Béhar (Paris: L’Âge d’Homme, 2002). 34 André Breton, ‘Picasso poète’, in Œuvres complètes, Vol. II, ed. Marguerite Bonnet, P. Bernier, É.-A. Hubert and J. Pierre (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1992), pp. 565–576 (pp. 566, 568). 35 Tristan Tzara, ‘Picasso et la poésie’ (1953), in Pablo Picasso, ed. Laurent Wolf and Androula Michaël (Paris: Édition de l’Herne, 2014), pp. 280–84 (p. 282).

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a tendency to connect and orchestrate. Crossings-out and corrections also confirm the fluctuating balance here between automatism and lucid, second-thought manipulation. Equally surrealist is Picasso’s ability to take literally, at face value, everyday metaphorical expressions. So, for example, ‘la machine mise en marche tourne autour du sujet le pousse en avant’ (E, 2 April 1938, 193). His constant subversion of stereotypical perceptions, linguistic clichés and fossilized thought patterns confirms his poetic complicity with Robert Desnos, with whom he also shares an affection for culinary metaphors. In 1923, Desnos referred to pleasurably complex and polysemic poetic formulations as ‘langage cuit’, the opposite of ‘langage cru’, understood as unprocessed, workaday communication. 36 Having mastered ‘la cuisine du peintre’, Picasso broaches ‘la cuisine du poète’ and he joins Desnos when he defines his poetic methodology as, ‘Frire la parole qui s’échappe en dormant’ (E, 31 October 1935, 31). His formulation includes the author’s intention to choose and process his raw materials, but also recognizes that the words escape his control like the movements of a dream or sleepwalkers who set off in their own direction. He here prefigures an observation on painting that he would note in a late sketchbook, at the age of 81: ‘La peinture est plus forte que moi elle me fait faire ce qu’elle veut / le 27.3.63’ (MP 1886). Picasso also invented word games such as ‘pot / scie / ma lady / gai / rit Sable’ (E, 24 March 1936, 107) or the visual riddle which translates as ‘L’hache-chat d’os 7 carpes postales porte mâle heures’ (E, 19 March 1937, 164–65). He is also close to Desnos in the pleasure he finds in symmetrical variations of language, notably apparent in writing from March 1937. On 11 March, Picasso established a series of 11 linguistic permutations whose progression may be suggested by three representative examples, leading up to a final resolution: i) coquetier de velours bourgeonnant de la mer les kystes de nacre entre ses lèvres cache derrière ses barreaux le désir si à l’étroit dans sa prison éclatant en fanfare éclairé par les cierges 36 Langage cuit is the title of a collection of poems based on systems of linguistic manipulation and permutation which Desnos published in 1923. See Robert Desnos, Corps et biens, preface by René Bertelé (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Poésie’, 1968). See also Peter Read, ‘Picasso et Robert Desnos, 1923–1945: “une exigence de liberté”’, suivi de ‘Lettres de Robert et Youki Desnos’, in Pablo Picasso, ed. Laurent Wolf and Androula Michaël (Paris: Édition de l’Herne, 2014), pp. 285–99.

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viii) si à l’étroit dans la prison sous les barreaux de la mer éclate en fanfare le désir xi) la longue procession des barreaux allume de sa prison où si à l’étroit dans la mer le désir se cache sonne le tocsin au coquetier de velours [17 March 1937] Le désir si étroit dans sa prison fait éclater la coquille de la mer et allume les barreaux qui l’enferment sonnant le tocsin au coquetier de velours

Increasingly concise, Picasso twists, turns and condenses the run of linguistic segments, testing their lyrical and communicative potential, before suspending the movement, then returning six days later to establish his definitive outcome in a form which evokes military rule in Spain but which also encapsulates the libidinal liberation to which all his writing aspires. That particular series covered a week, but some of his other creative patterns span longer periods. For example, on 6  February 1937, he concluded an unbroken chain of poetic transitions with a self-referential pirouette where he observes himself smoking and working: ‘à dix heures trempant sa plume dans l’encrier l’ombre de la feuille s’agitant sur le bleu du papier imaginé par le tas de cendres’ (E, 153). Over a year later, on 2 April 1938, a similarly cinematographic series of metamorphoses ends with pieces of furniture licked by flames, but also ‘déchirés à belles dents par la cendre des cigarettes se levant du plancher de la page écrite’ (E, 193). So we are returned to a self-referential still life of the artist’s cigarette ash and sheet of paper covered with completed writing. This call-andresponse design, stretching over a year, joins other broad patterns of symmetry and anaphora that work with semantic leitmotifs, dialectical tensions and free-flowing stylistic consistency to give the whole body of Picasso’s writing the supple coherence of an ongoing poésie ininterrompue. Picasso’s writing also confirms theories of the image formulated in 1918 by Reverdy and then developed by Breton. For Reverdy, a striking image convincingly combines ‘deux réalités plus ou moins éloignées’, 37 while for Breton such combinations are authentically effective when they are engendered automatically and arbitrarily, without rational thought or manipulation, ‘la raison se bornant à constater, et à apprécier le 37 Pierre Reverdy, ‘L’image’, Nord–Sud 13 (March 1918), n. pag.

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phénomène lumineux’. 38 The image-based quality of Picasso’s writing is accentuated by a disproportionate degree of nominalization. He parades lines of flashing, nominal images, as on 5 May 1936, when he writes: hirondelle posée sur le fil télégraphique rose du bouquet final corps pendu par la langue au feu discret de la pluie des graines de soleil de l’artificielle ardeur de la palette jetée par-dessus les moulins aux orties.

The nouns flow, meet and morph, clichéd expressions merge and fade and the lack of punctuation increases syntactical fluidity, establishing a string of semantic shifts that approach an ideal defined by one of Picasso’s heroes, Alfred Jarry, in Les Minutes de sable mémorial: ‘faire dans la route des phrases un carrefour de tous les mots’. 39 This hypernominalized style also transfers into writing the intense visual impact of painting and drawing, imposing the immediate presence of successive, autonomous realities. Syncopated rhythms, phonic patterns and rhymes attenuate the stark nominal transitions, however, while also establishing other secondary networks that extend beneath the percussive shock of disparate images and abrupt metamorphoses. A month later, on 7 June 1936, the swallows gather and take flight in a line that encapsulates major characteristics of Picasso’s mature writing: ‘fixé par les cris des hirondelles au vol géométrique du désir’. The elation of swift and sleek movement, ecstatically voiced, is matched by the impulsive attraction of order and symmetry, artfully represented here by a flock of swallows flying in formation. After at least a year of literary experiments, the formal and thematic tensions in this line suggest a degree of creative self-awareness which allows Picasso to acknowledge the formal dialectic shaping his writing, combining free expression and compositional constraint, automatism and control, chance and choice, geometry and imagination. His writing moves like a bird on the wing and those successive [i] phonemes here mimic the cry of the swallows. The sounds are sharp as needles and many of Picasso’s prose poems are indeed studded with pins, needles, nails, thorns and picadors’ spears, 38 André Breton, ‘Manifeste du surréalisme’ (1924), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. I, ed. Marguerite Bonnet, P. Bernier, É.-A. Hubert and J. Pierre (Paris: Gallimard: ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1988), pp. 309–46 (pp. 337–38). 39 Alfred Jarry, ‘Linteau’ (1894), in Les Minutes de sable mémorial, dans Œuvres complètes, Vol. I, ed. Michel Arrivé (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1972), p. 171.

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all serving to skewer fleeting impressions and images. Picasso often used pins to assemble and construct his collages, working like a tailor placing paper patterns and pieces of cloth,40 so here, too, the writer and the artist are as one. In his collages, pins allowed him to try out, move and reattach disparate elements, but in the prose poems, the fixing of transient experience, like a pin through a butterfly, reinforces the overall impression of vivid immediacy, placing every line in the here and now, ensuring that the content of the text and the act of writing exactly coincide. Picasso persistently exploits the kinetic potential of language, for example by breathing life into inanimate objects. So he proposes ‘(des) chaises sautant à la gorge de l’armoire’ or ‘les meubles criant au milieu des flammes’ (E, 2 April 1938, 193), anthropomorphic images that recall Breton’s poem ‘Vigilance’, in his 1932 collection Le Revolver à cheveux blancs, where a bedroom goes up in flames and furniture turns into wild animals. Picasso also freezes things which are essentially mobile, such as his ‘flammes pétrifiées’ (E, 18 September 1940, 239), an image which exemplifies the surrealist ideal of ‘la beauté convulsive’ and ‘l’explosante-fixe’, envisaged in Nadja and L’Amour fou. Constantly combining distant realities, Picasso’s images express burning anger and disgust during the Spanish Civil War, where he lists a menu of ‘soupe de clous’, ‘un nid de poussière’ and ‘un bon roti d’hosties’ (E, 194), and serves up a ‘sorbete de bacalao frito’ (sorbet of fried cod; E, 166). Mocking public monuments, he points out on 1 May 1938 the shimmering ‘statue de sperme que tu vois ici au milieu de la place’ (E, 195). Sometimes during the Spanish Civil War he echoes the vocabulary of the Great War, referring to ‘des fantassins engourdis par la mitraille’ (E, 6 July 1937, 173) and echoing the battle cry ‘Debout les morts!’ in his ‘debout bout à bout morts de chagrin’ (E, 12 July 1937, 173). He also turns virulently anti-clerical, ridiculing the ‘escargots vêtus en évêques’ (E, 16 April 1937, 166) and ‘la robe de mariée du prêtre déguisé en donzelle’ (E, 6 July 1937, 173), denouncing ‘les litanies des coups de fouet’ and an execution at dawn, under military and religious regalia, depicted as ‘la bouche édentée remplie des poils du drapeau plein de merde saignant sur la chasuble à l’odeur de pourriture’ (E, 5 July 1937, 170). The generic diversity in Picasso’s work as an artist, his aesthetic zigzags and unceasing ability to innovate and surprise may sometimes 40 Elizabeth Cowling, ‘The Fine Art of Cutting. Picasso’s Papiers Collés and Constructions in 1912–14’, Apollo (November 1995), 10–18.

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occlude the persistent, long-term strategies that underlie his output, shown for example in his commitment to developing all aspects of cubism from 1907 to 1917, or in his 1920s sketchbooks, where he spent six years devising blueprints for welded metal sculptures which he then built with Julio González between 1928 and 1932. Picasso’s creative writing aligns restlessly disparate verbal concatenations, but also deploys waves of related forms, images and ideas, unfurled and extended over several years. His Promethean aspiration towards absolute expressive freedom is matched by orchestral and architectural impulses that were already apparent in his first poem in 1905 and continued to operate in his later and more ambitious writing, within individual texts and on a panoramic scale. Those multiple lines of aesthetic and semantic consistency engender the formal coherence which channels Picasso’s intense emotions and sharp observations, greatly enhancing the power and pleasure of his writing.

chapter two

A Gaggle of Geese or Technical Rigour Re-forming the Novel in 1940s France Ann Jefferson Re-forming the Novel in 1940s France The form itself becomes a preoccupation. Beckett1

In the histories of twentieth-century French literature, novels written in the 1940s appear through a kaleidoscope of different categories—‘the existentialist novel’, ‘the novel of the absurd’, ‘the metaphysical novel’— but never that of ‘the novel of the 1940s’. The decade is routinely sliced at its midpoint, dividing war and the Occupation from the Liberation and the après-guerre, the Resistance from Existentialism. And it has become conventional to regard 1945 as the starting point for the literature of the second half of the twentieth century, relegating the first half of the decade to a different literary-historical era. The decade is further fragmented by the tendency to consider the novel of this period primarily with reference to the larger literary corpus of its individual practitioners, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice Blanchot, Louis-René des Forêts, Jean Genet and Jean Cayrol, all of whom also wrote in other genres.2 I cite these names since it is these writers—with 1 Samuel Beckett, in an interview with Tom Driver published in the Columbia University Forum in 1961, reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1997), pp. 217–23 (p. 219). 2 An exception to this rule is Gisèle Sapiro’s La Guerre des écrivains 1940–1953

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some others—whose novels I wish to ponder, against the grain of all this fragmentation, as a collective phenomenon of the 1940s, and the 1940s alone. Born between 1905 and the end of the First World War, they constitute a new generation of novelists who emerged during the 1940s but who, without ceasing to write, had largely abandoned the genre by the end of the decade. This suggests to me that there was something distinctive about the novel in the 1940s that drew writers of the time to the genre. Sartre’s fiction begins with La Nausée in 1938 and it was very soon seen as heralding a new direction in the novel. But his fictional output stops abruptly in 1949 with the third volume of Les Chemins de la liberté, and the projected fourth volume was never written. Similarly, his critical writing on the novel is largely confined to this period. More than half the essays included in Situations I (1947) are devoted to novels and novelists: Faulkner, Dos Passos, Mauriac, Giraudoux, Nabokov, Camus’s L’Etranger and Blanchot’s Aminadab, and he shows little consistent interest in any other literary genre. In Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, published in Les Temps modernes the same year before inclusion in Situations II (1948), literature itself is defined as prose to the exclusion of poetry, and prose is implicitly defined in terms of the realism broadly associated with the novel. When Sartre’s intense preoccupation with the novel, as both practitioner and critic, ceased at the end of the decade, he devoted himself thereafter entirely to theatre, biography and the philosophical essay. When he wrote about Genet in 1952 or Flaubert two decades later (1971–72), his focus in each case was on the man rather than the form. Simone de Beauvoir began her career as a writer in 1943 with L’Invitée, which was followed in quick succession by Le Sang des autres in 1945 and Tous les hommes sont mortels in 1946. She published Les Mandarins in 1954, but from Le Deuxième Sexe onwards, the centre of gravity in her work shifted to the essay and above all to autobiography, whose first volume, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, was published in 1958. In the case of Camus, L’Etranger, published in 1942, was followed by only one further novel, La Peste, in 1947. La Chute, which dates from 1956, bears the rubric récit, and from the late ’40s onwards, Camus’s energies were shared between the philosophical essay, journalism and theatre. 3 The same shift of gravity away from the novel can be seen in (Paris: Fayard, 1999) but, as her title suggests, her focus is primarily on the writers of the period rather than on the literary history suggested by their works. 3 The case of Camus is somewhat complicated by the two unfinished novels that bookended his career: the first, La Mort heureuse, written in 1936 and published

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the work of Jean Genet, whose novels were all published in a short space of time between 1944 (Notre-Dame-des-fleurs) and 1947 (Journal du voleur), to be followed in the 1950s by his writing for the theatre. The case of Louis-René des Forêts is a little different since his two novels, Les Mendiants (1943) and Le Bavard (1947), were followed not by theatre or philosophical essays but by poetry and récits (as distinct from the novel). The same transition from roman to récit can be seen in the work of Maurice Blanchot, whose novel writing began with Thomas l’obscur in 1941 and ended with Le Très-haut in 1948, the year in which he also published L’Arrêt de mort, the first of several récits. Similarly, though Beckett’s French-language novels were not published until the 1950s and are not usually associated with the previous decade, he actually wrote all three volumes of the Trilogy between May 1947 and January 1950, and, with the brief exception of Comment c’est (1961), his subsequent prose writing was in the mode of what he called ‘nouvelles et textes pour rien’.4 In any case, as with Genet, his main literary activity in the 1950s was theatre. This pattern of a shift from the novel proper into other literary genres is repeated too often for it to be dismissed as coincidence. But what also needs to be explained are the reasons why these writers were drawn to the novel in the first place. Beckett had already written a novel in English, but the fact that he chose the medium of the novel to make his move into French in 1946 with Mercier et Camier5 suggests that there was something about the French novel in the period that motivated him to make his linguistic move in the domain of prose fiction. Jean Cayrol started his creative life as a poet but switched to the novel with Je vivrai l’amour des autres in 1947 (it won the Prix Renaudot in that year), and he reflected at length on the genre in his essay ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’ in Lazare parmi nous (1950). However, unlike the other writers I have mentioned, his interest in the form did not stop at this point and he continued to write novels—albeit alternating these with récits—for the remainder of his writing career. posthumously in 1994, and the last, Le premier homme, published posthumously in 1971. 4 Samuel Beckett, Nouvelles et textes pour rien (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955). 5 The novel was not published until 1970. The trilogy was published between 1951 and 1953, some time after the completion of the manuscripts of the respective novels.

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Nor was Cayrol alone in continuing to write prose fiction in the form of the novel after the end of the decade, and it certainly can’t be claimed that all writers of the time abandoned the genre at this point: Julien Gracq published his first novel, Au château d’Argol, in 1938 (the same year as La Nausée) but continued to write in this form until 1976, when he published his last novel, Les Eaux étroites. Raymond Queneau’s career as a novelist spanned three and a half decades from 1935 (Le Chiendent) to 1968 (Le Vol d’Icare). Born in 1903, he was very slightly older than the rest of this generation (Sartre was born in 1905) and established himself as a novelist in the 1930s, but for reasons I shall come to in a moment he has a key part to play in the novel of the 1940s. By contrast, for novelists such as Giono, Aragon or Elsa Triolet, who had started writing in the 1920s and who continued long after the end of the 1940s, the decade cannot be said to have had any special significance.6 Looking ahead to the novelists of the 1950s—and the nouveaux romanciers in particular—it is notable that, with the exception of Michel Butor, they all wrote their first novels in the 1940s, but also that, for the most part, this work proved for one reason or another to be a false start. Claude Simon wrote Le Tricheur between 1936 and 1941, and although it was published in 1945 he refused all subsequent republication, a ban that he extended to La Corde raide (1947), written between 1945 and 1947, on the grounds that his work as a novelist began seriously only with Le Vent in 1957. Robbe-Grillet wrote Un régicide in 1949 but was unable to find a publisher and it didn’t appear until 1978. Marguerite Duras published two novels in the 1940s (Les Impudents in 1943 and La Vie tranquille in 1944) but critics tend to regard these as being merely a prelude to the fiction which for them starts with Moderato cantabile in 1958. Nathalie Sarraute is an apparent exception to this rule, since her novel Portrait d’un inconnu, written between 1941 and 1946 and published in 1948 with a preface by Sartre, is generally considered to be of a piece with the work that followed. But when two of the essays she published in Les Temps modernes in October 1947 and February 1950 were included in L’Ere du soupçon in 1956, the volume was read as a manifesto for the nouveau roman without any reference to the previous decade. If her writing hadn’t changed, the context most certainly had, and when Portrait d’un inconnu was republished in the same year, it had a very 6 Although, as will be seen below, Triolet’s work was considered at the time to be of its time. Her collection of ‘nouvelles’, Le premier accroc coûte 200 francs (1944), was awarded the Prix Goncourt for 1944.

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different reception to the one it received eight years earlier, when it sold only a few hundred copies before being deleted from Robert Marin’s list and the remaining stock pulped. In other words, something had changed between the decade of the 1940s and that of the 1950s, whether in the critical climate, the character of the writing or the authorship of novels themselves. But if the label ‘nouveau roman’ serves to characterize the novel of the 1950s, there is no equivalent label to identify the distinctiveness of the genre in the 1940s, and thus no motivation to regard this period as an important chapter in the modern history of the genre. Yet the novelists of the time clearly felt that the start of the new decade marked a watershed. This view was clinched by the defeat in June 1940 which crystallized a sense that a younger generation of novelists was in the ascendant, replacing a previous one whose work seemed irrelevant in a new historical context. Gide had written about the novel in broadly formal terms in the 1920s, but there’s an emphasis on form in the 1940s which introduces something new into the history of thinking about the genre, whose concerns had tended to be with its mission more than with its forms, its effects rather than its generic specificity. These changes were already in the air in the late ’30s, but for the literary generation of the 1940s they were given special force in the context of the defeat and the Occupation when they became linked to the issue of national identity. Although, of all genres, the novel is the one most open to transnational status, the French have—or at least they had—a proprietorial sense of le roman français and of a national tradition in the genre. However, over and above the military defeat, there was a strong sense amongst the younger generation of writers that France had fallen behind in the domain of fiction and that it had produced nothing to compare to the work of Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Faulkner or, for Sartre at any rate, Dos Passos. The significance of the defeat was underscored retrospectively by Sartre in his essay ‘Situation de l’écrivain en 1947’, where he wrote: ‘Le destin de nos œuvres elles-mêmes était lié à celui de la France en danger: nos aînés écrivaient pour des âmes vacantes, mais pour le public auquel nous allions nous adresser à notre tour, les vacances étaient finies’.7 For him this association between literature and national destiny entailed what Barthes soon afterwards called the ‘responsibility of forms’. The novelists of the time found themselves inescapably engaged in producing what Sartre calls 7 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Situation de l’écrivain en 1947’, in Situations II (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 202–330 (p. 244).

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‘une littérature de l’historicité’,8 and no longer able to maintain the remote authorial viewpoint from which their elders had written and which was the basis on which they produced the delusively stable world of the pre-war novel. Sartre clearly considered that the defeat of France in 1940 was due in part to the failures of the preceding generation of French novelists, and in his essay ‘La nationalisation de la literature’, written in 1945, he gives the novel a key role in redefining French nationhood after the Liberation. Questions of form acquired a new urgency for the novel in this decade. In an essay significantly entitled ‘Technique du roman’ (1937), Queneau was already calling for a formal dimension in fiction which he saw as lacking in the novels of his French contemporaries of the 1930s. He deplores what he calls the ‘laisser aller’ of the genre in which anyone can ‘pousser devant lui comme un troupeau d’oies un nombre indéterminé de personnages apparemment réels à travers une lande longue d’un nombre indéterminé de pages ou de chapitres’.9 He dismisses novels of this kind, populated by the gaggle of geese cited in my title, as nothing less than a ‘disaster’ which can be remedied only through what he calls greater ‘rigour’ in the exercise of prose. In his own formally and linguistically inventive work, Queneau acknowledges a debt to English and American novelists, ‘qui m’ont appris qu’il existait une technique du roman’, and he singles out Joyce for special mention.10 The rigour he urged on his compatriots was demonstrated not only in his own practice as a novelist, but also in his sampler of fictional styles, the Exercices de style, begun in 1942 and published in 1947, which the editor of the recent Pléiade edition of Queneau’s fiction describes as ‘une machine à fabriquer des romans’. The same editor notes that many of the so-called exercises in style are actually exercises in the novel (‘des exercices de roman’), as if the novel form itself rather than style in general were the book’s primary focus.11 The year after Queneau’s provocative essay on technique, Sartre could be said to have risen to his challenge with the publication of La Nausée, a novel in which questions of narrative organization and perspective are explicitly 8 Sartre, ‘Situation de l’écrivain en 1947’, p. 245. 9 Raymond Queneau, ‘Technique du roman’. Originally published in Volontés 1 (December 1937), the essay was subsequently included in Bâtons, chiffres et lettres, rev. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, coll. idées, 1980), pp. 27–33. (p. 27). 10 Queneau, ‘Technique du roman’, p. 28. 11 Henri Godard, ‘Préface’, in Raymond Queneau, Œuvres complètes III: Romans II, ed. Henri Godard et al. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2006), pp. ix–xxxvii (pp. xiv, xiii).

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discussed in terms of their conceptual import. The novel is conceived as having the task of finding formal solutions to the inevitable artifice of retrospective narrative. In fact Sartre had already begun to address these questions in his critical essays, such as ‘A propos de John Dos Passos et de 1919’ and ‘M. François Mauriac et la liberté’, first published in 1938, or ‘A propos de Le Bruit et la Fureur. La temporalité chez Faulkner’, which appeared just before the outbreak of war in July 1939. It is in this last article that Sartre made the famous assertion that ‘une technique romanesque renvoie toujours à la métaphysique du romancier’,12 emphasizing in his own terms the need to take account of ‘la technique du roman’. Blanchot’s first novel, Thomas l’obscur, appeared in 1941, but his critical reflections on the genre had begun as early as 1937 with the idea of what he called ‘le roman mallarméen’, a notion which he spells out more fully in an article entitled ‘Mallarmé et l’art du roman’ dating from 1943. This ‘art of the novel’ would do for the novel nothing less than what Mallarmé had done for poetry by making language in particular its central concern. Speaking of the novelist—that is to say, of the novelist in general—Blanchot writes that ‘Son livre, comme le livre de Mallarmé, doit tendre à être l’absolu qu’il convoite’.13 According to Blanchot, this absolute requires the novelist to take seriously the formal considerations which, even when they appear to acknowledge them, novelists have hitherto tended to treat only in the most superficial manner. These three novelist-commentators (Queneau, Sartre and Blanchot) are not arguing for exactly the same view of fiction, but each in their own way is making a strong case for form as the indispensable means of renewing the genre and bringing it up to date. All this testifies to what seems to me to be a key feature of fiction in the period, namely an intense reflection on the novel as a genre, which is visible in two related ways. The first is in the innovative and experimental character of many of the novels written in the 1940s; the second is in the critical and theoretical essays that were written over the course of that same decade, mostly, but not exclusively by novelists themselves, as if to suggest that the practice of fiction cannot do without serious thinking about fiction. Landmark publications in this thinking include Roger Caillois’s negative critique of fiction in contemporary society, Puissances du roman, and Kléber Haedens’s distinctly more positive essay Paradoxe 12 Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp. 65–75 (p. 66). 13 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Mallarmé et l’art du roman’, in Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 189–96 (p. 194).

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sur le roman, both published in 1941. Camus’s Mythe de Sisyphe, dating from 1942, gives the novel precedence over philosophy in confronting the absurd, as L’Etranger had recently demonstrated. In 1943, Blanchot’s volume of essays Faux pas had a section entitled ‘Digressions sur le roman’, containing discussions of Balzac, Melville, Virginia Woolf, Ernst Jünger, Queneau, L’Etranger, and the contemporary novel as well as the essay on Mallarmé and the art of the novel. The literary journal Confluences produced a double number on the novel entitled Problèmes du roman in 1943, assembling some 50 contributions by critics and novelists and introducing the notion of ‘une pensée romanesque’, of which more below. It was republished in book form in 1945, once again under the title Problèmes du roman. Jean Pouillon’s Temps et roman appeared in 1946, Sartre’s first volume of Situations came out in 1947, and the second in 1948, the same year as Claude-Edmonde Magny’s influential L’Age du roman américain. Blanchot’s volume of critical essays, La Part du feu, appeared in 1949, and to round off the decade, 1950 saw the publication of ClaudeEdmonde Magny’s Histoire du roman français depuis 1918 and Jean Cayrol’s ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’. These are just the highlights of a very active reflection on the novel found in articles, essays and literary journals throughout the decade, all of which testify to a concern with the novel in general and as a genre, rather than making a case for a particular kind of novel, a particular literary movement or even a particular author. The need for a collective viewpoint is articulated by Claude-Edmonde Magny in Les Sandales d’Empédocle when she writes: il y a à l’époque actuelle une sorte de crise du roman dont les signes visibles ne manquent pas. Or ce n’est pas en cantonnant l’analyse à l’intérieur de l’œuvre d’un seul écrivain qu’on peut en trouver les motifs profonds, mais par la comparaison. […] Ici une confrontation des auteurs pourra éclairer l’avenir d’un genre, en faisant pressentir un éclatement prochain des cadres traditionnels du roman.14

The book was published in 1945 but was written between 1939 and 1943 and Magny’s sense that the novel is at a point of crisis and poised to take on new forms is expressed by others at this time. So too is her argument that it is only by looking beyond the work of any single writer 14 Claude-Edmonde Magny, Essai sur les limites de la littérature. Les Sandales d’Empédocle (Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, [1945] 1968), p. 20.

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and setting several alongside each other, that the nature of that crisis can be identified. All these issues emerge very clearly in the double number of the journal Confluences devoted to the novel in 1943, one section of which is entitled ‘Crise du roman’ and another ‘L’avenir du roman’. Confluences was one of several journals created during the Occupation dealing with literary and cultural matters, often covertly complicit with the Resistance. It was founded in 1941 and based in Lyon in the zone libre, which was a major centre for the Resistance. Its editor was René Tavernier, father of the film-maker Bertrand Tavernier, and someone more usually associated with poetry than with fiction. The fact that this issue was given over to the novel is in and of itself an indication of the topical status the genre was perceived to have at the time. The special number was produced under the joint editorship of Tavernier and Jean Prévost. Prévost was the author of, amongst other things, a critical study of Stendhal’s fiction15 and a number of novels, although these are not primarily what he is remembered for. He fought in the Resistance and was killed in an ambush shortly before the Liberation in 1944 at the age of 43. The special number of Confluences was republished as a book by a Belgian publisher in 1945 under the title Problèmes du roman with the addition of an extension to Tavernier’s prefatory essay and a new postface by Georges Mounin, both of which sought to emphasize the distinctive characteristics of the most recent writing in the novel. Prévost was named posthumously as its editor,16 but in addition to offering a memorial to Prévost, this republication suggests that the questions addressed in the 1943 number were still felt to be pressing in 1945. The volume (whether as journal or book) is important not just because of the individual contributions but because of its overall ambition and its scope. It deserves to be considered as a key moment in the critical history of the novel in the mid-twentieth century, and three things emerge very clearly from it. The first is a sense that circumstances have changed radically; the second, that the very terms and nature of the novel have also altered dramatically; and the third, that this is reflected in a very active and wide-ranging thinking about the novel, a thinking which René Tavernier in his preface to the journal calls a ‘pensée romanesque’. All three are obviously connected. 15 Jean Prévost, La Création chez Stendhal: essai sur le métier d’écrire et la psychologie de l’écrivain (Marseille: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1942). 16 Jean Prévost (ed.), Problèmes du roman (Bruxelles: Le Carrefour, 1945).

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The expression ‘pensée romanesque’ is a very good one, and it captures something that is evident both in the critical writings at the time and in the actual practice of novelists. In the article written for the 1945 publication, Georges Mounin (a linguist and critic, but not himself a novelist) describes the novelists of the day as ‘une école sans le savoir’,17 but the ‘pensée romanesque’ of the 1940s was never explicitly associated with a school, and it doesn’t present itself as a theory in the way that was the case with the nouveau roman a decade or so later. The idea that something has changed is a claim that is made on a number of occasions in the special number of the journal, and confirmed by Tavernier in his 1945 Préface when he says: ‘Depuis l’armistice de 1940, il semble en effet qu’un roman différent de celui d’entre les deux guerres soit en train d’éclore en France’.18 For him, the novel is implicated in the current circumstances because it is both the means of revealing them and a necessary participant in them. In a separate article the critic Edmond Jaloux writes unambiguously about a ‘renouvellement complet de notre art romanesque’ and he says that there is a categorical break between the generation of novelists belonging to the two decades leading up to 1939, and the one that emerged after 1940.19 The point is put most clearly by Joë Bousquet (like Tavernier, he was actually more of a poet himself), who stresses the radical nature of the literary change that has taken place: Une rafale est passée sur les lettres: nous n’avons rien vu, rien entendu. Mais à jauger notre incapacité de plus nous intéresser à des œuvres hier encore admirées, nous avons compris qu’il s’était produit quelque chose de grave. Tout est si bien changé qu’il n’est plus au pouvoir de personne de puiser dans l’expérience critique d’avant-guerre une doctrine du roman valable pour l’avenir. 20

This fresh blast that has blown through the landscape where novelists previously struggled to guide their gaggle of fictional characters is the result of the collective impact made by the writers of the time, and not 17 Georges Mounin, ‘Postface. Une école sans le savoir’, in Problèmes du roman. 18 René Tavernier, ‘Préface’, in Problèmes du roman, ed. Jean Prévost (Bruxelles: Le Carrefour, 1945), pp. 11–22 (p. 21). This comes from the added section of the preface. For the sake of simplicity I shall refer throughout to the 1945 edition when quoting this essay. 19 Edmond Jaloux, ‘L’évolution du roman français’, Confluences 21–24 (1943), 25–35 (p. 35). 20 Joë Bousquet, ‘Maurice Blanchot’, Confluences 21–24 (1943), 179–84 (p. 179).

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just by individual figures such as Blanchot or Sartre, each of whom is nevertheless the subject of individual articles in the volume.21 Bousquet’s article is about Blanchot’s fiction, and Edmond Jaloux observes that Sartre’s La Nausée is the most ‘actuel’ of the novels published on the eve of the war. 22 Where individuals are mentioned, it mostly is as precursors or representatives of a broader phenomenon. In his ‘Introduction’ to the journal number, Prévost distinguishes between the individual and the collective when he says that after 1920, there were some great names amongst novelists, and he cites Proust, Gide, Mauriac and Roger Martin du Gard. But, he claims, the collective dimension was missing, and he goes on to ask: ‘Mais le roman lui-même?’23 Several of the articles mention the names of the emergent generation of novelists and while they are not discussed as an anonymous crowd, they are mostly mentioned in groups as representatives of a larger phenomenon which, just as Claude-Edmonde Magny suggests, their juxtaposition helps to make visible. Looking back in his 1945 Préface, Tavernier lists ‘Les quelques noms qui se [sont] imposés depuis trois ans, J.-P. Sartre, Mouloudji, Albert Camus, Louis-René des Forêts, Elsa Triolet, Simone de Beauvoir, Dominique Rolin, Raymond Queneau, Luc Dietrich etc.’ and he specifically names the writers and the works that have collectively produced a change: ‘le roman modern de Sartre, de Louis-René des Forêts, de Camus, la prose poétique d’un Henri Michaux ou d’un Francis Ponge, l’œuvre d’un Breton ou d’un Bataille’. Their collective impact has been to testify to a shared rethinking of the novel’s basic mimetic presuppositions, and ‘[ils] ont ceci de commun, qu’ils mettent en œuvre un “nouveau réalisme”’. 24 This collective contribution is repeatedly presented in the special number as a thoroughgoing reinvention of the realist function of the genre, particularly in its presentation of man and his relation to the world. 25 And this ‘new realism’ is perceived as entailing in turn a radical transformation of the genre itself. As Edmond Jaloux remarks, ‘[parmi 21 J.-J. Marchand, ‘Les temps et la technique romanesque selon J.-P. Sartre’, Confluences 21–24 (1943), pp. 170–78; Joë Bousquet, ‘Maurice Blanchot’. 22 Jaloux, ‘L’évolution du roman français’, p. 35. 23 Jean Prévost, ‘Introduction’, Confluences 21–24 (1943), 21–24 (p. 23). 24 Tavernier, ‘Préface’, Confluences 21–24 (1943), pp. 22, 19, 21. 25 Despite the inclusion of several women writers, the idiom continues to be largely masculinist.

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les] livres nécessaires parus depuis 1940 […] les meilleurs relèvent davantage de la métaphysique que du réalisme ou de l’observation des mœurs’, and it is this change that he sees as heralding the ‘renouvellement complet de notre art romanesque’ that he announces. 26 It’s striking how quickly this sense of a change is registered. In an article entitled ‘Nouveaux psychologues’ included in a section headed ‘Aspects nouveaux’, Pierre Lafue mentions five novels as examples of the new psychology that goes with this new realism and they are all virtually contemporaneous. Triolet’s Mille regrets, Luc Dietrich’s L’Apprentissage de la ville and Camus’s L’Etranger date from 1942, while Duras’s Les Impudents and Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami were published in the same year as the article that discusses them, 1943. Luc Dietrich died in 1944, before the end of the war, but Lafue is remarkably astute in this identification of new writers who subsequently became major exponents of the genre thanks, it would seem, to their responsiveness to the changes that were taking place in the conception of the novel form itself. It’s a change that shifts the focus away from a straightforwardly mimetic type of realism onto a concern with what Cocteau, in a remark quoted by Tavernier in his preface, called ‘la forme de l’esprit’, a formulation which Cocteau glosses as ‘Non la manière de dire les choses, mais de les penser’. 27 Character is subjectivized and what D. H. Lawrence, in another remark approvingly quoted by Tavernier, called ‘the old stable ego’ is dismantled: ‘Le “moi” s[e] dissout peu à peu, la personnalité s[e] désagrège à force d’être dépouillée’. 28 Nathalie Sarraute would develop this theme in her essay ‘L’ère du soupçon’, published in 1950. As would Jean Cayrol, albeit in a different vein, when he argued for what he calls ‘un romanesque lazaréen’ as the only means of giving expression to humanity after the camps, a humanity encapsulated in his notion of ‘l’homme lazaréen’. 29 If it’s the mind’s form rather than the world’s content that the novel is now concerned with, then new techniques and a new language are required. According to Tavernier, this emphasis on the form taken by the mind 26 Jaloux, ‘L’évolution du roman français’, p. 35. 27 Tavernier, ‘Préface’, p. 15. 28 René Tavernier, ‘Roman et bonheur’, Confluences 21–24 (1943), 258–66 (p. 259). 29 Jean Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’, in Lazare parmi nous (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1950), pp. 69–106.

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is due to the fact that ‘l’art du romancier n’est pas une description, il est une création du monde’. 30 The creation of this world can be brought about only by recourse to technique, whence, for example, Jean Pouillon’s exploration of different narrative perspectives in Temps et roman (1946). In his review of the special number of Confluences, Blanchot stresses in turn the aesthetic ambition of the novelist’s art, which is an art tout court whose goal is what, following Gide, he calls ‘le roman pur’. For Blanchot, the goal of ‘le roman pur’ is to be ‘un art qui cherche à n’obéir qu’à la nécessité esthétique’. 31 Rather than seek to depict an external reality, the pure novel will be constituted by ‘des relations intrinsèques et propre à se soutenir sans emprunt extérieur’. 32 ‘Le roman pur’ is the form the novel takes when form becomes its primary concern in order to say something about human existence more generally. It is only by means of this internal, aesthetically motivated coherence that the novel can hope to produce something which, as Blanchot puts it, will be in the image of the human situation and thereby convey its meaning: ‘à l’image de la situation humaine, pour en exprimer le sens’. The conclusion Blanchot draws from his reading of the special number of Confluences is that this ‘roman pur’ is ‘l’apport le plus significatif de la littérature romanesque contemporaine’. 33 The focus on form at this time is not therefore mere formalism. The ‘pensée romanesque’ that characterizes the decade arises from a sense that the novel as a genre is uniquely capable of addressing what matters most in human affairs. If, as Sartre writes in his preface to Nathalie Sarraute’s Portrait d’un inconnu (1948), ‘nous vivons à une époque de réflexion et […] le roman est en train de réfléchir sur lui-même’, 34 that reflection extends beyond the novel itself. As Simone de Beauvoir says in the essay ‘Littérature et métaphysique’, published in Les Temps modernes in 1946, the justification for the novel as a genre is that it is a mode of communication that cannot be reduced to any other. It alone can convey ‘[le] caractère subjectif, singulier, dramatique [de l’expérience 30 Tavernier, ‘Préface’, p. 20; emphasis added. 31 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Le roman pur’, first published in the Journal des débats in December 1943, reprinted in Chroniques littéraires du ‘Journal des débats’. Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard 2007), pp. 506–13 (p. 509). 32 Blanchot, ‘Le roman pur’, p. 510. 33 Blanchot, ‘Le roman pur’, p. 511. 34 Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait d’un inconnu, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié et al. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1996), pp. 35–39 (p. 35).

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métaphysique] et aussi son ambiguïté’. 35 The novel is thereby conceived as a means of exploration rather than simple representation. This relation between experience and the forms of fiction is also central to Camus’s defence of the novel in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, where he argues that the novel has outpaced the philosophical essay and that it offers a distinctive mode of reflection based on ‘[sa propre] logique, ses raisonnements, son intuition et ses postulats’. 36 The logic of fiction is able to convey experience—and, for Camus, this is an experience of the absurd—whereas philosophy depends on a logic whose rationality is by definition at odds with the absurd. Jean Cayrol’s notion of ‘le roman lazaréen’ is based on the same premise: even when writing about the camps, it is the novelist rather than the memoirist who can best convey the psychically disintegrated condition of ‘l’homme lazaréen’, particularly as that condition has spread beyond the camps and now affects everyone. It is here that the novel of the 1940s differs from the nouveau roman of the following two decades, while nevertheless being its indispensable precursor. 37 The sudden sense of disorientation—whether metaphysical, historical or existential—is peculiar to the 1940s, as is the accompanying conviction that the novel has the potential to provide much-needed insight into a changed world. For the novelists of the 1950s it was novelty itself, in the guise of formal innovation and experimentation, that became a value in its own right and the means of targeting the perceived return of that old enemy of literature, le bourgeois. Reflexivity was no longer linked to metaphysical reflection, and the novel ceased to be a matter of either national crisis or national self-esteem, but was one among several other manifestations of the new intellectual and cultural climate of the so-called ‘trente glorieuses’ whose euphoric apogee was May ’68.

35 Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Littérature et métaphysique’, published in Les Temps modernes in 1946 and republished in Simone de Beauvoir, L’Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations (Paris: Editions Nagel, 1948), pp. 103–24 (p. 119). 36 Albert Camus, ‘Philosophie et roman’, in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, in Essais, ed. R. Quilliot and L. Faucon (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), pp. 173–81 (p. 178). 37 One of the few attempts to identify the continuities between the nouveau roman and the novels that preceded it is Betty T. Rahv’s From Sartre to the New Novel (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974).

chapter three

‘Faire ceci ou faire cela?’ Barthes and the Choice of Form Diana Knight Barthes and the Choice of Form

In December 1978, completing his introduction to La Préparation du Roman, Roland Barthes encapsulates the central problem of his lecture course—how to pass from a fragmentary to a non-fragmentary form of writing, from ‘Notation’ to the ‘Novel’—as ‘le combat de la forme brève et de la forme longue’. Without ruling out the possibility of ‘une tierce forme’ that might paradoxically combine the two, he underlines the appeal of thinking in terms of simplified alternatives: ‘choisir est tout compte fait plus facile qu’inventer’.1 Moreover, before outlining the shape of the two years of teaching to come—discussion of short forms to focus on the example of haiku, that of the difficult transition to the novel to be centred, at this stage of his planning, around Proust—Barthes mentions that he could have chosen ‘des carnets de romancier, ou un journal biographique’ to illustrate notation (PR, 47). If he did not do so, it was because of his love of haiku (‘l’essence même de la Notation’), and to remain as close as possible to ‘le problème de la forme brève’. With such statements—the downplaying of the diary form, the supposed simplicity of choice relative to invention—Barthes characteristically This chapter is derived in part from Diana Knight, ‘Barthes Deliberates: Pascal, Ignatius and the Question of the Diary’, Textual Practice 30.2 (2016), pp. 221–39. It is reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. 1 Roland Barthes, La Préparation du Roman I et II: Cours et séminaires au College de France (1978–1979 et 1979–80), ed. Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2003), p. 46. Henceforth PR; subsequent citations in the main text.

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exposed and protected his personal, creative concerns. Indeed, this essay will explore the relationship between the rhetoric and actuality of Barthes’s apparent inability to choose between projects that are starkly polarized in terms of their form. Barthes’s ambivalent project of writing a ‘Roman’, which would gradually mutate into a more mysterious ‘Grande Œuvre’, was famously launched in ‘“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”’, the Proustian public lecture that heralded his more pedagogical Collège de France cours, La Préparation du Roman. ‘Est-ce que tout cela veut dire que je vais écrire un roman?’, he asks as he moves to a conclusion. His disingenuous question is parried with the reply that he has no idea, but what matters is to ‘faire comme si je devais l’écrire’.2 Just two months later, this manoeuvre is exactly repeated, but with an upping of the stakes that now places the whole of the cours under the aegis of the ‘comme si’: ‘Est-ce que je ferai réellement un Roman? Je réponds ceci et ceci seulement. Je vais faire comme si j’allais en faire un → je vais m’installer dans ce comme si: ce cours aurait pu s’appeler “Comme si”’ (PR, 48). In the ‘“Longtemps”’ lecture, Barthes describes the ‘comme si’ as the position of someone who is making something rather than talking about it, and glosses this as the basic working method of mathematics: ‘“Comme si”: cette formule n’est-elle pas l’expression même d’une démarche scientifique, comme on le voit en mathématiques? Je fais une hypothèse et j’explore, je découvre la richesse de ce qui en découle’ (OC, V.470). A year later, however, returning to the issue of simulation as method, he now stresses the imaginary dimension of acting ‘as if’: ‘c’est peu de dire qu’en cherchant à simuler la préparation de l’œuvre, je me mets dans la situation de la produire; il vaut mieux dire: je me mets en position; “situation”: condition empirique de faire […] ≠ “position”: je revets un rôle, je pratique et j’expose un imaginaire’ (PR, 233). What Barthes means by this distinction is engagingly explained with the help of the famous discussion, in L’Être et le Néant, of the garçon de café who plays at being the waiter that, in Sartre’s terms, he both is and is not:3 2 Roland Barthes, ‘“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Éric Marty, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 2002), V.459–70 (p. 470). Roland Barthes, Œuvres complètes henceforth abbreviated to OC, followed by volume number; all subsequent citations in the main text. 3 For the passage on which Barthes draws here, see Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 98–100.

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un garçon de café qui apporte une consommation est en situation de le faire; mais s’il pense son rôle, en rajoute un peu, glisse, vole, manie avec aisance le plateau […], il est en position: il pose un imaginaire (de sa fonction) et en profite […] → J’entends de même la simulation du Roman que moi, ‘professeur’ […], j’entreprends, comme une mise en position (et non une mise en situation qui, en tout état de cause, ne pourrait avoir lieu que dans la clandestinité de mon bureau): je laisse aller mon imaginaire. (PR, 233)

Barthes’s coy allusion to what might or might not be going on within the walls of his study brings me to a further example of the ‘comme si’. In the summer of 1979, between the oral delivery of the two halves of his lecture course, an exceptionally creative Barthes completed two works for publication, La Chambre claire (according to its subtitle, a ‘note’ on photography) and ‘Délibération’, an essay on the pros and cons of the diary form.4 Having dispatched the latter to Tel Quel in mid-August, he then worked intensively on two related projects: the posthumously published experimental diary Soirées de Paris and the mysterious Vita Nova, of which eight draft plans were reproduced by Éric Marty in his edition of Barthes’s Œuvres complètes. 5 The seventh of these plans, dated 3 September 1979, begins with the injunction ‘faire comme si’: [Lisant Pascal] Envie de: —Faire comme si je devais écrire ma grande œuvre (Somme). (OC, V.1016)

This penning of a plan for Vita Nova may seem a clear case of a Barthes en situation: a real individual actually getting down to preparing his ‘Roman’. Yet why should the reading of Pascal inspire Barthes to want to proceed ‘as if’ he were embarking on his totalizing grande œuvre? On the one hand, Barthes’s earlier equations of the ‘comme si’ with mathematical method may well be an allusion to Pascal’s esprit de géométrie.6 On the other hand, ‘faire comme si’ is Pascal’s advice to the free thinker who tries his best to resist the logic of ‘le pari’. Pascal’s statistical weighing of probabilities seeks to establish once and for all

4 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, OC, V.785–892, and ‘Délibération’, OC, V.668–81. 5 Roland Barthes, Soirées de Paris, OC, V.977–93, and Vita Nova, OC, V.1007–18. 6 See Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Gérard Ferreyrolles (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2000), pp. 444–49.

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that, in the absence of proof, opting for God’s existence, rather than his non-existence, is the rational wager. However, his fictional, somewhat petulant interlocutor is made to declare: ‘On me force à parier, et je ne suis pas en liberté, on ne me relâche pas. Et je suis fait d’une telle sorte que je ne puis croire. Que voulez-vous donc que je fasse?’ 7 Pascal’s reply is as follows: Vous voulez aller à la foi, et vous n’en savez pas le chemin? […] Apprenez de ceux qui ont été liés comme vous et qui parient maintenant tout leur bien. […] Suivez la manière par où ils ont commencé: c’est en faisant tout comme s’ils croyaient, en prenant de l’eau bénite, en faisant dire des messes, etc. Naturellement même cela vous fera croire.8

It is advice that the Barthes of the lecture course seems to have taken on board, giving purpose to an exaggerated simulation of his role—on a par with that of Sartre’s waiter—and motivating his empathetic exploration of the rituals of the great writer: ‘je me porte en avant de moi-même dans un rôle dont la force m’aidera à faire ce que je veux faire. […] Je me pose comme écrivain, dans toute l’ampleur, dans tout le sacré du rôle, pour m’aider à le devenir’ (PR, 295–96). The ‘faire comme si’ of the Vita Nova plan straddles the two levels of a Barthes en position (the public, pedagogical simulation of La Préparation du Roman) and a Barthes en situation—that once clandestine Barthes whose empirical struggle to choose the form of his Vita Nova is recorded in material that is gradually emerging from the archive.9 Similarly, the slippery to-and-fro movement between two Barthes (the Barthes of two modes that never quite coexist) applies to the whole issue of needing to choose between two literary forms. On both levels, Barthes’s language appears to reflect that of Pascal’s relentless insistence on the necessity of choice: ‘Oui, mais il faut parier. […] Puisqu’il faut choisir. […] “Puisqu’il 7 Pascal, Pensées, p. 464. 8 Pascal, Pensées, pp. 464–65; emphasis added. 9 The Barthes Archive is held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Most of the so-called private material is currently réservé; by definition, it includes important notes relating to Barthes’s more autobiographical writing projects. Fortunately for Barthes scholars, Tiphaine Samoyault was allowed full access to Barthes’s papers in order to write a new biography, Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 2015); this usefully quotes extracts from personal documents (on Vita Nova, see especially pp. 649–61). See too Éric Marty’s centenary volume, Roland Barthes, Album: inédits, correspondances et varia (Paris: Seuil, 2015), which reproduces 27 manuscript fiches (pp. xli–lxiv).

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faut nécessairement choisir”’, and so on.10 The Barthes of the public cours quotes Proust on his struggle to choose between essay form and novel form for his projected work on Sainte-Beuve: ‘La chose s’est bâtie dans mon esprit de deux façons différentes entre lesquelles je dois choisir […]. Or je suis sans volonté et sans clairvoyance’ (PR, 258). Meanwhile, the Barthes of his private study draws up a fiche bearing the title ‘Option’ in bold red ink. Dated 30 September 1979, it outlines Barthes’s current dilemma concerning the overall conception of Vita Nova (‘Mon problème est ceci’), before boldly declaring, ‘Il faut donc choisir’ and proceeding to set out two formal alternatives that are presented as radically incompatible, however equally desired.11 In December 1979, early in the second year of La Préparation du Roman, Barthes announced that the remaining sessions would trace a narrative. The story in question would be that of a ‘délibération’ in the rhetorical sense of the term: ‘ce sera l’histoire intérieure d’un homme qui veut écrire […] et délibère des moyens d’accomplir ce désir, ou cette volonté, ou encore cette vocation: ce à quoi il s’appelle → S’agit donc d’une Délibération, genre reconnu autrefois par la rhétorique […] → Cheminement délibératif’ (PR, 234). As Barthes puts it, no sooner has the would-be writer made the transition from ‘l’écrire’ to ‘l’écrire quelque chose’ (PR, 235), than he finds himself confronted with an escalating series of dilemmas, decisions and doubts. Although the deliberation will wend its way through what he calls ‘les trois épreuves’ (PR, 235)—‘le Doute’ (what to write about and in what form); ‘la Patience’ (how to organize life practically to make time for writing); and ‘la Séparation’ (how morally to deal with the sense of having seceded from society)— it is the first trial (‘le Choix, le Doute’) that effectively subsumes the others: ‘Elle réside essentiellement dans la texture alternative, à tous les niveaux, des opérations d’écriture: à chaque instant—et dès le départ: en 10 Pascal, Pensées, p. 461. 11 Marty, Roland Barthes, Album, p. lxi. In fact, this was not the first time Barthes’s creativity had risked running aground in the face of an overly schematized choice of form. There is a strikingly similar formulation in Le Lexique de l’auteur, the teaching seminar Barthes devoted to the ‘préparation’ of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes: ‘Choix, alternative entre deux images de livre, deux livres, deux options, dont l’une à sacrifier à l’autre → dilemme. […] En somme, choix entre un méta-livre (feint) et un livre. Or, incapacité de choisir: panne, blocage prenant la forme d’une incapacité de choisir, c’est-à-dire de sacrifier une solution à l’autre’. See Roland Barthes, Le Lexique de l’auteur: séminaire à l’École pratique des hautes études 1973–1974, ed. Anne Herschberg Pierrot (Paris: Seuil, 2010), p. 100.

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grand (par exemple Livre/Album)—, il faut choisir, et il n’y a pas de Dieu (de l’Écriture) qui impose ou même oriente le choix. → Écriture: liberté vertigineuse’ (PR, 265). Again and again, this inaugural trial imposes a choice between alternatives, the first of which is so crucial to grounding what follows—and in the case of the ‘Album’ or the ‘Livre’, so abstract and fantasmatic12 —that it risks functioning as a mental obstacle to getting anywhere at all. How, then, to get over the first deliberative hurdle? Bearing in mind that Pascal’s wager is also structured rhetorically as a deliberation—‘Examinons donc ce point et disons: Dieu est, ou il n’est pas. Mais de quel côté pencherons-nous?’13 —we find Barthes falling back, yet again, on the Pascalian stop gap of the ‘faire comme si’: Alors, comment en sortir?—Je n’en sais rien, car cet état est le mien au jour où j’ai préparé ce Cours: j’ai envie d’une Œuvre, mais je ne sais comment la choisir, la programmer […] → Il y a donc, ici, à ce moment du Cours, un blanc → Je n’ai pas résolu la première épreuve […] et cependant je dois faire comme si j’avais décidé de l’Œuvre à écrire, je dois parler des autres épreuves qui m’attendent, comme si la première, principielle, avait été résolue. (PR, 266)

The ‘faire comme si’ allows the Barthes of the cours to move on, his decision postponed rather than resolved, but strategically preserved by this very postponement: ‘Ainsi sortent (exeunt) le Livre et l’Album, renvoyés l’un à l’autre—suspendus cependant devant moi, comme les deux termes d’une option difficile’ (PR, 258). Barthes, then, structured La Préparation du Roman as a deliberation, but one that leaves its decision—the crucial choice between two forms— hanging in the balance. In 1969, already well-versed in the discourse of deliberative rhetoric,14 he wrote an inspired analysis of the Exercices spirituels of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.15 In Barthes’s reading, initially 12 For Mallarmé’s famous distinction between the ‘Album’ and the ‘Livre’, see Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Autobiographie’ [1885], in Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 662–63. For Barthes’s explicit discussion of these ‘deux formes fantasmées’, see La Préparation du Roman, pp. 246–58. The formal paradigm of ‘Album’ and ‘Livre’ is implicit in the closing section of ‘Délibération’ (OC, V.678–79). 13 Pascal, Pensées, p. 460. 14 See Roland Barthes, ‘L’ancienne rhétorique: aide-mémoire’, in OC, III.527–601. The seminar took place at the École pratique des hautes études in 1964–65; the written version was published in Communications in 1970. 15 The essay, first published in Tel Quel 38, was subsumed in 1971 into

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published under the title ‘Comment parler à Dieu?’, the Exercices spirituels are based on a rhetorical rather than a mystical model. Far from aspiring to ineffable union with God, their aim is to construct an artificial language through which to discover God’s will by an exchange of signs. At the heart of this process—and at the heart of Barthes’s fascination with Exercices spirituels—is the ‘acte de liberté par lequel l’exercitant choisit, conformément à la volonté divine, telle ou telle conduite sur laquelle il était préalablement incertain: c’est ce qu’Ignace appelle: faire élection’ (OC, III.741). However, in the relentlessly binary system that Barthes describes, the election (the choice) is not a dialectical moment as in the traditional model of dispositio (with its tripartite beginning, middle and end), or the ternary syllogism (with its two premises and conclusion).16 Rather, the election being structurally placed so as to take place at the end of the second week, the four weeks have at their centre an articulation producing ‘le contact abrupt d’une liberté et d’une volonté: avant, ce sont les conditions d’une bonne election; après, ce sont ses conséquences; au milieu, la liberté, c’est-à-dire, substantiellement, rien’ (OC, III.741). Barthes’s Sade, Fourier, Loyola (OC, III.733–65); the following year it appeared as ‘L’arbre de la foi’, a preface to Saint Ignace de Loyola, Exercices spirituels, trans. Jean Ristat (Paris: Union Générale d’éditions, 1972), pp. 5–53. It has been very little discussed by Barthes scholars. See, however, Philippe Roger ‘“Une fidélité particulière à l’infini” (de Barthes et des mystiques)’, in Barthes après Barthes: une actualité en questions, ed. Catherine Coquio and Régis Salado (Pau: Publications de l’Université de Pau, 1993), pp. 37–41. Roger provides an engaging account of the projection that underpins this ‘Portrait de l’Artiste en Exercitant’ (p. 40), quoting Barthes’s self-consciously drawn parallel between the ‘appareil méthodique installé par Ignace, réglant jours, horaires, postures, régimes’ and the rituals of the writer: ‘une préparation réglée des conditions matérielles de l’écriture (lieu, horaire, carnets, papier, etc.)’ (OC, III.740). 16 In practice, the ‘weeks’, like the ‘mixed-ability’ exercises of which they are made up, can be lengthened or shortened depending on the needs, understanding and progress of the exercitant. But Barthes convincingly proposes the ‘four’ of the four-week retreat as key to Loyola’s effectively cybernetic system of coded alternatives: ‘Les Exercices sont un peu une machine, au sens cybernétique du terme: on y introduit un “cas” brut, qui est la matière de l’élection; il doit en sortir, non certes une réponse automatique, mais une demande codée, et par là même “acceptable” (au sens que ce mot peut avoir en linguistique)’ (OC, III.750). In this spirit, Barthes sketches a linguistic tree diagram to represent the complex but logical system of paradigmatic antitheses that underpin the first week of the Exercices (see OC, III.749–50).

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If this formulation, which lacks the reassurance of a dialectical resolution, foreshadows the vertiginous freedom of writing—characterized in La Préparation du Roman as an endless obligation to choose between alternatives—this is because Barthes’s two texts function in strikingly similar ways. First, the Ignatian election, like the writer’s first trial in La Préparation du Roman, is described as exhausting all other aspects of Exercices spirituels. The decisions to be made are surprisingly concrete—not how to unite the exercitant’s freedom with God’s will in a general sort of way, but such matters as whether to become a priest, whether to marry or how much to give to the poor. As Barthes notes, ‘les Exercices sont très matériels, imprégnés d’un esprit de contingence (qui fait leur force et leur saveur); le choix qu’ils préparent et sanctionnent est véritablement pratique’ (OC, III.720). However, what Barthes describes as the best example of an election is found not in Exercices spirituels, but in its counterpart, Ignatius’s Journal spirituel. It is here that Ignatius dwells with excessive agonizing on the question he has been trying to answer within himself for many weeks, all the while attempting to solicit from God a determining sign: in the written Constitution of the Society of Jesus (which Ignatius had been involved in drafting), should churches be allowed to receive income? The question may seem far removed from Barthes’s public and private deliberations on the writer’s choice between the ‘Album’ and the ‘Livre’, yet its structuring is remarkably similar, as Barthes convincingly demonstrates: Il arrive un moment de la délibération où c’est oui ou non, et c’est à cette pointe extrême du choix que doit intervenir la réponse de Dieu. Aussi la langue d’interrogation élaborée par Ignace vise moins la question classique des consultations: Que faire? que l’alternative dramatique par laquelle finalement toute pratique se prépare et se détermine: Faire ceci ou faire cela? (OC, III.720)

Crucially, Barthes draws attention in his analysis of the Exercices to Ignatius’s rigorous distribution of roles. It is the exercitant’s responsibility to set up the question in the form of ‘une alternative d’une égalité parfaite’ (OC, III.763) to which God can reply by marking one term of the binary. But this marking is precisely God’s prerogative: ‘Dans le système ignatien, les paradigmes sont donnés par le discernement, mais seul Dieu peut les marquer: générateur du sens, mais non son préparateur, il est, structuralement, le Marqueur, celui qui imprime une différence’ (OC, III.762; emphasis added). The exercitant’s role in the election is therefore not only ‘nullement de choisir’, but very actively to work at not choosing:

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L’exercitant doit travailler à ne pas choisir; la fin de son discours est d’amener les deux termes de l’alternative à un état d’homogénéité si pur, qu’il ne puisse humainement s’en dégager; plus le dilemme sera égal, […] plus il sera sûr que la marque est d’origine divine; plus l’équilibre du paradigme sera accompli, et plus sensible le déséquilibre que Dieu lui imprimera. (OC, III.763)

This ‘égalité paradigmatique’ is Barthes’s way of explaining ‘la fameuse indifférence ignacienne, qui a tant indigné les ennemis des jésuites’ (OC, III.763). Developing Ignatius’s own metaphor of a set of scales—‘“je dois me trouver comme l’aiguille d’une balance pour suivre ce que je sentirai être davantage à la gloire et à la louange de Dieu notre Seigneur et au salut de mon âme”’ (quoted OC, III.763)—‘indifference’ is a practice described by Barthes as a relentless effort to make choices equal in weight, so that the beam will lean neither to one side nor the other— unless, of course, by divine intervention, which will then be recognizable as such. Only an intricate system of metaphorical tare weights, applied by the vigilant exercitant, can maintain the requisite perfect balance as the deliberation develops. If Barthes stresses the work all this requires, it is because interlocution, ‘le fondement même de toute parole’, is not given to the exercitant but must be conquered—in order to invent the language in which to address God and prepare his possible response, ‘l’exercitant doit accepter le travail énorme et cependant incertain d’un constructeur de langage’ (OC, III.739). Barthes’s account of the Exercices spirituels as the theatrical ‘préparation’ of an election presents, therefore, a number of parallels with his own ‘récit d’une Délibération’ in La Préparation du Roman. First, and most obviously, the latter can be seen as the preparation of a balanced choice between ‘Album’ and ‘Livre’, between ‘journal’ and ‘Roman’, rather than an argument for making any particular choice between them. Second, although the ‘texte multiple’ (OC, III.738) of the Ignatian language system depends on four imbricated levels of interlocution—1. Ignatius to the director of the retreat, 2. the director to the exercitant, 3. the exercitant to God, 4. God to the exercitant—Barthes identifies a slippage between the first and third levels. The Ignatius who offers the Exercices spirituels as a pedagogical training manual for spiritual directors tends to merge with the exercitant whom the director will instruct: ‘encore Ignace, qui inaugure la chaîne des messages, n’est-il rien d’autre, au fond, que l’exercitant qui la clôt: il s’est donné souvent lui-même les Exercices’ (OC, III.738). It would be hard to find a better parallel for the to-and-fro movement that characterizes La Préparation

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du Roman: the interplay of Barthes the pedagogue adopting the writer’s role, and Barthes the writer actually planning a ‘Roman’. Third, if Barthes sets up the equally weighted question of the choice of ‘journal’ or ‘Roman’, his essay on Ignatius provides a clue as to where to find the answer. How, asks Barthes, will God, whose role it is, move the beam, mark one of the terms of the choice? Exercices spirituels formulates the code of the question, but the code of the reply—the fourth level of interlocution—is to be found in Ignatius’s private diary: ‘pour connaître la langue dont la divinité use dans sa réponse, il faudra recourir au Journal spirituel’ (OC, III.738). The role Barthes allocates to the Journal spirituel is a striking aspect of his account of the circuits of interlocution constructed by the Exercices spirituels. In particular, he argues that the texts of the Exercices and the Journal cannot be dissociated: ‘il s’agit de deux systèmes corrélatifs, d’un ensemble dont le caractère radicalement binaire atteste la nature linguistique’ (OC, III.741). Indeed, it is Barthes’s brief analysis of the Journal spirituel that allows him to steer his essay to a provocative conclusion. For all their codification in the Journal, God’s signs are hardly conclusive, and in the diary entries we see Ignatius waiting, watching and counting as he doggedly elicits tears, devotions and visitations, yet becoming impatient in the absence of ‘une marque indubitable’. Yet this too becomes grist to the logothete’s mill: ‘Il ne reste qu’une issue à ce dialogue où la divinité parle (car les motions sont nombreuses) mais ne marque pas: c’est de faire de la suspension même de la marque un signe ultime’ (OC, III.765). Through Ignatius’s respectful acceptance of God’s delay in returning a sign, the absence of a divine reply is neutralized by its inclusion in the overall system. In Barthes’s account, it occupies ‘cette place vide et cependant signifiante que l’on appelle le degré zéro du signe: rendu à la signification, le vide divin ne peut plus menacer, altérer ou décentrer la plénitude attachée à toute langue fermée’ (OC, III.765). The Ignatian deliberation comes to rest in a tautological balance of question and answer, whereby the absent response is absorbed back into its own discourse. In her biography of Barthes, Tiphaine Samoyault quotes Barthes’s divided reaction when he rereads all of his past work in order to write Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. He oscillates between two extreme sentiments: that from the outset his books have been intelligent, subtle, coherent and well-expressed; that what he writes has never been remotely convincing. This situation he likens, in all its banality, to that of the tragic hero grappling with the uncertainty of God’s signs: ‘le dieu de la

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valeur, de la qualité, ne parle pas’.17 In his unpublished Journal d’Urt, in an entry of 2 August 1977, Barthes describes how he happens upon a radio programme about writers on holiday which includes extracts from his own work interspersed with music: ‘Déçu et déprimé par mes textes. […] Je me dis tristement: je ne suis pas écrivain: cela ne sonne pas bien à la diction; ce qui s’est formé simplement en moi sort compliqué, avec une grande perte d’impact’.18 However, muses Barthes, perhaps his Discours amoureux is more successful, perhaps it is better written? That Barthes is in his car at the time, on his way to Bayonne to buy a kettle and an egg whisk, means he has juxtaposed an almost parodically mundane diary entry with the question of the literary value of his writing. Barthes first published his analysis of Exercices spirituels in Tel Quel. Was it a coincidence that his essay on the diary form should appear in the same journal, ten years later, with the by-now loaded title ‘Délibération’? Barthes’s ‘délibération personnelle, destinée à permettre une décision pratique’, written in the summer of 1979, is structured around a general question (can a diary aspire to the status of literature?), and a private question that is nevertheless publicly posed: ‘dois-je tenir un journal en vue de le publier?’ (OC, V.669). Set up and then structured in keeping with the rhetorical model discussed in ‘L’ancienne rhétorique’,19 Barthes’s diary-deliberation moves through the requisite steps from an exordium based on a measured sifting of the ‘pros’ (the desire to keep a diary is conceivable, it is possible to itemize four ways in which it can be literary), to the exempla (two very different examples of Barthes’s attempts at keeping a diary), to an epilogue that at first overemphasizes the ‘cons’ (the diary form has no ‘mission’, necessity or authenticity), then arrives at an impasse (‘Autrement dit, je ne m’en sors pas’ (OC, V.680)), before finally loading both Kafka and Pascal onto the positive side of the scales (the literary text too is ‘sans preuves’, it too is excluded from the ‘ciel serein de la Logique’ (OC, V.681)), to establish the diary’s claim to be Literature. Yet what Barthes has done here—in line with 17 Samoyault, Roland Barthes, p. 580. 18 I am grateful for Michel Salzedo’s permission to consult and quote from the Journal d’Urt and the drafts of ‘Délibération’ (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, NAF 28630); my thanks too to Éric Marty and Marie-Odile Germain for their help. 19 See Barthes’s account of the distinction between the ‘thesis’ (a general question: ‘faut-il se marier?’) and the ‘hypothesis’ (a specific, future-oriented question based on a contingent set of circumstances: ‘X doit-il se marier?’), OC, III, 581 and 585–91.

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his analysis of the Ignatian deliberation—is to get the terms of the formal choice in balance, and to confirm the binary ‘Album’/‘Livre’ (or ‘journal’/‘Roman’) as a legitimate literary paradigm. The empirical dilemma—can Barthes himself, as a writer, choose the diary form?—is not resolved. The fantasized diary-not-at-all-like-a-diary of Barthes’s final sentence—‘il est bien possible que le Journal ainsi tenu ne ressemble plus du tout à un Journal’ (OC, V.681)—cannot be the focus of his private ‘élection’. This, I believe, turns on the more practical question of whether he should publish the Journal d’Urt, a perfectly traditional diary of which edited entries, drawn from the period 13 July to 13 August 1977, are embedded as an exemplum within the rhetorical structure of his essay. The Journal d’Urt, written in the context of the rapidly declining health of Barthes’s mother, was typed up at some stage from a handwritten manuscript of 67 small pages, was given a new title (on the typescript, the ‘Urt’ of the manuscript becomes ‘POUR ME SOUVENIR DE L’ÉTÉ’) and much of the framing discussion of the text of ‘Délibération’—the possible motivations for writing a diary, the problems of unintended effect, the significance of the time lapse between writing and rereading for a positive or negative evaluation—can be traced back to manuscript entries that are self-conscious about their status: jeudi 14 juillet Je n’écris pas tout ceci, à proprement parler, pour me distraire de mon angoisse. C’est plutôt qu’il y a un dédoublement irrépressible des ondes de conscience et d’affect. Impitoyable veille la conscience du futile. […] Nature monomaniaque du Souci (la santé de mam); cela déréalise tout; mais ce tout revient à la réalité par l’écriture. L’écriture ‘sauve’ le réel. vendredi 22 juillet Ce journal s’embourbe. Plus d’idées—déjà. Dégoût de l’egotisme, épuisé dans les lignes précédentes—Sans doute, renoncer? […] Cependant, je relis une dernière fois ce Journal, et me revient l’envie de continuer (en acceptant les pannes, les scories.

The hesitations, moments of discouragement, renewals of interest and— above all—the fluctuating evaluations that result from rereading the diary, appear to have moved sideways, in ‘Délibération’, from the diary extracts to the introductory and concluding sections. Appropriately, it is an entry from Journal de deuil, a diary that is similarly self-aware, that provides an ambivalent overview of the Journal d’Urt. On 21 November

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1977, a few weeks after his mother’s death, Barthes rereads his ‘journal de cet été’ and foresees that depression will set in once he can no longer cling for salvation to writing: ‘j’en suis à la fois “charmé” (pris) et déçu: donc, l’écriture a son maximum n’est tout de même que dérisoire’. 20 Yet the Journal d’Urt reveals that this particular rereading motivated Barthes to go back to his summer diary and to write one final entry on 28 November 1977: ‘Tout d’un coup, il m’est devenu indifférent de ne pas être moderne’. If the words are familiar, it is because Barthes reproduced them in ‘Délibération’, but moved them to the end of his final entry of 13 August, where they follow the episode of him falling off a borrowed bicycle outside the village baker’s shop. 21 Barthes’s repositioning of the November entry produces a closure for his diary-exemplum and acts as an implicit comment on its value. However, it is a paragraph of the very first entry—both the Journal d’Urt and the assembled ‘Délibération’ extract begin on 13 July—that suggests a buried link between context, content and the hesitant choice of form. In the edited paragraph of ‘Délibération’, Barthes writes: ‘Sombres pensées, peurs, angoisses: je vois la mort de l’être cher, m’en affole, etc. Cette imagination est le contraire même de la foi. […] En imaginant la mort, je décourage le miracle. Le fou d’Ordet ne parlait pas, il refusait la langue bavarde et péremptoire de l’intériorité’ (OC, V.671). In the manuscript entry, ‘Le contraire de la foi’ is a conspicuous, underlined subheading, and Barthes uses a more explicit language of the ‘Imaginary’ to characterize the ‘imagination galopante’ that drives this neurotic rehearsal of his mother’s death: ‘Cet état de l’Imaginaire (c’està-dire l’Imaginaire même) définirait assez bien le contraire de la foi’. To wallow in the Imaginary in this context is to discourage miracles, whereas in Theodor Dreiser’s strange and beautiful film Ordet, the faith of the mad brother brings about the literal resurrection of his sisterin-law: ‘le fou d’Ordet ne parlait pas de la mort, il refusait la langue bavarde et péremptoire de l’Imaginaire)’. And in the margins of Barthes’s 20 Roland Barthes, Journal de deuil, ed. Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil/Imec, 2009), p. 72. 21 If the diary itself might be thought a clear example of a mise en situation of writing, rather than the mise en position or a faire comme si, the content of this entry provides another instance of a merging the two—a Barthes falling off the bicycle he’s trying to get back on, a Barthes saving himself from too much empirical pain by his exaggerated imitation of somebody falling off their bicycle: ‘par instinct, je me laisse aller à tomber excessivement, les deux jambes en l’air, dans la posture la plus ridicule qui soit’ (OC, V.676).

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typescript can be deciphered an overdetermined annotation, added at some stage of rereading: ‘ça fait: pascalien’. Barthes needed to make a literary wager—can I publish this diary: yes or no?—but could not decide to do so.22 The drafts of the expository sections of ‘Délibération’ show the extent to which his overly self-conscious ‘deliberating’ interferes with the possibility of faith in the diary form as literature. A crossed-out paragraph states: ‘Je suis donc pris dans un Imaginaire de la Délibération, dont le propre est ce pouvoir que j’ai (comme il me fatigue!) d’imaginer les bonnes raisons du choix, sans cependant rien choisir’. Imagining ‘l’autre’ reading his diary, he is seized with doubts about its value (‘je suis saisi d’un trouble de l’Image’), adds a parenthesis (‘à tort ou à raison, peu importe: je suis ici dans l’Imaginaire’), but also adds in the margin: ‘mais cet Imaginaire est “réel” puisque j’en souffre’. Thus the Barthes who assumes the role of a deliberator is unable, once en situation, to break free of his rhetorical mise en position. Appropriately, it is Saint Ignatius who, as the pivotal election approaches at the end of the second week of the Exercices spirituels, elaborates a ‘quatrième règle’ well-suited to Barthes’s case: ‘regardant et considérant l’état où je me trouverai au jour du Jugement, penser à la façon dont je voudrais alors avoir décidé quant à la présente affaire et la règle que je voudrais alors avoir suivie; l’adopter maintenant, afin que je goûte alors un bonheur et une jouissance entière’. 23 As the posthumous scales slowly tip in the direction of publication, has Barthes found joy in the fact that his diaries are increasingly consumed as literature, and that his own anxious image has been confirmed as that of a writer?

