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Title The Home, the Map and the Garden: Literary Space as Monumental Space in Kofman, Perec and Rodoreda
Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/12v6k71d
Author Scala, Suzanne Anna
Publication Date 2014
Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Home, the Map and the Garden: Literary Space as Monumental Space in Kofman, Perec and Rodoreda
By
Suzanne Anna Scala
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
Comparative Literature
in the
Graduate Division
of the
University of California, Berkeley
Committee in Charge:
Professor Robert Alter Professor Michael Lucey Professor Emilie Bergmann
Spring 2014
The Home, the Map and the Garden: Literary Space as Monumental Space in Kofman, Perec and Rodoreda
Copyright 2014
By
Suzanne Anna Scala
Abstract
The Home, the Map and the Garden: Literary Space as Monumental Space in Kofman, Perec and Rodoreda
by
Suzanne Anna Scala
Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Robert Alter, Chair
This dissertation explores how three authors, Sarah Kofman, Georges Perec and Mercè Rodoreda, create textual monuments to divisive historical events. I look most closely at Kofman’s Rue Ordener, rue Labat, Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance and Rodoreda’s El carrer de les Camèlies. We can think of these texts as textual monuments because they emphasize the spatial aspect of their narratives and because they are concerned with memory.
The first chapter of the dissertation considers how, in Rue Ordener rue Labat, Sarah Kofman is able to write a memoir that recognizes the specificity of her experience while at the same time letting the reader into the story. I employ Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of the intersubjective space of the home to understand how Kofman, at both the level of content and structure, allows the reader to co-create the textual space.
In the second chapter I turn to Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Perec, unable to recall his childhood memories, instead creates a memoir structured by the “fragile intersection” of several texts. The textual monument he creates is not monolithic, but rather takes its form from the multiple paths between nodes of meaning.
The third chapter considers Mercè Rodoreda’s novella, El carrer de les Camèlies. Rodoreda uses the motifs of the garden and the cemetery to advocate for a textual monument that valorizes what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call “rhizomatic” connections between people and symbols, rather than a monument that concentrates on roots and the past.
The Conclusion considers the important common features of the three texts, namely the idea that memory is constructed by a person in the present and that this construction, while it can be experienced as tragic for the person remembering, can also be liberating. Future work in this area would seek to establish a relationship
1 between poststructuralist theory, narratology and the emphasis on space common to both textual and physical monuments in the twentieth century.
2
For Ben
i Table of Contents
Dedication i
Table of Contents ii
Acknowledgements iii
Introduction iv
Chapter One 1 Building a Home Together: Rue Ordener Rue Labat
Chapter Two 28 Relations: Network, Map and Memory in W
Chapter Three 57 Leaving the Garden: Living Monuments in El carrer de les Camèlies
Conclusion 85 The Home, the Map, the Garden and the Monument
Works Cited 88
ii Acknowledgements
I would not have been able to start, let alone finish, this dissertation without the help and guidance of my committee members, my dissertation group, and my family and friends.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Robert Alter, and to my committee members, Michael Lucey and Emilie Bergmann. At every step of the way they offered me helpful advice and encouragement. I would like to thank the members of my dissertation writing group, Sabrina Soracco, William Heidenfeldt and Kimberly Vinall. Every week they were there with helpful comments and needed support. I would also like to thank Adeline Tran and Jessica Crewe, who kindly read and commented on large portions of this dissertation.
Finally, a project like this would be impossible without my family, especially the encouragement and support of my husband, Ben, and the forbearance of my son, Max.
iii Introduction
During my travels to Barcelona to learn Catalan, I was often struck that people there tended to conflate the experience of the Spanish Civil War with the postwar era (la postguerra), as though the war did not end until Franco’s death. Such a temporally ambiguous and heterogeneous wartime experience is very hard to memorialize. In fact, there is no national memorial to the Spanish Civil War apart from one that Franco built with the help of political prisoners’ forced labor. In France, too, I witnessed how divided histories defy memorialization. When I first visited, as a teenager, the state had not yet admitted its role in the deportation of Jews during the occupation. How could France begin to approach this history? How could a memorial be created that honored the very different experiences of members of French society? These are not questions with easy answers. As I spent more time in Paris and Barcelona, I saw how cities are important memorial spaces, housing both official memorials and the memories that attach to “unofficial” memorial sites. As such, the space of the city has a privileged and hotly contested role in shaping the memory of a culture. This is especially so in the context of the complex experiences of the Spanish Civil War and la postguerra and the occupation of Paris during the Second World War. Maurice Halbwachs contends that individuals rely on “collective frameworks” of memory to have their own recollections, and that the recollections themselves are influenced by these frameworks: We can remember only on condition of retrieving the position of past events which interest us from the frameworks of collective memory . . . Depending on circumstances, and point in time, society represents the past to itself in different ways: it modifies its conventions. As every one of its members accepts these conventions, they inflect their recollections in the same direction in which the collective memory evolves. (On Collective Memory 172-173) Monuments are concrete expressions of the “framework of collective memory,” both expressions of collective memorial practice and an influence on the way members of a society remember past events. If the collective, whether in the form of the state or of a civilian group, cannot create a monument to a divisive historical event, then how can memories of it survive? In this dissertation, I examine textual monuments that respond in different ways to this question and the others I pose above. While texts are in some ways more flexible than physical memorials—they do not need the agreement of groups of people or massive amounts of funding to create, for instance— authors of textual memorials grapple with many of the same difficulties as builders of physical monuments. How can a text be faithful to an author’s personal experience or vision and still do justice to an experience that many had? Conversely, how can an author negotiate the different experiences of the readers that come to his or her text? How can a text acknowledge the way memories change over time? And, finally, how can a textual monument encourage readers to look towards the future as well as contemplate the past?
iv To consider these issues, I examine two memoirs in French, Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener, rue Labat (1994) and George Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975), and one novella in Catalan treating a woman’s coming of age during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, Mercè Rodoreda’s El carrer de les Camèlies (1966). Both Kofman and Perec were Jewish and spent part of their childhood in German occupied Paris. Kofman spent most of the occupation in Paris with her mother in the home of a woman she calls “mémé.” Perec left Paris, and his mother, on a Red Cross convoy and spent the remainder of the war with family in Villard-de- Lans, near Grenoble. Perec returned to Paris after the war to learn that his mother had been deported. Mercè Rodoreda left Spain in 1930, just before the Republicans were defeated. She lived in exile first in France and then in Switzerland. She wrote El carrer de les Camèlies from exile in Geneva. While she visited Barcelona periodically during her exile, she did not return to Catalunya definitively until 1972. These works all employ textual space and the space of the city to create monuments to ambiguous and divided histories. All three of these texts lay a particular importance upon space, both the physical space in which the texts take place and the textual space the author creates. At its most basic, a monument is the combination of memory and space, a concretization of memory that is both the product of a collective desire to commemorate and the locus of subsequent commemorative activities, such as pilgrimages or ceremonies. Thus the texts I have chosen to investigate here, and texts like them, have a claim to monumentality in that they have a pronounced spatial aspect and are specifically concerned with a past moment that has both personal and collective importance. By thinking of these texts as monuments, one can move towards answering an otherwise puzzling set of questions: why do so many memoirs and novels of historical violence lay such a heavy emphasis on space, especially the space of the city, and why are so many formally innovative? Considering a text as a monument also emphasizes the spatial aspects of these texts, providing a framework for understanding them not simply as texts among texts but also as monuments among monuments. An analysis such as this also widens the category of monument in potentially fruitful ways. Each of these texts is in dialogue with traditional, physical monuments; in each there are moments when the protagonist must consider the ways in which a physical monument memorializes, and the ways in which it may also fail to do so. The texts consider how physical monuments seek to shape memory and whose agenda they serve. Implicit in these encounters with monuments is the alternative of the text itself, the ways in which the textual monument can add a voice, complement or enter into dialogue with the physical monument. Language, from which these monuments are built, may be a powerful way to influence the “collective frameworks” for memory of which Halbwachs speaks. Language is a product of the collective and creates the social space in which a community exists. On the other hand, because words may have many layers of meaning and association, they may bridge the gap between the purely personal and the purely collective, allowing individual memories to influence and change the “collective framework.” It may be worthwhile to consider what we mean (and have meant) by the term monument, and how a text may also lay claim to the word. A monument may
v be triumphant, as in Roman victory columns and the Arc de Triomphe, or it may stand as a reminder of a painful past experience, like Henri Pingusson’s Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, on Ile de la Cité. In many cases, a monument develops layers of meaning over time, creating multiple dialogues between different moments. Even when layers of meaning are not added purposely, the meaning of any monument changes over time as newer historical events cast the subject of the monument in a different light. The Arc de Triomphe, for instance, is a monument that has acquired state-sanctioned layers of meaning and has also, because of its extraordinary symbolic importance, attracted others who would use and change the symbol. First built by Napoleon to celebrate his victories, after World War I the tomb of the Unknown Soldier was placed underneath it, complicating the meaning of the arch. When, in 1940, the occupying Germans marched around the arch, they were both capitalizing on the symbolic importance it already had and adding yet another layer of meaning. Such physical public monuments are political instruments. A monument constructed or approved by the state represents a purposeful shaping of public memory, whether tacit or explicit. These monuments express the explicit agenda of those in power and also may reveal an agenda unexpressed by them elsewhere. A monument may express the unity of the nation that created it, since to erect a monument at all implies a certain agreement among the various constituencies about what to memorialize and how to do it, but it can also show the anxious efforts of those in power to smooth over differences between factions. Tombs represent a kind of nexus of institutional and personal monumentalizing. On the one hand, an individual tomb has less of a claim to expressing collective memory than a monument created and funded by a large group. On the other hand, they are public monuments to the memory of a person. Whereas a small, highly personal memento (like a letter or photograph tucked in a drawer) is inaccessible to others and not meant to resist the damaging effects of time, a tomb is built of weather-resistant stone and can be visited by any member of the public. The grave, positioned as it is between collective monument and private memento, may seem a good solution to the problems of memorializing I mention above. It is personal enough to express individual complexity, but public enough to avoid hermeticism. Yet, for the authors I discuss, the grave can still be problematic. For Kofman, the words said over it cannot capture the complexity of the person underneath, and their relationships with others. For Perec, the grave cannot fulfill its promise to serve as a boundary; it cannot provide a space for the dead so that they can be truly “at rest” for the mourner. In Rodoreda, the fixedness of a tombstone, its immobility and the way it yokes a single name to a single body, overvalues the past and a specific place, denying the mourner the ability to grow and change, to move forward in time. The word monument, whether referring to large public monuments, to personal graves or to texts, derives from the latin “monere,” to remind or warn (“Monument”). A “monument” was not always a physical edifice. At first, the Latin word monumentum referred to “a commemorative statue or building, tomb, reminder, written record, literary work” (“Monument”). At this early moment in its life, the word intriguingly connects writing and literature with commemoration and
vi also with death. By the 19th century, however, the term came to refer almost exclusively to physical objects. While today we would not unthinkingly use the term monument to describe a text, a text has boundaries and structure, like a building, and thus there is a long tradition of imagining a text as a monument or a building, and the author as an architect. In his Odes 3.30, Horace writes, Exegi monumentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum altius quod non imber edax, non Aquilo inpotens possit diruere aut innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum. (1-5)
My [monument] is done: it will outlast bronze, it is taller than the Pyramid’s royal mounds, and no rain and corrosion, no raging Northwind can tear it down, nor the innumerable years in succession, and the transitory ages. (1-5) Horace compares himself to a builder and his work to a monument. Yet this monument in text is more lasting than a physical one; it cannot be worn away by the elements. As long as people continue to read, remember and understand his work, it will remain as undamaged by time as it was when he wrote it. For Horace, text is a more fitting medium for a monument than even the stones of the pyramids because it is in a sense eternally alive and new. The author “non omnis moriar” [will not wholly die] because his poem-monument is immortal (6). Centuries later, Du Bellay, in a reference to Horace, makes a similar statement. When he was writing, in the 1550s, the physical relics of ancient Rome were in ruins: Rome n’est plus, et si l’architecture Quelque ombre encore de Rome fait revoir, C’est comme un corps par magique sçavoir Tiré de nuit hors de sa sepulture (Les Antiquitez de Rome 5.5-8)
Rome is no more, and if her ruins still show us some shade of Rome, it is like a body raised by magic powers from its sepulcher at night. (The Antiquities of Rome 5) If there is anything left of Rome in its “architecture,” it is as eerie as a body reanimated at night by black magic. The ruins are merely a “sepulture” or funerary monument to house the dead body of Roman culture; nothing living remains. Du Bellay continues, however, “Mais ses escripts, que son loz le plus beau / Malgré le temps arrachent du tombeau, / Font son idole errer party le monde” (Les Antiquitez de Rome 5.12-14). [“But her writings, which in spite of time wrest her fairest praise from the grave, keep her specter wandering throughout the world” (The Antiquities of Rome 5)] In place of the destroyed and forgotten grave of physical Rome, textual Rome still “erre[ ] parmy le monde,” a living (or, at least, undead) monument to Rome’s grandeur.
vii At little less than 400 years later, Proust also takes up the comparison of a writer to an architect, musing in Le Temps retrouvé on the tremendous task of one who would “réaliser [une vie] dans un livre” (445) [“a life within the confines of a book” (507)]: “Et dans ces grands livres-là, il y a des parties qui n’ont eu le temps que d’être esquissées, et qui ne seront sans doute jamais finis, à cause de l’ampleur même du plan de l’architect. Combien de grandes cathédrales resent inachevées” (445). [“In long books of this kind there are parts which there has been time only to sketch, parts which, because of the very amplitude of the architect’s plan, will no doubt never be completed. How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!” (508)] The narrator decides against becoming the architect of a “great cathedral,” since such a task—to “realize a life” in writing according to an enormous predetermined plan—would be nearly impossible in the short time one has of one’s own life. Instead, he says, “je bâtirais mon livre, je n’ose pas dire ambitieusement come une cathédrale, mais tout simplement comme une robe” (446). [“I should construct my book, I dare say not ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress” (509)] From the writer as mastermind architect, constructing a whole cathedral according to a blueprint, Proust shifts to the writer-as-seamstress, sewing together pieces to create a whole. Even though he is not the master builder of his work, that is, even though he builds his work from small scraps of text he calls “paperoles” [“‘paperies’”], instead of as a single structure, Proust is still building and constructing (446, 509). A dress is still an object that encloses space. In the texts I analyze, Perec, Kofman and Rodoreda similarly critique monumentality, suggesting smaller memorial objects that, especially in Perec and Rodoreda, are be pieced together to form a shape. Yet textual monuments are not just monuments on the metaphorical level; texts can function as monuments quite literally. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Torah became a temple in writing, a substitute for and representation of the missing physical temple. In their introduction to From a Ruined Garden, a collection of translations of yizker-bikher, memorial books written in Yiddish to document and commemorate Jewish communities in Eastern Europe that were liquidated during the Second World War, Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin touch on how the need for historical memory in the absence of the physical temple provided a template for textual memorial forms that emerged much later (7). When survivors of the war, as well as those who remembered the towns and cities even though they had emigrated earlier, wished to memorialize a place and its occupants, they were imagining the text they created as a literal monument to those who had died. “It is worthwhile noting,” write Kugelmass and Boyarin, “that when landslayt from the town of Zwolen set out to produce a memorial book, their expressed intention was ‘to create a monument’” (4, footnote 5). Many memorial books have “a table of contents . . . and title page [with] drawings of gravestones as their backgrounds,” making very clear the book’s function as a textual monument (7). The original yoking of literary works to space, memory and death that can be uncovered in the meanings of the original Latin word monumentum thus continues to cling to the word monument. We can trace it from Horace through Du Bellay, as they describe literary monuments as simultaneously living and dead, all the way to the memorial books translated by Kugelmass and Boyarin.
viii Like a building, a city is a city because of its boundaries. The boundedness of the city took on particular significance during the Occupation and the Spanish Civil War (especially during the siege of Barcelona, when part of Rodoreda’s text takes place). Rodoreda’s protagonist never leaves Barcelona, and Perec and Kofman give particular weight to the moments when they enter or leave Paris. Their texts are not just buildings or structures: on another level, they are also city-texts. Kofman and Rodoreda even name their texts after city streets, cementing the relationship between the book and the city. Following Benjamin, we can see that the city is the space of history. In his article on this topic, “Archiving,” Michael Sheringham elaborates on this point. The city is a “memory machine” (10). Palimpsestic, it is the place of history while in the countryside “myths hold sway” (10). A city, in this formulation, is thus the proper home of monuments. If the city is a nation’s microcosm, then the monuments placed there speak for the whole. And if the city is a psyche writ large, monuments are concretized memories, a culture’s memory cues. In the texts I analyze, the city itself is also a kind of monument, a giant (but bounded) memory palace whose spaces and buildings can function like a spatial monument. The narrators move through the space of the text seeking to construct their identities through the city and its monuments. Their experiences evacuate the traditional monuments of meaning, however, and they find themselves adrift in a city without landmarks. The text itself becomes the missing monument. A monument is a piece of a system for perpetuating memory, working together with rituals of memory and the visitors themselves. Whether textual or physical, monuments are thus containers for memory, or locations where memory may take place. Monuments, by providing a literal space for memory, help to preserve it for, and transmit it to, those who come later. They therefore always function in relation to time, creating a dialogue between the past and the present. A monument might be understood as an expression of time in space, existing in the present but acting as a pointer to a moment (or moments) in the past and thus stretching back in time. Created as a permanent reminder of an event, monuments have a claim to a certain timelessness. Physical monuments are traditionally made of durable materials like stone or metal, designed to withstand the effects of time. Yet in their apparent timelessness, they nonetheless evoke the timefulness of the relationship between the visitor and the past event. A visitor senses his or her own mortality in the face of a more permanent structure like a monument, and is also conscious of the distance between the present and the memorialized past event. Earlier in this introduction, I mentioned that it was my texts’ emphasis on space, both narrative and physical, that combined with their focus on memory to create a monument. In his book Spatiality and the Novel, Joseph Kestner calls space in text a “secondary illusion” (9). In the otherwise timebound narrative, in which events happen one after another and the reader starts at the beginning and reads in a straight line to the end, an author may employ a number of techniques to create the illusion of space, that is, the illusion of timelessness. The difference between Vladimir Propp’s terms fabula (the chronological order of events in a text) and syuzhet (the order in which those events are revealed in the text) is one example of a way an author might create a “secondary illusion” of space. Each time the text veers from the strict chronological path, we have left the realm of time; the author has
ix created the illusion of space. In “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Joseph Frank makes a similar observation, noting that the tendency towards spatiality in modern poetry and novels create a “simultaneity of perception . . . by breaking up temporal sequence” (231). For Frank, this chopping up of chronology demands a different kind of reading. The spatialized text “asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity” (230). In the works I study, the authors manipulate chronology in this way, creating dense networks of intertextual reference (Kofman), internal reference (Perec) and symbols (Rodoreda) to spatialize their texts. Kofman, Perec and Rodoreda do not create space in their texts for its own sake. Because they deal with wartime, with the enclosed space of a city during that time and with experiences that cannot be easily assimilated into a chronological narrative, the space of these texts—enclosed like buildings—is the space of a monument. As I have said above, a monument exists at the intersection of space and memory. My three authors each use the interplay of space and time differently, to create different kinds of textual monuments. Kofman creates an intersubjective space that allows the reader to encounter the other, breaking apart the text-as- building metaphor to concentrate on the street space between buildings, thus expressing a kind of psychological homelessness. Perec’s text is a layered space that both explores and represents the layered, hole-filled nature of memory. He constantly reminds the reader that a memory is something created in the moment, not an unchanging object to be visited. A given memory is only the top layer of a composite made of many layers of memories, some invented or re-remembered differently. Rodoreda builds a network, a garden, of polyvalent monuments. Such monuments can grow, change and multiply, and the reader or rememberer along with them. A traditional monument, such as a headstone, affixes a particular name to a particular patch of ground, foreclosing growth and forcing one to concentrate solely on the past, to the exclusion of the future. Creating space in text is simultaneously a way of pausing narrative time, or creating that illusion. The psychoanalytic idea of trauma also involves a peculiar kind of timelessness. When a person undergoes a traumatic experience, they cannot assimilate it in the moment. The subject cannot translate the experience into a narrative in time, leaving the traumatic experience to surface later as a flashback that, for the subject, is not in the past, but rather an event outside of time, eternally happening. Because my texts treat experiences that could be traumatic, and because the authors use literary techniques to create a sense of timelessness, it is tempting to say that I am dealing with literary expressions of trauma. I would like to tread lightly on the applicability of trauma theory to these texts, however, because I think it is important to carefully differentiate between the trauma of a person and the translation of that trauma into text. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony, a beautiful and compelling book about witnessing and trauma, draws on the experience of psychoanalytic patients and engendered an entire school of criticism that attempts to translate those findings into the textual realm. While this is a fascinating project, there can be problematic slippage between the psychological condition of trauma and a text detailing traumatic events. Traumatic analysis can sometimes lead to the psychoanalyzing of a “traumatized”
x author, positioning the text as either merely an expression of that trauma or a healing tool, a document of mourning, of “working through.” Such analyses, while truly compelling from a psychological standpoint, neglect the complicated nature of textuality and sidestep some important questions we need to ask, such as whether, or under what circumstances, can texts be expressions of trauma? What are the ethics of psychoanalyzing an author? Does it diminish the text they have written, rendering it only an expression of a symptom? In addition, if we follow poststructuralists in pointing out the slipperiness of text (the way in which the reader is complicit in its creation, the way the writer is depersonalized in the creation of text and the ways that language itself is problematic), it becomes more difficult to assume an unproblematic relationship between an author’s (supposed) trauma and the text he or she creates. This problematic relationship between psychoanalysis and text is a topic that Perec and Kofman have treated themselves. In Autobiogriffures, Sarah Kofman makes the point that language destabilizes the subject, throwing into question the very possibility of writing about oneself at all. In Rue Ordener rue Labat she makes knowing references to Freud and other psychoanalysts. Perec wrote W during his analysis with Pontalis. It is a self-conscious text, aware not only of the possibility of trauma, but also aware of the ways in which a text can evade the reader’s armchair psychoanalysis and an analysand can evade the psychoanalyst. In “Les lieux d’une ruse,” Perec—characteristically a bit ambiguously—addresses his experience of analysis. Upon relating his “rêves trop beaux pour être rêves,” [dreams too beautiful to be dreams] he asks, “Où était le vrai? Où était le faux?” (68) [where was the truth? Where was the falsehood?]1 In questioning these beautiful dreams, Perec seems to ask if he has presented his analyst with a cleverly constructed text instead of a true dream. None of this is to say I do not think a text has the potential to express trauma, or that the authors I treat might not be traumatized, only that I try to treat such an analysis with a great deal of care. At any event, I certainly would argue that the experiences the authors convey are unlikely to have been shared by the majority of readers. As time passes, this becomes more and more the case. Thus the “otherness” of the traumatic experience, in that it was in some sense never even fully experienced by the traumatized subject, still applies at least in attenuated form to the texts in question. The task of one who would relate a traumatic experience to another, to put that experience into the temporal form of the narrative while at the same time being true to the aspects of the experience that stand outside of time, is shared by authors of textual monuments, traumatic or otherwise.
1 All translations not followed by a page citation are my own. 2 Franco was apparently obsessed with the monument. “It was said,” writes Paul Preston, “that the Valle de los Caídos became the nearest thing in Franco’s life to ‘another woman’” (352). 3 Thomas, Hugh. The Spanish Civil War. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961. 4 The word mémé means “granny” in French. Because it is not a proper name, Kofman does not capitalize it. 5 Because of this, no one knew how many Jews lived in France and where they lived until the German authorities commissioned a special census in 1940 and 1941 (Adler 3) 6 This is an ambiguous sentence, since she does not say whether what let her go (laché) was the pen or her father (9). I am inclined to think she means both. xi Remembering the Occupation and the Spanish Civil War
In the following section I offer a short history of the memorialization of the occupation of France and the Spanish Civil War in order to contextualize the work of Kofman, Perec and Rodoreda.
Memory of an occupation is the memory of internal struggle between groups who all have very different memories of the war. As Olivier Wieviorka and Sarah Farmer point out, unlike the First World War, which provided a unifying, Manichean memory of a fight with clear sides and a common symbol (the poilu or French soldier), the French experience of the Second World War was not primarily military. Apart from the short-lived military campaign against Germany in 1940 and the Liberation in 1944, France was not officially “at war” during the war. The collaborators, resisters and deportees of occupied France may almost be said to have experienced different occupations. After the Liberation, in an attempt to paper over these diverse French experiences with a military narrative, De Gaulle's postwar provisional government depicted the war as the final chapter in a “30 years war” with Germany. This enabled them to position Germany as a stable enemy against which France had fought. Of course, this official position ignored the ambiguities and subtleties of people's actual experience. (Wieviorka 11) After De Gaulle's departure, the Fourth Republic took a piecemeal approach to memorializing the war experience. The state organized no memorial in its name, leaving associations of different classes of deportees and individual towns and regions to erect memorial plaques. The reasons for this were twofold. First, the state lacked the funds to erect monuments, limiting itself instead to supervising local efforts and encouraging municipalities to erect temporary plaques instead of massive monuments. The second reason was political: they were reluctant to support monuments and other commemorations of De Gaulle and, on the other hand, also sought to distance themselves from commemoration of the political (that is, communist) elements of the Resistance. The Fourth Republic's approach to recognizing and supporting former deportees was similarly piecemeal. They drew a distinction between those who were deported because they were actively fighting the Nazis and the collaborationist government, and those who were deported because of their origin or their political affiliations. (Wieviorka 37) While at the time this distinction was an expedient and a way to provide financial assistance to deportees, the deportee hierarchy created by the Fourth Republic would shape how deportees both thought of themselves and were memorialized for years to come. One significant effect of this policy was to ignore the specificity of the Jewish deportee experience. Jewish deportees were seldom honored, first, because they were at the bottom of the hierarchy of deportees, and second because of an idea that to specifically recognize Jewish detainees would prevent them from reentering the French community. Former detainees themselves also felt this way. (Rousso in Wieviorka 73) In keeping with a long French tradition of laicité, it would be destructive to the national fabric to honor detainees of a particular religion, even if large numbers of French Jews
xii were entirely secular and hence Jewish only by ethnicity. In addition, memorials that did not differentiate between deportees could help to smooth over the Balkanized memorial and political scene under the Fourth Republic. With De Gaulle's return to power in 1958 (lasting until 1962) came a renewed effort on the part of the state to centralize memorial efforts and to use memorials to unify French memory. In the late 60s, just as Perec began W, the public began to clamor for more information about the Vichy period and France’s role in the Shoah. While commemoration began earlier—in 1956 Isaac Schneerson oversaw the construction of Le Tombeau du martyr juif inconnu, the world's first monument to the genocide—by the end of the 1970s there had been "une formidable explosion de mémoire du génocide" as those who were children during the war reached adulthood and new books, notably Robert Paxton's Vichy France, challenged accounts of Vichy as a “shield” over France that protected it from the Nazis (Barcellini and Wieviorka 451). At the forefront of this movement was (and is) Serge Klarsfeld, a schoolmate of Perec's, who rallied the French state to acknowledge the responsibility of Vichy for the genocide and compiled tomes with the names of deportees and the details of their transport to the east. This growing desire for recognition of the genocide on the part of private citizens conflicted with the Pompidou administration's marked disinclination to exorcise the ghosts of Vichy. Despite pressure from the public, Pompidou denied scholars access to Vichy archives and toned down public acknowledgment of resistance fighters. He went so far as to prevent Le chagrin et la pitié—the 1969 documentary directed by Marcel Ophüls that explores French citizens’ memories of the occupation—from being aired, even though it had been commissioned by French television. (Wieviorka 105-106) Thus, in 1971 when Perec began W ou le souvenir d'enfance, the country at large was pulling in two directions: toward recognition of the genocide in general and the role of Vichy in it, yet also away from that recognition as the state sought not to, in Pompidou’s words, “lift the veil” over this period. As I will discuss in more depth in Chapter Two, Perec's text reflects this moment, grappling with these issues as he both embraces and distances himself from his Jewish identity and considers the nature of identity and inheritance in general. Recognition of the specificity of the genocide and the complicity of the French state came gradually. Though people like Isaac Schneersohn, (who founded the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine clandestinely during the war), Robert Paxton and Serge Klarsfeld had been active for years in the struggle for information and state acknowledgement, it was not until 1995 that the French state officially acknowledged its role in the genocide. Sarah Kofman published Rue Ordener rue Labat in 1994, roughly 20 years after Perec's W, in a France that at once both copiously acknowledged the Jewish experience through monuments and, at the same time, was still unwilling to look its own complicity squarely in the face. Over this time the deportees' own understanding of their situation also changed. While at first most considered their experience a personal one, beginning in the 70s there was an increasing recognition among Jews of the collective aspect of the genocide. In her text, Kofman struggles with the ambiguities of public and private identity, and with the seeming paradox of being both Jewish and French.