22 In an oft-quoted entry for 5 August 1977, Barthes describes being overwhelmed by Prince Bolkonsky’s death scene in War and Peace: ‘La littérature a sur moi un effet de vérité autrement plus violent que la religion. Je veux dire par là, simplement, qu’elle est comme la religion’ (‘Délibération’, V.676). 23 Saint Ignace de Loyola, Exercices spirituels, pp. 14–15.

chapter four

The Eclipse of Form in Roland Barthes’s La Chambre claire Johnnie Gratton The Eclipse of Form

Roland Barthes began to write La Chambre claire in mid-April 1979, a month after winding up the first half of his 24 lectures on La Préparation du roman. Most of these had focused strongly on the haiku as the exemplary ‘Forme brève’, thus the short form most eligible to play a key role in his future conception of a longer tierce-forme. Much hinges on the word forme, on the notion of form, on morphology, in these lectures, and this applies equally to the second series, running from December 1979 to late February 1980, by which time Barthes had long since submitted the manuscript of La Chambre claire to his editor. In these later lectures, formal concerns remain prominent, especially where Barthes weighs up the merits of two ‘formes fantasmées’, Album and Livre. As always, however, his approach to form continues to ignore the constraints of formalism. Thus the haiku, for Barthes the ultimate forme brève, is considered, through its very brevity, to be a conductor or inductor of ‘truth’.1 Elsewhere, more modestly, but also more in line with his long-standing notion of ‘responsible form’, he points out the need to examine ‘[les] valeurs investies dans la Forme brève; et donc [les] résistances’ (PR, 211). Form embodies a stand ‘for’ and a stand ‘against’. A more dramatic version of this take on formal agency is offered at the start of the lecture of 12 January 1980. Barthes imagines himself as a 1 Roland Barthes, La Préparation du roman. Cours au Collège de France 1978–1979 et 1979–1980, ed. Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil, 2015), pp. 64–65. Henceforth cited in parentheses as PR.

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writer faced with the choice between two quasi-generic forms, Book or Album. This choice, he explains, bears on something beyond content or form, something ‘ideological’, which he names, precisely, as ‘la responsabilité des formes’ (the last written invocation of this conceptual mantra before his death; PR, 349; emphasis original). He concludes from this, rather starkly, that one cannot choose the right form, and cannot therefore start to write, without first deciding what one’s ‘philosophy’ is (PR, 350). Much as he had as far back as Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953), Barthes regards form to be the crux of the written word and, through its genesis via a series of considered choices and decisions, to be both the hallmark and site of the writer’s conscientious engagement with matters of meaning, value and belief. How come, then, that in the book sandwiched between these two sets of lectures, form, as a point of reference (whatever its guise or inflection) has ceased to innervate Barthes’s ‘nouvelle analyse’ of photography?2 (Constraints of space prevent me from addressing the formal cast or generic status of the book itself.) More bluntly, why does Barthes seem to lose interest in questions of form once he turns to photography? As addressing these questions will take up the bulk of my essay, I should perhaps signal here my intention to show eventually how Barthes might have found a way, without sacrificing his principles, to integrate a redeemed, ‘forceful’ notion of form into his ‘new analysis’ of photography. One answer to these questions bears on the fact that, nowhere more than in the visual arts, does ‘form’ tend to get reduced to visible form. And, although Barthes invokes morphological parameters in La Préparation du roman, his overriding preoccupation is with broadly ‘responsible’ rather than narrowly ‘visible’ form. It would therefore seem that, for Barthes, the photographic medium held far less potential for critical inquiry into form than did the medium of language. In La Chambre claire, form was to be an also-ran, if not an outright non-starter. Another way of answering these questions lies in a basic divergence between the course of lectures and the book. In the former, Barthes sustains an empathic identification with the object of his inquiry, which is less the preparation of a novel than the intimately explored preparations 2 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Gallimard/ Seuil, 1980), p. 37. Henceforth cited in parentheses as CC. Barthes’s chosen adjective—‘nouvelle’—points straight to his Vita Nuova project.

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of the novelist, whose main instantiation is Barthes himself as aspiring novel writer. The inquiring subject is part of his heroically characterized focal object. Empathy enforces a set-up that includes the figure of the novelist, visible behind the novel, as it were. In La Chambre claire, very differently, Barthes will settle for the viewpoint of the Spectator of photography (33–36), a viewer designed to attend to what he sees with little more than perfunctory acknowledgement of the photographer. This enforces a set-up destined to marginalize the photographer as both a source of agency and a figure worthy of empathic identification. Empathy, and pathic investment in general, will be reserved for what is seen and who is seen in photographs. In La Préparation du roman, we are shown writers pondering and testing forms, facing up to important formal decisions. 3 These are under-the-bonnet aspects of writing that have no equivalent in La Chambre claire when it comes to photography. Thus the set-up of the book clearly predisposes it to leave form, as a dimension of photography or the photograph, on the very outskirts of the writer’s field of attention and attachment. The set-up’s negations are most baldly, if parenthetically, stated in a draft manuscript of the book: ‘(le photographe, je n’y pense pas) […] (encore une fois, phénoménologiquement, la photographie ne compte pas)’.4 Further factors are rapidly brought into play as copartners in this sidelining process. The first is Barthes’s key decision in chapter 2 to elect the referent as the cornerstone of his approach to photography, a commitment underwritten by his return to phenomenology. He fashions the premise that no photo can ever be distinguished, or delaminated, from its referent, simply defined as ‘ce [que la photo] représente’ (CC, 16). The reductive5 consequences of this move are starkly expressed: ‘Quoi qu’elle donne à voir et quelle que soit sa manière, une photo est toujours invisible: ce n’est pas elle qu’on voit’ (CC, 18). The photograph’s job is to show, donner à voir: its function (for the time being) is purely ostensive. As such, it remains invisible, immaterial, and this regardless of its 3 On the importance of ‘formal decisions’ in the making or taking of photos, see Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs (London: Phaidon, 2007), pp. 98, 110, 122. 4 Quoted in Guillaume Bellon, ‘Barthes et l’“hésitation” proustienne ou le cheminement des deux côtés de La Chambre claire’, Genesis 36 (2013), 165–77; paragraph 12 in the online version, http://genesis.revues.org/1166 (consulted 30 September 2015). 5 Reducing things down to the irreducible is a key (and very Husserlian) vector of methodicity in La Chambre claire.

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manière, a term subsuming, in the moment of its dismissal, questions of form and style, and more broadly still, the whole dimension of the photographer’s technical input and self-investment into the photo. One major consequence of the primacy accorded to the referent is that Barthes’s actual descriptions of photographic image content rarely inflect ‘what is represented’ as represented (let alone enhanced or transformed). When his attention is drawn to forms, as with Warhol’s ‘ongles spatulés, à la fois mous et cernés’, or Mapplethorpe’s hand ‘dans son bon degré d’ouverture’, he logs them as solid forms, properties of informed matter belonging to the material world (CC, 77, 95). In Husserl’s terms, Barthes has passed through the stages of the physical object and the image object to ‘that normal contemplation of the picture’ whereby ‘I live in the image consciousness’: a state he describes as one of immersion or absorption. In Husserl’s words once more, I now see (indeed Barthes, from the outset, only sees) ‘the form of a sublime woman, of superhuman size’, as distinct from ‘an achromatic little figure of a woman, about a foot and a half high, tinted only in black and white’.6 By immersing himself in the referent, then, in an important respect Barthes renders the photograph as invisible as the photographer. Another factor that discourages any serious consideration of form is Barthes’s explicit commitment to affect, for affect introduces the paradigm destined to outstrip form, namely force: ‘Ma phénoménologie acceptait de se compromettre avec une force, l’affect; l’affect était ce que je ne voulais pas réduire; étant irréductible, il était par là même ce à quoi je voulais, je devais réduire la Photo’ (CC, 41). By the end of La Chambre claire, this reduction will indeed have been completed, as reason gives way to madness, perception to hallucination, and referent to a mere placeholder, leaving affect alone to provide the yardstick of being (‘garant de l’être’; CC, 176). In all this, ‘form’ has become a redundant concept. The affective subject is part of a more widely drawn subject, to whom Barthes attributes not just commitments, but also a range of entitlements dispensing him from anything that might deter him from writing ‘on’ photography as he sees, feels and thinks it. The self-mandating principle 6 Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 47–48. Husserl is looking here at a black-and-white reproduction of a painting of the Madonna by Raphael. In La Chambre claire, the one non-immersive exception to this bracketing is to be found in Barthes’s passing evocation of the photographic referent as a ‘petit simulacre’ (p. 22).

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in this respect is the pour-moi, guardian of Barthes’s idiosyncrasies and bestower of instant incontrovertibility upon his assertions. The pour-moi determines what counts and what fails to count, with examples of the latter getting unceremoniously ditched, whether it be the arid formalism of ‘[les] règles de composition du paysage photographique’ or the whole of knowledge: ‘je congédie tout savoir, toute culture, je m’abstiens d’un autre regard’ (CC, 19, 82) Throughout Barthes’s work, the verb congédier signals his view of Husserl’s epoché as sanctioning a ‘good’, or at least necessary, dogmatism to counter a variety of mainstream dogmatisms. I stated earlier that La Chambre claire is primed to sweep form, as a dimension of photography or the photograph, to the periphery of the writer’s field of preoccupation. In concrete terms, this means that textual occurrences of the word forme, alongside its verbal and adjectival cognates, are not only rare in the book, but also largely innocuous. The book actually contains more instances of transformation and its cognates than it does of forme and its cognates. That said, I have selected two occurrences where the verb former, and then the noun forme, while put to unremarkable use, nevertheless merit attention. The first of these examples crops up in chapter 28, which recounts Barthes’s discovery of and reaction to the Winter Garden Photo: J’observai la petite fille et je retrouvai enfin ma mère. La clarté de son visage, la pose naïve de ses mains, la place qu’elle avait occupée docilement sans se montrer ni se cacher, son expression enfin, qui la distinguait, comme le Bien du Mal, de la petite fille hystérique, de la poupée minaudante qui joue aux adultes, tout cela formait la figure d’une innocence souveraine … (CC, 107)

Verbs of forming are regularly used across a wide range of contexts to describe how a number of items can be seen or made to constitute parts of a whole. A very simple example of such forming occurs right at the start of Barthes’s ekphrasis of the Winter Garden Photo, when he observes that the faded print before his eyes just about showed ‘deux jeunes enfants debout, formant groupe’ (CC, 106). Against this, the emergent ‘figure of sovereign innocence’ clearly offers a more complex case of formativity since, as an outcome, it is not limited to a purely physical or visual order. This ‘figure’, at once composed of, and distilled from, ‘tout cela’ (i.e. everything about her), encapsulates a typifying, abstract ideal, as underlined by a follow-through constellating ‘innocence’ with ‘douceur’ and ‘bonté’. Yet Barthes, at this particular stage of his

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narrative, is at pains to dispel any implications of a transcendence of visuality. Thus he insists that, in this ‘image de petite fille’, he could ‘see’ his mother’s essential goodness. Recalling how such was her goodness that she never passed remarks, he explains what he finds exceptional about the Winter Garden Photo in the following terms: ‘Cette circonstance extrême et particulière, si abstraite par rapport à une image, était présente cependant dans le visage qu’elle avait sur la photographie que je venais de retrouver’ (CC, 109). The abstract qualities she epitomizes are manifest in their visible immanence. Nowhere in La Chambre claire can Barthes be found writing more reassuringly, more serenely about the visual, or about the visually formative, or indeed about the visually informative, than in the paragraph just examined. Nevertheless, I think we need to recognize that he is also dishing out some backhanded compliments here. As regards the photo, for instance, Barthes does not say that the goodness he saw was present in the photographic image, but that it was present ‘dans le visage qu’elle avait sur la photographie’ (my emphasis: the point is more tellingly made in French due to the prepositional shift from dans to sur, from immanence to imprint). Thus the photo has at best recorded and preserved that face. And what of the figure that was initially formed out of four aspects of the little girl (not just her face)? There can be no question that the photo’s composition in any way privileges her over her brother as (a) they are standing together, and (b) she in relation to him is actually ‘plus loin, plus petite’ (CC, 106). The idealizing figure conjured by Barthes would not be visible to our unprimed eyes even if he showed us the photo, and this because it is a form organized and energized almost unilaterally by an affect-laden gaze, a loaded gaze, that of Barthes the beholder desperately seeking the ‘right’ image (‘image juste’) of the mother he has lost.7 As such, the figure invites characterization as what the scientist René Thom calls a ‘pregnant form’, one definition of which is quoted by Barthes himself in his last lecture on La Préparation du roman before he started to write La Chambre claire: ‘Une forme est prégnante si elle suscite des réactions dont l’intensité est tout à fait disproportionnée, du point de vue quantitatif, avec l’intensité du stimulus’ (PR 231).8 In that lecture, 7 At any given point, either the beholder or the photo can be said to start things off. But, in virtually all cases, a loop of mutual inter-animation will quickly take over: ‘telle photo, tout d’un coup, m’arrive; elle m’anime et je l’anime’ (CC, 39). 8 The quotation is from René Thom, ‘Entretien sur les catastrophes, le langage, et la métaphysique extrême’, Ornicar 16 (1978), 73–109 (p. 75). On the same page,

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Barthes was using Thom’s concept to shed light on the ‘moment de vérité’, whereas, in my view, it applies more readily to examples of photos (the only ones that really count for Barthes) where forms begin to act as forces, thereby inducing in the viewer an unusually intense response. I shall return to the key concept of pregnant form in due course. I turn now to my second example of a form word put to interesting use by Barthes. It features in chapter 39 of La Chambre claire, as he returns to his notion of the punctum for the first time in Part II of the book, soon after having narrated his discovery of the Winter Garden Photo: ‘Je sais maintenant qu’il existe un autre punctum (un autre “stigmate”) que le “détail”. Ce nouveau punctum, qui n’est plus de forme, mais d’intensité, c’est le Temps, c’est l’emphase déchirante du noème (“ça-a-été”), sa représentation pure’ (CC, 148). The new punctum introduced by Barthes is one of many changes reflecting the palinodie announced at the end of Part I of La Chambre claire: palinodie, retraction, more specifically Barthes’s disavowal of his initial choice of a ‘projet hédoniste’, of an analysis undertaken from ‘[le] point de vue du plaisir’ (CC, 95, 115). We are now offered a punctum said to be no longer to do with ‘form’ because it no longer has the status of a ‘detail’. The word forme, at no point called upon to characterize either punctum or détail in Part I, is here finally enlisted, only to be revoked and instantly supplanted by the paradigm of force, evident in the term intensité. This is a paradigm largely deployed in the service of affect, as instanced here by the adjective déchirante (heartrending), which describes the impact of the noema of photography, ‘ça-a-été’. Previously so christened in chapter 32, this noema now enters a three-term equation: punctum = ‘ça-a-été’ = Time. And so the logic of the sentence builds to its climax: the new punctum is the ‘pure representation’ of Time. Context supports the argument that what Barthes means here by ‘pure representation’ is the paradox of representation without pictorial analogue, representation uncircumscribed by form or figure. ‘Ça-a-été’ in this new context can only be felt, suffered, doubtless through the photographic image, but not in the image since this noema is beyond the reach of showing or seeing. This understanding of ‘pure’ representation is confirmed later in the same chapter by Barthes’s recourse, not for the first time in his text, to the idiom of ‘reading’ photographs: a problematic move, given the fact that, Thom explains that pregnant form so defined has strong affinities with what ethologists call ‘supernormal releasers’—my correction of Thom’s ‘supra normal releasers’.

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in La Chambre claire, he frequently underlines the contrary capacities of language and photographic image, to the point of pondering ‘pourquoi, en dépit de ses codes, je ne puis lire une photo’ (CC, 141; Barthes’s emphasis). Having unveiled his notion of the new punctum, he proceeds to discuss how it manifests itself in Alexander Gardner’s famous 1865 photo of Lewis Payne, taken prior to the latter’s execution for the attempted assassination of the then American Secretary of State. As further evidence that ‘pure’ representation points to a beyond of visual apprehension, Barthes explains that ‘le punctum, c’est: il va mourir. Je lis en même temps: cela sera et cela a été’ (CC, 150). His choice of the verb lire could not be more calculated here: ‘what will be’ and ‘what once was’ are more like statements made by photos than visible properties of photos. The verb is later reiterated when Barthes asserts that ‘ce punctum, plus ou moins gommé sous l’abondance et la disparité, se lit à vif dans la photographie historique’ (CC, 150). Although Richard Howard’s rendering ‘is vividly legible’ for ‘se lit à vif’ is a relatively fair translation,9 his choice of English adverb fails to register the sense of ‘open wound’ with which the French adverbial phrase is associated. There results a double loss: firstly, because the translation elides the echo in à vif of the contextually present terms ‘horreur’ and ‘catastrophe’ (CC, 150), all three marking the beholder’s distress at, and recoil from, the new punctum; and, secondly, because it leaves but a faint trace of what, in the French, is more evidently an instance of legibility and visibility being cross-wired into an oxymoron, suggesting something like an unseen as stark as the sight of an open wound. The differences between the two parts of La Chambre claire should not be exaggerated. For example, the subordination of form to force is established well before Part II, a fact blatantly demonstrated, as it happens, in the sequence of chapters (19–23) dealing with the punctum. From an early point in this sequence, the punctum seems eager to shake off any formal restriction to detail. Already in chapter 19, by attributing to it a ‘force d’expansion’ (CC, 74), Barthes is able to claim that the surface of a dirt road covering three-quarters of the surface of a photo is a punctum. Soon after this, we encounter an example of an ‘unnameable’ punctum in a photograph—a double full-body portrait of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass taken by Robert Mapplethorpe. Barthes explains: ‘Bob Wilson me retient, mais je n’arrive pas à dire pourquoi, 9 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, [1981] 2000) p. 96.

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c’est-à-dire où: est-ce le regard, la peau, la position des mains, les chaussures de basket? L’effet est sûr, mais il est irrepérable, il ne trouve pas son signe, son nom’ (CC, 87). The punctum here is intuited through its effect, its affective impact on the viewer. However, being untraceable back to its cause, the effect cannot be pinned down to a location. This neatly turned image of orphaned effects seems to imply a further uncoupling: that of punctal effects from any kind of effect attributable to the visual nature of the photograph. To put it another way, despite the initial localization of punctum in detail, the evidence offered of its proneness to non-location and dislocation implies that it can never be contained within the boundary of a spatial form. Thus the later ‘new’ punctum, reviewed above, clearly inherits some key features of this, the ‘old’ punctum. A similar uncoupling is implied when, in the same chapter, Barthes reminds us of a photo he has already discussed, explaining that once it had worked away inside him since his first viewing of it, he realized that its ‘true’ punctum ‘was’ a quite different object to that originally identified. So we now go from unlocatable to re-locatable punctum. Significantly, a withdrawal of vision from the overall act of considering a photograph is an option recommended in the thick of Barthes’s discussion of this belated but finally ‘true’ punctum: ‘Il arrive que je puisse mieux connaître une photo dont je me souviens qu’une photo que je vois, comme si la vision directe orientait à faux le langage, l’engageant dans un effort de description qui, toujours, manquera le point de l’effet, le punctum’ (CC, 87). This all sounds quite reasonable at one level. Here we have Barthes the champion of indirectness, favouring recourse to memory over ‘straightforward viewing’ as a way of getting into a photo. Yet, despite the mitigated tone of his account (this is occasional, and it’s only ‘as if’), he cannot stop himself from once more associating perception with falsehood, whence a more provocative follow-up: ‘pour bien voir une photo, il vaut mieux lever la tête ou fermer les yeux’ (CC, 88). In his round-up on the punctum, chapter 23, Barthes confirms his understanding of this factor as not only a spur to post-visual apprehensions of photographs, but also an active force of de-visualization in its own right. The starting point for his main move is the punctum located in or on a person that the beholder would instantly like to meet. This desire provokes an inter-animation between beholder and photo, such that ‘le punctum fait fantastiquement sortir le personnage […] de la photographie, il pourvoit cette photo d’un champ aveugle’ (CC, 91). He explains the ‘blind field’ in relation to André Bazin’s famous

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distinction between the cadre of painting (frame) and the cache of film (frame as masking device, masking border or slide-mask).10 The concept of cache would go on to generate the technical terms hors-champ and champ aveugle in film studies. Familiar with both terms, Barthes uses the former once in La Chambre claire and the latter five times, all in Chapter 23, which is actually entitled ‘Champ aveugle’. And it is quite clear that his preference for this term reflects his eagerness to track punctum-driven events as eclipses of visuality. Indeed, the effective and affective force of the punctum is asserted here to be so strong that it actually supplies (i.e. creates) the ‘blind field’. The accompanying event described by Barthes involves a ‘character’ (personnage)11 exiting the photo, disappearing from view. This is not just a quasi-cinematic event. More fundamentally, it stands as a quasi-event,12 a metaphoric event conveying the beholder’s sense that the bearer of the punctum has, or once had, ‘toute une vie extérieure à son portrait’ (CC, 91). Boundaries and frames seem to exist only to be overstepped or overspilt, ‘comme si’, Barthes proposes, ‘l’image lançait le désir au-delà de ce qu’elle donne à voir’ (CC, 93). This is a compelling suggestion, worded in such a way as to win over doubters of his apparently anti-visual (and therefore anti-formal) stance on photography. And, although Part II of the book concerns itself with affects principally other than desire, it will continue to affirm and explore the powerful notion of a beyond of pictorial showing—not least in his conception of the ‘new’ punctum. Barthes develops a discursively rendered understanding of photography that constantly turns, or tropes, away from the medium’s visibility in order to decry its hegemony, deny its importance or, perhaps, simply to leave its obviousness to speak for itself. If further evidence is required to support this line of thinking, one need only take cognizance of the way Barthes regularly displaces seeing and looking, if only as lexical realizations, in favour of the paradigm of touch and the idiom of ‘reading’ the image. Limitations of space prevent me from any close 10 See André Bazin, ‘Peinture et cinéma’, in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1981), pp. 187–91 (p. 188). 11 This term is Sartrean as well as filmic. See CC, 38–39 for a lengthy quotation from Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire (1940), in which human figures in photographs are described as ‘personnages’. 12 One already rehearsed in Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), where the spoilsport is less the still photograph than representation itself, writ large: ‘La représentation, c’est cela: quand rien ne sort, quand rien ne saute hors du cadre: du tableau, du livre, de l’écran’ (p. 90).

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examination of these two complex issues. Suffice it to say here that the former is instanced in a host of ways, beginning (like so much in the book) with the punctum, the seeing of which is logically rendered as its pricking of the viewer. As for the latter, I have already examined one example of a photo being read. There, ‘reading’ blatantly supplanted ‘seeing’. But in other cases it comes across more as a supplement, or even a complement, of seeing. The positive spin on these alternatives to visual apprehension would be to say that they help turn La Chambre claire into a fascinating exploration of the basic idea that there’s more to photography than meets the eye. Approached from this angle, the book’s diverse vocabularies might most tolerantly be understood as contributions to a general synaesthetics of photography—one that embraces not just the sensorial, but the affective and the corporeal. Barthes’s chosen motto of himself as Spectator gives a flavour of this desire for interrelatedness. Compared to its intertext, Descartes’s famous ‘Cogito ergo sum’, it offers a rather busy bunch of verbs: ‘je vois, je sens, donc je remarque, je regarde et je pense’ (CC, 42). Sight is necessarily inscribed here, for this is the motto of the beholder. However, where Descartes moved from one single term to another, Barthes expands the range of what can be deemed to count. Seeing and feeling are paired as co-equal, synchronized capacities while, on the other side of ergo, the ‘result’ of that correlation is a trio of capacities activated by the beholder, once more, implicitly, all on a par and in unison with one another. Significantly, Barthes has retained Descartes’s ‘je pense’, but in such a way as to strip it of its Cartesian privilege as source and guarantor of being, for it is now positioned as part of an outcome whose impetus is driven by an alloy of seeing and feeling (by a body). Strategically, moreover, ‘je pense’ ensures that ‘je regarde’ cannot hog the limelight. Thus does Barthes’s cogito of the beholder acknowledge and yet simultaneously deprivilege visual apprehension. As La Chambre claire reaches its close, any belated opportunity for form to make a comeback is thwarted by an ever-stronger sense that, under the regime of the ‘new’ punctum, perception itself has ceased to be of value, most notably as a pathway towards anything ‘true’. For example, at the end of chapter 36, Barthes asserts: ‘L’important, c’est que la photo possède une force constative, et que le constatif de la Photographie porte, non sur l’objet, mais sur le temps. D’un point de vue phénoménologique, dans la Photographie, le pouvoir d’authentification prime le pouvoir de représentation’ (CC, 138–39). A new force is identified, one that shifts

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the balance of power from representation to authentication, thereby threatening the primacy of the referent, for the ‘new’ punctum bears ‘not on the object’ but, as already stated, and now restated, on ‘time’. Eventually, Barthes’s loss of faith in perception opens the way to a new sort of faith, one kindled in the beholder as he experiences a switch from donner à voir to donner à croire (CC, 175) and, concurrently, a happy confusion of ‘reality’—‘Ça a été’—and ‘truth’—‘C’est ça!’ (CC,  176). This redemptive realignment of the capacity of photography has the hallucinatory power to elevate a mere ‘effigy’ (meaning for Barthes a poor, disembodied likeness) to a point where ‘l’affect […] est garant de l’être’ (CC, 176). The book brings us to this ultimate point, the gateway to the realm of ‘mad truth’ (CC, 176), an immersive environment utterly foreign to considerations of form. Ultimately, it would seem, it is not just the punctum that ‘no longer has to do with form’ (CC, 148), but the whole book. We might even call La Chambre claire a post-formalist work. In such circumstances, is there any way that form in photography can be rehabilitated against the grain of the book, if not necessarily against Barthes at large? Apropos of this question, I find it regrettable that Barthes did not live long enough to become more familiar with the work of René Thom, who was still only developing his notion of ‘pregnant form’ (referenced earlier) at the time of Barthes’s death. I shall now try to show how this notion can enhance our understanding of the Barthesian punctum, and, more broadly, how it can revive and redeem the notion of form itself. This aspiration depends on establishing the value of a broad analogy, with all the risks attached to ‘broad analogies’! The starting point of Thom’s ‘semiophysics’ is the distinction he draws between ‘salient’ form and ‘pregnant’ form (a fair rendering of the latter in English would be ‘charged form’).13 Salience is a property attributed to any individuated form (typically a solid object) that is experienced as occupying a delimited region of space and standing out against a background. Most saliences go unnoticed; if registered, they linger only to fade. Certain forms, however, bear not just salience, but pregnance (translating the French prégnance). These forms are imbued with significance such that, once recognized, they trigger strong hormonal, motor and emotional reactions in the subject, whether human or animal—hence 13 Unless otherwise indicated, my presentation of these forms is based on Thom’s characterization of them in chapter 1 of his Esquisse d’une sémiophysique (Paris: Interéditions, 1998), pp. 15–34.

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Thom’s occasional switch of terminology from ‘pregnant’ to ‘inductive’ form (a term chiming strongly with Barthes’s repeated use of the verb induire in La Chambre claire to attest this particular capacity of photos).14 My focus here will be on ‘subjective’ (as opposed to ‘objective’) pregnances. In the biological domain, Thom asserts, ‘la prégnance d’une forme n’est pas une propriété intrinsèque de la forme, elle s’origine dans la privation des sujets sur lesquels elle s’exerce’.15 This applies most obviously to animal behaviour, but also has wider and higherlevel resonances. Thus, when one thinks of the affective palette of La Chambre claire, ‘deprivation’ strikes a chord, covering not just a range of desires awoken by photographs (especially by photographic puncta), but also Barthes’s feelings of loss and grief as they crystallize around the Winter Garden Photo. Moreover, Thom reiterates here a key aspect of subjective pregnance (and one that will lead us back to the punctum): it cannot be an intrinsic property of form (as was the case with Gestaltist Prägnanz) because its origins lie in an act of subjective investment, itself partly conditioned by the subject’s genetic and personal (including sexual) history. Like all of us, Barthes brings ‘baggage’ to his acts of beholding such that, whenever he identifies a punctum, he risks giving himself away.16 If Barthes’s punctum bears comparison to ‘supernormal releasers’ (see note 8), it would equally seem to invite definition as a hyper-subjective pregnant form. In the very interview read and quoted by Barthes, Thom contends that the pregnance of a form is always linked to a certain identification of the subject with the invested object, and that, by virtue of this link, ‘il y a non seulement intentionnalité du sujet, mais intentionnalité conférée à l’objet’.17 This notion of two-way intentionality runs close to Barthes’s general idea of inter-animation between image and beholder, as well as being strongly echoed in the agency attributed to the punctum, whereby it pierces me. Furthermore, in Thom’s discourse, pregnances ‘invade’, ‘infiltrate’ or ‘contaminate’ salient forms (penetrative actions close in 14 See notably CC, 65, 93, 123 and 131. 15 René Thom, ‘Pouvoirs de la forme’, in Les Figures de la forme, ed. Jean Gayon and Jean-Jacques Wunenburger (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), pp. 17–26 (p. 23). 16 The baggage here stems from the equation ‘detail’ = ‘part object’, leading to the comment: ‘Aussi, donner des exemples de punctum, c’est, d’une certaine façon, me livrer’ (CC, 73; emphasis original). 17 Thom, ‘Entretien’, p. 76.

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their semantic make-up to ‘piercing’), and then ‘propagate’ towards other salient forms; as such, they warrant description as invisible, labile, restless forces. Thus, when Barthes relocates a punctum, or when he experiences a punctum as the effect of an unlocatable cause, he is in the same disorderly zone as Thom, both of them delighting in the break from stable-state objects of inquiry and the positivisms that fund such inquiry. Transitionally speaking, unruly punctum is to tidy studium what pregnant form is to salient form. To sum up via an alternative terminology, deployed by both Barthes and Thom, both thinkers rail against any reduction of the imaginary to the symbolic. Finally, both Barthes on photography and Thom on pregnant form lend considerable importance to invisibility, especially as a property of forces at work in or upon visible plastic entities. In each case, a state of invisibility obtains when reception exceeds perception, when one has the experience, for example, that there is more ‘to’ a photo than just what is ‘in’ it. Thom’s ‘disproportionality’ remains the name of the game. However, there are also some clear differences between the two analysts in the way they handle the visible. While Barthes sees, looks, observes, scrutinizes and so on, he also apprehends photos in ways, and through terms, that are non-visual, post-visual or frankly anti-visual, and it is the influx of hostility into his approach to the visual that leads him to drop form in favour of force. In Thom’s theory, on the other hand, neither form nor its visibility is eclipsed (or supplanted); the invaded salient form is transformed into a highly charged, ‘pregnant’ state (it is supplemented) but, for all that, remains a form. More morphologically minded than Barthes, Thom also insists that pregnant forms cannot exist without salient forms (their relationship is one of complementarity). What, then, can forms do? This is not a pertinent question for Barthes, at least within the confines of his book on photography. But Thom does have an answer: forms can absorb forces, or even become forces, and this without ceasing to be forms. I think it fair to hypothesize that, once equipped with a fuller understanding of Thom’s ideas, Barthes would have been willing to recalibrate some of his own, in such a way as to acknowledge that forms and forces could coexist, oxymoronically or otherwise, alongside all the other strands making up his synaesthetics of photography. After all, doesn’t he say as much in virtually all of his other main works?

chapter five

Going on, or Achieving Interruption Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir Mairéad Hanrahan Going on, or Achieving Interruption

‘You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’:1 the famous ending to Beckett’s The Unnameable, with its double contradiction—on the one hand, between the announced impossibility of any continuation and its immediate continuation by a promise of continuation and, on the other, between the final promise of continuation and the textual silence that follows it—serves here as a springboard to approach the poet Jacques Roubaud’s 1986 collection of poems, Quelque chose noir. 2 Roubaud’s book originates in his grief following the abrupt and tragically premature death of his wife, Alix, in 1983. It is one of two projects that helped him to ‘go on’ in the sense of survive, continue living. This essay offers an investigation of that ‘going on’: I want to argue that for Roubaud the production of a poetic form constitutes an achievement, a success, because its very existence demonstrates that the devastatingly multifaceted ending represented by Alix’s death—her end, the end of their life together, the end also of the Roubaud of whose life she was a fundamental part and who in some sense died along with her—will prove at least at some level to have been an interruption, a temporary rather than a final end. But this refusal to accept an end is also an

1 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (London: John Calder, 1959), p. 418. 2 Jacques Roubaud, Quelque chose noir (Paris: Gallimard collection nrf Poésie, 1986). Henceforward QCN.

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attempt to achieve an end, to put an end to (or achever) the stillness that paralyses the poet in his suffering. Both in Quelque chose noir and in Le Grand incendie de londres, the other project developed after Alix’s demise, a work in prose rather than in verse, Roubaud speaks of the silencing effect that her disappearance had on him. Significantly, this silencing affects above all his capacity for poetry. Early in Le grand incendie, he states: Or, ce qui est devenu nul, pour moi, c’est la poésie. La prose, du moins une prose telle que celle à laquelle je m’exerce ici, m’apparaît, à l’inverse, le lieu d’absolue neutralité qui n’a, et pour longtemps, besoin ni des yeux d’un lecteur ni des oreilles d’un auditoire. La poésie, parce que j’avais pris l’habitude de la dire à haute voix, de lire en public, et pour elle, avec qui je vivais, s’est arrêtée pour moi […] J’avance ligne après ligne sans espérance et quand le jour, un peu plus en retard de nouveau chaque jour, m’en chasse, je retourne aux apparences de la vie. 3

The quotation establishes a link between poetry and life in that the poet used to read aloud ‘pour elle, avec qui je vivais’: while he was living with her, but also while there was someone with whom he was alive. Losing Alix was akin to stopping living. The passage thus links the distinction between poetry and prose to a question of continuity. Poetry is associated with discontinuity (‘s’est arrêtée’), whereas prose advances continuously, ‘ligne après ligne’. Indeed, the beginning of Le grand incendie describes in painful, laborious detail the poet’s laborious, painful attempt to cover the white page as fully as possible with uninterrupted black lines. Even in the depths of desolation, prose goes on. The question, however, is how alive this minimal survival can be said to be. Where the quotation from Beckett promises a continuation that the imminent ending of the book contradicts, Roubaud’s prose presents a continuation—it goes on—but one that is not necessarily a proof of life. In Quelque chose noir, the poet specifies that engagement in external activity is no guarantee of inner life; he follows a description of himself answering the telephone and hearing someone speak to him with the sentence: ‘Cela ne prouvera pas qu’il est vivant’ (QCN, 55). In the above quotation, the daylight that interrupts his writing of prose returns him ‘aux apparences de la vie’, a highly ambiguous formulation. Is writing prose different from the appearance of living in that it is ‘really’ living, has something vital that is lacking in the routine activities that populate his day, or does it not 3 Jacques Roubaud, Le Grand incendie de londres (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 55.

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even attain the ‘appearance’ of life? Or is this above all an invitation to infer that prose relates to poetry as ‘apparently living’ relates to living: a somewhat mechanical process that bears only a superficial resemblance to the ideal it replaces? Twice within Quelque chose noir, notably in ‘Aphasie’, Roubaud explicitly mentions his silence: Devant ta mort je suis resté entièrement silencieux. Je n’ai pas pu parler pendant presque trente mois. Je ne pouvais plus parler selon ma manière de dire qui est la poésie. (QCN, 131)

He contrasts this inability to speak with his reaction to an earlier death, that of his brother, which had marked his entry into poetry, the beginning of his poetic speech: J’avais commencé à parler, en poésie, vingt-deux ans avant. C’était après une autre mort. Avant cette autre mort je ne savais comment dire. j’étais comme silencieux.   Ainsi, pris entre deux ‘bords’ de mort. (QCN, 132–33)

The difference between Roubaud’s being ‘entièrement silencieux’ after Alix’s death and ‘comme silencieux’ before his brother’s suggests that anything he said prior to the latter was equivalent to silence (only an ‘appearance’ of speaking). Poetry figures here explicitly as an interruption of silence. Not only, then, was poetry (unlike prose) interrupted (‘s’est arrêtée’) in the wake of Alix’s death, it is itself a space of interruption. Above all, it involves an interruption of death as well as silence in that the time of poetry is the period ‘entre deux “bords” de mort’. Nonetheless, the material existence of the poems manifestly attests to the fact that the interruption of poetry (the 30 months during which he could not speak) has itself now been interrupted. The title of the other poem in which Roubaud alludes specifically to his inability to speak makes that temporal limit explicit: ‘1983: janvier. 1985: juin’ (QCN, 33). Unlike other dated titles that locate the poem at one particular moment (for example, those entitled ‘Méditation’: ‘Méditation du 21/7/85’, ‘Méditation du 8/5/85’ and, especially, the collection’s opening poem ‘Méditation du 12/5/85’, not quite 30 months after Alix’s death in January 1983), this title presents a gap or interval. The time in question appears to pertain not to the énonciation (when the poem was produced, as in the ‘Méditations’) but rather to the énoncé, the period that the poem is concerned with diegetically, a period that the second date

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implies has passed. However, in contrast with the use in ‘Aphasie’ of the perfect tense with its aspect achevé signalling clearly that the silence is over (‘je suis resté silencieux’, ‘je n’ai pas pu parler’), in this earlier poem the present tense predominates:      1983: janvier.   1985: juin Le registre rythmique de la parole me fait horreur. Je ne parviens pas à ouvrir un seul livre contenant de la poésie. Les heures du soir doivent être annihilées. Quand je me réveille il fait noir: toujours. Dans les centaines de matins noirs je me suis réfugié. Je lis de la prose inoffensive. Les pièces sont restées en l’état: les chaises, les murs, les volets, les vêtements, les portes. Je ferme les portes comme si le silence. La lumière me dépasse par les oreilles. (QCN, 33)

The poet thus speaks in the present about his inability in the past to engage with poetry. From the opening line, the contradiction is manifest: the poem opens with a rejection of poetry, ‘le registre rythmique de la parole’. Where there is rhythm, there is necessarily change; the loss of Roubaud’s capacity for poetry appears linked to the unremitting blackness, and bleakness, in which he finds himself. The evening (‘soir’) is a time to be ‘annihilated’; the daytime literally echoes it, featuring as a time of darkness (‘noir’) rather than light. ‘Quand je me réveille il fait noir: toujours’—the detachment of the short verse against the blank space emphasizes the possibility of reading it both literally (‘when I wake up it is still dark’) and metaphorically (‘every day is black now’). The absence of light is further reflected in the absence of sound. In the poem’s final line, it is via his ears that the poet acknowledges the absence of light; similarly, it is with our eyes that we register the silence surrounding him, both figured in the blankness made visible by the short lines and concretized in the image of the doors which have remained ‘en l’état’, unused and hence presumably unheard. ‘Je ferme les portes comme si le silence’. The parallel between the poet’s inability to open poetry in the second verse and his closing doors in the eighth is evident. However, the truncated sentence precisely leaves open whether the silence here relates to the absence of noise in the no-longer-shared apartment or his own ingrained but now needless habit of closing the door quietly so as not to disturb anyone else. Is he prolonging the silence or breaking it? It is significant that this uncertainty arises in the one truncated verse of

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the poem, the penultimate one whose missing end does not entail the end of the poem. Silence need not necessarily be a termination. If, as we saw earlier, poetry represents an interruption of silence, here silence interrupts the poem. Rather than the end of poetry, silence here signals a poem that remains to be continued. An End to ‘Now’ In effect, the need to find a way of going on, of continuing into the future, paradoxically appears closely related to the question of how to convert a present into a past. Much of the bleak tone of the early part of Quelque chose noir derives from the many and diverse ways that Roubaud creates the impression of a ghastly stillness. ‘Méditation du 12/5/85’, the poem first in order of presentation although not in order of time,4 stresses how ‘maintenant’, ‘now’, many months after Alix’s death, the poet is still haunted by the memory of the sight of the congealed blood at the end of her fingertips that caused him to realize that she was dead: Cette image se présente pour la millième fois   à neuf   avec la même violence    elle ne peut pas ne pas se répéter indéfiniment   une nouvelle génération de mes cellules   si temps il y a    trouvera cette duplication onéreuse    ces tirages photographiques internes    je n’ai pas le choix   maintenant. Rien ne m’influence dans la noirceur. Je ne m’exerce à aucune comparaison   je n’avance aucune hypothèse   je m’enfonce par les ongles. (QCN, 11)

This indefinite repetition, ‘pour la millième fois à neuf’, introduces nothing new; on the contrary, it condemns the poet to reliving the same moment again and again. ‘Si temps il y a’: he feels imprisoned in a timelessness where no movement is possible, where he cannot advance (‘je n’avance aucune hypothèse’). He goes on (continues) without going on (going forward). Change appears impossible: not only has he kept his apartment in the same condition as when he shared it with Alix, but he has maintained the same habits, eating his breakfast in silence and in darkness (‘Dès que je me lève’, QCN, 27). Even the changing daylight between the windows of his apartment, the very sign of time passing, 4 ‘Méditation du 8/5/85’ is the title of the second poem of the second section.

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is represented as an unchanging sameness. In ‘Méditation du 8/5/85’, for example, the movement of the light continues brutally the same, regardless of the drastic difference that Alix’s absence and invisibility have introduced into the room: Soir après soir Le vecteur de lumière traverse La même vitre S’éloigne Et la nuit L’emporte Où tu te ranges Invisible Dans l’épaisseur. (QCN, 29)

This sameness of the light contrasts sharply with Alix’s own work on photography in ‘quinze minutes la nuit au rythme de la respiration’, an image to which Roubaud refers both in Quelque chose noir (99) and in Le grand incendie de londres (396–403). This picture, summarized at the end of the discussion in Le grand incendie as ‘une photographie du noir, du noir même’ (GIL, 403), was taken by holding the camera ‘sur la poitrine (contre le cœur, les seins)’ (QCN, 99) for 15 minutes. The extremely slow exposure produced a blurred image that bears the imprint of Alix’s living body; although it stops time insofar as, like all photographs, it is static, it also manages to capture the traces of movement of the faintest light. With this picture, Alix succeeded in photographing not a moment in time but an interval. I want to suggest that Quelque chose noir is Roubaud’s attempt, similarly, to render the passing of time. And in so doing, not just to pass time (another echo of Beckett) but to make time pass. In the wake of Alix’s disappearance, the poet suffers from the feeling that time has stopped, exacerbated ironically by the memory that, unlike her dead body at the moment he discovered it, her watch was still moving: ‘L’aiguille de ta montre continuait à bouger. dans ta perte du temps je me trouvais tout entier inclus’ (QCN, 118). ‘Continuait à bouger’: he is in search precisely of a continuation that moves, not just an endless prolongation of the same. This poem, ‘Mort réelle et constante’, ends with his claim to be ‘entré dans une nuit qui avait un bord. au-delà de laquelle il n’y aurait rien’ (QCN, 118). The challenge for him is how to give a second ‘bord’ to the night or nothingness he experiences so that it too, like the poetic self we saw earlier, will become an interlude ‘pris

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entre deux bords’. The problem made explicit in the title is that death is ‘constante’; what he needs, in effect, is to interrupt death. Paradoxically, to do this—to make death itself into an interruption rather than an end—he needs to give death an end. Ends appear to be what he has lost on Alix’s death. In contrast with the focus in ‘Méditation du 8/5/85’ on the recurrence of the same light through the same window evening after evening, in ‘Fins’ (QCN, 38–39) the declining sunlight is reinvested more conventionally as the index of an ending: Le soleil couche sous la porte. De toute évidence quelque chose s’achève mais comment savoir quoi? si c’était le jour ce serait simple, mais d’une simplicité extérieure, n’impliquant que des gestes: la lampe, la fermeture des portes, le lit. Ce ne peut pas être cela.

However, what exactly is drawing towards a conclusion – ‘s’achève’ – remains uncertain. The poet rules out the obvious, somewhat stereotypical analogy between the fading light and the approach of death: Mourir? je ne crois pas. mourir d’ailleurs ne serait pas un achèvement. du moins pas pour moi. Quelque chose qui est à sa fin, toute proche, au soleil couché sous la porte. je ne parviendrai pas à savoir quoi.

One interpretation of why death would not be an ‘achèvement’, a completion, is that it would be more like a continuation of his current condition than a change. The final verses specify that he will not try to reach a conclusion as to this impending conclusion, drawing a distinction with his earlier curiosity: Il y eut un temps où je n’aurais laissé se perdre le sens d’aucune fin intérieure. je serais resté dans la nuit, les mains dans la nuit, les mots. Maintenant, vient une fin, je renonce. (QCN, 38–39)

Roubaud’s previous attempts to formulate something in language are thus explicitly associated with determining an end. By crystallizing a form, poetry defines what something will have been. In contrast, ‘Maintenant, vient une fin, je renonce’. For the purposes of my argument, the important question is how extensive this ‘now’, this present, may be. As a shifter, its reference depends on the enunciative context. Does this ‘maintenant’ refer only to the poem in which it appears, or to the volume as a whole? One of

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the challenges of reading Quelque chose noir is precisely the need to differentiate between different present tenses, and to take account of the organization of its constituent parts: nine sections each containing nine poems, each (or most, as we shall see shortly) in turn composed of nine verses. Is the time referred to by the first ‘now’ of the text, in the first poem of the collection, the same as that of the last, in the second-to-last poem? In other words, is the ‘now’ in which the collection is written a point or a period? Interestingly, ‘point’ and ‘period’ are alternative terms in French and English for the full stop; as can be seen from many previous quotations, one of the most unconventional aspects of Roubaud’s use of punctuation is that he often places full stops in the middle of sentences, not merely at the end. 5 The fact that they simultaneously stop and do not stop the flow of writing invites a reading of the collection as both a point and a period in the course of which, precisely, ‘quelque chose s’achève’. If, for example, we read ‘Fins’, which is the final poem of the second section, in conjunction with ‘En moi’, the second poem of the final section, progress of some kind seems to have been achieved:             En moi Ta mort ne cesse pas de s’accomplir     de s’achever. Pas   simplement  ta mort.  morte  tu l’es.  il n’y a pas à en dire.    et quoi?   inutile. Inutile l’irréel du passé     temps inqualifiable. Mais ta mort en moi progresse     lente    incompréhensiblement. Je me réveille toujours dans ta voix    ta main   ton odeur. Je dis toujours ton nom   ton nom en moi   comme si tu étais. Comme si la mort n’avait gelé que le bout de tes doigts n’avait jeté qu’une couche de silence sur nous    s’était arrêtée sur une porte. Moi derrière   incrédule. (QCN, 136)

In this poem, it is explicitly ‘ta mort’ that is drawing to a close. As such, the poem corroborates the poet’s earlier intuition that the accomplishment he sensed in ‘Fins’ was not a matter of dying (‘Mourir?’). 5 I discuss Roubaud’s use of the full-stop in a companion piece to this essay, ‘“Le Point vivant”: The Poignant Geometry of Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir’ to be published elsewhere.

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It is death, not life, that is coming to an end or, more exactly, going on ending, unendingly ending: ‘ne cesse pas de s’accomplir de s’achever’. The death in question is not that of the poet, nor is it ‘simply’ that of Alix: ‘morte tu l’es. il n’y a pas à en dire’. It is specifically her death ‘en moi’, its progressive spreading within him. At issue appears to be his realization of Alix’s death, in both senses of the word: a grasping of its implications (in contrast with his clinging to ‘l’irréel du passé’ and his continuing to act ‘comme si tu étais’), but also its performance, its achievement. The transformation he senses being accomplished is that of her death no longer being frozen at the shocking moment of its discovery. While he continues to live as if death ‘n’avait gelé que le bout de [s]es doigts […] s’était arrêtée sur une porte’, the door – and his capacity for poetry, as we saw in ‘1983: janvier. 1985: juin’ – remains shut. Roubaud’s particular insight here is that mourning involves opening that door to her death. The image is markedly different from the conventional notion of mourning as internalization or introjection: instead of containing or enclosing the death, the question for him is to open himself up to it. To the extent that Quelque chose noir gradually makes it possible for her death no longer to stop at the metaphorical door, the collection performatively transforms Alix’s death in Roubaud (and for Roubaud) into something that moves, and thus something more alive than dead. It turns the poet’s inability to write poetry into poetry. With only eight verses, ‘En moi’ is one of four poems in Quelque chose noir not to contain nine verses. These structural anomalies (an example of the clinamen that is arguably as integral to the practice of Oulipo as the governing constraint that it rejects) punctuate the collection at significant junctures. As the fifth poem of the fifth section, ‘Scénario de la méditation’ (QCN, 81), also with eight verses, marks its halfway point; the centre therefore not only of the poem but of the book as a whole (exactly at the stipulation that ‘il y a aussi nécessairement des déplacements’) is the gap between the fourth and fifth verses: ‘Le centre de Quelque chose noir est blanc’.6 ‘La certitude et la couleur’ (QCN, 57) also has eight verses; its position as the final poem of the third section means that a missing verse marks a point one third of the way through the book. As in ‘Scénario de la méditation’ (but unlike the truncated end of the eighth verse of ‘1983: janvier. 1985: juin’, for example), nothing 6 See the unsigned discussion, ‘Le centre blanc de Quelque chose noir’, at www.lastree.net/presentation/presentation.php. This discussion does not comment on the other poems that do not satisfy the constraint of nine verses per poem.

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in the poem’s presentation draws attention to the absence to make it visible. Thematically, the absence invites relating to the gap that the poem explores between the Alix the poet recalls and the photograph(s) she took which are his best reminder of her: Tu n’étais pas blanche et noire    plate.     l’étais-tu? Tu n’étais pas découpée en rectangle dans le monde. (QCN, 57)

The chasm between the Alix whom Roubaud knew and the images that remain of her is paralleled in the gap that separates the Roubaud whom she knew (and to whom her camera spoke) from the man ‘now’ contemplating her photograph: Cette image:7    tu n’as jamais répondu sur ton regard quel après fixes-tu?   où tu me places   seul Moi?    quelque chose d’entièrement neuf?

The possibility for Roubaud of being entirely ‘neuf’ [new] is thus evoked in the first departure from the norm, the first poem itself to be new in not being ‘neuf’ [nine]. Quelque chose noir allocates ‘La certitude et la couleur’ a symmetrical counterpart in ‘Dans cette lumière’ (QCN, 108), the only poem to have ten verses and, as the second poem of section seven, very nearly the same distance from the end of the collection as the other is from the beginning. The semantic field of ‘Dans cette lumière’ echoes that of the earlier poem in its focus on the colour red (‘rouge’/‘sang’) and on the inadequacy of an ‘image’ to render its object. Again, the poem’s layout does not draw attention to its deviation from the standard nine verses. Just as a perspective on the missing verse of ‘La certitude et la couleur’ could be found in the thematic emphasis placed on a hiatus, so the supernumerary verse bears interpretation in the light of a thematic excess, that of the light mentioned in the title. This light turns out to be akin to an overexposure or excess of light to the extent that, far from enhancing Alix’s visibility, its effect is to conceal rather than reveal her: Exclu, dans cette lumière, sans objet. Il se trouva que la lumière, s’accordant à cette chose déjà, qui existait, en même temps te déniait l’existence. (QCN, 108) 7 Thematically, this image recalls the last photograph published in Alix’s Journal, which I believe is the source for the two poems entitled ‘Cette photographie, ta dernière’ (pp. 91 and 103).

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Significantly, a link between an opacification and a measuring or counting is signalled in the second half of the poem: morte  pendant cet état    de la lumière L’image, sortant, t’atteignait Tombée, là comme un instrument de mesure Il était devenu impossible de dire Un nuage. (QCN, 108)

The ‘nuage’ that closes the poem in fact reflects a cloudiness or opacity at several levels within these last five verses. The absence of full stops other than in the final line (in marked contrast with the first five verses which all contain a terminal full stop) makes the status of the last line uncertain: is ‘Un nuage’ the unsayable object of the previous verse (in other words, what could not be said), or is it a syntactical rupture that refers rather to the impossibility of saying (that is, saying casts more cloud than light)? Similarly, it is impossible to decide if the antecedent of ‘tombée’ is the addressee of the poem, ‘morte pendant cet état de la lumière’, or the ‘image’ that ‘atteignait’ [‘reached’, but also ‘hurt’] her. All of this uncertainty combines to suggest that the poem itself – the poetic image as well as the visual image it alludes to – serves to obfuscate rather than to cast light on its object. The fact that Roubaud conveys this by evoking a failure of measurement, the abandonment of an ‘instrument de mesure’, suggests that the poem’s surplus line functions as the negative image of the other poem’s missing one: an indication that any representational attempt to measure or ‘count’ reality unavoidably has failure at its heart. These three poems that punctuate – and puncture – Quelque chose noir at carefully measured intervals by not respecting the constraint of nine verses, thus contain a reflection on the necessary gap or failure at the heart of poetic speech. To return to ‘En moi’, the final poem to disobey the constraint also occupies a significant place. As the second poem of section nine, it is the eighth-to-last poem of Quelque chose noir—that is, the section comprising the first eighty-one poems of the overall collection, similarly entitled Quelque chose noir. But it is therefore also the ninth-to-last poem of the collection as a whole, which includes the final section entitled Rien containing only one poem. The deviation from the norm in ‘En moi’ thus invites reading in relation with the fact that the collection as a whole exceeds its own constraint. An absence and an excess mirror each other. A gap produces an excess that serves in

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turn to continue the gap; something dark gives way to nothing, yet the nothing is at the same time a something, ‘un rien’. These derogations from the rule are performative evidence that the end does not necessarily mean the end. After the end, in spite of everything, poetry goes on. This structural tension between a continuation and an ending is replicated at the textural level most obviously in Roubaud’s use of hyperbaton, a figure that interrupts the natural flow of a sentence; it includes, inter alia, an addition to a sentence which seems already finished. Roubaud’s extraordinary deployment of the full stop within as well as at the end of sentences, as in many of the poems explored above, notably serves to create a forceful hyperbatic effect. In ‘Mort réelle et constante’, for example, the proliferation of full stops on the one hand intensifies the impression of stasis, of immobility, as when the stop interrupts the sentence just after we learn that (only) the hands of Alix’s watch continue moving. Yet its very innovation also draws attention to itself: it is impossible to ignore the fact that Roubaud is inventing endings, interruptions, in unexpected places. By sheer creative force, he is refusing that the ending will have been a final ending. In addition, ‘Mort réelle et constante’ contains an example of another kind of hyperbatic form, where a verse both repeats (extends) and truncates the preceding one: C’était le dernier moment où nous serions seuls. C’était le dernier moment où nous serions. (QCN, 118)

At the level of content, the truncation draws attention to the truncation of the ‘nous’ itself: it is not just that Alix’s life has been cut short but that ‘we’ as an entity has ceased to be. Formally, we see the poem dismantle itself before our eyes. This dismantling chimes with an image Roubaud uses in ‘Aphasie’, the poem where he comments on his inability to write poetry: Jakobson dit que l’aphasie mange la langue à l’envers de son acquisition. Les articulations les plus récentes partent les premières. Une bouche qui se défait commence par les lèvres. J’ai pensé la même chose du vers. les règles du vers disparaissent une à une dans sa destruction, selon un ordre, aussi, aphasique. Comme si les poètes défaisaient leur bâtiment étage par étage. Sans le faire exploser d’un coup. (QCN, 131)

The hyperbatic repetition that repeats a verse without its ending makes it seem, indeed, ‘comme si le poète défaisait son bâtiment étage par étage’.

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Yet, in making manifest the removal of the end of the construction, the hyperbaton simultaneously provides an end. It both highlights the missing end and adds an end. Roubaud’s image of a poet literally ‘undoing’ his own building is furthermore significant in that the last floor of a building to be constructed is necessarily the roof or toit, a word that features seven times within the collection. The view from the poet’s window, and thus the context in which he writes, is that of a ‘golfe de toits’. This view extends right into his apartment; as he develops in a number of poems, especially the two entitled ‘Cette photographie, ta dernière’, he has left Alix’s last photo where she had placed it on the wall such that, when one looks at it: ce que l’on voit, là, recevant la lumière, qui décline, dans le golfe de toits, à gauche de l’église,      ce qu’on voit,    les soirs, assis sur une chaise, est, précisément, Ce que montre l’image laissée sur le mur. (QCN, 91)

This ‘gulf’ or excess of ‘toits’, however, brings out forcefully the enormous difference between then and ‘now’, the absence of Alix rendered all the more poignantly by the homophony in French between toits and the disjunctive pronoun toi: et la lumière, entre, depuis toujours, depuis le golfe de toits à gauche de l’église,    mais surtout il y a, ce qui maintenant manque Toi.      parce que tes yeux […]. (QCN, 92)

The gap between the words ‘manque’ and ‘toi’, followed in turn by a gap before the rest of the verse, places the pronoun in isolation and emphasizes the interruption of its relation to the world. Nonetheless, the enjambment at the same time establishes a continuity. In the very act of stating the collapse of his world, poetry offers Roubaud a way of going on. While the light continues to decline in the poem, then, the effect of the poem is to continue the declining light, to continue the light in its decline. The sense of poetry’s achievement in using the disappearance or fading or shrinking of the very thing it grieves as a way of continuing comes across especially strongly in one of the last poems of Quelque chose noir, ‘Ce temps que nous avions au monde’. Alix’s photos are now poignant reminders of how short the couple’s time together was, although of course at the time they did not know that: time ‘n’avait pas de limitations’.

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The extremely Beckettian ‘and so on’ that closes the fourth verse draws attention to the double gesture that this continuation signifies. On the one hand, it is backward-looking insofar as it repeats the shrinking emphasized by the words ‘rétrécie’, ‘condensée’ and ‘comprimée’. Moreover, coming immediately after the repetition of ‘rétrécie par la fenêtre’, it makes the line circle back on itself, suggesting a continuation that merely constitutes more of the same. On the other hand, however, the expression of continuation unmistakably introduces an alterity into the poem, a linguistic alterity whose importance for Roubaud Michael Sheringham was among the first to explore.8 It is not only forwardlooking, it is forward-moving: the mere fact of saying ‘and so on’ produces an interruption, opens onto a different kind of circle or ‘boucle’, where what returns is not the same ghastly memory of Alix’s dead body, but the ‘vacillante’—varying, oscillating, interruptive—memory of the music they had loved together. As such, it is emblematic of the collection as a whole. Words have made the difference: in his dogged determination to go on, Roubaud has found his way back to speaking the ‘autre langue’ that, as much as English, is the language of poetry.

8 See Michael Sheringham, ‘Les Vies anglaises de Jacques Roubaud’, in Jacques Roubaud, compositeur de mathématique et de poésie, ed. Agnès Disson and Véronique Montémont (Charenton-le-Pont: Absalon, 2011), pp. 235–48.

part 2

Form and Life Writing

chapter six

Narratives of Forgetting Memory and Literary Form Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir Memory and Literary Form

If forgetting is a constant companion in any memory text, is it possible to map the methods and strategies that writers employ when writing the forgotten? Can the different reworkings, negotiations and representations of remembrance and forgetting in memory texts help us to see how writing on memories of the past influences literary form? Some elements of autobiography, the prime genre of memory, draw particular attention to the referential aspect of the form; for instance, the use of paratextual material such as notes and corrections, and references to archival material such as photographs, diaries and letters. These aspects can be highly instructive for understanding the memorial/ mnemonic processes at work in the shaping of autobiography. In some cases, forgetting can be seen to take on form in narrative; as scenes of forgetting are apparent for instance where the gaps, the forgotten, the misremembered, are constantly revealed and interrogated. Autobiographical form seems to generate certain unease about its meaning-making processes. The concern voiced by many autobiographers is that the text might not do justice to their memories of their lives or reflect accurately the perceived structure of their past, the form itself being in some sense inadequate to the task. The initial challenge for the autobiographer is, however, not only the question of narrative and form, but simply that of memory itself; the paradoxical notion that what we remember, as meaningful as those memories might be to us, is not necessarily the whole story. After describing some of her earliest memories in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Virginia Woolf goes on to

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explain: ‘These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important’.1 In his autobiographical work Nothing to be frightened of (2008) Julian Barnes voices a similar concern with the role of the forgotten in our life stories and the problems with representing it in narrative: ‘We talk about our memories, but should perhaps talk more about our forgettings, even if that is a more difficult—or logically impossible— feat’. 2 Such thoughts on the unreliability of memory and on the role of the forgotten can be said to characterize a type of autobiographical practice (which we may term literary) in France in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. As these issues seem prevalent in Western life writing in general it seems apposite to view French examples as part of a larger discourse. What is of note in many such texts is how they question the capacity of autobiographical writing to represent the past, a life, a self—whether such reservations are influenced by psychoanalytical thought, modernist doubts about realist narrative conventions or postmodern/poststructuralist ideas about our problematic relationship to the world outside the text. The autobiographer has to come to terms with the role of forgetting in his reminiscences, and in the process of writing these down, as the writing is always based on selection, one memory is chosen while the other is discarded—‘forgotten’ or silenced in the writing. Of course, Freudian understanding of the forgotten permeated our thoughts on the subject in the twentieth century, where forgetting can either hide trauma or reveal it. And this informs our view of the connection between writing and the forgotten, as Michael Sheringham has noted in his seminal work on French autobiography: We could begin with the sense that to bring memories back to the light of day, into the foreground of consciousness, into language and onto the page, is to expose them […] to a potentially destructive glare. Or we could start from the related feeling that the excavation of memory can have the therapeutic character of an exorcism, that to retrieve something from memory is to draw its sting, to be done with it, to allow it to be forgotten. Instead of reintegrating us with part of our being, the 1 Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”, in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 78–160 (p. 83) 2 Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of (London: Vintage, 2009), p. 38.

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act of memory, in this perspective, engenders splitting and expulsion: remembering becomes dismembering—a way of forgetting. 3

Forgetting relieves us of our past, but also shapes our memories, the remains, the traces of that past. Sheringham points out that at times memory can acquire the status of myth, as when memory is presented as a sublime gift which the autobiographer makes use of, gathering the past and unifying his past and present selves with its aid. Memory has therefore essentially done some of the autobiographer’s work for him: ‘The idea that memory secretly sifts and decants tends to indemnify the autobiographer not only against the accusation that what was most important may have been forgotten, but also against the suspicion that memories have been hand-picked and meddled with’.4 Forgetting is thus an inevitable part of the writing process; one of the form’s unspoken foundations. The relationship between remembering and forgetting is not a stable one, or one that can be easily defined. Suffice it to say that memory always entails both remembering and forgetting. In order to remember one must have forgotten; the forgotten is always already an integral part of memory. In Andreas Huyssen’s words: ‘Inevitably, every act of memory carries with it a dimension of betrayal, forgetting, and absence’. 5 It is therefore hardly feasible to attempt to disentangle the two concepts and place them in separate categories; as José F. Colmeiro puts it: ‘remembering and forgetting are articulated in a precarious balance of forces, always in a constant state of renegotiation’. 6 And where better to see these forces at work than in autobiography, a literary category often termed the ‘genre of memory’, but perhaps more accurately defined as the genre of ‘memory and forgetting’. Paul Ricoeur finds in the forgotten ‘the dialectic of presence and absence at the heart of the representation of the past’.7 This constant movement between presence and absence is in some 3 Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires. Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 311. 4 Sheringham, French Autobiography, p. 290. 5 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 4. 6 José F. Colmeiro, Memoria histórica e identidad cultural. De la postguerra a la postmodernidad, Memoria Rota: Exilios y Heterodoxias 40 (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2005), pp. 28–29. My translation. 7 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 414.

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works accentuated with notes, comments, and corrections of the text. A memory comes into view, is corrected or commented on, and subsequently recedes from view again or might be brought into sharper focus. The most common type of commentary on the text can be found in forewords or introductions. Autobiography is a literary form which almost seems to demand a foreword, a preamble, an introduction to the text at hand. The ubiquity of such preambles bears witness to a certain disquiet about the possibilities and restrictions of autobiographical writing, not least regarding its founding principle, memory. Often they make the presence of the forgotten felt by drawing attention to it, for instance in the hesitation voiced by writers in claiming authority for the narrative of their memory texts. Many of them mention sincerity, some touch upon the difference between fiction and autobiography, but all by default draw attention to the writing moment, the gap between the two time frames at work, as well as indicating the importance of the writer-reader relationship, calling the reader as a witness to a testimony, and emphasizing the role the reader plays as a receiver of these memories.8 Philippe Lejeune sees this, of course, in terms of the ‘le pacte autobiographique’ established by ‘les codes implicites ou explicites de la publication,—sur cette frange du texte imprimé, qui, en réalité, commande tout la lecture (nom d’auteur, titre, sous-titre, nom de collection, nom d’éditeur, jusqu’au jeu ambigu des préfaces)’.9 This ‘jeu ambigu’ is one of the tools the autobiographer uses to further define the pact. To introduce an autobiography to its readers with a preface or introductory paragraph seems to reflect a need to distinguish the autobiographical work from other types of work (philosophical, fictional or even historical), and reveals a certain unease with the borderline nature of such works between fiction and non-fiction. It can also draw attention to the precarious status of remembrance and forgetting, and thus the status of the literary form itself. Autobiography in France has a long history of experimental autobiographical writing which is not exempt from these concerns, indicating perhaps that these thoughts traverse any traditional-experimental textual divides in autobiography. Two highly original works of autobiography still 8 I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 2, ‘Forewords and Forgettings: Introductions and Preambles in Autobiography’ in my book Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016). 9 Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 45.

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echo the line of thoughts found in traditional autobiography from Michel Leiris’s prologue to L’Age d’homme (1939) to Roland Barthes’s photographic prologue in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975). In the opening paragraphs of the prologue, Leiris offers his body to the reader, so to speak, with a detailed description of his physical characteristics, and concludes the prologue by suggesting ways of reading: ‘S’il s’agissait d’une pièce de théâtre, d’un de ces drames dont j’ai toujours été si féru, il me semble que le sujet pourrait se résumer ainsi: comment le héros—c’est-à-dire Holopherne—passe tant bien que mal (et plutôt mal que bien) du chaos miraculeux de l’enfance à l’ordre féroce de la virilité’.10 Barthes’s text offers one of the most intriguing examples of the use of photographs in autobiography (of course it poses problems in itself to call the text an autobiography, but as it maintains some sort of representation of a self, let us for the time being think of it as an autobiographical text). Not that his choice of photographs is surprising: what is of interest is the conventionality—even banality—of the photographs compared to the experimental nature of the text.11 The photographs are arranged at the start of the book, the first 40 pages or so, and bear no direct relation to the text itself, a collection of fragments. Despite this they 10 Michel Leiris, L’âge d’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), pp. 41–42. 11 Despite the experimental nature of the text, Sean Burke claims that it still maintains its status as autobiography: ‘It is, therefore, in its pronominal economy that Roland Barthes is most markedly set off from conventional forms of autobiography […] However, in subverting this autobiographical etiquette Roland Barthes does not break with the deep structures of the autobiographical récit’. See The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 54–55. But Johnnie Gratton emphasizes Barthes’s anti-autobiographical stance: ‘The pre-critical subject is the confessional, dissident, innocent “I” whose claim to recognition within or alongside the more austere regime of critical discourse introduces what I earlier deemed it appropriate to call an “autobiographical” factor. But by this stage I can no longer put off reckoning with Barthes’s own patent boycott of the term “autobiographical”, most strongly signalled in his preference for the terms of fiction, which inevitably suggest an anti-autobiographical slant’. See ‘Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes: Autobiography and the Notion of Expression’, Romance Studies 8 (1986), 57–65 (p. 62). Paul John Eakin points out that ‘even at [Barthes’s] most “anti-autobiographical”, his most aggressively fictional, he does not shake free from the pull of reference’. See Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 23.

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serve as an ‘introduction’ to the work by providing a type of autobiographical photoessay, anchoring the author and text in a certain time and place, giving ‘a sense of the whole being as a changing constant’ as Richard Brilliant describes the insight that photographic portraits can provide.12 ‘Mais je n’ai jamais ressemblé à cela!’ reads the text next to two portraits of the author, before explaining that we never know what we look like as ‘même et surtout pour votre corps, vous êtes condamné à l’imaginaire’.13 The aforementioned doubts that autobiographers often voice about autobiography’s capacity to tell our lives, are here echoed in his commentary on the photographs of himself. Claire Boyle discusses the anxieties often apparent in late twentiethcentury French autobiographical writing, what she describes as the autobiographer’s fear that her self will be consumed by others, and suggests that what generates these anxieties is fear: ‘fear of being exposed to external perception, and fear of what exactly those external perceptions will be’.14 The texts in question employ certain strategies in countering this: ‘The principal aim of these strategies, I shall argue, is to discourage readings in which the textual self is seen as the gateway to the walking, talking self of the author’.15 The message to the reader is a warning that the autobiographical work will not provide him with a stake in the person of the author, her self or her memory. Leiris and Barthes both posit the body of the author in the prologue, thereby giving ‘themselves’ in one way or another to the reader. Barthes’s questioning of the ‘meaning’ of the photographs qualifies the role it plays, and the ‘access’ the reader has to ‘himself’. The physicality of those prologues, however, can be seen to ground them in a world outside the text, a world outside writing. Words of warning or qualifications, doubts expressed in prologues have in some works been taken to the extreme, however, and not necessarily to urge the reader to recognize the sincerity of the writing, but rather to point out that the ‘truthfulness’ of the account might be highly questionable. This can be seen, for instance, where authors use footnotes, comments or corrections: paratextual material as 12 Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), p. 134. 13 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 42. 14 Claire Boyle, Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-War France (Leeds: Legenda, 2007), p. 4. 15 Boyle, Consuming Autobiographies, p. 4.

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commentary on their autobiographical narrative. These paratexts are, in Gerard Genette’s terms, ‘un seuil’: ‘cette frange, en effet, toujours porteuse d’un commentaire auctorial, ou plus ou moins légitimé par l’auteur, constitue, entre texte et hors-texte, une zone non seulement de transition, mais de transaction: lieu privilégié d’une pragmatique et d’une stratégie, d’une action sur le public au service’.16 As in the preambles or introductions, the emphasis is very much on direct communication with the reader. One of the most famous texts of this kind is doubtless Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), which includes a 20-page foreword where she discusses several things that impinge on her accounts of the past. First of all, she claims that readers tend to believe she has ‘made up’ stories from her past, because she is a writer. She then explains that the dialogue in her accounts is fictional as of course she does not remember them verbatim. Another problem is that she was an orphan: ‘One great handicap to this task of recalling has been the fact of being an orphan. The chain of recollection—the collective memory of a family—has been broken’.17 She also has problems with her genes, as she claims to have inherited a strain of ‘untruthfulness’ from her father. After each chapter she includes notes, at times lengthy, with corrections, doubts or additions, which seem like attempts to locate the forgotten, point it out and try to eliminate it with constant flow of comments and corrections.18 At the end of the first chapter there is a lengthy chapter of corrections and revision of events and narrative prefaced with the sentence: ‘There are several dubious points in this memoir’.19 And at the end of the third chapter she explains: ‘This account is highly fictionalized’. 20 Notes 16 Gerard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), p. 3. 17 Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 10. 18 Leigh Gilmore calls these sections of the work ‘a sequence of italicized interchapters’ as they are placed between ‘the numbered chapters, the purportedly truthful accounts drawn from life’, where McCarthy ‘distinguishes what she really remembers from what she invented to satisfy her own artistic sensibility’. See Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 121. Martha Lifson notes in her analysis of McCarthy’s work that ‘the italicised commentaries which follow each chapter add to the purposeful and often playful undermining of truth’. See ‘Allegory of the Secret: Mary McCarthy’, Biography 4.3 (Summer 1981), 249–67 (p. 256). 19 McCarthy, Memories, p. 44. 20 McCarthy, Memories, p. 85.

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and corrections have a paradoxical function here, on the one hand exuding a certain authority over the past, as footnotes do with their aura of scholarship and factual accuracy, while drawing attention to the problems at the heart of autobiographical writing as it is riddled with doubt, forgetfulness and uncertainty, and McCarthy emphasizes the sense that fiction has its own truth, as she explains at the end of the fourth chapter: ‘This story is so true of our convent life that I find it almost impossible to sort out the guessed-at and the half-remembered from the undeniably real’. 21 The unreliability of memory must therefore raise questions of autobiographical narrative in the reader’s mind. Mary McCarthy explains that in her case ‘the chain of recollection had been broken’ with the loss of her parents and few texts have demonstrated this as palpably as Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975). A work centred around the lack of memory, the loss of a past, as Sheringham suggests: ‘In […] Perec’s [work] a sense of the otherness of memory stems from the recognition that remembering is as much an activity of concealment and displacement as of preservation. What Perec investigates and seeks to come to terms with is not so much what his memories mean, and the story they tell, as what they disguise, and the history they partially supplant’. 22 Like McCarthy before him, Perec also uses different typefaces to differentiate between three types of text that make up his work: the fictional work—the fantasy on the island of W—is in italics, an earlier attempt at writing about his past is in bold lettering, while the rest of the childhood memories are in normal roman type. So it seems clear that the fiction and the older text are seen as aberrations to the text proper—the childhood memories, which most closely resemble a conventional narrative. The text includes corrections and comments on the older memory texts, a commentary which has some elements of a paratext, but is perhaps actually the main text—it is impossible to ignore and is very much at the heart of the reader’s interpretation of the work, and in some ways this goes for some of the commentary in McCarthy’s works as well. Perec’s textual meanderings accentuate loss and absence, and the difficulties of pinning down remembrances and turning them into text. In a section written 15 years earlier, which is printed in the text with notes and corrections, Perec describes two photographs of his father. Of the first he says: 21 McCarthy, Memories, p. 108. 22 Sheringham, French Autobiography, p. 320.