xiii * The Spanish Civil War, fought between Republicans and Nationalist rebels from 1936 to 1939, left Spain exhausted, broke and bitter. While the two sides had neither the energy nor the resources to keep fighting, the war continued in some senses many years after its official end. Years after Franco’s Nationalist victory, there were still pockets of resistance in the form of the maquis, guerrilla fighters still living in hiding (Preston 334). Leftist leaders and intellectuals were in exile in Europe and Latin America, especially Mexico. After peace was declared, the victors continued to punish the losers with forced labor camps, imprisonment and executions. Exhumations of Nationalist soldiers and frequent memorial rallies held by the fascists continued to spark violence against the erstwhile Republicans, while the famine years created by Franco's policy of economic independence (“autarky”) also affected the former Republicans more acutely (Preston 344-46). In fact, Spain’s economic situation was actually worse in the years after the war than during. Rodoreda’s protagonist in El carrer de les Camèlies goes hungry in the postwar years, reflecting a reality for a large portion of Spain’s population. She also becomes a prostitute after her first lover, with whom she lived, is put in prison and then killed after the authorities learn, or claim to learn, that “durant la guerra havia estat d’un comité [republicà]” (88). [“he’d been on a [Republican] committee during the war” (71)] Prostitution was a common occupation for single or widowed women, especially Republican war widows, who could not claim a pension (Sánchez 36). The Spanish population during the Franco years was ruled by fear. “The continually reinforced message,” writes Antonio Sánchez, “was that Franco and his regime meant peace, while liberal democracy meant chaos and death. It followed therefore that for Spaniards to enjoy peace, they had to give up freedom, to which they were unsuited” (23). “Franco’s peace” meant that the population exchanged certain freedoms for the promise that the Civil War would not be repeated. During this time, there was a general feeling in the population that no good could come of talking about politics, or even thinking about it. The odd silences and elisions in El carrer de les Camèlies make more sense in this context. Sometimes, in the text, the narrator is unable to give an explanation of why something might have happened, giving the impression of a universe in which things happen for no apparent reason. In real life during this time, people could not or chose not to talk about the real reasons for things like the famine, giving a similar impression of a universe in which cause and effect have an uneasy relationship. Memorialization of the Civil War began while Franco was still in power. In 1959 Franco finished construction on the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), a monument ostensibly constructed to heal the rift between Republicans and Nationalists after the civil war. Located near the Escorial palace outside of Madrid, the Valle de los Caídos includes a basilica topped with the largest cross in the world. In the surrounding valley, 40,000 mostly Nationalist soldiers are buried. Inside the Basilica are the tombs of Franco and Primo de Rivera, the President of the Falange party executed by the Republicans in 1936. Yet, built partially with forced labor by Republican political prisoners and dominated by massive religious icons, the Valle de los Caídos appears more as a monument to fascist victory than to national
xiv healing.2 Today, Spain is deliberating what to do with the Valle de los Caídos. Some wish to incorporate a museum that explains the Franco years and the history of the monument. Artist Leo Bassi has satirically suggested converting the site to “Francolandia” following the model of Disneyland (in Spanish, Disneylandia). Still others, notably those in the conservative Partido popular, wish to leave the site as it is. Rodoreda published El Carrer de las Camèlies in 1966, seven years after work was finished on the Valle de los Caídos. Franco was still in power and would be for another 9 years. In many ways, the war still had not ended. While the country was faring better economically, this success, combined with Franco’s anti- communist stance, made his regime more palatable to powers like the US and Britain, and Spain was attracting tourists (Sánchez 26). It seemed as though the world had decided to overlook Franco’s oppression if the country were safe, anti- communist and economically and politically stable. Reflecting this time of hopeless stasis, Rodoreda's protagonist is continually looking backwards, unable to move forward in her life. By the 1960s, however, economic liberalization and the cultural changes brought by Spanish migration to other European countries did begin to loosen Franco’s grip on Spanish culture. Yet even after his death in 1975 it was a number of years before Spain could start a society-wide conversation about the civil war. A “pacto de silencio” [pact of silence] between political parties after Franco died, intended to help the country avoid another civil war, made a national conversation about the past impossible, while also leaving statues and other images of the Francoist regime intact. (Hadzelek, note 1) Tellingly, the first history of the civil war was written by an Englishman, Hugh Thomas3. Spain is still taking first steps toward memorializing the civil war and postwar periods, as well as toward thinking through how and what to memorialize. In 2007 Spain passed the Law of Historical Memory, a law even whose name is problematic (how is historical memory different from other memory, for instance?) that, on the one hand, offers support to those who want to identify those buried in mass graves and, on the other, also calls for the removal of Francoist symbols from public buildings (Hadzelek, note 1). Memory, it seems, also involves a measure of forgetting. The country is currently in the throes of a “memory boom”—a national hunger for information, testimony and memorials—that France experienced in the early 1970s and, at the same time, is grappling with how to treat the tangible monuments of Francoist rule.
2 Franco was apparently obsessed with the monument. “It was said,” writes Paul Preston, “that the Valle de los Caídos became the nearest thing in Franco’s life to ‘another woman’” (352). 3 Thomas, Hugh. The Spanish Civil War. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961.
xv
Chapter 1: Building a Home Together: Rue Ordener Rue Labat
One of the difficulties of creating a monument to a historical moment like the occupation of Paris is how to account for the diverse experiences of those who lived through it, while at the same time creating something that expresses collective experience. The monument must both acknowledge the uniqueness of individual experience and invite or allow a visitor to access those experiences to the extent that he or she can. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Sarah Kofman struggles with the same dilemma. On the one hand, she seeks to avoid making her experience representative of collective experience, since to do so would fail to acknowledge the specificity of others’ individual experiences. On the other hand, a purely personal text would be inaccessible to the reader with whom she would like to share her memories. In expressing this second concern, I am already using a spatial metaphor: Kofman’s concern is with creating a textual space that allows the reader to enter, but that is, at the same time, her private space. Kofman does not write directly about the purpose of her narrative or her vision of it. Her structural and thematic emphasis on space and its permeability, however, make an edifice of her text. If a monument, in the modern sense of the word, is the combination of memory and space, then we may say that Kofman has written a monument in text. A major, if not the major, theme of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is the unstable distinction between the public and private realms. On every level of the text, from her depiction of her life on Rue Ordener and Rue Labat to the chapter organization, Kofman closely examines how identity—hers and the reader’s—is not simply a question of how a private “me” relates to the outside world. The structure of the chapters, Kofman’s use of intertextuality and the content of her memoir all work together to create an intersubjective space, a “home” with a door open to the reader. Rue Ordener Rue Labat chronicles Kofman’s experiences as a child during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Rue Ordener and Rue Labat are two streets in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, separated by Rue Marcadet. The 18th had a large population of Eastern European Jews at least since the first pogroms there in 1880. (Jarrassé 57). According to a special census ordered by the German authorities of Jews in the occupied zone, by 1940 the 18th arrondissement had the second largest Jewish population in Paris. (Adler 6, 10 (table 5) and Jarrassé 57) In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Kofman mentions none of this historical context. In this text, Rue Ordener and Rue Labat define spatial and temporal zones specific to Kofman’s experience. Rue Ordener is the spatial representation of her life with her family before the occupation, and, after her father’s arrest and deportation, a symbol of her mother’s influence. It is the zone of Judaism, family and private life. Before his arrest, Kofman’s life on Rue Ordener was conducted in Yiddish and revolved around the Jewish rituals led by her father, a rabbi. Rue Labat, where she and her mother flee to escape the Gestapo and French authorities who had already deported her father, defines the zone of “mémé”, a beautiful gentile woman who hides Kofman
1 and her mother for the duration of the war4. There, life is no longer ordered by her father and the Jewish rituals he conducted. Instead, mémé’s Christian, French way of life structures Kofman’s experience. Rue Labat is the zone of Christianity and life in public: while her mother must hide in a back bedroom, Kofman can leave the apartment on Rue Labat as the supposed Christian daughter of mémé. Over the course of the war, mémé gains a larger and larger place in Kofman’s mind and heart. She showers her with love and attention, even sewing her new clothes. Mémé also introduces Kofman to Jewish thinkers like Freud and Bergson, and, more generally, to an academic and intellectual milieu she did not previously have access to. Despite all of the horrors of the war and occupation, Kofman remembers it partially as an idyll that allows mémé and her to enjoy one another’s company without interference ("Je redoutais maintenant la fin de la guerre!" (67). [Now I even dreaded the end of the war! (57)] After the liberation of Paris, Kofman returns to life with her mother and siblings and pines for mémé. Life with her mother during this time is difficult. Her mother beats her, withholds food and cuts the electricity at night to prevent her from studying, yet Kofman manages to go off to the university. The text ends with her reflections on mémé’s death. I mentioned above that we may conceive of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as a meditation on the uneasy relationship between public and private. The sections of bombed-out buildings that appear in the text are emblematic of Kofman’s experience of the dissolution of the distinction between these realms. On nights when there were bombardments, Kofman recalls it was particularly difficult to remain hidden from the “<
4 The word mémé means “granny” in French. Because it is not a proper name, Kofman does not capitalize it. 5 Because of this, no one knew how many Jews lived in France and where they lived until the German authorities commissioned a special census in 1940 and 1941 (Adler 3)
2 and keeping kosher is an act of community with other Jews. In Kofman’s story, dietary rules become secret, private information. In order to survive, Kofman must not reveal her unwillingness to disobey those rules. The play of public and private helps to provide a possible solution to a central problem of Kofman’s text: how can she create a textual monument that, on the one hand, is is true to her personal experience and that, simultaneously, creates an intersubjective space in which a reader, that is, another person, can come to understand that experience. On the one hand, Kofman is leery of putting forward her experience as somehow emblematic of every wartime experience. As I mention above, she purposely omits contextual details that would ground her experience in larger historical trends. Yet to write a purely personal memoir would be an exercise in hermeticism. Kofman intended to, and did, publish her work for others to read. Kofman bookends her text with discussions of two monuments, one very public and the other very private. Neither of these monuments is sufficient to represent her experience to another. Between those two monuments stretches her response to this challenge: a text that upends the distinction between public and private in order to allow a third, intersubjective space to come into existence. This, she argues, is the domain of writing. The one traditional monument discussed at any length is mémé's tomb, mentioned in the final sentence of the text. She writes, “je sais que le prêtre a rappelé sur sa tombe qu’elle avait sauvé une petite fille juive pendant la guerre.” (99) [“I know that at her grave the priest recalled how she had saved a little Jewish girl during the war” (85)] The priest's words are the final words on mémé and the final words in Kofman's book. A tombstone is an ending, a conclusion. What is written on it, or said over it, is meant to be the durable legacy of a person’s life. Yet the words at mémé's tomb fill the reader with mistrust: Kofman's whole book seems to stand in opposition to the priest’s pat statement. mémé did not just “save,” Kofman, after all, she also saved her mother. Yet at the same time she separated Kofman from her mother irrevocably. And an argument could be made that the little girl who entered mémé’s apartment at the beginning of the war was not the one who left after the liberation: from her clothing to her diet, mémé transformed Kofman into a more French, Christian girl. Placed at the end of a book that so unflinchingly looks at the torturous ambiguity of her feelings and experience, the priest’s words seem terribly inadequate as a summary of their relationship. How could a simple marker and a short speech really do justice to the relationship between Kofman and mémé? In this light, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat stands in opposition to the simplicity of the tomb as a complex monument to mémé. The tomb’s very substantialness, its promise that it is the final word on mémé, seems duplicitous or propagandistic in comparison. If there is a discourse of tombs, Kofman may be saying, beware of what they say. The permanence, solidity and public nature of the traditional monument is an inapt representation of the fluidity and fragility of memory and legacy, especially in the context of a book that takes as its subject the metaphorical insubstantiality of things that we tend to think of as solid: family, religion, identity, home and even language. Other monuments in Kofman’s text have a greater claim to truth in that they are fragile testaments not to presence (as a solid stone is), but testaments to
3 absence. Most of these monuments, perhaps more accurately, mementos, relate to her father. The book opens with a description of such a monument, Kofman's father's pen. Placed in implicit opposition to the traditional tomb described at the end of the book, we are encouraged to compare the fragile pen with mémé's tomb, and to consider the pen as a monument. “De lui, il ne me reste que le stylo," [“Of him all I have left is the fountain pen” (3)] writes Kofman (9). This pen, which “m’a ‘lachée’ avant que je puis me décider de l’abandonner” [“‘failed’ me before I could bring myself to give it up” (3)] no longer functions, even though it has been “rafistolé avec du scotch” (9)6. [“patched up with Scotch tape” (3)] This pen, a stand- in for her father, a way, when it functioned, to experience a tenuous physical connection with him, is now a stand-in for the absence of her father. Yet it is that absence that “me contraindre à écrire, écrire” [“makes me write, write” (3)], positioning Kofman’s writing as another expression of absence (9). It is in the absence of the functioning pen and in the absence of her father that her writing takes shape. Her father’s last letter to her family, written from the Drancy prison camp, similarly serves as more of a monument to absence than to former presence. Kofman writes, “Nous ne revîmes, en effet, jamais mon père. Aucune nouvelle non plus, sauf une carte envoyé de Drancy, écrite à l’encre violette, avec un timbre sur le dessus représentant le maréchal Pétain. Elle était écrite en français de la main d’un autre” (15). [“As it turned out, we never did see my father again. Or get any news of him, either, except a card sent from Drancy, written in purple ink, with a stamp on it bearing Marshal Pétain’s picture. It was written in French by someone else’s hand” (9)] While any letter represents the absence of the writer, this card is doubly a symbol of absence, since it is written by another in a language her father does not speak. Kofman’s father is already becoming a ghost, disembodied. His handwriting—a link, after all, to the body that produced the text—is no longer accessible. All the while Pétain hovers above his words, reminding the recipient that they and the sender no longer have the privilege of private communication. Yet despite these pressures, his words and personality come through: he is asking for cigarettes, his great pleasure (“Dans cet ultime signe de vie où il annonçait sa déportation, il demandait que dans le colis de deux kilos autorisé légalement, on lui fit surtout parvenir des cigarettes” (15). [In this last sign of life we had from him, where he told us he was being deported, he asked that in two kilogram packages we were legally authorized to send we be sure to include cigarettes (9)] And despite the letter’s weakness as a proxy for her father, when Kofman cannot find the letter after her mother’s death, she writes, “c’était comme si j’avais perdu mon père une seconde fois” (16) [“it was as if I had lost my father a second time” (9)]. Like the broken pen, Kofman writes about the absence of the letter, itself a testament to the absence of her father’s own writing, which, in turn, signifies the absence of the man who wrote. In this chain of absence, Kofman’s father announces his presence in that last letter by a request for cigarettes. The smoke from cigarettes is a fitting symbol for an
6 This is an ambiguous sentence, since she does not say whether what let her go (laché) was the pen or her father (9). I am inclined to think she means both.