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Sur la photo le père a l’attitude du père. Il est grand. Il a la tête nue, il tient son calot à la main. Sa capote descend très bas. Elle est serrée à la taille par l’un de ces ceinturons de gros cuir qui ressemblent aux sangles des vitres dans les wagons de troisième classe. On devine, entre les godillots nets de poussière—c’est dimanche—et le bas de la capote, les bandes molletières interminables. Le père sourit. C’est un simple soldat. Il est en permission à Paris, c’est la fin de l’hiver, au bois de Vincennes. 23

In the notes to this description Perec casts doubt on the three things that cannot be determined from the photograph itself: ‘Dimanche, permission, bois de Vincennes: rien ne permet de l’affirmer’. 24 With these notes the atmosphere Perec has created in the description of the photograph is stripped away, and even the description of his father’s clothes is corrected. What at first sight seems a detailed, rather objective description of a photograph has become suspect, like so many of Perec’s memories in this work. They are historical documents that do not give out any information beyond their appearance. They are clues to a gap, a lack, to nothing. In Roland Barthes’s terms, there is no punctum, only studium. 25 As Sheringham claims, however: ‘Regardless of its relative success or failure, the act of writing—in its inherent endlessness, its eternal severance from the concrete, its intrinsic incapacity to grasp the real, its basis in absence—is attuned to the reality of loss’. 26 The textual (and photographic) intricacies in the works I have briefly touched upon can be seen to serve as a bridge between the text proper and the world outside the text, crossing Genette’s seuil and thereby drawing us back to the moment of writing. They are texts of forgetting, interrupting and at times almost drawing to a halt the flow of narrative of the main text, the text of memory. They reveal processes, expose the genre of autobiography as a web of texts rather than a direct reflection of the author’s memory. They make visible in their form and physical

23 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël, 1975), p. 42. 24 Perec, W, p. 49. 25 Marjorie Perloff also points out that ‘for writers and artists born in World War II France, and especially for Jewish artists like Perec and Boltanski, the Proustian or Barthesian souvenir d’enfance seems to have become a kind of empty signifier, a site for assumed identities and invented sensations’. See ‘“What has occurred only once”: Barthes’s Winter Garden/Boltanski’s Archives of the Dead’, in Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997), pp. 32–58 (p. 47). 26 Sheringham, French Autobiography, p. 323.

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presence the constant renegotiation between memory and forgetting in autobiographical narrative. This negotiation often comes to the fore when writing on one’s family history (i.e. a parent’s story). Lydie Salvayre’s text Pas pleurer (2014) offers a narrative between memory, postmemory and historiography, where she recounts her mother’s memories of the Spanish Civil War interspersed with Georges Bernanos’s much earlier work on the war, Grands Cimetières sous la lune. Pas pleurer is an intriguing example of what happens in auto/biographical writing, how its referential nature is revealed, its connection to the ‘real’, when authors make use of archival material. The archive, which forms part of cultural memory (and forgetting), reveals certain characteristics when viewed through the prism of autobiographical memory. Aleida Assmann differentiates between two forms of forgetting in cultural practices. ‘Active forgetting is implied in intentional acts such as trashing and destroying’. The second form of ‘cultural forgetting’ is the ‘passive form’ which ‘is related to non-intentional acts such as losing, hiding, dispersing, neglecting, abandoning, or leaving something behind. In these cases the objects are not materially destroyed; they fall out of the frames of attention, valuation, and use’. It is important to note—and this also relates to forgetting—that what ‘is lost but not materially destroyed may be discovered by accident at a later time in attics and other obscure depots, or eventually be dug up again by more systematic archaeological search’. 27 If we consider family stories to make up part of the archive, Salvayre ‘rescues’ her mother’s voice from oblivion, and thus the family archive, through writing. By including Bernanos’s text, which she explains is largely forgotten, she also rescues another part of the archive of the civil war. The autobiographical significance of digging up these stories is also examined: ‘j’essaie de déchiffrer les raisons du trouble que ces deux récits lèvent en moi, un trouble dont je crains qu’il ne m’entraîne là où je n’avais nullement l’intention d’aller’. 28 Autobiographers thus (re)visit and reconstitute the family archive, they can interfere and reverse the passive forgetting of the unseen or unresearched archive. What the family archive contains and how it relates to the writing subject’s memory and experience is often one of 27 Aleida Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive’, in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 97–107 (pp. 97–98). 28 Lydie Salvayre, Pas pleurer (Paris: Seuil, 2014), p. 17.

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the elements with which the autobiographer concerns herself, and in it inevitably must face up to the forgotten. In his discussion of the archive, Sheringham suggests that ‘the archive can be shorthand for a certain kind of encounter between subject and memory, where memory, even one’s own, has become other’. 29 The encounter with the family archive in life writing can thus reveal processes and transactions between remembrance and forgetting. Perec’s constant dialogue between memory, loss and absence accentuates how the familial loss results in loss of narrative, his notes on the few family photographs available to him highlights the lost archive, and the loss of meaning of the little that is left. Loss, migration, ruptures in the familiar narrative inevitably affect the family archive and thus its auto/biographical potential. Vladimir Nabokov explains the problems so often encountered by the immigrant in Speak, Memory (1967), the lack of (physical or cultural) access to the archive: ‘While writing the first version in America I was handicapped by an almost complete lack of data in regard to family history, and consequently, by the impossibility of checking my memory when I felt it might be at fault’. 30 The belief voiced here by Nabokov is a common one; the archive should provide the answers, light up the murky areas of the past, provide logic and continuity in the family history and in turn one’s own life story. Thus, it should bring order to a problematic or fractured form. There is a desire, a longing, for a ‘perfect’ archive in many of these texts, a belief that documentation will save us from forgetting—which often does not account for how documents can obscure as well as illuminate the past. Assmann suggests that the material of the archive, the knowledge stored there, is ‘inert. It is stored and potentially available, but it is not interpreted’. She defines it ‘as a space that is located on the border between forgetting and remembering; its materials are preserved in a state of latency, in a space of intermediary storage (Zwischenspeicher). Thus, the institution of the archive is part of cultural memory in the passive dimension of preservation’. 31 This passive dimension is what the autobiographer attempts to reverse, thus turning the passively forgotten into the actively remembered, whether such an endeavour is 29 Michael Sheringham, ‘Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life-Writing’, French Studies 59.1 (2005), 47–53 (p. 47). 30 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 9. 31 Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive’, p. 103.

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ever completely successful is another matter, as the archive can also prove ‘unlockable’, its material somehow ‘unknowable’ and thus outside memory. Sheringham maintains that in the field of life writing ‘the figure of the archive, and the related vocabulary of document and trace, have become increasingly prominent’. In his estimation this is a reflection of ‘a number of shifts: from a focus on the individual to the interaction of individual and collective; from exploration of inner life to “la vie extérieure” (Annie Ernaux’s phrase), where identity is a function of the encounter with others in social space; from a sense that the materials of autobiography are personal to a sense that they derive equally from the social framework of memory’. Sheringham claims that all this is ‘evident in the evolution of autobiographical writing, in the second half of the last century, towards a confrontation between an individual subject and the products of quasi-archival practice’. 32 This is, as I mentioned above, particularly relevant in the autobiographies of the descendants of immigrants, and in works of postmemory, where the narrator in many cases describes travels and visits to particular official archives to address the lack of a family archive—to fill in the gaps in the (ruptured) family history. As Marianne Hirsch contends: ‘Archival practices invariably rely on documents, objects, and images that survive the ravages of time and the destruction wrought by violent histories’. But despite our efforts to engage with them, collect them, etc. she suggests that ‘we cannot disguise the lost and shadow archives, and the absences, that haunt all that we are able to collect’. What is important to ask is: ‘How can our albums and archives gesture toward what has been lost and forgotten, toward the many lives that remain obscured, unknown, and unthought?’ Hirsch finds this in ‘the relentless obsessive searches characterizing postmemory, and the inevitable disappointments that follow, [which] enable us to conjure images that cannot be found, marks that are invisible. We fill the emptiness through our performative practices of desire. In an opposite move, however, silence, absence, and emptiness are also always present, and often central to the work of postmemory’. 33 Thus, the potential of the plentiful archive is very often thwarted. It promises more than it can deliver, and so the autobiographer has to contend with that unanswered quest, loss and absence. 32 Sheringham, ‘Memory and the Archive’, p. 49. 33 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 247.

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There is still, however, a strong drive towards the archive, to find it and to find answers in it. Assmann suggests that the ‘function of the archive, the reference memory of a society, provides a kind of counterbalance against the necessarily reductive and restrictive drive of the working memory. It creates a meta-memory, a second-order memory that preserves what has been forgotten. The archive is a kind of “lost-and-found office” for what is no longer needed or immediately understood’. 34 Thus the archive has a double function: on the one hand, it is a promise to the writers of a physical place where they can find their past and thus illuminate what they have forgotten, and on the other, a last repository, the only thing that prevents their ancestors/family histories from being forgotten. There is often an effort involved in dealing with the archive; it is laborious, difficult and even lonely work. Sally Mann, in her autobiographical work Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (2015), describes the physical effort she performed while delving into the archive: I began this Knossian epic by cutting, one by one, the strings securing the boxes that I had hauled back from the nursing home after my mother died. As if eager to spill their guts, they spewed before me letters, journals, account books, ships’ manifests, stopped watches, menus, calendars, pressed flowers, scribbled love notes, telegrams, a ring from which the jewel had been crudely torn, dance cards, photographs, and newspaper clippings, all stashed away without system or order. For the hot half of the year, I bent into the angle of the attic eave and sifted through his wholly unsuspected, revelatory and peculiar past. 35

The family archive is far from being the ordered, arranged, categorized and preserved entity we associate with official archives. Instead, it is a collection of disparate material, mementoes whose original purpose may be long forgotten, letters and photographs. The autobiographer becomes at once an archivist and a researcher who mediates the material. Salvayre mediates her mother’s story in this fashion, by listening to her speak, turning that voice into narrative, the narrative’s flow sometimes halted with direct references to the mother’s voice in the present. 36 34 Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive’, p. 106. 35 Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2015), pp. 171–72. 36 José Luis Arráez analyses the voices in the novel in his essay ‘Les voix/es de la mémoire dans Pas pleurer de Lydie Salvayre’, French Cultural Studies 18.2 (2017), 186–97.

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The death of a parent is often the catalyst that opens up the archive, as in Roland Barthes’s famous find of his mother’s photograph in La Chambre claire (1980). That this vital part of the archive is not included in the text itself has intrigued many critics. 37 Diana Knight has offered a fascinating explanation of the missing photograph, claiming that it is in fact present in the text but in a different guise: ‘It is therefore my belief (or my fantasy) that the Winter Garden photo is simply an invention, a transposition of the “real” photo (“The Stock”) to a setting that provides Barthes with the symbolism of light and revelation appropriate to a recognition scene and to his inversion of the camera obscura of photography into a chambre claire’. 38 This idea—that the ‘find’, or what Knight calls ‘the revelation’, could well be an invention—points to the problematic status of the photograph as evidence or document in autobiographical texts. The inert archive is turned into a meaningful autobiographical moment of remembrance through reimagining and writing, which might not necessarily capture its original purpose or meaning. Harriet Bradley, in an essay appropriately titled ‘Seductions of the Archive’, explains that the work in the family archive is very often autobiographical in nature and thus leaves out, ‘forgets’, other areas of the archive. Those things that do not serve the interest of the investigator/writer are at times ‘actively forgotten’ inasmuch as they can be discarded and thrown away. Bradley describes her own search through her late mother’s archive and finds that ultimately it is her own ‘archive rather than unlocking the door to my mother’s being, the archive merely seemed to transmit images all too familiar to me’. She explains: ‘Perhaps this is an inevitable function of the selection process: in choosing what to keep I was drawn to things with which I could easily identify: pictures, letters concerning myself—and concerning those things closest to myself—births, deaths, loves. So that what I see in the scraps and relics of my mother’s life, is primarily myself’. 39 37 Barthes writes, ‘Dans la Mère, il y avait un noyau rayonnant, irréductible: ma mère’. See La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: l’Étoile, Gallimard, Seuil, 1980), p. 117. 38 Diana Knight, ‘Roland Barthes, or The Woman without a Shadow’, in Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997), pp. 132–43 (p. 138). 39 Harriet Bradley, ‘The Seductions of the Archive: Voices Lost and Found’, History of the Human Sciences 12.2 (1999), 107–22 (p. 116).

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Looking for oneself is thus a familiar endeavour in archival work, a search for understanding, an attempt to paint a fuller picture of origins and family traits—to attend to the forgotten or silenced which makes up a life. Mary McCarthy found an explanation for her own fascination with fiction in the strain of ‘untruthfulness’ she believes she inherited from her father. Autobiographical searches in the family archive can turn up exactly this kind of evidence, writers finding explanations for their own being. Sally Mann also links her findings to her own self: ‘But no less marvellous is the strength of the genetic threads that, woven together, explain those romantic artistic tendencies otherwise unaccounted for by my personality or upbringing. These threads I have followed with all the diligence and groping optimism of a mythic hero, and with as many dramatic discoveries’.40 Bradley elucidates: ‘The archive is the repository of memories: individual and collective, official and unofficial, licit and illicit, legitimating and subversive. And on the basis of such memories we strive, however ineffectively and partially, to reconstruct, restore, recover the past, to present and re-present stories of the past within our narratives’.41 In this lies the promise of the archive: ‘There is the promise (or illusion?) that all time lost can become time regained. In the archive, there lingers an assurance of concreteness, objectivity, recovery and wholeness’.42 Sheringham, drawing on the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Arlette Farge, posits that ‘recent theorizations provided a context for a significant reorientation of autobiographical and biographical practices’. He focuses on one trait that to him seems to characterize the renascence of the archive as a figure of memory. This is the way that […] archival practice involves a hiatus between the materials of the past and the present act of manipulation […] The archival encounter has its own belated truths to offer, and those are the more potent for being hedged with uncertainty.43

Dealings with the family archive reveal the complex and ongoing negotiations operating in memory work, and in bringing it into narrative form. The precarious state of the family archive points to the impossibility of rescuing the past from oblivion, and suggests that we will only ever 40 Mann, Hold Still, p. 171. 41 Bradley, ‘The Seductions of the Archive’, pp. 108–09. 42 Bradley, ‘The Seductions of the Archive’, p. 119. 43 Sheringham, ‘Memory and the Archive’, p. 53.

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have fragments and scraps which we need to make sense of in narrative, filling in the gaps—either with the often cited ‘embellishments’ or with constant commentary and querying of memory.44 This is reflected in commentary that autobiographers sometimes provide to their memories; the questioning of the past, of memory and of the meaning-making processes of narrative. The resonances of the archive in autobiographical writing bring forth challenges as well as affirmations of the autobiographical effort, urging us to contemplate the processes at work in bringing memory/forgetting into narrative form.

44 Digitization of the family archive changes these dynamics to a degree we have yet to come to grips with; on the one hand, its abundance of material is possibly overwhelming, and on the other difficulties with access and questions of ownership seem to be inevitable side effects of new technology.

chapter seven

The Time of Our Lives Repetition, Variation and Fragmentation in French Women’s Life Writing Shirley Jordan Repetition, Variation and Fragmentation

This chapter asks what forms can do when it comes to a problem that is central to life writing: that of ‘doing time’. How does a writer handle time, that notoriously unstable and elastic element, so as to convey on the page a viable sense of lived experience, to capture the moment and the micro detail as well as the broader sweep, with its years and decades? Our particular concern will be with repetition, variation and fragmentation as devices that shape, and that are privileged in, recent experimental life writing by women. The accounts of lives that interest us here have roots that travel back to deconstructionist feminist approaches to autobiography, to Kristeva’s ‘subject-in-process’1 and to emphases on the fluctuating, the provisional and the fragmentary specifically as feminist devices. They remind us that women’s life writing has had particular reasons for seeking to do time differently and that unpicking linear models, shaking off connective tissue and underscoring the artifice of self-structuring have been, self-consciously, aspects of feminist politics.2 1 Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, [1963] 1977), pp. 55–106. 2 For critical debate on female-authored autobiography that tackles the gendered specificity of the genre and its offshoots see: Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Tess Coslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (eds), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000); Claire Boyle,

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Several decades on, when life writing in general is so diverse and thoroughly refashioned a field, the questions related to how writers structure accounts of lived experience are more various, yet there remains a persistent emphasis on repetition, variation and fragmentation in many notable instances of women’s life writing. Two quotations will serve as our starting point. The first is Michel Leiris’s observation that ‘il y a une unité dans une vie et […] tout se ramène, quoi qu’on fasse, à une petite constellation de choses qu’on tend à reproduire, sous formes diverses, un nombre illimité de fois’. 3 The second is from Camille Laurens: ‘La répétition nous permet […] de nous structurer dans le temps’.4 Both plot the individual’s trajectory as one which takes shape by incessantly looping back upon itself in variants of established behaviour, while Laurens’s observation in particular opens up to the quotidian, the unremarkable stuff which constitutes the bulk of our lives and which is perhaps especially marked by gender. The life writing by Laurens, Annie Ernaux and Chantal Akerman that will serve as our examples are particularly time-rich and time-sensitive. Each shows a concern for units of time—the hour, day, week or year—and for marking time. Each stands in relation to an already complex and extensive body of work by its author, a developing archive, and gives a sense of this depth and emerging totality as well as of what Michael Sheringham refers to as the ‘création de nouvelles voies temporelles’ that thinking with the archive permits. 5 Each has in perspective the problem of organizing the whole life, while also focusing on the lived experience of time and seeking to grasp the ‘inchoate immediacy’ of the everyday.6 In each we will consider Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-War France (Oxford: Legenda, 2007); Michael Sheringham, ‘Changing the Script: Women Writers and the Rise of Autobiography’, in A History of Women’s Writing in France, ed. Sonya Stephens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 185–203; Shirley Jordan, ‘État Présent: Autofiction in the Feminine’, French Studies 67 (2012), 76–84; Anna Rocca (ed.), Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). 3 Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), p. 218. 4 Camille Laurens, Encore et jamais: variations (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), p. 134. Further references will be given as EJV followed by the page number. 5 Michael Sheringham, ‘Annie Ernaux: le temps et l’archive dans Les Années’, in Fins de la littérature T2, ed. Dominique Viart and Laurent Demanze (Paris: Armand Colin/Recherches, 2013), pp. 175–86 (p. 170). 6 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 338.

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which formal devices lend the whole its overall temporal architecture, as well as homing in on some characteristic markers or units of time, other than those provided by clock or calendar. T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock famously ‘measured out [his] life with coffee spoons’, each one a unit of boredom and conformity;7 other repeated measures and markers characterize the temporal constellation of the works discussed here. Camille Laurens: Variations ‘Mon cœur bat, les saisons reviennent, les gens qui m’attirent se ressemblent, les scénarios se répètent, la routine s’installe. Je redis, je relis, je revois, je refais, je ressasse—allez, re! Quelquefois aussi, je revis’: thus, on the quatrième de couverture of Encore et jamais: variations, Camille Laurens characterizes the time and tempo of her life not as linear but as made up of series of similar movements which spiral self-referentially backwards even as they repeat themselves. Encore et jamais: variations is an extended essay, or rather a series of 38 mini-essays, each a variant on the question of repetition as it structures lived experience and as it lends form to works across types of cultural expression from literature to film to theatre to fine art and to dance. It considers experiments as diverse as the choreographic tics of Pina Bausch (EJV, 32, 137) and the curiously coded diary of Benjamin Constant wherein the author exchanges key recurring experiences—such as sexual pleasure, work or the weariness of a demanding lover—for numbers, giving rise to an idiosyncratic, pulsating (and curiously reductive) numerical shorthand.8 At once erudite and intimate, Laurens’s book constitutes not only a compendium of reflections on repetition but an instance of life writing. As such it reprises the key themes of her autofiction: romantic love, 7 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917), in Collected Poems by T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), pp. 13–17 (p. 14). 8 Thus: ‘1 signifie jouissance physique. 2 désir de rompre mon éternel lien dont il est si souvent question. 3 retours à ce lien par des souvenirs ou quelque charme momentané. 4 travail. 5 discussions avec mon père. 6 attendrissement sur mon père. 7 projets de voyage. 8 projets de mariage. 9 fatigue de Mme Lindsay. 10 souvenirs doux et retours d’amour vers Mme Lindsay. 11 hésitation sur mes projets avec Mme Dutertre. 13 incertitude sur tout. 14 projet d’établissement à Dole pour rompre avec Biondetta. 15 projet d’établissement à Lausanne dans le même but. 16 projets de voyages outre-mer. 17 désirs de raccommodement avec quelques ennemis’ (EJV, 22–23).

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family, bereavement, psychoanalysis and writing, and is in itself an attempt to structure the time of her own life. Laurens is interested in repetition as a double-edged category, something that is good to think with and that can provoke lively reactions, either procuring pleasure or testing tolerance as her title ‘encore et jamais’ suggests. Our lives themselves may be choreographed according to repeated actions, thoughts and feelings but when is repetition legitimized in art forms and when is it reprehensible? In visual art, repetition of the motif is embraced and we gaze with fascination at the numerous takes of the same subject made by the artist; in written texts, conversely—and excluding poetry—a return to the same can be more questionable, potentially disruptive or absurd and, as Beckett shows with inimitable mastery, existentially threatening. At school Laurens and her peers are taught that repetition is sterile, a defect, ‘le contraire de penser’ (EJV, 61). Repetition is not progress. It is associated with uncontrollable tics, with the dullness of routine and the shame of self-pleasuring, things to which we frequently return but of which it might be thought pointless or embarrassing to speak. On the other hand, repetition can be productive and fertile, bringing joy—even ecstasy—as in the pleasures of poetry, of the caress and of love, ‘qui n’a pas peur de la répétition’ (EJV, 20). Laurens opens Encore et jamais with a mini-essay whose subject is also taken up in original ways by Ernaux and Akerman: domestic time as constitutive of women’s experience (EJV, 15–21). Here she is concerned with the quotidian as it was measured out by the routine movements of her grandmother’s duster over the same domestic spaces at the same time every week, a re-passage through and confirmation of home space that seemed to the child at once comforting and, in a precocious intimation of Simone de Beauvoir’s observations on housework as related to the labours of Sisyphus, stultifying. Structuring her own days by writing on, rather than dusting, a ‘bonheur-du-jour’ (the quaint mid-eighteenthcentury term for a lady’s writing desk), the adult Laurens seeks at first to defy routine, convention and time: ‘je voudrais qu’écrire ne dépende ni de la règle ni du siècle, je voudrais qu’écrire n’ait rien à voir avec l’ordre du temps, avec le retour du tic et du tac et du ding et du dong et du soir et du matin’ (EJV, 21, 19). A writer, after all, can overcome time’s grinding imperatives and is surely in the business of renewal: when the hand moves over the page or the keyboard there is ‘rien à repriser, tout est neuf’ (EJV, 19). Yet Encore et jamais returns ineluctably to the same repertoire of experiences and moments.

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The overall architecture of Laurens’s book as an exercise in life writing is governed by something cyclical, even circadian, for it is framed by the unit of the day and focuses on the cusp of night and day and on the alternation of darkness and light.9 It commences and concludes on the narrator’s daily round of waking in anxiety and struggling into consciousness with all the effort of a salmon swimming upstream. Its final chapter, entitled ‘Ressusciter’ (EJV, 169–73), configures sleep and waking as small instances of death and reanimation. The prelude to sleep is marked by a new measure of time ushered in by technological change, the ‘quelques dizaines de secondes’ during which the room is filled with the blueish light emitted by Laurens’s computer as it switches itself off (EJV, 169). The prelude to waking is light of a more conventional order, ‘Un rai de jour [qui] passe par les volets à l’endroit où ils sont mal joints’ (EJV, 173), and this is followed by an inventory of the everyday and the routine that is structured by, and in turn structures, the self: ‘La chambre est à son ordinaire, le bureau, la chaise, la lampe, l’armoire. Il y a une mouche morte sur le rebord, vanité. Je reconnais les bruits habituels de la rue, les poubelles, les portes qui s’ouvrent, les premiers saluts, les chansons qu’on sifflote’ (EJV, 173). As well as using the recurrence of the day to imagine the time and shape of her life, Laurens has recourse to spatial figures, such as a series of ‘cercles concentriques autour d’un point de douleur’ (EJV, 110), a point which is not so much a star in the ‘petite constellation des choses’ mentioned by Leiris but a black hole and one of the taboos alluded to in the ‘jamais’ of Laurens’s title. As life writer Philippe Forest contends: ‘Ce qu’on ne peut pas dire, il faut le répéter’.10 Those familiar with Laurens’s corpus will know that this ‘point de douleur’ is the death of her son Philippe minutes after his birth, a trauma which jolted the author definitively away from fiction and into life writing and which receives powerful expression in several of her works.11 The book that 9 For the ways in which the day determines the shape of life writing, see ‘The Space of the Day’ in Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 364–75. 10 Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), quoted in Encore et jamais, p. 159. See also ‘Entretien avec Philippe Forest by Marie-José Latour’, L’En-je lacanien 2.11 (2008), 181–200: ‘Contrairement à la célèbre formule de Wittgenstein: “Ce qu’on ne peut pas dire, il faut le taire”, j’ai toujours pensé que ce qu’on ne pouvait pas dire, il fallait le répéter’. 11 For an analysis of Laurens’s mourning of Philippe, see Barbara Havercroft,

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concerns us here returns directly to this loss three times, including in a chapter which shares the title of the collection as a whole, ‘Encore et jamais’ (EJV, 157–59). Here Laurens notes that readers have reproached her for revisiting the subject of her son’s death too often and that they have done so in explicitly gendered terms. She is accused ‘d’y revenir sans cesse, de radoter comme une vieille femme qui n’arrive pas à oublier—ou pire, qui reprend le crincrin de la corde sensible afin d’en tirer profit’ (EJV, 157). Yet writing and rewriting the death of Philippe—repeatedly losing, reclaiming and naming him as what Freud called ‘la repetition démoniaque’ (EJV, 107) slowly loosens its grip—is a core factor in shaping the author’s experience of time, and one which reminds us powerfully of the several ways in which women harness repetition, fragmentation and variation in life writings that relate specifically to traumatic experience.12 One might add that Roland Barthes’s repeated returns to express the grief occasioned by the death of his mother in La Chambre claire13 and Journal de deuil14 have given rise to no such accusations of profiting from mourning. Is there a particular intolerance for repetition, then, when it is associated with and produced in life writing authored by women? It is worth raising the question, although we must leave it hanging rather than answer it here. The muscular metaphor of the ‘cercles concentriques’ (EJV, 110) through which Laurens conveys the experience of loss in her book offers a powerful alternative to the repetitive movement that is more ‘Cette mort-là: l’écriture du deuil chez Camille Laurens’, in Le Roman français de l’extrême contemporain: écritures, engagements, énonciations, ed. Barbara Havercroft, Pascal Michelucci and Pascal Riendeau (Quebec: Nota Bene, 2010), pp. 319–42; Kathryn Robson, ‘Psychic Plagiarism: The Death of a Child in Marie Darrieussecq’s Tom est mort and Camille Laurens’s Philippe’, French Studies 69.1 (2015), 46–59. 12 One especially notable example of a further extensive life writing project that puts repetition, fragmentation and variation in the service of trauma and that supplements the material in the current chapter, is found in the distinctively troubling work of Christine Angot. Here it is the experience of father-daughter incest that disrupts and marks time throughout the author’s entire corpus, reaching its most explicit and marked expression in the courageous Une semaine de vacances (Paris: Gallimard, 2013) wherein the time of a week—a week lifted out of time—is measured for both narrator and reader by a toxic inventory of the father’s repeated gestures of abuse. 13 Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). 14 Roland Barthes, Journal de deuil (Paris: Seuil, 2009).

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habitually associated with traumatic loss in a psychoanalytic context: that of the fort/da game through which the child repeatedly rehearses the eventuality of maternal absence by throwing away and then reeling in a wooden spool attached to a string. The theory is familiar: in repeating this gesture the boy explores the possibility of exercising a degree of control over the inherently uncontrollable and creates himself, proleptically, as a survivor. Conversely, the enveloping ripples envisaged by Laurens configure responses not to anticipated trauma but to the actual trauma of death and to the repetitions of traumatic memory as, to quote Cathy Caruth, it ‘totters between remembrance and erasure’.15 They mark a new relationship with time: an interrupted and reiterative relationship which frequently eludes control, and perhaps a maternal relationship too, that in turn structures the text. To this powerful and unusual metaphor of concentric circles Laurens adds a more conventional structuring metaphor in the form of an architectural reference. What she calls the ‘clef de voûte’ of her text (EJV, 110) is another, quite different trauma, lived through in childhood and still more unrepeatable in social terms: her experience of sexual abuse by a great-uncle. Because this physical and emotional memory surfaces in Laurens’s writing less often than that of maternal bereavement and appears to be less of a structuring force, it seems at first puzzling that she rehearses it so self-consciously on the book’s central page. Yet this choice asks us to note that there is something generic about the experience of being told not to repeat something, of being instructed to keep silent about issues that matter. It is the enforced vow of silence, wrested from her by her grandmother’s reiterative injunction: ‘Ce que tu viens de me dire, ne le répète jamais. Tu entends? Ne le répète jamais’ (EJV, 111), which ultimately generates her determination to articulate the abuse, to repeat this articulation and to plant this political fable about not repeating slap bang in the centre of her work. Laurens’s Encore et jamais, then, explores repetition as textual device and as lived experience, as public and as private, as voluntary and involuntary. It asks how repetition regulates experiences of labour and of play and constitutes the layers and loops of memory that provide a sense of life’s shape and course. Laurens ponders on the relationship between diverse forms of repetition especially as they relate to women, domesticity, love, mothering, sex, traumatic loss, mourning, the talking 15 Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), pp. 78–79.

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cure, writing and the everyday. Her text is itself an example of what it explores, its own repetitions and variations engendering tremendous pleasure (for this reader at least) as its formal properties lock us in to sustained consideration of repetition and variation in our own lives. Anne Ernaux: Fragments Annie Ernaux’s fragmentary texts are invariably driven by the question of what forms can do and of how they can, as she puts it in a jotting made in February 1982 included in her recently published writer’s diary L’Atelier noir, ‘faire sentir l’épaisseur du réel’.16 The author claims that her originality lies in the intimate, almost organic connection between everyday experience and what she refers to as ‘des organisations inconnues d’écriture’ (UP, 56), as well as in the transpersonal emphasis in her writing which has it hesitate on the cusp of intimate and collective experience: ‘Plus je pense à mon “histoire”’ says Ernaux, with the idea of a personal life story firmly in inverted commas, ‘plus elle est en “choses” extérieures (fond) et fragments (forme)’ (AN, 191). And, in terms of the temporal dimension of her writing, we might quote the firm and steadfastly observed injunction: ‘Quel que soit le projet, faire sentir le passage du temps’ (AN, 51). Ernaux’s most extraordinary and ambitious feat in terms of using fragments to ‘do time’ is to be found in the total socio-autobiography Les Années (2008), where a range of devices come together to produce a powerful combination of historical and intimate time, providing ‘l’histoire d’une femme “traversée par l’histoire”’ (AN, 69) and, as Sheringham observes, conjoining ‘différentes manières de penser l’archive’.17 Here the surge of History is rendered by a dense accumulation of experiential fragments with little in the way of connective tissue so that, as Adrien Scharff observes, ‘l’essence d’une époque’ is charted by ‘l’inventaire et l’énumération’.18 Time coalesces, for 16 Ernaux, L’Atelier noir (Paris: Éditions des Busclats, 2011), p. 17. The diary, henceforth cited as AN followed by page number, contains short, often reiterative comments, dated between 1982 and 2007, on the author’s creative processes and ambitions. 17 Sheringham, ‘Annie Ernaux’, p. 180. 18 Adrien Scharff, Le Temps et le moi dans l’œuvre d’Annie Ernaux (Paris: Éditions le Manuscrit, 2008), p. 35.

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instance, around set-piece structures such as the vignettes of family meals that punctuate the book and whose repetitions and variations provide affective, temporal and social markers of change. It is nuanced and thickened in places by Ernaux’s recurring interest in songs and photographs: the former, sometimes given in list form, are felt by the author to be avenues to a ‘sentiment heureux du temps’,19 while the latter are associated with the discontinuity of identity and the ‘tragic’ feeling of time: ‘J’ai souvent pensé’, she muses, ‘qu’on pourrait raconter toute sa vie avec seulement des chansons et des photos’ (UP, 102). Les Années is envisaged by its author on two temporal axes: one horizontal, taking the reader through from the immediate post-war period to the time of the manuscript’s completion in 2007; and one vertical, a kind of layering of past experiences which are accessed through spatial and sensory memories and often experienced simultaneously in a ‘sensation palimpseste’ (AN, 184) that sometimes constitutes the author’s lived experience of time. In its latter stages the text renders a sense of time’s speeding up, of the pressure of new temporal rhythms intimately connected to both the author’s advancing years and to new communications technology: the pulse of time, now racing, is measured, says Ernaux, by the repetitive gesture of ‘le clic sautillant et rapide de la souris sur l’écran’. 20 In formal terms, Les Années opens and closes with the total collapse of chronological time as a succession of fleeting, unrelated images surface and fall away, performing the fraying of the work’s organizing consciousness and enacting the author’s knowledge that ‘Toutes les images’ of her memory bank ‘disparaîtront’. 21 Much has been written in response to the remarkable multi-temporal organization and structure of Les Années. 22 Here we shall briefly home 19 Annie Ernaux, L’Usage de la photo (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), p. 102. Further references will be given as UP followed by the page number. For study of the structuring function of the fragments of songs that are strewn throughout Ernaux’s corpus, see Bruno Blanckeman, ‘La Chanson, les chansons’, in Annie Ernaux: le temps et la mémoire, ed. Francine Best, Bruno Blanckeman and Francine DugastPortes, with the participation of Annie Ernaux (Paris: Stock, 2014), pp. 442–58. 20 Annie Ernaux, Les Années (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), p. 223. 21 Ernaux, Les Années, p. 11. For analysis of this framing device as it relates to ageing in Ernaux, see Shirley Jordan, ‘Writing Age: Annie Ernaux’s Les Années’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 47.2 (2011), 138–49. 22 Significant studies include, but are by no means limited to: Yvon Inizan, ‘Les Années: entre mémoire et histoire, génèse d’une forme’, in Annie Ernaux: le temps et la mémoire, ed. Francine Best, Bruno Blanckeman and Francine

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in on an element of one of the bridging texts which refers forward to and helps to prepare Les Années, a text which encompasses the author’s experience of just one year, 2003, and whose material seems to refer us rather to the day (in parentheses, the provisional title of Les Années was indeed Jours du monde (AN, 197)) or the moment. This work, L’Usage de la photo, 23 shows Ernaux engaging in what was for her a rather new solution to organizing what Virginia Woolf famously referred to as ‘this loose, drifting material of life’24 and elaborating a Perecquian fascination for the ways in which a given room might open up to time. 25 A work of multiple fragments and repeated gestures, L’Usage de la photo is, as Ernaux puts it, a ‘mise en récit minimale’ (UP, 56) of a time when she was both ill and embarking on a new love affair; suffering and engrossed in sensuality (the text is in fact co-authored with her then lover Marc Marie, although we will not elaborate on that here). Sex, so central to Ernaux’s life writing, is referred to by her as ‘la répétition, le présent’ and ‘justement le contraire du temps’ (AN, 115), its immediacy rendering it elusive. Here the gestures of lovemaking are alluded to in a series of 14 photographs. Each image is snagged between pudeur and obscenity; each documents the banal domestic disorder—piles of clothes, bedclothes, evidence of a meal—which is a residue of lovemaking, and each allows the author to recover ‘l’irréalité du sexe’ in ‘la réalité des traces’ (UP, 13). It is worth commenting here on how one particular photograph, and the uses to which it is put, relate to this chapter’s theme. A fragment rooted in a specific moment in time, it is given the title ‘Cuisine matinale, dimanche 16 mars’ (UP, 52). It is a quiet domestic interior, a scene of Dugast-Portes, with the participation of Annie Ernaux (Paris: Stock, 2014), pp. 158–74; Sheringham, ‘Annie Ernaux’; Maïté Snauwaert, ‘Les Années d’Annie Ernaux: la forme d’une vie de femme’, Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine 4 (2012), 102–13. 23 See note 18. 24 See The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 266. 25 In Espèces d’espaces Perec includes a section entitled ‘Chambres’ in which the bedrooms where he remembers sleeping serve as portals to the past and as spurs to structure and shape of his memory. Thus an inventory of the room where he slept in Cornwall in the summer of 1954 gives rise to a physical reanimation of former sensory experience and to a flood of memories characterized as ‘les plus fugaces, les plus anodins comme les plus essentiels’. See Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces (Paris: Éditions Galilée, [1974] 2000), p. 46.

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everyday, ordinary disorder, in fact of ‘Deux désordres’, says Ernaux, since ‘Rien n’a été rangé ici, ni les vestiges des repas ni ceux de l’amour’ (UP, 54). It operates as a time capsule, allowing different temporalities to flood in and to be held in stasis. As an analogue photograph it evokes the numerous meditations on time, traces and mortality that are associated with the distinctive temporal regime of such images and that flood this idiosyncratic album. 26 The unwashed dishes near the sink and what looks like laundry on the floor illustrate life in flux and evoke its small repetitive rhythms and cycles. Like all the photographs in the book, this one is followed by an exercise in ekphrasis, a thick description which underscores the photograph’s ethnographic value and which, à la Perec, defamiliarizes as well as calling attention to the domestic round. Ernaux picks out and lists cooking vessels, cleaning fluids, a chopping board, liquid plant fertilizer, Whiskas cat food, a Tupperware, a tea towel, a full rubbish bin ‘avec des écorces d’oranges pressés sur le dessus des ordures’ (UP, 53), matter with which the self is conspicuously entangled. She supplements the photograph with layers of sensory impressions, adding smells (coffee and toast) and sounds (the regular stop-start humming of the fridge; an aeroplane making its way to Roissy airport). And just as, for Perec, the narrowness of a particular bed in Cornwall was connected to morning tea, marshmallows and the Geneva Convention, 27 so in L’Usage de la photo slight and momentous matter rubs shoulders as the Cergy kitchen links the intimate time of domesticity with the time of History: 16 March was the last Sunday preceding the Iraq war and although we see no photograph of it, Ernaux recalls the white banner of protest flying from her balcony (UP, 90). Critics of Ernaux have been rather less enthusiastic about L’Usage de la photo than about many of her other works, yet this reiterative phototextual device that caters for Ernaux’s desire to salvage something pertaining to an especially difficult year of her life is both skilful and subtle. Here the author puts to the test her formula of visual/textual fragments and variants until finally she wearies of repeating it, and its organic connection to that particular period of her life seems to 26 For studies of the work that include analysis of the photographs, see: Alison Fell, ‘Intimations of Mortality: Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’Usage de la photo as Breast Cancer Narrative’, Nottingham French Studies 48.2 (2012), 68–79; Shirley Jordan, ‘Improper Exposure: L’Usage de la photo by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’, Journal of Romance Studies 7.2 (2007), 123–41. 27 Perec, Espèces d’espaces, pp. 43–47.

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have run its course. Of the last photograph to be reproduced in this unconventionally rhythmic album she notes, ‘Elle n’éveille rien en moi’ (UP, 146), signalling her detachment from the (serious) game in which she and her lover have been involved over the past 11 months, and the provisional exhausting of this particular formal solution. The idea of the domestic room that yields access to the past will, however, return in Les Années and the author’s mounting sense of urgency with regard to time will also be carried forward to infuse this more major project of writing the total life. A final comment on Ernaux’s numerous considerations of what forms can do concerns not the felicitous meshing of form with known experience, but instead the revelatory capacity of form. One of the most telling entries in L’Atelier noir makes this abundantly clear: ‘Le problème est toujours de trouver une forme qui permette de penser l’impensé (le mien, celui des autres)’ (AN, 99). Chantal Akerman: ‘petits riens’28 Chantal Akerman’s sustained investigation of what forms can do is sometimes filmic, sometimes written, and sometimes explored via the installation works with which she began to experiment in 1995 and which combine photographs, texts, video films or extracts from films that loop back upon themselves to begin over and over again on multiple screens. Whatever the device, Akerman’s work shows a marked fascination with everyday, repeated gestures, with the unremarkable non-events that constitute the bulk of our lived experience, and with rhythm and slowness. The famous sequence in the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles of the eponymous heroine peeling potatoes in real time—a sequence which allegedly tried the patience even of Marguerite Duras, herself no stranger to the art of repetition—is perhaps the best remembered instance. Akerman’s sole experiment in writing her whole life, a fragmented, ruminative phototextual self-portrait entitled Ma mère rit (2013), conveys the author’s experience of self in time through a similar insistence on repetition which amounts to repetition compulsion. If repetition is, as Camille Laurens says, ‘une manière de “persévérer dans son être”, d’appliquer son désir au renouvellement continu, en dépit de la perte et de la douleur’ 28 Akerman, Ma mère rit (Paris: Mercure de France, 2013), p. 33. Henceforth MMR followed by the page number.

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(EJV, 159), Akerman’s reproduction of the same certainly bears out the claim. The feminist drive of her depiction of woman, space, time and the everyday in Jeanne Dielman29 gives way here to a quieter, differently troubled domesticity. What, then, is the stuff of life in this work and how does Akerman shape it? Ma mère rit was commissioned for the Mercure de France traits et portraits series whose premise is to generate formally innovative life writing in which a visual and a written narrative are productively entangled with each other. One might therefore expect to find within it copious evidence of this nomadic film-maker’s travels to Mexico, Russia, China, New York and Israel, yet the visual content pertaining to the outside world is downgraded for the most part to tiny, almost thumbnail screen grabs and the global issues that are tackled elsewhere in Akerman’s work (racism in the American South; illegal immigration; terrorism in the Middle East) are omitted in favour of the pared-down confinement of domestic interiors, the small activities of buying cigarettes and of writing—the only ones, claims Akerman, ‘où je sens que j’ai une vie’ (MMR, 32)—as well as the mundane conversations that shape the day. ‘Ce livre’, observes Catherine Millet, ‘n’est pas un panorama, c’est un chant’, 30 and it is indeed a kind of choral that sweeps us along with its interlocking voices. Foremost among these is the voice of Akerman herself which stammers, tails away then begins again so that her writing, as Millet continues, ‘enregistre la pensée comme elle va et vient et se perd et revient sur elle-même, comme un œil numérique scanne un corps dans ses moindres replis’. 31 We also hear the voices of Akerman’s sisters and more especially of her mother Natalia, familiarly referred to as Nelly by her daughters. Akerman’s ‘little constellation of things’ includes repeated exchanges with her mother, not least in her last works when the latter, in her eighties, needed care and this is in many ways a symbiotic text in which interaction with her mother shapes both the author’s life and text. The work is, as the back cover tells us, ‘écrit à vif, dans […] l’intensité et la crudité du quotidien’ and is often confined to bedrooms, a corridor, 29 For a detailed and rigorous political reading, see Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 30 Catherine Millet, ‘Portraits de famille’, Le Monde des livres (8 November 2013), 10. 31 Millet, ‘Portraits de famille’.

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a kitchen and the slow movements between them. Meals are taken ‘à heures fixes dans une cuisine propre’ (MMR, 41); days pass in ‘des petits riens […] le téléphone qui sonne […] les mots dits ou échangés. Le silence. Les soupirs parfois. Le bruit des voisins. L’ascenseur qui se bloque. Les poubelles à descendre et encore les mots dits et à peine échangés’ (MMR, 33). The circadian rhythms that often seem to structure Akerman’s work—the emphases on bed, sleep, bleary-eyed and reluctant awakenings (not unlike those that frame Laurens’s daily experience) and a general sense of being in a different time zone as if jetlagged—are also in evidence along with a new emphasis on ageing; an insistent, rhythmic return to her mother’s body, heartbeat, breathing, appetite, waking, sleeping and daily injections. The particular feature that we will pick out here is the quality of voice and of talk between mother and daughter. Akerman focuses insistently on the repeated everyday words and ordinary, formulaic small talk that contain the affective texture of the mother-daughter relationship. Here I intend the term ‘contain’ to allude to a sense of restraint as well as to expression, for in this work time is measured, and the sense of a life fashioned, by often phatic verbal fragments and by the tension between silence and speech, as each woman negotiates interdependency and the need for separation. ‘Elle aime dire comment ça va et elle aime dire “ça va bien”’ (MMR, 67); ‘Elle répète tout le temps la même chose et quand je lui dis tu me l’as déjà dit elle se met en colère’ (MMR, 59); ‘[elle] se plaint “Dis quelque chose”’ (MMR, 180). Akerman’s resistance to giving an account of herself as a famous film-maker, writer, artist and university teacher in New York and Tel Aviv, is repeatedly rehearsed in the book as she tells her mother that she has nothing to say. Nelly’s response, ironically, reads like a mise-en-abyme of the book itself: ‘Mais il ne faut pas avoir quelque chose à dire pour parler. On peut juste dire quelque chose et puis une autre chose, c’est comme ça qu’on parle’ (MMR, 182). Guilt-ridden, the daughter resolves such discord by proposing a recurring consensual activity: the making of a list for the few foodstuffs that Nelly still eats: ‘Je reviens la voir et dis si on faisait une liste’ (MMR, 180). Lists indeed punctuate Ma mère rit as moments where time briefly coalesces with greater purpose and with an impetus to the future. The text is also punctuated by pre-verbal material in the form of sighs and, as its title indicates, of laughter, the repetitive, rhythmic marker of pleasure that lingers in the spaces between form and formlessness and that in each human being is a unique sound. Akerman observes of Nelly:

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Elle rit. J’aime entendre son rire. Elle dort beaucoup, mais elle rit. Elle a du plaisir. Puis elle dort. (MMR, 11)

Throughout, Akerman holds us firmly in the present time, the time of exchange, for like Ernaux, she is more interested in recording traces than in producing narrative. 32 In this regard it is significant that her last ever installation exhibition, displayed in London, was called Chantal Akerman—NOW. 33 This attention-grabbing title was intended to flag up in particular the presence within the installation of Akerman’s most recent creations as well as the relevance of her work to contemporary politics (the 2015 installation work entitled NOW which formed the centrepiece of the exhibition is a haunting reflection on violence and conflict in the Middle East). 34 We may also understand the installation’s title, however, as a reference to the film-maker’s proclivity for extended takes in which very little happens and the world stands still, inviting us to attend to the moment. And we might usefully turn to this installation here, since it is Akerman’s final attempt to explore ways of structuring lived experience in her art 35 and is in some ways a response to perceived failure. Indeed, Ma mère rit contains a number of wrenching statements about failure. Akerman assesses her life itself as botched: ‘Ma vie, je n’ai pas de vie. Je n’ai pas su m’en faire une’ (MMR, 26), a far-reaching proclamation which raises profound questions about what constitutes the shape or the quality of a valid life or a good life. She comments too, in self-reflexive impotency, on the unsatisfactory nature of her attempts to get to the nub of her life by lending it form in writing. At the outset Akerman declares herself capable ‘Ni de vérité ni à peine de ma vérité’ (MMR, 9) as well as dissatisfied with her text: ‘J’ai écrit tout ça et 32 Elsewhere, explorations of Akerman’s communication with her mother investigate the temporal impact of new communications technology, incorporating similarly phatic conversations conducted long-distance on Facebook and Skype. See for instance Akerman’s No Home Movie (2014). 33 Chantal Akerman—NOW ran at AMBIKA P3, University of Westminster, London, from 30 October to 6 December 2015. 34 The configuration of time in NOW is unusual for Akerman since it is based on rapidity and urgency and sets the pulse racing. The installation consists of eight video projections, each showing a generic desert landscape filmed from a car hurtling along at high speed, while the distant gunfire and sirens on the soundtrack indicate that we are on the outskirts of a war zone and in a situation of high alert. 35 Akerman took her own life on 5 October 2015.

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maintenant je n’aime plus ce que j’ai écrit’ (MMR, 9). The 2013 installation Maniac Shadows is a four-channel video projection with two soundtracks and a cluster of 96 small photographs, stills selected from the moving images of the projections. The installation, then, attempts to ‘do time’ via a different set of formal devices. A continuation of, or partner piece to, Ma mère rit, it is a still more pared-back, short-hand work that curates much of the same material and, since it is made up of a collection of brief, almost notational video films on a loop, is even more reiterative, offering like much of Akerman’s work a ‘rhythmic accretion of the ensemble of images and sounds’. 36 The installation room is darkened and semi-partitioned. On the far wall is projected a film of Akerman reading extracts from Ma mère rit, translated into English, in her gravelly smoker’s voice; on the nearer partition wall three juxtaposed screens let in some of the everyday stuff of life, synthesizing Akerman’s two most familiar places, Harlem and Brussels, and holding us on the cusp between a cloistered domestic world and the world beyond. A laundry cart is pushed across the screen; kids on scooters hurtle into and out of the frame; a man dances to jazz on a pavement; while indoors Akerman’s camera captures Nelly laboriously navigating the environment of her apartment and charts her own everyday trajectories creating a tactile and visual poetry of micro-movements, of doorways, corridors, windows, blinds and ceiling fans. Muffled, muted soundscapes overlap one another. The installation condenses the matter of Akerman’s life, drawing us not so much into narrative as into a zone of consciousness so that we attend with her, in her own time, to the quotidian through what have been referred to, in reference to a different work by Akerman, as ‘cascading visual riffs that touch us on a visceral level’. 37 This summary of the stuff of life is not about action, event or achievement; it is about registering the infra-ordinary in a mode that is at once intimate and detached and offering us what Annie Ernaux, with reference to the organizing consciousness at the centre of Les Années, calls ‘ce monde qu’elle a enregistré rien qu’en vivant’. 38 Immersed in Akerman’s hypnotic installation, we might well be reminded of Camille 36 Rina Carvajal, ‘Visions in Passing: From the East (D’Est)’, in Chantal Akerman, Moving through Time and Space, ed. Terrie Sultan (Houston: Blaffer Gallery, 2008), pp. 10–17 (p. 11). 37 Terrie Sultan, ‘Preface’, in Chantal Akerman, Moving through Time and Space, ed. Terrie Sultan (Houston: Blaffer Gallery, 2008), pp. 5–8 (p. 7). 38 Ernaux, Les Années, p. 238.

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Laurens’s observation that at their best, repetitive structures—including those that are expressions of boredom, mundaneness or constraint— allow us, along with the author or film-maker, to take flight: to ‘quitter le cercle vicieux pour l’hélice’ so that ‘On tourne en rond, mais en s’élevant’ (EJV, 67). To conclude, this chapter has analysed some of the ways in which recent women’s life writing in French endeavours to give a sense of how the self is anchored in time by deploying repetition, variation and the fragment and by homing in on the everyday. There are of course many other instances of writers who have recourse to such devices and the corpus, which could incorporate life writing by creators as diverse as Hélène Cixous, Sophie Calle or Christine Angot, is potentially extensive. What seems of particular interest in the three authors chosen is their experimental attempt to grasp the temporal shape not of a single experience or period but of a whole life, as well as their productive resistance to life as linear narrative.

chapter eight

Vertical Travel, Listing and the Enumeration of the Everyday Charles Forsdick Vertical Travel, Listing and the Enumeration of the Everyday

Ou bien encore: s’efforcer de se représenter, avec le plus de précision possible, sous le réseau des rues, l’enchevêtrement des égouts, le passage des lignes de métro, la prolifération invisible et souterraine des conduits (électricité, gaz, lignes téléphoniques, conduites d’eau, réseau des pneumatiques) sans laquelle nulle vie ne serait possible à la surface.   En dessous, juste en dessous, ressusciter l’éocène: le calcaire à meulières, les marnes et les caillasses, le gypse, le calcaire lacustre de Saint-Ouen, les sables de Beauchamp, le calcaire grossier, les sables et les lignites du Soissonnais, l’argile plastique, la craie.1

In this passage from Georges Perec’s Espèces d’espaces (1974), from the section entitled with characteristically deceptive simplicity ‘La rue’, the author describes a progressive burrowing down into space, a form of vertical travelling into the everyday that disrupts the customary horizontal patterns of passing through the city to peel away its layers, revealing the innards of the urban: the underground spaces of transport and waste disposal, but also the hidden arteries on which the delivery of 1 Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces, in Œuvres, ed. Christelle Reggiani, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard; Pléiade, 2017), I.547–653 (p. 603). Subsequent citations are made to EE.

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utilities depends. The imaginary descent is performed rhetorically, via the fragments of the list, a device central to Perec’s work where it plays a role that is both textual and methodological, writerly and ethnographic. The momentum of this particular listing penetrates the layers of the Anthropocene to reach the natural elements of earlier geological strata, belonging most notably to the Eocene epoch, to which the oldest known fossils of many of modern mammal orders are dated. Perec catalogues the forgotten foundations of the city, and deploys a mode of enumeration that connects the street with the rocks on which it rests: rocks of various degrees of density and friability, presented generically or brought back to the specific through association with particular locales in Paris and its surroundings. In evoking Saint-Ouen, Beauchamp and Soissons, Perec inserts disruptions and even personal feedback loops into the apparent linearity of the list, not least because the third of these places was defended against the Germans by the author’s father shortly before his death in June 1940. Discussions of the structure of Espèces d’espaces often focus not on the vertical descent that this catalogue implies, but on the concentric circles through which the text unfolds structurally, passing from the bed, bedroom and apartment, via the street, quartier and town, to the country (France), the continent (Europe) and then the world. In a manoeuvre central to the reflections in the chapter that follows it, I suggest that Perec uses this structure to privilege microspection and to survey—with a marked sense of discontinuity and even fragmentation— various degrees of spatial granularity as he toys with the variable distance between observing subject and observed space. The aim of the text, as Michael Sheringham notes memorably in his Everyday Life, is to ‘play cat and mouse with organized forms and procedures of knowledge’. 2 What is particularly striking about Espèces d’espaces, and about the numerous experiments it has engendered, is the extent to which these may be perceived—in retrospect—as part of the elaboration of a neo-humanist geography, situated at a point where the fields of semiology, anthropology and creative writing converge. As Derek Schilling suggests, this forms part of an effort shared with contemporaries as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard and Michel de Certeau not only to challenge the ways in which, in the post-war period, people were increasingly alienated from the spaces in which they dwelt, but also to 2 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 49.

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reveal how implicit in those spaces is the material for a powerful critique of everyday life as well as the resources for new forms of living together. 3 Perec’s call—throughout much of his work and most notably in the unfinished lieux project—is for new ways of viewing and engaging with space, and these are rooted in fresh approaches to spatial literacy, a point underlined by the fact that Espèces d’espaces opens in fact not with a focus on the bed (which, for Perec, is ‘l’espace individuel par excellence, l’espace élementaire du corps’; EE, 564), but—self-referentially—with attention to the actual page. Mindful of the fact that our passage through everyday life leaves endless written traces—evident not least in the forms of listing on which this chapter will focus (‘presque tout’, it is noted, ‘à un moment ou un autre, passe par une feuille de papier’)— Perec privileges the act of writing (EE, 560). He presents it as a means, via non-literary practices such as cartography and toponymy, of bringing spaces into being; but also sees his own writing as a spatial practice in its own right: ‘J’écris: j’habite ma feuille de papier, je l’investis, je la parcours. Je suscite des blancs, des espaces (sauts dans le sens: discontinuités, passages, transitions)’ (EE, 559). Writing is seen even as an active colonization of paper—‘J’écris: je trace des mots sur une page […] Une ligne horizontale noircit l’espace vierge, lui donne un sens, le vectorise de gauche à droite, de haut en bas’—and this is a process that Perec describes in specific terms of geometry, evoking not only vectorization, a movement habitually in this context from left to right, but also, in this section, writing calligrammatically and in the form of a list to highlight the tensions between the verticality and the horizontality of the page (EE, 557–58). The suggestion that writing is a form of travel across the space of the page (‘je la parcours’) invites exploration of the ways in which Perec’s interest in the geometric dimensions of writing converges with very similar issues in travel itself—and more specifically in travel literature. I have long been struck by the surprising absence, from the variables by which travel is analysed, of questions of geometry: most notably axes (verticality vs horizontality) and vectors (the specific and indeed often unique direction of the journey, and associated issues of velocity). With some notable exceptions, such as accounts of journeys based around mountaineering, travel writing implies an embedded horizontalism that tends to downplay verticality, and does not fully entertain the multilevel 3 Derek Schilling, Mémoires du quotidien: les lieux de Perec (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2006), p. 128.

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and multidirectional nature of travellers’ engagement with space.4 There are exceptions to these spatial assumptions, and these are issues present in the work of an earlier twentieth-century author, Victor Segalen: his major 1914 journey across China was dubbed in geometric terms ‘la Grande Diagonale’; the imaginary travelogue Equipée, partly inspired by the same journey, highlights questions of ascension and descent; and René Leys reveals an interest in shapes and intersections hidden in the urban texture of early twentieth-century Beijing. Twentiethcentury travel writing in French often tends to be concerned more, however, with what Michel Le Bris has called ‘le grand dehors’, a great outdoors characterized by horizontal expansiveness, by the yearning for wilderness free of traces of humanity, by a late solipsism redolent of much Romantic travel and by the traveller’s self-positioning that may be understood in terms of what Mary-Louise Pratt, in Imperial Eyes (coincidentally published in the same year as Le Bris’s volume), called the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey trope’. 5 A mordant critique of Le Bris—and of a number of fellow members of the Pour une littérature voyageuse group—appeared in the work of the semiotician and anthropologist Jean-Didier Urbain. In Ethnologue, mais pas trop (2003), Urbain juxtaposes the ‘tyrannie agoraphile’ of much contemporary travel writing with what he dubs an ‘ironie claustrophile’, the identification of different modes of travel, of relating to space and of textualizing a relationship to space that no longer fetishizes the ‘exotic’ (understood in a reductively geographical sense) but explores instead the ‘endotic’.6 In generating this binary, Urbain reveals his clear debt to Perec, and in particular his reflections on the subject in ‘Approches de quoi?’, where Perec writes: ‘Peut-être s’agit-il de fonder enfin notre propre anthropologie: celle qui parlera de nous, qui ira chercher en nous ce que nous avons si longtemps pillé chez les autres. Non plus l’exotisme, mais l’endotique’.7 Urbain’s response is to identify a number of contemporary ‘voyageurs de l’immédiat’, travellers drawn—to borrow again 4 Tim Ingold challenges the horizontalism of a world ‘on which we dwell’ with the vertical perspective of one ‘within which we dwell’. See ‘Globes and Spheres’, in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 209–18 (pp. 209, 213). 5 Michel Le Bris, Le Grand Dehors (Paris: Payot, 1992); Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 6 Jean-Didier Urbain, Ethnologue, mais pas trop (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2008). 7 Georges Perec, ‘Approches de quoi?’, in L’infra-ordinaire (Paris: Seuil, 1989), pp. 9–13 (pp. 11–12).

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from Perec—to the ‘choses communes’ of the infra-ordinary, who adopt an often project-based mode of ‘ironie claustrophile’ in order to re-engage with the everyday.8 As examples, he cites now well-scrutinized accounts of decelerated journeys through French non-lieux, domestic travel that atomizes and defamiliarizes everyday spaces, and encourages attention to their unexpectedly fractal details: Les Autonautes de la cosmoroute by Julio Cortazar and Carole Dunlop, who treat the ‘autoroute du soleil’ not as a means of accessing elsewhere, but as a site of travel in its own right; and Les Passagers du Roissy-Express by François Maspero and Anaïk Frantz, who travel the RER B in a southerly direction, away from Roissy, and become explorers of the banlieue. Although cognate to Perecquian practices (and the product of a shared sociocultural and political context), these examples owe as much to other forms of engagement: most notably to the idea of interstitial travel, in which any distinction between point of departure and point of arrival becomes hazy, and space is encountered through a fragmented practice of microspection; or through a disruption and defamiliarization of the traditional dynamics of ethnography, an approach indebted historically not least to Montesquieu and evident in the essays of Marc Augé, whereby the domesticity of French culture and society is exoticized via a series of foreignizing strategies. To explain the mechanics of these journeys, Urbain adopts the modes of descent with which this chapter began and deploys the metaphor of travel into the catacombs, using the subterranean, even katabatic journeying this involves to reinscribe verticality and forms of burrowing down into the everyday. As such, from a French and francophone perspective, he contributes to recent discussions of ‘vertical travel’, explored in detail by Michael Cronin in Across the Lines: Travel, Language and Translation, where he claims: Horizontal travel is the more conventional understanding of travel as a linear progression from place to place. Vertical travel is temporary dwelling in a location for a period of time where the traveller begins to travel down into the particulars of place either in space (botany, studies of micro-climate, exhaustive exploration of local landscape) or in time (local history, archaeology, folklore).9 8 On literature and the project, see Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (eds), The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Twentieth-Century French Culture (Oxford: Berghahn, 2005). 9 Michael Cronin, Across the Lines: Travel, Language and Translation (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), p. 19.

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The verticality in ‘vertical travel’ can be literal, implying a downward movement underground, clandestine or otherwise, that permits a discovery of elements of everyday space otherwise deliberately concealed or ignored by emphases on horizontal, superficial ways of encountering space and its contents; or it can be more figurative, implying the degree of curiosity and dépaysement more often associated with non-domestic cultures, and encapsulating the fresh attention to often unanticipated detail that emerges from slowing down, from adopting a radically different mindset, from looking, listening and sensing in new ways. Urbain claims eleswhere: ‘La banalité n’est pas dans le monde, elle est dans le regard de l’homme’,10 but much vertical travel—with its interest in soundscapes and smellscapes—seeks also to disrupt the connection between horizontalism and ocularcentrism, and to suggest that the microspection it entails is a multisensory practice. Vertical travel operates as a federating term to describe a range of modes of travel. It is linked to psychogeography, to Urb-Ex (or Urban Exploration), to ‘deep topography’—and to other modes of (re)visiting and revaluing what Robert Macfarlane calls the ‘detrital and neglected’.11 In his recent study of language and landscape, and of the ways in which a reduced vocabulary relating to the natural world may be seen to reflect the impoverishment of our perception and of our human relationship to the environment, Macfarlane quotes from ‘The Parish and the Universe’ (1967) by Patrick Kavanagh, the poet of the Irish everyday, and suggests that the genealogies of contemporary reflection on ‘vertical travel’ merit scrutiny, not least because of the ways in which the practice extends beyond the urban and also relates not just to praxis but also to poetics: 10 Jean-Didier Urbain, Secrets de voyage: menteurs, imposteurs, et autres voyageurs invisibles (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1998), p. 27. 11 Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (London: Penguin Books, 2016), p. 232. For an introduction to psychogeography, a playful and disruptive exploration of urban environments that draws on the work of the Situationist International, see Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (London: Pocket Essentials, 2006). Urb-Ex (or Urban Exploration) is the exploration of often hidden parts of the built environment, including rooftops, underground spaces and abandoned ruins. On this subject, see Bradley L. Garrett, Explore Everything: Place-hacking the City (London: Verso, 2013); Timothy Hannem, Urbex: 50 lieux secrets et abandonnés en France (Paris: Flammarion, 2016). The concept of ‘deep topography’ is developed by Nick Papadimitriou. See, for instance, Scarp (London: Sceptre, 2013).

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To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience, it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields—these are as much as a man can fully experience.12

Kavanagh juxtaposes deep with superficial knowledge, verticality with horizontalism, suggesting that the intensity of experience of place is linked not only to forms of microspection and unaccustomed, repeated attention to detail, but also to the limiting of attention in a process that Perec would dub a tentative d’épuisement. Macfarlane is of relevance to this chapter not because, in focusing on such practices, he raises questions about ‘nature writing’ and its existence in literary traditions outside the English language, and also about the respective roles of ‘vertical travel’ in urban and rural contexts (and crucially in the ‘edgelands’ and other liminal zones where those contexts intersect), but because in Landmarks he relates this emphasis on depth-not-width to the specific questions of enumeration and cataloguing. Macfarlane’s particular interest in this book is in lexical loss, in language deficit and in the role of word lists in the establishment of a relationship between individual and place. His protagonists are word-hoarders, glossarians and archivists of disappearing vocabularies, and although their approach to place differs in some significant ways from the other forms of exhaustive enumeration on which the chapter will now focus, they nevertheless exemplify a clear relationship between travel, deep engagement with fragments of the everyday and a specific enumerative drive, and an associated poetics of listing. Although little critical attention has paid to the phenomenon, the practice of enumeration—manifest in the different phenomena of the list, the catalogue or the inventory—is in fact relatively common in travel literature. It has been evident since the foundational texts of the genre such as Herodotus’s Histories in which—as Joseph Skinner outlines in The Invention of Greek Ethnography—listing permits management of the plethora of information gathered.13 Already in classical literature, the formal rhetoric of the list provides ‘important mechanisms of signification’, with an ‘ability to segment, order, condense and transform’.14 In more 12 Cited in Macfarlane, Landmarks, p. 63. 13 Joseph Skinner, The Invention of Greek Ethnography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 14 Skinner, The Invention of Greek Ethnography, p. 122.

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recent texts, the instantaneous textualization of travel, in the field, still often depends on the telegraphic listing of details (of places, encounters, sensations, impressions…) which may serve as the raw material for a retrospectively produced account. This detail is often only revealed by genetic approaches to the travelogue, which customarily reveal a transformation of such fragments into more discursive forms of narration and description, providing a post hoc impression of textual coherence. These practices of progressive accumulation are nevertheless evident in a number of travel narratives, which either deploy, as a structuring device, a proliferation of fragmentary details and impressions to designate the fallibility of human memory (a striking cinematic example of which is found in Chris Marker’s Sans soleil), or seek to use listing as a means of suggesting the unrepresentativity and contradictoriness experienced when faced with the fragments of the field of travel (evident in the expressionist catalogues, with their recurrent patterns and jarring juxtapositions, of Michel Butor’s US road trip narrative Mobile). Outside travel literature, the literary and cultural uses of listing have attracted considerable attention, with Robert Belknap analysing the historical and epistemological diversity of what he calls the ‘literary list’, as well as the poetics that listing implies, and Bernard Sève offering an exploration of what he calls the ‘philosophie des listes’.15 One of the most searching recent explorations was provided by Umberto Eco, who—in 2009—was invited to curate a series of events at the Louvre entitled Vertige de la liste, an activity that led to his own 2009 study, The Infinity of Lists. Associated with Eco’s programme was work by Jacques Roubaud and Christian Boltanski, most notably Les Habitants du Louvre, a disruption of conventional classificatory mechanisms associated with the museum and—in a playing with lists of names of artists and those involved in their display—an evocation of what they see as alternative criteria of assembly.16 In The Infinity of Lists, Eco ranges from Homer to Joyce to explore enumeration as it manifests itself transhistorically, across media, and with a range of specific functions, pragmatic and 15 See Robert Belknap, The List: Its Pleasures and Uses in Nineteenth-century American Literature (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2005); Bernard Sève, De haut en bas: philosophie des listes (Paris: Seuil, 2010). On lists in literature, see Sophie Milcent-Lawson, Michelle Lecolle and Raymond Michel (eds), Liste et effet liste en littérature (Paris: Garnier, 2013). 16 On Roubaud and Boltanski’s project, see Kathleen Morris, ‘Les habitants du Louvre: The Museum and the List’, L’Esprit Créateur 54.2 (2014), 172–85.

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poetic, panegyric and scientific, accumulative and commemorative. Eco reflects on the list and spatiality, and coins the term ‘list-city’ to describe rhizomatic, decentred urban sprawls such as Los Angeles. At the same time, considering lists in modern and postmodern literature, he identifies two main trends: lists that assemble items ‘deliberately devoid of any apparent reciprocal relationship’, characterized by ‘chaotic enumeration’, and exemplified by Borges, Joyce and Prévert, who seek to ‘chaoticize’ order and ‘reshuffle the world’; and those lists, such as Perec’s Je me souviens or his Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, that are ‘coherent by excess, […] put[ting] together entities that have some sort of kinship among them’.17 As Eco and others have suggested, lists proliferate throughout Perec’s work, but the extent to which they adhere neatly to this binary remains unclear, for they often gather up everyday detail linked by spatial coordinates whilst at the same time reshuffling the ways in which these phenomena are customarily related to each other.18 Central to much of Perec’s fiction (notably La Vie, mode d’emploi), they are also a key part of his travels in the everyday, where they play an instrumental role in the construction of what Joshua Armstrong has recently called ‘empiritexts’, by which he means ‘empirically-bound texts [that] allow invention to spring from attention’, permitting—in other words— ‘tak[ing] the literary text out into the real world and challeng[ing] it to find its content and form’.19 As the practical exercises included in Espèces d’espaces make clear, this invention-springing-from-attention relies heavily on enumeration and listing: ‘Il faut y aller plus doucement, presque bêtement. Se forcer à écrire ce qui n’a pas d’intérêt, ce qui est le plus évident, le plus commun, le plus terne’ (EE, 600). Michael Sheringham presents Tentative d’épuisement, the transcript of notes taken across three successive days in the Place Saint-Sulpice in October 1974, as ‘Perec’s single most significant contribution to the exploration of the quotidien’, 20 and the work has attracted significant 17 Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (London: MacLehose Press, 2009), p. 254. 18 For a key study of lists in Perec, see Jacques Roubaud, ‘Notes sur la poétique des listes chez Georges Perec’, in Penser, classer, écrire. De Pascal à Perec, ed. Béatrice Didier and Jacques Neefs (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), pp. 201–08. 19 Joshua Armstrong, ‘Empiritexts: Mapping Attention and Invention in Post-1980 French Literature’, French Forum 40.1 (2015), 93–108 (pp. 95, 105). 20 Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 261.

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critical attention in the four decades since its publication. A free-standing text, it is nevertheless to be understood in the frame of the wider—and incomplete, existing only as an archive—project of Lieux, a sustained ‘vertical travel’ initiative of which Perec spoke on numerous occasions, the broad rationale of which depended on describing 12 sites across 12 years, with each catalogued in the field and from memory. As Derek Schilling has illustrated, the five extant fragments of this work appeared in a number of fora, most notably in periodicals and in a production for the Atelier de création radiophonique. 21 The listing on which these works depend relies upon a spontaneous field recording, textual or oral, whose detail illustrates the approach outlined in Espèces d’espaces: ‘S’obliger à voir plus platement’ (EE, 600). 22 The extent to which flatness of description is achieved is limited, however, for while Perec’s lists do not contain any thicker description, or do not lead to the retrospective narrative often associated with the literary elaboration of notes captured in the field, their seemingly factual, unvarnished style yields to significant variability, revealing a proliferation of different forms of enunciation. Not only do they encapsulate clear formal variation, with movement between catalogues and descriptions, enumerations and (non-)systematic categorizations, and also with layout shifting between vertical stacking and horizontal sequencing; they also track the subjectivity of the vertical traveller, whose text is shaped by attention to certain objects, to the ebb and flow of particular features, whose enumeration of the everyday is on occasion disrupted by personal memories and even the arrival of acquaintances—drawing on the distinction between noting, noticing and glimpsing. The centrality of listing to the Tentative d’épuisement is apparent from the outset. ‘Il y a beaucoup de choses place Saint-Sulpice’, begins Perec, with the ‘par exemple’ that follows this triggering a list of buildings, statues, monuments and other street furniture, interspersed with glosses relating to the historic individuals with which they are associated. 23 The 21 See Schilling, Mémoires du quotidien. 22 This approach has inspired a number of subsequent Perecquian journeys, dependent on cataloguing of experiences and the forme brève, notable among which is the work of the geographer David Matless focused on the area around the Norfolk Broads, The Regional Book (Axminster: Uniformbooks, 2015). 23 Georges Perec, Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, in Œuvres, ed. Christelle Reggiani, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard; Pléiade, 2017), II.817–58 (p. 819). Henceforth TE.

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textual manoeuvre the author suggests, however, reveals a swerve away from these ‘choses […] décrites, inventoriées, photographiées, racontées ou recensées’, and the adopting of an alternative and potentially inexhaustible form of listing: ‘décrire le reste’ (TE, 819). Observation triggers enumeration, with the first attempt at listing the place Saint-Sulpice focusing on the linguistic landscape, the letters, numbers and symbols visible around Perec, before he shifts to cataloguing colours and intangible phenomena such as the trajectories of vehicles that pass by. Moving from the Tabac Saint-Sulpice to the Café de la Mairie, Perec alludes to the infinite, uncapturable diversity that surrounds him: ‘plusieurs dizaines, plusieurs centaines d’actions simultanées, de microévénements dont chacun implique des postures’ (TE, 825), but proceeds to catalogue the sights and sounds that his senses freight. Previous patterns re-emerge, such as a focus on colours, on numbers and letters, on specific vehicles such as the Citroën 2CV; there are playful juxtapositions: ‘Un chien basset. Un homme à nœud papillon’ (TE, 829); the succession of cars, buses and lorries is disrupted by the sudden appearance of friends and acquaintances (Jean-Paul Aron, Jean Duvignaud, Paul Virilio …), of lookalikes of the famous (a dog resembles Milou, a man Peter Sellars). The subjectivity of the inventory is made clear: there are moments of fatigue and ‘instants de vide’, and changes in the weather—in particular the onset of rain—disrupt emerging patterns of observation. Yet the listing continues, although an increasing frustration can be detected as Perec’s sessility is contrasted with the mobility of the coachloads of tourists, particularly German and Japanese, who pass by.24 The list plays a dual function: it is a seemingly inexhaustible source of observation of the endotic and everyday, which in its cataloguing takes on aspects of the exotic and even bizarre; but in its baroque and seemingly unpredictable patterns and juxtapositions, it asserts the subjectivity of the inventorist and his affective relationship to the far-from-neutral activity in which he is involved. Perec’s lists are thus to be seen as part of a more general formal experimentation, seen in the development of ‘fractal’ texts evident throughout his oeuvre, manifest across his fictional, autobiographical and ludic work, and providing a clear indication of the search for new and constrained forms central to the work of OuLiPo. Texts such as Tentative 24 For a discussion of this aspect, see Livi Yoshioka-Maxwell, ‘Photophages: Tourists, Natives, and Stylistic Quirks in Georges Perec’s Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien’, Francosphères 5.1 (2016), 103–26.