4 absent man. “‘Envoie-moi surtout des cigarettes, des gauloises bleus or vertes,’” (17) [“‘Most of all, send cigarettes, blue or green Gauloises’” (11)] he writes in that final letter. Kofman’s memory of this request provides a link to another, earlier memory, of the end of the Sabbath as the moment when her father was able to smoke again. Cigarette smoke, like Kofman’s father and the objects that represent him, is a play of presence and absence, a symbol of the functioning of memory. The smoke is the present evidence of the absent smoker and the burned cigarette, with a tenuous connection to the person who exhaled it. The smoke chains together Kofman’s separate memories of her father, connecting his final letter to his family with a memory of him lighting a cigarette after the sabbath. Yet smoke also disappears gradually into the air, like a fading memory. A trace of its scent can linger on for longer until it, too, fades. These private mementos of her father, the pen and the letter, appropriately capture the evanescence of memory and the feeling of absence that is, in a sense, the essence of Kofman’s memory of her father. These mementos fall short of being true monuments, however. Alone, the pen and the letter only have evocative power for Kofman herself. They stand as private monuments, but not public ones. Mémé’s tomb, upon which a simplified narrative is carved in stone, cannot provide truth. It promises a pat version of a story of extraordinary moral complexity. More honest are the mementos of Kofman's father, since in their very fragility and absence they allow the holder to reexperience the loss of a loved one. Yet if a discussion of monuments and memory in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat were to end here, an enormous part of the book would be neglected. Much of the text involves the streets and spaces of Paris. How can we reconcile this memoir, a book about memory, with the preeminence of space of the city? Between the bookends of the private, absent monuments to Kofman’s father’s absence (his pen and the lost card from Drancy) and mémé’s public, solid, untrustworthy tomb stretch the Paris streets, which function both as a stone monument like mémé’s tomb and a testament to the absence of those who lived on these streets and the complexities of their lives. City space, specifically the space of the neighborhood, helps Kofman create a text that is both true to her private experience and also able to welcome a reader. As the title implies, the Paris depicted in Rue Ordener, rue Labat is primarily the area around those two streets. Kofman leaves Paris several times in the text, but very rarely does she leave her neighborhood in the north of Paris. The streets of the city are, of course, a public place. Yet the neighborhood both is and isn't public: one's neighborhood square is an extension of one's own living room. One "lives with" one's neighbors as well as with one's own family. As Pierre Mayol writes in volume two of L’Invention du quotidien, the neighborhood is un dispositif pratique dont la fonction est d'assurer une solution de continuité entre ce qui est le plus intime (l'espace privé du logement) et ce qui est le plus inconnu (l'ensemble de la ville ou même, par extension, le reste du monde) . . . Le quartier est le moyen terme d'une dialectique existentielle (au niveau personnel) et sociale (au niveau du groupe des usagers) entre le dedans et le dehors. (19)
5 A practical device whose function is to ensure a continuity between what is the most intimate (the private space of one’s lodging) and what is the most unknown (the totality of the city or even, by extension, the world) . . . The neighborhood is the middle term in an existential dialectic (on a personal level) and a social one (on the level of a group of users) between inside and outside. (11) In Mayol's formulation, the neighborhood is not just a particular space, but also a dispositif or “device” for negotiating between inside and outside, private and public. As “le moyen terme” between the home and the vast city (or world), the neighborhood is an intermediary space. When you are out in the neighborhood you are somewhere between your most private home and vast, unfamiliar public space. In My Father and I, his meditation on the Marais neighborhood of Paris, David Caron draws a relationship between the concept of the neighborhood as outlined by Mayol and how the public-privateness of a community, in Caron’s case the Jewish and gay communities that live and have lived in the Marais, is problematic for the French state and French culture. If everyone is publicly a citizen and only privately a member of a community, the self-separation inherent in a Jewish or gay neighborhood is antithetical. Caron quotes the famous 1789 speech by the count of Clermont-Tonnerre on whether Jews deserved citizenship in the new republic: Il faut refuser tout aux juifs comme nation et accorder tout aux juifs comme individus; il faut méconnaître leurs juges, ils ne doivent avoir que les nôtres; il faut refuser la protection légale au maintien des prétendues lois de leur corporation judaïque; il faut qu’ils ne fassent dans l’État ni un corps politique ni un ordre; il faut qu’ils soient individuellement citoyens. (Clermont- Tonnerre in Caron 76)
As a nation, Jews must be denied everything, as individuals, they must be granted everything; they must have our judges alone, theirs must not be acknowledged; legal protection must be denied to the so-called laws of their Judaic corporation; within the state they must be neither a political body nor an order; they mud the individual citizens. (Clermont-Tonnerre in Caron 76) He notes that “thus articulated, the emancipation of the Jews has remained ever since the template for how the nation is to deal with its minorities”. (76) In fact, a statement from the Vichy government about “the Jew” seems drawn directly from Clermont-Tonnerre’s words: The influence of the Jews has been undeniably corruptive and finally decaying. The government as a whole intends quite seriously not to engage in reprisals. It respects the Jew as well as his possessions. It will forbid him however to hold certain administrative responsibilities, authority in the national economy and education. Past experience has shown to all impartial minds that the Jews represent an individualistic tendency which leads to anarchy. (Le Temps, October 17, 1940, in Adler 16) The Vichy statement seems to contend that Clermont-Tonnerre’s requirement that the Jews “soient individuellement citoyens” has not been followed, though the Vichy government will still extend some of the respect that Clermont-Tonnerre said
6 should belong to the individual Jew, excepting certain positions of power7. As with Clermont-Tonnerre, the Vichy government sees Jews as “corruptive and finally decaying” because of their “individualistic tendency” of keeping to themselves as a group. Such an argument implies an either/or logic: either you are a member of the Jewish community, or the French one. The idea of the Jewish neighborhood might have seemed to reinforce these ideas: a space occupied by a community with a particular ethnic belonging looked, to the Vichy mind, a lot like the "nation within a nation" that Clermont-Tonnerre finds unacceptable. Yet, as Caron argues, a "nation within a nation" would be more like a ghetto and less like a neighborhood. A ghetto has tight, clear borders that inhabitants may not be allowed to breach while the borders of a neighborhood are fluid (the exact borders of a neighborhood are a matter of individual opinion) and traversable. Caron shows that Mayol’s description of a neighborhood as both public and private gives the lie to the idea that public and private zones can ever be completely separated, and thus also to the idea that one could lead a life in public without any kind of reference to the life lived in private. (85) The relationship of the individual to his or her neighborhood is therefore, as Mayol says, “existential." Caron shows how this existential relationship carries over to how inhabitants of a city understand themselves as individuals and part of the collective, not just how they understand the relationship between their homes, the neighborhood and the rest of the world. In Kofman's text, as in Mayol and Caron's writing, the problem of public and private, of their relationship and how they might be negotiated by the individual, is more complex than simply imagining the private home and the public street. As with the bombed out building, these distinctions are not easily negotiated. At issue in Kofman’s text is the question of who exactly she is, and how she might write an autobiographical text that is the story of her confusion about her identity. Is she the Jewish girl who grew up speaking Yiddish and admiring her father, the rabbi? How could she be? She forgot her Yiddish and purposefully distanced herself from Judaism. Is she “Suzanne,” mémé’s daughter? No again, since she also has a relationship, albeit fractious, with her biological mother. During the occupation, Kofman has a public, Christian mother, and a private, Jewish, mother. This situation mimics her experience on the streets of occupied Paris: publicly, she can only appear as mémé's Christian daughter, while her private Jewish identity languishes in a back room of mémé's apartment. Kofman’s walk from her mother’s apartment on rue Ordener to mémé’s on rue Labat is a central moment in the text, symbolizing Kofman’s negotiation of her identity in the not-quite-private and not-quite-public environment of the neighborhood. It is significant that Kofman vomits on rue Marcadet, the path from rue Ordener to rue Labat. Vomiting is an act of rejection, but it is also a way of making public what is private. The contents of the stomach—which not even the possessor usually sees—is put on public display. The common reaction to vomiting,
7 The Vichy government of course later reversed its position on “respect[ing] the Jew as well as his possessions”. In fact it had already stripped the Rothschilds (and other less famous Jews) of both their citizenship and their possessions (Le Temps 6 and 9 October).
7 both producing it and witnessing it, is disgust. Julia Kristeva specifically mentions vomit as a material producing the situation of abjection. To abject literally means to “throw away.” For Kristeva, this concept helps us understand how we create ourselves in opposition to other things we deem not-us and radically unacceptable. In a discussion of how the child may use food loathing to separate herself from her parents, Kristeva writes, Mais puisque cette nourriture n'est pas un « autre» pour « moi» qui ne suis que dans leur désir, je m'expulse, je me crache, je m'abjecte dans le même mouvement par lequel « je » prétends me poser. Ce détail, insignifiant peut- être, mais qu'ils cherchent, chargent, apprécient, m'imposent, ce rien me retourne comme un gant, les tripes à l'air: ainsi ils voient, eux, que je suis en train de devenir un autre au prix de ma propre mort. Dans ce trajet où « je » deviens, j'accouche de moi dans la violence du sanglot, du vomi. (10-11)
But since food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in [the parents’] desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that “I” am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which “I” become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. (231) Food and vomit occupy a middle space between me and not-me. As Kristeva writes, when I vomit, “I spit myself out.” The act of vomiting, as well as seeing vomit, reminds the vomiter or viewer of her own implication in the not-me, even as vomiting (as an act of abjection) represents an attempt to draw a bright line between self and other. In this sense, abjection is both an action and a relationship, tying the self to the not-self. Vomiting, then, like the place of the neighborhood in the city, marks a zone in between private and public. Following Kristeva, that zone is paradoxical: it is both undeniably me and undeniably not-me. In Rue Ordener, rue Labat, the space of the neighborhood is both the symbol and the stage for the enactment of this paradox. Kofman's family apartment on rue Ordener also performs (or, rather, is made to perform) an act of abjection. When Kofman and her mother return to their apartment on rue Ordener, they find that the Gestapo, "dans leur fureur d'être venus pour rien, . . . avaient, nous dit le concierge, jeté les meubles par la fenêtre. Les fauteuils et le divan de la chambre de mon père, tout avait été cassé, brisé. Ils avaient fait le vide." (41) [“In their anger at coming up empty-handed, . . . had thrown the furniture out the window, the concierge told us. The armchairs and the sofa from my father’s room—everything had been broken, smashed. They’d emptied it out” (33)] Like Kofman herself when she vomits on the street, her apartment is made to disgorge its contents so that the private furnishings of the house are made public. With Mayol's help, we can see how destructive the “abjection” of Kofman's apartment on rue Ordener is. There is, writes Mayol, l'élucidation d'une analogie formelle entre le quartier et l'habitant . . . Par le biais de la vacuité s'ouvrant à l'intérieur de dispositions concrètes
8 contraignantes—les murs d'un appartement, les façades des rues—, l'acte d'aménager son intérieur rejoint celui de s'aménager des trajectoires dans l'espace urbain du quartier, et ces deux actes sont fondateurs au même degré de la vie quotidienne: ôter l'un ou l'autre, c'est détruire les conditions de possibilité de cette vie. Ainsi, la limite public/privé . . . n'est pas seulement une séparation, mais elle constitue une séparation qui unit . . . ils sont . . . sans cesse interdépendants l'un de l'autre puisque, dans le quartier, l'un n'a aucune signification sans l'autre. (19-20)
there is the elucidation of a formal analogy between the neighborhood and one’s home . . . Because of the empty space inside constrained concrete layouts—the walls of an apartment, the facades of a street—the act of arranging one’s interior space rejoins that of arranging one’s own trajectories in the urban space of the neighborhood, and these two acts are the cofounders of everyday life in an urban milieu: to take away one or the other would be to destroy the conditions of possibility for this life. Thus, the limit between public and private . . . is not only a separation, but constitutes a separation that unites . . . one has no meaning without the other. (11-12) The apartment is a bounded space that allows the dweller to lead a life: within one's four walls, one can know one's personal space and organize one's furnishings. The bounded space of the neighborhood allows the inhabitant to negotiate between the perfectly private and the perfectly public outside world. When the apartment on rue Ordener is made to vomit its contents onto the street, that "interdependent" relationship between home and neighborhood is destroyed, making, as Mayol writes, daily life impossible. The “device” of the neighborhood negotiates between home and not-home so that you can understand your place in society. If you do not have a home, if your home is suddenly public and lying in the street, such a negotiation is impossible. If your home is not private, or is gone entirely, how do you know where your neighborhood is? After the violent abjection of her family's belongings and the loss of her home, Kofman stands as open to the depersonalizing environment as that bombed out building. The prominence of the public/private environment of the neighborhood underscores the importance of space, particularly the space of the city, in Kofman’s text. In fact, the neighborhood is not the only intermediary space Kofman addresses in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. After describing how her father would light a cigarette as soon as the sabbath was over, and how she used to love to purchase Zig-Zag rolling papers for him, she writes, “Plus tard, dans un rêve, je me représentai mon père sous la figure d’un ivrogne qui traversait la rue en zigzaguant” (18) [“Later, in a dream, my father appeared to me as a drunk zig-zagging across the street” (12)]. This dream inscribes her father, and the smoke that symbolizes the fragility of her memory of him, onto the street, creating a path in space from her memory of her father. The zig-zag shape, usually two parallel lines with a slanted line connecting them, is a visual rendering of intermediate space; the slanted line mediates between one parallel line and the other. Kofman’s narrative about her father, and about her own life, cannot move straight forward in textual space; it must zig zag.