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d’épuisement belong primarily to the ‘sociological’ strand of Perec’s production, however, and demonstrate the potential of what Michael Sheringham calls the ‘recourse to enumeration’. 25 These texts reveal the ways in which listing serves as both praxis and form, aspects which—in the context of ‘vertical travel’—are creatively and inextricably linked. Perec’s use of the list is thus associated in part with what Michael Cronin has recently called a specific ‘politics of microspection’, an interest in the detail of ‘micro-modernity’ that seeks—by revealing the local to be ‘endlessly and tantalizingly distinctive’—a ‘way of re-enchanting a world grown weary of the jeremiads of cultural entropists’. 26 At the same time, Perec’s use of observational catalogues challenges any understanding of them as ‘subsumptive’ forms that identify a thing by subordinating it under a particular category. Instead, his lists articulate what is observed very differently: arranging, combining and ordering words, observations and things sequentially not only subverts categorical hierarchies but also has positively generative qualities in creating new orderings of knowledge. It is important to underline the power of the list to subvert established orders of knowledge and to suggest alternative means of making sense of the everyday in a context of their growing recuperation within parameters that may be seen to limit any such disruptive potential. From museology and curation (most notably the British Library’s 100-part radio series, ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ (2010), and its seemingly endless derivatives) to the increasingly prescriptive approach to the so-called ‘bucket list’ (a catalogue of places to visit, books to read, albums to listen to before you die), enumeration is—as Umberto Eco claims—increasingly constitutive of contemporary culture and society. The personal, domestic list has long been exemplary of everyday ephemera, a disposable glimpse of the quotidian, the recuperation and archiving of which can take on surreal dimensions. Bill Keaggy has, for instance, gathered discarded grocery lists into a volume entitled Milk Eggs Vodka. 27 He caters for a certain voyeuristic pleasure in accumulating, sifting and reproducing under a range of headings these intimate glimpses into anonymous lives: ‘sad grocery lists’; ‘organized lists’; 25 Sheringham, Everyday Life, p. 112. 26 Michael Cronin, The Expanding World: Towards a Politics of Microspection (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2011), pp. 71, 7. 27 Bill Keaggy, Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found (Cincinnati: How Books, 2007).

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‘healthy (and hygienic) lists’. Keaggy’s project focuses on the banality of listing, identifying occasional poetic flourishes, but ultimately relying on a conceit—i.e. an enumeration of lists, in which specific patterns are identified—for humorous effect. Other recent publications have instead encouraged the creative production of lists, and even the experience of the world through processes of enumeration. The geographer Richard Phillips has analysed such works in his research on the development of experimental fieldwork practices, underlining the extent to which they defamiliarize everyday settings and seek ‘space for curiosity’. 28 These new approaches to everyday fieldwork, often harnessing vertical travel to practices of listing, have been popularized in the work of artists such as the Canadian guerrilla artist Keri Smith. In key works including How to Be an Explorer of the World, Smith’s Perecquian emphasis on the endotic—evident in the work’s meticulous record of its bibliographical underpinnings, where she includes both Georges Perec and Michael Sheringham—manifests itself in increasing attention to the quotidian. 29 This illustrates—through practices of exoticization, defamilarization and re-enchantment—what Cronin calls ‘travel[ling] down into the particulars of place’. Whereas Smith encourages curiosity and deploys listing as a ludic mode of defamiliarization, the marketing and monetization of such an approach is evident in the term ‘Listography’, coined and trademarked by Lisa Nola and transformed into a series of journals (published by Chronicle Books, and translated into at least six languages) and a number of spin-off products including a board game and an app that permits the personal creation and sharing of lists. The purpose of the website listography.com is to list lists, revealing the proliferation of the practice in the digital age, and the assumption of the listography brand is that list-making is not only a way of organizing one’s life but also serves as a means of recording an individual autobiography. Such an approach is not only minimalist, but also almost obsessively regulated. The baroque and often bizarre enumeration has, since Herodotus, characterized lists and inventories assembled in the field of travel. The book Travel Listography, for instance, provides an opportunity to record places visited or to be visited under clearly stipulated headings from which no deviation is invited, and even the free text opportunities—‘travel 28 Richard Phillips, ‘Space for Curiosity’, Progress in Human Geography 38.4 (2014), 493–512. 29 Keri Smith, How to Be an Explorer of the World (New York: Penguin, 2008).

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mishaps’, ‘serendipitous travel moments’—set out clear boundaries within which observations and experiences are to be channelled and recorded. 30 Generically indeterminate and eschewing such ‘listographic’ attempts at predetermination, the lists of Perec’s texts are significantly associated with the unfinishability or inexhaustibility of the ‘tentative’, a term that cannot but be seen to resonate with the essai, and more particularly with the peripatetic practice of essayism. 31 Adorno’s reflections in ‘The Essay as Form’ converge with the emphasis on fragmentation identified in the reflections on the formal Perecquian poetics of urban representation with which this chapter opened. Adorno foregrounds an eschewal of rootedness, and privileges an allegiance with what we may see as a more rhizomatic mode: that is, ‘accentuating the fragmentary, the partial rather than the total’. 32 Interrogating the literary list, Robert Belknap acknowledges that the form has ‘no requisite force of closure’, but admits nevertheless that it ‘has a load limit of what it can skilfully hold’. 33 In Penser/classer, Perec elaborates on this very tension: ‘Il y a dans toute énumération deux tentations contradictoires; la première est de TOUT recenser, la seconde d’oublier tout de même quelque chose; la première voudrait clôturer définitivement la question, la seconde la laisser ouverte’. 34 Such a reflection on the possibility of closure is directly linked to questions of (in)exhaustibility with which Perecquian listing is associated, and to the ultimate openness with which both the practice and form are associated. This is not so much—to return to Eco’s analyses—a contrast between different systematized modes of accumulation, ‘chaotic enumeration’ vs ‘coherence by excess’, but rather an acknowledgement that enumeration of the everyday remains an unfinished and ultimately 30 Lisa Nola, Travel Listography: Exploring the World in Lists (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2013). 31 See Charles Forsdick, ‘De la plume comme des pieds: Essayism as a Peripatetic Genre’, in The Modern Essay in French: Sociology, Genre, Écriture, ed. Charles Forsdick and Andrew Stafford (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 45–69. On essayism and the everyday, see Michael Sheringham, ‘The Essay and the Everyday: Reading Perec with Adorno’, in The Modern Essay in French, ed. Charles Forsdick and Andrew Stafford (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 87–100. 32 T. W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique 32 (1984), 151–71 (p. 157). 33 Belknap, The List, pp. 30, 31. 34 Georges Perec, Penser/classer (Paris: Hachette, 1985), p. 167.

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unfinishable project. This is in part a result of the ever-increasing fractal detail to which the microspection inherent in vertical travel permits access, and in part because of the multiple deformations and defamiliarizations that repeated listing generates. Travel writing has increasingly been seen as a mode of translation and retranslation of place as subsequent generations of travellers re-engage repeatedly with the same locales and create new versions of them. Michael Cronin’s discussion of ‘vertical travel’ is in part a study of that interconnection. I suggest in conclusion that the practice of enumeration central to the tentative d’épuisement—as well as to cognate subsequent projects, such as François Bon’s Paysage fer (2000) or Jacques Roubaud’s Tokyo intra-ordinaire (2014)—may contribute to these debates about travel and translation by raising questions instead about (un)translatability, with (in)exhaustibility understood here specifically in the light of Barbara Cassin’s definition of the intraduisible. This relates to a condition of unfinishedness and unfinishability: ‘ce qu’on ne cesse pas de (ne pas) traduire’ is linked, therefore, in this context with practices of verticality and in the context of ever increasing attention to the fractal dimensions of the everyday, with forms of listing that pay attention to ‘ce qu’on ne cesse pas de (ne pas) épuiser’. 35

35 See Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Paris: Seuil, 2004), p. xv.

chapter nine

Eugène Savitzkaya Fictional Forms of Remembrance Patrick Crowley Fictional Forms of Remembrance

With the publication of his novel Fraudeur in 2015, Eugène Savitzkaya appears to return us to his first novel Mentir published in 1977.1 In the intervening years Minuit published nine novels by Savitzkaya and each of them has put the form of the novel in play through a variety of devices ranging from paratextual commentary on the generic status of the novel to the integration of autobiographical materials. The focus of this chapter will be on the figure of the mother as inscribed within Mentir and Fraudeur and how she is at once both a biographème that signals the author’s past and referential horizon yet also a source of fiction that exceeds the autobiographical even as it draws upon it. In reading both these novels, I want to explore the formal relationship between the novel and auto/biography in terms of fiction. Michael Sheringham writes that ‘the fictional in autobiography is best understood not as departure from fact but as hypothesis and construction’. 2 Here fiction is understood in its primary etymological sense of shaping and I want to read this insight conversely in order to think about the autobiographical within fiction’s quintessential genre— the novel. In doing so I want to open up fiction to its second sense—that of the imagination. In other words, fiction not so much as a construction 1 Eugène Savitzkaya, Mentir (Paris: Minuit, 1977) and Fraudeur (Paris: Minuit, 2015). Hereafter abbreviated to M and F, respectively. 2 Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 30.

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that advances a hypothesis but as a lie that departs from the pursuit of an autobiographical hypothesis in order, perhaps, to reaffirm itself as a fiction. Within such a frame, how then does the autobiographical retain its mark or become remarkable within the embrace of the novel’s fiction? Sheringham highlights the importance of the autobiographical device of the turning point—‘whose role in the disclosure of unity and coherence in human lives was stressed by Dilthey’3 —and develops it into an analysis of autobiography itself. Sheringham returned to the turning point in his later work, noting that in the narrative of a life it serves as a hinge that enables a closing and an opening at the threshold of change but also serves as a device, a metaphor, to condense and bring forth one aspect of memory over and above that which the autobiographer might want to forget and sometimes in order to provide a veneer of coherence to the ‘mess of experience’.4 Turning points, he observes, invite analysis but, he cautions, should also be treated with scepticism. Writes Sheringham: ‘A life staked out with clear turning points may be a life remembered, but it may also, in a profounder sense, be a life forgotten, buried, covered over, although not definitively. The organised life of autobiography can resemble a kind of mausoleum where an embalmed effigy lies in state’. 5 Autobiography as genre involves rhetorical devices—in particular the turning point—that lends it outward shape and form, though sometimes at the cost of uncertainty, or ambiguity or of conveying the pulse and energy of a life once lived. In pursuing this return to turning points, Sheringham offers fresh insight into the autobiographical through close readings of works which, formally or generically, are non-autobiographical.6 He opens his discussion with Baudelaire’s untitled poem that begins ‘La servante au grand cœur dont vous étiez jalouse’, and ends with Beckett’s piece for stage That Time along with Emily Dickinson’s poetic lines ‘Knows how to forget’. In each case these conventionally non-autobiographical genres allow Sheringham to reflectively tease out the nature of forgetting, and 3 Sheringham, French Autobiography, p. 8. 4 Michael Sheringham, ‘Autobiographical Turning Points: Remembering and Forgetting’, Literator 36.2 (2015), 4. Available at http://www.literator.org.za/index. php/literator/article/view/1229 (accessed 10 November 2016). 5 Sheringham, ‘Autobiographical Turning Points’, p. 5. 6 Sheringham notes that ‘For Perec the process of autobiography could not be conducted within the confines of any one genre or practice’ (French Autobiography, p. 327). Sheringham often pursues a similar approach in his tracking of the autobiographical.

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the transactions that are involved, within the autobiographical process. Baudelaire’s poem, for example, is described as a ‘stage for a transaction with oneself, where different versions, different possible selves […] are in play’.7 It is, Sheringham writes, a ‘pre-autobiographical poem in that it takes us to the brink of autobiography with the question: “que pourrais-je répondre?”’ He speculates that the response might have been a move towards autobiographical narrative, of which we possess fragments in the form of Baudelaire’s posthumously published autobiographical project Mon Cœur mis à nu. Sheringham discriminates between the promiscuity of the autobiographical process and autobiography as a formal genre and it is the brink between process and form, and how to think it, that fascinates. Drawing from Sheringham’s work, at least two points can be made. The first is that, reminded of Perec, we can discern the autobiographical process in genres other than autobiography and the second is the risk that autobiography, if overly determined by a rhetorical device, can calcify a life remembered. In that sense, there is room to think that the inscription of a life might be better served by a fiction that proclaims itself as a lie. The lie is free from the expectation of articulating truth while at the same time the imbrication of fiction and fact within autobiography can result from an intentional, though never entirely confirmed, act of anamnesis—i.e. the attempt to recall memories and their mise en forme. Such an act of anamnesis through fiction counters the rhetorical constructions that can embalm the spirit of a life that language seeks to revive. And yet, if such a life is revived, in some form, what is its referential status if what is also at stake is how we read—or even recognize—the autobiographical process within an avowed act of fiction? Savitzkaya’s novel Fraudeur presents us with a narrator who identifies himself as ‘le fou’.8 The narrator self-describes in the third person: ‘N’ayant ni hauteur ni forme, le fou n’a non plus d’épaisseur et pas plus 7 Sheringham, ‘Autobiographical Turning Points’, p. 3. 8 Savitzkaya’s narrator is named ‘le fou’ in two of his other publications. The first is in Fou civil (Paris: Les Flohic, 1999), published without a generic rubric and featuring a narrator who travels between Liège and Brussels. The second is Fou trop poli (Paris: Minuit, 2005). Published with the rubric roman on the cover it is similar in style to Fou civil with its brief, playful, almost surreal poetic fragments from a life of a writer in Liège. It includes a reference to the narrator’s mother: ‘Notre mère s’appelle Nina, en nous est toujours vivante’ (23).

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de consistance que de couleur. Il n’a ni nom ni matricule ni argent ni ventricule’ (F, 7). The narrator appears as narrative construction—as an anti-referent of sorts partly prompted by the internal rhyming couplet— and we follow him as he hops from different narrative fragments and reflections to tell the disjointed story of his protagonist, a boy who wanders from his home into the surrounding countryside to climb a tree, a birch tree, that he names ‘la Sorcière’ and this is fiction presented less as hypothesis than as a story that triggers the imagination: ‘Il descend donc de l’escalier, ce garçon; nous ne lui donnerons pas de nom, qu’il reste dans votre imagination sous une forme vague est indispensable au bon déroulement du récit’ (F, 17). No signed autobiographical pact here that would satisfy Philippe Lejeune’s formalist and pragmatic view of autobiography based on the ‘identité de nom entre l’auteur (tel qu’il figure, par son nom, sur la couverture), le narrateur du récit et le personnage dont on parle’.9 The text appears to reinforce its status as novel through the figuration of narrator and character as non-referential. And yet already there is a stylistic identification between narrator and protagonist that gestures back to Savitzkaya by way of the third figure, that of the mother. At the outset, the narrator reflects on what to recount, he is a writer in search of an incipit. He ruminates: Pense à sa mère vivante, se souvient de la plupart de ses gestes. Est obsédé par quelques phrases prononcées par cette femme. Pour y penser, écrit. Nous parlerons d’elle en long et en large. Nous parlerons de Russie qui est le pays où elle est née. D’elle nous ne possédons qu’un poème, dix photographies où on la voit belle et trois recettes indispensables. Nous avons donc la voix, la beauté et la bonté (F, 8–9)

The figure of the mother is ‘alive’, ever evoked by memory and by those few remaining objects: a poem, ten photographs and three recipes. She is an absent presence, reinforced by these objects and the narrative fragments and memories that yield up part of her past. This past is one thread within Fraudeur’s narrative of temporal jumps and deferrals. The second thread is the narrator’s telling of the tale of the child protagonist’s ramble across the Liégeois countryside towards the birch tree, ‘la Sorcière’. Finally, in the background there is the figure of the father, a Polish immigrant who is ‘le mineur, le jardinier, le vidangeur’ (F, 104). I want to work this into what we know of the life and writings of Savitzkaya. He was born in Liège in 1954 to newly arrived immigrant 9 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 23–24.

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parents: a Polish father, who worked in the coal mines near Liège, and a Russian mother whose surname he bears.10 His first novel, Mentir, could be likened to the late nouveau roman style of the period or, better again, to the kinds of writer Savitzkaya admires—Pinget, Beckett, Guyotat, Genet. The style of his novels has since evolved, becoming at first more baroque through an extravagance of fantastical detail—such as La  Disparition de maman (1982) and Les Morts sentent bon (1984)— before moving towards the pared-down, yet strikingly poetic, style of his more recent ‘auto/biographical’ works that focus on his son, Marin mon cœur (1992), and his daughter in Exquise Louise (2003). The critic and writer René de Cecatty remarks that Savitzkaya remains one of those contemporary writers ‘qui persistent à faire preuve d’une totale liberté d’esprit, de forme, de ton, de style’ and rightly asks: ‘Quelle œuvre plus libre que celle d’Eugène Savitzkaya […]?’11 The liberty of form that Cecatty highlights has been a feature of Savitzkaya’s work and his paratextual commentaries that play genres and biographical references against each other. His second novel, Un jeune homme trop gros (1977) is, we read on its quatrième de couverture, dedicated to the memory of Elvis Presley, even if the principal character is left unnamed. In fact, it is remarkable that at a time when the play of biography and novel was still a form to come, Savitzkaya’s quatrième de couverture provides a playful gloss on the text’s generic status: Ce roman est la biographie exemplaire d’une célèbre vedette de la chanson, qui n’y sera jamais nommée. Certes, l’ouvrage est dédié à la mémoire d’Elvis Presley, mais l’auteur ne respecte guère les lois du genre. Il transforme certains épisodes réels, il ajoute des détails inexistants et saugrenus, il affabule, il ment.

The quatrième de couverture acknowledges the conventions of generic protocols and the opportunities for transgression that such protocols, as normative constructs, invite. He parodies biography’s presumed function to narrate the story of a life by offering a novel, with its licence to invent, as an exemplum for biography. The genres of novel and biography are put in play; each is part of a process that works with 10 These details are from Eugène Savitzkaya, ‘Éléments biographiques’, in Mongolie, plaine sale, L’Empire, et Rue Obscure (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1993), pp. 196–98. They are supplemented with details from an interview with the author, 18 March 2005. 11 René de Cecatty, ‘De l’invective au rêve, l’art de la petite prose’, Le Monde des livres (26 April 2002).

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Elvis’s life only to transform it within the fabulist’s interweaving of real and non-existent incidents. In this way, Savitzkaya calls our attention to the resources of the lie, in ways more explicit than in his first novel, and brings us closer to an Elvis that was always already mediated by images, film and recorded voice. Similar links between the form of the novel and biography are brought to the fore on the quatrième de couverture of Sang de chien (1989). Although it mainly, if obliquely, deals with the narrator’s parents, it is the first of Savitzkaya’s novels in which the narrating je is also a principal subject of the narrative. In this sense, the text brings us closer to a subject that could be described as auto/biographical, for in narrating incidents relating to his parents he does so from a position that is already implicated in the account. Again, the quatrième de couverture is marked by a profusion of generic forms: Si Sang de chien avait été un journal, il aurait été écrit au jour le jour, chronologiquement, calmement. Si Sang de chien avait été la biographie de l’auteur, il aurait été plus précis, plus bref. S’il avait été écrit dans le but de vous stupéfier, l’auteur se serait appliqué à être encore plus bref et, en tout cas, plus sectaire. Si son but avait été de vous édifier, il s’y serait pris différemment et ce livre aurait été écrit comme un pensum, un manuel à l’usage de tous. Mais Sang de chien n’est ni un manuel didactique, ni un recueil de psaumes, encore moins une biographie de l’auteur. Sang de chien n’est qu’un roman, dont l’usage, c’est bien connu, reste à découvrir.

Much of the blurb purports to tell the reader what Sang de chien is not: it is not a collection of psalms, it is not a diary, it is not, we read twice, a biography—it is a novel. Why, one might ask, does Savitzkaya include two disclaimers to biographical intent and a similar rejection of the diary form on the back cover of a book that is published as a novel? Such a disclaimer might well be taken as a precaution against a reading that reduces the poetics of the text to a referential function. Another interpretation of this is that, as with Un Jeune homme trop gros, Savitzkaya introduces a range of generic forms that tempt the reader with possible ways of reading the text. In mentioning the genres of biography and diary Savitzkaya plays on the nostalgia for reference that inhabits most readings. And, he returns the novel to the mixture of forms that characterized its emergence: a range of genres that stretch from the epistolary to the hagiographic. Savitzkaya offers a negative definition of his novel, thus freeing it from a restrictive notion of what the novel is and opening it up to other generic possibilities, in particular

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to genres that are referential. The incorporation of such genres and the coy comment that ‘Sang de chien n’est qu’un roman, dont l’usage, c’est bien connu, reste à découvrir’ reminds us of the novel’s porosity and its capacity to incorporate other genres and renew itself. Yet that Savitzkaya chooses to explicitly identify these texts as romans indicates an intention and a reserve. Elvis is not named in Un jeune homme trop gros and the figure of the mother in Sang de chien is strongly drawn into the eddying pools of imaginative language: Devant elle [la mère] n’évoquez pas les dragons; elle les a déjà vus peints à même le ciel. Elle sait que l’ogre sort toujours d’une fosse nauséabonde dès le crépuscule du soir. Elle connaît le bruit des bombes et le sifflement des balles. Elle connaît l’aspect obtus d’une gueule de revolver. Les poils d’une souris morte dans un pot de miel la feraient vomir et blêmir. Le kapok. La lèpre. La hanche plantée dans les vertèbres cervicales. Le Mexique. Le tétanos. La polio. […] Le goût de la terre crue. (SC, 58)

This enumerative, accumulative poetics moving from dark fairy-tale images to allusions to war, violence, disease and geography continues until finally returned to the narrator – ‘On les écrit. Je les prononce […] Et je les vois, les entends, les sens et parfois les touche sans que mes doigts en soient brûlés’ (SC, 59). It is as if the profusion and dispersal of words circulate around the mother but come from the narrating son, experimenting with language—its forms, materiality and possibilities. Whether Savitzkaya’s intention in Sang de chien is to transgress the novel or to poetically explore and rework autobiographical traces, we do not know. Nevertheless, the intentional index of the quatrième de couverture sets up a hermeneutic game of cat and mouse between writer and reader. Once committed to the genre of the novel, any reference to the narrator’s parents in Sang de chien moves beyond the orbit of what can be read as ‘real’ and must instead be considered as part of a fictional, and at times quasi-fantastical, world, even if it is given a referential fillip by the incorporation of what appears to be the auto/biographical. This detour through Savitzkaya’s explicit commentaries on generic forms reinforces Cecatty’s comment on the liberty of form in Savitzkaya’s work which, if less apparent in Mentir, can be used to read his first novel. Mentir is structured around a mother who, we eventually gather, is ill and appears distant from her son, a distance filled with the narrator’s observations made more poignant by an emotional austerity that is easily decoded as a fiction, as screen. In an interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Savitzkaya comments on the title: ‘J’ai appelé ce livre

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Mentir parce que cette forme [that of the novel] était immédiatement un mensonge. Vouloir dire le vrai est illusoire’.12 Here title and generic form appear to reinforce each other in setting up an expectation of a lie. And yet the comment also reveals the aporia of bespeaking a truth. If the claim to inscribe an auto/biographical truth is illusory—and auto/ biography is thus implicitly placed under erasure as a vehicles of truth— then is it within the fictions of the novel where that horizon of truth is best given form? The narrator of Mentir is unreliable, or contradictory or unsure: ‘J’ai vu ma mère. Ce n’était pas elle: une femme tenant par la main un petit garçon blond’ (M, 28), ‘A cet endroit de la maison, spécialement, se tenait ma mère, je crois. Mais rien n’est moins sûr dans cette maison en plein été comme en toute saison’ (M, 28). Savitzkaya’s poetics of reiteration, modification (at times contradiction), his anaphoric sentences that seem to nudge the text forward but not the narrative, generate sentences that ‘instaurer une rythmique hynotique, une transe incantatoire autour d’un personage insaisissable […] Le travail phrastique s’efforce de cerner la figure de la mère sans toutefois y parvenir’.13 The mother’s ungraspable ‘presence’ is a product of rhetoric yet such is the insistence of a text that returns and circles around this figure that the reader could be forgiven for equating this centripetal motion with the autobiographical experience of the author. If such a response could only be speculative in 1977, the accumulation of biographical detail relating to her illness and background since then and references to the mother’s origins in Russia in the more recent novel Fou trop poli (2005) allow for such a reading even if the dynamic of fiction and the autobiographical is, understandably, displaced from the textual. Reading Mentir and Fraudeur together, and taking into account the passage of time—38 years—that separates their publication, allows for a recentring of that dynamic within Savitzkaya’s textual world. Savitzkaya takes the form of the novel as it largely is and has been: a permissive genre, a receptacle of diverse forms that flags the pleasures of falsification through a generic rubric that shapes the reader’s expectations. As with Savitzkaya’s Mentir, Fraudeur unfolds its poetic, deliciously wayward language within the frame of the novel and opens a space to forms of writing that evoke the autobiographical, the biographical, the 12 Antoine de Gaudemar, ‘Le jardin d’Eugène’, Libération (2 April 1992), 20. 13 José Domingues de Almeida, ‘L’écriture jubilatoire chez Eugène Savitzkaya. Lecture des premiers “romans”’, Textyles 44 (2013), 55–65 (p. 59).

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landscape—real and imaginary—of a childhood in the countryside beyond Liège. Fraudeur is a narrative tangle of interrelated threads across different times—the present of the homodiegetic narrator, ‘le fou’ who self-narrates in the third person, switches to the first person plural nous and narrates fragments that convey a sense of the protagonists: mother, father and boy. In this way, ‘le fou’ returns us to the narrator’s childhood, to neighbours, sensorial memories of vegetation and fauna (precisely named) and to the leitmotif of the mother—ill and absent and interwoven now, as she was in Mentir, within language and embraced by a form that seems to belie its memorial import. The novels echo each other. Where the narrator of Fraudeur reflects on being ‘obsédé par quelques phrases prononcées par cette femme’ (F, 8), Mentir begins with a phrase that recurs throughout the novel: ‘Ces fleurs ne sont plus pour moi, dit-elle […] toutes ces fleurs, ces très belles fleurs, surtout ces pivoines trop rouges, ces pivoines trop blanches surtout, ne sont pas pour moi’ (M, 12). We find this same phrase taken up again in Fraudeur: ‘Ces fleurs ne sont pas pour moi aujourd’hui’ (F,  30). The odour of overripe bananas also features in both texts. In Mentir we read of ‘la chambre assombrie et infestée par l’odeur des bananes, des fruits mûrs et mous’ (M, 21) and again ‘la chambre peu aérée et l’odeur des bananes qu’elle ne voulait jamais manger, dont elle détestait le goût, l’odeur, la consistance’ (M, 29). And yet earlier in the novel we read: ‘la chambre sans couleur, sans odeur, une pièce habitée nuit et jour’ (M, 18). The strong, distinctive odour of bananas returns in Fraudeur: ‘La mère est nue dans sa chambre dans l’odeur des bananes trop mûres’ (F, 88). The return of a phrase and an odour, linked to the mother in both novels, creates an intratextual connection between the texts—textual echoes surrounding the figure of the mother that suggest the insistence of memorial promptings, traces that mark a persistent loss. There are, however, significant differences between Mentir and Fraudeur in the way memory is given textual form and, in the case of Fraudeur, contextual amplification. Memory in Mentir, at the level of content, is rarely addressed directly. The homodiegetic narrator is rarely directly implicated in what is recounted, remaining at the very edge, ruminating on photographs of his mother—‘Est-ce ma mère? Sur cette photo, elle est jeune et trop maigre, peut-être triste aussi’ (M, 68). There is only one explicit reference to memory: ‘Le lait qu’elle aurait dû boire. Le lait se déposait au fond du bol, je crois, si mes souvenirs sont exacts’ (M, 74). As in Fraudeur, little attempt is made to shore up the credibility of the narrator’s memories with evidentiary support or

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by resorting to the stabilizing effects produced by proper names and dates. Instead, Mentir shies away from direct reference. The mother is not named, the location of the house is not named. There are hints, however, of the circumstances of the memory-trace. We read that the mother has ‘une sorte de maladie sans fin qui jaunissait ses yeux, une maladie sans couleur pourtant et sans beaucoup d’odeur autour, sans beaucoup de traces’ (M, 17). The phrase ‘sans beaucoup de traces’ can be read as a commentary on the narrator’s engagement with his past. Similarly, occasional sentences such as ‘Le nom du sanatorium. L’odeur du sanatorium’ (M, 98) can, in the light of biographical details we now know, be read as obliquely auto/biographical. There is a suggestion in Mentir that to name the past would be to diminish it. The anonymity of the mother suggests an unnameable experience which, paradoxically, the reader is required to experience as an absent presence marked by the traces that remain.14 In Mentir she is described metonymically, that is to say in terms of the objects in her world. For the most part, these objects are not described with precision yet are returned to again and again. The motif in pages 53 to 56, for example, relate to ‘Ma mère et ses effets’ (M, 55). The text refers to ‘ses effets’ nine times. They are described as ‘minuscules’ (M, 54), as ‘peu de chose’ (M, 54–55), as ‘morceaux d’étoffe’ (M, 54), as ‘ses innombrables charpies’ (M, 54). They appear to be marked by their insignificance but also by the vividness of their colour: ‘un flacon de vernis rouge vermillon’ (M, 54), ‘ses charpies et ses petits bouts de soie verte ou bleue, de soie transparente verte et bleue’ (M, 54–55). The passage moves from the intensity of colours remembered towards an imprecision that articulates a type of formlessness: ‘Des effets, des capsules, des cartouches de couleurs, du vernis rouge vif et des broches sans formes ni couleurs, des débris de broches’ (M, 55–56). We are reminded here of the description of Fraudeur’s narrator as ‘n’ayant ni hauteur ni forme […] pas plus de consistence que de couleur’ (F, 7). Mentir, like Fraudeur, concentrates on recurring points of intensity within the ruins of memory rather than defined outlines, nameable referents. These personal effects, and repeated references to her ‘robe en interlock’ combine to serve as a synecdoche for the figure of the mother and her absence: ‘Parfois, la robe de chambre en interlock bleu avait disparu, avait quitté sa place habituelle devant la croisée, sur un fond de 14 This seems to be confirmed in Fraudeur, where we read of the dog ‘dont nous tairons le nom dans ce récit pour mieux préserver son âme franche’ (F, 155).

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chambre sombre’ (M, 20). The mnemic trace of the mother is circumscribed rather than inscribed. Her trace prompts a chain of signifiers that are organized in iterative, folding, metonymic combinations. Thus structured, or rather disseminated, the mother, the object of memory in Mentir, is constantly deferred but returned to, creating an uncertain outline, an indistinct shape. But it is where Fraudeur differs from Mentir that we come closer to the work of the autobiographical process within the novel. In Fraudeur, despite the title’s allusion to ruse, falsification or bad faith, the autobiographical turn is much the stronger and takes narrative, explicative form, bringing the minimal narrative threads of Mentir into a more expansive narrative weave. Take, for example, the odour of ripe bananas: Sur un plateau de cuivre, le mineur, le jardinier, le vidangeur lui servait des bananes qui mûrissaient, extrêmement parfumées, écœurantes. Et la chambre sans pensées de la mère du fou, de la mère du bel enfant, sentait la banane. L’odeur de banane est inoubliable, l’odeur de banane empêche de penser. Le faucheur devait le savoir et c’est pourquoi il avait en permanence des bananes trop mûres dans la chambre de la mère nue. Il n’y avait plus du tout de pensées dans sa tête et un immense feu dans son cœur. (F, 104–05)

These auto/biographical amplifications are accompanied by the narrator’s reflections on the process itself such as the train journey across Russia that prompted him to recall his mother:15 ‘Et soudain, nous parvenons aux terres rouges, aux montagnes rouges, quelque part au beau milieu de la Sibérie méridionale, sur les traces d’une femme aujourd’hui disparue et dont la voix nous hante’ (F, 124). But any privileging of the autobiographical process would be to betray this beguiling text. If the mother, her Russian roots (F, 39) and later illness, is given greater content (rather than shape) in Fraudeur than in any of his previous works, she is also doubled and transformed within the narrator’s story of the boy’s wandering across the fields into the woods and on to the birch tree. Throughout his work, Savitzkaya’s subjects are never given definitive form, never stand still, for that would draw them too close to the rigid outlines of the effigy. His subjects move between forms. Unstable in 15 In 2010 a number of French, or French-published authors, were invited by the French public radio station France Culture and the Russian government to take the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Vladivostok. Amongst those who undertook the trip were Patrick Deville, Jean Echenoz, Danièlle Sallenave, Mathias Enard, Sylvie Germain, Olivier Rolin, Maylis de Kerangal and Eugène Savitzkaya.

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form, they operate within a logic of metamorphosis to transgress the limits of recognizable form. This is especially true of La Disparition de maman (1982) but the theme of chaos is an encoded and enacted theme throughout Savitzkaya’s work, explicitly so within Fraudeur—‘Par à-coups certaines formes apparaissent avant de retourner au chaos […] Cessons d’être ce qu’on est, le cosmos tend au repos’ (F, 162). One thing can become another. In Mentir, for example, the mother is often contiguously linked to an animal of uncertain form. At times she appears to take the form of a panther: ‘Comment le visage de la femme se métamorphose et perd tous les traits humains, ne conservant, à première vue, que sa peau initiale mais légèrement plus grise’ (M, 47). The image of the panther is repeatedly returned to in Mentir. It becomes a figure of the mother as incipient metamorphosis, as changeable form, threatening, sexual and strange. Both of the panther and not of the panther, the narrator’s representation of his mother seems to be served better by the image of the panther than by the referential thrust of biography. This quasi-metamorphosis of form evokes the quality of a complex auto/biographical memory that draws upon the fiction of a metaphor but resists its definitive foreclosure. If in Mentir the doubling is that of the ‘mère-panthère’, in Fraudeur the rhyming doubling is that of the ‘mère-sorcière’. The birch tree is the boy’s destination and destiny: ‘Sur le chemin qui mène au bois des tombes, chemine le garçon de quatorze ou quinze ans, vers son destin, vers la fraîcheur des arbres au feuillage languissant, vers son bouleau favori’ (F, 148). Savitzkaya reprises the sentence anaphorically further on: ‘Et, pensant, le garçon avance vers son destin, vers le bois, vers l’arbre du bois des tombes […] vers la Sorcière’ (F, 150). The association of ‘mère’ and ‘sorcière’ is made explicit at least twice within the text: ‘la mère du garçon dont on parle est sorcière’ (F, 114) and ‘sa mère, la sorcière dont nous avons parlé’ (F, 165). This connection is amplified through parallel descriptions: ‘L’enfant grandit près de la mère absente, gardant dans ses narines sa fragrance intime, l’onctueuse douceur de sa peau’ (F, 99) and later, ‘Le bouleau nommé La Sorcière est d’une opulence incroyable, jamais vue ni touchée de la peau. La lactescence de son écorce ragaillardit les corps’ (F, 111). The birch tree, venerated in Russian folklore, is central to shamanistic practices of initiation and storytelling.16 In Fraudeur the birch tree, the 16 See Christina Pratt, An Encyclopedia of Shamanism, Vol. 1 (New York: Rosen, 2007), p. 72. Also Kira van Deusen, Singing Story, Healing Drum: Shamans

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‘Sorcière’—female and magical—is the object of the boy’s peregrination and desire. The tree, as powerful shamanistic symbol, stands for the mother’s energy and vital force that invest memory and spur fiction. At the end of the novel the boy arrives at the tree and begins to climb it—an action linked to initiatory practices in Shamanistic cultures— only to fall. In Fraudeur there is no moment of spiritual breakthrough, no turning point, only the failure that is the necessary condition for the story itself. The boy’s fall to the ground is the novel’s end point; he is brought back to earth, away from the fiction of a union with the symbolic mother. At the same time, life is affirmed. He is winded by the impact with the ground but vidant avec soin les poumons, sollicitant le plexus solaire, débloquant le diaphragme, il revient à la vie pendant que les musaraignes courent sur le terrain spongieux, pendant que le pic noir creuse le tronc mort et qu’un hérisson savoure avec force bruits de salive le cadavre d’un oiseau de l’espèce des corvidés. (F, 167)

Thus ends the text. The boy is brought low but ‘il revient à la vie’, is brought back into nature’s incessant activity and there we leave him, he who will be the narrator, next to ‘la Sorcière’ as the hedgehog feeds, the shrew scurries, the woodpecker taps, and all at the same time, each form doing its bit within the ambit of the text and within the world that circumscribes the moment. This moment. Or that one in which the imbrication of autobiography and the novel is at stake; where fiction seeks to break away from the embrace of autobiography and into the liberty of the imagination but cannot quite free itself from the referential ground it has helped to fabricate. The autobiographical process is marked by forms of iteration that are intra-textual and by the failed turning point left behind by Savitzkaya’s prose. Here we have neither the foreclosure of metaphor’s condensation that would signal fiction’s poetic thrust nor the hypothesis sponsored by fiction’s subordination to autobiography. The tussle between them takes place within the frame of the novel’s promiscuous embrace of forms that remain unstable. What we read, this ending, is an ending, of sorts, for the story of a boy that was to exist in our imaginations: ‘qu’il reste dans votre imagination sous une forme vague est indispensable au bon déroulement du récit’ (F, 17). Keeping the form uncertain, vague, unstable within a and Storytellers of Turkic Siberia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), p. 59.

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process of transformation and movement draws it away from the process of embalmment, keeps it alive, keeps the energy that inhabits a memory from fading, defers the moment of time’s utter erosion: ‘Personne n’est mort réellement. Personne ne peut mourir réellement. Il faut des siècles pour que la mort advienne vraiment’ (F, 115). Savitzkaya’s novels are storehouses of memories and their affects transformed into fictions— the mother’s trace escapes a definitive, biographical form yet conveys an autobiographical process that evokes metamorphosis and privileges poetic possibility over autobiographical hypothesis.

chapter ten

A Voice Takes Form The Sounds of Autobiography in Louis-René des Forêts’s Poèmes de Samuel Wood Ian Maclachlan A Voice Takes Form

Écoutez-le qui grignote à petit bruit, admirez sa patience Il cherche, cherche à tâtons, mais cherche. Saura-t-il du moins mettre en ordre, Débarrasser, décrasser les coins et recoins De cette tête encombrée qui est la sienne Où il tourne en rond sans trouver sa voix, Sinon quand le vent souffle à travers bois, Que la mer roule fort, couvre d’écume les digues, Quand la nature met la langue à sa rude école Et lui enseigne des harmonies sauvages, Suaves aussi parfois comme la flûte d’un oiseau, Qu’elles viennent de cet oiseau même ou du roulis d’un ruisseau.1

Louis-René des Forêts’s poetic sequence Poèmes de Samuel Wood begins by inviting us to listen, to attend to the search for a voice. It’s a curious opening, since the invitation relies on our response to another voice, of 1 First published as Louis-René des Forêts, Poèmes de Samuel Wood (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1988). Reprinted in his Œuvres complètes, ed. Dominique Rabaté (Paris: Gallimard ‘Quarto’, 2015), pp. 975–1003 (p. 977). All subsequent references to des Forêts’s work, henceforth identified as PSW, will be to this latter edition.

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course: the one which enunciates this invitation, and this is a voice that seems already to have found itself, so to speak, one that is already settling into a recognizable mode of poetic accomplishment. Although only one of these lines resolves into an alexandrine (line 4)—and even then, eschewing a medial caesura—many others hover in that vicinity, in lines of 11 (5 and 10) or 13 syllables (8 and 9), or a rhyming couplet of decasyllables (6–7); and whilst there may be still more metrical irregularity in the remainder of these opening dozen lines, the reader is lulled into a sense that rhythmical patterns are being established by, for example, the fact that four of the first five lines share initial hemistichs of seven syllables. Although the decasyllabic couplet is the only line-terminal rhyme as such (and a rime pauvre at that), there is prominent internal rhyming and assonance, as well as the quite obtrusive presence of rhetorical patterning: reduplication and polyptoton in lines 2 and 4, for example. All of this is launched, of course, with the studied diction of a repeated address in the first line, and this particular sequence culminates in an evocation of the sounds of nature as a possible source for the elusive voice—this in itself seeming like something of a lyric commonplace— undertaken in quite mannered terms, verging on preciosity. The poetic sequence introduced by this invitation to listen comprises 13 sections (or individual poems, if we take the title at face value) of varying length, running to 559 lines in total. First published as a slim volume in 1988, its opening five sections had appeared in a literary review a couple of years earlier. 2 In terms of its genesis, this poetic sequence forms part of the distinctive autobiographical project for which des Forêts eventually adopted the name ‘Ostinato’, fragments from which began appearing in journals from 1984 onwards. In a conversation reported by Jean-Benoît Puech, des Forêts indicated his view that the Poèmes de Samuel Wood formed part of this same overall project. 3 The poetic sequence shares with the prose fragments

2 Louis-René des Forêts, ‘Poèmes de Samuel Wood’, L’Ire des vents 13–14 (March 1986), 11–27. 3 Jean-Benoît Puech, that dedicated reader of des Forêts and theorist-practitioner of the phenomenon of what he terms the ‘auteur supposé’, records in a diary extract of September 1985: ‘L[ouis-]R[ené] me dit qu’Ostinato prend désormais, et comme malgré lui, la forme d’un poème en vers. Immédiatement lui est venue l’idée d’attribuer ces vers à un “auteur supposé” comme ceux que j’ai étudiés. Il se nomme Sir Samuel Wood’ (Jean-Benoît Puech, Louis-René des Forêts, roman (Tours: Farrago, 2000), p. 39).

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constituting the remainder of the ‘Ostinato’ project (pp. 1017–1334)4 an interrogation of the possibilities and limits of language, which are in turn repeatedly evoked in relation to the struggle to do justice to elusive memories, to loss and mourning, and to the passage of time and the awareness of mortality. They also have in common a number of oblique autobiographical references, most notable of these being the shattering grief caused by the death of a child: des Forêts’s daughter Élisabeth died in an accident in 1965, when she was just 13 (one is struck by the coincidence of her age and the number of ‘poems’ in this sequence). The poetic sequence differs from the other ‘Ostinato’ texts, of course, in its attribution to a fictive signatory, the heteronymous ‘author’ indicated by the work’s title, with a surname that seems to transport des Forêts’s own from French to English. 5 Finally, the Poèmes de Samuel Wood stand apart from the ‘Ostinato’ project in terms of form, of course. Like the opening lines above, the poems in this sequence are written in an inconsistent metre, but one that often seems to hover tantalizingly either side of the regularity of the alexandrine or, in some passages, of octosyllabic or decasyllabic lines, flirting with the kind of traditional prosody their elevated, often quite heavily stylized diction also seems to invite, with occasional deployment of rhyme or half-rhyme, accompanied by some salient features of metrical, syntactic and rhetorical patterning. In the obliqueness and abstraction of such autobiographical reference as they contain, in their attribution to a heteronymous author-figure, and in their verse form, the Poèmes de Samuel Wood might seem to defy classification as autobiographical writing. But their autobiographical status is something on which I want to insist in my analysis, even if these poems must be considered a rather peculiar species of autobiography. It seems to me that the most important sense in which they firmly belong to the ‘Ostinato’ project has to do with their position within an autobiographical genre whose limits they test, and that the role of literary form in this testing of genre is essential. 4 Individual volumes comprising the ‘Ostinato’ project were first published as: Face à l’immémorable (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1993); Ostinato (Paris: Mercure de France, 1997); Pas à pas jusqu’au dernier (Paris: Mercure de France, 2001); … ainsi qu’il en va d’un cahier de brouillon plein de ratures et d’ajouts … (Bordeaux: William Blake & Co., 2002). 5 For more on ‘Samuel Wood’, see Puech, Louis-René des Forêts, p. 39; Jean Roudaut, Louis-René des Forêts (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 181; Marc Comina, LouisRené des Forêts: l’impossible silence (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), pp. 141–42.

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In much recent theoretical work on autobiography, questions of form have tended to be treated primarily in relation to characteristics of textual énonciation, in so far as the latter impact on the generic status of works that might loosely be viewed as autobiographical, but whose classification as ‘autobiographies’ as such may be subject to doubt. This is especially the case in France, and in connection with poetic form in particular, in the wake of the pioneering critical model proposed by Philippe Lejeune. Notoriously, Lejeune excluded poetry from the definition of the genre of autobiography given at the beginning of his landmark study Le Pacte autobiographique (1975), which, amongst other restrictions, framed autobiography as a retrospective narrative account written in prose.6 Of course, the use of verse form is hardly the only way in which the Poèmes de Samuel Wood would fail to satisfy Lejeune’s criteria for inclusion in the genre of autobiography. As we have noted, not only does this poetic sequence eschew referential detail and serial narrative development for the apparently autobiographical circumstances it records, in its adoption of what seems to be an authorial heteronym, designated mainly but not exclusively in the third person, the sequence fails to respect the key convention stipulated by Lejeune as necessary for the establishment of an autobiographical pact with the reader, namely, the self-identity of author, narrator and protagonist, this being confirmed above all at the level of énonciation by the proper name: ‘Ce qui définit l’autobiographie pour celui qui la lit, c’est avant tout un contrat d’identité qui est scellé par le nom propre’.7 My discussion will be guided by the sense that des Forêts’s experimentations with form, voice and authorial identity in the Poèmes de Samuel Wood come together to serve the interests of his pursuit of a distinctive autobiographical mode. Far from reflecting and securing authorial identity, this mode might be considered one that concerns an impersonal or anonymous level of experience that is fundamentally insecure and ultimately inappropriable; 6 ‘DÉFINITION: Récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité’ (Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, expanded ed. (Paris: Seuil ‘Points’, [1975] 1996), p. 14). 7 Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, p. 33. It might be argued that des Forêts’s fabrication of a heteronymic identity corresponds to the kind of indirect autobiographical pact classified by Lejeune, especially in relation to autobiographical novels, as a ‘pacte fantasmatique’ (Pacte, pp. 41–43); but my argument is that des Forêts adopts this strategy in pursuit of a more fundamental questioning of identity that disables an analysis of the kind proposed by Lejeune.

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we might think of this mode as a kind of degree zero of autobiography, 8 an autobiography in the neuter9 or an ‘autobiographie intérieure’, to deploy a term used by des Forêts himself in relation to his collection of short stories, La Chambre des enfants.10 In considering the role of des Forêts’s poetic writing in the pursuit of this distinctive mode of autobiography, I want also to exert some critical pressure on what we understand by the notion of ‘form’ in the relationship between poetry and autobiography, and not just in the limited sense that, in the modern French tradition in particular, poetry cannot just be reduced to the adoption of verse form. To invoke ‘form’ in that sense is still to suggest that the formal properties of poetic writing can be equated with a set of recognizable characteristics of literary expression at the level of énonciation, even if those characteristics exhibit a wide spectrum of historical variability. But shifting the sense of ‘form’ away from, say, verbal patterns of énonciation, will not simply entail displacing questions of form into the arena of the énoncé instead, in a gesture that is more familiar from critical discussion of autobiography, in so far as autobiographical writing is held to fashion the author’s life experience into a certain shape, most typically a narrative one. In his seminal study French Autobiography, Michael Sheringham maps out a range of the forms taken on by lived experience in accounts of autobiography, from the intrinsic experiential ‘connectedness’ held by Wilhelm Dilthey already to bind together the disparate strands of our existence, 8 See, for example, the chapter ‘Vers le degré zéro de l’autobiographie’, in Georges Gusdorf, Les Écritures du moi: lignes de vie 1 (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), pp. 405–20. 9 I have in mind the particular sense in which Maurice Blanchot uses the term neuter. See, for instance, the essays collected in ‘L’Absence de livre (le neutre le fragmentaire)’, the third part of his volume L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 419–636. The term ‘autobiographie au neutre’ is also deployed by Louis Marin in his essay ‘Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes ou l’autobiographie au neutre’, in L’Écriture de soi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, coll. ‘Collège international de philosophie’, 1999), pp. 3–13. 10 In the ‘Prière d’insérer’ provided for that collection, des Forêts observed that four of its original five stories may be read as ‘les versions successives d’une autobiographie intérieure sur laquelle, du fait que presque tout s’y réfère à la vie secrète—celle des rêves, des phantasmes, des obsessions—, plane un soupçon d’irréalité qui conduit le narrateur lui-même à les récuser tour à tour’ (Œuvres complètes, p. 860). For an extension of the term ‘autobiographie intérieure’ to encompass des Forêts’s later writings, see Dominique Rabaté’s editorial ‘Présentation’ of the Œuvres complètes (pp. 11–25, esp. pp. 22–25).

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prior even to such connections as autobiographical writing may seek to draw, to the ‘will-to-form’ which expressly pursues unity as a superadded category, in the accounts of the autobiographical impulse provided by critics such as Georges Gusdorf and Roy Pascal.11 The peculiar sort of impersonal, fragile shards of experience evoked by the Poèmes de Samuel Wood scarcely seem to lend themselves to being characterized in terms of formal unity or cohesion at the level of the énoncé either, even though it is true that, as we saw in its opening lines, the sequence does begin by posing the question as to whether an order might be found, along with the voice which the putative speaker seeks (cf. PSW, 977, ll. 3–6). The notion of form that I’ll be looking to pursue in relation to the unusual autobiographical mode of the Poèmes de Samuel Wood is one that involves a reforming of distinctions such as that between énonciation and énoncé, which itself tends to replicate binaries of form and content, style and substance, expression and idea, and so on. Commentators such as Angela Leighton remind us that, historically, form itself has tended to move from one side of such binaries to the other: ‘As a word it holds off from objects’, she observes of the legacy of Platonic form in particular, ‘being nothing but form, pure and singular; at the same time, its whole bent is towards materialization, towards being the shape or body of something’.12 Whether it shows up on the side of énonciation or énoncé, matter or idea, form is all too apt to appear as static, either as the shape given to something, or as the shape something has. In contrast with notions of form as a stable shape, mould or set of conventions, I want to work with the idea of form as active, dynamic and mobile, a process of forming, deforming and reforming which is always temporally emergent and variable, rather than a structure that might simply contain something like content or experience. This is the sense of form explored by Derek Attridge in its participation in what he describes as the ‘event’ of the literary work, a sense in which ‘form needs to be understood verbally—as “taking form”, or “forming”, or even “losing form”’.13 This 11 Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires, Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 2–5. 12 Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 1. Leighton’s opening chapter, ‘Form’s Matter: A Retrospective’ (pp. 1–29) should be consulted for an illuminating overview of the vicissitudes of the notion of form. 13 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 113. The whole of the chapter on ‘Form, meaning, context’ (pp. 107–21) should be consulted for Attridge’s mobile sense of form. For a review

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is a conception of form in which, rather than appearing as the shape possessed by something at the outset, or the shape into which something is finally fashioned in its aesthetic realization, form is always a movement between, as is suggested by a parenthetical formulation by Barthes on which Leighton draws at one point in her survey of literary forms: ‘la forme, c’est ce qui est entre la chose et le nom, c’est ce qui retarde le nom’.14 Interestingly, given our present concern with the relationship between autobiography and poetic form, the context for Barthes’s passing observation is a discussion of the artist Bernard Réquichot, whose work— notably, the so-called reliquaries, comprising encased collages of densely applied coils and mounds of oil paint, cuttings from photographs and magazines, and natural objects such as fragments of tree roots, animal bones and bird feathers—exploits its materials to pursue what Barthes views as a kind of abstract, internal ‘self-portrait’ of the body, in which form is constantly emerging from matter in movement.15 The theme of the emergence of form, alongside the quest for a poetic voice, recurs insistently in the Poèmes de Samuel Wood. As we have seen, the opening section asks whether the third-person figure whom we take to be the eponymous, perhaps authorially heteronymous Samuel Wood will be able to find an internal, mental order: ‘Saura-t-il du moins mettre en ordre, / Débarrasser, décrasser les coins et recoins / De cette tête encombrée qui est la sienne’ (PSW, 977, ll. 3–5). Then the poem’s pursuit of a voice turns outwards, to the sounds of the natural world (PSW, 977, ll. 7–12), but as it does so it asks an implicit question about form and the relationship between mind and world, or between language and object. The question is one which we encountered a moment ago: is form a shape possessed or a shape conferred? The poem offers only a question, this time explicit, in lieu of a definitive resolution between the poles of those alternatives, but the clear implication is of language’s inability to shape the world, the matter of the poem and the matter of the world of recent critical renewals of the idea of form, see also his chapter ‘A Return to Form?’, in Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 17–30. 14 Roland Barthes, ‘Réquichot et son corps’, in Œuvres complètes, Vol. IV, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002), pp. 377–400 (p. 399); English version cited in Leighton, On Form, p. 20. 15 On matter in Réquichot’s work, see Barthes, ‘Réquichot et son corps’, pp. 389–90. For a brief but helpful account of Barthes’s essay, see Andrew Brown, Roland Barthes: The Figures of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 169–72.

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being condemned, as it were, to remain either side of a chasm. The poem continues, from where we left off at the opening of this discussion: Dirait-on qu’il faut accorder sa voix à celle des éléments Mais soit qu’on dise l’inverse, c’est les deux fois ne rien dire. Les mots dont chacun use et abuse jusqu’au jour de sa mort, Les a-t-on jamais vus agiter les feuilles, animer un nuage? (PSW, 977, ll. 13–16)

Hesitancy and scepticism about form and its significance continue to predominate in the sequence. The second poem (PSW, 978–79) conjures up a series of disturbing familial figures, visions of desolation and destruction, and haunting dream images, framing these isolated snapshots with questions about their source and meaning. After a tender, doleful third poem evoking a lost child (PSW, 980–82), clearly inviting an autobiographical reading in relation to des Forêts’s daughter Élisabeth, the fourth poem returns to fleeting images of the past, likened now to ‘les métaphores des rêves’ (PSW, 983, l. 2). This poem reiterates the inadequacy of language to capture figures from the past ‘dans ses pièges’ (l. 6), but then goes on to suggest that, precisely in their resistance to the deceptive forms that poetic expression might seek to give to them, these vestigial ‘dream-metaphors’ possess a haunting insistence: Mais bien loin de se tenir à distance Elles rayonnent assez fort pour que s’exerce Au-delà des mots leur hégémonie souveraine Sur l’esprit qui, grâce à elles, y voit plus clair Quand il ne se laisse pas dévoyer par la phrase Avec ses trop beaux accords, son rituel trompeur Auxquels s’oppose en tout la communion silencieuse, Ce feu profond sans médiation impure. Prendre forme est si contraire à leur nature Qu’il ne sert à rien de leur faire violence […]. (ll. 7–16)

I won’t go on to enumerate all the other moments at which the Poèmes de Samuel Wood explore the resistance of aspects of past experience to the forms of poetic expression, but I will just turn to one more for the time being, in the fifth poem of the sequence, because, like this fourth, it exhibits a characteristic, ironic tension at work precisely between énoncé and énonciation. It will be evident that the lines cited above, announcing the recalcitrance of the ‘dream-metaphors’ to taking on form within the confines of poetic language, do so in a mode of expression that is almost parodically exemplary of the ‘trop beaux accords’ and ‘rituel

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trompeur’ whose inadequacy the passage appears to denounce. The diction is elevated and orderly, conveying inexpressibility with elegant lucidity, and the verse form maintains a reassuring sense of balance; in fact, as in the opening section where we began, these lines tend to hover just around the regularity of decasyllables and alexandrines, several of them—as was the case with the opening lines—sharing initial seven-syllable hemistichs, and the impression of syntactic and metrical stability being underscored by line endings that verge on half-rhyme and assonance. The fifth poem (PSW, 985–89) adopts the mode of a secondperson address, either to the authorial self or to Samuel Wood, in an ambiguity that is clearly central to whatever autobiographical status the sequence as a whole may possess, the full exploration of which I’ll have to continue to postpone for the moment. What is initially urged on the addressee, emphatically and insistently, is renunciation, in terms of acceptance of finite existence, but also, in keeping with an attitude of self-abnegation in the face of mortality, in terms of abandoning the false consolations of writing. Thus, there is an entreaty both to renounce that part of the self that struggles against mortality and to relinquish the writing that attests to—or even, is—that very struggle: Ne cède pas au cœur qui se rebelle ni à ses plaintes désolées, Détache-toi de toi auquel t’a lié un mauvais coup du hasard Et, sans te donner tort d’avoir lutté avec des armes aussi pauvres, Refusé de les rendre avant d’être tout au bord de mourir, Délaisse les feuilles en chantier qui encombrent ta table Où tu n’auras perdu que trop d’heures à construire Et à détruire. (PSW, 986, ll. 25–31)

Of course, such an injunction adds a further, underlying irony to the ironic discrepancy between énoncé and énonciation that we noted in the fourth poem. Literary adjurations to abandon literature catch themselves up in performative self-contradiction, as Samuel Beckett knew well. The source of such an adjuration in this fifth poem seems to know it too, as the poem’s ensuing section presents a resistance to the acquiescence previously implored, acknowledging a writerly version of the dilemma that to desire the end of all desires is still to desire: ‘Est-il pire façon d’alléger ses regrets / Que perdre le désir de désirer ce qui passe?’ (PSW, 987, ll. 19–20). So, the abandonment of literary expression must itself be abandoned, and the self on whom resignation was urged likewise must survive its own struggle to cease struggling: ‘Le moi propre reste encore assez vivace pour dire non / Et redire non à ces voix qui le somment de lâcher prise’ (PSW, 988, ll. 21–22).

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This ironic tension between the thematic expression of the inadequacy of words in general, and of the forms of poetic language in particular, and the adoption of a heavily stylized mode of poetic expression in order to enunciate that very inadequacy, is often channelled into a contrast between human language and natural sounds, as we saw at the outset, with the evocation in the first poem’s opening section of those moments when ‘la nature met la langue à sa rude école’ (PSW, 977, l. 9). This contrast is the particular focus of the eleventh poem in the sequence (PSW, 999–1000), which is also the only part of the work that names the pseudo-authorial heteronym of the sequence, concluding as it does with an 11-line, second-person apostrophe to ‘Samuel’, that apostrophe also providing the sequence’s only occasion for the explicit voicing of the first person singular as a subject pronoun (PSW, 999, l. 19; PSW, 1000, l. 1). The first part of this eleventh poem laments the poverty of human expression by comparison with the ‘musique native’ (PSW, 999, l. 5) produced by non-human animals (the song of an unseen bird, the howling of wolves), and it moves towards its guiding question about how to overcome this human deficiency in expression in terms that are worth noting. In relation to the music of sounds inspired in such animals by ‘l’allégresse et la faim’ (l. 6), it asks: Sans prétendre égaler leurs prouesses vocales Non corrompues par le désir d’auditoire Qui fait de l’homme une créature si vaine Comment chanter sur un registre moins pauvre? (ll. 7–10)

Besides the unsurprising opposition established here between the instinctual sounds of non-human animals and the reflective register of human language, it is telling that the latter is expressed in terms of the inhibiting self-regard of a performance, the very kind of performance that the opening lines of the entire sequence had conspicuously set up, with their invitation to us to attend, like an audience in the literal sense, to the scratchings of someone in search of a voice (PSW, 977, ll. 1–2). Moreover, as if to exemplify the self-conscious verbal artifice they highlight as an obstacle in human expression, these four lines are fairly ostentatious in their own prosodic performance: two of the lines are alexandrines (PSW, 999, ll. 7, 9), with the other two falling one syllable short;16 and the metre of the first of these is particularly salient, since it 16 The word ‘corrompues’ (PSW, 999, l. 8) makes the line in which it appears metrically ambivalent. A line-internal, unelided e atone immediately following a

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takes the form of a classical alexandrine with a medial caesura dividing two perfectly balanced hemistichs. It is in keeping, then, with the contrast developed here, and intermittently throughout the sequence, between the proclaimed desire for a supposedly spontaneous, instinctual expression, on the one hand, and the highly stylized expression of that desire, on the other, that the eleventh poem continues by suggesting that the quest for ‘un registre moins pauvre’ will not involve turning back in nostalgia for a lost, ‘natural’ origin of expression, but will rather be pursued by a passage through the forms of human language in order to move beyond them, into a kind of silence: Nous n’aurons eu d’autres outils que les mots Auxquels demander plus qu’ils ne savent faire Conduit à désespérer de leur usage Mais ils demeurent nos maîtres en toute chose Puisqu’il faut en passer par eux pour se taire […]. (PSW, 999, ll. 11–15)

We may get a sense of what this passage into silence might entail from the final, apostrophizing section of this eleventh poem, which follows a couple of lines later, and is worth citing in extenso: Toi dont rien ne dit que tu vives sous ce nom, Samuel, Samuel, est-ce bien ta voix que j’entends Venir comme des profondeurs d’un tombeau Renforcer la mienne aux prises avec les phrases Ou faire écho à sa grande indigence? Bon génie qui semble le démon en personne Je n’en saurais guère plus loin sur ton compte Sauf qu’atteint par la maladie du langage Celui que tu tiens ne peut m’en guérir. Mais l’effroi, mais les vérités les plus sombres Toi qui n’es qu’un nom trouve la force de les dire. (PSW, 999, l. 18–PSW, 1000, l. 5)

This closing section of the eleventh poem suggests, therefore, that the passage through words into silence may involve the eclipse of one’s own vowel sound would have been avoided in classical French verse. Its presence here means that, although scansion of ‘corrompues’ as three syllables seems the more obvious, making this a hendecasyllabic line, a reading that gives syllabic value to the adjective’s feminine ending cannot be entirely dismissed; on that reading, the line would therefore resolve into another, rather irregular alexandrine.

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voice in favour of the silent inscription of a fictional poetic voice, that of Samuel Wood. But, of course, it does so in ways that are uncertain or ambivalent through and through: the very name of ‘Samuel’ is held to be without secure foundation; the sound of his voice is posed as a question, and its relation to the first-person voice might be either that of fortifying support or duplicating weakness; and, in keeping with that ambivalence, we presume, Samuel might be either a benevolent spirit or a demonic figure. In the remaining discussion, I propose to focus on the silence from which language emerges, particularly in the opening poem. At the outset, we noted something of the multilayered effect of this sequence’s own breaking of the silence in its opening lines. At this initial threshold of the poem, we are effectively invited to read and to listen, to attend to both an inscription and a more or less vocalized set of sounds. Of course, just such a gesture might be viewed as nothing other than the invitation to read poetically, but if that is so, then the invitation in this case seems to be accompanied, as we have already noted, by a fundamental uncertainty about that bedrock of poetic—and more particularly lyric—writing: the poetic voice. The voice to which the opening lines refer, which we take to be that of the eponymous pseudoauthor Samuel Wood, is one which can only as yet be announced, since it is itself declared, by the enunciating voice, to be in the process of a difficult and uncertain emergence. An enigmatic relationship is set up between the enunciating voice and that other voice which it heralds. First of all, the temporality in play seems complex and conflictual: staged in the present in terms of tense, the exhortation to listen that the opening words pose to us relates to an ongoing sound that is purportedly yet to reach vocalization, let alone any articulated expression, but which is accorded a tenacity that implicitly spans an indeterminate past: ‘Écoutez-le qui grignote à petit bruit, admirez sa patience’ (PSW, 977, l. 1; emphasis added). The anticipation of this possible future voice is evoked in the subsequent lines, as we saw at the beginning of our discussion. In terms of tense, however, following the adoption of the future in the question that conveys that anticipation (l. 3), the resumption of non-specific present tenses serves to convey the repetitive nature of the quest for voice (‘il tourne en rond sans trouver sa voix’, l. 6), and to further open that repetitive present to other, no more than hypothetical occasions on which natural sounds may come to supplement the absent voice (‘Sinon quand le vent souffle à travers bois’, etc., ll. 7–12).

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A second layer of obscurity posed by the opening lines of the sequence concerns the source and characteristics of the sounds associated with this incipient voice. The compensation for the absent voice that might be offered by the sounds of nature, in that hypothetical gesture from the opening of the work to which we have just referred, seems to propose ‘natural’, non-human ‘animal’ sounds as a source for a pure poetic voice that would not yet be tainted by the abstractions of human language. This is the apparent sense of the rapid renunciation of the quest to ‘accorder sa voix à celle des éléments’ (PSW, 977, l. 13), since articulated human language has departed too far from its animal origins to be able to interact with the forces of nature; hence, the despairing tone of the ensuing question: ‘Les mots dont chacun use et abuse jusqu’au jour de sa mort / Les a-t-on jamais vus agiter les feuilles, animer un nuage?’ (ll. 15–16). With the reprise of this theme in the eleventh poem, what has been lost in this departure from the origins of voice in animal sound is figured, in a familiar trope that we noted earlier, as a natural music, since the human vocal instrument has become ‘une gorge si creuse / Inapte à produire cette musique native / Qu’inspirent aux bêtes l’allégresse et la faim’ (PSW, 999, ll. 4–6). Since at least eighteenth-century debates on the origins of language, it has been a common gesture to place the alleged musicality, or even onomatopoeia, of poetic language—insofar as the latter is supposed to prioritize some innately expressive or communicative qualities of sound—in proximity to a natural, instinctual voicing of feeling.17 Rather than rehearsing these commonplaces here, let us record straight away a couple of other characterizations of the elusive voice in the opening lines of the Poèmes de Samuel Wood that seem to strike some dissonant notes. Although the sounds of nature surveyed in lines 7–12 of the opening poem suggest an external, material source where the poetic voice might be sought, which would further be in keeping with the birdsong and chorus of wolves that are envied in the 17 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues is obviously a key reference point here: ‘les retours périodiques et mesurés du rhytme, les infléxions mélodieuses des accens firent naitre la poesie et la musique avec la langue, ou plustôt tout cela n’étoit que la langue même pour ces heureux climats et ces heureux tems où les seuls besoins pressans qui demandoient le concours d’autrui étoient ceux que le cœur faisoit naitre’ (Œuvres complètes, vol. V, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al. (Paris: Gallimard ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1995), pp. 371–429 (p. 410)). For a survey of such debates, and an incisive analysis of their stakes, see David Nowell Smith’s chapter ‘A Natural Scale’, in On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 15–47.

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eleventh poem, this should be set against the indication in lines 5–6 that the unremitting quest for a voice is taking place internally, mentally, within ‘cette tête encombrée qui est la sienne’ (l. 5). Indeed, the very first sound evoked in the poem seems to emerge from a source situated uncertainly between the bestial and the human, and between instinctual sound and deliberative inscription: faced with the invitation, ‘Écoutez-le qui grignote à petit bruit’ (l. 1), are we to listen for something like the nibbling of a rodent or, perhaps, the scratchings of pen on paper? Besides establishing the fairly conservative prosody that will, with variations, continue across the sequence, the first few lines noticeably contain some salient phonic and graphic patterning, of which I’ll highlight just a few examples here. As the initial evocation of the sounds of nature draws to its close in lines 9–12, the pair of adjectives used to characterize nature’s harmonies seem to have their contrastive qualities highlighted, first of all by their division across an enjambment, but secondly by the anagrammatic play that no doubt catches the eye rather than the ear (‘des harmonies sauvages, / Suaves aussi parfois’, ll. 10–11). In that same passage, line-terminal rhyme is also used to link the two possible sources suggested for those natural harmonies: the ‘flûte d’un oiseau’ (l. 11; the rhyme-word being repeated in the ensuing line) or the ‘roulis d’un ruisseau’ (l. 12). But most strikingly of all, there is a cluster of internal and line-terminal rhyming and assonance around the middle of these opening dozen lines, at the point where the seemingly vain quest for a voice is said, hesitantly, to receive some sort of compensation from nature’s harmonies. A circling pattern of assonance on [u] sounds appears to reinforce the repetitive futility of the pursuit that the lines describe: ‘Où il tourne en rond sans trouver sa voix, / Sinon quand le vent souffle à travers bois, / Que la mer roule fort, couvre d’écume les digues’ (ll. 5–8). More intriguingly, however, with the voix/bois rhyme, we have the impression that the poem marks itself with a kind of sound signature, as the elusive pseudo-authorial voice becomes phonically attached, via a translingual pun, with the ‘Wood’ of the poem’s titular heteronym, which in turn transports des Forêts’s own name back across the same pair of languages. With a view to proposing some concluding reflections on the status of this autobiographical signature, I want to draw together some strands of what we have noted about the characteristics of form and voice in des Forêts’s poetic sequence. In particular, I want to flag up an obvious tension between the patterns that we have seen coming into focus, on the one hand, and the notion of a search for a voice, on the other. As we

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have noted, this supposedly uncertain pursuit of a voice is itself voiced in ways that will be readily recognizable to the reader of French poetry. This is the case not only for the more ‘local’ effects on which I have been dwelling latterly, but also in terms of poetic models and genres in relation to which an experienced reader will doubtless begin to situate this poem, such as the ars poetica in its reflexivity, or the elegy, in its mournful lamentation. I’d like to suggest that this tension between a proclaimed voicelessness and the markers of an accomplished poetic voice is itself a manifestation of the underlying tension between the enunciating subject of these lines and that other voice that appears, in diverse ways, as their enunciated subject: the one seemingly designated by the fabricated name of ‘Samuel Wood’. In relation to this tension between form as an emergent process and the recognizable forms we find in the Poèmes de Samuel Wood, I think it may be fruitful to think of poetic form, particularly in this instance, as the shaping of a voice that, as it seeks to carve out a singular timbre for itself, has to shuttle between idiom and convention, between fluidities of sound or mark and fixities of meaning or identity; and furthermore that, in considering that shuttling movement, we should be wary of securely situating ‘form’ on one side or the other of that spectrum, and instead conceive of ‘forming’ as itself being a movement between and, indeed, within each pole. In this sense, the autobiographical gesture sketched out by the work of form in des Forêts’s poetic sequence might be described as the mobile interplay between singular identity and anonymous impersonality, the fashioning of a signature between inimitable sound or mark and recognizable, repeatable patterns, giving uncertain voice to an autobiographie intérieure that must remain inappropriable in its inscrutable exteriority—a ‘voice from elsewhere’, as the closing poem suggests: Une ombre peut-être, rien qu’une ombre inventée Et nommée pour les besoins de la cause Tout lien rompu avec sa propre figure. Si faire entendre une voix venue d’ailleurs Inaccessible au temps et à l’usure Se révèle non moins illusoire qu’un rêve Il y a pourtant en elle quelque chose qui dure Même après que s’en est perdu le sens Son timbre vibre encore au loin comme un orage Dont on ne sait s’il se rapproche ou s’en va. (PSW, 1003)

part 3

Form and Social Experience

chapter eleven

Circuits of Reappropriation Accessing the Real in the Work of Didier Eribon Edward J. Hughes Circuits of Reappropriation ‘S’il fallait affronter le “réel” sans cet écran …’1 ‘Je crois que j’assume et dépasse la déchirure culturelle’2

‘Malaise’, ‘mélancolie’, ‘désarroi’, ‘infériorisation’ (RR, 14, 15, 19, 23): these are some of the terms used by Didier Eribon in his autobiographical work Retour à Reims (2009) to convey the affective charge associated with his project. The text sets out to retrieve his earlier life experience in a working-class milieu in northern France. Eribon makes numerous cross-textual references, both in this text and its sequel, La Société comme verdict, to theories surrounding the figure of the transfuge de classe. These are drawn from literature, politics and ethnography, in particular from works by Annie Ernaux, James Baldwin, Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and John Edgar Wideman. In the concluding pages of Retour à Reims, he reflects that the mediation constituted by this matrix of references provides him with a framework through which to approach the question of his social origins. Strikingly, the spectrum of intertextual reference serves, in Eribon’s case, to 1 Didier Eribon, Retour à Reims (Paris: Flammarion, [2009] 2010), p. 246. Hereafter abbreviated to RR. 2 Annie Ernaux, L’Ecriture comme un couteau: entretien avec Frédéric-Yves Jeannet (Paris: Stock, 2003), p. 35.

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‘neutraliser la charge émotionnelle qui serait sans doute trop forte s’il fallait affronter le “réel” sans cet écran’ (RR, 246). The current study seeks to consider the ways in which this filtering of the real and of its emotional charge is a feature of Eribon’s trajectory. It additionally considers those modern and contemporary authors whose ‘confrontations with the real’ he charts. Central to my argument is that in the representation of the obstacles confronting these authors—which are variously social, sexual and racial—forms of digression and detour, be they theoretical, textual or bibliographical, frequently constitute a recurring feature. Accessing the real may thus come via a process of circuitous reappropriation. Such a process has ramifications for the question of textual form and in the course of this chapter we will be seeing how the reach to a real that is problematical in personal terms or is socially contested often manifests itself precisely as anxiety or inhibition in respect of form. Venturing into recognizably literary spaces, for example, may be seen by the writer as an unpalatable intervention in that the form carries connotations of social class. Yet, as we have noted, it is the intertextual screen that allows Eribon to approach the fraught question of psychosocial background. In the case of the prominent figures whose achievements he champions—Foucault, Bourdieu and Wideman, for example—we will see how the historical archive, sociological enquiry and the genre of conventional autobiography become the orbits along which the personal is ambiguously and obscurely tracked. These authors have, I will be arguing, a strong claim to our attention precisely because of their interrogation of questions to do with form, detour and indirection. Standing in marked contrast to these devices of screening and circumlocution, however, is social conditioning as experienced by the working class. Such conditioning Eribon depicts as performing an ineluctable, significantly unmediated branding. On the subject of what he refers to as ‘les destins sociaux’, he writes: ‘les sentences sont gravées sur nos épaules, au fer rouge, au moment de notre naissance’ (RR, 52–53). Such determinism is reinforced, he argues, through established antinomies such as the utilitarian (slanted conventionally towards the working class) and ‘the cultural’ (a would-be bourgeois domain) (RR, 53). Eribon weighs up the paradox whereby, as a thinker, he is an opponent of political and intellectual hierarchy and yet in experiential terms he has consciously abandoned the subaltern world into which he was born (RR,  72). Sexual identity here compounds the difficulties inherent in

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social class identity, Eribon acknowledging that, as a gay writer, his early adulthood was shaped around a rejection of class origins (RR, 230). As reconstructed by Eribon, the return in Retour à Reims comes after decades during which its author, living in Paris, pursued his career as a journalist, thinker and gay rights campaigner. The return to his roots was prompted by the death of his father, a manual worker with the prejudices of many of his generation and class, including homophobia. The retour allows Eribon to reflect on what are presented as parallel forms of social marginality: the fact of having been born into a proletarian family living just outside Reims, on the one hand, and the experience of being adrift from the heterosexual normativity prevalent in the working-class community in which he grew up. For Eribon, these twin expressions of outsiderness are connected, crucially, in a relationship of rivalry. He presents the flight from working-class culture as the necessary precondition for his finding sexual liberation. It is as though the shelving of one aspect of his identity might allow for the realization and expression of another. Authoring Réflexions sur la question gay published in 1999 would thus stand as one strand, the publication of Retour à Reims representing another, in the author’s identitarian search. But by Eribon’s admission, the two are dialectically linked: ‘je dus me façonner moi-même en jouant de l’un contre l’autre’ (RR, 230). As Sheringham reflects in a discussion of the theme of new directions taken in individual lives, such turning points may ‘answer a need for coherence, but at the risk of traducing something very valuable’. 3 Through the workings of the ‘retour’, Eribon comes to valorize and reappropriate a discarded proletarian identity, a past which he had found alienating. Here again, Sheringham’s reflection on turning points has a bearing: ‘to think of a life as having a shape, as hanging together around some major articulations, is a way of bridging the gap between ourselves and others’.4 Citing James Baldwin, Eribon refers to the return to one’s origins as an embracing of life: ‘To avoid the journey back is to avoid the Self, to avoid “life”’ (quoted RR, 34). These calls for attentiveness to discarded forms of ‘life’ are to be heard not only in the projects of Baldwin and Eribon but also in texts by 3 Michael Sheringham, ‘On Turning-Points’: A Sermon Preached in the Chapel of All Souls College, Oxford, 2 November 2008 (Oxford: All Souls College, no date), p. 6. 4 Sheringham, ‘On Turning-Points’, p. 10.

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Ernaux, whose influence Eribon acknowledges in a series of references to her work. Coincidentally, Ernaux has fashioned her own retour, Retour à Yvetot (2013), the text being a transcript of a lecture given at Yvetot in the autumn of 2012. There, Ernaux looks back on how she had come to settle, selectively, for just one ‘héritage’, namely that of ‘l’ecole, l’université et la littérature’. 5 The link to Eribon where a comparable choice is made (Paris, writing, intellectual pursuits) is clear. In both cases, the adoption of literary form seals the social divorce. In the same lecture, Ernaux evokes ‘un retour au réel’ (RY, 29) which she experienced when teaching in a lycée technique in Haute Savoie. Faced with a class of 40 pupils drawn predominantly from the region’s urban and rural working class, she is drawn up short by the gap between the literature she is teaching and ‘leur culture d’origine […] Je constatais aussi l’injustice d’une reproduction des inégalités sociales au travers de l’école’ (RY, 29). The reflections of both Ernaux and Eribon confirm what, in another context, Jacques Rancière refers to as ‘l’ancestrale hiérarchie’ that subordinates those destined to work with their hands to those ‘qui ont reçu le privilège de la pensée’.6 The question of ancestral illiteracy which Ernaux addresses in La Place also features in Retour à Reims. One of Eribon’s grandmothers was illiterate, a condition which he sees as reinforcing ‘cette soumission à la réalité’, the idea being that of a social insertion that entailed ‘cette résignation’ to the reality of a hierarchical order (RR, 47). In a similar way, the cité-jardin in which Eribon’s father lived before the author was born is referred to as ‘un lieu de relégation sociale. Une réserve de pauvres’ (RR, 48). In a reinforcement of this view of an inexorable social determinism which denies the working class access to other forms of cultural and economic experience, the factory is described as ‘waiting for’ Eribon’s father, a 14-year-old school leaver (RR, 50). More generally, Eribon reflects on how, in the case of working-class lives, the mental outlook is nothing other than ‘le produit, gravé en nous, sédimenté de strate en strate, de la longue fréquentation du monde extérieur’ (SV, 37). The metaphor of geological fixity corroborates the characterization of the life of Eribon’s father as ‘cet être-au-monde si précisément situé’ (RR, 35), the sociocultural constriction and containment explaining, in Eribon’s words, ‘la semi-folie de mon père’.7 For Eribon, this accounts 5 Annie Ernaux, Retour à Yvetot (Paris: Mauconduit, 2013), p. 28. 6 Jacques Rancière, La Nuit des prolétaires (Paris: Pluriel, [1981] 2012), p. 8. 7 The Foucauldian echo here may be linked to Eribon’s biographical work on

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for the latter’s inability to establish relationality with others. Thus with the accretions of social sedimentation comes emotional disturbance. Eribon’s mother, he adds, asks him to look charitably on the faults of a father who had worked to support his family. Her intervention echoes, for Eribon, the case of James Baldwin, who was reminded by his mother of the social conditioning undergone by his father (RR, 35). The contradiction that Eribon sees in his own position is that, whereas he is opposed in principle, as a writer and intellectual, to social exploitation of this kind, in practice he had disowned the world of exploitation in which he grew up (RR, 72, 88). Self-incrimination thus forms a base layer in the psychological autoportrait to be found in Retour à Reims. The hard manual work of a parent, the book’s author writes with regret, is the precondition that allows him to study Marx, Trotsky, Beauvoir, Genet and Aristotle. Eribon recalls in this regard Ernaux’s reflection in Une femme that her mother sold groceries all day long to allow her daughter to sit in a lecture theatre learning about Plato.8 Access to these expressions of advanced literary composition and form is thus predicated on the manual toil of others. Pointedly in Eribon’s narrative of family life, it is as the exhausted industrial labourer sleeps that her would-be radical son reads. Looking at the physically diminished body of his mother who had worked on a production line for years, Eribon reflects: ‘je suis frappé par ce que signifie concrètement, physiquement, l’inégalité sociale’ (RR, 85). The text thus underscores the corporeal manifestation of what Eribon terms ‘la violence nue de l’exploitation’. His understanding of Marxism was, he writes in self-repudiating mode, ‘une façon d’idéaliser la classe ouvrière, de la transformer en une entité mythique’ (RR, 86). By contrast, the precariousness of working-class lives assumes an urgent, somatic manifestation: ‘Un corps d’ouvrière’, he writes, ‘quand il vieillit, montre à tous les regards ce qu’est la vérité de l’existence des classes’ (RR, 85). (In a novel dedicated to Eribon, Edouard Louis, evoking the lives of working-class male adolescents in contemporary northern France, refers to ‘ces corps, déjà marqués par leur classe sociale’.)9 The return to Reims thus holds an epiphanic dimension in that evidence from real lives—the musculoskeletal damage sustained by his butcher brother, for example, who for decades had carried animal the author of Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, which I shall come to below. 8 Annie Ernaux, Une femme (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p. 66; quoted in RR, 84–85. 9 Edouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Belleguele (Paris: Seuil, 2014), p. 153.

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carcasses (RR, 113)—unsettles the textbook access to Marxist accounts of proletarian life that had been Eribon’s reference points. Indeed Eribon takes left-wing intellectuals to task for the ‘ethnocentrisme de classe’ (RR, 155) that sees them make pronouncements that are socially disconnected. His own concern with revolutionary class politics had served to ‘masquer le jugement social que je portais sur mes parents, ma famille, et mon désir d’échapper à leur monde’ (RR, 88). In his willed social class migration, Eribon has become blind to the aspiration of family members to be part of a consumerist culture: ‘exalter “la classe ouvrière” pour mieux m’éloigner des ouvriers réels’ (RR, 88) becomes his trenchant self-assessment. With the retour, however, comes an urgent engagement with working-class lives in contemporary France and a correction of Eribon’s ‘désidentification sociale’ (RR, 88). This turning back entails a stern scrutiny of academic pronouncements on the real. Eribon declares himself impatient with psychological and psychoanalytical explanations, these serving, he cautions, to ‘désocialise[r] et dépolitise[r]’ (RR, 96). In a rewriting of and distance-taking from Lacan, he proposes ‘un stade du miroir social’, ‘une scène d’interpellation sociale—et non psychique ou idéologique—par la découverte de la situation sociologique de classe qui assigne une place et une identité’ (RR, 97). Eribon similarly queries Gilles Deleuze’s definition of the left as entailing an outlook that functions globally by encompassing the Third World, for example.10 The left which Eribon encounters in workingclass north-eastern France is, by contrast, one tightly wedded to protest against immediate social conditions. Moreover, the return to Reims sees Eribon confronted with the rise of the Front National, whose views his own family and community of origin now endorse, this deriving from a broader movement of ‘raidissement raciste’ (RR, 150) in the 1970s and 1980s. Eribon interprets this voting trend as being in part, and however paradoxical, ‘comme le dernier recours des milieux populaires pour défendre leur identité collective, et en tout cas une dignité qu’ils sentaient comme toujours piétinée’ (RR, 134). Uninhibited by political correctness, Eribon thus attempts to fathom the politics of reaction within the working class. In an analogous way, the suspicion which he directs against theory becomes part of an attempt, however conflicted, to rehabilitate a discarded way of life. 10 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Gauche’, in L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, DVD, Editions du Montparnasse, 2004, quoted in RR, 43–44.

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A Work of Social Vigilance In both Eribon and Ernaux, the French educational system is depicted as a powerful vector in the propagation of a culture that is bourgeois, with an attendant relegation of particular forms of the real. We have already noted Ernaux’s account of the alienating experience of teaching in a lycée technique. Both writers refer to their earlier ignorance of the world and culture of the classes prépas and the grandes écoles. Eribon refers to it as ‘la voie royale’ (RR, 192), a pathway of which he had been totally oblivious. Ernaux, in turn, refers to her family’s ignorance of the filières or discipline-specific pathways in the school curriculum and the workings of educational exclusion: ‘on ignore les filières, hypokhâgne et khâgne, n’en parlons pas’ (RY, 27–28). For both authors, then, the system with its privileging of very specific discursive forms reinforces the devalorization of the post-war working-class culture that was theirs. (We might add that Paul Nizan, one of Eribon’s chronologically earlier reference points in Retour à Reims, offers a caustic, interwar-years view of the Ecole Normale Supérieure as gatekeeper of elitism and concealer of ‘l’existence charnelle de nos frères’.)11 Ernaux writes of her own trajectory as an ‘immigrée de l’intérieur’ within French society, her writing entailing a conquering of ‘le savoir intellectuel par effraction’.12 Confronted with class divisions that are reinforced at every point, Eribon protests about the presence of ‘une étanchéité presque totale entre les mondes sociaux’ (RR, 51). Via a telling lexicon of social relegation and subjection—Eribon draws heavily on a vocabulary of rules, frontiers, barriers, exclusions and social inertia (RR, 51–52)—he sets out the need to break ‘les catégories incorporées de la perception et les cadres institués de la signification’ (RR, 52). Yet the same social class that is so tightly governed in turn becomes the site of a repressive, specifically homophobic culture. Eribon shows the linguistic resourcefulness of that culture, the real being evoked in Retour à Reims through a language of incision, imposition and branding: he confesses to having felt ‘frappé, brûlé, glacé’ (RR, 207); the experience of being gay releases a fear of being ‘moqué, stigmatisé ou psychanalysé’ (RR, 207); and the term ‘pédé’ ‘venait me transpercer comme un coup de couteau, me terroriser aussi’ (RR, 204). The synonyms ‘tapette’, ‘tantouze’ and ‘tata’ (RR, 204) provide further evidence of the linguistic 11 Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie (Paris: La Découverte, [1931] 2002), p. 60. 12 Ernaux, L’Ecriture comme un couteau, pp. 34–35.

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energies released by conformism in Eribon’s community of origin. Still, he speaks out not just against physical attacks on homosexuals but also against ‘un autre type d’agression […] discursive et culturelle’ (RR, 222) which he specifically sees at work within psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The suspicion directed against theory thus energizes the identitarian quest that forms the core of the text. The consequences of the process of disidentification which saw him abandon the milieu of his birth are carefully scrutinized by Eribon. Whereas his brother is employed in an abattoir, Eribon describes himself aged 16 as constructing ‘un ethos lycéen’, his dress sense, hair style and choice of music all distancing him from a brother who continued to show what Eribon labels ‘un ethos populaire’ (RR, 110). Intrafamilial difference provides a negative definition of identity formation: ‘ne pas être comme lui’, Eribon confesses (RR, 114). The disowning of siblings is again in evidence in La Société comme verdict, published in 2013: there, Eribon confesses to denying that he was related to a garage worker with the same surname who was in fact one of his brothers.13 Moreover, he reflects on how he literally excised from a photo of his parents the image of his father, an act which he classifies as a ‘geste étrange et lamentable’ (SV, 36). If shame is adduced by Eribon as an explanation for the mutilation of the photo, he sees the emotion as having a powerful collective hold, referring to ‘la réalité hontologique du monde social’ (SV,  36). Drawing on comments by Bourdieu on the Kabyle writer Mouloud Mammeri, Eribon presents shame as, in Bourdieu’s view, ‘cette forme suprême de la dépossession’ (SV, 87). The disowning and evacuation of identity make all the more radical the reappropriation of a particular form of social real in Retour à Reims. *** Eribon’s search for models of understanding that are germane to his own project also sees him explore anglophone literature. John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers (1984) provides him with a striking example of a gulf that separates siblings, in this case that between the author, who is a university teacher, and his younger brother convicted of an armed robbery that ended in homicide. Eribon concedes that the gulf in Wideman between the black neighbourhood in industrial 13 Didier Eribon, La Société comme verdict (Paris: Flammarion, 2013), p. 35.

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Pittsburgh where he grew up and the university position he came to occupy is wider than the one confronting the son who returns to Reims. He nevertheless identifies with Wideman’s initial haste to shake off his origins. Of his criminal brother’s behaviour, Wideman writes: ‘Your words and gestures belonged to a language I was teaching myself to unlearn’.14 In Eribon, the process of social unlearning is no less tensely evoked: ‘Il me fallait exorciser le diable en moi, le faire sortir de moi. Ou le rendre invisible, pour que personne ne puisse deviner sa présence. Ce fut pendant des années un travail de chaque instant’ (RR, 115). Wideman’s vigilance is thus echoed in Eribon’s erasure of a social real which Retour à Reims will seek to reverse. In both cases, censorship of self stands as prelude to a writing of reconnection. Neither author, however, sees his intervention as being unequivocally reparative. In Wideman’s case, his book becomes a co-production with his imprisoned sibling, with Brothers and Keepers containing substantial sections of first-person reflection narrated by the younger brother. Yet the book that Wideman would wish to be redemptive risks merely accentuating the divide between siblings; it would ‘belong to the world beyond the prison walls. Ironically, it would validate the power of the walls’ (BK, 199). Wideman is thus alert to the tension between textual composition and the call of a lived reality that may be spurned by such writing. He asks if the collaborative writing project might not spell the traducing of something valuable in terms of interpersonal connection: ‘Was the whole thing between us about a book or had something finer, truer been created?’ (BK, 200), he asks. In a restatement of this anxiety, Wideman acknowledges the distance between him and his sibling: ‘Many of my worries clearly were not his. I was the writer, that was my kitchen, my heat’ (BK, 200; emphasis original). In La Société comme verdict, Eribon reflects that the world of would-be intellectual liberty to which he had aspired ‘se révèle le lieu d’une quasiservilité généralisée et plus ou moins adoptée comme mode de vie et intériorisée’ (SV, 112). To Wideman’s image of writerly angst, we can thus add Eribon’s view of an intellectual culture that enslaves those who aspire to be part of it. High culture’s use of the adjective populaire stands as a form of masked aggression for Eribon, who identifies in such usage ‘une fonction d’euphémisation de la violence que comporte cette assignation à l’infériorité’ (SV, 116). For the author of La Société comme verdict, his 14 John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (New York: Vintage Books, [1984] 1995), p. 26. Subsequently abbreviated to BK.

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own avowedly frenetic quest for bourgeois culture has led to a powerful withdrawal or ‘désidentification’ in relation to his roots (SV, 142). Yet the violence of a more powerful social class also comes to be internalized by the subaltern, as Eribon recalls when evoking the plight of his pregnant, unmarried grandmother. She is banished from the family home by a father who, in placing a curse on his daughter, gives expression less to individual venom than to a socially conditioned response: ‘sa dureté ne faisait que répéter des attitudes et des énoncés déjà produits avant lui; son propos revêt un caractère citationnel’ (SV, 140). If the derivative provenance of this verbal violence reinforces the concept of social verdict in Eribon’s title, the term may be read etymologically as a would-be ‘true saying’, a verum dictum that nevertheless remains squarely societal in origin. While unambiguously endorsing Wideman’s project, Eribon’s review of anglophone literature that specifically addresses the question of social class migration also throws up elements of trenchant critique. In La Société comme verdict, he sees Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, for example, as reinforcing gender stereotyping of the most conventional kind. While welcoming certain aspects of Hoggart’s evocation of northern English popular culture, Eribon criticizes him for depicting negatively those working-class women who refused to follow the schoolto-factory-to-marriage habitus that Hoggart evokes approvingly: ‘les femmes libres’, writes Eribon, ‘représentent la menace que tout le livre cherche à conjurer’ (SV, 201).15 Some specific details in Eribon’s own family history help explain his reticence when faced with Hoggart’s tacit assumptions about community formation. The knowledge that one of his grandmothers became a femme tondue at the end of the Second World War leaves him disinclined to endorse Hoggart’s moral conservatism. Likewise, he writes with some frustration about Raymond Williams’s novel Second Generation, a work which the author of La Société comme verdict sees as reinforcing social conservatism. In Eribon’s trenchant assessment, the Marxist sociologist in Williams has become a preacher with a puritanical message (SV, 220). 15 In this regard, Eribon (SV, 200) cites the negative response to Hoggart to be found in Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986). Steedman rejects what she presents as the trend within cultural criticism in Britain to propose ‘a psychological simplicity in the lives lived out in Hoggart’s endless streets of little houses’ (Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 7).

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Yet in his responses to Williams and Hoggart—he describes the latter as constructing an ideological artefact and passing it off as ethnographic work (SV, 207)—Eribon may be seen to be extending outwards the trenchant self-critique that marks the representation of his personal trajectory in Retour à Reims. Moreover, in other ways, as a sociologist he endorses these classics of mid-twentieth-century British reflection on working-class culture. He cites approvingly one of the closing lines in Williams’s novel Border Country in which the social class transfuge, in an attempted calibration of the cultural distance travelled between South Wales and the metropolis where he now lives, comes to reflect: ‘By measuring the distance, we come home’.16 The paradox of simultaneous distance-taking and belonging similarly features in Brothers and Keepers, where Wideman ponders the linkage between the exilic and the identitarian. As he reflects on the lives of his grandfathers who had moved up from the deep South, Wideman asks: ‘Were they running from something or to something? […] Is freedom inextricably linked with both, running from and running to?’ (BK, 24). Retour à Reims has its own conflicted dynamic of ‘running from’ and ‘running to’, in that the narrative works on the twin trajectories of estrangement and reincorporation, of discarding and retrieval. Indeed for Eribon, as we have seen, freedom lies along what are presented, provocatively one could argue, as two opposing vectors, the expression of his gayness and the reconnection to working-class origins. But whereas the one had originally required the discarding of the other, in a restorative moment in the text, the narrator’s father, his casual homophobia notwithstanding, staunchly defends his son when the latter makes a television appearance to promote gay rights. Retour/détour In the next phase of my argument, I want to suggest that the ‘running from’/‘running to’ may be read paradigmatically and linked to the dynamic of the ‘retour’ and the ‘détour’, in relation not just to Eribon’s work but also to the authors whose projects he endorses. In Ernaux, we have seen the ‘héritage universitaire’ presented as a path followed and then regretted. Similarly, Eribon writes in Retour à Reims 16 Raymond Williams, Border Country (Cardigan: Parthian (Library of Wales), [1960] 2006), p. 341; cited, in French translation, in RR, 247.

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of a screening-off of the real. His earlier, biographical work on Michel Foucault again carries a significant exploration of the retour/détour axis. For Eribon, Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique stands as a form of elaborate detour: the work’s choice of subject—the historical analysis of practices of social exclusion on the grounds of madness— enables Foucault to give oblique expression to his own experience of malaise and outsiderness in the homophobic world of post-war France. While, by Eribon’s own admission, the risk of reductivism is present in his methodological approach in the biography, he draws on Foucault’s writings to weld together the personal and the historical. In a 1975 interview entitled ‘Je suis un artificier’, Foucault observed: ‘Dans ma vie personnelle, il se trouve que je me suis senti, dès l’éveil de ma sexualité, exclu, pas vraiment rejeté, mais appartenant à la part d’ombre de la société […] Très vite, ça s’est transformé en une espèce de menace psychiatrique’.17 Six years later, Foucault observed that each time he undertook theoretical work, the motivation for such endeavour lay in his own life experience: ‘C’est parce que je croyais reconnaître dans les choses que je voyais, dans les institutions auxquelles j’avais affaire, dans mes rapports avec les autres, des craquelures, des secousses sourdes, des dysfonctionnements, que j’entreprenais un tel travail—quelque fragment d’autobiographie’.18 A speculative, theoretical perspective, then, has as underpinning a stratum that is private and experiential. Eribon argues in the same context that each of Foucault’s works has an autobiographical dimension to it.19 That said, Foucault claims that in his own case the experiential was shaped less within a familial nexus than in a wider social domain. In this regard, Eribon’s biography brings out the primacy of the historical event in the shaping of character for Foucault. Reflecting on the experience of his generation growing up in the 1930s, Foucault writes of how the threat of war formed the backdrop to his early life: Puis la guerre vint. Bien plus que les scènes de la vie familiale, ce sont ces événements concernant le monde qui sont la substance de notre mémoire. Je dis ‘notre’ mémoire, parce que je suis presque sûr que la plupart des jeunes Français et Françaises de l’époque ont vécu la même expérience. Il 17 Quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Paris: Flammarion, [1989] 2011), p 53. 18 Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 54. Eribon insists that his intention is not to see Foucault’s research reductively as a writing-out of his sexuality. 19 See Eribon’s preface to the 2011 edition of his Michel Foucault, p. 12.

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pesait une vraie menace sur notre vie privée. C’est peut-être la raison pour laquelle je suis fasciné par l’histoire et par la relation entre l’expérience personnelle et les événements dans lesquels nous nous inscrivons. C’est là, je pense, le noyau de mes désirs théoriques. 20

The projects of Eribon and Ernaux are no less connected with the imbrication of private and public. Ernaux’s childhood memory of Yvetot as a place of rubble and destruction at the close of the Second World War, as evoked in Retour à Yvetot, provides a striking example of the hold of historical specificity. Likewise, Eribon’s account of the 1950s expansion of the village of Muizon outside Reims draws collective and private histories into intimate connection (RR, 11–12). Eribon concludes his preface to the 2011 edition of the Foucault biography he first published 20 years earlier with a reflection that reinforces the theme of rerouting and circumvention: ‘lorsqu’il [Foucault] évoque le long détour par l’érudition et la plongée dans les archives que requiert cette “ontologie de nous-même”, on ressent immédiatement que la magnifique formule qu’il emploie le contient lui-même tout entier: “Un labeur patient qui donne forme à l’impatience de la liberté”’. 21 In Foucault’s chiastic formulation, academic endeavour and emotional longing criss-cross in what may be read as a variant on the détour/retour paradigm that I am proposing. The intense investment that marks the writing of L’Histoire de la folie would, then, signal parenthetically a freedom march on the part of its author, the archive becoming linked to an archaic that is private and personal. But here again, the narrativization of experience is channelled via the screen or detour that is, in Foucault’s case, the archival project. Representation of the encounter with the real thus acquires, and in a way requires, this oblique character. The archive and associated historical enquiry become the forms adopted for the accommodation of self. The issue of the link between specifically printed form and the real is illustrated in the choice of book cover for Retour à Reims. Eribon discusses at some length the requirements of his publishers regarding the cover illustration for the work’s second edition. Whereas he was envisaging an illustration from contemporary abstract art (a work by Clyfford Still or Barnett Newman was what he had in mind), his publisher wanted a photograph of the book’s author. Eribon was initially 20 ‘Michel Foucault: An Interview with Stephen Riggins’, Ethos 1.2 (Autumn 1983), 4–9 (p. 5). Quoted in Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 25; emphasis added. 21 Quoted in the preface to the 2011 edition of Eribon’s Michel Foucault, p. 12.

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reluctant to comply, fearing that the use of such an image would tend to ‘personnaliser et […] singulariser les problèmes que j’avais voulu aborder’ (SV, 18), whereas his whole endeavour had been to address such problems in a collectivizing manner. As he explains, he had been seeking a social real rather than something that was narrowly personal: ‘tout mon effort avait consisté à les dépersonnaliser [les problèmes que j’avais voulu aborder] […] à les “sociologiser” en quelque sorte’ (SV, 18). Eribon reflects ironically on how he drew on his knowledge of contemporary art to put forward counter-proposals to his publisher (SV, 18). Intellectual and aesthetic capital forms part of Eribon’s will to grasp, in a depersonalized form, a concrete collective reality. Indeed he had feared that the switch, between the first and second editions, from abstract art to a photograph with a very precise social class subject matter and provenance would provoke ridicule. Yet the image that he eventually provides for the new edition (it shows him as an adolescent leaning on his father’s car) helps him achieve his goal: ‘[la photo] signalait sans détour l’inscription sociale et, dans sa simplicité figée en noir et blanc, elle présentait […] plus de vérité sociologique impersonnelle que les subtiles compositions de couleurs dans les tableaux des peintres dont je suggérais les noms’ (SV, 19; emphasis added). Importantly, Eribon says of his reluctance to make such a photo available that it pointed to an unwillingness on his part to assume his own familial history: ‘je me sentais capable de l’évoquer dans un discours travaillé et construit, mais n’étais guère enclin à simplement la montrer’ (SV, 17; emphasis added). The return in Eribon’s Retour à Reims thus entails a re-apprenticeship to the real, with an acceptance of its visual, photographic disclosure now throwing into relief the constructedness and artifice of a verbal text. *** Writing in Brothers and Keepers, Wideman reflects on ‘the series of roles and masquerades’ (BK, 33) that he assumed as a social class migrant. Eribon’s project in evoking the position of the transfuge de classe works similarly, entailing as it does both a confrontation with, and a withholding of, a socially specific form of the real. Screens, masks, masquerading, forays into the archive: these are some of the props and manoeuvres adopted by Eribon and identified by him in the authors with whose works he closely engages. He writes of how Bourdieu, in his Esquisse pour une autoanalyse, frequently masks autobiographical

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reality—this being, in Eribon’s view, the sociologist’s attempt to draw attention away from the reality of his upbringing. For Eribon, this was Bourdieu offering autoanalyse and not autobiographie, the better to ward off a would-be hostile biographical gaze. In this way, Bourdieu’s model of autoanalyse protects him, Eribon argues, from ‘une réduction trop directe—et animée par des passions hostiles—du contenu de son œuvre à ses origines sociales’ (SV, 73). Bourdieu thereby deflects any discrediting of his work by those who might seek to reduce it to constricting biographical data. Screening is a device similarly adopted by Eribon and serves to illustrate the paradox inherent in a reappropriation that proceeds circuitously. For Eribon, that literature and intertextual reference should become a way of attending to the real demonstrates how such a matrix provides the space of possibility within which a return can be realized. The production history of Retour à Reims, as the issue of the book’s later cover shows, serves to underscore the conflicted response of Eribon in his attempt to represent the real. He additionally explains in La Société comme verdict that he had originally included in his Retour manuscript an avant-propos in which he had highlighted an article by Bourdieu celebrating Mouloud Mammeri’s return to his native Kabylia. ‘L’Odyssée de la réappropriation’ is how Bourdieu labels this return and quest. Late in the production process, Eribon removed this framing text, believing that its inclusion risked denying his own narrative of return its ‘radicalité’ and its violence (SV, 82). With the scaffolding of an avant-propos and indeed also a postface removed, Eribon was attempting to foreground a lived experience, a real that has been, historically and conventionally, marginalized within academic and literary discourse. But in the process, he demonstrates that the reach to the real functions via often circuitous channels, as Retour à Reims shows and as the contexts he proposes for an understanding of Wideman, Foucault, Ernaux and others confirm. Such channels are themselves an expression and a realization of what is permissible or accessible, as Eribon puts it, in cultural and economic terms (SV, 200). Yet, in respect of the working-class lives that he commemorates, it is crucially the curbs on what is permitted and accessible that shape the ‘apprentissage du monde’ (RR, 35) of these subjects. His father’s death gives urgency to Eribon’s recording of that social constriction and the eclipsing of perspectives it delivers. It is a constriction that upholds society’s verdict and leaves Eribon confronted by ‘un désarroi […] provoqué par une interrogation indissociablement personnelle et politique’ (RR, 19).

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In a reflection on momentous forms of witnessing, Ross Chambers evokes what he terms ‘the “alien” scene, the “other” context’ that is no less a part of culture. Chambers writes: ‘witnessing […] takes the form of seeking to cause some disturbance in well-established cultural regularities and routines’. 22 In Eribon’s autoanalyse and in his response to writers with whose projects he identifies, we see disturbance formed by the désarroi of lived experience and its ambiguous textual mediation. In cultural interventions of this kind, it is in the ambivalent play between running from and to such experience that the overlaying of past exclusions—social, sexual, racial—and current self-positioning is effected.

22 Ross Chambers, Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. xix–xx; emphasis original.

chapter twelve

Metaphor, Parody and Madness Two Readings of Marie Chauvet’s Folie Celia Britton Metaphor, Parody and Madness

In this essay I will present an example of the importance of formal features in the interpretation of the text on a diegetic level—what is actually going on in the narrative. Specifically, I will ask: how can the use or non-use of metaphor and parody determine our perception of the narrator as either sane or mad? ‘Mad’ discourse would appear to be resistant to these two features, in ways that I will investigate in relation to Marie Chauvet’s Folie. Folie is an 85-page novella which forms the final part of Chauvet’s trilogy Amour, Colère, Folie.1 The trilogy as a whole is a very bitter, angry depiction of life under the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, written in the 1960s when ‘Papa Doc’ was in power. Publication in Haiti was clearly impossible, so Chauvet sent the manuscript to Simone de Beauvoir in Paris, who arranged for it to be published by Gallimard in 1968. Chauvet’s family, however, judged that even this was too dangerous and refused to allow the publication to go ahead, buying back the entire stock from Gallimard. Although some copies of the trilogy were later made available from a bookshop in New York and one in Haiti—and it became an underground classic—it was eventually officially published only in 2005, many years after Chauvet’s death in exile in New York in 1973.2 1 Marie Chauvet, Amour, Colère, Folie (Paris/Léchelle: Maisonneuve et Larose/Emina Soleil, 2005). Subsequent citations of Folie will be to F. 2 For a full discussion of the publishing history of Amour, Colère, Folie, see Thomas C. Spear, ‘Marie Chauvet: The Fortress Still Stands’, Yale French Studies

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Folie is set in a small provincial town, and opens with an attack by the ‘Tontons Macoutes’—the state-sponsored thugs of the Duvalier dictatorship—who have been sent to the town from the capital because of reports of a conspiracy against Duvalier. The text is narrated by René, a penniless starving poet and alcoholic, who hears shooting and barricades himself inside the ground-floor room in which he lives; he is gradually joined here by his friends and fellow poets André, Jacques and Simon. They are all terrified by the presence of the Tontons Macoutes, because they have recently been arrested and imprisoned for declaiming in the streets the revolutionary poetry of Massillon Coicou, a nineteenthcentury nationalist Haitian poet: ‘Entendez-vous ce cri qui retentit: Aux armes! / Encor l’horreur! Encor du sang! Encor des larmes!, etc.’ (F, 323). René comments: ‘Il n’a pas l’air de beaucoup apprécier Massillon Coicou, le commandant Cravache. Il m’a mis la main au collet […] en me traitant de fou.—Confrérie de poètes fous, a-t-il dit’ (F, 323). The four friends remain in René’s room for a period of time which seems to be approximately two or three days, during which Jacques dies, probably of starvation but it is not made quite clear. Then René rushes outside, explodes one of the Molotov cocktails that he has previously made, is arrested by the police together with André and Simon, and all three are accused of conspiracy, tortured and shot by firing squad. As its title suggests, Folie explores the theme of madness. In this context, it has been the subject of two very different readings by major figures in francophone Caribbean studies: Michael Dash in his The Other America (1998) and Ronnie Scharfman in a 1996 article on the trilogy. 3 For Dash, Folie represents ‘the full-blown emergence of 128: ‘Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine’, ed. Kaiama L. Glover and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken (2015), 9–24. Spear claims that ‘The “hows and whys” of the publishing history of Chauvet’s works—itself romanesque—continue to mystify her critics and readers’ (p. 9). 3 J. Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998), pp. 109–17; Ronnie Scharfman, ‘Theorizing Terror: The Discourse of Violence in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour Colère Folie’, in Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, ed. Mary Jane Green, Karen Gould, Micheline Rice-Maximin, Keith L. Walker and Jack A. Yeager (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 229–45. For other critical works on the trilogy, see for example Maryse Condé, La parole des femmes: essai sur des romancières des Antilles de langue française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1979), pp. 98–110; Joan Dayan, ‘Reading Women in the Caribbean: Marie Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness’, in

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a postmodern poetics’,4 because he sees it as a parody in which the portrayal of René and his fellow poets serves to ridicule an earlier generation of modernist Caribbean writers. He shows how ‘The cruelly parodic nature of Chauvet’s fiction reads like a defiant send-up of the heroics of modernism as defined in texts such as Césaire’s Poetry and Knowledge and in the idealism of such [Haitian] writers of the generation of 1946 as Depestre and Alexis’; and ‘Folie holds up to ridicule the legacy of the Haitian avant-garde’. 5 René and his friends also ‘attempt in their own pathetic way to imitate Coicou’; Folie, in other words, parodies not only literature but also the Haitian avantgarde’s claim to political relevance, which it mocks as delusory: ‘Just as the avant-garde created no generalized prise de conscience, so René and his fellow poets are cut off from the rest of society. They are alienated from both the bourgeoisie they despise and the masses’.6 Finally, and in my opinion less convincingly, Dash claims that Folie parodies madness, describing the text as ‘the most powerful assault on literary madness in the Caribbean’, and sees its treatment of René as entirely unsympathetic: ‘René, the main protagonist, oscillates between a self-assertive exhibitionism and its opposite, paranoid voyeurism’; and: ‘Despite, or perhaps because of, René’s majestic sense of his self-importance, the prevalent mood of the story is that of tragic farce’.7 Parody does not feature at all in Ronnie Scharfman’s analysis of Folie. Also, where Dash takes it for granted that René is mad—introducing him simply as ‘one of four mad poets’8 —Scharfman sees his madness as both more ambiguous and more positive. It is more ambiguous because, she claims, the extreme terror of the Duvalier regime blurs the borderline between sanity and insanity: the ‘boundaries become more and more fluid […] In such a story, on which side can we place the appellation Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French, ed. Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 228–53; Kaiama L. Glover, ‘“Black” Radicalism in Haiti and the Disorderly Feminine: The Case of Marie Vieux Chauvet’, Small Axe 40 (March 2013), pp. 7–21; Dany Laferrière, ‘Marie Chauvet: Amour, Colère, Folie’, Littérature haïtienne 11 (July 1983), pp. 7–10; Maximilien Laroche, Trois Etudes sur ‘Folie’ de Marie Chauvet (Montréal: GRELCA, 1984). 4 Dash, The Other America, p. 110. 5 Dash, The Other America, pp. 114, 112. 6 Dash, The Other America, pp. 112, 113. 7 Dash, The Other America, pp. 110, 112, 116. 8 Dash, The Other America, p. 111.

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“mad”?’; and she comments, ‘here reality is worse than any hallucination, or rather, we find it impossible to distinguish between the two’.9 Indeed, a major characteristic of Chauvet’s writing, Scharfman claims, is a particular type of ambiguity which also functions as a form of textual violence, and which she defines as the oxymoron: ‘The oxymoron both contains and represses ambivalence; it produces ambiguity. This text does violence to us by subverting our habitual conceptions of notions such as love, anger, madness, but also of terms such as black and white, power and submission’.10 The oxymoron is not the kind of ambiguity that invites the reader to decide between two different interpretations; rather, both are simultaneously true; and it is therefore not a question of wondering whether René is mad or not. Madness is indubitably present, but it shades imperceptibly into sanity. Moreover, his and his friends’ madness gives them access to insights that are not accessible to other people: ‘they make each other both crazier and more lucid, so that the boundaries between these two states become more and more fluid’. In other words, Scharfman also presents them—in stark opposition to Dash’s reading—as embodying the Romantic conception of the madman as seer and visionary: ‘hallucinating what they call the devils, and thereby articulating the profound truth of the situation surrounding them without, however, being able to name the enemy directly’.11 To sum up: for Scharfman, madness is the result of the terror imposed by the Duvalierist regime and is also both undecidably ambiguous and positive in so far as it endows René and his friends with a lucidity denied to other characters; for Dash, it is simply pathetic and is aggressively parodied in the text. But rather than attempt to adjudicate between these two interpretations, I intend to use them as a framework within which to explore the representation of madness in the text in its relation to two of its prominent formal features: parody and metaphor. Firstly, however, I want to ask a question that both Dash and Scharfman, for different reasons, would consider superfluous. Is René 9 Scharfman, ‘Theorizing Terror’, pp.  232, 244. This interpretation is supported, although Scharfman does not mention this, by Chauvet’s choice, as epigraph to Folie, of the famous passage from Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau on the borderline between the ‘sage’ and the fou’: ‘Il n’y a pas de meilleur rôle auprès des grands que celui de fou […] celui qui serait sage n’aurait point de fou; celui donc qui a un fou n’est pas sage; s’il n’est pas sage il est fou; et peut-être, fût-il le roi, le fou de son fou’ (F, 297). 10 Scharfman, ‘Theorizing Terror’, p. 232. 11 Scharfman, ‘Theorizing Terror’, p. 232; emphasis added.

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actually mad? He does not think so, and at the outset we are inclined to believe him: the other characters who call him mad—such as the abovementioned Commandant Cravache, or the next-door neighbour’s maid, who shouts at him, ‘Fou, tu es fou, eh!’ (F, 302)—are unsympathetic and their views are untrustworthy. However, the experience of reading the text reproduces in us not only the terror but also the confusion of the situation: it is impossible to ascertain how much of what René ‘sees’ is actually happening. So as the narrative progresses, his apparent hallucinations—what he sees as the corpse of a man shot dead by the Tontons Macoutes turns out (probably) to be a dead dog, for instance—and the apparent craziness of the plan he concocts to attack the Tonton Macoutes and liberate the town (‘Dieu m’a choisi pour délivrer la ville’, F, 315, 324) perhaps lead us to change our minds with regard to his sanity. Also relevant is the cruel irony of the ending: in order to be executed, René must be judged sane, and to this end a local doctor who has been brought ‘tout tremblant’ (F, 380) to the scene of the arrest is forced against his better judgement (by threatening to sue him for malpractice on the completely unrelated issue of three girls who have died as a result of abortions) to declare him sane (F, 381). This irony would lose its force if René really were sane, and therefore the ending does seem to imply that he is mad. However, the indications of his madness are far less apparent at the beginning of the text, and accumulate dramatically as it proceeds. Therefore my own reading of Folie is that René gradually goes mad in the course of the narrative as the stress of the situation precipitates a psychotic breakdown.12 Moreover, the text’s representation of this psychological process is inseparable from its formal operations; as I shall now attempt to demonstrate, it both determines and is determined by the textual use of parody and metaphor. Dash claims that Folie is a consistently parodic text which mocks, among other things, René’s claim to be a poet. It is certainly true that the style of his narrative, especially at first, is exaggeratedly florid, extravagant and ‘poetic’; it is saturated with figurative language, and some of these metaphors are quite clearly poetic clichés: ‘La vie est un lourd chariot qui creuse lentement, implacablement son chemin droit devant lui’ (F, 305); ‘Alentour, la nature immuable semblait narguer notre angoisse’ (F, 308). René’s pretentious identification with great poets of the past is also subject to parody: he frequently claims kinship with other poets and 12 Dash in fact also refers to ‘René’s descent into madness’ (The Other America, p. 113; emphasis added).

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artists—‘Orgueilleux et insatisfait comme tous les artistes’ (F, 304)—and justifies his constant drinking by citing Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud (F, 324). Indeed, he introduces himself on the first page of the text as a poet and revolutionary hero, in an inflated style that does seem definitely parodic: ‘Seul, drapé d’une majesté ancestrale, ils me verront apparaître, moi, le poète inoffensif et rêveur, et offrir un front serein à leurs balles’ (F, 299). However, such self-aggrandisement often gives way to an awareness of his failures as a poet and his self-delusion: this sentence is immediately followed by the admission, ‘Mensonges. Le poème traverse après de nombreux méandres le champ de ma pensée et s’y fixe comme pour me tromper sur mon propre compte’ (F, 299). A more complex example, in which René describes how he started to write poetry, is: ‘j’écrirai, m’écriais-je, des poèmes qui remueront le monde’. Et par la suite, je découvris qu’il fallait pour une telle tâche donner son sang goutte à goutte. Je m’ouvris les veines et je trempai en vain ma plume dans mon sang. Poète maudit! Poète d’emprunt! Poète nègre moulé par la France! Où est ta langue? (F, 332)

Here the cliché of writing in one’s own blood is, surely, parodic, as is the description of himself as a ‘poète maudit’; but this immediately shifts into a criticism of his failure to be an authentic ‘black’ poet (in line with the prescriptions of the Negritude movement), since he can only ‘borrow’ French styles and has been ‘moulded’ by France, with no authentic language of his own. This intermittent self-criticism could be seen as negating the parodic effect. Alternatively, however, it sometimes produces an effect of bathos which, it might be argued, in combination with the arrogance and the feebleness that Dash describes, merely sharpens the parody—bathos is indeed one of the principal techniques of parody. For example, the grandiosely metaphorical expression of his quest to succeed as a poet—‘Je grimperai seul. Machette en mains sur la colline du rêve. Je taillerai mon chemin dans la broussaille des lianes enchevêtrées. Seul sur le chantier que mes mains auront tracé les premières, je lèverai la tête dans l’avant-jour, face au ciel, machette au poing, trempé de sueur et de sang’ (F, 312)—is deflated a few lines further on by the observation, ‘La chambre aussi pue. Le pot de chambre est plein jusqu’au bord’ (F, 312). (The chamber pot is in fact used several times in the course of the text to similarly bathetic effect.) However, these metaphorical characterizations of the poet that could be considered to be examples of parody in fact tend to disappear as the

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narrative progresses. A later description of Jacques writing poetry is very different: ‘Pris au piège des rimes. Il est tombé dans le piège et ne peut plus en sortir. Il ne peut pas courir pour échapper aux rimes. Le mécanisme du piège s’est déclenché et lui a coupé les jambes jusqu’aux cuisses’ (F, 329). Here the banal metaphor of ‘pris au piège’ is transformed into something far more concrete—the trap has actually cut off Jacques’s legs—and the resulting violence and sheer oddity have the effect, I would suggest, of rendering it immune from parody. Indeed, as the discourse of narration gradually becomes—as I shall show—‘madder’, parody seems to become impossible, in so far as it relies on the existence of a clearly recognizable model of discourse that is being parodied: the pretentiously florid style of a would-be poet, for instance. In contrast, the image of rhymes cutting someone’s legs off is, surely, too unusual and weird to belong to any such model. In other words, mad discourse would seem to be largely resistant to parody; not only in that there is, one might feel, something unethical or at least distasteful in parodying genuine madness, but also because the discourse of madness is not sufficiently stylistically codified to serve as a model for parody.13 The fact that so many of the instances of parody in the text involve metaphor indicates how closely connected these two formal features are. But the issue of the status of metaphor in the text and its relationship to madness also extends far beyond the question of parody. It can be related to Scharfman’s concept of the undecidability of madness: more precisely, the ambiguous borderline that she posits between madness and sanity is, I would argue, replicated in an equally ambiguous borderline between figurative and literal uses of language. Thus, for example, Folie’s opening sentence is, ‘C’était comme si, brusquement, la terre violentée, saccagée par un effroyable cataclysme s’était ouverte pour nous engloutir’ (F, 299); and its final sentence is, ‘Et c’est alors que le ciel s’ouvrant doucement, j’en vis descendre des anges aux ailes étincelantes qui nous prirent dans leurs bras et nous enlevèrent en chantant’ (F, 382). Dash interprets both of these as parodies of a typically pretentious allusion to the Book of Revelation,14 13 One would have to distinguish here between parody and satire; madness can be satirized (one can imagine a novel in which a character who thinks he is Napoleon, or something similar, is mocked) because, unlike in the case of parody, this does not have to engage with the actual quality of the character’s speech. 14 Dash writes: ‘The entire story seems, at times, scripted in the language of the book of Revelation, from the first lines that suggest the claustrophobic entombment

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and points to other uses of biblical imagery in the text, commenting: ‘These are the fantasies of impotence as rational political hope fails and marginalization and vulnerability provoke suprarational visions. Conventionally, in Caribbean literature, it is the peasantry who are shown to be afflicted by magicoreligious beliefs. In “Folie”, Chauvet extended this dubious honor to the Haitian artist and intellectual’.15 But if one considers the two sentences in more detail, an important formal contrast becomes apparent. While the final heavens’ ‘opening’ echoes more benevolently the initial earth’s ‘opening’, the first sentence is a simile: ‘C’était comme si, brusquement’. In other words, it is unambiguously figurative, and also a self-conscious attempt at a grandiose poetic style. But in the final image there is no ‘comme si’; René simply states that he ‘sees’ angels coming down to take them up to heaven, thus raising the possibility that the sentence is not a metaphor at all but a description of a real hallucination; and this would indicate that by the end of the text René is indeed mad. The contrast between the opening and closing sentences of Folie thus implies that a characteristic of mad discourse, at least in this text and perhaps more generally, is that passages that would otherwise be unproblematically interpreted as metaphorical may turn out to be literal descriptions of hallucinations. This would imply, therefore, that mad discourse is resistant not only to parody, as I have shown above, but also to figurative language. A more extended passage illustrates, through its ambiguities, these interconnections between madness, metaphor and parody. Here, André is trying to block up the holes made by rats in the walls of René’s room, to keep out the rats and also the smell of the corpses outside (although it is not quite clear whether the smell is actually from corpses or from the chamber pot in the room). He tries to enlist René’s help, but their conversation is interrupted by a passage of René’s interior monologue: ‘Comment peuvent-ils tuer quand le soleil se couche? Comment peuvent-ils tuer quand le soleil se lève? Tout est si beau à toutes les heures du jour et de la nuit! Pour l’instant, la mer étreint le ciel là où le soleil a plongé, paré de safran et de pourpre. Tout un pan du ciel se trouve incendié. Des flammes lèchent les nuages et les embrasent’ (F, 321) This at first seems to be a clear example of René indulging in escapist ‘poetic’ contemplation, rather than attending to the reality of the situation—and of the grotesque […] to the last images of celestial ascent’ (The Other America, p. 115). 15 Dash, The Other America, p. 115.

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so, an equally clear example of parody. But his interior monologue then continues with what at first appears to be a metaphor: Le soleil est un centaure à la crinière flamboyante. J’enfourche le soleil. Je me cramponne à deux vagues monstrueuses qui ont gardé par quel miracle une couleur immaculée. Je saisis au passage deux nuages minces comme des rubans et si rouges qu’ils semblent teints de sang. Je suis debout sur le soleil, au milieu des vagues blanches, les muscles bandés, la tête auréolée d’étoiles naissantes, comme un dieu sur un char ruisselant de lumières … —Bouche le trou, me dit André. (F, 321)

Michael Dash would no doubt interpret this as Chauvet’s parody of René’s attempts to play the role of the Romantic poet—and the bathetic ending provided by André’s intervention certainly suggests parody. But what if it is a hallucination? In other words, if René really thinks he is standing on the sun? Then the language is not self-consciously poetic (apart from the banal simile of ‘comme un dieu’), the ‘centaure’ is not a metaphor, and nor is the image of riding the sun: it is a literal description. As such, as I have already suggested, it becomes quite problematic to define it as the object of parody. Here, however, Chauvet’s text invites us to consider not only the incompatibility between madness and parody but also a further incompatibility between madness and metaphor. This is all the more important for our reading of the text as a whole in that much—indeed, most—of the evidence for René’s madness relies on textual interpretation of his language as either metaphorical (and therefore sane) or literal (and therefore mad); the formal features of the text play a crucial role in determining our understanding of it on a diegetic level. However, in many cases we find ourselves unable to decide between the two possibilities of metaphorical/sane versus literal/ mad. There are numerous passages that can be read either as poetic metaphor or as literal descriptions of hallucinations, and this ambiguity is an important component of the reader’s more general confusion as to what is actually happening in the scene. For instance, in this slightly later passage, the envisaged ‘explosion’ could be a metaphor for the violence wreaked by the Tontons Macoutes, but it is also possible that René thinks that the whole area is really about to be destroyed by a cataclysmic explosion: ‘Une terrible explosion va tout faire disparaître. Elle va retentir brusquement, soulevant les maisons, les transformant en torches, réduisant les êtres humains en poussière. Ça va venir. Ça va venir. C’est terrible, l’attente!’ (F, 333). There are many other examples

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of these images that hover undecidably between metaphorical and literal interpretations—as when René says, ‘Je vois danser les maisons de la ville. Elles forment une ronde autour de ma mansarde’ (F, 332), for example. They serve to illustrate Scharfman’s concept of the oxymoron in Chauvet’s writing as producer of ambiguity; and they are also the equivalent on the formal level of the other ambiguous boundary that she identifies between madness and sanity.16 As the text progresses, however (and therefore, in my reading, as René descends into madness), there are more cases of what I would argue are clear hallucinations. For instance, René refers throughout to the Tontons Macoutes as ‘diables’: this is a common and banal metaphor, and it is only gradually that the reader realizes that he actually believes that they are devils. For example, his fatal decision to leave the precarious safety of his room and go outside with his Molotov cocktails is precipitated by ‘seeing’ the Tontons Macoutes capturing Cécile, his next-door neighbour with whom he is hopelessly in love. This is how he describes what he ‘sees’: Et je vis sortir de terre une multitude de diables. Ils étaient nus cette fois et tout noirs avec des cornes et une queue rouge. Ils se mouvaient en cadence comme s’ils rythmaient une danse vodou étrange et stylisée. Je vis l’un d’eux grimper par une poutre avec une agilité de singe jusqu’au balcon de Cécile. Il enfonça la porte du salon et revint la portant sous le bras comme un paquet […] Il lui arracha ses vêtements et la mit nue. Je sautai sur mes armes. J’enfonçai cinq bouteilles dans mes poches, fis craquer une allumette et enflammai la mèche du sixième. (F, 355)

I would argue that the description here of the ‘diables’ is clearly a psychotic hallucination. This interpretation is complicated, perhaps, by the widespread Caribbean belief in the supernatural, from which it would follow that believing in devils is not necessarily, in the cultural context, evidence of insanity. René, for example, prays to the ‘loas’ (the Haitian gods) and gives them food, which he seems to think that they actually eat (F, 301–02); and he argues about the existence of devils with Simon, who is French and therefore does not believe in them (F, 352). Nevertheless, it is clear that René himself subscribes only half-heartedly to these beliefs, and sees himself as torn between the Haitian popular culture of his mother and his own very ‘French’ education: ‘J’ai méprisé 16 For the sake of clarity, I should say that I am not of course claiming that all figurative language use is evidence of sanity, but rather that in certain cases the interpretation of a passage of the text as literal leads to the conclusion that the narrator is mad.

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les loas et fui l’idée de Dieu […] Je prie et invoque les loas avec la conviction que je joue la comédie’ (F, 301, 327). In any case, there is a difference between believing in devils in general and seeing the human figures of the Tontons Macoutes as devils. Moreover the very precise details of the description here (‘nus cette fois’) are, surely, characteristic of a hallucination. It is also relevant that when Cécile reappears shortly afterwards in handcuffs, she is not naked: she asks the doctor to ‘fouillez dans ma poche, vous y trouverez la clef de ma maison’ (F, 368). Other images also seem to be unambiguous hallucinations—in other words, literal rather than metaphorical—just because of their precision and their opacity. A metaphor, after all, has to be ‘for’ something: it is a figurative expression of something real. But when we read, for example, that ‘En tout cas, quelque chose de mystérieux passe dans la pièce: deux étoiles me sont sorties des yeux et elles se sont mises à danser et puis elles ont filé par le trou de la serrure. La deuxième est restée accrochée. Elle brillait comme un regard’ (F, 336), it is difficult to discern any literal correlate that such a ‘metaphor’ could be figuratively expressing. It is notable also that this type of image often occurs at moments of extreme terror, as when René goes out into the street with the Molotov cocktails: Les montagnes s’épaulèrent, masses compactes vert-bleu cernant la ville, marchant sur elle, lentement, inexorablement. Tout commença à chavirer: les arbres, les maisons, les rues. Tout se mélangea, s’aggloméra, s’agglutina pour ne former qu’un bouillonnement de laves écarlates où se débattaient en hurlant les habitants de la ville. Je reconnus ma mère […] et je me mis à hurler en me roulant par terre. (F, 355)

My interpretation of this is that he literally hallucinates the mountains moving and the earthquake, and that he really believes that he sees, rather than just imagining, his long-dead mother. Similarly, in another moment of terror, his description of the policeman who is torturing him, in a pointless attempt to force him to name other non-existent conspirators, moves in three sentences from the prosaic—‘Il était tout petit avec une tête un peu longue et des yeux bridés surmontés de gros sourcils en pointes’—to a more frightening but clichéd description—‘Il sourit et ses lèvres découvrirent des dents pointues d’une blanche éclatante’—to what is surely a clear hallucination: ‘Le visage que l’homme tenait penché sur moi se brouilla tout à coup, fondit à vue d’œil et se transforma en une plaque métallique, aveuglante’ (F, 378). I have tried to show how the text of Folie represents René’s descent into madness, which is accompanied by a shift from grandiose and

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self-consciously ‘poetic’ metaphors to literal hallucinations; and I have argued that if these images are hallucinations then that excludes their interpretation as parody, because parody requires a clearly recognizable model, and I would suggest that the unpredictability and strangeness of the ‘mad’ images cannot provide this. Unlike Dash, therefore, I do not think that Chauvet is simply making fun of René’s madness: while there are certainly many instances of parody in the text, they do not in my view occur in relation to madness. However, it is also difficult to find any real evidence that would support Scharfman’s claim that René’s madness endows him with a lucidity denied to the merely sane; in other words, the Romantic view of madness would seem to be as untenable as Dash’s rather brutal treatment of it. Chauvet’s representation of René is both more sympathetic—and empathetic—than Dash’s ‘cruel parody’, and less idealized than Scharfman’s view that he is ‘articulating the profound truth of the situation’. Finally, this essay has also analysed the way in which the representation of madness in Folie is crucially dependent on the formal features of the text: metaphor, parody and madness are inseparably interconnected. Scharfman’s argument, quoted earlier, that its narrative presents us with a situation in which ‘reality is worse than any hallucination, or, rather, we find it impossible to distinguish between the two’ is very compelling;17 and one of its consequences is that there is little on the diegetic level, either in terms of narrative events or the descriptions of characters, that can help us to determine whether René is mad or not. The situation is objectively so violent and confused that almost anything is possible; and even his decision to attack the Tontons Macoutes with his Molotov cocktails could be seen as an act of heroic self-sacrifice and despair rather than of insanity. Ultimately, it is the quality of the language of his narration, and the way in which this changes as the narrative proceeds, that leads us to the conclusion that we are witnessing René’s descent into madness. Parody recedes as his language gradually acquires a kind of mad originality, and what might in other contexts be interpreted as figurative language gives way to literal descriptions of hallucinations. The evidence of Folie thus suggests that the representation of mad speech is resistant to both metaphor and parody; and in so doing, this extraordinary text also demonstrates the power of such purely formal features to determine our interpretation of the ­psychological state of its narrator. 17 Scharfman, ‘Theorizing Terror’, p. 244.

chapter thirteen

Aesthetic Form and Social ‘Form’ in À la recherche du temps perdu Proust on Taste Alison Finch Aesthetic Form and Social ‘Form’

The work of Micky Sheringham informs this essay in direct and indirect ways. His scholarship on the ‘everyday’ in particular makes a wide-ranging contribution to debates about ‘taste’.1 In this chapter, I focus on Proust’s play with the word goût, a playing that contributes to the shape, the ‘form’, of the novel, while at the same time raising questions about social ‘form’. (The double meaning of forme is of course the same in French; Peter France has brought out the overlap between ‘good form’—politeness—and ‘good taste’ in his book Politeness and Its Discontents. 2) As ethnographers and cultural critics show, the physical, political, sexual and aesthetic connotations of taste all feed off each other, so to speak; and Proust exploits this malleability, interweaving the corporeal, the historical and the imaginary. Many Proustians have highlighted the roles of ‘good taste’ and ‘bad taste’ in À la recherche de temps perdu, among them Antoine Compagnon and Edward Hughes. 3 And the spectres of good taste, 1 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 2 Peter France, Politeness and Its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 3 Antoine Compagnon, La Troisième République des lettres, de Flaubert à Proust (Paris: Seuil, 1983); Antoine Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles (Paris:

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deliberate breaches of it, the inverse functions of distaste and disgust, hover in numerous studies of Proust, for example those by Michael Lucey and Christopher Prendergast.4 This essay draws on their and others’ discussion, bringing together and extending some of their suggestions. Étienne Brunet’s statistical research tells us that the word goût/s, singular and plural, occurs more frequently in À la recherche than in most contemporaneous authors’ works, and that on average it appears every seven pages throughout the novel. 5 Though care is needed in the interpretation of word frequencies, this is already suggestive. Here is one type of form: a recurring lexicon—in a novel some sort of parallel, albeit imperfect, to recurring phonemes in a poem. The reappearances of the word goût give it a submerged structural function. Deployed in various guises and with varying degrees of ambiguity, it creates a network—a series of echoes that can be disjunctive or distorted, but the clashes are part of the impact and the entertainment. Another kind of form is created by the positioning of climaxes in the narrative. Certain luscious puns in À la recherche are inspired by the imagery of ‘taste’, and in their exceptional density give a sense of peaks or little explosions. Finally, there is the major overarching structure: what, for instance, is going on halfway through a novel? Is that moment summative, does it reorient the rest of the narrative? In Proust, does ‘taste’ figure at such moments? Let us now look at these three kinds of form—first of all the network of meanings, and starting with the bodily. While goût in Proust signifies important physical tastes—the madeleine, Françoise’s cooking, other hedonistic delights—these are all ostentatiously filtered through the narrator’s imaginaire: ‘je remarquai alors sur les fleurs de petites places plus blondes, sous lesquelles je me figurai que devait être cachée cette odeur comme sous les parties gratinées le goût d’une frangipane’.6 Famously, Seuil, 1989); Edward Hughes, ‘Perspectives sur la culture populaire dans l’œuvre de Proust’, Cahiers de littérature française IX–X: ‘Morales de Proust’, ed. Mariolina Bertini and Antoine Compagnon (2010), pp. 69–82. 4 Michael Lucey, Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide and Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Christopher Prendergast, Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 5 Étienne Brunet, Le Vocabulaire de Proust, 3 vols (Geneva: Slatkine, 1983), I.154 (in chapter 5, ‘Le contenu thématique: Proust comparé à son temps’, I.139–71); and see the entries for goût/s. 6 Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard,

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the novel itself will in due course be compared to Françoise’s cooking. And through her name, as well as through the diplomat Norpois’s appreciation of her culinary skills, Proust nods knowingly towards the gastronomy for which France has been internationally renowned since the seventeenth century. The links between oral taste and other kinds belong to the imaginaire of other characters besides the narrator, indeed to the world stage: Norpois tells the narrator’s mother: ‘Vous avez un chef de tout premier ordre […] Et ce n’est pas peu de chose. Moi qui ai eu à l’étranger à tenir un certain train de maison, je sais combien il est souvent difficile de trouver un parfait maître queux’ (ARTP, I.449–50). With goût as aesthetic taste, we enter the shifting social battleground of À la recherche. Within France, doubtless more than in other European nations, ‘taste’ has been politicized for at least threeand-a-half centuries, as argued by numerous scholars, from Michael Moriarty in his pioneering Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France to Robert and Isabelle Tombs in That Sweet Enemy.7 They have analysed ‘taste’ as the marker of both the French nobility and the nation itself, demonstrating the tensions surrounding it. One example of such tensions: the Racine who is still, in some quarters, deemed the epitome of classical restraint gives in Phèdre a perfect homophone of the word dégoûtant. Dégoûtant had entered the language in its modern strong meaning of ‘disgusting’ in 1642, a few decades before Phèdre (1677). Racine’s homophone occurs in Théramène’s renowned récit about Hippolyte’s bloody death: ‘les ronces dégouttantes / Portent de ses cheveux les dépouilles sanglantes’.8 The wordplay between ‘dripping’ and ‘disgusting’ will have spoken to Racine’s audience. (And it would be remarkable if Proust had not noticed the pun in this play that he knew almost by heart.) Dégoût in French more easily conveys the (as it were) opposite of goût than do the non-corresponding pairs taste/ disgust in English or Geschmack/Ekel in German.9 Both linguistically and politically, to conjure up dégoût implies a blow against upper-class 1987–89), I.112. Subsequent references to À la recherche du temps perdu, abbreviated to ARTP, will appear in the text. 7 Michael Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Robert Tombs and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (London: Heinemann, 2006). 8 Jean Racine, Phèdre, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), I.800 (Act V scene vi). 9 While ‘distaste’ exists in English, it is weaker than dégoût.

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tribalism more readily than it would in some other cultures. I shall return to dégoût. Meanwhile, at many moments in À la recherche Proust reminds us of the ‘taste wars’ of France, particularly those of the nineteenth century. In his salons, he stages talk of Hugo’s recommendations to create beauty from the ugly—‘il [Hugo] ne sait pas distinguer entre le laid et le beau […] il y a des choses ridicules, inintelligibles, des fautes de goût’ (ARTP, II.781–82)—while Zola is launched by Mme de Guermantes as a taste weapon: ‘Mais Zola n’est pas un réaliste, Madame! c’est un poète!’ (ARTP, II.789). Indeed, both Mme de Guermantes and Charlus often impertinently display ‘good taste’ to reinforce their own prestige. For them, the seventeenth-century ethos is alive and well: taste is the hallmark of the elite stratum. But over and over Proust undermines the basis of that ethos. The Princesse de Parme has ‘le goût de ce qu’elle croyait les Arts’ (ARTP, II.354). Norpois, a marquis, claims that the flower paintings executed by his lover Mme de Villeparisis are far superior to those of Fantin-Latour, thus proving the nullity of not only his but his class’s judgement: ‘Même en supposant que la partialité de vieil amant, l’habitude de flatter, les opinions admises dans une coterie, dictassent ces paroles à l’ancien ambassadeur, celles-ci prouvaient pourtant sur quel néant de goût véritable repose le jugement artistique des gens du monde’ (ARTP, II.571). And Charlus, says the narrator, is only a Guermantes, but for all that his attempts at painting are not without taste! ‘M. de Charlus n’était, en somme, qu’un Guermantes. Mais [… c’était] un peintre amateur qui n’était pas sans goût’ (ARTP, III.344). The insistence of this and similar remarks, the fact that Proust’s thumb is pressing down one side of the scales, speak for themselves. If not the aristocracy, who does have taste? Effecting his own social upheaval, Proust endows the working class with it. Françoise shows it not only in cookery but in clothes: ‘ce goût qu’elle avait, ce même goût, en effet, qu’elle montrait dans la cuisine’ (ARTP, IV.47). Prostitutes like Rachel can have taste: ‘pour bien des jeunes gens du monde, lesquels sans cela resteraient incultes d’esprit, rudes dans leurs amitiés, sans douceur et sans goût, c’est bien souvent leur maîtresse qui est leur vrai maître’ (ARTP, II.139). And Jupien—professionally, according to the narrator, the ‘lowest of the low’—is singled out in the last volume of the novel for his ‘goût naturel’. The narrator, in an again emphatic encomium, even asserts that he knows no other person as gifted in this respect: D’autre part, je connaissais peu d’hommes, je peux même dire que je ne connaissais pas d’homme qui sous le rapport de l’intelligence et de

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la sensibilité fût aussi doué que Jupien; car cet ‘acquis’ délicieux qui faisait la trame spirituelle de ses propos ne lui venait d’aucune de ces instructions de collège, d’aucune de ces cultures d’université qui auraient pu faire de lui un homme si remarquable, quand tant de jeunes gens du monde ne tirent d’elles aucun profit. C’était son simple sens inné, son goût naturel, qui de rares lectures faites au hasard, sans guide, à des moments perdus, lui avaient fait composer ce parler si juste où toutes les symétries du langage se laissaient découvrir et montraient leur beauté. Or le métier qu’il faisait pouvait à bon droit passer, certes pour un des plus lucratifs, mais pour le dernier de tous. (ARTP, IV.417–18)

This paean is the most provocative reversal in the novel of the old ‘taste’ hierarchy.10 But the characters who most consistently appropriate the mantle of taste in Proust are middle-class. The picture is mixed, even at times confusing.11 The new arbiters of Third-Republic taste may be Jewish connoisseurs or affluent bourgeois women, painters or aspiring writers. And when Mme Verdurin progresses socially by taking over the promulgation of the arts from the aristocracy, for example by supporting foreign composers and dancers, the narrator delivers another snub to le beau monde: even society people who publicly declare their taste welcome this renewal: ‘Même ceux des gens du monde qui faisaient profession d’avoir du goût […] étaient enchantés de voir de près ces grands rénovateurs du goût’ (ARTP, III.742). Swann, possessed of better taste than his aristocratic friends, praises the gauche but middle-class Bloch: ‘En tous cas il [Bloch] a du goût’ (ARTP, I.96). Here too, however, there is instability, given that Swann is increasingly cast as ‘just’ a dilettante. And his ambivalent reactions to the Sorbonne academic Brichot are also revealing, if less often discussed by critics. Brichot, that scholar with the corny sense of humour, is the closest we come, in the novel, to a representative intellectual (again, middle-class). He does not conform to the stereotype of the intellectual that the right wing tried to promote round the turn of the century, being neither Jewish nor a Zola-esque champion of the underdog. But at a few points the novel juxtaposes him with, and against, the taste of the elite, including that of 10 Hughes also cites it in ‘Perspectives sur la culture populaire’, p. 78. 11 Patrick McGuinness, writing about verse of the period, describes the relationship between poetry and the politics of the time with the oxymoron ‘straightforwardly chaotic’ in his Poetry and Radical Politics in fin-de-siècle France: From Anarchism to Action française (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 54.

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Swann. The etymologies that the narrator enthusiastically encourages Brichot to explain in Sodome et Gomorrhe are themselves, it has been argued, a breach of good taste—both socially, within the fictional situation, and formally; they are a structural excrescence.12 However, long before this, in Un amour de Swann, we have been told that Swann is not in a position to appreciate Brichot’s intelligence fully, so thoroughly is he, Swann, inculcated with the tastes of high society.13 Then, in Sodome et Gomorrhe, the narrator wonders if Brichot may be superior to people with the Guermantes cast of mind and who would have had the ‘good taste’ to avoid his pedantically facetious jokes: while this is hardly a ringing endorsement, it is a vindication of sorts. Brichot may be superior. Finally, Brichot’s deviation from the taste of high society is a sticking point for Charlus too, but one that eventually diminishes in importance. Charlus, ‘impregnated’ with Swann’s taste and at first irritated by Brichot, learns to appreciate his fund of knowledge, his tolerance; remarkably, Brichot becomes something of a confidant. All in all, this academic and his learnedness occupy a strange social position: if he is not to upper-class taste, if he offends ‘good form’, that does not matter—his value is nevertheless suggested; rather unexpectedly, he contributes to the changing fortunes of goût by sidelining or trumping it. 12 See Compagnon’s discussion in Proust entre deux siècles, chapter 8. 13 This and the other relevant remarks cited in this paragraph are as follows: ‘Un genre d’esprit comme celui de Brichot aurait été tenu pour stupidité pure dans la coterie où Swann avait passé sa jeunesse, bien qu’il soit compatible avec une intelligence réelle. Et celle du professeur, vigoureuse et bien nourrie, aurait probablement pu être enviée par bien des gens du monde que Swann trouvait spirituels. Mais ceux-ci avaient fini par lui inculquer si bien leurs goûts et leurs répugnances […] que Swann ne put trouver les plaisanteries de Brichot que pédantesques, vulgaires et grasses à écœurer’ (I.249); [Mme Verdurin:] ‘N’est-ce pas, il a été délicieux, notre Brichot? [Swann:] […] j’ai été ravi. Il est peut-être un peu péremptoire et un peu jovial pour mon goût’ (I.260); ‘alors que les Guermantes eussent déclaré Brichot l’homme le plus bête qu’ils eussent jamais rencontré, je restais incertain s’il n’était pas au fond supérieur sinon à Swann même, au moins aux gens ayant l’esprit des Guermantes et qui eussent eu le bon goût d’éviter et la pudeur de rougir de ses pédantesques facéties’ (III.361); ‘M. de Charlus, encore trop imprégné du goût de Swann pour ne pas être irrité par Brichot’ (III.439); [Charlus on Brichot:] ‘“C’est un homme d’une grande valeur, qui sait énormément […] Il a gardé une largeur de vues, une tolérance, rares chez ses pareils […]” [Brichot] cueillait à propos dans les philosophes grecs, les poètes latins, les conteurs orientaux, des textes qui décoraient le goût du baron d’un florilège étrange et charmant’ (ARTP, III.793–94).

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Also significant is the taste of Albertine. Jacques Dubois has written persuasively about her middle-classness in Pour Albertine.14 La Prisonnière explores as never before Albertine’s taste; this and her intelligence have evolved—to be sure, under the tutelage of the narrator, or so she herself believes: le goût naturellement difficile de la jeune fille (encore affiné par les leçons d’élégance que lui avait été la conversation d’Elstir) […] Elle avait même commencé de jolies collections qu’elle installait avec un goût charmant […] Et alors elle me répondit par ces paroles qui me montrèrent en effet combien d’intelligence et de goût latent s’étaient brusquement développés en elle depuis Balbec, par ces paroles du genre de celles qu’elle prétendait dues uniquement à mon influence [...] (ARTP, III.541, 870–71, 635–36)

The patriarchal element here is uncomfortable, but at the same time the narrator leaves open the possibility that it is not only he who has developed Albertine’s taste (‘elle prétendait’). The political point is that ‘taste’ is not a static upper-class gene: it can exist elsewhere and grow. And the palm goes to that other middle-class character, the narrator, whose taste in the arts dominates the novel—not only through implicit and explicit comment but also by way of the chosen works of painting, literature and music that he cites. (Those can include popular music, as Hughes shows.15) Proust thus moves fluidly between experiences of goût and dramatizes taste in scenarios that are changeable, relative. Relativism, blurred dividing lines, also characterize erotic taste. As the novel goes on, the word goût migrates and widens its import; ever more frequently (as can be traced with Brunet), it denotes sexual orientation. Le goût singular already existed, long before Proust, in the sense of ‘amorous inclination’ (‘avoir du goût pour quelqu’un’), and he sometimes uses it conventionally in this way. But he also often uses it in the plural—les goûts, gay or bisexual tastes—and he may have been the author who invented or launched the plural in an erotic sense: he is the first writer cited in Le Grand Robert for this usage. Here are a few examples among many: M. de Charlus, indigné si on le citait pour ses goûts, mais toujours amusé de faire connaître ceux des autres […] tel homme en vue qui incarne ces goûts-là pour la masse […] Certes, ces souvenirs me causaient une 14 Jacques Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social (Paris: Seuil, 1997). 15 Hughes, ‘Perspectives sur la culture populaire’.