9 Zig-zagging occurs at several levels of Kofman’s narrative: at the level of chapter organization, narrative structure and diction. All of these levels create an image of the mental space that Kofman asks the reader to experience. In addition to the image of zig zagging, I will use the concept of the crossroads and Kofman’s term, voie de traverse, to consider the way space functions at these three levels of the text. Kofman employs zig-zagging to “spatialize” her text, creating a 2-dimensional plane instead of a straight narrative. Her story does not move straight from the beginning to the end. Instead, hers is of a dual identity, of a woman who is simultaneously the daughter of her mother and the daughter of mémé. Because a linear, chronological text makes such simultaneity difficult to convey, spatialization allows the reader to experience more than one moment in time concurrently. In addition, a spatialized text almost literally creates room for the reader, building a textual monument that is in between personal and public. The chapter organization of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat maps the space of the text onto urban space and replicates the zig-zag nature of the narrative in the streets themselves. Kofman divides the book into 23 chapters, the first seventeen of which take the reader from her early childhood before the war to the liberation of France, forming a long first section. Chapters 18 and 19 are intertextual excursions into the work of Freud, Leonardo and Hitchcock, providing a break before the final four chapters, which address Kofman’s life after the war. At the center of that first section is chapter 9, titled “Errances.” [“Peregrinations”] In this chapter Kofman and her mother flee their home and take a zig zagging route to mémé’s home on rue Labat. The street where they live, rue Ordener, does not intersect with mémé’s street, rue Labat. In order to get there, they must take rue Marcadet, which intersects rue Ordener at an acute angle and provides a path to rue Labat. Rue Marcadet is placed in between the two streets the way that chapter 9 is placed at the center of the first section of the book, with Kofman’s previous life on one side and her new life with mémé on the other. Like the content of the chapter, the chapter itself forms the bridge between these two lives. Kofman, her mother and the story itself zig zags at this chapter, making literal the idea that textual space and lived, urban space can be mapped onto one another. The fact that Rue Ordener and Rue Labat, symbols both of Kofman’s two mothers and of her life before and during the war, do not intersect therefore carries narrative implications. If, as Stephen Winspur argues in his discussion of Baudelaire’s prose poems, “the city streets function as a metaphor for narrative itself,” this lack of intersection represents a break in narrative flow (60). One street does not simply lead to another, and Kofman’s story is not exactly a Bildungsroman that shows us how she became, step by step, the woman she is. Instead, rue Marcadet leads Kofman “elsewhere,” to a parallel life in which mémé is her mother. The mothers coexist both in her mind and in reality at mémé’s apartment. In assigning parts of her life to these two streets that do not intersect, Kofman favors the spatial dimension of the text over the chronological, showing how she does not see her childhood as a process of maturation over time, but rather an exercise in inhabiting two distinct and conflicting identities—that of her mother’s Jewish daughter and mémé’s Christian daughter—at the same time.
10 Rue Marcadet, as a connection between the two streets of the title, thus forms a crossroads that leads Kofman from one life to another. Winspur argues that, since “the city streets function as a metaphor for narrative itself,” that streets in a text often lead the reader and protagonist to a crossroads at the center of the plot where different characters or strands of narrative intersect, moving the plot forward. In the prose poems, says Winspur, crossroads function differently: they don’t further the plot, but rather lead the reader away from linear narrative to a second city, a Baudelairean “elsewhere” (67). In Kofman’s text, the Rue Marcadet similarly forms a crossroads that leads “elsewhere,” from Kofman’s life with her mother to her life with mémé. Between one home and another, one life and another, stands rue Marcadet, a missing term, hidden within the two streets named in the title. In “Cauchemar: en marge des études médiévales,” the final essay in her book Comment s’en sortir?, Kofman expands on the role of rue Marcadet as a crossroads leading “elsewhere”. In “Cauchemar,” she tells the same story of her flight with her mother to rue Labat via rue Marcadet, but expands on the importance of the street name Marcadet. The story comes at the end of a discussion of Bernard Cerquiglini's work on the medieval French adverb “mar,” a syntactically ambiguous, “unheimlich” word which "'évoke le malheur d'une destinée essentiellement dramatique'" [evokes the misfortune of an essentially dramatic destiny] (Cerquiglini in Kofman 107). She continues, "Dans le texte de l'épopée, il désigne l'intensité ou la démesure de la scène. Il est un signe du code épique, 'sorte de unité minimale signifiante qui peut au sein d'un autre code littéraire renvoyer par allusion au régistre de l'épopée'" [In the epic text, it designates the intensity or the excessiveness of the scene. It is a sign of the epic code, ‘a sort of minimal signifying unit which can, in the midst of another literary code, bring one back, by allusion, to the epic register’]” (Kofman, Cerquiglini in Kofman 107). Mar, then, is shorthand for unmanageable or inexpressible excess, a visitor from another genre. When characters in medieval romance must express unfathomable grief, they resort to mar and the epic register it invokes. Kofman makes a sonic association between this “unmanageable” word and modern French by relating a nightmare (French: cauchemare) involving her experience running from the authorities along rue Marcadet (10). Within a text, mar is a path leading “elsewhere,” to a different genre and towards emotion that exceeds the boundaries of that genre. Like the rue Marcadet, what Verena Conley calls the two “toponyms” of the title also plot Kofman’s narrative onto the map through sonic associations. Ordener becomes “‘ordonnée or ‘ordinaire,’” the space of “ordinary” life. Labat becomes “là- bas”, a word that “is not quite—but indeed might be—a vanishing point”, carrying the connotation of hell. (Conley 156) In ordinary speech, là-bas is a vague pointer to somewhere else, to “elsewhere”. Rue Marcadet, then, both literally leads “elsewhere,” to rue Labat ,and leads Kofman and the reader towards inexpressible emotional regions where the familiar aspects of life—family, religion—are thrown into question—“là-bas”. Kofman uses the two streets to circumvent the conventions of the Bildungsroman that expect a chronological process of maturity over time. In speaking of her oeuvre, Kofman uses a French term similar to the English word crossroads: voies de traverse. On the first page of the text, she reflects that, “mes nombreux livres ont peut-être été des voies de traverse obligées pour parvenir
11 à raconter <<ça>>” (9). [“Maybe all my books have been the detours required to bring me to write about ‘that’” (3)] The term “voies de traverse” is difficult to translate into English. A “voie” is a way, a channel, a track or a path (“Voie”). A “traverse” is a crosspiece, and a “rue de traverse” is a sidestreet (“Traverse”). So “voies de traverse” has the connotation of sidestreets or paths over something else. It might also be translated as “crossovers”, perhaps as “detours.” Ginette Michaud translates the term as “passages between and beyond” (37). These books, these “voies de traverse,” are indirect routes towards “ça”. Words like “ça,” too, are “voies de traverse” towards something that cannot be approached via a direct route. The word “ça,” like “là-bas,” is a verbal pointer to something unmentioned or unmentionable. In this passage, the referent of “ça” is unclear. The paragraph that precedes this reflection, the first one of the text, is a meditation on Kofman’s father’s pen, her only memento of her father. The pen, even though it no longer writes, is “rafistolé avec du scotch, il est devant mes yeux sur ma table de travail et il me contraint à écrire, écrire” (9). [“Patched up with Scotch tape; it is right in front of me on my desk and makes me write, write” (3)] If Kofman had not put “ça” in quotation marks, then we might suppose she is referring to this poignant meditation on the loss of her father and his marginal legacy in the broken pen. The quotation marks put the referent of “ça” into question, however. It cannot just be a reference to the story of the pen, since if this were the case it would need no quotation marks. While normally in writing demonstrative pronouns refer to something previously stated, in this case it can refer to something the reader will encounter in the future, in the rest of the text, or to something entirely outside of the text, perhaps even to something that cannot be rendered in writing. In this latter case, the image of the patched pen that cannot write, yet forces Kofman to “écrire, écrire,” is a fitting image for this “ça,” which generates text that attempts to communicate it, yet is itself mute. Kofman’s spatialization of her text provides “voies de traverse” towards topics she is otherwise unable to discuss. When Kofman and her mother are fleeing the authorities, rue Marcadet is an escape route to another street and another life, as the adverb mar is an escape route out of one genre and into another. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, others’ texts are also escape routes or voies de traverse, enabling Kofman to escape her own identity and destiny. The similarities between Kofman’s text and Freud’s 1908 essay “Der Familienroman der Neurotiker” (“Family Romances”) begin to show us the relationship between text and identity. The topic of Freud’s essay, like Kristeva’s work on abjection, is how a child negotiates an identity independent from his or her parents. While, for Kristeva, vomit is one method of expressing this complex relationship, for Freud, this separation is negotiated through text. “Family Romances” paints young children as proto-novelists, seeking to write their way out of their own family homes and the destiny it seems to promise. Freud begins by discussing children’s tendency to fantasize about having a different set of parents, one that is higher in social class (299). The “romances” Freud describes— perhaps of having been switched at birth, or of being secretly adopted—allow a child to envision him or herself as separate from his or her parents. Because, according to Freud, these fantasies occur before a child knows about the mechanics of sexual reproduction, the child does not necessarily see a reason why he or she
12 could not be the child of another couple, or the product of a secret liaison between their mother and another, superior, man. In fantasy, then, the child is able to leave the family and create an identity of his or her own, a step towards maturity and independence. Rue Ordener, rue Labat is a very literal “family romance.” Kofman’s childhood experience of persecution is the peacetime child’s experience writ large. Freud mentions that, as “intellectual growth increases, the child cannot help discovering by degrees the category to which his parents belong” (298). Kofman becomes aware of her “category”—Jewish, a child of immigrants—not by degrees, but rather all at once. And unlike the child in Freud’s essay, Kofman does not need to fantasize that she has another mother—she actually has one. mémé, like the fantasy parents in “Family Romances,” is “of higher social standing” insofar as she is a full French citizen and a Christian. In order to discover the “category” to which his or her parents belong, the child must develop the ability to look at his or her parents from the perspective of an outsider, a step towards imagining him or herself as separate from the parents. For Kofman, her survival depends upon imagining herself from another’s perspective well enough to actually inhabit a different, Christian, identity. In Freud’s formulation, the child escapes from the suffocating triad with the parents by way of fantasies in narrative, employing the texts of others to build a new story. In a sense, they write their own Bildungsroman, their own story of their origins and maturation. Children’s fantasies of being adopted, he says, are “usually a result of something they have read” (298). These narratives offer escape routes by which the child may strike out on his or her own, independent from the family. In using others' texts to create a genealogy, the child builds a bridge to the biologically unrelated fantasy parents, a crucial step towards becoming an independent person. Separating oneself from the private realm of the family, even in fantasy, means entering the public outside world as an individual. Like the child in Freud’s essay, Kofman’s also uses others’ texts to escape from her family and operate as an individual in the public world, charting a movement from private to public via a coming of age story involving multiple parentage. Kofman has a deep relationship to these texts, and description of a new living situation seldom comes without a note about what books she read there. While the people who gave her the books disappear from her life, she carries the books they gave her from place to place. In what is otherwise a catalogue of loss when Kofman’s apartment is put “sous scellés,” she mentions the gift from a favorite teacher that she managed to bring along: En revanche, quand je suis partie cette nuit-là me cacher chez <
But on the night I left to hide in the home of “the lady on Rue Labat,” I did take along The Misadventures of Jean-Paul Chopard, an illustrated book in the “Pink Collection,” which Madame Fagnard had given me for my birthday. (19- 20)
13 In Les Mésaventures de Jean-Paul Chopard, the title character runs away from his family and home to have adventures. Les Mésaventures is a kind of “roman de formation” or Bildungsroman, in which Jean-Paul learns something about life from his “fugue”, the way Freud’s children gain wisdom and independence through their fantasies of escape from the family. This is a benign version of Kofman’s story, since she is also separated from both home and family and, by the end of her memoir, has gained knowledge of the outside world as a result of her adventures, including a “fugue”. Kofman’s intertextual escape routes are not confined to passing textual references. At two points in Rue Ordener Rue Labat, Kofman breaks the narrative thread of her story to dwell on the work of others that seems, at least on a very superficial level, to be tangential to the story at hand. Chapters 18 and 19 point outside of Kofman’s text, allowing both Kofman and the reader to escape her story. Chapter 18, “Les deux mères de Léonard”, discusses Leonardo’s “carton de Londres” (in English, the Burlington House Cartoon) and Freud’s analysis of it. Chapter 19 remains separate from the narrative thread, this time allowing Kofman to discuss “un de [s]es films préférés” (75) [“one of [her] favorite [films]” (65)], Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. These two intertextual chapters come in the last third of the text, directly after the chapter (“Libérations”) recounting the “Liberation” of Paris (Kofman puts the word in quotation marks) and her mother’s liberation from the house of mémé. A story only about Kofman’s experiences during the war would end there, implying her relationship with mémé ended with the war and perhaps implying a slightly happy ending as she becomes again her mother’s daughter and is reunited with her siblings. Chapters 18 and 19 offer the reader a chance to pause before diving into the unhappy ending that awaits, as well as a chance to reflect on the resonances Kofman’s story has with these three works (“Le Carton de Londres,” Freud’s interpretation of it, and The Lady Vanishes) that mean so much to her. While these chapters allow Kofman to meditate on her own story through resonances with these other texts, they also accomplish a meta-textualization, in which not only Kofman-the-subject of the text, but also Kofman-the-writer of the text seeks to escape the story. The intertextual chapters, insofar as they create “escape routes” from Kofman’s story, puncture the text, unsealing it, making it less hermetic. Through these intertextual references, which, on the one hand, import others’ texts to create a path out of the text and, on the other hand, enlist the reader for the creation of the text. The reader must do his or her own work when faced with intertext, using previous knowledge to unpack the significance of the reference. This use of intertext thus creates a textual monument that is co-created by the reader and the writer. One way to envision the particular relationship of Kofman’s text to space is to imagine a Möbius strip, with Rue Marcadet, or the intertextual moments, as the twist. A Möbius strip is merely a loop with a twist in it, but tracing a path on one side will bring you to the other. If you begin at the interior of the strip and follow the loop through the twist, you get to the exterior side. Similarly, Kofman begins in the interior, in her family home, and takes rue Marcadet (a crossroads or zig-zag) to a life on the exterior in which she can be seen on the street as the Christian daughter of mémé. Rue Marcadet, in this formulation, is an intermediary space between the
14 public and private realms. Like the two sides of the Möbius strip, rue Ordener and Rue Labat do not intersect without the voie de traverse of rue Marcadet. Thus Kofman’s public and private lives, represented by the two streets, take place simultaneously but do not intersect. The intertextual moments in the text make it clear, however, that the public and private realms do not merely share an ambiguous liminal space. The intertextual sections of the text, which make reference to shared culture beyond that text and are thus in a sense public and outward-facing, paradoxically lead the reader (and the writer) more deeply into Kofman’s private domain. When Kofman seems to move from private to public, as when she addresses a work of art or a film, she is always also moving in the opposite direction, towards intimate mental consequences of her story that she does not address directly. Chapter 18 works in this way, enabling Kofman to examine facets of her mother’s experience that she cannot or does not discuss in the course of the memoir. She begins the chapter by mentioning that she chose the “carton de Londres” as the cover image for her first book (on Freud and art), L’Enfance de l’Art. After introducing the guest speaker (“Freud:”), the rest of the chapter is given over to Freud’s analysis of Leonardo’s drawing. Freud hypothesizes that the Virgin and St. Anne in the drawing represent a collection of Leonardo’s maternal figures (73). In the cartoon, Saint Anne and Mary both caress the Christ child, who is playing with Saint John the Baptist. For Freud, these two figures have a double significance. First, they represent Leonardo’s father’s second wife, Donna Albicia, and his paternal grandmother, Mona Lucia. Freud hypothesizes that Saint Anne also represents Leonardo’s “‘vraie et première’” (74) [“‘earlier and true’” (64)] mother, Caterina, who was forced to give him up to his father and new wife. Most of Kofman’s memoir struggles with the problem of having two mothers. The name “mémé” means “granny” in French, obscuring mémé’s role as a mother replacement just as in Leonardo’s cartoon.8 The cartoon and Freud’s analysis show how difficult it is to even imagine having two mothers. Leonardo uses Saint Anne/Mona Lucia as a screen for the first and true mother, who must remain unmentioned. Kofman never explicitly mentions the relationship between her own situation and Freud’s interpretation of the “Carton de Londres,” yet it does not take an especially subtle reader to see how a story of a rivalry between mothers, and of a mother hidden in plain sight, resonates with Kofman’s own. In his analysis of the cartoon, Freud puts effort into imagining Caterina’s feelings about losing her son, neglecting Leonardo’s own feelings about the matter: “Et l’artiste recouvrit et voila, avec le bienheureux sourire de la sainte Anne, la douleur et l’envie que ressentit la malheureuse, quand elle dut céder à sa noble rivale, après le père, l’enfant [...]. Quand Léonard, avant sa cinquième année, fut recueilli dans la maison grand-paternelle, sa jeune belle-mère Albicia supplanta sans aucun doute sa mère dans son coeur.” (74)
8 Solange Leibovici notes that “mémé” sounds like mamme or memme, “mother” in Yiddish. Kofman enshrines the ambiguity of the relationship in a pun between her two “mother” tongues.
15 “The artist seems to have used the blissful smile of St. Anne to disavow and to cloak the envy which the unfortunate woman felt when she was forced to give up her son to her better-born rival, as she had once given up his father as well . . . When Leonardo was received into his grandfather’s house before he had reached the age of five, his young stepmother, Albiera, must certainly have taken his place where his feelings were concerned.” (64) Leonardo is the object of desire of two women, his biological mother and his stepmother. Freud imagines that Leonardo cruelly chases his mother from his heart to make room for the young and beautiful newcomer, as Kofman does in her own story. That Leonardo’s stepmother is noble brings us back to “Family Romances”: like Kofman, Leonardo has savored the pleasure and the misery of having a childish fantasy (that his mother be a noblewoman) come true. Nowhere in Rue Ordener Rue Labat does Kofman reckon with her mother’s feelings of abandonment, nor with her own possible feelings of guilt. It is here that she comes closest, allowing Freud’s reflections on Leonardo to speak for her mother’s anguish. In this chapter, Kofman’s intertextual escape from her own story paradoxically brings her, and the reader, deeper inside that story to thoughts and feelings that are not expressed in her first- person narrative. If in “Family Romances,” narrative creates a route for a child to enter the public world, here Kofman creates an intertextual path that leads to the public world, but which then leads the reader back to the private world. While Kofman employs intertext in Chapter 18 to obliquely consider her mother’s pain, she employs it in Chapter 19 to communicate her own anguish when she is ripped away from mémé as well as how the horror of that experience symbolizes the horror and uncertainty of the war itself. In The Lady Vanishes, a kindly old woman is kidnapped by criminals and replaced with a nasty crone. The heroine, Iris, is the only person to notice the first woman’s disappearance and her replacement. Those responsible for kidnapping the kind old woman are agents of a foreign enemy (the old woman being a spy for England). They try to convince Iris she is hallucinating when she asks questions about what has happened. The film begins as a kind of hotel farce in a fictional Eastern European country, Bandrieka, complete with loud musicians, a room mixup with romantic consequences and drunken Englishmen. The action then moves to a train that will take Iris, Miss Froy (the kind old lady), Gilbert (Iris’ love interest) and a host of others back to England. The genre of the film changes to something more serious and sinister at this point. The humor of the hotel sequence is gone, replaced by dread and paranoia. By the end of the film, both the train and the action have gone off the rails as they hurtle towards an unknown destination. It becomes clear that what the other passengers had considered Iris’ paranoid delusions are quite real when soldiers from Bandrieka begin shooting at the passengers. The Lady Vanishes was released in 1938, at the eve of war with Germany and obliquely grapples with the question of whether to appease or engage with Germany. In his biography of Hitchcock, Patrick McGilligan observes that the train shoot out [in The Lady Vanishes] reinforced the politics. The hero and heroine try to rally their countrymen away from teatime, but the English passengers are stubbornly complacent: “They can’t do anything to us, we’re British subjects!” One Englishman—an adulterer, and worse, a heel—declares
16 himself neutral and steps from the train waving a white flag. He is promptly shot dead. The message is clear: England is kidding itself to think it can appease Hitler. (208) The film thus links Kofman’s individual and personal story, of herself, her mother and mémé, with the larger historical moment. Kofman seldom mentions the wartime context of her story, making for instance only a typographical reference to the infamous Vel d’Hiv roundup in which her father, along with about 13,000 other people, were arrested and eventually deported: “Le 16 juillet 1942, mon père savait qu’il allait être ‘ramassé’” (11). [“On 16 July 1942, my father knew he was going to be picked up” (5)] It is only here, by stepping outside her narrative to discuss Hitchcock’s politically-oriented film, does Kofman begin to connect her personal experiences to larger historical forces. Kofman positions her discussion of the film before the moment in her life that most resembles it, interrupting the chronology of her story in two ways: first by stepping outside of it intertextually, and second by recounting her experience and her association with it in reverse order. These interruptions again bring the reader from the outside to the inside of Kofman’s story. In chapter 20 (titled “Idylle”), which follows her discussion of The Lady Vanishes, we learn that after the war ended, Kofman stayed with mémé for a period while her mother left Paris to retrieve her siblings. Her mother returns dramatically, appearing one day in mémé’s place to pick her up from school: “Un jour, 4 heures 30. Fin de l'école. Je me précipite vers la sortie, je cherche mémé. Ce n'est pas elle qui m'attend mais bel et bien ma mère venue me reprendre définitivement. Mon coeur se met à battre à toute allure. Ce fut atroce" (81). [“One afternoon, 4:30, the end of the school day, I rush to the exit, I look for Mémé. It isn’t she who is waiting for me but sure enough my mother, come to take me back for good. My heart starts to race. It was atrocious” (68-69)] Before coming to that part of her story, Kofman describes in detail her experience of a similar moment in The Lady Vanishes, writing, l’intolérable, pour moi, c’est toujours d’apercevoir brutalement à la place du bon visage <
The part that is always unbearable for me is to perceive, all of a sudden, instead of the good maternal face of the old lady (and everything in the film suggests she represents the good mother . . . ), the face of her replacement . . . It is a horribly hard, shifty face, and just as one is expecting to see the good lady’s sweet, smiling one instead. (65-66) We would expect Kofman to narrate her story starting from the original experience through to the association, chronologically, but she breaks chronology to protect both the reader and herself from the most difficult parts of her story. Instead of plunging straight into her forced separation from mémé, we enter Kofman’s memory from a public, outside place: the movie theater. Only then do we come to her private experience. This reverse chronology makes emotional, rather than
17 narrative sense, bringing into relief the way the topology of narrative and the topology of the mind differ. While Kofman’s discussion of The Lady Vanishes prepares the reader for the moment of her separation from mémé, the scene from the film does not form a perfect parallel to her experience. In the film, the original mother figure is the good and kind one, while “sa remplaçante” is “dur” and “faux”. In Kofman’s case, it is the opposite: her scowling mother is the original, her replacement kind and gentle. Kofman does not desire the recuperation of the original mother, as Iris does, but rather wishes to repress her in favor of the replacement. Mémé might be said to serve as a screen for Kofman’s original, ambivalent connection to her mother. Over the course of her memoir, Kofman’s mother changes from the most desired person in her life, for whom she risks deportation in her desire to be reunited, to a brutal harpy who starves her and wants to keep her from school. Kofman’s analysis of the film resonates not only with her desire for mémé, but also with the changes in her relationship with her mother. The final lines of Chapter 19 imply as much: “le mauvais sein à la place du bon sein, l'un parfaitement clivé de l'autre, l'un se transformant en l'autre” (77). [“The bad breast in place of the good one, the one utterly separate fro the other, the one changing into the other” (66)] Kofman is referring to the “good breast” and “bad breast” theorized by Melanie Klein. When the mother has abundant milk for the child and welcomes him or her to her breast, the child experiences the “good breast”. When her breast is dry, or she refuses the child, or the child’s desire deserts him, she possesses the “bad breast” that the child would like to bite, to hurt, to devour, and the mother along with it. The good and bad breast belong to the same woman; they are the same breast. For the child, she seems to transform from one to the other, but this is only from the child’s immature point of view. What is “intolerable” for Kofman in the sentence quoted above is not just the nightmare of finding her own mother in place of mémé, but also the deeper horror that the loving mother of her earlier childhood is the same woman who subsequently tortures her. In a discussion of the “Le Carton de Londres” in L’Enfance de ‘art, Kofman makes reference to Freud’s observation that the Virgin and Saint Anne appear fused into a kind of two headed woman caressing the Christ child (114). This fusion is a good figure for the kind of confusion Kofman experiences between her good mother, her bad mother and mémé, as well as for the confusion children experience when they realize that the good and bad breast belong to the same woman. According to Klein, since children at this age think of themselves as omnipotent, a violent thought against the mother is also a violent action, and thus children experience deep guilt when they think they may have hurt or destroyed their mother. While Kofman does not address feelings of guilt in her narrative of her own childhood, she can approach them intertextually. These intertextual references are on one level escape routes out of Kofman’s own personal narrative, similar to the stories the children in Freud’s “Family Romances” use to escape from their family and destiny. One another level, like the twist in the Möbius strip, they also offer routes into Kofman’s more intimate thoughts and feelings. For Kofman, all writing is intertextual and therefore any writing has the potential to muddy the border between writer and text, private and public. She
18 argues in “Ça cloche,” a commentary on Derrida's Glas, that writing is helplessly citational, and thus the borders between one text and another are impossible to discern: "[les textes] parlent l'un dans la langue de l'autre . . . provoquant une sorte de débordement mettant à mal toutes les limites coupantes." (Lectures de Derrida 144) [[texts] speak one in the language of the other . . . Provoking a sort of overflowing that threatens all boundaries] Ann Smock combines this point with Kofman's work in Autobiogriffures, a reading of Hoffman's Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr. In Hoffman's story, a “normal” autobiography is interleaved with the wild, boundary-erasing autobiography of a cat. Smock makes the point that it is not just the boundaries between texts that writing does away with, it also erases the boundary between author and text. Smock writes, “for all writing worth anything is barbed and feline and a menace: let it be as linear, as logocentric, as you like, Sarah Kofman says, and it is still sure to dispossess you; it has no respect for propriety or property” (59). Texts are a zone without borders that can reach into the private space of the author and “dispossess” him or her. Similarly, Kofman's trip between rue Ordener and rue Labat, and any trip she takes in her neighborhood as the supposed daughter of mémé, is through an ambiguous zone and threatens to rob her of her identity, or, more accurately, to remind her that she has no original and true identity at all. Her intertextual references merely dramatize the way in which all writing creates paths between what is personal and interior and what appears on the page, ultimately leading back from the public realm to the private. In that it muddies the distinction between self and other, the space created by writing in general, and intertext in particular, is a space of intersubjectivity. While loss of personal identity can be horrifying, in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Kofman also puts this loss to positive use. If her concern is to create a monument that is both personal and also open to the other, then the intersubjective space she creates in her text is a realm composed of both Kofman and her reader, a fragile point of intersection and communication. It is significant that what makes texts so “feline” and slippery is their citationality. Citations are expressions of context. Like the inhabitant of the public- private space of the neighborhood, a text does not exist all by itself in a vacuum. It exists in a world of other texts. This idea of context is key to Kofman's philosophy as well as to her autobiography. She treats the (male) philosophers she critiques as "sons of mothers", not just as sexless thinkers sealed off from the rest of humanity (Deutscher and Oliver 18). As sons of mothers, these philosophers have a genetic context, bodies, desires and a psychologically complicated relationship to women and sex. To pretend otherwise discounts the role of life and the body in the work of philosophy. And it is by looking at what philosophers have to say about women that Kofman is able to find the weak points in an otherwise seamless philosophy. It's where the (private) body of the philosopher—his context—intersects with his (public) philosophy that the inconsistencies appear (Kofman with Hermson 65)9.