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grande douleur. Ils étaient comme un aveu total des goûts d’Albertine […] Pourquoi ne m’avait-elle pas dit: ‘J’ai ces goûts’? […] chez des femmes comme la fille d’Odette ou les jeunes filles de la petite bande il y a une telle diversité, un tel cumul de goûts alternants si même ils ne sont pas simultanés, qu’elles passent aisément d’une liaison avec une femme à un grand amour pour un homme, si bien que définir le goût réel et dominant reste difficile. (ARTP, III.64, 801, 656, IV.88, 286)

Which tastes, what sexuality? we may find ourselves asking. The objects of the tastes do not have to be specified, which gives the word a curious openness. Indeed, by way of the plural Proust makes explicit comments on erotic variability, as in the last extract cited. Thus goût becomes cumulatively associated with a manifold sexuality. In whatever sense, taste is multifarious; and the narrator never really lets us decide what it is, what ‘they’ are. Even during the aesthetic discussion of Le Temps retrouvé, he is contradictory, referring to ‘le véritable goût’ while soon problematizing that notion: Car la faculté de lancer des idées, des systèmes, et surtout de se les assimiler, a toujours été beaucoup plus fréquente, même chez ceux qui produisent, que le véritable goût […] Sans doute, quand on est amoureux d’une œuvre, on voudrait faire quelque chose de tout pareil, mais il faut sacrifier son amour du moment, ne pas penser à son goût, mais à une vérité qui ne vous demande pas vos préférences et vous défend d’y songer. (ARTP, IV.471, 621)

These then are the subterranean or not so subterranean networks created by goût in À la recherche. Let us now pick out a few of the ludic high points mentioned earlier, those created by a concentrated word playing, or concept playing, with goût. Mme de Guermantes’s guests appreciate her gatherings as they might appreciate gourmet food: ‘Sans doute, s’ils gardaient là leurs habitudes, était-ce par éducation affinée de gourmet mondain, par claire connaissance de la parfaite et première qualité du mets social, au goût familier, rassurant et sapide, sans mélange, non frelaté dont ils savaient l’origine et l’histoire aussi bien que celle qui la leur servait’ (ARTP, II.804). Proust puns on the two main meanings of goût. The duchess serves up collective nutriment whose taste appeals to her guests. Another more entertaining crossover is present in the Sodome et Gomorrhe episode in which the dowager Mme de Cambremer exclaims to her aggressively avant-garde daughter-in-law over the fact that Chopin is back in fashion—that he now conforms to current taste. The dowager’s mouth waters and she covers her own hat-veil and moustache in spittle. The word goût does not figure in the

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following extract, but it occurs twice in the immediate run-up to it, as does the verb ‘goûter’ (ARTP, III.211): L’hypersécrétion salivaire ne suffit plus. [...] ‘Élodie! Élodie! il [the narrator] aime Chopin.’ […] Et sa voix était aussi caillouteuse que si, pour m’exprimer son ardeur pour Chopin, elle eût, imitant Démosthène, rempli sa bouche avec tous les galets de la plage. Enfin le reflux vint, atteignant jusqu’à la voilette qu’elle n’eut pas le temps de mettre à l’abri et qui fut transpercée, enfin la marquise essuya avec son mouchoir brodé la bave d’écume dont le souvenir de Chopin venait de tremper ses moustaches. (ARTP, III.212–13)16

In a comic climax, ‘good tastes’ are preposterously yet subtly fused: things that make you salivate, things with which you can reinstate yourself in an elite. The shooting out of the spit is a mini-explosion rather like the structural ‘behaviour’ of the scene itself. And another such dense climax is created by the main demonstration of Albertine’s new taste: her over-the-top description of eating ice-cream (ARTP, III.636–37). Tasty! Proust merges the aesthetic, the gustatory and the sexual. In conclusion: Proust’s treatment of dégoût alongside goût leads us to the third interpretation of form, form as a broad structure giving a sense of beginnings, middles and ends. Before considering a prime example of this, let us remember that dégoût often invokes goût and vice versa, as we see in the amusing sequence staging Charlus’s reaction to the middleclass doctor Cottard. If the aristocracy has traditionally advertised its merit by way of its taste, it may entertain a corresponding distaste or disgust for inferior classes. Thus Charlus masters his aversion to Cottard not so much erotically but, rather, by bringing himself to overlook Cottard’s membership of a repugnantly lower rank: M. de Charlus désireux de témoigner sa reconnaissance au docteur, de la même façon que M. le duc son frère eût arrangé le col du paletot de mon père, comme une duchesse surtout eût tenu la taille à une plébéienne, approcha sa chaise tout près de celle du docteur, malgré le dégoût que celui-ci lui inspirait. Et non seulement sans plaisir physique, mais surmontant une répulsion physique, en Guermantes, non en inverti, pour dire adieu au docteur il lui prit la main et la lui caressa un moment avec 16 This passage is discussed by Malcolm Bowie in Proust among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 70–73. On Mme de Cambremer’s salivation, see also Prendergast, Mirages and Mad Beliefs, pp. 151–52; Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles, pp. 187–89.

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une bonté de maître flattant le museau de son cheval et lui donnant du sucre. (ARTP, III.458)

‘Dégoût’, ‘répulsion physique’; but note the sugar—the baron is sweetening his repellent interlocutor with a little lump of pleasant taste. Again different meanings of goût and of dégoût govern the figure of speech.17 The most concentrated cluster of dégoût, dégoûtant and cognates comes in the famous opening section of Sodome et Gomorrhe—the 30-page sequence in which the narrator, witnessing a gay encounter, remarks that if gays confided in their straight friends, they would be rejected with disgust; they may too be rejected by fellow-gays in whom they arouse the disgust of seeing what they themselves are: ‘le premier élan de confiance et de sincérité qu’ils seraient tentés d’avoir les ferait rejeter avec dégoût […] leurs semblables, auxquels ils donnent le dégoût de voir ce qu’ils sont’ (ARTP, III.17). However, this section of Sodome et Gomorrhe also pinpoints the constructedness of disgust. (Ethnographers and cultural critics bring out the diversity of repugnance as well as of taste.) Again, the relevant passages are well known to Proustians; to recap briefly: earlier, in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the narrator had expressed revulsion for both oysters and jellyfish. The prospect of eating oysters, he had claimed, was disgusting, even more so than the sight of the viscous jellyfish that tarnished the Balbec beach: that prospect ‘augment[ait] l’impression de dégoût que j’avais à cette heure-là, car la chair vivante des huîtres me répugnait encore plus que la viscosité des méduses ne me ternissait la plage de Balbec’ (ARTP, II.56). But in the Sodome et Gomorrhe sequence, this response is said to have changed: ‘Quand je ne suivais que mon instinct, la méduse me répugnait à Balbec; mais si je savais la regarder […] du point de vue de l’histoire naturelle et de l’esthétique, je voyais une délicieuse girandole d’azur’ (ARTP, III.28). ‘Délicieuse’: it is now appetizing, delectable to the palate. Consciously or unconsciously, readers will be bearing this evolution in mind whenever, later in the novel, they read that the narrator finds lesbianism disgusting, or that Charlus’s lover finds him disgusting, or that the Verdurin habitués envisage Charlus as a box exhaling a strange smell of fruits, the mere 17 Other blends of bodily and moral disgust are to be found in À la recherche, as for instance when Brichot’s jokes are said to be ‘vulgaires et grasses à écœurer’ (I.249), ‘grasses’ meaning both licentious and greasy, sickly; already cited in n. 13 above.

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thought of tasting which turns the stomach: he was ‘semblable à quelque boîte de provenance exotique et suspecte qui laisse échapper la curieuse odeur de fruits auxquels l’idée de goûter seulement vous souleverait le cœur’ (ARTP, III.429). Our delicious jellyfish, then, merges physical reaction, art criticism and social commentary, showing in a delicate yet scandalous way the mutations of judgement, and, by way of those, pleading for tolerance, as in a final extract from the Sodome et Gomorrhe exordium in which the key word ‘goûter’ occupies an emphatic position: ‘il n’est pas indifférent qu’un individu puisse rencontrer le seul plaisir qu’il soit susceptible de goûter, et “qu’ici-bas toute âme” puisse donner à quelqu’un “sa musique, sa flamme ou son parfum”’ (ARTP, III.28). And to return to the question of form: the exordium comes almost exactly halfway through the novel, starting at about page 1,500 out of 3,000.18 That position might have moved had Proust lived longer and revised the rest of his novel still further. But this is the work we have, and, in the third type of ‘form’, the Sodome et Gomorrhe sequence is pivotal.

18 Ingrid Wassenaar points this out in her Proustian Passions: The Uses of Self-Justification for À la recherche du temps perdu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 221: ‘by delaying the account of how the narrator discovers homosexuality (“si importante en elle-même que j’ai jusqu’ici, jusqu’au moment de pouvoir lui donner la place et l’étendue voulues, différé de la rapporter”: iii. 3), Proust has, structurally, made this the centrepoint of the entire novel’ (emphasis Wassenaar’s).

chapter fourteen

‘La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’ Proust with Bourdieu Michael Lucey Proust with Bourdieu

What, as compared to a material world or a mental world, is a social world? What would it mean to talk about the reality of that social world? How can that level of reality be represented? How is it to be experienced? How can the experience of social reality be communicated in a literary work such as a novel? How might it change our ways of thinking about the formal properties of a literary work if our goal is to understand the way that work is crafted, the way it is formed, in order to produce an experience of the reality of the social world? Pierre Bourdieu once described the social world as a ‘lieu de tendances immanentes’. It is a space of probabilities. Some people are more likely to follow one kind of social trajectory than another. A given trajectory might be smooth sailing for one person, and an uphill battle for others. And so on. Because of those immanent tendencies, people face the social world with unequal chances. The different kinds of capital that Bourdieu discussed and elaborated in his work—economic, cultural, social— serve as conceptual tools to help understand how different agents are positioned differently within an uneven social field, and to account for the different chances that individual agents have when faced with similar circumstances in the same social world, to explain why ‘tout n’est pas également possible ou impossible à tous, à chaque moment’.1 What kind 1 The citations are from the ‘Résumé’ of Bourdieu’s 1983–84 seminar at

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of reality could we say that immanent tendencies have? How could a novel represent them? Sociology has as one of its goals to map what Bourdieu refers to in ‘Espace social et genèse des “classes”’ as a ‘topologie sociale’, the topology of a social universe, a shifting surface that partially accounts for the various immanent tendencies that can be observed as agents act and as time passes within that universe. Bourdieu speaks of representing the social world ‘sous la forme d’un espace (à plusieurs dimensions) construit sur la base de principes de différenciation ou de distribution constitués par l’ensemble des propriétés agissantes dans l’univers social considéré, c’est-à-dire propres à conférer à leur détenteur de la force, du pouvoir dans cet univers’. 2 Different social universes function differently, have different topographies, sometimes because the active properties that shape their topography are different from those found elsewhere. In some social worlds the number of languages you speak makes no difference; in others it does. In some, physical strength and dexterity are hugely important, in others less so. And so on. As Bourdieu pointed out in La Distinction, one of the properties that is unequally distributed in many social worlds, and that may or may not be important in different contexts is ‘l’aptitude à la rencontre inspirée avec l’œuvre d’art et, plus généralement, avec les œuvres de culture savante’. 3 Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is filled with moments in which people either have, pretend to have, or miserably fail to have inspired encounters with works of art and other refined cultural artefacts—the famous Vinteuil Septet being one prominent example. Sometimes their successes and failures in this regard are consequential and sometimes not. But in every case, we can see that Proust’s novel shares with Bourdieu’s sociology an interest in what Bourdieu refers to in his lectures on Manet as ‘un effet social de l’œuvre’. That is, a work of art, being the product of a social world, can also on occasion serve as an instrument that reveals something of the immanent structures that contribute to the shape of the social the Collège de France, published in the Annuaire du Collège de France (1984), pp. 551–53. The ‘Résumé’ is consultable online at https://www.college-de-france. fr/media/pierre-bourdieu/UPL3466825117012470610_AN_85_bourdieu.pdf. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Espace social et genèse des “classes”’, in Langage et pouvoir symbolique (Paris: Seuil-Essais, 2001), pp. 293–94. 3 Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979), p. 29.

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topography around it. It does so by producing effects on the public. The social effect of a work is, Bourdieu reminds us in those lectures, ‘différentiel’; it is not ‘un effet omnibus, une œuvre n’exerçant pas le même effet sur tout le monde’.4 Both the Vinteuil Sonata in the first volume of Proust’s Recherche and the Septet in the fifth volume are presented in the novel as works that have this kind of differential social effect: that is, by producing different effects on different listeners they become a diagnostic instrument revealing the social topography around them. Indeed, the scene of the Septet’s performance is described in intense ethnographic detail and in ways that signal that certain members of the audience represent prototypes of different manners of listening that are characteristic of different, and perhaps opposing, social regions. The narrator’s role is particularly complex because he is both the ethnographer and a participant in the scene, someone whose own attitudes and manners serve to distinguish him from the other listeners and perhaps reveal something about both his social location and his social trajectory. Here, for instance, is how he views the Baron de Charlus as the Septet’s performance is about to get underway: Aussitôt M. de Charlus, redressant sa taille en arrière […] pris une expression de prophète et regarda l’assemblée avec un sérieux qui signifiait que ce n’était pas le moment de rire, et dont on vit rougir brusquement le visage de plus d’une invitée, prise en faute comme un élève par son professeur en pleine classe. Pour moi, l’attitude, si noble d’ailleurs, de M. de Charlus avait quelque chose de comique […] afin de leur indiquer comme en un vade mecum le religieux silence qu’il convenait d’observer, le détachement de toute préoccupation mondaine, il présentait lui-même, élevant vers son beau front ses mains gantées de blanc, un modèle (auquel on devait se conformer) de gravité, presque déjà d’extase, sans répondre aux saluts des retardataires, assez indécents pour ne pas comprendre que l’heure était maintenant au grand Art. Tous furent hypnotisés, on n’osa plus proférer un son, bouger une chaise; le respect pour la musique—de par le prestige de Palamède—avait été subitement inculqué à une foule aussi mal élevée qu’élégante. 5 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Manet: une révolution symbolique (Paris: Raisons d’agir/ Seuil, 2013), p. 51. 5 Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade], 1987), III.752–53. All future citations will be from the same volume of this edition, abbreviated as ARTP, and will be given ­parenthetically in the text.

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There are two sets of guests at this musical soirée, the bourgeois guests, invited by the Verdurins, and the nobles, invited by the Baron de Charlus. There are in both camps eager listeners and ignorant ones—more ignorant ones than eager ones, it seems. But guides to how to listen—or how to look like you are listening—are predominantly provided by Charlus and Mme Verdurin, in ways that are similar and yet different. Here is the narrator’s description of Mme Verdurin: Je regardai la Patronne, dont l’immobilité farouche semblait protester contre les battements de mesure exécutés par les têtes ignorantes des dames du Faubourg. Mme Verdurin ne disait pas: ‘Vous comprenez que je la connais un peu cette musique, et un peu encore! S’il me fallait exprimer tout ce que je ressens, vous n’en auriez pas fini!’ Elle ne le disait pas. Mais sa taille droite et immobile, ses yeux sans expression, ses mèches fuyantes, le disaient pour elle. (ARTP, 755)

The ‘détachement de toute préoccupation mondaine’ that both model listeners seem to wish to illustrate for their fellow listeners is, of course, a fabricated performance to some unspecified degree. It is, after all, possible to be caught up in an aesthetic experience, attentive to it, and at the same time have some attention left over for who is arriving late, or who is beating time with their heads. Mme Verdurin and Charlus are thus both similar, in laying claim to an appropriate form of receptivity to the music, and yet displaying that receptivity from markedly different social positions and to different ends. His white gloves and her romantic hairdo both index different social profiles, different styles of listening, rival forms of sophistication. While turning his attention to the music, he keeps track of who in his set does not have the respect to arrive in time for the performance; he knows he has to demonstrate to his set that talking is not allowed during this performance (because, one assumes, their habit at other musical events in salons they attend, is to talk away as they please); he has no expectation that they will appreciate the performance, but he does expect that in this particular instance they will sit quietly through it. She expects appropriate signs of musical cultivation in her audience. In a form of music in which the metre is surely fluid and underemphasized, trying to keep time is a sign of a hopeless lack of sophistication. There are other musical features that should ravish your sensibility, but you must not betray that ravishment in any too corporeal a manner. And what of our narrator, who is observing all of this social action around him while also attending to the music in his own way? In fact,

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the question as to whether or not it is appropriate to talk during a performance and the question of metre both come up in his account of his own listening. Le concert commença, je ne connaissais pas ce qu’on jouait; je me trouvais en pays inconnu. Où le situer? Dans l’œuvre de quel auteur étais-je? J’aurais bien voulu le savoir et, n’ayant près de moi personne à qui le demander, aurais bien voulu être un personnage de ces Mille et Une Nuits que je relisais sans cesse et où dans les moments d’incertitude surgit soudain un génie ou une adolescente d’une ravissante beauté, invisible pour les autres, mais non pour le héros embarrassé, à qui elle révèle exactement ce qu’il désire savoir. Or à ce moment, je fus précisément favorisé d’une telle apparition magique. (ARTP, 753)

Lacking a programme, and unaware that the Septet exists, the narrator at first thinks, upon seeing a large group of musicians assembling to perform, that it must be the work of some other composer that will open the programme, because as far as he knows, Vinteuil has only written a sonata. If an appropriate person had been seated near to him, he would have leaned over and posed a question: what are they performing? A dangerous act, if you don’t know the person you are asking. What if they reply too loudly? What if they think you are an idiot? What if they are shocked that you have broken the expected code of silence? His mind wandering, daydreaming we might say, he imagines a genie or a pretty girl (and in fact it is characteristic of the narrator that listening to music frequently arouses libidinal currents, causing him to imagine pretty girls, or to think of Albertine in slightly erotic ways) arriving to orient him in his listening. What arrives is the famous petite phrase of the Sonata, figured as the adolescent daughter of some friends whose garden you find yourself passing by at a moment when you thought you had got lost on your walk. Knowing which composer he is listening to orients our narrator’s attention in certain ways. He becomes fascinated by the experiential difference between listening to the Sonata, which he has done many times, and listening to the Septet, of whose existence he was previously unaware. The language is rich and endlessly fascinating. For our present purposes, note this passage in particular: Et un chant perçait déjà l’air, chant de sept notes, mais le plus inconnu, le plus différent de tout ce que j’eusse imaginé, à la fois ineffable et criard, non plus roucoulement de colombe comme dans la sonate, mais déchirant l’air, aussi vif que la nuance écarlate dans laquelle le début était noyé, quelque chose comme un mystique chant du coq, un appel ineffable

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mais suraigu, de l’éternel matin […] elle semblait [l’atmosphère de ce passage] [...] matérialiser la plus épaisse joie. À vrai dire, esthétiquement ce motif de joie ne me plaisait pas; je le trouvais presque laid, le rythme s’en traînait si péniblement à terre qu’on aurait pu en imiter presque tout l’essentiel, rien qu’avec des bruits, en frappant d’une certaine manière des baguettes sur une table. Il me semblait que Vinteuil avait manqué là d’inspiration, et en conséquence, je manquai aussi là un peu de force d’attention. (ARTP, 754–55)

It is at this moment, as his attention wanders, that the narrator’s eye falls upon Mme Verdurin sitting upright in her chair, her posture and her hair conveying her investment in the music, her immobility an implicit critique of the nodding heads of others in the audience. And yet, their heads must be nodding at this same passage that has displeased the narrator because of its rhythm, too unsubtle or too foregrounded: uninspired, the narrator has it. The narrator’s investment in this music, and his way of conveying it, is diacritically related to those of Charlus and Mme Verdurin. He would be willing to whisper a comment to a neighbour while the music was playing if the limits of that exchange could be appropriately controlled. He, like Mme Verdurin, eschews any physical acknowledgement of the rhythmical features of the music—this form of response being understood as unsophisticated, just as the appeal of rhythm, it is implied here, is often too facile. So, we might imagine, for the narrator, the fact that the ignorant heads of a few elegant ladies of the faubourg are bobbing at this particular moment in the concert is not only a sign of their unsophisticated relation to musical apprehension; it is for him also a sign of the compositional weakness of the music they are listening to. We are back to what Bourdieu called the ‘effet social de l’œuvre, qui est différentiel, qui n’est pas un effet omnibus, une œuvre n’exerçant pas le même effet sur tout le monde’. Bourdieu continues: ‘Cet effet social différentiel contient des révélations sur l’œuvre d’art […] dire qu’il y a un effet de l’œuvre d’art, c’est dire qu’il y a dans l’œuvre d’art des causes de cet effet’.6 And this, it seems to me, is what Proust’s Recherche is interested in here, the way that somewhere ‘within’ the Septet as it is being performed there are certain causes that produce the effects we see around the room: the position of Charlus’s gloves, the immobility of Mme Verdurin’s spine, the nodding heads of the elegant but unsophisticated listeners, the wandering attention of the narrator. Bourdieu 6 Bourdieu, Manet, p. 51.

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suggests that one analytical task, a socioanalytic one, when faced with a work such as the Vinteuil Septet or a painting by Manet is to ‘essayer de voir dans ces œuvres ce qui peut permettre de rendre raison de ces effets’. To undertake such a task would be to undertake ‘une recherche de ce que l’on pourrait appeler la charge symbolique de l’œuvre’.7 It is not possible here to develop fully the way in which Proust’s novel is committed to investigating what Bourdieu calls ‘la charge symbolique’ of various kinds of musical works (particularly the kinds of works associated with composers such as Fauré or Franck), how their way of mobilizing and balancing the resources of melodic and rhythmic development, how certain ways of refusing the obvious and the well-known in terms of compositional form, contribute to their ability to produce the differential effect that Bourdieu discusses and Proust’s novel represents. Observe nonetheless the ways in which all of those considerations lie behind a passage like the following, which occurs further along in the extended description of the performance of the Vinteuil Septet: [H]ésitante, elle [une phrase de Vinteuil] s’approcha, disparut comme effarouchée, puis revint, s’enlaça à d’autres, venues, comme je le sus plus tard, d’autres œuvres, en appela d’autres qui devenaient à leur tour attirantes et persuasives aussitôt qu’elles étaient apprivoisées, et entraient dans la ronde, dans la ronde divine mais restée invisible pour la plupart des auditeurs, lesquels n’ayant devant eux qu’un voile confus au travers duquel ils ne voyaient rien, ponctuaient arbitrairement d’exclamations admiratives un ennui continu dont ils pensaient mourir. (ARTP, 764)

Note, in particular, all that is implicit here: that the narrator is the kind of listener who studies musical works in order to enhance his understanding of them, and will be studying this one in detail in the near future (‘venues, comme je le sus plus tard, d’autres œuvres’); that the thematic complexity of Vinteuil’s compositional style, and his technique of reusing material from one work in another, means that repeated listening to his works as a whole, rather than focused attention on any individual work, seems to be what his works ‘ask for’; and that, because of the complexity of his way of treating thematic or melodic material and his way of creating a system of cross-referencing between a variety of his works, his compositional style poses significant challenges to a casual listener, even a practised casual listener, who may well find nothing to listen to (‘un ennui continu dont ils pensaient mourir’). 7 Bourdieu, Manet, p. 51.

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One of the questions I opened with was how an experience of social reality might be communicated in a literary work such as a novel, in particular an experience of that aspect of the social world that makes it a ‘lieu de tendances immanentes’. How can a novel provide us with an experience of social topographies and their evolutions? The first part of my title, ‘la recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’ comes from a moment in Bourdieu’s Les règles de l’art in which he is talking about what he calls ‘un formalisme réaliste’, and notes (speaking of Baudelaire and Flaubert in particular) that in certain circumstances, in certain hands, ‘c’est le travail pur sur la forme pure, exercice formel par excellence, qui fait surgir, comme par magie, un réel plus réel que celui qui se donne immédiatement aux sens et auquel s’arrêtent les amoureux naïfs du réel’.8 This ‘réel plus réel’ of which Bourdieu is speaking is the reality of the social world and all its immanent tendencies, the reality of the social topography we all move through with varying degrees of practical skill. Both texts and their makers are shaped by the social world. Certain makers of texts, by the work they do in making them, reflect upon, or uncover or recover (in a process Bourdieu calls anamnesis) the relationship between the writing they do and the way the social world is shaped and has shaped them: La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle sur la composition de l’œuvre, sur l’articulation des histoires des différents personnages, sur la correspondance entre les milieux ou les situations et les conduites ou les ‘caractères’, aussi bien que sur le rythme ou la couleur des phrases, sur les répétitions et les assonances qu’il faut chasser, les idées reçues et les formes convenues qu’il faut éliminer, fait partie des conditions de la production d’un effet de réel bien plus profond que celui que les analystes désignent d’ordinaire par ce nom […] c’est à travers ce travail sur la forme que se projettent dans l’œuvre ces structures que l’écrivain, comme tout agent social, porte en lui à l’état pratique, sans en détenir véritablement la maîtrise, et que s’accomplit l’anamnèse de tout ce qui reste enfoui d’ordinaire, à l’état implicite ou inconscient, sous les automatismes du langage qui tourne à vide.9

The anamnesis of the shaping effects of the social world and of the determinants of the immanent tendencies that produce its topography are present in Proust’s novel in all of the formal features Bourdieu 8 Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Seuil-Essais, 1998), p. 182. 9 Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art, p. 184.

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mentions and in one more. The novel carefully links the performance of the Vinteuil Septet to a number of its own thematic features, all of which are interlaced rather in the way the narrator describes the themes of the Septet itself dancing together: there are the social ambitions of the Verdurins, and the way they shape and instrumentalize their own aesthetic preferences in order to give their salon its appeal; there is the intimate attachment that exists (at least until the end of the evening) between Charlus and the violinist Morel; there is the fact that the score of the Septet was itself reconstructed and edited by the girlfriend of Vinteuil’s daughter: the score to be played, the musicians to play it, the salon in which it is played and the audience that attends the performance are thus all carefully produced and articulated in the novel in a way that suggests Proust’s attentiveness to the kind of multivariable calculus of socially pertinent variables (sexuality, class, age, educational background, gender, status) that shapes social topographies, but also the chances of and the contours of any given aesthetic experience. The formal feature of Recherche that still needs to be mentioned is the construction of the first-person narrator in his differential relation to so many other characters—as we have seen here, in particular, his own aesthetic stance in relation to those of Mme Verdurin and the Baron de Charlus. That is, the work on language that produces the language of the narrator, and that produces the possibility that a reader might recognize all the kinds of person the narrator might be, is formal work, but formal work that points the reader not only back to the work itself but also to their own experience of their own social world. It is formal work on language (and also on other architectural features of the novel) that then requires of the reader an effort to experience the immanent tendencies of the social world indexed in the language and other structural features of the work itself. This often then involves experiencing the social in words other than through their meaning—not in their meaning, but rather in what is invoked of the social world by their very use. A final citation from Les règles de l’art: Enfin, faire de l’écriture une recherche inséparablement formelle et matérielle visant à inscrire dans les mots les plus capables de l’évoquer, par leur forme même, l’expérience intensifiée du réel qu’ils ont contribué à produire dans l’esprit même de l’écrivain, c’est obliger le lecteur à s’arrêter sur la forme sensible du texte, matériau visible et sonore, chargé de correspondances avec le réel qui se situent à la fois dans l’ordre du sens et dans l’ordre du sensible, au lieu de la traverser, comme un signe transparent, lu sans être vu, pour aller directement au sens;

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c’est le contraindre ainsi à y découvrir la vision intensifiée du réel qui y a été inscrite par l’évocation incantatoire impliquée dans le travail de l’écriture.10

There is more meaning in the words we exchange and in the manner in which we exchange them than we could ever know or control. Often without even fully knowing it, we index the immanent structures of the social world and attempt to act upon them by speaking with others. The formal work of which Bourdieu speaks, and of which Recherche is a compelling example, is work that asks us to notice this, to experience it anew, to react to it, to attend to something that happens in language all the time. In 1999 Bourdieu’s seminar at the Collège de France was called ‘L’Effet Manet’. It was about one month into the first year’s seminar, on 3 February, 1999, that he observed the following: Exister dans un champ, qu’on le veuille ou non, qu’on le sache ou non, c’est produire par référence à des coproducteurs […] quoi qu’ils fassent, les agents sociaux se distinguent parce qu’ils existent dans un espace social qui est constitué comme un espace symbolique dans lequel les actions sont perçues à travers des principes diacritiques; ils produisent des actions ou des œuvres qui, immédiatement soumises à cette perception diacritique, deviennent distinctives, c’est-à-dire éventuellement distinguées ou vulgaires, le vulgaire étant aussi distinctif que le distingué. La recherche de la distinction n’est qu’une des formes très particulières que prend, dans certaines catégories sociales, le rapport à cette propriété anthropologique universelle qui est que, quoi que nous fassions, nous nous distinguons.11

Becoming distinctive is something that happens to works thanks to the actions of multiple agents and because of the fact that a cultural producer exists among co-producers, between all of whom different kinds of diacritical differences come to exist, immediately in some cases, and over time in others. Much of what Proust’s Recherche studies regarding the distribution of different forms of aesthetic perception across a given social topography has a relation to what Bourdieu outlines in this passage. What Bourdieu here calls diacritical perception is central to the way Proust’s narrator takes in aesthetic objects, as, for example, when he describes what he imagines the composer Vinteuil to have been doing as he composed his Septet. 10 Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art, pp. 184–85. 11 Bourdieu, Manet, pp. 126–27.

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In the passage in which he hears the Septet for the first time, the narrator notes that musicologists might, at some later point in time, demonstrate how Vinteuil’s musical phrases are related to ones by earlier composers, but he insists that such relations will only ever be ‘accessoires’, of only secondary importance. The direct impression of these musical phrases will, he insists, be different from any other. For the narrator, a suitably trained listener will distinguish Vinteuil’s musical works from anyone else’s, because there will be a diacritical difference that has come to exist between him and everyone else: Car alors Vinteuil, cherchant puissamment à être nouveau, s’interrogeait lui-même, de toute la puissance de son effort créateur atteignait sa propre essence à ces profondeurs où, quelque question qu’on lui pose, c’est du même accent, le sien propre, qu’elle répond. Un accent, cet accent de Vinteuil, séparé de l’accent des autres musiciens, séparé de l’accent des autres musiciens par une différence […] une véritable différence […] c’est bien un accent unique auquel s’élèvent, auquel reviennent malgré eux ces grands chanteurs que sont les musiciens originaux, et qui est une preuve de l’existence irréductiblement individuelle de l’âme. (ARTP, 760–61)

Whatever the narrator’s theories do or do not prove about the existence of the soul, they reveal a way of thinking about a field of cultural production that is organized around a principle of diacritical difference that the narrator refers to as ‘newness’. The narrator assigns this struggle for newness to the composer, but the point is also being made implicitly that this is a mode of perception that the narrator has inculcated in himself and that may differ from other modes of perception in the world around him, say those of the musicologists he has just mentioned, who, rather than newness, are predisposed to hear the ways in which Vinteuil’s music sounds like other people’s. If Vinteuil’s works are distinctive, it would appear that it is not just anyone who can hear and therefore know this. It requires someone like the narrator, who is already primed to be listening in a certain way, just as it requires an implicit conception of a field of production structured around diacritical differences. That is, if Vinteuil is to sound only like himself, there will need to exist someone, or some group of people, who can recognize the distinctive differences in his musical works and assign value to them. Such distinctive value may well not be audible to just anyone. But by becoming audible, it gains the potential to be correlated to other kinds of social divisions. Remember the narrator’s eyes falling upon Mme Verdurin’s rigorously immobile countenance during the performance of

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the Septet. She refuses to nod, because to do so would be, we might say, vulgar. The aristocratic ladies are perhaps desperately nodding in time to a moment in Vinteuil’s composition, which they seem to be finding intensely soporific, because this moment provides enough rhythmic transparency to enable them to engage in a bit of physical movement that might help them stay awake, might make time move a bit more quickly. The narrator here seems convinced of the aesthetic weakness of this moment in Vinteuil’s composition. One hundred or so pages later, however, he will seem to change his mind about this. In that later moment he has undertaken to study the Septet in more detail using the technology of the pianola. Thanks to repeated listening, he comes to revise the impression of the composition that he gained on his first acquaintance: Dans la musique entendue chez Mme Verdurin, des phrases inaperçues, larves obscures alors indistinctes, devenaient d’éblouissantes architectures; et certaines devenaient des amies, que j’avais à peine distinguées, qui au mieux m’avaient paru laides et dont je n’aurais jamais crue, comme ces gens antipathique au début, qu’ils étaient tels qu’on les découvre, une fois qu’on les connaît bien. Entre les deux états il y avait une vraie transmutation. D’autre part, des phrases, distinctes la première fois, mais que je n’avais pas alors reconnues là, je les identifiais maintenant avec des phrases des autres œuvres, comme cette phrase de la Variation religieuse pour orgue qui chez Mme Verdurin avait passé inaperçue pour moi dans le septuor, où pourtant, sainte qui avait descendu les degrés du sanctuaire, elle se trouvait mêlée aux fées familières du musicien. D’autre part, la phrase qui m’avait paru trop peu mélodique, trop mécaniquement rythmée de la joie titubante des cloches de midi, maintenant c’était celle que j’aimais le mieux, soit que je me fusse habitué à sa laideur, soit que j’eusse découvert sa beauté. (ARTP, 875–76)

Sustained study of Vinteuil’s Septet has changed the narrator’s taste. Since a particular characteristic of Vinteuil’s style is that he recycles and resignifies thematic material from work to work, the narrator’s more thorough study allows him to acquire new forms of specialized knowledge, charting the movement of thematic material from composition to composition and finding descriptive language for distinguishing the different contexts of their use. Most interesting for our purposes, however, is his relation to that moment in the Septet that set those heads nodding and caused Mme Verdurin resolutely to engage all the necessary parts of her musculature to ensure immobility in the face of this rhythm. Now this very musical moment has become the

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narrator’s favourite moment in the whole piece, and yet he cannot decide if it is an ugly moment or a beautiful one. A field of cultural production, Bourdieu reminds us, is always offering up works that give us the occasion either to reaffirm or to rethink our taste: Le champ de production, qui ne pourrait évidemment fonctionner s’il ne pouvait compter sur des goûts déjà existants, propensions plus ou moins intenses à consommer des biens plus ou moins strictement définis, est ce qui permet au goût de se réaliser en lui offrant, à chaque moment, l’univers des biens culturels comme système des possibles stylistiques parmi lesquels il peut sélectionner le système des traits stylistiques constitutifs d’un style de vie.12

What Recherche shows us is the narrator realizing his taste by way of his ongoing relation to the Vinteuil Septet, becoming a professionalized listener whose ears seem attuned to those musical qualities that are essential to the forms of diacritical difference most actively in play in the field of cultural production in question. The narrator, we might note, implicitly asserts that his mode of perception in relation to Vinteuil’s Septet has a more compelling normative claim than does that of Mme Verdurin, while also recognizing that her mode ranks higher than that of the ‘dames du Faubourg’ of the nodding heads. We can also see here part of the reason why it is important to think of musical compositions as time-based works in Proust—not only because it takes time to perform them, but because they have to be reperformed and re-experienced so that the time of apprenticeship in listening to them can happen. Part of what Recherche studies is how the professionalization of the narrator’s listening over time becomes imbricated in his own sense of social distinction as a critic of works of art—a kind of distinction that almost becomes, we might say, scholarly. Which is not to say that it is not also social. To the contrary, taking up a scholarly, professional attitude towards aesthetic objects turns out to be one of the narrator’s primary ways of successfully asserting his social status, because he claims this scholarly stance gives him access to the true content of the works in question. What we might say we are being shown, as the narrator learns what he likes about Vinteuil’s Septet, is a small part of the collective labour that aims to produce a normative understanding of an iconoclastic 12 Bourdieu, La Distinction, p. 255.

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or innovative work, an understanding capable of insisting on and supporting the value of that work for a particular community of listeners, for a particular public. Of course, Proust’s novel has carefully shown us more than just the narrator’s response to the work. The narrator imagines the different likely responses of certain musicologists. He depicts for us the varied responses of the nodding women and Mme Verdurin. He speculates for us about the labour of Vinteuil’s daughter’s girlfriend, who assembled the score of the Septet from the manuscripts Vinteuil left behind at his death. We could say that the work itself, as the novel imagines it, by provoking different responses, is shown to reveal something about the history of the field of cultural production from which it emerges and about the distribution of different modes of perception, different forms of uptake, different manners of use in the social world of its listeners. In this, we could say that Proust’s novel presents the Septet to us so that we can, in Bourdieu’s words, ‘étudier l’effet que l’œuvre produit sur le public’.13 As for the effect produced by the Septet on the narrator, we could perhaps say that the narrator feels he has been especially addressed by it, but that it has taken him some time to understand what the work was telling him, implicitly, about its distinctiveness. He cannot nod along with the women from the faubourg, but he realizes that what the music was saying at that point was not vulgarly rhythmic, or not merely that; it was a more complex challenge: don’t nod, don’t refuse to nod, listen on a different level where the enjoyment has to do with recognizing that while there may be an ugliness (or a vulgarity, or a lack of distinction) in music that encourages nodding, there may be a refinement in appreciating music that only seems to encourage nodding in order to produce, on one level, a distinction between those who nod and those who don’t, but on another level, a more important but less explicable distinction between the whole set of people nodding or not nodding, and another set, for whom they are both amateurish, engaged in a misunderstanding of the musical moment that is crafty enough to sort them into those two groups while discreetly suggesting that the ultimate distinction would be to appreciate this moment without needing finally to decide if it is ugly or beautiful, because its value lies elsewhere. But finally, we should probably remember that this is not what the novel suggests the Vinteuil Septet has achieved; it is the meaning the narrator decides he has heard 13 Bourdieu, Manet, p. 51.

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there as he explores or realizes his own taste and imagines himself to be contributing to the becoming distinctive of the Septet he has fallen in love with in his own distinctive way. The reading I have been proposing of Recherche, by way of Bourdieu, is of course also distinctive, diacritically different from many other ways of approaching the novel. It could perhaps be demonstrated that the novel calls out for the kind of reading I am offering, that it carries it in its form. My project in these pages has been to use this juxtaposition of Proust and Bourdieu to suggest that Proust’s novel’s form offers a way of perceiving how our pleasure in aesthetic objects (novels, septets) can, when viewed from the appropriate angle, reveal the topography of the social world through which we must all necessarily find our way.

part 4

Forms and Formless: World, Movement, Thought

chapter fifteen

How to Think Like a Plant? Ponge, Jaccottet, Guillevic Emily McLaughlin How to Think Like a Plant? Et si c’était eux Qui t’avaient fait à leur image? Eugène Guillevic1

The humanities have undergone a ‘non-human turn’ in recent decades as writers in many different disciplines have critiqued the anthropocentric nature of Western systems of thought. New fields such as animal studies and new materialisms have flourished as theorists have questioned how other, non-human entities experience the world and how much value we attribute to these modes of existence. Less attention has been accorded to the question of plant life. For philosophers such as Michael Marder and Emanuele Coccia, this oversight is not surprising. They argue that vegetation is the form of life that has been most vigorously repressed by Western systems of conceptual thought. In Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetable Life, Marder writes: ‘If animals have suffered marginalization throughout the history of Western thought, then non-human, non-animal living beings, such as plants, have populated the margin of the margin, the zone of absolute obscurity undetectable on the radars of our conceptualities’. 2 Coccia uses a psychoanalytic imagery to describe 1 Eugène Guillevic, Maintenant: Poème (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 137. 2 Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetable Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 2.

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this repression in La Vie des plantes: une métaphysique du mélange and suggests that plants represent: ‘Le retour du refoulé, dont il est nécessaire de nous débarrasser pour nous considérer comme différents: hommes, rationnels, êtres spirituels’. 3 Both philosophers argue that we are remarkably reluctant to address the question of the agency or even creativity of plant life because to do so would be to face the possibility of upsetting the ontological hierarchies that sustain our cultural, familial, social, political and economic systems. Poetry is very often presented as a mode of writing that thrives on the margins of conceptual thought.4 It is therefore perhaps not surprising that, if plant life has been somewhat neglected philosophically, it has nonetheless continued to thrive on these margins. Poets, arguably, have never ceased to interrogate the strange and uncertain realities of plant life. From the late twentieth to the early twenty-first century, French poets in particular have been drawn to plants’ quiet and peripheral presence, to their unique temporalities, rhythms and praxes. Undeniably, some of these poets have written about plants in order to better instrumentalize them, and to reinforce our sense of uniqueness, using them as a springboard to celebrate humanity’s creative powers. But others have not shied away from the difficult philosophical questions that, according to Coccia and Marder, make plants a subversive and unsettling subject matter. They have questioned the specific realities of plant life, asking whether language can know or describe their private existences. And some have questioned their agency and creativity, asking if these are really uniquely human capabilities, or if they are capacities that are shared amongst a wide range of worldly entities? This chapter explores how three mid- to late twentieth-century French poets—Francis Ponge, Philippe Jaccottet and Eugène Guillevic— give voice to plant life. It analyses the distinct way that they each negotiate the relation between the human and the non-human in their work and how this particular negotiation shapes their understanding of what poetic form is and what it does. This study begins by analysing some of Ponge’s and Jaccottet’s renowned texts on plants. It juxtaposes, 3 Emanuele Coccia, La Vie des plantes: une métaphysique du mélange (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2016), p. 15. 4 See, for example, Christian Doumet, La Déraison poétique des philosophes (Paris: Stock, 2010); Timothy Clark, The Poetics of Singularity. The CounterCulturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

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on the one hand, Ponge’s delight in the dynamics of language, his linguistically experimental texts that seek to articulate plant life in a textual ‘efflorescence’, and, on the other, Jaccottet’s wariness of the language’s colonizing tendencies, his use of a rhetoric of hesitation to gesture towards plants’ inherent mystery. This is a familiar critical paradigm, adopted by many critics. It has been used to map two opposing strands in the twentieth-century French poetic tradition: one textually driven and inspired by Mallarmé’s internally relational poems and one materially oriented and inspired by Rimbaud’s call to embrace ‘la réalité rugueuse’. 5 This chapter critiques the way that reflections on plant life and the physical world in general have been constrained by this critical schema. For whilst Ponge’s and Jaccottet’s approaches to the physical world do indeed differ, critics who have presented their textually and materially inclined approaches as emblematic of the two poles of the French poetic tradition have reinforced a norm: they have suggested that poetry is concerned only with the mediation of the physical world by human consciousness and have enshrined a dualist epistemology at the heart of poetry criticism. Seeking to redress this imbalance, this chapter investigates how the Breton poet Eugène Guillevic very deliberately overturns the assumptions that underpin the work of his contemporaries by refusing to limit the poem’s field of enquiry to the subject’s access to the physical world. It analyses how Guillevic adopts a much weirder and more radical—and perhaps even more productive—approach to plant life. Investigating how he uses the question form in particular to query the sentience of plants, this chapter analyses how he provocatively and playfully asks not what plants are like for us as human beings, or 5 We might point to Deguy’s and Bonnefoy’s poetry, or the poets surrounding Tel Quel and those surrounding L’Éphemère. Michel Collot offers a very useful account of how this schema has dominated the critical perception of the twentiethcentury poetic landscape in ‘Lyrisme et littéralité’, Littérature 110 (1998), 38–48. Critics often seek to nuance and surpass this model but it still recurs with remarkable persistence. The blurb of Nina Parish and Emma Wagstaff’s important new anthology Writing the Real: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary French Poetry observes that its ‘two competing approaches’ have dominated French poetry ‘since the 1960s’. The anthology presents ‘contemporary forms of both’ approaches as well as the work of poets who ‘refuse to be categorised in this way’, but it is striking that this binary model is still the archetypal paradigm that is used to measure degrees of continuity and change. See Writing the Real: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary French Poetry, ed. Nina Parish and Emma Wagstaff (London: Enitharmon Press, 2016).

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what our relationship to them is, but what it is like for a plant to be a plant. It explores how this speculative approach allows him to develop an understanding of poetic form that is no longer ‘correlationist’, no longer merely conceiving of it as a human category and practice but as a general or widespread creative force in which humankind participates, an inherently worldly process of interrogation. In an interview with the critic Jacques Lardoux in March 1994, Guillevic describes his interrogative approach to plant life as a ‘sous-réalisme’.6 Lardoux comments: ‘On dit souvent de certains poètes qu’ils sont au ras des pâquerettes, mais vous, c’est très volontaire’. And Guillevic agrees with a laugh: ‘J’ai écrit: “Rose, je te respecte / Pâquerette, je t’aime”. Être au ras des choses, c’est ce que j’appelle aussi mon “sous-réalisme”!’ 7 Coining the word ‘sous-réalisme’, Guillevic pokes fun at both the realist desire to know the world exactly and the surrealist desire to endlessly amplify and intensify our own experiences of it. He insists instead on the importance of seeing ‘au ras des choses’. Setting his own perspective in a relation of parity with the perspective of the plant, he suggests that one way of knowing the world is no more primary or authoritative than the other. He affirms the relative and provisional nature of human knowledge and accepts that he can now only speculate about the question of the plant’s existence. Lardoux asks Guillevic if this practice of ‘sous-réalisme’ could be likened to Ponge’s strategy of taking the side of and speaking on behalf of things. Guillevic immediately demurs: Nous sommes très différents. Ponge parle des choses de l’extérieur, il les dépeint. Moi je vis la vie de la crevette, je suis dedans. Pour les quatrevingts ans de Ponge, j’ai fait, dans Le Monde, un petit article: ‘Ponge, vu par la crevette’. Lui a écrit sur la crevette, alors j’avais retourné les choses, et j’ai fait parler la crevette sur lui!8

Guillevic suggests that when Ponge looks at a prawn, he is only aware of his own gaze and his own creative powers and forgets that the prawn is looking back at him. Guillevic chooses to focus his writing on the prawn’s perspective. He explores the question of what might happen when the prawn gazes at the poet and how such a gaze could be constitutive of the poet’s reality. 6 Eugène Guillevic and Jacques Lardoux, Humour-terraqué: entretienslectures (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires Vincennes, 1997), p. 36. 7 Guillevic and Lardoux, Humour-terraqué, p. 36. 8 Guillevic and Lardoux, Humour-terraqué, p. 37.

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Guillevic’s interrogative poems anticipate the non-anthropocentric forms of thought developed by theorists of the non-human turn in recent decades. Thinkers in the field of animal studies explore the uncertainty that we feel when we look into the eyes of another species and try to define the exact nature of their particular experience. Two seminal essays, Thomas Nagel’s ‘What Is it Like to Be a Bat?’ (1974) and Derrida’s ‘Et si l’animal répondait?’ (1999), pose questions in their titles. They both argue, albeit in very different ways, that an animal’s experience remains an open question for us, a force that has an endless capacity to unsettle our desire for definitive or complete knowledge.9 New materialists question the agency of matter in similar ways. Jane Bennett conjectures that a ‘certain wilfulness’ is located at the heart of all substance, ‘dispersed throughout the universe as an attribute of all things, human or otherwise’,10 and suggests that a cautious practice of anthropomorphism can be useful in learning to attune oneself to it. Anthropomorphism has the advantage, she suggests, of alerting us to what is lively about matter, without attributing too many clear or fixed characteristics to it.11 However, a more significant overlap still is observable between Guillevic’s interrogative approach to plants and the recent philosophical movement known as ‘speculative realism’. Speculative realism draws together diverse thinkers but what they all share is their rejection of Kantian ‘correlationism’: ‘the belief that knowledge of the nonhuman world has to be correlated with or mediated by a priori human categories’.12 In The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, Steven Shaviro writes that ‘the world in itself—the world as it exists apart from us—cannot in any way be contained or constrained by the question of our access to it’.13 Shaviro argues that the task of the thinker is to explore the autonomous and agential capacities that other, nonhuman life forms possess. Using Whitehead’s philosophy to develop his particular version of speculative realism, Shaviro argues that, whilst the autonomous experiences of other beings are inaccessible 9 Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is it Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974), 435–50; Jacques Derrida, L’Animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006). 10 Jane Bennett, ‘De Rerum Natura’, Strategies 13 (2000), 9–22 (p. 14). 11 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 120. 12 Richard Grusin, ‘Introduction’, in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. xii. 13 Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 66.

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to us, we still know affectively that ‘there is something that it is like to be that organism’.14 Insisting that affect is more primary than humanity’s cognitive faculties, Shaviro presents it as a general characteristic of all existence and argues that human thought emerges from this basic affective disposition. It is because we share this common affective disposition with other entities, he argues, that we can speculate, however vaguely or allusively, about what it is like to be a plant or an animal.15 Shaviro writes: ‘Likeness-in-human-terms, if it is projected imaginatively enough, may work to dislocate us from the correlationist position of understanding these other entities only in terms of their resemblance, and relationship, to ourselves’.16 Guillevic’s poems anticipate elements of all three of these different strands of non-human or post-human thought. This is surely because they ask questions about many different kinds of non-human entities: animals, minerals, water, bacteria, a salt marsh. It seems fair to suggest, however, that he poses his most radical and searching questions about plants. Whilst theorists of the non-human turn have tended to question the affective capacities of the beings closest to us (animals) or the substances farthest from us (things or matter), Guillevic signals that there is a particular advantage to focusing on plants. Like Coccia and Marder, he suggests that plants are uniquely inspiring or unsettling because of the intermediate position that they occupy in the ‘chain of being’, as organisms with whom we share a vague sense of kinship. Guillevic interrogates this ‘middle position’—close and distant, familiar and unfamiliar—exploring how it gives plants an uncanny capacity to unsettle our deeply rooted assumptions about ourselves, to make us question the nature of vitality and sentience, asking what it means to feel or to think, where it happens, and who gets to do it. When Ponge writes about plants in Le Parti pris des choses, he employs the same analogy repeatedly. He compares plant growth to the process of writing. His famous poem ‘Le Cycle des saisons’ opens with a description of the growth of trees in spring: ‘ils lâchent leurs paroles, un flot, un vomissement de vert. Ils tâchent d’aboutir à une feuillaison complète de paroles’.17 Throughout this poem, Ponge plays on the 14 Shaviro, Universe, p. 91. 15 Shaviro draws on Nagel’s essay ‘What Is it Like to Be a Bat?’ in forging this argument. 16 Shaviro, Universe, p. 91. 17 Francis Ponge, ‘Le Cycle des saisons’, in Œuvres complètes, Vol. I, ed.

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double meaning of the word ‘feuilles’. The trees spew forth an endless stream of ‘paroles’. The poet suggests that as they grow, the leaves have ambitions of totality and diversity: ‘Ils croient pouvoir dire tout, recouvrir entièrement le monde de paroles variées’ (LCS, 23). They find themselves trapped, however, in an endless cycle of homogeneity: ‘Aucune liberté dans la feuillaison [...] ils ne disent que “les arbres...” [...] Toujours la même feuille’ (LCS, 23). Plant growth continually reaches towards something other but it continually gives rise to the same: ‘Tente encore une feuille!—La même! Encore une autre! La même!’ (LCS, 23–24). The final lines of the poem suggest that the only thing that could break this cycle is the observation: ‘“L’on ne sort pas des arbres par des moyens d’arbres”’ (LCS, 24). The poet sets this phrase entre guillemets. Ponge forges a subtle contrast between the homogeneity of tree growth and the citational capacity that language gives us. A phrase can always be lifted out of context and cited in another situation, giving it a new and distinct meaning. This phrase is deliberately aphoristic, which is to say, it is an inherently migratory phrase that can be cited in endless different contexts. It can assume many different meanings. Ponge suggests that language is precisely the medium that cultivates difference in this way and that allows us to perceive the world in different ways. Language thus resists the deterministic and homogeneous laws of material existence and lifts the trees ‘out of context’. It allows them to accede to the otherness and diversity to which they aspire. Ponge presents the trees’ growth in linguistic terms to suggest their endlessly generative and expansive nature. He does not do so to highlight the trees’ expressive powers, however, but to foreground the exceptional nature of humanity’s linguistic capabilities. He contrasts the trees’ limitations with humanity’s freedoms. He juxtaposes the one-dimensional way in which a tree articulates itself with the comparative and differential modes of expression that human beings can use. ‘Le Cycle des saisons’ does not celebrate the growth of the trees but, rather, the linguistic process of mediation that generates difference, allowing us to perceive diverse layers of texture and nuance, and to continually renew and reinvent our perception of the world. Ponge suggests that it is only by paying attention to this linguistic process of translation that we can save the trees from oblivion and ourselves from inattention and complacency. The poetic text thus reminds the reader of Bernard Beugnot (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), pp. 23–24 (p. 23). Subsequent citations are to LCS in the text.

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the crucial existential role that language plays in shaping our experience of the world. In Proêmes, in ‘Notes premières de “l’homme”’, Ponge writes, ‘la nature n’existe que par l’homme’ (225). In ‘Pages Bis’, he observes, ‘La “beauté” de la nature est dans son imagination, cette façon de pouvoir sortir l’homme de lui-même [...]’ (217). If Ponge’s poem presents the growth of the trees as a form of linguistic expression, Jaccottet’s texts tend to foreground the plant’s withdrawal from language. In the prose poem ‘Les Pivoines’ in Après beaucoup d’années, Jaccottet describes the experience of looking at a patch of peonies.18 As he does so, he likens himself to one of the elders who gazes at Suzanna while she bathes. He dramatizes his desire and reticence, his awareness that his linguistic access to these flowers comes at the risk of indiscretion and even violation. His text charts the many diffident attempts he makes to approach the ‘grace dérobée’ of these delicate flowers (LP, 817). Playing with the idea of ‘derobing’ this essential grace or allowing it to remain discreetly hidden, the poet likens the flowers to ‘robes déchiffonnées: pivoines qui se dérobent, qui vous échappent— dans un autre monde, à peine lié au vôtre’ (LP, 819). The theme of other-worldliness recurs throughout the poem. The more the poet tries to expose these flowers’ essential grace, ‘plus elles se retranchent dans un monde inaccessible’ (LP, 820). Jaccottet writes, ‘Elles ne veulent pas qu’on parle à leur place’. And yet, no sooner does he make this statement, however, than he immediately corrects himself: C’est encore trop que d’écrire qu’elles ne veulent pas, ou veulent quoi que ce soit. Elles habitent un autre monde en même temps que celui d’ici. C’est pourquoi justement elles vous échappent, vous obsèdent. Comme une porte qui serait à la fois, inexplicablement, entrouverte et verrouillée. (LP, 820)

The poet is acutely aware that he cannot speak of these peonies’ desires. Their smoothly enfolded forms pull privately inwards, away from him, offering a glimpse of a transcendental horizon, another world that can be intuited but not grasped. The prose poem ends with a quasi-mythical image of the poet imagining himself pushing back the layers of vegetation and trying to cross this threshold. ‘On va les suivre, sous des arceaux verts’, Jaccottet writes, ‘et que l’on se retourne, peut-être s’apercevra-t-on que l’on ne fait plus d’ombre, que vos pas ne laissent plus de traces dans 18 Philippe Jaccottet, ‘Les Pivoines’, in Œuvres, ed. José-Flore Tappy (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), pp. 817–21. Subsequent citations are to LP in the text.

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la boue’ (LP, 821). The poet suggests that to pursue these flowers any further and to know them more intimately would be to abandon his own human existence. It would be to cease to exist altogether. Ponge’s and Jaccottet’s poems articulate plant life in very different ways. Ponge privileges linguistic expression. He suggests that language can make the trees’ chatter articulate in meaningful ways, allowing them to flourish. He demonstrates their potential exuberance from one enthusiastic epithet to the next. Jaccottet takes the opposite approach, criticizing the crudely expository nature of language and dramatizing how the plant resists its grasp. Through subtle wordplay and equivocations, he seeks to evoke an alterity glimpsed at the very limits of human perception. What is striking about these two approaches— one textually and one materially driven, one constructivist and one cautiously liminal—is that they both offer us accounts of the poet’s subjective and linguistic access to the organic world. Even though Ponge perceives his poetic performance as an existential attempt to re-endow material things with dignity and importance, he suggests that they can only come to life through the medium of human perception. And even though Jaccottet is determined to attend to the plant’s otherness, he can only envisage this alterity negatively as his own exposure to an ungraspable horizon. Both poets perceive the landscape in which they find themselves in dualist terms, presenting the poet as a special and a distinct presence. Both cultivate a poetics of subjective access to the material world. Guillevic’s poetry changes the terms of poetic enquiry precisely because he is less interested in his own experiences as an observer and more interested in the experiences of the diverse life forms that he encounters. He approaches the plant as an autonomous being and he wagers, to quote Thomas Nagel, that ‘there is something that it is like to be that organism’.19 Guillevic knows the plant’s experiences to be different and even inaccessible, but he does not, like Jaccottet, posit their absolute alterity. He suggests that plants are our ‘Familiers’. This is the title of a section from the 1981 poetry collection Trouées, which contains poems about a flower, an oak tree and fresh water.20 ‘Familier’ means ‘quelqu’un qui fait comme partie de la famille’ and ‘qui participe à l’intimité de quelqu’un’. Guillevic uses this term to suggest 19 Nagel, ‘What Is it Like to Be a Bat?’, p. 436. 20 Eugène Guillevic, Trouées: poèmes 1973–80 (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), pp. 71–83.

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humanity’s pseudo-kinship with the plant world but he also hints at the word’s other usage, ‘un démon ou génie familier’, ‘un esprit surnaturel qui protège ou conseille un individu’, echoing the English concept of ‘a witch’s familiar’ with its animistic conception of non-human forms of life. 21 Guillevic’s ‘familier’ denotes closeness and distance, an uncanny mixture of familiarity and strangeness. It allows him to suggest that his sentience does not necessarily separate him from plant life but also that his thoughts do not mediate its presence, for the plant is as autonomous and as free as he is. But how is the poet to approach something that is familiar and different in this way? How are we to know something of its independent existence? Guillevic is acutely aware that the move he makes is speculative but insists on the importance of not ignoring affective intuitions and he uses the question form to hold these possibilities open. A short poem from the collection Maintenant: poème, published in 1993, poses a series of questions about the internal experiences of a leaf, a tree and then the earth itself. ‘La feuille sent-elle’ is only four lines long and poses three questions in quick succession: La feuille sent-elle Ce qu’elle doit à l’arbre? L’arbre à la terre? La terre à la gravitation?22

Guillevic presents a vision of a world in which everything is embedded in a set of larger processes. He questions whether the leaf or the tree senses its participation in processes that exceed it. He knows that these questions cannot be answered and allows them to hang tantalizingly open, using them to awaken a sense of wonder, of limitless interconnectedness. As we proceed from one question to another, the level of implication increases exponentially: the leaf is embedded within the tree, which is embedded within the earth, which is embedded within the universe. And there is also one essential question that is never spoken but is suggested continually. Do we feel what we owe to our own physical environment? Do we sense how our own sentient experience emerges from a world of material processes? The emphasis that this poem places on feeling is striking. Guillevic suggests that such is the scale of our implication in material or 21 ‘Familier’, in Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales, https:// www.cnrtl.fr/definition/familier (consulted 27 October 2016). 22 Eugène Guillevic, Maintenant: poème (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 148.

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cosmological processes that we can never hope to fully understand the myriad ways in which we are implicated in them. And yet, he implies that we can still continue to feel our involvement in these processes. He suggests that there is more to existence that can be felt rather than known, and that humanity’s sensory and intuitive capacities perhaps exceed its intellectual capacities. A similar idea is evoked in another of Guillevic’s late poems, ‘À mon frère le chêne’, written just two years before his death in 1997, in which the poet reflects on his relationship to an oak tree. 23 The title affirms a kinship that exists between the poet and the tree. In the opening lines, Guillevic acknowledges that the tree will not confirm his intuitions about what it feels: ‘Ce n’est pas toi, mon chêne, / Qui me diras si je divague, / Invente ou parle vrai’ (AMFC, 780). The poet has no illusions that the tree might speak or offer him some privileged form of access to its particular reality. He affirms, however, that he feels friendship for the tree and even senses that the tree reciprocates: ‘Pour moi, tu es un ami, / Ensemble nous rêvons, / Contents l’un de l’autre’ (AMFC, 780). This might seem wilfully naive, or even like the worst form of narcissistic anthropocentrism, but the questions that follow reveal the poet’s perspicacity about such issues: ‘Et si ce n’était que pure imagination? / Si tu m’ignorais, vivant ton monde / Où je n’ai pas accès?’ (AMFC, 780). The poet knows that these are all very real possibilities. The plant’s way of ‘living its world’, as Guillevic phrases it, might be entirely inaccessible to the poet. Yet all his questions hang open. He realizes that rational thought will tell him nothing conclusive about any of these questions. It cannot prove or disprove what the plant feels, or even that the plant feels. Guillevic observes, ‘Rien, ni personne pour me dire ce qu’il en est’ (AMFC, 780). And so, the poem ends with a kind of wager. The poet asserts that he will trust in feeling and in the intuition that affect is not a uniquely human capacity: ‘Je continue donc à te vivre en frère—/ Pourquoi renoncer à ce que je sens?’ (AMFC, 780). He accepts the feeling of friendship or kinship that binds him to the plant. The poem thus concludes with a very different kind of question. Unlike the previous questions, it does not seek to cast doubt on the poet’s affective intuitions. On the contrary, it seeks to play thought at its own game. ‘Pourquoi renoncer à ce que je sens?’, Guillevic asks. There is, 23 Eugène Guillevic, ‘À mon frère le chêne’, in Relier: poèmes, 1938–1996, ed. Lucie Guillevic-Albertini (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), p. 780. Subsequent citations are to AMFC in the text.

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of course, no answer to this question either. When confronted with the question of feeling, thought cannot respond decisively. Thought’s inherent groundlessness becomes apparent. And so the poet wonders, if rational thought cannot decide upon the status or value of ‘ce que je sens’, what can it say about what a plant might feel? If we have no means of rationally understanding inner experience, why should we discount the partial and provisional knowledge afforded by feeling, and the questions that it opens up? Guillevic’s questions about how the oak tree might ‘live its world’ change the status of plants, granting them a potential autonomy and agency, but they also change the status of human thought. Confronted with the unusual question of ‘what it is like to be a plant’, thought suddenly appears diffident and uncertain. It only has recourse to questions. And Guillevic suggests that this uncertainty is perhaps not merely symptomatic of humanity’s interactions with plants but defines human thought in general. The collection Trouées (1981), which contains the section entitled ‘Familiers’, also contains a section entitled ‘Comparutions’ which comprises the three poems ‘Laurier’, ‘Feuille’ and ‘Tilleul’. Like the term familiers, ‘Comparutions’ suggests the intimate nature of the poet’s relationship with these plants. Using a coinage that is also employed by Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean Christophe Bailly, Guillevic hints that humans and plants are not autonomous entities but mutually constitutive forms that have evolved side by side, steadily adapting to and forming one another. 24 The third poem in this section, ‘Tilleul’, interrogates the potential sentience of a lime tree. But it begins, first of all, with a reflection on the nature of the poet’s own consciousness and the act of questioning: ‘Si j’interroge / Mon interrogation, / C’est que je suis interrogé’. 25 The poet reflects on the act of questioning. If I question my questioning, he speculates, if I am self-conscious or self-doubting, it is because—or it follows that—‘je suis interrogé’. I am questioning and questioned. And one might also suggest, I am questionable. There are many echoes here, but the strongest is Descartes’s interrogation of the nature of human subjectivity in Discours de la méthode and his famous affirmation ‘cogito ergo sum’. 26 Descartes suggests that once we have 24 Jean-Christophe Bailly and Jean-Luc Nancy, La Comparution (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2007). 25 Eugène Guillevic, ‘Tilleul’, in Trouées: poèmes 1973–80 (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), pp. 58–59. Subsequent citations are to T in the text. 26 We can also hear the echo of Rimbaud’s own challenge to Descartes’s cogito,

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questioned everything else, we can affirm the reality of human thought and, in turn, the reality of the self. Against Descartes, the opening lines of Guillevic’s poem suggest that when we question everything—including our questioning—we are left with questions. He presents thought, and the self to which it gives rise, as an endlessly interrogative dynamic. He suggests that it is not an indisputable foundation for knowledge but a restless and uncertain projection forwards. Like most of Guillevic’s long poems, ‘Tilleul’ aligns a series of short formulations, separated by asterisks, each one venturing a proposition or hypothesis. The next formulation contrasts the poet’s questioning with the plant’s purely material growth, much in the same way that Ponge does in ‘Le Cycle des saisons’. The poet observes that, whereas human subjectivity is inherently interrogative, ‘Apparemment / Le tilleul ne l’est guère. / Lui fait ses feuilles, / En effet’ (T, 58). The lime tree is materially generative; it exists only ‘en effet’. But the poet’s use of the word feuille here makes him hesitate. The homophonic concurrence of the terms ‘leaf’ and ‘page’ that prompted Ponge to juxtapose plant growth and writing now causes Guillevic to equivocate and to wonder whether the opposition between the tree’s material life and our cognisant life is as simple as we normally assume. Does the coincidence of these two notions within the word feuille only have material implications? Guillevic writes: ‘Moi aussi, / Je fais mes feuilles. / Poème écrit, / Feuille poussée. / Et le tilleul, / Alors?’ (T, 58–59). As the poet inverts the standard terms of this analogy, the lime tree suddenly resonates with a host of unthought and unquestioned possibilities: ‘Et le tilleul, / Alors?’ The poet starts to wonder whether the tree’s physical activities could also be interrogative or speculative: ‘Ses feuilles poussées, / Il interroge aussi / Son interrogation?’ (T, 59). Could all material processes be as multifaceted as the physical act of writing? Can growth also be perceived as a form of interrogation? And if this were so, how would we know or prove such a thing? Guillevic responds to all these questions with the words: ‘Possible, / Après tout’ (T, 58). Set between two asterisks, this brief formulation occupies a space all of its own, bathing in the surrounding whiteness rather like a Mallarmean ‘peut-être’, relishing the affirmation of the indefinite. ‘je est un autre’. Rimbaud affirms an alterity that is operative within human subjectivity by suggesting that the self comes into being through the interplay of interior and exterior, active and passive forces. Unlike Rimbaud, Guillevic places the emphasis not on the presence of the other but on the dynamic of interrogation.

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The next sequence returns to the notion of questioning: ‘Interrogation / Sur interrogation’. Punning on the word ‘sur’, Guillevic suggests that the questioning of questioning leads to questions after questions. He implies that questioning is endless and perhaps extends far beyond us. The poet’s sense of uncertainty and wonder steadily increases and the poem ends with three final questions: Maintenant, Le tilleul en plus? Les interrogations De mon tilleul?    * En plus, Vraiment? (T, 59)

The lime tree too? The idea seems almost too much to grasp. But once the poet opens up the possibility, more questions quickly follow. There is nothing but questions. We find ourselves immersed in the very process of questioning—and the questioning of questioning—that was described at the beginning of the poem. We become aware that the poet’s definition of thought as an essentially interrogative dynamic makes it strangely difficult to discount the possibility that plants also think. Guillevic suggests that it is not the job of thought to verify or dismiss these possibilities but to entertain them. He suggests that the plant’s sentience is a real possibility, or at least that this possibility is real enough to change how we think of the plant and how we think of ourselves. We wonder: if thought is conceived as an uncertain prospective motion, is it really so different from plant growth? And are we really so different from plants? When Guillevic poses his final questions, he allows the suggestive formulation ‘En plus, / Vraiment?’ to hang in isolation. Echoing the previous question, ‘Le tilleul en plus?’, these final reiterations suggest the endless nature of this process of questioning. But there is also the subtle suggestion, because this final formulation does hang in isolation, that it is also asking whether ‘l’interrogation’ might be ‘en plus’, which is to say, en surcroît or en surabondance. Is thought abundant or even excessive? Are my questions part of a larger process of questioning? The final ‘Vraiment?’ reiterates the earlier questions too but also offers a final wry redefinition of truth. In a world in which thought investigates its implication in processes that exceed it—like the leaf within the tree, and

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the tree within the earth—Guillevic asks whether truth might be better defined not as a statement of fact but as a dynamic of enquiry. Guillevic’s poems about plants interrogate a dynamic of enquiry that is ‘en plus’. And in this respect, Guillevic overturns the epistemological approach to other worldly beings that is adopted by his peers. Ponge lends plants voice in order to give them form. From one exuberant clause to the next, he allows figurative language to flourish. He believes that only language’s comparative structures can give the trees depth and distinction, rescuing them from what he describes as ‘la non-conscience’ in Le Carnet du bois de pins.27 Jaccottet’s texts attend to the plant’s essential autonomy or privacy. He leaves us vacillating on a threshold that we cannot cross, reaching, at the limits of human experience and in the interstices of language, towards the plant’s ungraspable otherness. Guillevic’s poetry resists the duality of both these modes of thought. It refuses both the idea that being is necessarily mediated by thought, and that being in its intimacy is alien to thought. Guillevic feels that the cleft between the human and the non-human is not an exceptional divide. He uses the question form to demonstrate that thought, on its own terms, cannot prove its uniqueness; that it cannot define or definitively ground itself where we know it does exist, within ourselves. So how, he asks, are we able to define its limits securely within the realms of the human? When thought keeps ungrounding itself, when it is so slippery, how can we know that we would recognize it if we came across it in another entity? The questions keep coming. Guillevic turns the tables on the traditional processes of enquiry of rational scepticism, demonstrating that thought cannot ground itself in any kind of subjective base or foundation. And as he does so, another less cerebral, more embodied and affective dynamic of enquiry makes itself felt within his poems. At the end of ‘Mon ami, le chêne’, the poet decides to trust in what he feels and continues to relish the feelings of reciprocal enjoyment that connect him to the oak tree. In ‘La feuille sent-elle’, as the poet questions whether the leaf senses its involvement in larger material processes, he implies that feeling is primary precisely because we are all immersed in processes that exceed us and that we can only sense vaguely or uncertainly. And in ‘Tilleul’, as the poet presents human subjectivity as a process of interrogation, he suggests that the cerebral dimension of this activity is inseparable from its corporeal and 27 Francis Ponge, Le Carnet du bois de pins, in Œuvres complètes, Vol. I, ed. Bernard Beugnot (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), p. 384.

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material dimensions. The poet hints that interrogation is perhaps more widespread and diffuse a process than we normally assume. He invites us to perceive it as a general, worldly processes of striving, solicitation and communication. One of the striking features of all Guillevic’s interrogative poems about plants is that the more questions the poet poses about the possibility of plant sentience, the more it comes to seem like a real possibility. The poet may repeat questions in incredulity or shock, but he is trapped in something of a vicious cycle. For each new question makes the praxis of the act of questioning more apparent. The poet tests out a hypothesis, questions it, ventures a counterhypothesis, hesitates, heads in a new direction. And the more he probes, the more sinuous and plant-like his thought seems. The formal dynamics of the poem steadily persuade him of the inseparable nature of the material and the speculative. They suggest that speculation is perhaps simply a manifestation of the world’s more primary dynamics of physical enquiry. And so, the poet embraces a Baudelairean practice of ‘conjecture’ or a Mallarmean thinking of suspens but he grants these notions an ontological status. He proposes that all life—human, animal, floral, bacterial, viral—moves forward tentatively and speculatively, each organism reaching outwards without knowing what it is moving towards, wondering what possibilities this motion will engender. He suggests that the questioning of existence is the very praxis of existence. And so, if Guillevic adopts an anthropomorphic approach towards plants, it is not in order to impose human characteristics upon them. The form of speculation that he cultivates is not naive or narcissistic. He uses anthropocentrism tactically, as both Bennett and Shaviro do, to counteract the anthropocentrism of traditional structures of thought. It is in this respect that his work resembles Shaviro’s Whiteheadian brand of speculative realism. For, like Guillevic, Shaviro seeks to avoid the ‘pernicious dualism that would insist that humans alone […] have feelings’. He argues that ‘perception, feeling, and aesthetics are universal structures’. 28 Affirming the primacy of affect, he contends that it is a general worldly disposition that is shared by all entities. He presents the act of writing as an attempt to tap into this particular modality of being, as an attempt to ‘think outside of our own thought’ and to ‘conceive of things positively outside of our own conceptions of them’. 29 To do so, 28 Shaviro, Universe, p. 61. 29 Shaviro, Universe, p. 67.

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he suggests, we have to probe a dimension of being that is ‘immanently active, productive, and formative’. 30 We have to probe the world’s creative and agential force, a dynamic that precedes and exceeds us, even if it implicates us. The formal process of experimentation that the writer undertakes is perceived as a way of participating in this larger creative force. Both the poet and the philosopher suggest that we participate uncertainly, feeling our way forward in much the same way that a plant tentatively sends out shoots, sensing the influence of other forces that articulate themselves ‘in an entirely different register’. 31 In the short poem cited at the start of this chapter, which appears in the collection Maintenant (1993), Guillevic asks a question that subverts the conception of creation as it is presented by the Christian creation story. He observes that ‘you’ tend to talk on behalf of the tree and the blackbird and, yet, ‘you’ are neither tree nor blackbird. He then asks: ‘Et si c’était eux / Qui t’avaient fait à leur image?’ His question suggests that creativity is not possessed by human beings alone but also by plants and animals. Overturning the idea that we are made in God’s image, it asks us to consider the possibility that we have been made in the image of other animals. We have been subjected to their creative powers and shaped by them. The reversal that this poem effects is very similar to the reversal that ‘Tilleul’ brings about when it suggests that questioning is perhaps not merely something we do but a force that exceeds us and brings us into being. In both poems, there is something deeply thrilling about the way that Guillevic’s questions overturn our deep-set preconceptions about creativity and sentience and redefine our understanding of poetry’s own formative activity. For as Guillevic aligns the gestures by which a leaf and a question unfurl, as he suggests that creativity and agency precede and exceed human existence, he insists that poetic form is not a special mode of mediation between the human and the non-human, the self and the world, the mindful and the mechanical. On the contrary, he proposes, as Shaviro does, that the non-human world ‘not only exists without us and apart from our conceptualizations of it but is actually organized or articulated in some manner, in its own right, without any help from us’. 32 He suggests that form is omnipresent and we are in it. His interrogative poems elaborate an ahierachical thinking of form—what Shaviro describes as an aesthetics—that allows us as 30 Shaviro, Universe, p. 99. 31 Shaviro, Universe, p. 148. 32 Shaviro, Universe, p. 68.

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readers to sense the ways that form plays through us and through the poem, all around us, with and without us. His questions are thrilling because they allow us to feel the agency of form in this way, an agency that is ‘en plus’, and that invites us to participate in its larger dynamic of interrogation.

chapter sixteen

Certeau’s Landscapes What Can Images Do? Patrick O’Donovan What Can Images Do?

‘Le grand murmure’ and the Multiplicity of Form What Michel de Certeau termed ‘le grand murmure’ can be equated both with the ungovernable, incalculable, unmappable, irreversible course of the everyday and, reflexively, with the forms that we can give to it.1 This dual aspect of form, both anthropological and figurative, will be our main focus here. 2 Certeau’s L’Invention du quotidien begins with an invocation of ‘l’homme ordinaire’, a self-conscious reinvention of the inaugural gesture of epic—and, by extension, an appeal to the immemorial agency of form (IQ, 11). His preoccupation with precarious environments and our uncertain access to them 1 To quote Certeau’s characterization of his object: ‘la réalité, le réel, le grand murmure, ce qui se fait, des conflits’, in an interview with Jacques Chancel on Radioscopie, 22 October 1975, https://www.ina.fr/audio/PHD95075218/ (consulted 7 January 2016). Certeau’s object is to theorize and document the ‘quotidien’ as it manifests itself in ‘les opérations des usagers’, via a series of ‘récits’ centred on ‘des pratiques communes’, in L’Invention du quotidien, 1, Arts de faire, ed. L. Giard (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. xxxv, xxxiii. All future references to this work, abbreviated to IQ, will be given in parentheses in the text. 2 Such a duality shaped Michel Foucault’s thinking also: the ‘murmure indéfini’ of the written record was one dimension of his conception of the archive, alongside the ‘bruit sourd’ of lived experience, as Michael Sheringham shows in ‘Michel Foucault, Pierre Rivière and the Archival Imaginary’, Comparative Critical Studies 8.2–3 (2011), 235–57 (p. 236).