9 "Le thème de <
19 Kofman’s insistence on context emerges in Rue Ordener, rue Labat as an insistence on the context of the city and the neighborhood. The word context comes from the latin for “weaving together” (con-text). The word text is related to words like texture (“Context”). The city provides the peculiar texture of one's life, the fabric into which we are woven, together with the other inhabitants. It might seem ironic to underscore the importance of context in a book so seemingly contextless as Rue Ordener, rue Labat. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Kofman doesn't provide any of the history or background description of her neighborhood. We know her father's synagogue is nearby, but we learn nothing about the communal Jewish life in what was one of the largest Jewish communities of Paris before the war. Kofman takes pains to keep her story strictly personal and to avoid positioning herself as a representative of other Jewish children who were hidden during the war. Her translator, Ann Smock, notes in the introduction to the English version of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat that Sarah Kofman was one of many Jewish children who were entrusted during the war to non-Jewish households, who . . . became the objects of painful disputes among adults with almost unbearably complicated motives . . . Sarah Kofman might have compared memories with other Jews of her generation, I suppose, but though I could be wrong, I doubt that she ever did at any length before writing this book. (xi-xii) Smock is reacting to the way Kofman’s story seems to ignore context, a quality she describes as “lucidity unclouded by insight” (xii). Rue Ordener, rue Labat only seems contextless, though, if we imagine that her text is meant to be read on its own, without reference to other books about the time and without reference to her own other books. In Paroles suffoquées, her meditation on the aftermath of the Holocaust through Blanchot and Antelme, Kofman describes her father's arrest and his later fate from a slightly different angle than in Rue Ordener, rue Labat. Kofman assumes a text embedded in its context, woven together with other texts. In this light, the contextlessness of this text is an expression of the integral relationship of one text to another. If a “text” is a weaving, then intertextual, after all, would mean “interwoven”. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, spaces, like texts, are also hopelessly entangled with one another. Spaces, too, are citational and “parlent l'un dans la langue de l’autre” (Lectures de Derrida 144). The inhabitants of a city are enmeshed with one another, their public and private selves in continual flux and the buildings and streets of a city, too, are citational. Texts inhabit the space of previous texts, even without knowing it, the way that most of our houses and apartments belonged to other people before they belonged to us10. The spaces that we live in—our spaces— are quotations of the lives of the previous inhabitants. Like an author using another's words in his or her own text, we use the spaces of others in order to lead our own lives.
10 Renting a home makes this point clearer, since your home is simultaneously not yours. Because they were "seulement locataires,” Kofman and her family could not return to their apartment after the Liberation (41).
20 Kofman and her mother become poignantly aware of this when they return to their apartment on rue Ordener after it has been put “sous scellés”. Grâce à la voisine du palier, qui tenait un restaurant en bas de l'immeuble, nous pûmes accéder <
Thanks to the neighbor who shared our landing and ran a restaurant on the first floor of the building, we were enter our “own home” one last time, by the window. Never again, except in dreams, have I ever gone back there. At the end of the war, we were unable to get the apartment back for it had been “occupied,” and we were only renting. We were relocated—with other “disaster victims”—on the Impasse Langlois near the Porte de la Chapelle. (33) Like ghosts (revenantes in French) coming back to haunt, Kofman and her mother come back to a place they were never meant to see again. No longer able to enter through the front door, they go through the window like thieves in order to steal back a few photographs and mementos. In this passage, Kofman puts three words in quotation marks, marking them as citations and underscoring their odd double meanings. “<
21 letter, preserve Kofman’s unique experience but cannot effectively communicate that experience to another. The public monument, mémé’s tomb, is accessible to all, but cannot express the complexity of Kofman’s private truth. Again, Rue Ordener, rue Labat can be seen, from one perspective, as a long meditation on the interpenetration of the public and private realms at multiple levels: memory, monuments, space, narrative, intertextuality and writing in general. This meditation is more than the delineation of a problematic, however. It creates a text that inhabits the space between purely private and purely public, preserving the complexity of Kofman’s experience while also allowing the reader to share her experience to the extent that they can. She accomplishes this by marrying text and space to create room for the reader. Yet Kofman is not the sculptor of a monument, with the reader as passive viewer. I have said that Kofman creates a textual space, but it may be more accurate to say that she creates the conditions under which she and the reader can mutually create that space. The reader is co-creator when, for instance, he or she supplies the missing context or works to understand the intertext. These lacunae, for instance the historical context of Kofman’s experience or an explanation of the relationship between The Lady Vanishes and Kofman’s own experience, create a space for the reader to inhabit. The goal is mutual transcendence, a meeting of the writer and the reader in the shared and co-created space of the text. This transcendence is, for Kofman, a central characteristic of writing as such. The ethical dimension of Kofman’s project, to preserve her own subjectivity and the subjectivity of others (instead of speaking for them by implying that her experience can stand in for the experience of others), and to invite a reader to understand her experience, may be expressed in Lévinassian terms. For Lévinas, the most basic relation that “quitte . . . L’ordre de la violence” (“Éthique et Esprit” 19) [“quits the order of violence” (“Ethics and Spirit” 7), that is, in which a subject treats the other also as a subject, may be found in simple conversation between two people. That such a banal thing as conversation can accomplish this, Lévinas writes, is “la merveille des merveilles” (19). [“the marvel of marvels” (7)] He calls the kind of relation created by conversation an encounter with the face of the Other, who always preserves an element of ungraspable enigma. (Totalité et Infini 21) An encounter with the Other’s face does not allow the subject to objectify the Other, which would occur if the subject were to think they could understand the other in his entirety. Rather, such an encounter preserves the Other’s subjectivity. This is precisely Kofman’s concern: to create a monument that allows for an encounter between subjects. The encounter between the subject and the Other takes place within a space that is very similar to the physical and textual spaces in Rue Ordener, rue Labat. In his Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas Jacques Derrida observes that Lévinas’ philosophy is “un immense traité de l’hospitalité” (49). [“an immense treatise of hospitality” (21)] Hospitality presupposes a space in which to host, a space that the subject must build. This home that the subject builds, is, like space in Rue Ordener Rue Labat, paradoxically both public and private. The home is of course the private domain of the subject, as Mayol writes in his discussion of the neighborhood. Yet the home is also undeniably not the subject, since it is exterior. Man, Lévinas writes, is
22 “simultanément dehors et dedans, il va au dehors à partir d’une intimité. D’autre part cette intimité s’ouvre dans une maison, laquelle se situe dans ce dehors. La demeure, comme bâtiment, appartient en effet, à un monde d’objets” (Totalité et Infini 126) [“simultaneously without and within, he goes forth outside from an inwardness [intimité]. Yet this inwardness opens up in a home which is situated in that outside—for the home, as a building, belongs to a world of objects” (Totality and Infinity 152)] The Lévinassian home is like Kofman’s text, as well as the spaces she describes in that text: a place where private subjectivity and the outside world interpenetrate one another. The home, for Lévinas, though, is not just another object in the “world of objects”: “Le recueillement nécessaire pour que la nature puisse être représentée et travailée, pour qu’elle se dessine seulement comme monde, s’accomplit comme maison” (125). [“The recollection necessary for nature to be able to be represented and worked over, for it first to take form as a world, is accomplished in the home” (152)] Without a home, “recollection” and representation are impossible. This is because the home functions as a shelter from the immediate experience of the world, from the elements. Only in this shelter can recollection take place, since the distractions of the present world are kept at bay: “le sujet contemplant un monde, suppose donc l’événement de la demeure, la retraite à partir des éléments, (c’est-à- dire à partir de la jouissance immédiate, mais déjà inquiète du lendemain), le recueillement dans l’intimité de la maison” (127). [“the subject contemplating the world presupposes the event of a dwelling, the withdrawal from the elements (that is, from immediate enjoyment, already uneasy about the morrow), recollection in the intimacy of the home” (153)] In other words, the space of a home is a precondition for thinking and representation. Similarly, Kofman constructs a textual space within which her recollections can take place and be represented. Put another way, with this text that details the destruction of a home and the subjective confusion this entails, Kofman is building another home. But where is the Other in this relationship between subject and dwelling? For Lévinas, a home, by virtue of being intimate, is necessarily human and therefore always presupposes an Other who welcomes the subject11. Thinking of the “distance” involved in recollection, that is, the way the subject must separate him or herself from the world in order to recollect, he asks, “A moins que la distance à l’égard de la jouissance [des éléments en dehors], au lieu de signifier le vide froid des interstices de l’être, ne soit vécue positivement comme une dimension d’intériorité à partir de la familiarité intime où plonge la vie?” (128) [“would the distance with regard to enjoyment [of the elements outside], rather than signifying the cold void of the interstices of being, be lived positively as a dimension of interiority beginning with the intimate familiarity into which life is immersed?” (154) Lévinas’ answer is yes, recollection does not take place in a “cold void,” but rather in the intimacy of the home. And intimacy “suppose . . . une intimité avec quelqu’un. L’intériorité du recueillement est une solitude dans un monde déjà humain. Le recueillement se réfère à un accueil” (128). [“presupposes an intimacy
11 For Lévinas, this other already inhabiting the home is a feminine Other, a fact that I cannot give the analysis it deserves within the scope of this paper.