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prompts him to have recourse to the category of form in several discrete but interrelated ways. Thus, for instance, the ‘murmure’ remains of undiminished ethnographic importance today, as Certeau insisted: ‘Aujourd’hui, ces pratiques portant le secret de notre raison n’ont plus figure aussi lointaine. Avec le temps, elles se rapprochent’. And yet, though proximate, they assume a ‘forme “ethnologique”’, meaning that their otherness remains irreducible (IQ, 101–02). Form is the salient aspect of this ethnographic reality in all of its urgency. How we conceptualize it is a matter of form too, in that a figure like metaphor, on which we may call in performing this task, is itself what Certeau terms a ‘forme interrogative’. 3 We see ‘faire’ and ‘dire’, the domains of agent and observer respectively, suddenly brought into relation, but the act of stating what is done is not to be conceived of simply as ‘un rapport de contenant à contenu’. It is rather ‘une articulation de termes différents’, in other words a mobilization, of forms that somehow discloses ‘le silence immense de la pratique’.4 In such moments, ‘le sol du réel manque’5 and the interaction of discrete forms, ethnological as well as figurative, permits a contact with practice that has an emancipatory as much as a cognitive impact. The issues in debate here—the performative role of form in connecting text to experience, or the postulation of alternatives to the real as currently or generally configured—are central to Certeau’s project, so much so that it finds itself exposed to the risk of the failure of form. Hence his question to himself at the outset: ‘De cette histoire muette, que dire?’ (IQ, xxxiii). The image in particular may provide some remedy, even in contexts that tend more towards the anthropological than the literary, as we shall see in comparing Certeau to more recent writers, all of whom call upon us to think not only about the relationship between form and the agency of literature, but also about what ideas, arguments, theoretical interventions may owe to the agency of form. What, then, is Certeau doing as a cultural theorist when he does things with form? And 3 Michel de Certeau, La Faiblesse de croire, ed. L. Giard (Paris: Seuil, 1987), p. 288. Compare Paul Rabinow, for whom writing, as distinct from fieldwork or participant observation, is the paramount ‘practice of figuration’ in an anthropology, like Certeau’s, that is concerned with what is near at hand. See Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 77. 4 Certeau, La Faiblesse de croire, pp. 220–22. 5 Michel de Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction, ed. L. Giard (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 136.

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what precisely is the context in which he and some others prompt the more specific question: What can images do? Image and Argument What form can do in Certeau’s writing is in part a matter of what images do, of how they contribute to ‘bringing the contingencies of utterance to bear on sites otherwise monopolized by controlling discourses’, to quote Michael Sheringham.6 But it is also in part a matter of how images are represented, given the recurrent impetus that they give to theorizing. It is this twofold thread in L’Invention du quotidien that will be our concern now, before we turn to the issue of how the reception and the subsequent transformations of Certeau’s images on the part of three anthropologists—Tim Ingold, Philippe Descola and Eduardo Kohn—have taken the matter of form and agency further. Certeau’s celebrated book, first published in 1980, juxtaposes a series of diverse theoretical investigations with some récits of the type through which he aims to reinvent a relation with the everyday. He presents the first two of five parts as a kind of ‘conclusion prospective’ (IQ, 11), and these will be our main focus. As well as being a site of risk, the book is liminal: it is purposefully addressed to creating new conditions for research in the future. From the start, Certeau emphasizes the subordinate position that the writing of this research occupies relative to the incalculable mass of its material. The chemins that it will take are just that—indications of research questions pursued or to be pursued: ‘je voudrais présenter le paysage d’une recherche et, par cette composition de lieu, indiquer les repères entre lesquels se déroule une action’ (IQ, xxxiii). By the same token, the register is of necessity figurative: the wayward directions and temporalities of these chemins are to be inferred from the metaphor of the sol over which they will extend, and are at the limit untrackable. The imaginary is significant also because it keeps in play the variability and the unpredictability of everyday life, and specifically those features that might otherwise be lost to knowledge. Images, several of them recurrent, form a highly visible part of Certeau’s initial exposition of his project, usually in connection with natural landscapes or human 6 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 212.

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engagements with these. An instance that comes immediately to mind is the protean figure of the marche for which Certeau has become legendary, as when he refers to ‘cet entrelacs de parcours’ which, ‘bien loin de constituer une clôture, prépare, je l’espère, un cheminement à se perdre dans la foule’ (IQ, xxxiv). The figurative latency of the crowd, as multiform source of effective practices, is connoted by fluvial and maritime images with which it is linked: ‘C’est une foule souple et continue, […] une multitude de héros quantifiés qui perdent noms et visages en devenant le langage mobile de calculs et de rationalités n’appartenant à personne. Fleuves chiffrés de la rue’ (IQ, 12). The maritime association is in turn brought to bear on the task of characterizing the kind of investigation that Certeau is poised to undertake: ‘Même si elle est aspirée par la rumeur océanique de l’ordinaire, la tâche ne consiste pas à lui substituer une représentation […] mais à montrer comment elle s’introduit dans nos techniques—à la façon dont la mer revient dans les creux des plages—et peut réorganiser la place d’où le discours se produit’ (IQ, 19).7 It is only by conceiving of the investigation of so elusive an object as being situated in a nightscape that we can imagine it being realized, and even then only tentatively: ‘Le but serait atteint si les pratiques ou “manières de faire” quotidiennes cessaient de figurer comme le fond nocturne de l’activité sociale, et si un ensemble de questions théoriques, de méthodes, de catégories et de vues, en traversant cette nuit, permettait de l’articuler’ (IQ, xxxv). Here, it is as if the ‘night’ of occulted social practices might be breached, though not dispelled. The outcome of this thread is the identification of the imagined subject of the investigation with the successive figures that connote also the traces of his/her passage: ‘Ce héros anonyme vient de très loin. C’est le murmure des sociétés’ (IQ, 11). The imaginary is a mode, not so much of access as of a highly conditioned mediation of practices that are themselves understood as forms or, as Certeau puts it, ‘poésies insues’ (IQ, 141). The ‘expérience’ of space that results is layered: it has the potential to be all at once ‘“anthropologique”, poétique et mythique’ (IQ, 142). And, in a conceptual move, what Certeau proposes as a translation of the image as mark of 7 The sea’s edge is not the only site that can be assigned an emblematic and recurrent imaginary value, as a comparison with Yves Bonnefoy can show: ‘Si les rivages m’attirent, plus encore l’idée d’un pays en profondeur, défendu par l’ampleur de ses montagnes, scellé comme l’inconscient’. See L’Arrière-pays (Geneva: Skira, 1972), p. 15.

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experience is precisely the figure of metaphor: ‘Une ville transhumante, ou métaphorique, s’insinue ainsi dans le texte clair de la ville planifiée et lisible’ (IQ, 142). As Certeau rehearses in a highly implicit way the premises of the investigation on which he is about to embark, he appeals almost unconsciously to images in the opening chapters of L’Invention du quotidien, so testifying to the scope of form to shed some light on the kind of va-et-vient that is taking place—in all of its nocturnal mystery. The object and the analysis, everyday practices and the landscape in which they are performed, converge notably on the basis of the repeated metaphor of exploratory transit on foot. And yet, the point of view of the agent is anything but given: ‘Les pratiques de la consommation sont les fantômes de la société qui porte leur nom. Comme les “esprits” de jadis, elles constituent le postulat multiforme et occulte de l’activité productrice’ (IQ, 58). Certeau first hints at a ghostly manifestation of the supposed marcheurs, as if to pre-empt any facile elaboration of a model through which to recount their practices. He proceeds instead by shifts and adjustments, insisting on the properly temporal, rather than spatial, character of action. But then, the model of the trajectory to which he appeals at first is very rapidly called into question: ‘elle métamorphose l’articulation temporelle des lieux en une suite spatiale de points’ (IQ, 59). It is through the revision of the image of the trace that the argument advances: practice is irreversible, but a putative trajectory is problematic because it supposes an enduring trace. In brief, no image can substitute for the moment, if the remainder of everyday ‘performances’ is not also to be ‘le signe de leur effacement’ (IQ, 59). In response, Certeau goes on to propose the now proverbial distinction between strategy and tactics: ‘j’appelle tactique l’action calculée que détermine l’absence d’un propre […] La tactique n’a pour lieu que celui de l’autre. Aussi doit-elle jouer avec le terrain qui lui est imposé tel que l’organise la loi d’une force étrangère’ (IQ, 60). The logic of tactical moves is articulated not so much in images as in the concept of metaphor itself: the absence of the proper creates a void and, just as in metaphor, ‘la tactique’ comes into being by means of a displacement, by making its ‘lieu’ out of that of the other. Certeau’s practice of arguing on the basis of images is overt, not only because of the cumulative impact of recurring tropes, but also because the image is fully and explicitly assumed in and of itself: ‘Le flux est monté […] Dans ses eaux, il roule et disperse les œuvres, jadis insulaires, muées aujourd’hui en gouttes d’eau dans la mer, ou en métaphores d’une dissémination langagière qui n’a plus d’auteur mais devient le discours ou la citation indéfinie de l’autre’ (IQ, 13). So,

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‘flux’, a metaphor, is compared to metaphor and, in turn, literature— understood not as a canon, but a practice of intertextual dispersal, assuming the eclipse of the author and the erasure of proper nouns. It is worth noting that the model of the trajectory, which a few pages later Certeau will go on to rehearse and then reject, is metonymical. The liquid image before us is, by contrast, explicitly metaphorical: the limitless field of effective practices is the unspoken tenor, the ‘flux’, the vehicle. But the latter is then remobilized so as to represent the alternative conceptual space differently again—as if metaphor as such is the means by which the agency of form is extended to argument. ‘Le paysage imaginaire’: What Is an Image? In brief, the turn to images is one condition of the enquiry whose focus, methods and figures Certeau rehearses on behalf of his collaborators.8 At the same time, he makes use of the terms ‘image’ and ‘imaginaire’ in theoretical contexts also. We come now to two pages of the work that demand closer attention for this reason. These open with an image that addresses not so much the elusive object as the landscape within which the emergent investigative récit might situate it: ‘A scruter cette réalité fuyante et permanente, on a l’impression d’explorer la nuit des sociétés, une nuit plus longue que leurs jours’ (IQ, 67). Though neither agent nor observer is mentioned at the outset, it is the latter’s access to the point of view of the former within the unpredictable terrain of effective practices that is at issue. What does the image say? The reality—to use Certeau’s term—of effective social practices is one in perpetual flight, one that can never be exhaustively mapped: ‘nappe obscure où se découpent des institutions successives, immensité maritime où les appareils socio-économiques et politiques feraient figure d’insularités éphémères’ (IQ, 67). There is then a sharp change of direction, opening with the theoretical claim that ‘Le paysage imaginaire d’une recherche n’est pas sans valeur, même s’il n’a pas de rigueur’ (IQ, 67). What the image does is keep in play the variability and unpredictability of the everyday, for these are features of life that would otherwise evade analysis: ‘Il maintient donc présente la structure 8 For an appraisal of the wider project undertaken with Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol of which the first volume of L’Invention du quotidien forms part, see Sheringham, Everyday Life, pp. 237–39.

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d’un imaginaire social d’où la question ne cesse de prendre des formes différentes et de repartir’ (IQ, 67; emphasis added). But not all of this is fully spelt out; rather, it is to be inferred from the several distinct claims that he does make. Certeau’s first move is the concessive claim, as we just saw. But if images do in some sense provide access to tactics and ruses in all their multiplicity, it is because they are ghosts: ‘Il assure au moins leur présence à titre de revenants. Ce retour sur une autre scène rappelle ainsi le rapport que l’expérience de ces pratiques entretient avec ce qu’en expose une analyse’ (IQ, 67). The image, as image, testifies to the impossibility of closing the gap between tactics and an analytical inquiry considered as a strategic intervention, and so, notwithstanding the opening qualification, proves to be an indispensable element of research.9 Certeau closes by making the crucial, albeit compressed, claim that this imaginary space extends to embrace the observer. In other words, the image is reflexive and so will have a critical impact on the investigation in which it arises. The image transforms the silent ‘expert’, no less than the agent under observation, into something ghostly: ‘De ce que chacun fait, qu’est-ce qui s’écrit? Entre les deux, l’image, fantôme du corps expert et muet, préserve la différence’ (IQ, 68). The image, in conclusion, demands theoretical attention because it points to the limits of the anthropological investigation of which it forms part. The putative ‘landscape’ of the investigation exists, then, in the mode of the imaginary and Certeau claims that, as such, it thus has a ‘valeur de rectificatif’ (IQ, 67). This compressed claim is an allusion to Gaston Bachelard, for whom rectification is the self-correcting activity of thought before the real: we ‘approach’ knowledge through the constant search for greater precision and certainty.10 Critical to Bachelard’s adoption of this as an epistemological principle is the premise that scientific knowledge thus elaborated (or ‘approached’) absolutely prevails over ordinary beliefs. What is remarkable about Certeau’s appropriation of this idea is that he substitutes, in effect, the other for the real with which Bachelard engages on the basis of a rationalist epistemology. The image, in other words, subjects scientific knowledge itself to rectification: the 9 The connoted object has the power to modify the observer, as Certeau acknowledges in a further variant of the figure of the nocturnal seascape: ‘cette nuit océanique me fascine et m’interroge’. Michel de Certeau, La Culture au pluriel, ed. L. Giard (Paris: Seuil, 1993), p. 211. 10 Gaston Bachelard, Essai sur la connaissance approchée (Paris: Vrin, 1927), p. 16.

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suspension of the objective point of view is a pre-emptive swerve that allows the investigation to remain attentive to ‘manières de faire’. But no other avenue is open to us: this counter-rectification is consistent with what Certeau elsewhere calls the ‘vérification visible de l’invisible’.11 In addition, it is informed by a holistic rationale of its own, amounting to a ‘thérapeutique globale’ that pre-empts a reductive ‘examen latéral’ (IQ, 67). To the extent that everyday practices imply a reappropriation of the social environment, they give rise to ‘une thérapeutique de socialités détériorées’ (IQ, liii), and Certeau here concludes that it is through the image that this effect is realized. This extended commentary, which marks the end of Certeau’s initial exploration of the challenges of everyday practice, seems at once something improvised and, in the cryptic negotiation of its stance vis-à-vis a purportedly scientific point of view, something highly orchestrated. It is in its own way a liminal performance. It should also be noted that Certeau’s wider conception of the practice that he seeks to elaborate here displays the same liminality. Much later in L’Invention du quotidien, he comments to this effect on the projected exploratory narrative: ‘Les reliques verbales dont le récit est composé, liées à des histoires perdues et à des gestes opaques, sont juxtaposées dans un collage où leurs rapports ne sont pas pensés et forment, de ce fait, un ensemble symbolique. Elles s’articulent par des lacunes’ (IQ, 161). The ‘récit’ into which the imaginary landscape will eventually be incorporated conveys only what can be glimpsed in interstices, or in residual ‘lacunes’, like the image as sign of the gap between what happens and what comes to be written. Certeau refers often in L’Invention du quotidien to Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Les Ruses de l’intelligence, first published in 1974. The mètis that Detienne and Vernant analyse is ‘une forme d’intelligence’ that is always embedded in practice and falls much more on the side of tactics than that of strategy. Form is one of its aspects: ‘elle multiplie les masques et les métaphores: c’est une défection du lieu propre’ (IQ, 124). This is an instance of form that operates, like those 11 Certeau, La Faiblesse de croire, p. 226. Certeau’s allusion to Bachelard may well be indirect, in that elements of his epistemology are likely to have been mediated via the work of Foucault and Georges Canguilhem (on the latter, see La Faiblesse de croire, pp. 209–10). Certeau elsewhere aligns Bachelard’s thinking more or less directly with models that privilege unconscious archetypes or notions of the collective unconscious, of which he tends to be critical. See Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 33, 39, 51.

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we have already witnessed, on both sides of the relation between agent and observer, and for this reason has a notable theoretical import. It is this dimension that we shall now consider more closely, as we see how images derived directly or indirectly from Certeau recur in the work of other theorists writing today, among them Tim Ingold. Ingold in effect generalizes Certeau’s images to produce new representations of relations between persons and things. Like Certeau, he moves between the denotative and the connotative, and reinvents the imaginary register accordingly—extending it to lines, meshworks, knots: ‘When everything tangles with everything else, the result is what I call a meshwork. To describe the meshwork is to start from the premise that every living being is a line or, better, a bundle of lines’.12 Ingold’s engagement with Certeau is explicit and draws on the key distinctions we have seen him elaborate: ‘the line is tactical rather than strategic: its paths are “wandering” or “errant”’.13 The models derived from him are considerably adapted—a version, in brief, of the as yet indeterminate future to which Certeau himself looked in what was an avowedly experimental venture on his part. Certeau’s abandoned notion of the trajectory is extended into further categories, which generate in turn discrete new relations and their dependent forms. These can be positioned between the referential and the figurative, and, like Certeau’s analyses, have an epistemological dimension in that, here too, the claims of purely objective interventions are heavily qualified: ‘[Geometry and meteorology] are premised on the logical operation that I have called “inversion”, by which the pathways of growth and movement along which life is lived are converted into boundaries within which it is contained’.14 A modified landscape is the outcome, with a focus on environments, their uses and their contours: ‘In this zone of entanglement […] there are no insides or outsides, only openings and ways through. An ecology of life […] must be one of threads and traces, not of nodes and connectors  […] Ecology is the study of the life of lines’.15 The impact is felt not only in anthropology as a discipline, via a reconfiguration of the relationship between observers and participants 12 Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 3. 13 Ingold, The Life of Lines, p. 59. 14 Ingold, The Life of Lines, p. 53. Certeau too uses the term ‘inversion’, but rather to designate the tentative disclosure of an otherwise occluded element of practice (IQ, 99), or, to adapt Ingold’s model, a ‘counter-inversion’. 15 Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 103. The

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but also, Ingold claims, in ways of life: ‘like people everywhere and at all times, we are both observers and participants […] Participant observation […] is a practice of correspondence […] [anthropology] is to join with others in an ongoing exploration of what the possibilities and potentials of life might be’.16 What was for Certeau a critical gap is narrowed in ways that create new investigative options, that make all of us participant ‘experts’, that make the future possible. Thus, Ingold’s main ambition converges with that of Certeau in L’Invention du quotidien, namely to sketch the ground of future practice, though it should be noted that in most cases what was for Certeau a metaphorical vehicle, like the cheminement, here becomes the ethnographic tenor to be understood and interpreted, via the image. At the same time, the issue of practice continues to call for a rectification, so as to expose and to counter the misplaced logic of inversion. Form and Thought—Beyond the Human? Certeau’s example is decisive in that, in its pioneering engagements with the ordinary and the everyday, it compels us to acknowledge the existential vulnerability that the mediation of practice can disclose. Philippe Descola converges with Certeau in giving primacy above all other investigative considerations to what he terms ‘le foisonnement des usages’. They both display a sense of the ecological urgency that results from a commitment to what each terms ‘le grand murmure’— another way of referring to this foisonnement.17 Certeau and Descola seem, then, to share an approach to practice in which our engagement with an endangered world demands that we find ways to transmit our understanding of it to a future from which we may be excluded. Descola’s concern is with the risk of environmental or human annihilation, or both, and in turn the heightened ephemerality of the usages that are the characteristic object of anthropology. Its task and its lesson are reinvented in the light of this sense of threat—so Descola repeatedly concept of the meshwork is comparable to Certeau’s definition of ‘l’espace’ as a ‘lieu pratiqué’ (IQ, 173). 16 Ingold, The Life of Lines, p. 157. 17 Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 203. Both writers use the same phrase in similar contexts, though Descola makes no reference to Certeau.

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insists. Thus his call to expand its scope to encompass humans and non-humans alike. At the root of ‘une universalité nouvelle’ in which the distinction between nature and culture is dissolved, there is still the same ‘grand murmure’.18 But, when it comes to sustainability, the scale of the ordinary is vastly expanded; likewise the import of the irreversibility of time. Under these conditions, the exploratory commitment to the foisonnement to which Descola refers is at once everything and nothing. Descola understands anthropology as a theoretical framework that draws on ethnographic fieldwork and then in turn on comparative analysis in ethnology, in order to produce a systematic account of discrete modes of identification and of relation. He extends its scope beyond ‘l’anthropos’ in isolation to embrace ‘toute cette collectivité des existants liée à lui et reléguée à présent dans une fonction d’entourage’.19 Discrete forms of identification and relation then interact, meaning that exchanges among existants fall into one of four ontologies: animism, totemism, naturalism and analogy. 20 While his approach is quite different from that of Certeau, Descola nonetheless appeals to the same intimations of the incalculable mass of all usages, as we have seen. The ‘quotidien’ emerges as an ethnographic reality with its immediate interpretative challenges, which Descola addresses by adapting Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of totemism. What Descola terms ‘le grand murmure’, by contrast, exists on an anthropological scale and demands a comparative approach, drawing on ethnographic and ethnological work on different themes in different zones. 21 The imaginary here is no more than latent in the mention of this figurative undercurrent of sound, though perhaps for that reason it retains some of its performative potential. As with Certeau, it is in the name of a commitment to the full expression of this murmure that the work is undertaken. It is a task that implicates ‘chacun d’entre nous’ and whose purpose is to ‘conjurer l’échéance lointaine à laquelle, avec l’extinction de notre espèce, le prix de la passivité serait payé d’une autre manière: en abandonnant au cosmos une nature devenue 18 Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, pp. 689, 203. 19 Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, p. 19. 20 An ontology is a multidisciplinary ‘science des êtres’ and not least of ‘relations encore à venir’, as Descola observes, in La Composition des mondes: entretiens avec Pierre Charbonnier (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), p. 245. 21 Descola, La Composition des mondes, pp. 157–58.

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orpheline de ses rapporteurs parce qu’ils n’avaient pas su lui concéder de véritables moyens d’expression’. 22 The threats that the world faces in the Anthropocene are not least those that an anthropology like Descola’s, with its stress on the ephemerality of cultural systems, might allow us to anticipate and—above all—to respond to.23 ‘Le grand murmure’ is, for Descola, the insistent if remote clamour of a vulnerability that we characteristically fail to acknowledge. He is not alone in seeking to reorient anthropology in the light of this concern. Like Descola, Eduardo Kohn aims to expand the range of conceptual tools on which we can draw in understanding environments encompassing humans and non-humans. Kohn’s account of how forests can be said to think is comparable to Descola’s approach in its insistence on the urgency of an anthropology that, in working to embrace all existants, takes us beyond an exclusive conception of thought as distinctively human. But then, he claims, ‘It is because thought extends beyond the human that we can think beyond the human’.24 Kohn brings us full circle, in that we again find that an expressive preoccupation with form is a means of conceptualizing our access to objects and relations, on the one hand, and of acknowledging a heightened awareness of their fragility and vulnerability, on the other. The anthropological acceptation of ‘form’ is accordingly revised: the ‘relational logic’ of the forest can only be grasped when we realize that form is ‘a strange but nonetheless worldly process of pattern production and propagation’, whose ‘generative logic’ is harnessed by humans and non-humans alike.25 In the process, both the vulnerability and the indeterminacy of the realities to which it relates come—just for a moment—into view. Form, thus, is itself no less ‘fragile and ephemeral’: ‘Like the vortices of the whirlpools that sometimes form in the swift-flowing Amazonian headwaters, it simply vanishes when the special geometry of constraints that sustains it disappears’.26 For Kohn as for Certeau, these forms are typically hidden, and for both the image also entails the need to break with standard methods of analysis. 22 Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, pp. 689–90. 23 Descola comments that in the Amazon every event assumes ‘une dimension cosmique’: in the absence of seasonal variation, this becomes a closed system lacking temporal depth. See Philippe Descola, Les Lances du crépuscule: relations jivaros. Haute-Amazonie (Paris: Plon, 1993), p. 85. 24 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 22. 25 Kohn, How Forests Think, p. 20. 26 Kohn, How Forests Think, p. 20.

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All of the images that we have encountered, because they are connotative much more than they are denotative, are themselves traces, fleeting forms of form.27 If we follow Kohn, they matter because of the access to a holistic semiosis they seem to proffer. The distinctive move in his argument lies in the appeal to form as an instance of ‘linkages across disjuncture’. Thus, ‘language is connected to the semiosis of the living world, which extends beyond it’.28 Form is—explicitly and recurrently—at issue, just as with Certeau, and some of its manifestations are likewise ghostly: ‘that spirits are a real part of an afterlife that extends beyond life tells us something about the continuity and generality of life itself’.29 Form, then, is the impetus by which we can broach the task—all at once supremely difficult and supremely compelling—of connecting such traces to those that have preceded them in deep time. 30 It falls to us now to cultivate these as ways of thinking, if the practices to which we are committed are to survive beyond the Anthropocene: this is the explicit burden of his argument. Form is a medium in which we—as one kind of existant among innumerable others—may endure, if only as a residual murmur, alongside all the other kinds of life that are, precisely, forms. It is thus one of the better hopes for a continuation that will exceed us and—perhaps—will still envelop us in the semiosis, or the boundless ‘thought’, of the living world. 31 27 Footprints represent a decisive though highly contingent trace. On the discovery of the oldest hominin prints outside Africa, deposited between 1 million and 0.78 million years ago (though they have since been obliterated by the tide), see Nick Ashton et al., ‘Hominin Footprints from Early Pleistocene Deposits at Happisburgh, UK’, PLoS ONE 9.2 (February 2014), https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0088329. 28 Kohn, How Forests Think, p. 226. 29 Kohn, How Forests Think, p. 226. Certeau too connects habitation to afterlives: ‘Il n’y a de lieu que hanté par des esprits multiples, tapis là en silence et qu’on peut “évoquer” ou non. On n’habite que des lieux hantés—schéma inverse de celui du Panopticon’ (IQ, 162). 30 See Jeremy Davies, who comments that the ‘idea of the Anthropocene simply couples the present crisis to the rest of geohistory, identifying it as yet another sharp and dangerous twist in the drama of deep time’, in The Birth of the Anthropocene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), p. 134. Compare Rabinow’s call for the human sciences to experiment with ‘forms’ that originate in mobility, and through which we can aspire ‘to take better care of things, ourselves, and others’, in Anthropos Today, pp. 136–37. 31 In his preface to the French translation of Kohn’s book, Philippe Descola extends the non-human to non-animate objects, on the basis that these too are to be viewed as agents that have a bearing on interactions, in Eduardo Kohn,

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Form: An ‘art de la relation’ Certeau’s preoccupation with form, and with the image as a kind of form, has endured and above all been transformed: for others too, it is as if the long ‘night’ of biosemiotic (following Descola and especially Kohn) as well as social practices might for a moment be suspended, if not definitively dispelled. As of today, his prime imperative goes some way to being vindicated: ‘le grand murmure’ has become the ground of an anthropology whose methods are open to the imaginary, following Ingold, or in which the theory of how we inhabit an endangered world finds its ultimate rationale in the effort to perpetuate our understandings of it, following Descola and Kohn. In this, we must all become experts. The image, like the real practices of which it is the imaginary vehicle, is ephemeral, because liminal. This is what gives it its value and its theoretical significance, and makes it equal to the contingency of the occasion: it actualizes an occasion that exists ‘only insofar as [it is] grasped’, to quote Sheringham; by definition, it is an aspect of ‘l’art de la relation’. 32 But the murmure is ceaseless. What results is at root a paradoxical and highly equivocal agency of form, leading Certeau to characterize his book in the end as ‘une fable indéterminée’ whose value lies in its espousal of ‘les pratiques métaphoriques’ of the everyday (IQ, 296). Certeau’s noctural identification with the elusive forms of cultural practice is, then, a kind of recherche, a reinvention of the choice that Proust saw as fateful between the novel and the essay. 33 The mobility of the image, its oscillation between the registers of the literary and the anthropological, testifies to the overwhelming pressure of the problem of accommodation, compounded as it is by an awareness—just as Proustian—of the irreversibility of time, which motivates the search for a form that yields to its ceaseless movement without being submerged by it. What might be termed the form of the form—in other words, the set of formal relations in which a specific form, here the image, can be said to be embedded—is ultimately dialogical; indeed intertextual, on the grounds that neither Descola nor Kohn, unlike Ingold, refers explicitly to Certeau. Comment pensent les forêts: vers une anthropologie au-delà de l’humain, tr. G. Delaplace (Brussels: Zones sensibles, 2017), p. 17. 32 Sheringham, Everyday Life, pp. 220, 231. 33 Marcel Proust, Carnets, ed. F. Callu and A. Compagnon (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 49–50.

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The image is also a medium of critical thinking: it is an outlet for the pressing question of the sufficiency of the ‘moyens d’expression’ on which we depend, to quote Descola again. But it is perhaps its form that accounts for the survival of Certeau’s work, even more than its real substantive claims. The recurrent image of the all too mobile observer, that ‘passant considérable’, 34 is at once a concession to the book’s anticipated effacement and a timely reminder of the urgency of the questions that it seeks to address: ‘l’expérience scriptuaire’ that results ‘se déploie sur le mode du rapport entre l’acte d’avancer et le sol mortifère où se trace son itinérance’ (IQ, 287). It is in this mode that the work is drawn upon by others in reconstructing and reactualizing the relationship between participation and observation, and not just from the vantage point of the expert ethnographer. By its engagement with form, ethnography gives voice to these pressing issues, urging ‘chacun d’entre nous’ to take them on. Certeau’s example, which lies in a now receding past, prompts us to ask how we might today conceive of a therapeutic practice of the image and of the discourses, both literary and anthropological, that it might sustain. The holism with which the image is identified, even in the sometimes residual form we find in the work of more recent writers, has become the unmistakable attribute of an anthropology of sustainability. The image is emancipatory in that, rather than claiming to represent the ordinary, it simply refers something of its murmure back to participant and observer alike, who find themselves altered as a result. The mobility of forms to which Certeau’s work is, as we have seen, an exemplary witness is compounded by the transmission and retransmission of ideas and images through time—that is where its significance is to be found today and from a Certalian point of view this is perhaps the most valuable outcome: that the image does come to be retransmitted, though in the process the intellectual missions with which it is so closely identified are carried forward too and adapted to new, no less urgent, ends. Certeau’s dream—that of conveying to the future some version of our ‘rapport’ with the ‘paysage imaginaire’—is precariously though joyously reaffirmed and, through the revaluation of the relationship between participant and observer, object and ‘rapporteur’, his ghostly expert is rejuvenated, and newly brought into relation with each of us.

34 Certeau, La Faiblesse de croire, p. 297, drawing on a phrase of Mallarmé speaking of Rimbaud.

chapter seventeen

A la dérive Drifting in and out of Form in French Literature and Visual Art from Bataille to Bergvall Eric Robertson Drifting in and out of Form

In his monumental book Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, Michael Sheringham provides a series of incisive readings of photographs by Jacques-André Boiffard.1 What makes Boiffard an especially intriguing figure is that his work was appropriated in the late 1920s by both the mainstream and the dissident factions of the Surrealist group. Indeed, some of the images examined in Sheringham’s book were commissioned to illustrate André Breton’s Surrealist narrative Nadja in 1928; the others appeared a year later in Documents, the journal edited in the margins of Surrealism by Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein and Michel Leiris. In his analysis of the images, Sheringham makes revealing distinctions between these two groups of photographs, and draws some important conclusions on the workings of the visual image within Surrealism more broadly. He notes how Boiffard’s photographs activate a two-way process: they stimulate the viewer’s unconscious drives, endowing the image with a hallucinatory power, while also summoning us to make our psyche ‘permeable to the genius loci, to the ambience, the “dehors”’. 2 Documents can be seen as the site and mouthpiece of the first concerted articulation of the formless, yet this fact seems to sit 1 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 86–103. 2 Sheringham, Everyday Life, pp. 92–93.

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uneasily alongside that journal’s copious illustrations, particularly its photographs. It may seem surprising that such a highly precise and technical means of representing the world should figure so prominently in a publication whose underlying strategy was to declassify and break down conventional taxonomic categories: as Bataille writes, ‘informe n’est pas seulement un adjectif ayant tel sens mais un terme servant à déclasser’. 3 Yet the Documents group’s use of photography, alongside other forms of illustration, is indicative of a complex and nuanced approach to representation that Georges Didi-Huberman defines in terms of a ‘frottement’ between related images, references and critical methods. In what follows, I wish to suggest that the formless can also be seen as encapsulating and enacting a kind of ‘flottement’: definitions of the formless often have recourse to evocations of liquid, and like the phenomenon of the ‘informe’ itself, discourse on the formless drifts in and out of form. The term ‘flottement’ has further connotations of delay or hesitation, and this relates well to a certain temporality in the way the formless can trigger a reaction in us. Analysing Jacques-André Boiffard’s photographs that appeared in Documents alongside Bataille’s essay ‘Le gros orteil’, Sheringham notes that the photographs were carefully cropped, and in at least one case the subject’s other toes were pulled aside in order to highlight the strangeness of the big toe and detach it visually from its immediate context, the foot to which it belonged. The effect is paradoxical, at once offering undeniable proof of the toe’s real existence, and yet also presenting its troubling otherness and excess. As Sheringham concurs with Didi-Huberman, this image offers ‘une vision “au ras des choses” qui serait néanmoins une vision toujours au-delà’.4 This dual status, as document and as fantasy, owes something to the particular mode of our interaction with the toe, namely that this encounter with an ostensibly ‘real’ phenomenon is actually a highly mediated one: as the subject within a photograph, the toe is incontrovertibly real, yet it has been manipulated, framed and very significantly enlarged. The peculiar status of this photograph, and of the copious illustrations throughout Documents more generally, reminds us that even the formless, in order 3 Georges Bataille, ‘Informe’, Documents: Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, Variétés 1.7 (1929, repr. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1991), 382. 4 Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1996), p. 56, cited in Sheringham, Everyday Life, pp. 99–100.

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to be articulated, requires a considerable amount of structured staging and mediation. It seems it is difficult to engage with the formless without first accepting the possibility of form. Forms of Formless in Documents Writing in 1929 in the seventh number of Documents, Bataille dedicates a small eponymous dictionary-style entry to the topic of the formless (‘Informe’). 5 In this deceptively inconspicuous short text, the formless emerges as an undoing of formal categories and a turning away from idealization of the sort that fascinated André Breton and his coterie towards a much more material form of brute reality. Yet some recurrent tropes do conspire to endow the formless with a measure of consistency and invite a reading of it that accommodates surprisingly formalist readings. In ‘Informe’ and elsewhere, for instance, Bataille draws our attention to a downward trajectory, by moving away from matters of the mind and gravitating towards the feet and the ground that is their natural habitat. Another tendency perceptible in this and other Documents essays is the use of imagery invoking the dissolution of solid into liquid; this is articulated most prominently in one of the most celebrated sentences from Bataille’s ‘Informe’ text: ‘affirmer que l’univers ne ressemble à rien et n’est qu’informe revient à dire que l’univers est quelque chose comme une araignée ou un crachat’.6 In the previous number, Bataille’s fellow contributor Michel Leiris had produced a longer entry, ‘L’Eau à la bouche’, on the subject of spittle, in which he too focused on the body’s movements as being closely related to more psychically inflected experiences. Indeed, the mouth, Leiris argues, can be seen as a portal that connects to another realm, one governed by more spiritual matters: ‘La bouche – ouverture magiquement la plus importante du corps – est humide du va et vient de l’âme, qui rentre et sort sous forme de souffle’.7 Leiris cites spittle as an exemplary instance of the formless. ‘Le crachat est enfin, par son inconsistence, ses contours indéfinis, l’imprécision relative de sa couleur, son humidité, le symbole même de l’informe, de l’invérifiable, 5 Bataille, ‘Informe’, p. 382. 6 Bataille, ‘Informe’, p. 382. 7 Michel Leiris, ‘L’Eau à la bouche’, Documents: Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, Variétés 1.7 (1929), 381.

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du non-hiérarchisé’.8 From the inception of Documents, the various contributors to the journal had already given clear intimations that the formless offered a key to understanding a powerful tendency in contemporary artistic practices. The October 1929 number of the journal had included an article by Leiris on recent paintings by Joan Miró, one of a number of artists undergoing a period of crisis in his art at the time. Leiris defines the artist’s methods in terms of a ‘série de destructions et reconstitutions successives’, an approach at whose heart lies the dismantling of some of the fundamental givens of art production.9 For the mainstream surrealists around André Breton, the notion of the merveilleux suggests the possibility of a form of transcendence; for Leiris, by contrast, Miró’s work triggers a sensation that is overwhelmingly somatic rather than conceptual, and the painting’s amorphous liquid form places it in the realm of base materialism. By bringing his gaze close to the picture surface, Leiris attains the opposite of a microscopic perspective in that, far from offering sharper definition, contours cease to be visible and matter reveals itself to be inchoate and indeterminate. In this way, he witnesses the dissolution of form: Je me mouche ; et […] cette trompette nasillarde me ramène aux tableaux de Miró […] Cette liquéfaction, cette évaporation implacable des structures […], cette fuite mollasse de la substance qui rend toutes choses – nous, nos pensées et le décor dans lequel nous vivons – pareilles à des méduses ou à des poulpes, il revient à Miró de l’avoir très adéquatement exprimée.10

Dérives: Barthes on Réquichot As will already have become clear, Leiris and Bataille seem to concur that the operation of the informe entails a move away from solid form towards the gelatinous and slippery. Yet we sense the struggle between form and formless, as if a residual form is fighting to lift its head above the morass; even jellyfish or squid have clearly defined contours. This conflict is ever-present in the essays published in Documents, which 8 Leiris, ‘L’Eau à la bouche’, p. 381. 9 Leiris, ‘Joan Miró’, Documents: Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, Variétés 1.5 (1929), 263–66 (pp. 263–64). 10 Leiris, ‘Joan Miró’, p. 266.

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are ironically alert to the risk of allowing a measure of formalism to enter the realm of the formless; as Patrick Crowley and Paul Hegarty contend, ‘To think of the formless must be to betray it, but conversely, to think form is to invoke a formlessness, the possibility of given forms not being’.11 This is a tension that scholars have identified in Bataille’s writing which, for all its preoccupation with base materialism, is also the product of an essentially structural operation. These conflicting imperatives can be reconciled, as Patrick ffrench suggests, by ‘seeing the operation as one which is carried out in and on language rather than in terms of axiological values’.12 As ffrench contends, ‘the operation Bataille undertakes is one which dissects and redistributes the body of culture insofar as it is carried by and in language’.13 A slippage away from form emerges in the writings of Roland Barthes in the early 1970s. His reading of Bataille’s essay ‘Le gros orteil’ in 1972 may have contributed to the shift in his work from structuralist semiotics towards a concern with the body, the neutral and la dérive. Barthes’s essays from 1973 on the art of André Masson and Bernard Réquichot are also revealing in this regard.14 But even as these writings move away from the grip of structuralism, they evince a persistent concern with language as a system, and its relationship with other systems of signs. Symptomatic of this is the recourse to certain terms of reference that ineluctably bring the somatic into contact with the semiotic. One instance of this is the term pulsion, which Barthes uses repeatedly in his short essay on André Masson’s Asiatic glyphs.15 For Barthes, Masson’s free-form, de-semanticized scriptural lines embody the physically charged, energetic impulse that defines the very essence of writing, not as a vehicle of meaning but as an expression of corporeal presence: as he contends, the truth of writing lies ‘dans la main qui appuie, trace et se conduit, c’est à dire dans le corps qui bat (qui jouit)’.16 11 Patrick Crowley and Paul Hegarty (eds), Formless: Ways in and Out of Form (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), p. 12. 12 Patrick ffrench, ‘Documents in the 1970s: Bataille, Barthes and “Le gros orteil”’, Papers of Surrealism, 7: The Use-Value of Documents (2007), n. pag., http:// www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal7/. (accessed 5 April 2018). 13 ffrench, ‘Documents in the 1970s’, n. pag. 14 Roland Barthes, L’Obvie et l’obtus: essais critiques, III (Paris: Seuil, 1982). 15 Barthes, ‘Sémiographie d’André Masson’, in L’Obvie et l’obtus, pp. 142–44 (p. 144). 16 Barthes, ‘Sémiographie d’André Masson’, p. 144.

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Translated into English as ‘pulsion’ by Richard Howard, la pulsion is the accepted French translation for Freud’s term Trieb, normally rendered in English as ‘drive’. Freud’s Trieb/pulsion is located on the boundary of the psychic and physical realms. The term pulsion reappears in Barthes’s 1973 essay, ‘Réquichot et son corps’, and again in the important book and exhibition that Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss dedicated to the formless in the mid-1990s.17 As Bois and Krauss admit, pulsation is not a term commonly associated with Bataille, yet it figures alongside base materialism, horizontality and entropy as a salient tendency in their taxonomy of the formless. Pulse, pulsation and the pulsatile all imply the element of time, but also the sexual instinct. For Krauss and Bois, it is ‘through the lowest and most vulgar cultural forms that the visual is daily invaded by the pulsatile: the blinking lights of neon signs; the “flip books” through which the visual inert is propelled into the suggestive obscene; the strobe effects of pinball machines and video games’. 18 They ascribe to it a vector of verticality, ‘reaching upward toward the sublimated condition of form in order to undo that order, and to desublimate that vision through the shock effect of the beat’.19 A similar preoccupation with the vertical as a vector of desublimation pervades Barthes’s essay on Bernard Réquichot. Recalling Bataille’s bas matérialisme and the heterological ethnography of Documents, the essay focuses variously on ancient Greek vase inscriptions, refuse, the illegible, sacrifice and the phenomenon of ‘roi-de-rats’, which calls to mind Jacques-André Boiffard’s photographs of flies reproduced in Documents. The section of the essay that Barthes devotes to ‘La Langue’ dwells not on the system of language but the organ of speech, the tongue; here he reflects on Réquichot’s collages incorporating images of animals’ muzzles and tongues. Barthes connects these to a form of language that is not that of civilized society, but ‘le langage visceral, érectile; la langue, c’est le phallus qui parle’. 20 Building on this connection between the linguistic and the phallic, Barthes identifies Réquichot’s painting not so much as an erotic act but as an erectile movement that reaches a ‘jouissance’ before a ‘débandade’ ensues. 21 Krauss and Bois consider 17 Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 18 Bois and Krauss, Formless, p. 164. 19 Bois and Krauss, Formless, p. 165. 20 Barthes, ‘Réquichot et son corps’, p. 192. 21 Barthes, ‘Réquichot et son corps’, p. 193.

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Réquichot alongside the art brut of Jean Dubuffet, and observe related but opposing trajectories in their work: while Dubuffet turned mud into art, Réquichot did the opposite with his Reliquaires, turning paint into a muddy heap that derives a powerful tactile presence from the sheer accumulation of matter. 22 The connection to Documents-era Bataille seems to inform much of Barthes’s essay on Réquichot, both in its fixation with ‘base materialism’ and in its observation of art not as a finished entity or an aesthetic form but as a process or opération. Bataille, in Documents, writes of primitive and children’s art as possessing a wilfully destructive impulse that he sums up in the term altération, a downward drive into decomposition and damage that at the same time brings us closer to the sacred. 23 Réquichot’s art compels Barthes to see a similar downward trajectory as a necessary corollary of a creative deformation: ‘dans la peinture, comme dans la cuisine, il faut laisser tomber quelque chose quelque part: c’est dans cette chute que la matière se transforme (se déforme) […] il y a production d’une matière nouvelle (le mouvement crée la matière)’. 24 Barthes produces an extended analogy with the digestive process, likening Réquichot’s painting to a raclette in its bubbling, dribbling formlessness. Réquichot’s spiral ball-point drawings, and his odd, visceral accretions made of curtain rings, recall Eli Lotar’s photographs of the Villette Abattoir in Paris that appeared in Documents. Writing in that magazine in 1929, Leiris observed that ‘le crachat […] ravale la bouche […] au rang des organes les plus honteux […] La divinité de la bouche, par lui, est journellement salie’. 25 As Leiris contends, saliva links us to those lower life forms whose sole orifice serves purposes of eating and excreting. In turn Barthes sees Réquichot’s works as conflating all stages of the process of alimentation: ingestion, digestion and evacuation. 26 In Réquichot’s spiral forms and other ink drawings, Barthes sees a form of illegible writing that has much in common with Masson’s automatic abstractions based on flowing cursive lines. But in a literal sense, too, Réquichot produced illegible, invented scripts; similar to 22 Bois and Krauss, Formless, p. 62. 23 Bataille, ‘L’Art primitif’, Documents: Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, Variétés 2.7 (1930), 389–97 (p. 397, n. 2). 24 Barthes, ‘Réquichot et son corps’, p. 195. 25 Leiris, ‘L’Eau à la bouche’, pp. 381–82. 26 Barthes, ‘Réquichot et son corps’, p. 196.

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the glyphs and invented alphabets of Henri Michaux and Paul Klee, these are devoid of any obvious semantic content, pointing instead to an expansive textuality that Barthes in his Masson essay calls ‘l’Utopie du texte’. And what gives it that quality is its expressive corporeality: for Barthes, the fundamental essence of writing is not related to its communicative function but instead is a symptom of the physical, bodily act of producing it: rage, tenderness or rigour of the drawing of its curves and strokes (in French, jambes). 27 It seems indicative of the direction Barthes’s thinking has taken that, even when he returns to the theme of writing, he does so by accentuating its physicality, as if it were an extension of the body. The ‘total language’ might lie beyond text and beyond painting, occupying instead a space where words, images and the body come into contact. And the essence of that language is messy and attends to the formless, like life itself. Réquichot’s autobiographical writings shed valuable light on his working practices and situate him firmly in the domain of the material and the real, rather than on the more elevated plane of intellectual activity. For him, too, it seems, the most meaningful discoveries are to be made with downcast eyes. He recounts how the act of walking through fields stimulated the creative process, but especially so when he kept his gaze focused on the ground: Il y a seulement un mois, si je partais par les champs en croyant que l’air libre m’aiderait à combiner les pensées des autres et les miennes, je revenais de ces chasses non la tête pleine d’idées mais les poches débordantes de pierres, de racines, de mâchefer. 28

Outside the Box: Tetsumi Kudo The trio of material forms that conclude Réquichot’s comments merit further reflection. While stones and roots evoke natural processes of organic growth and geological concretion, the last word, ‘mâchefer’, occupies a different place. Denoting a form of industrial waste known in English as ‘clinker’, it calls to mind a particularly urban detritus, one that is a by-product of manufacturing processes. It calls to mind the idiosyncratic kind of informe encountered in the work of Japanese artist 27 Barthes, ‘Réquichot et son corps’, p. 201. 28 Bernard Réquichot, ‘Métaphysique’, in Ecrits divers. Journal, lettres, textes épars, Faustus, poèmes, 1951–1961 (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), p. 64.

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Tetsumi Kudo. Born in 1935, he established his reputation as a member of the French pop art scene of the 1960s, but quickly established a distinctive artistic idiom of installations, sculptures, drawings and other works. These insistently reiterate his conviction that the natural environment was contaminated by electronic and other effluent of the modern era, but that a new hybrid generation of nature would emerge from this. Harnessing biology and technology in a post-atomic world, Kudo repeatedly invokes the notion of transmutation. As his 1970–71 Centre Pompidou installation, Pollution – Cultivation – Nouvelle Écologie (Grafted Garden), suggested, the metamorphosis that his art evokes is not the happy ending of some caterpillar-into-butterfly evolution, but rather the dystopian, nightmarish scene of a futuristic world – perhaps our own already? – that has been irrevocably contaminated and plunged into a state of luridly phosphorescent decay. 29 The natural world in which plants emerge, grow and thrive in nutrient-rich soil is replaced with that of mutant growths and alien conjunctions: stems emerge, but the flowers are garish and nestle alongside disembodied phalluses and the detritus of the technological era. Kudo’s works propose a base materialism fit for the technological age: they incorporate electronic elements, such as transistors, vacuum tubes and circuit boards, along with substances resembling organic matter, as if to suggest that they had emerged as part of a single process of growth. Time and again, Kudo evokes a world in the process of mutation: the organic and the inorganic are no longer separate, but appear to have fused together, as if they have resulted from atomic damage. Coupled in this way, his works form a powerful comment on a world forever affected by humans’ desire for progress at all costs. They seem to suggest a state of altération in Bataille’s sense of the term, in that they embody not only a transmutation from one state to another, but also the inflicting of damage. The gaudy flowers that Kudo places in his installations do not point towards the sublime or the Surrealist marvellous, but to a new ecology of pollution and radioactivity. In this respect he recalls Bataille’s 1929 essay on the language of flowers, accompanied by Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs of plant forms in extreme close-up. 30 Bataille subverts the 29 Kudo’s installation is illustrated in Anne Tronche, Tetsumi Kudo: la montagne que nous cherchons est dans la serre (Lyon: Fage éditions, 2007), pp. 17–19. 30 Georges Bataille, ‘Le langage des fleurs’, Documents: Doctrines, Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie 1.3 (1929), 160–64.

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traditional symbolic association of flowers with beauty, seeing them instead in their material baseness and noting that ‘certaines mêmes sont déplaisantes sinon hideuses’; he cites that most celebrated of flowers, the rose, which is transformed when its petals are removed: ‘il ne reste plus qu’une touffe d’aspect sordide’. 31 He observes how ‘la merveilleuse corolle pourrit impudiquement au soleil’, and that within even the most beautiful flowers lurks ‘la tache velue des organes sexués’. With their clumps of roots ‘qui grouillent, sous la surface du sol, écœurantes et nues comme la vermine’, and their flowers, destined to decay, fall and return to the soil, plants are the very embodiment of baseness and the downward trajectory of all matter. 32 Bataille’s essay ends with an anecdote about the Marquis de Sade requesting petals in order to throw them into a pool of liquid manure. 33 In similar vein, discussing Joan Miró’s paintings of the late 1920s, Bataille turns his gaze downwards and locates the artist’s work in a particularly formless impulse: ‘la décomposition fut poussée à tel point qu’il ne resta plus que quelques taches informes sur le couvercle (ou sur la pierre tombale, si l’on veut) de la boîte à malices’. 34 This short text has been widely cited as a starting point for Bataille’s engagement with the formless; but it is also noteworthy that the image he presents sets the formless within a context of containment. The tombstone, or the box of tricks, or indeed the edges of Miró’s canvases, are necessary foils for the ‘taches informes’ precisely since they are loci of enclosure that demarcate a space in which the formless can emerge and beyond whose realms the formless always threatens to spread. Both plants and boxes are recurrent features in Kudo’s art. He employs boxes and other receptacles to explore spatial ambiguity, shifts of scale and the notion of containment that governs our lives from beginning to end. As he wrote in 1976: On naît dans une boîte (matrice), vit dans une boîte (appartement) et finit après la mort dans une boîte (cercueil). Au fond, on fabrique soi-même depuis sa naissance jusqu’à sa mort des petites boîtes c’est-à-dire qu’on fabrique des boîtes dans une boîte.

31 Bataille, ‘Le langage des fleurs’, p. 163. 32 Bataille, ‘Le langage des fleurs’, p. 163. 33 Bataille, ‘Le langage des fleurs’, p. 164. 34 Georges Bataille, ‘Joan Miró: Peintures récentes’, Documents: Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, Variétés 2.7 (1930), 398–403 (p. 399).

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Ces petites boîtes sont celles qui enferment nos prières (souhaits) et malédictions. 35

Not only do these words recall Bataille’s evocation of the ‘boîte à malices’ in his short essay on Miró and the informe, but a discussion of the role of the box in Kudo’s work inevitably calls to mind myriad artistic works that set up a tension between order and entropy, containment and chance. Votre Portrait, votre jeu (1962–63), a construction that resembles Joseph Cornell’s glass-fronted shadow boxes, unites various elements deriving from different gaming contexts: resembling a bagatelle board, it appears ready for action, complete with table tennis balls and a phallic spring-loaded device to propel them around the surface. A work of this sort implies that the spectator should become an interactive participant or player; but the real game in question is the one that Kudo plays on the spectator: like Duchamp’s glass construction entitled A regarder d’un œil, de près, pendant presque une heure (1918), this work compels us to reflect on the nature of looking, our interaction with this artwork and the relationship between art, the self, the everyday and the forces of chance. It is possible, too, to draw a connection between Kudo’s dice-shaped boxes and Réquichot’s reliquaries. What they have in common is that they serve as the repositories of an unspecified symbolism in their heterogeneous objects permeated with an obscure but deeply personal meaning. Can we say that they are imbued with any kind of religious or spiritual significance? Perhaps Kudo’s cages and tanks relate to science in ways not dissimilar to those in which Réquichot’s reliquaries invoke formal religion, that is, they borrow the outer form of a culturally enshrined artefact in order to pose questions relating both to art and to the cultural practices from which they draw their influence. A dialectical relationship between formal structure and arbitrariness emerges from Kudo’s choice of the die format for his boxes, which adds a further layer of meaning by invoking the element of chance to which all life is subject. The die is a perfect paradox, since it connotes both absolute regularity of form and unpredictability: as a cube, its six faces of equal dimensions imply repetition, formal order and mathematical precision; the differing numbers of dots that distinguish each face from all others introduce into this predictable realm a very significant 35 Tetsumi Kudo, ‘Boîte’ (1976), in Kudo, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Galerie Beaubourg, Galerie Vallois, 1977), p. 160.

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element of variability within predetermined parameters. In a figurative sense, the cube embodies the abstract notion of geometric precision, while its physical function as an object to be cast out of the hand enacts the workings of chance. Kudo uses the cube as a container, and in the process suggests the sheer randomness and banality of the elements – a Cinzano bottle, a bottle of pills, a pistol, amongst others – that can go together to encapsulate a life. Most significantly, in the context of our discussion, he recasts the die, as it were, by propelling it into the realm of the formless: the heterogeneous mess of its contents strips it of its formal purity and turns it instead into a site of entropy. Poetry of the Formless? Our discussion of the paradoxical yet often symbiotic relationship between form and its other prompts reflection on the extent to which we can ever legitimately reconcile the formless with the textual practice most rigorously governed by formal constraints, poetry. Interviewed about his book Le Plaisir du texte, Barthes draws a revealing distinction between textual and visual forms: on ne peut jamais assimiler un texte à une œuvre picturale, à une œuvre visuelle, parce que tout simplement le texte, de quelque façon qu’on s’y prenne, véhicule du sens […] Le texte c’est du langage, et par conséquent la destruction du langage ne peut jamais être véritablement opérée par le texte. 36

For Barthes, then, a text is irrevocably bound to its signifying function. To what extent is it even possible to think of a literature, and, more pointedly, a poetry of the formless? In a draft letter to André Breton, Bataille confessed that there was nothing he hated more than poetry, which he ranked alongside cheese and dessert. 37 Jay Parini contends that ‘there is no such thing as formless poetry, as all poetry is by definition form’. 38 Even free verse, for all its claims to structural and rhythmic elasticity, recognizes the existence of limits. 36 Roland Barthes, ‘Le Plaisir du texte’ (interview, 19 March 1973), https://www. ina.fr/video/CPF10005880. (accessed 5 April 2018). 37 Bois and Krauss, Formless, p. 49. 38 Jay Parini, Why Poetry Matters (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 113.

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If it is possible to reconcile the seemingly incompatible imperatives of poetry and the formless, then we probably need to leave behind the Cartesian planes of the page and the written word in order to enter the more inchoate realm of preverbal sounds. The glossolalic sound poems of the Dada poets and, after them, the Lettristes’ discrepant texts jettison the word as a fully formed, semantically charged unit and supplant it with sounds that make no sense in any conventional way. Situated between these two instances, Antonin Artaud made poems consisting of grunts, wheezes and yells that express the possibility of poetry as a formless projectile: as Jacques Derrida observes, ‘La pensée du jet est la pensée de la pulsion même, de la force pulsive, de la compulsion et de l’expulsion. De la force avant la forme’. 39 The experiments of the Lettristes using vinyl discs and tape reels bring us closer to the body and to a force before form. From its title to its performance, spittle is explicitly present in Isidore Isou’s film-manifesto from 1951, Traité de bave et d’éternité. Isou’s practice of bleaching and scoring the celluloid, and detaching the soundtrack from the visual frames, has the effect of amplifying auditory and visual noise and drawing attention to the voice in all its preverbal materiality. Transferring the scratchy, crackly soundtrack from vinyl onto film, a practice that Pavle Levi terms ‘retrograde remediation’, Isou accentuates by mechanical means the somatic quality of sound.40 The film incorporates François Dufrêne’s sound poem of 1949, ‘J’interroge et j’invective: poème à hurler’, dedicated to Artaud. Dufrêne endows vocal performance with a wordless physicality, replacing semiosis with a corporeality that enacts the collapse of form. During the recitation of ‘J’interroge et j’invective’, we hear the spittle gathering in his mouth.41 In the early 1960s, Pierre Garnier defined the new concrete poetry as liberating the word from the constraints of the page and inscribing it ‘sur des murs, sur des pierres, sur des vitres, sur du sable figé, sur du papier d’emballage, sur de vieux sacs’.42 His is a poetry of the body with echoes 39 Jacques Derrida, ‘Forcener le subjectile’, in Derrida and Paule Thévenin, Antonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 11. 40 Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 41 Kaira M. Cabañas, Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 27. 42 Pierre Garnier, ‘Deuxième manifeste pour une poésie visuelle’, Les Lettres 8.30 (31 December 1962), 14–28 (p. 14).

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of Artaud: ‘J’appelle poésie la connaissance du souffle’. Replacing the metaphor of humid spittle for one of aridity, Garnier echoes Bataille’s emphasis on ‘les besognes des mots’, locating the usefulness of language in the act of grinding words to dust. With echoes of Bataille’s base materialism, Isou justified his choice of the title Traité de bave et d’éternité for his film-manifesto in terms of its capacity to ‘marquer la distance entre la poussière de notre parole et la hauteur de son pouvoir’.43 A poet who sympathized with this view is Henri Chopin. A practitioner of both concrete poetry and sound poetry, arguably polar opposites in formal terms, his relationship to form is accordingly contradictory. Chopin’s sound poems in particular seem to embody the formless and its perpetual struggle with form. His early work, roughly contemporaneous with that of Réquichot, frequently abandons semantically driven language in order to conduct soundings of the body – and on one occasion in 1974 even literally, when he swallowed a small microphone. In the sound poem ‘La civilisation du papier’ (1963), his distorted, modified voice utters the line, ‘Je n’ai jamais accepté une poésie sans voix et sans corps’. The title occurs in the performance only as a negation: ‘plus de civilisation-papier’. Apart from that, the other auditory elements are corporeal: clicks, gasps, laughter, sounds that transport us to the body and its innards. Yet the Lettriste experiments do have recourse to a degree of form. Isou’s film employs a voiceover (supplemented by English intertitles in the version distributed in the US) to foreground and frame François Dufrêne’s sound poems. The visual flow is interrupted rhythmically by flickering frames momentarily displaying the words ‘start’ and ‘fin’, as if to draw attention to the film’s temporal coordinates and the process of shaping it and giving it form. Henri Chopin’s experimental concrete poem ‘Horizons illimités’, for all its apparent formlessness, is tightly bound by its linear margins and the order of the numerical system, progressing in sequence from 1 to 9 and from there to rows of ampersands, plus signs, question marks, asterisks and full stops; these give it some of the rigour of the modernist grid. Admittedly these signs are inverted and, overlapping one another, they partially negate each other; but they are there none the less. Once again it seems that form exerts a tenacious hold on our way of thinking, and even its subversion entails its acknowledgement. 43 Isidore Isou, ‘Traité de bave et d’éternité’, in Œuvres de spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 85.

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Conclusion: Bergvall’s Drift I wish to draw the present discussion to a close by citing a contemporary instance in which form and formless engage in a never-ending pas-de-deux. The interlingual, intermedial work of UK-based FrancoNorwegian poet Caroline Bergvall experiments with the outer edges of what can legitimately be called poetry. Bergvall’s Drift (2014) explores a dérive that is linguistic, chronological, geographic and formal.44 Without hierarchical distinctions, the book intersperses Old English verse, contemporary poetic writing, a forensic report, ink lines, Nordic runes and photographic images. These diverse contents span a wide semantic range from clarity to an impenetrable fog of enlarged pixels or isolated letters in rows or sporadic clusters on the page. The notion of derivation seems to underpin Bergvall’s project; indeed, etymologically, the verb ‘derive’ itself conveys the sense of diverting water from its natural course. The notion of drift that emerges from this work is itself fluid and multi-referential. The theme of navigating at sea is a familiar poetic trope of poetry over the centuries, and Bergvall consciously connects with this tradition, revisiting the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’ in the context of a recent, real-life tragedy at sea. In 2011, a boat of migrants was spotted adrift off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa. It was allowed to drift in international waters, unaided by various coastal authorities, until all but ten of its 72 occupants had died. This deeply troubling factual basis intensifies the work’s generic instability and prompts us to question the identity of what we are witnessing. Bergvall’s ‘hyphenated practice’ comprises elements that in their own right lack form, but the act of assembling these endows the book with a strong coherence. On opening Drift, the reader confronts several pages of serried lines of ink, symptoms of textuality from which writing, understood in its conventional, semantically driven guise, has been evacuated. In the middle of the book, occupying six pages, are indistinct black-andwhite photographic images: their source, recognizable only thanks to a caption at the end of the book, is an aerial photograph of the drifting migrant boat taken by a French reconnaissance aircraft and sent to the Italian coastal authorities. Like Jean Painlevé’s film stills of sea creatures published in Documents, these images are greatly enlarged, but once 44 Caroline Bergvall, Drift (Brooklyn and Callicoon: Nightboat Books, 2014).

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again the end result, far from enhanced clarity, is an intensified flou. Only once we have negotiated these indistinct images do we find a report outlining the chilling facts of the migrant boat tragedy. For all their significant differences, Bergvall’s work seems to confirm what Bataille and his cohort asserted, namely that form and formless are not mutually exclusive but are fluid and shifting phenomena that can carry out each other’s besognes. It seems we share a fundamental need to ascribe meaning to things by giving them form; but this runs parallel to a deep-seated compulsion to return to the shapeless, slippery indeterminacy of reality. And arguably it is this very confrontation with the formless, and its never-ending va-et-vient with form, that most vividly summons forth what it means to be alive in the world.

chapter eighteen

Convulsive Form Benjamin, Bataille and the Innervated Body Patrick ffrench Convulsive Form

In the essay ‘Notes on Gesture’, citing observations by the nineteenthcentury clinician Gilles de la Tourette, Giorgio Agamben points to the prevalence in the twentieth century of a ‘generalized catastrophe of the gestural sphere’.1 At the end of the nineteenth century, Agamben proposes, gesture as a means of symbolism and communication is in crisis; the twentieth century had consequently ‘lost its gestures’, and sought to recapture what it had lost in aesthetic forms. Agamben writes that: ‘The dance of Isadora Duncan and Sergei Diaghilev, the novel of Proust, the great Jugendstil poetry from Pascali to Rilke, and, finally and most exemplarily, the silent movie, trace the magic circle in which humanity tried for the last time to evoke what was slipping through its fingers forever’. 2 The loss Agamben diagnoses here is of gesture not as a simple movement from A to B, but as a ‘pure mediality’, the communication of communicability as such, of man’s being in language. 3 Now, this account is essentially melancholic; it follows in the wake and in the mode of Walter Benjamin’s vision of the ‘tiny, fragile body of man’, standing in a ‘field of force of destructive torrents and explosions’ in 1 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 50. 2 Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, p. 54. 3 Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, p. 58.

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‘The Storyteller’.4 It sees the convulsive body solely as a degradation, under the effect of shock, of integrative corporeal agency, as an impoverishment. It is possible, however, to ask, less redemptively, in the wake and in the mode of Spinoza and Deleuze, and with different elements of Benjamin’s thought: what can the convulsive body do?5 What forms can it produce? I want in this essay to pursue these questions via an exploration and a comparison between two important and roughly contemporary considerations of the convulsive or ‘innervated’ body in the twentieth century, in the work of Benjamin and of Georges Bataille. Agamben’s essay ends with the proposition that ‘Politics is the sphere of pure means, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings’.6 To this extent, the questions about convulsive form and its potential that I want to pursue here necessarily engage, also, with the fraught politics of the last century. The Innervated Body: Benjamin, Chaplin and Mickey Mouse In the second version of the essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, and in unpublished fragments drafted from the late 1920s, Walter Benjamin establishes the basis for a socially progressive theory of cinema based on the concept of mimetic innervation. Miriam Hansen, among others, has drawn out of Benjamin’s writings the figure of an innervated cinematic body that has incorporated the effects of the machine and is thus able to provide a new a form of mediation between the human and the technological. This body has the potential, according to Hansen, to recover some of the sensory capacities lost through the anaesthetizing shock effects of modernity, by redirecting technology towards an extension of the human sensorium. The incorporation of the apparatus produces a body whose capacities have been extended, rather than one oppressively subjected to technology as a 4 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, [1968] 2007), p. 84. 5 The question ‘What can a body do?’ is central to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘Spinozist’ approach to the body, especially in their Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1982). See also Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit, 1968) and Ian Buchanan, ‘The Problem of the Body in Deleuze and Guattari, Or, What Can a Body Do?’, Body & Society 3.3 (1997), 73–91. 6 Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, p. 59.

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purely nefarious ‘second nature’. ‘The movie-going experience’, writes Hansen, ‘would […] seem to be the logical site for thinking through the possibility for a bodily collective innervation, as the condition for an alternative interaction with technology and the commodity world’.7 One of the principal sources for Hansen’s reading of Benjamin is a fragment written in the autumn of 1935: The formula in which the dialectical structure of film—film considered in its technological dimension—finds expression runs as follows. Discontinuous images replace each other in a contiguous sequence. A theory of film would need to take account of both of those facts. First of all, with regard to continuity, it cannot be overlooked that the assembly line, which plays such a fundamental role in the process of production, is in a sense represented by the filmstrip in the process of consumption. Both came into being at roughly the same time. The social significance of the one cannot be fully understood without that of the other. At all events, our understanding of this is in its infancy.—That is not quite the case with the other element, discontinuity. Concerning its significance we have at least one very important pointer. It is the fact that Chaplin’s films have met with the greatest success of all, up to now. The reason is quite evident. Chaplin’s way of moving [Gestus] is not really that of an actor. He could not have made an impact on the stage. His unique significance lies in the fact that, in his work, the human being is integrated into the film image by way of his gestures—that is, his bodily and mental posture. The innovation of Chaplin’s gestures is that he dissects the expressive movements of human beings into a series of minute innervations. Each single movement he makes is composed of a succession of staccato bits of movement. Whether it is his walk, the way he handles his cane, or the way he raises his hat—always the same jerky sequence of tiny movements applies the law of the cinematic image sequence to human motorial functions. Now, what is it about this behavior that is distinctly comic?8

Benjamin establishes in this fragment an analogy between the assembly line and the filmstrip, based in the technological fact of the contiguous sequence of discontinuous images. One element or side of this 7 See Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999), 306–43 (p. 340). See also Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”’, New German Critique 40 (1987), 179–224. 8 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Formula in which The Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression’, in Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2002), p. 94.

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analogy—discontinuity—is symptomatically represented by the body of Charlie Chaplin, a specifically filmic body insofar as its way of moving or Gestus ‘dissects’ movement into a series of ‘minute innervations’.9 The innervated body, composed of ‘staccato bits’ of movement, translates the discontinuity of the filmstrip and, by extension, of the assembly line—to the movement of the human body. The innervated body thus incorporates the automatism of the machine. The notion of innervation articulated in the 1935 fragment emerges against the background, in Benjamin’s work, of a number of strands of enquiry. One of these concerns the topic of play. In an essay of 1928 he signals the significance of the ‘great law that presides over the rules and rhythms of the entire world of play: the law of repetition’.10 Referring to Freud’s insight that there is an impulse in repetition that lies ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, Benjamin reads play as a mode of ‘triumph over experience’: ‘it […] means enjoying one’s victories and triumphs over and over again, with vital intensity’.11 Benjamin gives a typically dialectical image of repetition here—it is both a way of dealing with horror, but it is also a mode of triumph. The use of repetition, or habit, as Benjamin names it at the end of the essay, is a form of sublimation. In 1929 the concept of innervation formally enters Benjamin’s vocabulary, in the unpublished fragment ‘Programme for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre’. This is focused on the question of play; the children’s actions and gestures are ‘a signal from another world’; Benjamin conceives of them in terms of innervation.12 Drawing on the German art historian Konrad Fiedler, he writes: ‘the painter is a man who sees more accurately with his hand when his eye fails him, who is able to transfer the receptive innervations of the eye muscles into the creative innervation of the hand. What characterizes every child’s gesture is that creative innervation is exactly proportioned to receptive innervation’.13 9 The term Gestus is prominent in the essay on Kafka in Illuminations, pp. 111–40. Benjamin wrote this fragment a year before Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936), in whose opening sequences the analogy between the innervated body and the assembly line is given visual form. 10 Walter Benjamin, ‘Toys and Play’, in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 120. 11 Benjamin, ‘Toys and Play’, p. 120. 12 Walter Benjamin, ‘Programme for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre’, in Selected Writings 2: part 1, 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 204. 13 Benjamin, ‘Programme’, p. 204.

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The three key elements of this sequence—the idea of the signal, the possibility of transfer from reception to innervation to creation and the notion of proportion—sketch out a basic neurological theory which Benjamin will develop in later works. It is from the regime of the technological that Benjamin believes such ‘secret signals’ can emerge. This is also patent in the 1929 essay on Surrealism, where, having recognized in early Surrealist work the lesson and value of ‘profane illumination’, he points to the need for an integration of ‘image space’ and ‘body space’: The collective is a body too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, be produced only in that image space to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image space so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective becomes revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto.14

This dense formulation speaks to Benjamin’s emphasis on the need for a theory (and practice) of collective innervation, or action, rather than individual reception. For Benjamin, the cinema is a collective space and this, among other things, explains its value for him. But he also implies a neurological or neurophysiological theory in which ‘tension’ can become ‘innervation’, and ‘innervation’ can become ‘discharge’.15 The terms ‘body space’ and ‘image space’ also require further explanation, but it is clear from the above that the integrated space of body and image is one in which the subject is not distant from the image, in which the ‘transfer’ between profane illumination and revolutionary discharge is immediate. Profane illumination as an image alone is not enough, Benjamin seems to contend; it needs to be supplemented by a new kind of space, in which body and image are somehow integrated. This space is to be made possible by technology, and in the cinema. In a ‘lightning flash’ typical of Benjamin which illuminates the terrain as if from the standpoint of a utopian future looking back to the present, 14 ‘Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ in Selected Writings 2: part 1, 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 1999), pp. 217–18. 15 These terms are more or less explicitly Freudian, while the theory which they imply differs from Freud’s in important respects. See Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema’ for a discussion of this difference, esp. p. 316.

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in a fragment written in 1931, Benjamin sees in the figure of Mickey Mouse an instance of emancipatory technology. He writes that: ‘Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind’.16 Drawing here on the dimension of the creaturely which he had explored and would continue to explore in the Trauerspiel book, in his writings on Kraus and Kafka, and in the late essay ‘The Storyteller’, what Benjamin intends here relates very much to the question of ‘second technology’ that will come fully to the fore in the ‘Work of Art’ essay.17 While first technology makes fullest use of human beings and culminates in the human sacrifice (an instrumentalization of man by man that is not without relation to the lines of argument drawn out of Benjamin’s work by his Italian translator Giorgio Agamben), second technology tends to reduce human involvement to a minimum, and culminates, Benjamin would write in 1935, in ‘remote control aircraft which need no human crew’.18 Rather than seeing second technology as ‘mastery over nature’ (which would be to see the second technology ‘from the standpoint of the first’), or as a nefarious denaturalization, Benjamin sees it as a manifestation of play or interplay between man and nature. Mickey Mouse, then, is a prime example of second technology’s movement away from dependence on both human and nature, taken to the extreme of the drone-like independence from both, as Benjamin remarks that Mickey Mouse can survive the theft or loss of his own arm, or even his 16 Walter Benjamin, ‘Mickey Mouse’, in Selected Writings Volume 2, part 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 545. 17 See Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 2009) and Illuminations for ‘The Storyteller’ and ‘Franz Kafka’. For the essay on Karl Kraus, see Selected Writings 2: part 2, pp. 433–57. For further discussion of the ‘creaturely’ see Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 18 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility’, in Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2002), p. 107. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). As Hansen intimates, this often tends to result in readings which focus on the nefarious effects of pilotless or drone technology, which thus move against the affirmative direction of travel that Benjamin wants to establish here. See Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema’, p. 320. A recent example would be Grégoire Chamayou’s Théorie du drône (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013).

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body. Mickey offers the image of a body liberated from experience, and the reason for his success, Benjamin contends, is ‘simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them’.19 This life seems to reside in the confrontation with fear, and it is in this that the notion of play or interplay might, paradoxically, seem most pertinent; the liberation of Mickey from phenomenal dependence and the adventures that Mickey endures are akin to a form of performance in which the possibilities of the body are tested, in which, as Benjamin had written earlier about child’s play, the child can ward off the threat of experience through a form of repetition. As the later reference to Mickey Mouse in the ‘Work of Art’ essay suggests, the figure mediates for a collective, and mediates cathartically: ‘Collective laughter is one such preemptive and healing outbreak of mass psychosis. The countless grotesque events consumed in films are a graphic indication of the dangers threatening mankind from the repressions implicit in civilization, American slapstick comedies and Disney films trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies’. 20 If the animated, virtual body of Mickey Mouse, provoking a discharge of laughter through the depiction of a fantastic dismemberment, might seem a step too far, it is perhaps because in Mickey the body image attains an inhuman extreme of elasticity denied by ‘ordinary’ experience. The body resists—this is perhaps the lesson of Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity: even though the brain, and thus the neurological networks through which sensations become innervations, can change their form, there is a plasticity to this form which pulls against adaptability or elasticity. 21 Elasticity, of the kind fantastically depicted with Mickey Mouse, operates at the expense of what Agamben calls ‘form of life’, in which ‘a life’ is not extractable or independent from its form. 22 This perhaps explains Benjamin’s hesitation, in a note to the second version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay, where he points to the accessibility of the ‘revolutionary’ innovations of the Mickey Mouse films to being taken over by fascism. What Benjamin objects to, particularly in the 19 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 107. 20 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 118. 21 See, for example, Catherine Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 2nd ed. (Paris: Bayard, 2011), pp. 61–88. 22 ‘By the term form-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.’ Giorgio Agamben, ‘Form-of-Life’, in Means without End (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2000), pp. 2–3.

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colour films which began to appear from 1935, is the ‘cozy acceptance of bestiality and violence as inevitable concomitants of existence’.23 This raises issues about the relation between laughter and the spectacle of sadomasochism, and about the relation between the mass spectacle of automated dismemberment and the psycho-politics of fascism to which I will return in the second part of his essay. In 1935, then, the ‘Work of Art’ essay draws together the various strands of Benjamin’s thinking about film, technology and mimesis that we have been considering above. It develops a consistent emphasis on the capacity of film, as an example of ‘second technology’ to ‘emancipate the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual’. 24 In its incorporation of repeated ‘test performances’, in its capacity for improvement (meaning the possibility of choosing between several ‘takes’), film involves a ‘renunciation of eternal value’. 25 Art has thus escaped the role of ‘beautiful semblance’; the scope or room for play, or the ‘sphere of action’ (Zohn’s translation of Spielraum) is increased: ‘In film, the element of semblance has been entirely displaced by the element of play’. 26 Here, and across many of the conceptual pairs of Benjamin’s essay, the underlying opposition is between ritual and play. In the opposition between first technology and second technology, for example, Benjamin intends an affirmation of the emancipation from ritual inherent in the latter. Implicitly, ritual appears as a technology that depends on the instrumentalization of human beings, while second technology, in its mediation between humanity and nature by means of the machine, creates the room for play. Together with the emancipation from ritual, the enlargement of the scope for play and the cathartic role whereby the filmic protagonist triumphs over the apparatus, a crucial element of Benjamin’s enlistment of film in the service of the revolution is, as we saw above, its nature as a collective art. It is in relation to this instance that the concept of innervation recurs. As a footnote to the point about film’s capacity to accelerate the adaptation to the new technology, Benjamin writes: The aim of revolutions is to accelerate this adaptation. Revolutions are innervations of the collective—or, more precisely, efforts at innervation 23 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 130. See Hansen’s discussion of this point in ‘Benjamin and Cinema’, p. 342. 24 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 106. 25 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 109. 26 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 127.

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on the part of the new, historically unique collective which has its organs in the new technology. This second technology is a system in which the mastering of elementary social forces is a precondition for playing [das Spiel] with natural forces. Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach. For in revolutions, it is not only the second technology which asserts its claims vis-à-vis society. Because this technology aims at liberating humans from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action [Spielraum], immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space. But already he registers his demands on it. For the more the collective makes the second technology its own, the more keenly individuals belonging to the collective feel how little they have received of what was due them under the dominion of the first technology. In other words, it is the individual liberated by the liquidation of the first technology who stakes his claim. No sooner has the second technology secured its initial revolutionary gains than vital questions affecting the individual—questions of love and death which had been buried by the first technology—once again press for solutions. Fourier’s work is the first historical evidence of this demand. 27

The reference to Fourier at the end of this remarkable sequence already points to its utopian qualities. Benjamin imagines a use of technology which liberates humanity from its dependence on ritual and from ‘drudgery’, which has the dimensions of a ‘play-space’. While Miriam Hansen associates the image of the child stretching out its hand for the moon with T. E. Hulme’s imagistic poem in which the moon hangs in masts like a child’s balloon, I see it rather in relation to the scenario of the child with the toy in Freud’s fort/da game, in other words, less as an imaginary lure and more as a form of play close to the repetition compulsion. 28 The image of the child reaching for the moon as if for a ball thus figures a utopia that seems accessible through collective innervation. Benjamin imagines this innervation to be accessible through film.

27 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 124. 28 See Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema’, p. 322. For Freud and the fort/da game, see Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 284–87.

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From the Convulsive Imaginary to Convulsive Politics Rather than a personal pathology, the incidence of the convulsive body in the pre-war writing of Georges Bataille draws on what Rae Beth Gordon has identified as a generalized topos of the hysterical or convulsive body which emerged in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century and was thus by the 1920s part of the imaginary repertory available to the Surrealists and other writers in their orbit. 29 Gordon argues that the theories of cinematic spectatorship and shock in the work of Benjamin and Kracauer have to be seen against a background of the psychological and physiological theories that had become part of cultural memory. She points in this vein to the incidence in the film theories of Eisenstein and Artaud of the idea of film as having a direct physiological effect on the spectator, referring also to Eisenstein’s affirmative description of the ‘specific mechanics’ of Chaplin’s movement. It would be easy to show that the convulsive imaginary attains a particularly acute plasticity in Bataille’s early récit Histoire de l’œil and in other early texts in eruptive or ejaculatory figurations, symptoms perhaps of the irrepressible drive to expenditure with which Bataille endows the cosmos. Is there, however, a politics of the convulsive body in Bataille’s work? We have seen how Benjamin sees in the innervated bodies of Chaplin and Mickey Mouse potential for a socially progressive mediation and the resultant provocation of revolutionary energies. Adorno was more sanguine, and criticized Benjamin’s celebration of Chaplin and Mickey Mouse, seeing it as provoking only sadistic laugher on the part of a predominantly bourgeois audience. 30 Benjamin himself, as we saw, was hesitant about Mickey Mouse and anxious about the ‘availability’ of the figure for fascism. These questions about the possibility of a convulsive politics, and its direction of travel, are particularly salient in the work of Bataille from the 1930s, where the specific issues of fascism, but also of convulsive corporeality, are at stake. 29 Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 30 In a letter to Benjamin dated 18 March 1936, Adorno is critical of Benjamin’s affirmation of Chaplin and Disney as vehicles for an innervation of the collective, seeing them instead as provoking sadistic laughter on the part of the spectators, antithetical to social progression. See Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), p. 121. Stanley Cavell discusses this briefly in ‘Concluding Remarks Presented at Paris Colloquium on La Projection du monde’, in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (New York: SUNY Press, 2005), pp. 284–85.

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Jean-François Louette has provided extremely useful pointers to the incidence of the convulsive across Bataille’s work of the early to mid-1930s in the notes to Le Bleu du ciel included in the Pléiade edition of Bataille’s Romans et récits. These include Bataille’s questioning of the prioritization of individual or collective convulsion in Malraux’s novel La Condition humaine in a review of 1933. Bataille asks if social movements, which he characterizes here as convulsive, are to be situated outside individual lived experience, or as part of the same convulsion: ‘devons-nous voir […] qu’une seule convulsion peut lier la même vie à son obscure destin personnel et aux évènements qui décident du sort d’une ville?’31 The question concerns the relation between individual and collective psychology; Bataille is in effect working at this stage with a particularly strong notion of collective psychology, drawing on the work of Durkheim and Mauss, but also on Freud and Pierre Janet. 32 According to this view, social movements can be understood on a quasiphysiological basis; a revolution is thus ‘un certain état d’excitation’ and to effect revolution is a ‘discharge’ of this excitation. 33 Bataille’s concern with the ‘forces of attraction’ of social movements is also evident in the essay ‘La Structure psychologique du fascisme’ that he wrote at the same time, also for the dissident Marxist review La Critique sociale. He is concerned in particular, in this essay, with ‘heterogeneous elements’ which have a ‘valeur excitante’. 34 The fascist leader, in particular, belongs to heterogeneous domain, to this species of ‘completely other’ (tout autre) objects. Bataille writes that: ‘Mussolini ou Hitler apparaissent immédiatement en saillie comme tout autres’, and ‘la force du meneur est analogue à celle qui s’exerce dans l’hypnose’, referring here to Freud’s essay on collective psychology. 35 The essay ends with the ominous description of the situation as ‘[un] moment où une vaste convulsion oppose, non pas exactement le fascisme et le communisme, mais des formes impératives radicales à la profonde 31 Georges Bataille, ‘André Malraux, La Condition humaine’, in Œuvres complètes, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 372. 32 For a discussion of Bataille’s pre-war work in this direction, see chapter 1 of Patrick ffrench, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (Oxford: Legenda, 2007). See also Nidesh Lawtoo, ‘Bataille and the Birth of the Subject’, Angelaki 16.2 (2011), 73–88. 33 Bataille, ‘André Malraux’, p. 372. 34 Georges Bataille, ‘La Structure psychologique du fascisme’, in Œuvres complètes, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 374. 35 Bataille, ‘La Structure psychologique’, p. 348.

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subversion qui continue à poursuivre l’émancipation des vies humaines’. 36 The only hope, Bataille concludes, against the imperative social forces of fascism is a power of subversion supported by the knowledge of the forces of attraction and repulsion. There are marked continuities at play here across Bataille’s use of the vocabulary of ‘forces of attraction’, ‘discharge’, ‘excitation’, ‘effervescence’ and Benjamin’s notion of innervation, but the underlying question remains: is convulsive politics definitively fascist? Is the convulsive body a fascist body? By way of a response to these questions, I want to turn to Bataille’s novel Le Bleu du ciel and to its final scene in particular. The novel was published in 1957, but written originally in 1935, in the same year as the first and second drafts of Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay. As Louette notes, the figure of Dirty in the novel is endowed with a convulsive force, figured politically. 37 The corporeally transgressive figure of Dirty draws on the same convulsive imaginary as the female figures of Histoire de l’œil, only here it seems to be supplemented with the issue of class difference, with an excremental value, and associated with the site and cruelty of the abattoir, as in the following description: Les domestiques terrifiés virent un filet d’eau couler le long de la chaise et des jambes de leur belle interlocutrice: l’urine forma une flaque qui s’agrandit sur le tapis tandis qu’un bruit d’entrailles relâchées se produisait lourdement sous la robe de la jeune fille, révulsée, écarlate et tordue sur sa chaise comme un porc sous un couteau. 38

Dirty’s transgressive expenditure is intensified by being performed in front of ‘servants’, and in the luxurious setting of the Savoy, only a stone’s throw, the narrator tells us, from ‘l’immonde égout du paysage’, the supposedly abject slums of London. 39 In the terms of the essay on the psychological structure of fascism, Dirty is a heterogeneous element endowed with the imperative force of abjection. But it is on the final description of the fascist parade that I want to concentrate, as it poses the difficult question of the relation between the convulsive imaginary and convulsive politics in a particularly acute manner: 36 Bataille, ‘La Structure psychologique’, p. 371. 37 Georges Bataille, Romans et récits (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 1055–63. 38 Georges Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel in Romans et récits (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), p. 117. 39 Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel, p. 118.

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J’étais devant des enfants en ordre militaire, immobiles, sur les marches de ce théâtre: ils avaient des culottes courtes de velours noir et de petites vestes ornées d’aiguillettes, ils étaient nu-tête; à droite des fifres, à gauche des tambours plats. Ils jouaient avec tant de violence, avec un rythme si cassant que j’étais devant eux le souffle coupé. Rien de plus sec que les tambours plats qui battaient, ou de plus acide, que les fifres. Tous ces enfants nazis (certains d’entre eux étaient blonds, avec un visage de poupée) jouant pour de rares passants, dans la nuit, devant l’immense place vide sous l’averse, paraissaient en proie, raides comme des triques, à une exultation de cataclysme: devant eux, leur chef, un gosse d’une maigreur de dégénéré, avec le visage hargneux d’un poisson (de temps à autre, il se retournait pour aboyer des commandements, il râlait), marquait la mesure avec une longue canne de tambour-major. D’un geste obscène, il dressait cette canne, pommeau sur le bas-ventre (elle ressemblait alors à un pénis de singe démesuré, décoré de tresses de cordelettes de couleur); d’une saccade de sale petite brute, il élevait alors le pommeau à hauteur de la bouche. Du ventre à la bouche, de la bouche au ventre, chaque allée et venue, saccadée, hachée par une rafale de tambours. Ce spectacle était obscène. Il était terrifiant: si je n’avais pas disposé d’un rare sang-froid, comment serais-je resté debout regardant ces haineuses mécaniques, aussi calme que devant un mur de pierre. Chaque éclat de la musique, dans la nuit était une incantation, qui appelait à la guerre et au meurtre. Les battements de tambour étaient portés au paroxysme, dans l’espoir de se résoudre finalement en sanglantes rafales d’artillerie: je regardais au loin … une armée d’enfants rangée en bataille. Ils étaient cependant immobiles, mais en transe. Je les voyais, non loin de moi, envoûtés par le désir d’aller à la mort. Hallucinés par des champs illimités où, un jour, ils s’avanceraient, riant au soleil: ils laisseraient derrière eux les agonisants et les morts.40

This sequence occurs at the end of Le Bleu du ciel, between Dirty’s departure and the narrator’s own, on a train presumably bound for Paris. It lacks a sense of integration in the rest of the narrative and has an isolated quality which tends, I think, to endow it with a quasiallegorical character, and suggests that one read it in relation to the issues around fascism that Bataille had explored in the early to mid-1930s. In this context, it has a hermeneutic value in relation to the politics of the convulsive body. What I think Bataille’s figuration does is to offer a subversion of the potentially heroic ‘sovereign’ figure of the Nazi, effectively through a sexualization oriented towards abjection. This 40 Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel, pp. 204–05.

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subversion, in Bataille’s sense, is effected through the association of the exultant figure of the band leader with baton with the ‘obscene’ image of fellatio of a monkey’s penis. The association of the Nazi children with dolls also adds to the unheimlich quality of the scenario. The whole image thus resembles a kind of clockwork mechanism or automaton, ‘ces haineuses mécaniques’ performing in a void, to ‘rare passers-by’ only. The uselessness, the uncanniness and the machinic obscenity of this example of the innervated body suffice to endow it with a darkly comedic function. Bataille’s comic subversion, however, is oriented towards abjection, towards what he calls a ‘black irony’, reinforced by the premonition of its death-driven, lethal future. If Benjamin offered Chaplin’s innervated body as a figure of triumph over the apparatus, and saw Mickey Mouse as a kind of prosthetic liberation from civilization, Bataille’s obscene image of the Nazi automata has no such sublimatory or cathartic value; it is purely a figure of abjection. Bataille’s image thus undermines the theory of innervation. It says that innervation can be co-opted to obscene military ends, can easily be pressured into the stiffness of automata and the rhythm of artillery fire. On the other hand, despite the historicity embedded in his work, Bataille lacks a theory of technology. In his later work of the 1930s with the Collège de Sociologie, he will propose, in the face of the threat of fascism, a return to ‘the old house of myth’ as a mediation between humanity and the ‘effervescent forces’ which fascism conjures and manipulates.41 This recourse to ritual, however atheological, is diametrically inverse to the affirmation of technologically mediated innervation in Benjamin’s work. In Benjamin’s terms, Bataille is advocating a return to the conditions of first technology, to the era of human sacrifice, while Benjamin’s advocation of second technology moves in the opposite direction, towards the prosthetic extensions of the body in play rather than the use of the body as a plaything.42 41 Bataille uses the expression ‘la vieille maison humaine’ to refer to myth in ‘L’Apprenti sorcier’, one of three texts intended as a platform for the Collège de sociologie in July 1938. See Georges Bataille, ‘L’Apprenti sorcier’, in Œuvres complètes, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 536. 42 This much is evident in an early text by Bataille in Documents, ‘Les Pieds nickelés’, which also engages with a popular comic form (the children’s comic of the same name), but in order to propose the continuity of the comic’s images and their subversive violence with human sacrifice in Central America, the topic of a previous essay in Documents. See Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 233–35.

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The forms which the (convulsive) body can take, the affects it can take on can thus be seen to diverge, in the accounts given by Benjamin and Bataille, between the regimes of play and of sacrifice, respectively. In the figures of Mickey Mouse and of Chaplin Benjamin sees the risk of an innervated form susceptible to mediate the energies of the mass through the collective space of the cinema. He cannot be blamed for not having entirely predicted the capture of convulsive form in the figure of the fascist leader. Bataille, perhaps with greater but more problematic foresight, saw the dangerous continuity of erotic convulsion and a hysterical, authoritarian politics, but was unable to think this outside the frame of ritual and sacrifice. Further enquiries will be needed to track further into the century the forms the convulsive body can take, and what it can do.

chapter nineteen

Form and Energeia in the Work of Barbara Cassin (For M) Michael Syrotinski Form and

At a conference in Aberdeen in 1995 on the theme of ‘Sensual Reading’, Michael Sheringham delivered a typically compelling keynote talk, subsequently published as a chapter in an edited volume.1 As one of the many rich meditations that would eventually turn into his major study of poetry and the everyday, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, the discussion focused on Merleau-Ponty and a number of contemporary French poets, notably Philippe Jaccottet, and what they do with colour. The core of his argument pivoted around the productive tensions he identified between colour as a form of immediate, principally phenomenological absorption in the world, and colour as a language, a series of semiotic codes with an infinite number of conventional associations which, literally, ‘colour’ that immediacy. He was talking, in other words, and more generally, about how we translate and transmute lived experience into poetic form, a process that Sheringham was always alive to in so many different texts and contexts. The supplemental, parenthetical subtitle (‘For M’, or perhaps ‘For MS’) not so much explains as performs the ostensible subject of the main title, since this subtitle is the hidden, unconscious but ever-present dimension of the tribute I would like to pay here to Michael Sheringham. 1 Michael Sheringham, ‘Language, Color and the Enigma of Everydayness’, in Sensual Reading: New Approaches to Reading in its Relations to the Senses, ed. Michael Syrotinski and Ian Maclachlan (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), pp. 127–52.

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My own reflection on the question of form takes what might at first seem an oblique detour through the work of Barbara Cassin, the distinguished French philosopher, Greek philologist and editor of the acclaimed Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles. I have over the last few years been fascinated by the notion of the ‘untranslatable’, that is, not words or phrases that have not been, or cannot be, translated, but those which pose endless challenges to translation, and are themselves the source of an infinite, interminable translation.2 As well as being one of the main translators of the English translation and edition of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, I have translated two of Cassin’s other texts, 3 and consequently have come to know the extraordinary range and complex web of her oeuvre more generally. Although she is a philosopher by training, and the centre of gravity of all of her texts is primarily philosophical rather than strictly ‘literary’, her writing often blurs boundaries of disciplines and genres, and it is through an increasing attention to the performative nature of her own text that I have become aware of how questions of form surface with some insistence (both as an insistent signifier and part-signifier, as well as a concept), and seem to coalesce, perhaps unintentionally or unconsciouslessly, at the juncture of several closely intertwined themes. I will sketch these out for clarity of presentation in five distinct subsections as follows: (1) most importantly to my mind, the ever-expanding Untranslatables project, with its very fine-grained attention to the nuances of key philosophical concepts as they wend and morph their way through history and different languages and cultures, and which is at the heart of a very different way of ‘doing philosophy’ multilingually; (2) Cassin’s powerful philosophical critique of Google’s domination of the so-called information age (and 2 Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Originally published in French as Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des Intraduisibles (Paris: Robert-Le Seuil, 2004). Subsequent references abbreviated to DU, with page number immediately following quotation. 3 These are Google-moi: La deuxième mission de l’Amérique (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007) and Jacques le sophiste: Lacan, logos et psychanalyse (Paris: Epel, 2012), which have also been published in English editions as Google Me: One-Click Democracy, trans. Michael Syrotinski (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018) and Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos and Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Syrotinski (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). Subsequent references to the translations abbreviated GM and JS, respectively, with page number immediately following quotation.

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its claim to make universally accessible ‘all the world’s information’; (3) her reading of Jacques Lacan as a present-day sophist, taking more seriously the sophistic challenge to Platonic or Aristotelian form, and linking it to the form of knowledge (or more accurately ‘non-knowledge’) one finds in Lacanian psychoanalysis; (4) her Austinian performative reading of political discourse as it relates to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa; and (5) her polemical intervention in the politics and philosophy of education, Derrière les grilles: sortons du tout-évaluation, where the French word grilles refers both to imprisonment, as well as the grids or forms into which we increasingly have to fit accounts of our activity, scholarly and otherwise.4 This is part of a more wide-ranging critique one finds throughout her work of the pervasive and pernicious effects of systematic, formal evaluation. I read Cassin’s work, therefore, as an important contribution to contemporary critical efforts to rethink form as a dynamic principle beyond its long history of aesthetic contemplation or formalist analysis. In other words, not so much a question of what forms are as what they do, and how we can assess their social, ideological or—in this case— philosophical purchase, in ways that can afford genuinely new insights into the complexity of how we act and think. In this respect, it echoes the approach taken by Caroline Levine in her recent book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, and her call for a defiant reaffirmation of formalist criticism that brings to bear an attentiveness to linguistic detail and the skills of close reading to comparable social and political forms. As she puts it, many forms are organizing us at all times. Where exactly, then, can we locate the best opportunities for social change in a world of overlapping forms? Can we set one form against another or introduce a new form that would reroute a racial hierarchy or disturb exclusionary boundaries? I argue that we need a fine-grained formalist reading practice to address the extraordinary density of forms that is a fact of our most ordinary daily experience. 5

Cassin’s work presents a powerful example of this fine-grained reading, taking as her primary objects the founding texts and conceptual 4 Barbara Cassin, Derrière les grilles: sortons du tout-évaluation (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2014). Subsequent references abbreviated to DG, with page number immediately following quotation. 5 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 22.

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formulations of Greek philosophy, but more significantly the history of their continual overlapping translations and multilingual reinventions, as well as the implications this has for our own philosophically impoverished times. Untranslatable Form Nowhere is this acute attention to the interplay between linguistic, philosophical and aesthetic form more evident than in Cassin’s landmark work, the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. This encyclopaedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary and political terms was originally published in French in 2004 by Robert/Seuil. The entries for each term set out to describe its origins and meanings, its translations into other languages, and the history and context of its usages through illustrative commentary of well-known philosophical and literary texts. The terms—such as Dasein (German), Logos (Greek), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese) or stato (Italian)—came from over a dozen languages, spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary periods, and the entries were written by more than 150 distinguished European philosophers and scholars. These are all terms, in other words, which have had a deep and long-lasting impact on thinking across the humanities. The Vocabulaire was thus a volume unlike any other in the history of philosophy, in that it considered concepts not just as words, but words that enter into all sorts of problematic exchanges with other words in other languages, in a kind of vast multilingual performance that Cassin calls ‘philosopher en langues’ (‘philosophizing in languages’, with the accent emphatically on the plural). The dictionary also includes historical surveys of the major European languages: English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Cassin herself provides a useful nutshell definition of ‘untranslatable’ in her preface: To speak of untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question, or the expressions, the syntactical or grammatical turns, are not and cannot be translated: the untranslatable is rather what one keeps on (not) translating [l’intraduisible, c’est plutôt ce qu’on ne cesse pas de (ne pas) traduire]. But this indicates that their translation, into one language or another, creates a problem, to the extent of sometimes generating a neologism or imposing a new meaning on an old word. (DU, xvii)

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Clearly, of course, translation takes place, and has taken place, often very successfully, as evidenced by the many linguistic histories that are narrated with such extraordinary philological erudition and attention to detail, but also by the fact that the Vocabulaire itself is now being gradually translated into a dozen other language editions, most notably the 2014 Anglo-American one published by Princeton University Press as the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. As one of the five translators of the Dictionary of Untranslatables (I  was responsible for 55 entries, alphabetically, from HOMONYM to MOTIONLESS), I found myself acutely aware at every turn of how often the different histories of these terms that are brought forth in all their rich complexity had to navigate the choppy waters of a treacherous strait, what Barbara Cassin identifies as the twin pitfalls of articulating a history of philosophical language in translation: on the one hand, logical universalism (in the analytic tradition) which ignores languages and, on the other, the inherent essentialism of linguistic or philosophical nationalism. FORM as an entry in the Dictionary of Untranslatables is an example of what Cassin calls a ‘directional’, that is, a term so excessively dense— such as ART, SENSE, TIME and so on—it would be impossible to write anything even approaching a succinct philosophical translation history. It thus functions as a signpost leading towards other, fuller entries and conceptual histories, depending on the particular nuance of meaning and context. What is intriguing about form is that, like colour, it reveals at its core a constitutive but symptomatic tension. This is how FORM is described in the opening paragraph of the English translation of this ‘directional’: ‘Form’ comes from the Latin forma, itself possibly borrowed, by way of Etruscan, from the Greek morphê, which means ‘form or beautiful form’ and concretely refers both to the mold and to the shape of the resulting object, whether the word concerns arts and techniques (the form of a shoe, the plan of a house, the frame of a painting), norms (a legal formula, the imprint on a coin), or speech (a grammatical form, a stylistic device). The term is especially plastic in French, as in Latin, since it was used to translate the Greek words eidos, ‘idea’ (in contrast to eidôlon, ‘image’) or ‘form’ (in contrast to hulê, ‘matter’); morphê (‘aspect or contour’); schêma (‘shape or manner of being’), ousia (‘essence’); to ti esti (‘quiddity’); paradeigma (‘model’); or charaktêr (‘mark, distinctive sign’). (DU, 349)

So FORM is immediately, and from the outset (‘always already’, one might say), a very slippery and polysemic concept. It is both mould and

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shape produced, both outer container and inner contained, signifiant and signifié, syntactical construction and semantic content, and is marked by a fairly radical undecidability—what Cassin in her long entry on HOMONYM in the Dictionary of Untranslatables calls equivocation (équivocité), quoting Hannah Arendt, who talks of mutlingualism as exposing ‘the wavering equivocation of the world’ (la chancelante équivocité du monde).6 Indeed, homonymy, and the necessary, uncontrollable internal differences within a language it reveals—and thus the poetic quality of language that comes to the fore—becomes a guiding principle of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, and its emphasis on the differences between languages. As Cassin’s own brief presentation of her project makes clear, homonymy is precisely what ties linguistic performance to meaning: Performance and signifier are interconnected, and the Dictionary of Untranslatables will later confirm how closely interconnected performance and signifier are with sophistry, which Aristotle accused of wanting to take advantage of ‘what is in the sounds of the voice and in words’ in order to refuse the decision of meaning, the tyranny of univocity, and the prohibition of homonymy which are at the heart of the principle of non-contradiction. ‘A language is merely the integral of its equivocations that history has allowed to persist’: what Lacan writes in ‘L’Etourdit’ about the languages of the unconscious is characteristic of all languages, considered both separately and in relation to one other. Later on and after the fact, the diversity of languages can be apprehended as the web of their equivocations, or rather, the homonyms at the core of a given language determine the synonyms as well as the non-coincidences and distortions between different languages. (‘EU’, 147–48)

This re-evaluation of the relationship between languages involves at the same time a rethinking of universalism, an operation Cassin describes as ‘complicating the universal’ (compliquer l’universel), replacing it with a more relativistic understanding of universalism (which, like all concepts, never settles definitively into an ‘ergon’, a finished form, but is rather energeia, endlessly generating new meanings, and new forms, within and between languages). Translation, seen through the lens of the Untranslatable, thus becomes for Cassin nothing less than a new 6 See Cassin, ‘The Energy of the Untranslatables’, trans. Michael Syrotinski, Paragraph 38.2 (July 2015), 145–58 (p. 157). Special Issue on ‘Translation and the Untranslatable’. Article subsequently abbreviated to ‘EU’, with page references immediately following quotation in parentheses.

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paradigm—paradeigma being one of the Greek origins of the Latin forma—of a truly interdisciplinary and interlingual human science. All the World’s Information It is the intellectual project that the Dictionary of Untranslatables represents, as well as its subsequent translations into other languages, which underpins Cassin’s critique of the search engine Google in her book Google-moi: La deuxième mission de l’Amérique,7 bound up as it is with a certain cultural and thus linguistic imperialism. In this case, the reflection on form might be summarized quite simply as a question: how have the digital age and developments in information technology transformed the very forms that knowledge itself takes nowadays? Cassin approaches this question via Greek culture, philology and philosophy (and the history of philosophy and thought more broadly), and this becomes the lens through which she challenges the political and ethical basis on which Google makes its claims, and the manner in which it carries out its operations. Her critique is thus a serious one, since it goes to the heart of what we often think of uncritically as the benefits that accrue to humanity from increasingly advanced Internet technology. The book starts out as an entertaining historical (as well as personal) account, but it is really in the later chapters that the philosophical stakes become clear. As her argument gathers pace, she marshals by turns Heidegger’s thinking on technology, Spinoza’s concept of monads, Deleuze’s notion of multitude, Hannah Arendt’s ideas about language and translation, and the distinction between morality and ethics in Kant, as well as anchoring her discussion in Plato and the Sophists. Cassin takes Google to task for its self-proclaimed ‘mission’ to democratize information, and for imposing its doxa as truth. Doxa (opinion, although its polysemy is considerably richer, as Cassin explains) has a long history in Greek philosophy, denounced by Plato, for example, as second-hand or received wisdom rather than the epistemologically verifiable truth of ‘what is’. Indeed, what is characterized as ‘doxography’ becomes a dramatic staging of the tensions between doxa and aletheia (truth) that structure the early Sophistic dialogues, and 7 Barbara Cassin, Google-moi (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007) Google Me: One-Click Democracy, trans. Michael Syrotinski (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

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which allow for Cassin’s highly original analysis of the ontological status of ‘information’ in today’s hypertechnologized world. The target of her critique is the impact that Google is having on ‘forms’ of knowledge that are now structured and determined by the all-pervasive modalities of information technology, and one can see in the following passage how terms and part-terms connected to information and formatting, with an almost obsessive drive towards panoptic control, coalesce around notions of ‘form’: The first premise is that Google, in order to become the number-one search engine, has to store all the information in the world, that is, all information from the past and all information from the present, in as close to real time as possible. The second premise is that everything—everything we know or believe, everything we do, everything that happens, everything we can imagine or hope, everything we feel—can be formatted as information, with a small, big, or enormous loss. So Google, if it is to conform to its original concept, must be kept virtually informed of everything. (GM, 79–80)

Google’s addiction to totalization is symptomatic, of course, of an immeasurably rapid expansion of the techniques whereby we are now able to process information, but Google is merely the best at what it does. Its ultimate aim to gather and organize ‘all the world’s information’ profoundly and irreversibly alters how we know the things we know, and what we might have accepted until recently as secure givens. Indeed, it is perhaps no accident that the whole question of the relationship between communications technology, mass surveillance programmes and democratic freedom has been thrown into dramatic relief by the very high-profile cases of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, which made publicly available mass data from previously secret or classified US government intelligence files, and of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency employee and whistle-blower, who revealed to the world the extraordinary scale of mass surveillance programmes and covert hacking operations that are being carried out in the name of ‘global security’. As more recent developments since the 2016 US presidential election show, although we are dealing with a constantly shifting and ever-more complex landscape, the last few years underline all the more forcefully how prescient was Cassin’s analysis of the claims made by Google, and the cultural, political, economic and juridical implications one could extrapolate if its ‘mission’ were to succeed.

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One of the core arguments of Google-moi is to show how the concepts and language that Google uses to define its mission come out of a long and often complex philosophical prehistory, as it were, whose contours can be more sharply delineated by a focus on translation. The question of translation indeed comes to the fore in the latter half of Google-moi, and Cassin argues passionately for the multiplicity and diversity of languages (including within each language and cultural tradition), over and against the linguistic (and, more importantly, philosophical) impoverishment of ‘Globish’, or global English. This exploitation of the potential of doxa as a theoretical paradigm can also be seen in Cassin’s more recent works, such as Sophistical Practice: Towards a Consistent Relativism, or her reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis as itself an essentially sophistical practice, Jacques le Sophiste: Lacan, logos et psychoanalyse. 8 Cassin’s witty, punchy and provocative style, which in Google-moi is intended to situate the book as a punctual intervention at a given point in time, makes it at the same time a very personal account, as a subject/object caught in Google’s web, and a playful, performative experiment in the kind of immediacy the web purports to offer, but which Cassin challenges with a rare philosophical and philological seriousness. What she advocates instead is a sophistic attentiveness to the performative, indeed transformative (and I would say poetic) quality of language, brought into sharper focus through a fuller historical awareness of the singular contexts of translation, and all of its attendant complications: As far as culture goes, and this is really something of a statement of fact even if it is seldom acknowledged, the missing dimension is that of the artwork which, even open and ‘performed,’ is necessary for thinking languages as well as books. Once again culture cannot be reduced, any more than knowledge can, to the sum total of information—no more indeed than a sum total of pieces of information can make up information as such. (GM, 120)

So while Google is at one level naturally a boon to students and researchers, Cassin’s argument that the economic and commercial interests underlying Google’s many services fundamentally compromise any principled claim to democracy or universality is truer now than ever before.

8 Barbara Cassin, Sophistical Practice: Towards a Consistent Relativism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); and Cassin, Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos and Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Syrotinski (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020).

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Sophistry and the Forms of the Unconscious It is perhaps not surprising that psychoanalysis lends itself particularly well to Cassin’s rethinking of the dynamic effects of linguistic forms, both conscious and unconscious. This is more clearly apparent in her reading of Lacan in Jacques le sophiste, where we find a rich exemplification of the way in which the focus on the Untranslatable, as a form of philosophizing that foregrounds the intra- and interlingual play of the signifier, challenges conventional relationships of language to truth and meaning, and in her narrative she weaves together sophistry and psychoanalysis in a remarkable performative demonstration: We will have to see exactly what Lacan understands by the term sophist as well as by the term psychoanalyst (and what kind of ‘psychoanalyst’ he is), what is distinctive about our time, and what it is about each status that is different. Let us just say provisionally that the respective discourses of sophistry and Lacanian psychoanalysis share a rebellious relationship to meaning, which operates performatively, at the level of the signifier, and distances itself from the truth of philosophy [le champ partagé par la sophistique et la psychanalyse lacanienne est le discours dans son rapport rebelle au sens, qui passe par le signifiant et la performance]. Our time is the time of the subject of the unconscious bound to the sexual relationship that does not exist, by contrast with the Greek political animal, but both are first and foremost speaking beings. As for the differences in status that follow from this, they can perhaps be expressed in terms of discourse as a social link that has to be negotiated between medicine and politics, between jouissance and mastery.9

In many ways, the Dictionary of Untranslatables is again a pivotal point of reference linking Lacan and sophistry, since not only is psychoanalysis widely represented in the dictionary,10 but Cassin’s own readings of psychoanalytical and linguistic terms are profoundly informed by her philosophical insights.11 For Cassin, the key difference between Freud 9 Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos and Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Syrotinski (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), pp. 25–26. 10 See, for example, the entry on INGENIUM, and the interlingual network connecting mot d’esprit, Witz, witticism, and so on. 11 See the relevant sections on SIGNIFIER, or HOMONYM or SPEECH ACT, for example. Indeed, it is very much the Freud of jokes, the psychopathology of everyday life and of dreams where Lacan finds inspiration for his own linguistically inflected psychoanalytic theory.

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and Lacan is that while the former sought to uncover hidden meanings, often sexual in origin, for Lacan there is no hidden meaning, or signified, since it is precisely unknowable: there is only the originarily split subject and the signifying chain which is set in motion by desire. Cassin considers Lacan a sophist precisely because for him language is not bound to, or does not reveal, any universal truth or meaning (Platonic or Aristotelian), and there is no metalanguage, no ‘subject who knows’, but desire and meaning are founded on lack, a fundamental béance or gap which he illustrates with a range of startling metaphors such as, for example, the theatricalized prompter’s box [le trou du souffleur]. In his later texts, Lacan would theorize this lack using ever more sophisticated models and concepts, such as jouissance, or plus-dejouir (themselves notoriously untranslatable terms). Following Cassin’s linking of psychoanalysis and sophistry, language thus functions neither as a Platonic relation to ‘truth’, nor according to an Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction, but is always caught in an intersubjective dialectic, within its own endless signifying chain, what Lacan would come to refer to most persistently as each subject’s unique ‘lalangue’. Cassin uncouples the truth/untruth distinction, then, through a number of increasingly bold moves. She goes beyond this distinction by privileging sophistry over Platonism, and the entire metaphysical tradition for which it serves as a foundation. As we have seen, she argues that Lacan is closer to the Sophists when he takes issue with Freud’s insistence on uncovering hidden meanings, or the sexual origins of symptoms. This is in turn aligned with her assault on the entire analytic tradition in philosophy (one of the main targets of the Dictionary of Untranslatables), which claims that philosophical thinking can be done without reference to language, and which leads Cassin to turn to Austin’s theory of performative language, both as a methodological paradigm shift and in the active insertion of her own subjectivity within the narrative she presents. Finally, the emphasis on the Untranslatable points to elements of language that undermine stable meaning, but here again, Cassin moves beyond the philosophically comfortable couple of sense and nonsense, and aims to theorize something that would be closer to Lacan’s ‘real’, as ab-sense [ab-sens]. As a philosopher who is also profoundly concerned with philosophizing as a woman, this ‘ab-sense’ is inextricably tied to the lack of sexual relationship (Lacan’s famous ‘il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’), which develops into a rereading of Seminar XX (Encore) and the question of feminine jouissance in the light of Lacan as a sophistic thinker.

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My own interest and investment in this text as a translator is twofold (at least). First and foremost, the pragmatic question of how best to solve the particular challenges and puzzles of translating Lacan (and one is dealing very much with puzzles and word games, or the kinds of ‘rebus’ that Freud uses to interpret in his dreamwork), but also translating Cassin’s French, which is unashamedly (and mimetically) ‘Lacanian’ at times, so trying to do full justice to her ‘philosophico-psychoanalytic’ performance. In this sense, translation puzzles would perhaps fall into three broad categories. There are, firstly, the ‘classically’ untranslatable terms, which have acquired theoretically dense and singular meanings, such as la jouissance, which are normally by consensus retained in French, as the best translations do, although even here, we are always only ever dealing with a rather provisional linguistic stability, since how do we then translate le joui-sens? Secondly, there are Lacan’s own deliberate neologisms, often designed as intentionally untranslatable, where he is marking out his difference from received institutional meanings of psychoanalytic diagnostic criteria (how does one translate, for example, parlêtre, hainamoration, lalangue and so on?). Finally, how does one negotiate Lacan’s homonyms, where he playfully stretches out of shape his own terms, very much like the anamorphosis of the death’s head in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which he uses in Seminar XI to illustrate the gaze as objet petit a (so what does one do, for example, with con-nerie, les non-dupes errent, sinthomme, or hihanappât)? Translating a text such as Jacques le sophiste means one has to position oneself performatively as a speaking subject in relation to Cassin’s text in the same way in which Cassin positions herself in relation to Lacan, and to adhere to the principle of untranslatability, that is, actively resisting any totalizing or reductive recovery of meaning. Performing Justice This uncoupling of the philosophical paradigm of truth/untruth (or aletheia/doxa) through the psychoanalytical detour of Lacan, has a political corollary in Cassin’s reading of ‘truth’ in the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. This is perhaps where one might find the most interesting parallels between Caroline Levine’s rethinking of the relationship between aesthetic formalism and social and political forms, and Cassin’s reflections on linguistic form and political performance as a question of

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(un)translatability. The inherently political dimension of the Untranslatables project, traced of course back to the city state in ancient Greece, is clear both from the many entries in the dictionary which address this explicitly (for example, POLIS, POLITICS, CIVILIZATION, CIVIL RIGHTS, COMMUNITY, GOVERNMENT, LEX, LIBERTY, RULE OF LAW, PEOPLE/RACE/NATION or STATO) and from the infinitely expanding connections emerging out of the translation of the dictionary into other languages, which have their own particular contexts and emphases. This was dramatized most starkly and poignantly with the Arabic edition—Ali Benmakhlouf, the editor, focused on the political terms in the Vocabulaire (entries such as PEOPLE, LAW and STATE) in order to measure the distances between languages and cultures and to open them up to one another, and also as a means to professionalize the act of translation itself in the Arab world—and the production of the Ukrainian and Russian editions, which is, as Cassin puts it, ‘a collaboration that transcends the present conflicts, and a necessary act that deserves to be recognized and supported by Europe, as an example of intellectual, intelligent peace work’ (‘EU’, 50). The most intense historical pressure points in terms of the relationship of politics to language occur, not surprisingly, during times of political upheaval and trauma, and Cassin has at various points written eloquently about the impact of Nazism on the German language, for example, as well as more recent comparable events such as the Rwandan genocide. What happened in the latter case was that the meaning of certain words in the survivors’ language was radically altered, or indeed removed, post-genocide, so that in the period of recovery and reconciliation that followed, all those involved in the judicial process, or as listeners to survivor narratives, had to be acutely aware of these shifts of meaning. Here we have a circular process involving speech practices and an entire language, which is how language evolves. This was particularly evident during the TRC, where the civil war in effect was transposed into a war of words, in which the security forces were criticized for failing to exercise proper care for the words they used, and anyone engaged in anti-apartheid political struggle was reduced to a ‘terrorist’, and thus a legitimate war target. The discourse of apartheid thus had a similarly poisonous effect to that of Nazism on the German language, and Cassin warns of the need for endless and extreme vigilance towards the easy slide of language into unthinking clichés and politically accepted norms. When it comes to the process of reconciliation, this more active engagement with language comes to the fore. Cassin takes the TRC

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as an exemplary model process for separating out the question of amnesty—as the political and juridical social mechanism by which the transition is made to a post-apartheid era—from the moral (and psychological) dimension of forgiveness (that is, although political amnesty is granted with full disclosure of crimes, victims are not obliged to forgive or forget). For her, the question of narrative truth is marked by an important shift away from a focus on disclosure as a ‘revelation’ of what was hidden, and an acknowledgement of the crimes they represented, to a more finely tuned attentiveness to language as performative (that is, reparative and—it is to be hoped—transformative) act. One can see a clear homology with the transformations of psychoanalytic transference at the level of discourse, and Cassin develops this idea further still by talking about truth in terms of its contextual effectiveness, rather than any decontextualized, ahistorical absolute. This is what she means by ‘consistent relativism’ (relativisme conséquent), which is not just a question of translation in the abstract, but always translation for (a particular purpose or context): ‘There is a better translation for – for the purposes of getting us to understand this, or that. Consistent relativism implies, I think, moving away from the idea of a single Truth, or the Truth, and thus from the idea that there is a right way and a wrong way, towards the idea that there is a “truer” way, a way that is “better for”’ (‘EU’, 156). Forms and More Forms This more ‘performative’, multilingual mode of approaching ‘truth’ and the ‘real’ (whether conceived in philosophical, psychoanalytical, technological, social or political terms), is for Cassin quite easily transferable to the modes and forms of evaluation with which we have to contend nowadays, notably for us when it comes to so-called ‘research performance’, with the increasing prevalence of quantifiable metrics as tools to measure research quality (citation indices, journal impact factors, article download counts, etc.), as well as the use of global ranking lists whose methodology mirrors Google’s own PageRank search algorithm. As she puts it: Ten years on, I would place a slightly different emphasis on the danger of Globish, seeing it now as corresponding to the ‘normal’ politics of language, which for many of our ministers goes without saying, insofar

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as it cannot nowadays, in Europe and across the world, be dissociated from evaluation, or ranking, and thus from the economy. It is the language of expertise, which allows us to bring everything back to a common denominator and which constrains us to above-all-not-thinkfor-ourselves behind the evaluation grids of a knowledge-based society, with work-packages, deliverables and key words to lock us in. It has become a language without authors and without works (as anyone doing research in the humanities could tell you from painful experience, files and documents submitted to Brussels have to be written in Globish). It is also very much the language of ‘search engines’, such as Google with its linguistic flavours: just as with their algorithm, it is creating a world in which quality is (nothing but) an emerging property of quantity, with no possible recognition of or place for invention. (‘EU’, 148)

In her most recent polemical intervention, Derrière les grilles: sortons du tout-évaluation, ‘grilles’ refers both to an all-pervasive imprisonment of the human body, mind, spirit and imagination, and the literal grids into which we all have to fit accounts of our activity for the purposes of systematic evaluation and assessment. This is how we have all now become accustomed to live in the contemporary neoliberal University. Like Michael Sheringham, Cassin is drawn to writers whose works are characterized by an extraordinary inventive energy and originality, and who engage in endless formal play and creativity. It is precisely for this form of originality and invention—in short, a kind of perpetual commitment to performativity—that Barbara Cassin makes a passionate plea in the introduction to Derrière les grilles, circling back to the art of Greek rhetoric (which figures prominently in the Dictionary of Untranslatables). She does not dispute the importance of careful and accurate counting and accountability, which are necessary for good, transparent government and civic life. Could we, however, she asks, see these grids which dominate our lives as analogous to the topoi and lieux communs of ancient rhetoric, the syntax and grammar of languages, the rules of versification and rhythmic forms which precisely enable invention and originality? The immense difference, as she rightly states, is that ‘grids do not tolerate any exception’ [les grilles ne tolèrent aucun écart]: A grid is not an innocent division [n’est pas un découpage qui n’engage à rien], it is a formatting which excludes everything that does not fit into it. Commonplace expressions, by contrast, are a source of inventiveness, a making available of resources, or of propositions, which one can draw on for one’s arguments, and which not only tolerate but give rise

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to previously inexistent adjustments, encourage the inventiveness of exceptions and surprises in relation to what is normally expected. In the case of grids, linguistic activity is strangled: with topoi, or commonplaces, it is on the contrary stimulated in its creative force, supported by the treasure-trove of possibilities and powers one experiences. (DG, 19; my translation)

Cassin’s work thus demonstrates, in an extraordinarily wide-ranging reflection on different linguistic, philosophical, social, political and literary contexts, from ancient Greek philosophy to the present day, how the already complex nature of form is opened up to the prismatic and dynamic effects of (un)translatability when these forms are considered as plurilingual, as endlessly transformative energeia rather than aesthetically stable ergon. Her work challenges what we thought we knew about philosophical concepts or aesthetic categories, but in so doing it suggests new paradigms that have the potential to be philosophically enriching, or politically reparative, or socially liberating, through an attention to linguistic effects that is, in essence, profoundly poetic. For my part, I have always found the act of translation to be inherently creative, and one that is as intellectually challenging and enriching as any sustained critical reading, whether of literature, philosophy or any other cultural forms: the act of translation, and theoretically informed acts of literary criticism, are indeed perhaps ultimately closely compatible in terms of what forms can do to us.

Index Index

2016 US presidential election 310 ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ 142 Adorno, Theodor W. 144, 296 ‘The Essay as Form’ 144 Agamben, Giorgio 287–88, 292, 293 ‘Notes on Gesture’ 287 Age, L’, du roman américain 46 Akerman, Chantal 5, 10, 16, 114, 116, 124–28 Chantal Akerman––NOW 127 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles 124–25 Ma mère rit 124–28 Maniac Shadows 128 Akerman, Natalia (Nelly) 125, 126, 128 Alexis, Jacques Stéphen 197 American South, the 125 Angot, Christine 129 Anthropocene, the 132, 266, 267 Apelles 29 Apollinaire, Guillaume 26, 29 ‘Le Poète assassiné’ 29 Aragon, Louis 42 Arendt, Hannah 308, 309 Aristotle 183, 308 Armstrong, Joshua 139 Aron, Jean-Paul 141 Artaud, Antonin 283–84, 296 Assange, Julian 310

Assmann, Aleida 106, 107, 109 Attridge, Derek 166 Augé, Marc 135 Austin, J. L. 313 autobiography 9, 11–12, 18, 97–112, 113, 147–60, 161–75 autofiction 9, 115 Bachelard, Gaston 261 Bailly, Jean-Christophe 3, 4, 10, 15, 248 Sur la forme 3 Baldwin, James 179, 181, 183 Balzac, Honoré de 46 Barcelona 24, 26 Barnes, Julian 98 Nothing to be frightened of 98 Barthes, Roland 4, 5, 7–9, 11, 16, 43, 53–66, 67–80, 101–02, 105, 110, 118, 167, 274–78, 282 and photography 68–80, 101–02, 110 ‘Comment parler à Dieu?’ 59 ‘Délibération’ 55, 63, 64, 65, 66 Discours amoureux 63 Journal de deuil 8, 64, 118 Journal d’Urt 63, 64, 65 La Chambre claire 7–8, 55, 67–74, 76–79, 110, 118 La Préparation du Roman 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 69, 72 Le Degré zero de l’écriture 68

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Le Plaisir du texte 282 Œuvres complètes 55 ‘Réquichot et son corps’ 276 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes 9, 62, 101 Soirées de Paris 55 Vita Nova 55, 56, 57 Basler, Adolphe 32 Bataille, Georges 2, 5, 15–16, 49, 271–77, 279–82, 284, 286, 287–88, 296–301 ‘Informe’ 273 Histoire de l’œil 296, 298 ‘La Structure psychologique du fascisme’ 297 Le Bleu du ciel 297, 298, 299 ‘Le gros orteil’ 272, 275 Romans et récits 297 Bateau-Lavoir poets 26 Baudelaire, Charles 148–49, 200, 226 ‘La servante au grand coeur dont vous étiez jalouse’ 148 Mon Coeur mis à nu 149 Bausch, Pina 115 Bayonne 63 Bazin, André 75 Beauchamp 132 Beauvoir, Simone de 39, 40, 49, 51, 116, 183, 195 L’Invitée 40 Le Deuxième Sexe 40 Le Sang des autres 40 Les Mandarins 40 ‘Litterature et métaphysique’ 51 Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée 40 Tous les hommes sont mortels 40 Beckett, Samuel 39, 41, 81, 82, 86, 116, 148, 151, 169 Comment c’est 41 Mercier et Camier 41 That Time 148 The Unnameable 81 Trilogy, the 41

Belknap, Robert 138, 144 Benjamin, Walter 16, 287–96, 298, 300–01 ‘Programme for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre’ 290 Spielraum 294, 295 ‘The Storyteller’ 288, 292 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ 288, 292–94, 298 Trauerspiel 292 Benmakhlouf, Ali 315 Bennett, Jane 241, 252 Bergvall, Caroline 15, 271, 285–86 Drift 15, 285 ‘The Seafarer’ 285 Bernanos, Georges 106 Bernheim-Jeune gallery 32 Grands Cimitières sous la lune 106 Blanchot, Maurice 7, 39, 40, 41, 45, 46, 49, 51 Aminadab 40 Faux pas 46 L’Arrêt de mort 41 La Part du feu 46 Le Très-haut 41 ‘Mallarmé et l’art du roman’ 45 Thomas l’obscur 41, 45 Blossfeldt, Karl 279 Boiffard, Jacques-André 271–72, 276 Bois, Yve-Alain 2, 276 bois de Vincennes 105 Boisgeloup 32 Boltanski, Christian 138 Les Habitants du Louvre 138 Bon, François 145 Paysage fer 145 Bonnefoy, Yves 1 Borges, Jorge Luis 139 Bourdieu, Pierre 12, 13, 179, 180, 186, 192–93, 219–21, 224–28, 231–33 ‘Espace social et genèse des “classes”’ 220

Index Esquisse pour une autoanalyse 192 ‘L’Effet Manet’ 228 ‘L’Odyssée de la réappropriation’ 193 La Distinction 220 Les règles de l’art 226, 227 Bousquet, Joë 48, 49 Boyle, Claire 102 Bradley, Harriet 110, 111 ‘Seductions of the Archive’ 110 Braque, Georges 29 Breton, André 5, 33, 35, 37, 49, 271, 273–74, 282 Clair de terre 33 L’Amour fou 37 Le Revolver à cheveux blancs 37 Nadja 37, 271 ‘Vigilance’ 37 Brilliant, Richard 102 Britain 29 British Library, the 142 Britton, Celia 13, 195–206 Brunet, Étienne 208, 213 Brussels 128, 317 Butor, Michel 42, 138 Cahiers d’art 33 Mobile 138 Caillois, Roger 45 Puissances du roman 45 Calle, Sophie 129 Camus, Albert 5, 39, 40, 49, 50, 52 La Chute 40 La Peste 40 L’Etranger 40, 46, 50 Le Mythe de Sisyphe 46, 52 Caruth, Cathy 119 Cassin, Barbara 2, 11, 16, 145, 303–18 Derrière les grilles: sortons du tout-évaluation 305, 317 Dictionary of Untranslatables: a Philosophical Lexicon 304, 307–09, 312, 313, 317 Google-moi: La deuxième mission de l’Amérique 309, 311

321

Jacques le Sophiste: Lacan, logos et psychoanalyse 311–12, 314 Sophistical Practice: Towards a Consistent Relativism 311 Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles 304, 306–07, 315 Cayrol, Jean 39, 41, 42, 46, 50, 52 Je vivrai l’amour des autres 41 Lazare parmi nous 41 ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’ 41, 46 Cecatty, René de 151, 153 Centre Pompidou 279 Cergy 123 Certeau, Michel de 5, 15, 132, 255–69 L’Invention du quotidien 255–62, 264, 268 Césaire, Aimé 197 Poetry and Knowledge 197 Chambers, Ross 194 Chaplin, Charlie 16, 288–90, 296, 300–01 Chauvet, Marie 5, 13–14, 195–206 Amour 195 Colère 195 Folie 13, 195–206 China 125, 134 Chopin, Henri 284 ‘Horizons illimités’ 284 ‘La civilization du papier’ 284 Chronicle Books 143 Cixous, Hélène 129 Coccia, Emanuele 237–38, 242 La Vie des plantes: une métaphysique du mélange 238 Cocteau, Jean 50 Coicou, Massillon 196, 197 Collège de France 228 Colmeiro, José F. 99 Communist Manifesto 291 Compagnon, Antoine 207 Confluences 46, 47, 51

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Constant, Benjamin 115 Cornell, Joseph 281 Cornwall 123 Cortazar, Julio 135 Les Autonautes de la cosmoroute 135 Critique sociale, La 297 Cronin, Michael 135, 142–43, 145 Across the Lines: Travel, Language and Translation 135 Crowley, Patrick 11, 147–60, 275 cubism 24, 38 cubist collages 33 cubist painting 24, 31 Dada 283 Dash, Michael 196–203, 206 The Other America 196 Deleuze, Gilles 184, 288, 309 Depestre, René 197 Derrida, Jacques 8, 111, 241, 283 Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde 8 ‘Et si l’animal répondait?’ 241 Descartes, René 77, 248–49 Discours de la méthode 248 Descola, Philippe 15, 257, 264–66, 268–69 Desnos, Robert 34 Detienne, Marcel 262 Les Ruses de l’intelligence 262 Diaghilev, Sergei 287 Dickinson, Emily 148 ‘Knows how to forget’ 148 Didi-Huberman, Georges 272 Dietrich, Luc 49, 50 L’Apprentissage de la ville 50 Dilthey, Wilhelm 148, 165 Disney films 293 Divry, Sophie 6 Rouvrir le roman 6 Documents 271–74, 276–77, 285 Dos Passos, John 40, 43 Dreiser, Theodor 65 Ordet 65

Dubois, Jacques 213 Pour Albertine 213 Dubuffet, Jean 277 Duchamp, Marcel 281 A regarder d’un œil, de près, pendant presque une heure 281 Dufrêne, François 283–84 ‘J’interroge et j’invective: poème à hurler’ 283 Duncan, Isadora 287 Dunlop, Carole 135 Les Autonautes de la cosmoroute 135 Duras, Marguerite 42, 50, 124 La Vie tranquille 42 Les Impudents 42, 50 Moderato cantabile 42 Durkheim, Émile 297 Duvalier, François (‘Papa Doc’) 13, 195–97 Duvignaud, Jean 141 Eco, Umberto 138–39, 142, 144 The Infinity of Lists 138 École nationale supérieure de création industrielle 3 École Normale Supérieure 185 Einstein, Carl 271 Eisenstein, Sergei 296 Eliot, T. S. 115 Eluard, Paul 33 L’Immaculée conception 33 Eocene, the 132 Eribon, Didier 5, 12, 14, 179–94 La Société comme verdict 179, 186–88, 193 Réflexions sur la question gay 181 Retour à Reims 179–87, 189, 191–93 Ernaux, Annie 4, 5, 10, 16, 108, 114, 116, 120–24, 127, 128, 179, 182, 183, 185, 189, 191, 193 ‘Cuisine matinale, dimanche 16 mars’

Index Jours du monde 122 L’Atelier noir 120, 124 La Place 182 Les Années 120–22, 124, 128 L’Usage de la photo 122–23 Retour à Yvetot 182, 191 Une femme 183 Europe 132, 317 Existentialism, 39 Farge, Arlette 111 Faulkner, William 40, 43 Fauré, Gabriel 225 ffrench, Patrick 16, 275, 287–301 Fiedler, Konrad 290 Finch, Alison 13, 207–17 Flaubert, Gustave 40, 226 Forest, Philippe 117 Forêts, Élisabeth des 163, 168 Forêts, Louis-René des 11, 39, 41, 49, 161–75 La Chambre des enfants 165 Le Bavard 41 Les Mendiants 41 ‘Ostinato’ 11, 162–63 Poèmes de Samuel Wood 11, 161–75 Forsdick, Charles 10–11, 131–45 Foucault, Michel 12, 111, 179, 180, 190–91, 193 Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique 190–91 Fourier, Charles 295 France 6, 9, 39–52, 98, 100, 132, 164, 184, 200, 209, 210 France, Peter 207 Politeness and Its Discontents 207 Franck, César 225 Frantz, Anaïk 135 Les Passagers du Roissy-Express 135 Freud, Sigmund 118, 276, 290, 295, 297, 312–14 Front National 184

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Gallimard 195 Gardner, Alexander 74 Garnier, Pierre 283–84 Gasché, Rodolphe 2 Gaudemar, Antoine de 153 Genet, Jean 39, 40, 41, 151, 183 Journal du voleur 41 Notre-Dame-des-fleurs 41 Genette, Gerard 103, 105 Geneva Convention, the 123 Gide, André 43, 49, 51 Giono, Jean 42 Giraudoux, Jean 40 Glass, Philip 74 Godard, Jean-Luc 132 González, Julio 38 Google 16, 304, 309–11, 316–17 Gordon, Rae Beth 296 Gracq, Julien 42 Au château d’Argol 42 Les Eaux étroites 42 Grand Robert, Le 213 Gratton, Johnnie 7, 9, 67–80 Great War 37 Greece 315 Gudmundsdottir, Gunnthorunn 9, 97–112 Guillevic, Eugène 5, 14, 237, 238–42, 245–53 ‘À mon frère le chêne’ 247 ‘Comparutions’ 248 ‘Familiers’ 245, 248 ‘Feuille’ 248 ‘La feuille sent-elle’ 246, 251 ‘Laurier’ 248 Maintenant 246, 253 ‘Mon ami, le chêne’ 251 ‘Tilleul’ 248, 249, 251, 253 Trouées 245, 248 Gusdorf, Georges 166 Guyotat, Pierre 151 Haedens, Kléber 45 Paradoxe sur le roman 45–46 Haiti 12, 195

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Halles, Les 30 Hanrahan, Mairéad 8, 81–94 Hansen, Miriam 288–89, 295 Harlem 128 Haute Savoie 182 Hegarty, Paul 275 Heidegger, Martin 309 Herodotus 137, 143 Histories 137 Hidaka, Christian 29, 30 Hirsch, Marianne 108 Hitler, Adolf 297 Hoggart, Richard 188–89 Uses of Literacy 188 Holbein, Hans (the Younger) 314 The Ambassadors 314 Homer 138 Howard, Richard 74, 276 Hughes, Edward J. 12, 13, 179–94, 207, 213 Hugo, Victor 210 Hulme, T. E. 295 Husserl, Edmund 70, 71 Huyssen, Andreas 99 Ignatius of Loyola, Saint 7, 58, 60, 61, 62, 66 Exercices spirituels 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66 Journal spirituel 60, 62 Ingold, Tim 15, 257, 263–64, 268 Iraq war, the 123 Isou, Isidore 283–84 Traité de bave et d’éternité 283–84 Israel 125 Jaccottet, Philippe 14, 237, 238–39, 244–45, 251, 303 Après beaucoup d’années 244 ‘Les Pivoines’ 244 Jacob, Max 24, 26, 27, 28, 30 Jaloux, Edmond 48, 49 Janet, Pierre 297 Jarry, Alfred 36 Les Minutes de sable mémorial 36

Jefferson, Ann 7, 39–52 Jordan, Shirley 10, 113–29 Joyce, James 43, 44, 138, 139 Jugendstil poetry 287 Jünger, Ernst 46 Kabylia 193 Kafka, Franz 43, 63, 292 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry 28 Kant, Immanuel 2, 309 Kavanagh, Patrick 136–37 ‘The Parish and the Universe’ 136 Keaggy, Bill 142–43 Milk Eggs Vodka 142 Klee, Paul 278 Knight, Diana 7, 53–66, 110 Kohn, Eduardo 15, 257, 266–68 Kokhlova, Olga 32 Kracauer, Siegfried 296 Kraus, Karl 292 Krauss, Rosalind 2, 276 Kristeva, Julia 113 Kudo, Tetsumi 278–82 Pollution – Cultivation – Nouvelle Écologie (Grafted Garden) 279 Votre Portrait, votre jeu 281 Lacan, Jacques 184, 305, 308, 312–14 ‘L’Etourdit’ 308 Seminar XX (Encore) 313 Lafue, Pierre 50 L’Age d’homme 101 ‘Nouveaux psychologues’ 50 Lampedusa 285 Lardoux, Jacques 240 Laurens, Camille 5, 8, 10, 114, 115–19, 129 Encore et jamais: variations 8, 115, 116, 119 Laurens, Philippe 117–18 Lawrence, D. H. 50 Le Bris, Michel 134

Index Leighton, Angela 2, 166–67 Leiris, Michel 28, 101, 102, 114, 117, 271, 273–74, 277 ‘L’Eau à la bouche’ 273 ‘Picasso écrivain’ 28 Lejeune, Philippe 12, 100, 149, 164 Le Pacte autobiographique 164 Lettristes, the 283, 284 Levi, Pavle 283 Levine, Caroline 2, 16, 305, 314 Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network 2, 305 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 265 Liberation, the 39, 44, 47 Liège 150–51, 155 life writing 9–12, 107, 108, 113–29 London 127, 298 Los Angeles 139 Lotar, Eli 277 Louette, Jean-François 297, 298 Louis, Edouard 183 Lucey, Michael 13, 208, 219–33 Lyon 47 McCarthy, Mary 103–04, 111 Memories of a Catholic Girlhood 103 Macfarlane, Robert 136–37 Landmarks 137 Maclachlan, Ian 11–12, 161–75 Mclaughlin, Emily 14–15, 237–54 Magny, Claude-Edmonde 46, 49 Histoire du roman français depuis 1918 46 Les Sandales d’Empédocle 46 Malabou, Catherine 293 Mallarmé, Stéphane 45, 46, 239 Malraux, André 297 La Condition humaine 297 Mammeri, Mouloud 186, 193 Manet, Édouard 220, 225 Mann, Sally 109, 111 Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs 109 Mapplethorpe, Robert 70, 74

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Marder, Michael 237–38, 242 Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetable Life 237 Marie, Marc 122 L’Usage de la photo 122 Marin, Robert 43 Marker, Chris 138 Sans soleil 138 Marquis de Sade 280 Martin du Gard, Roger 49 Marty, Éric 55 Barthes’s Œuvres complètes 55 Marx, Karl 183 Marxism 183 Maspero, François 135 Les Passagers du Roissy-Express 135 Masson, André 275, 277–78 Matisse, Henri 30 Mauriac, François 40, 49 Mauss, Marcel 297 May ’68 52 Melville, Herman 46 memory 97–112, 155 Mercure de France 125, 127 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 303 Mexico/Mexique 125, 153 Michaux, Henri 49, 278 Mickey Mouse 16, 288, 292–93, 296, 300–01 Middle East, the 125 Millet, Catherine 125 Milou 141 Minuit 147 Miró, Joan 274, 280, 281 Moise 26, 27 Monde, Le 240 Montesquieu 135 Moriarty, Michael 209 Taste and Ideology in SeventeenthCentury France 209 Mouloudji, Marcel 49 Mounin, Georges 47, 48 Muizon 191 Mussolini, Benito 297

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Nabokov, Vladimir 40, 107 Speak, Memory 107 Nagel, Thomas 241, 245 ‘What Is it Like to Be a Bat?’ 241 Nancy, Jean-Luc 248 Negritude movement 200 New York 125, 126, 195 Newman, Barnett 191 Nizan, Paul 185 Nola, Lisa 143 Travel Listography 143 Nord-Sud 24 Normandy 31 nouveau roman 42, 43, 48 nouveaux romanciers 42 O’Donovan, Patrick 15, 255–69 Occupation, the 39, 43, 47 Olivier, Fernande 26, 27 OuLiPo 141 Painlevé, Jean 285 Parini, Jay 282 Paris 24, 30, 32, 105, 132, 181, 182, 195, 277, 299 Pascal, Blaise 7, 55, 56, 58, 63 Pascal, Roy 166 Pascali, Pino 287 Pavey, Don 29 Colour and Humanism 29 Payne, Lewis 74 Penrose, Roland 24 ‘pensée romanesque’ 47, 48, 51 Perec, Georges 5, 10–11, 104–05, 123, 131–35, 137, 139–44, 149 ‘Approches de quoi?’ 134 Espèces d’espaces 131–33, 139–140 Je me souviens 139 La Vie, mode d’emploi 139 Lieux 140 Penser/classer 144 Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien 139–40, 141–42, 145 W ou le souvenir d’enfance 104

Perpignan 24 Philadelphia Museum of Art 29 Phillips, Richard 143 Picasso Museum 26 Picasso, Pablo 4, 5, 6, 23–38 Autoportrait à la palette 29 El entierro del Conde de Orgaz 31 Homme à la cheminée 28 La Fillette aux pieds nus 29 Le désir attrapé par la queue 31 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 29 Les quatre petites filles 31 Nature morte à la chaise cannée 31, 32 ‘Poesie pour te remercier de ton desin’ 25, 27, 28, 30 Pinget, Robert 151 Pittsburgh 187 Place Saint-Sulpice 139, 140–41 Plato 183, 309 Platonism 313 Pléiade 44, 297 Pliny the Elder 29 Natural History 29 Ponge, Francis 4, 5, 14, 49, 237, 238–40, 242–45, 249, 251 Le Carnet du bois de pins’ 251 ‘Le Cycle des saisons’ 242–43, 249 Le Parti pris des choses 242 ‘Notes premières de “l’homme”’ 244 ‘Pages Bis’ 244 Proêmes 244 Pouillon, Jean 46, 51 Temps et roman 46, 51 Pratt, Mary-Louise 134 Imperial Eyes 134 Prendergast, Christopher 208 Presley, Elvis 11, 151–53 Prévert, Jacques 139 Prévost, Jean 47, 49 Princeton University Press 307 Prix Renaudot 41 Problèmes du roman 46, 47

Index Proust, Marcel 5, 12–14, 49, 53, 57, 207–17, 219–33, 268, 287 À la recherche du temps perdu 13, 207–17, 220–21, 224, 227–28, 231, 233 À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs 216 La Prisonnière 213 Le Temps retrouvé 214 Sodome et Gomorrhe 13, 212, 214, 216–17 Un amour de Swann 212 Prufrock, J. Alfred 115 Puech, Jean-Benoît 162 Queneau, Raymond 7, 42, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50 Exercices de style 44 Le Chiendent 42 Le Vol d’Icare 42 Pierrot mon ami 50 ‘Technique du roman’ 44 Racine, Jean 209 Phèdre 209 Rancière, Jacques 182 Read, Peter 6, 23–38 Reims 181, 183, 184, 187, 191 Réquichot, Bernard 167, 274–78, 281, 284 Reliquaires 277 Resistance, the 39, 47 Reventós, Ramon 24 Reverdy, Pierre 23, 24, 25, 35 Cravates de chanvre 23 Le Chant des morts 23, 24 Ricardou, Jean 7 Ricoeur, Paul 99 Rilke, Rainer Maria 287 Rimbaud, Arthur 200, 239 Rissler-Pipka, Nanette 27 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 42 Un régicide 42 Robert, Le 306 Robertson, Eric 15–16, 271–86

327

Roissy 135 Roissy airport 123 Rolin, Dominique 49 Roubaud, Alix 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93 ‘quinze minutes la nuit au rythme de la respiration’ 86 Roubaud, Jacques 5, 8, 16, 81–94, 138, 145 ‘1983: janvier. 1985: juin’ 83, 89 ‘Aphasie’ 83, 84, 92 ‘Ce temps que nous avions au monde’ 93 ‘Cette photographie, ta dernière’ 93 ‘Dans cette lumière’ 90 ‘En moi’ 88, 89, 91 ‘Fins’ 87, 88 ‘La certitude et la couleur’ 89, 90 ‘Le centre de Quelque chose noir est blanc’ 89 Le Grand incendie de londres 82, 86 Les Habitants du Louvre 138 ‘Méditation du 8/5/85’ 83, 86, 87 ‘Méditation du 12/5/85’ 83, 85 ‘Méditation du 21/7/85’ 83 ‘Mort réelle et constante’ 86, 92 Quelque chose noir 8, 81–83, 85–86, 88–91, 93 Rien 91 ‘Scénario de la méditation’ 89 Tokyo intra-ordinaire 145 Russia/Russie 125, 150, 154, 157 Rwandan genocide 315 Sabartés, Jaime 27, 30, 31, 33 Saint-Ouen 132 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 57 Salmon, André 29 Salvayre, Lydie 106, 109 Pas pleurer 106 Samoyault, Tiphaine 62

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Sarraute, Nathalie 9, 42, 50, 51 Enfance 9 L’Ere du soupçon 42 L’ère du soupçon 50 Portrait d’un inconnu 42, 51 Sartre, Jean-Paul 7, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 51, 54, 56 ‘A propos de John Dos Passos et de 1919’ 45 ‘A propos de Le Bruit et la Fureur. La temporalité chez Faulkner’ 45 ‘La nationalisation de la littérature’ 44 La Nausée, 40, 42, 44, 49 L’Être et le Néant 54 Les Chemins de la Liberté 40 ‘M. François Mauriac et la liberté’ 45 Qu’est-ce que la littérature? 40 ‘Situation de l’écrivain en 1947’ 43 Situations 46 Situations I 40 Situations II 40 Savitzkaya, Eugène 5, 11, 147–60 Exquise Louise 151 Fou trop poli 154 Fraudeur 11, 147, 149–50, 154–59 La Disparition de maman 151, 158 Les Morts sentent bon 151 Marin mon cœur 151 Mentir 11, 147, 151, 153–58 Sang de chien 152–53 Un jeune home trop gros 11, 151–53 Scharff, Adrien 120 Scharfman, Ronnie 196–98, 201, 204, 206 Schilling, Derek 132, 140 Second World War 188, 191 Segalen, Victor 134 Equipée 134 René Leys 134 Sellars, Peter 141 Seuil 306 Sève, Bernard 138

Shaviro, Steven 241–42, 252, 253 The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism 241 Sheringham, Michael 18, 19, 94, 98, 99, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111, 114, 120, 132, 139, 142–43, 147–49, 165, 181, 207, 257, 268, 271–72, 303, 317 Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present 132, 271, 303 French Autobiography 165 Siberia/Sibérie 157 Simon, Claude 42 La Corde raide 42 Le Tricheur 42 Le Vent 42 Sisyphus 116 Skinner, Joseph 137 The Invention of Greek Ethnography 137 Smith, Keri 143 How to Be an Explorer of the World 143 Smock, William 19 Snowden, Edward 310 Soissons 132 Sophistry 312 Sophists 309, 313 Soupault, Philippe 33 South Africa 305, 314 South Wales 189 Spain 29, 35 Spanish Civil War 6, 26, 30, 37, 106 Spinoza, Baruch 288, 309 Stendhal 26, 27, 28, 47 De l’Amour 27 Still, Clyfford 191 Surrealism 18, 271, 291 Surrealist group 271 Syrotinski, Michael 2, 11, 16–17, 303–18 Tavernier, Bertrand 47 Tavernier, René 47, 48, 49, 50

Index Tel Aviv 126 Tel Quel 55, 63 Temps modernes, Les 40, 42, 51 Third Republic 211 Third World, the 184 Thom, René 7, 72, 73, 78, 79, 80 Titian 29 Tombs, Isabelle 209 That Sweet Enemy 209 Tombs, Robert 209 That Sweet Enemy 209 Tontons Macoutes 196, 199, 203–06 Tourette, Gilles de la 287 Triolet, Elsa 42, 49, 50 Mille regrets 50 Trotsky, Leon 183 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 305, 314, 315 Tzara, Tristan 33 United Kingdom 285 United States 284, 310 Urbain, Jean-Didier 134–36 Ethnologue, mais pas trop 134 Valéry, Paul 5 Verlaine, Paul 25 200 ‘Cortège’ 25 Fêtes galantes 25 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 262 Les Ruses de l’intelligence 262

329

vertical travel 131–45 Vésinet, Le 26 Vigny, Alfred de 27 Œuvres complètes 27 Villette Abattoir 277 Vinteuil Septet 13, 225, 228–32 Vinteuil Sonata 223 Virilio, Paul 141 Vollard, Ambroise 24 Whitehead, Alfred North 241 Wideman, John Edgar 12, 179, 180, 186–89, 192, 193 Brothers and Keepers 186–87, 189, 192 Wikileaks 310 Williams, Raymond 179, 188–89 Border Country 189 Second Generation 188 Wilson, Robert 74 Winter Garden Photograph 8, 71, 72, 73, 79, 110 Wood, Samuel 167, 169, 172, 175 Woolf, Virginia 43, 46, 97, 122 ‘A Sketch of the Past’ 97 Yellow Book, The 29 Yvetot 182, 191 Zohn, Harry 294 Zola, Émile 210, 211