23 with someone. The interiority of recollection is a solitude in a world already human. Recollection refers to a welcome” (155)] And this welcome is one of “une hospitalité . . . une attente . . . un accueil humain” (129). [“hospitality, expectancy, a human welcome” (156)] Thus, recollection and representation can only take place in a space separate from the outside world, the home, in which another is always already there to welcome the subject. The home, then, is not just a place where the interior of the subject and the outside world interpenetrate one another. It is also an intimate place where the subject and the Other meet, where the Other welcomes the subject and lays the groundwork for recollection. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Kofman similarly co-creates a space with the reader by leaving lacunae that the reader can inhabit. The Other does not just welcome the subject in the home, the Other is also welcomed into the home by the subject to engage in conversation. Lévinas has written more than once about being disturbed “chez soi” by another (Totalité et Infini 9). In “Enigma and Phenomenon” he literalizes this idea of being disturbed “chez soi" by inviting the reader to imagine the writer disturbed at his work by the ringing of the doorbell. The Other disturbs the subject with his alterity, he is an enigma to the subject. Lévinas’ Other has a way “de quérir ma reconnaissance tout en conservant son incognito, en dédaignant le recours au clin d’oeil d’entente ou de complicité, cette façon de se manifester sans se manifester, [que] nous []appelons . . . énigme.” (“Énigme et Phénomène” 209) “ of seeking my recognition while preserving his incognito, disdaining recourse to the wink-of-the-eye of understanding or complicity, this way of manifesting himself without manifesting himself, [which] we call enigma” (“Enigma and Phenomenon” 70). Rue Ordener, rue Labat is punctuated by Kofman disturbing someone “chez soi.” As things get more dangerous for her mother and her, they must ask others to take them in. These people include the pharmacist who lives downstairs from them, “la vendeuse de lait Maggi,” (39) [“the woman who sold Maggi milk” (30)] her teacher madame Fagnard and, finally, mémé. In the two scenes with madame Fagnard, especially, Kofman tells most of the story from the threshold: J’étais montée chez elle, au 75 ou 77 rue de la Chapelle, et sur le pas de la porte, lui avais dit, <
I had gone to her apartment, at 75 or 77 rue de la Chapelle, and right there on the doorstep I had said, “It’s my birthday today!” And she had gone to find me a book. (20)
Trois heures du matin: Edith [a woman taking Kofman back to her mother after a failed attempt to hide her in the countryside] a peur de se rendre chez ma mère; peut-être avons-nous été suivis. Elle me demande chez qui nous pouvons débarquer, à cette heure de la nuit-là, et à l’improviste. Je ne peux penser à personne d’autre qu’à madame Fagnard. Je revois encore son visage surpris et inquiet quand elle ouvrit la porte. Elle ne me fait aucune semonce et demande seulement qu’on ne fasse pas de bruit pour ne pas réveiller sa vieille mère
24 infirme. Elle me prépare une tisane, apporte des couvertures et je m’endors, épuisée, dans un fauteuil du salon. (31)
Three in the morning: Edith [a woman taking Kofman back to her mother after a failed attempt to hide her in the countryside] is afraid to go to my mother’s apartment; we may have been followed. She asks me whose house we could turn up at without warning so late at night. I couldn’t think of anyone but Madame Fagnard. I can still see her surprised and worried face when she opened the door. She made no comment at all, only asking us not to make any noise so as not to wake her aged, infirm mother. She made me some herb tea, brought covers, and I went to sleep, exhausted, in one of her living room armchairs.” (24-25) Ringing someone’s bell already creates an obligation, a disturbance. Kofman is also asking the other person for something, creating a greater feeling of obligation and responsibility for her. In the first passage, her request, for a birthday gift, is benign. In the second passage there is more urgency and more danger for madame Fagnard. Kofman arrives at another’s threshold demanding a welcome. She asks more of the Other than is proper, forcing them out of themselves. She disturbs. As Bettina Bergo observes, “the fundamental intuition of Levinas's philosophy is the non-reciprocal relation of responsibility. In the mature thought this responsibility is transcendence par excellence” (“Emmanuel Levinas”). Kofman’s situation is literally a “non- reciprocal relation of responsibility”: she is a child asking for shelter and, by coming out of herself to ask for this welcome, she allows the Other to transcend herself as well. Kofman’s position on the threshold is significant for this discussion of mutual transcendence. Like the home itself in Lévinas’ formulation, the threshold is both outside and inside, it is the division between those two spaces. It is in this space between the Other’s home and the outside that a welcome can be given. Yet neither Kofman nor the Other she disturbs can completely transcend themselves. At madame Fagnard’s house, she retains her enigmatic facet. Madame Fagnard “ne me fait aucune semonce et demande seulement qu’on ne fasse pas de bruit pour ne pas réveiller sa vieille mère infirme.” She does not ask why Kofman is at her door or take her to task for coming. Kofman’s welcome by mémé, however, is not a Lévinassian welcome. Kofman paints their arrival at her door similarly to her arrival at madame Fagnard’s house: “Elle était là. Elle soignait sa soeur atteinte d’un cancer à l’estomac. Elle accepta de nous héberger pour une nuit et nous offrit des oeufs à la neige. Elle était en peignoir, je la trouvais très belle, douce et affectueuse” (40). [“She was home. She was caring for her sister, who had stomach cancer. She agreed to shelter us for a night and offered us Floating Island for dessert. She was wearing a peignoir and looked very lovely to me, and she was so gentle and affectionate” (32)] Yet mémé does not allow Kofman her enigmatic aspect. Instead she consumes her, remaking her as “Suzanne,” a French, Christian daughter. In Lévinassian conversation, the subject must transcend himself or herself in order to grasp the enigmatic aspect of the Other, recognizing that he cannot find the solution to this enigma inside of himself. And the Other, also engaged in conversation, must do the same. The subject and the other cannot meet entirely: Transcendence “désigne une relation avec une réalité infiniment distante de la
25 mienne, sans que cette distance détruise pour autant cette relation et sans que cette relation déstruise cette distance” (Totalité et Infini 12). [“designates a relation with a reality infinitely distant from my own reality, yet without this distance destroying this relation and without this relation destroying this distance” (Totality and Infinity 41)] Transcendence—conversation—is the subject fully grasping the distance between the other and himself. If the subject were to overcome this distance from the Other, he or she would be turning the Other into an object that can be understood in its totality, rather than an Other who retains an aspect of incomprehensibility. This transcendent relationship is especially true of a reader and a writer. Writing, a kind of conversation, assumes the absence of the interlocutors in both space and time. The reader and the writer meet in the space of the text, but they do so incompletely. For Lévinas, the Other is both the condition for recollection (insofar as the Other is a defining part of the home in which recollection can take place) and the condition for the representation, since it is in conversation with the Other that the subject can communicate. The Other is necessary to get from memory, an “inversion du temps historique [qui] est l’essence de l’intériorité” (27) [ “inversion of historical time [that] is the essence of interiority,” (56)] to language, which is “le passage même de l’individuel au général” (49) [“the very passage from the individual to the general” (76)] and “jette les bases d’une possession en commun” (49). [“lays the foundation for possession in common” (76)] Together, the writer and the reader build Kofman a textual home with space for both of them. It is a home to which the reader opens the door to Kofman and to which Kofman also opens the door to the reader. In this mutual space, a space both interior and exterior, Kofman can both remember her story and put it into language. In her memoir, Kofman occupies many spaces, but she does not find a home of her own. The monument Kofman creates with Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is, finally, a home, but not a private home. It is a home that acknowledges the ways in which people and spaces interpenetrate one another. Kofman’s text is, on the one hand, deeply private. She makes no metatextual statements to introduce the reader to the space she is creating, for instance, and she does not do work for the reader’s benefit, such as explaining the significance of July 16, 1942 or The Lady Vanishes. This lack of gestures towards the reader may seem unwelcoming. Yet this very lack of purposeful welcome enables the reader to interact with Kofman and her text, to help build it out by providing the historical context and following the intertextual references where they lead. The home Kofman and the reader build together is a Möbius-monument, a space of escape routes and thresholds that allow for, perhaps, a measure of mutual comprehension while simultaneously acknowledging and preserving individual subjectivity. Architect Julian Bonder employs Lévinas when he explains how the ethical “working memorials” he builds should create a space in which the visitor can enter into a conversation with the Other and with the otherness of the past (67-68). While Bonder builds physical monuments, such as the Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage in Nantes, France, text may in some ways be a more appropriate medium for an ethical monument. As Ann Smock notes, text, especially for Kofman, is “sure to dispossess you,” robbing the writer and the reader of their subjectivity and enabling
26 them to transcend themselves and, as Lévinas would say, to have a conversation (59). Kofman maps her memories and city space onto one another, using the inherent intersubjectivity of text to create a monument in their intersection where both she and the reader may dwell.
27 Chapter Two: Relations: Network, Map and Memory in W This chapter turns to the work of Georges Perec, mainly his autobiographical work, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (W or the Memory of Childhood). Perec and Kofman have similar biographies: Perec was Jewish and born two years after her. Like Kofman, he spent the early part of the occupation in Paris with his mother, but in 1941 he was sent to stay with his aunt and uncle in Villard-de-Lans, a town just outside of Grenoble in the Italian-occupied zone. His mother stayed behind in Paris and, despite a failed attempt to cross into the Italian zone to meet her son, was deported while he was gone. As adults, both Perec and Kofman became writers and figures in the postwar intellectual scene in France. W is composed of interleaved stories: a discontinuous fictional story about a missing boy and the horrific island of W, Perec’s own autobiographical writing, and his later observations and emendations on the autobiographical text. The W story is also a rewriting: Perec wrote about the imaginary island as a child. Between the first and second sections of the book is a page blank but for an ellipses in parentheses, “(…)” (89). Perec says he has no memories of his life with his mother and father, and thus W is less a traditional memoir than an exploration of how to write an autobiography without memory. What remains when memory is gone, and how does a writer thus construct a memoir? For Perec, the answer to that question lies not in the (possibly spurious) memories he relates, but rather in the links a reader might forge between them. If Rue Ordener, Rue Labat addresses the creation of a relationship between the reader and the writer, W treats the relationship between one text in the book and another, and between memory and text. In Kofman, the textual space she creates is room for the reader and the writer to interact, to meet on mutual ground. Perec, too, heavily emphasizes the spatiality of his text12. In W, the space of the text is an indication of what is missing, a placeholder for absent memories. Space is, in a manner of thinking, the opposite of memory. By this I do not mean that space is associated with forgetting, but rather that it is the trace of memory, the empty imprint where a memory had been, like the “formes de bois” (197) [“wooden moulds” (144)] that Perec remembers making clear “empreintes—petite vache, fleur ou rosace” (197) [“stamping marks—a little cow, a flower or a rosette” (144)] in fresh butter. Perec’s textual space preserves the contour of the missing memory. In W, memory is inaccessible in itself, but may be intuited in the network of meaning created by his overlapping texts. The monument that Perec creates in text is thus not metaphorically composed of walls, but rather of empty space that is delineated by markers. The memories that do remain to Perec—disconnected from one another and deformed by layers of writing and rewriting, remembering and re- remembering—are not the monument. They are nodes that create a kind of network, or just a net, around an empty space where his forgotten experience resides. While we tend to think of a monument as an isolated structure, unrelated to what surrounds it, Perec’s network-as-monument shows the interconnectedness of the memories towards which monuments gesture. After all, physical monuments,
12 This is an interest of Perec’s not just in W, but in general. He begins Espèces d’espace, for instance, by literally considering the space of the page (21).
28 the ones we might see on a tourist map of a city, also function as landmarks. A landmark, like a monument, is a reminder of something in physical space, helping the visitor to orient him or herself. Yet a landmark is meaningless all by itself: it is only useful in relation to some other point between which the visitor navigates. In W, the monument, the spatial expression of memory, is a network of landmarks that, together, form a legible map. Perec begins the autobiographical section of his 222 page memoir with a simple, paradoxical statement: “Je n’ai pas de souvenirs d’enfance” (17) [I have no memories of childhood]. In this text, the memories that should make up “le souvenir d’enfance” [the memory of childhood] of the title are blank space. Space is thus crucial to Perec’s memorial project. His missing memories are not merely inconvenient lacunae: the lacunae are the very stuff of his monument. He continues, je posais cette affirmation avec assurance, avec presque une sorte de défi. L’on n’avait pas à m’interroger sur cette question. Elle n’était pas inscrite à mon programme. J'en était dispensé: une autre histoire, la Grande, l’Histoire avec sa grande hache, avait déjà répondu à ma place: la guerre, les camps. (17)
I made this assertion with confidence, with almost a sort of defiance. It was nobody’s business to press me on this question. It was not a set topic on my syllabus. I was excused: a different history, History with a capital H, had answered the question in my stead: the war, the camps. (6) Perec employs the language of school, positing his “défi” to an unnamed person who would interrogate an unwilling Perec about his childhood, reducing memory and the act of remembering to a rote memory drill in a classroom. He is not responsible for the story of his childhood—that is, he is not required to remember it or recite it— because it is not “inscribed on [his] program,” or, as Bellos translates it, is “not a set topic on [his] syllabus”. A syllabus is a table of contents upon which a student may be tested. Perec’s own “table of contents” has blank space where his childhood should be “inscribed”. During this imaginary exam, Perec need not speak because “l’Histoire” has already responded in his place, silencing his memories with “the war, the camps.” Because History has already responded, even before the moment of this “exam” in which Perec might be expected to read from the text of his own history, his “programme” is not a text that has been erased. Rather, his personal history never existed in the first place: it has always already been spoken over by the louder, larger voice of History. This History that speaks for Perec is written with a “grande hache”. [big axe] The word histoire starts with an h, pronounced “ash” in French. The French word for axe, hache, is pronounced identically. A “grande hache” is thus both an axe and, sonically, a big or capital, H. Perec plays on these homophones to align the forces or trajectory of History with the slice of an axe. An axe separates one thing from another or, more precisely, turns one thing into several separate things. A theme of separation and of binding appears at every level of W. History’s “axe” has separated Perec from his parents and Perec himself from his own memories and thus from his former self. “Je ne sais,” writes Perec, “où se sont brisés les fils qui me rattachent à mon enfance” [I don’t know where the strings that attach me to my childhood have
29 broken], but he knows that they have been severed by the Grande Hache (25). An axe cleaves, that is, it separates one thing into two things. Although they are not etymologically related, cleave can also mean to stick together: one thing may cleave to another (“Cleave”). These two senses of cleave are relevant to Perec’s project. On the one hand, W is composed of fractures: fractured memories, texts that are broken up across chapters and interleaved with others. Yet at the same time those memories and texts are bound together, and these bindings form a shape over and around empty space, the contour of Perec’s missing memories. The memories Perec does have date from his time in Villard de Lans, after his separation from his mother. Yet his recollections of this time do not form a chronology; they are isolated: Ce qui caractérise cette époque c’est avant tout son absence de repères: les souvenirs sont des morceaux de vie arrachés au vide. Nulle amarre. Rien ne les ancre, rien ne les fixe. Presque rien ne les entérine. Nulle chronologie sinon celle que j’ai, au fil du temps, arbitrairement reconstituée: du temps passait. Il y avait des saisons. On faisait du ski ou les foins. Il n’y avait ni commencement ni fin. Il n’y avait plus de passé, et pendant très longtemps il n’y eut pas non plus d’avenir; simplement ça durait. On était là. [ . . . ] (98)
What characterizes this time is above all its absence of landmarks: the memories are pieces of life snatched away from the void. No mooring. Nothing anchors them, nothing fastens them. Almost nothing confirms them. No chronology except that that I have, over the course of time, arbitrarily reconstituted: time passed. There were seasons. We went skiing or haymaking. There was no beginning and no end. There was no longer a past and, for a very long time, there was no future, either; things simply went on. One was there. Perec uses maritime imagery, amarre, ancre, to depict his memories as lonely ships set adrift: these fragments of Perec’s story float in an otherwise blank, empty space. Severed from one another, unable to form a continuous chronology, these memories cannot be “confirmed” or “ratified,” bringing into question their very claim to truth. There are no repères, or landmarks, that would link them to the life and the world that Perec does remember. This lack of chronology situates the Villard de Lans period outside of time. Even the memories themselves are characterized more by what is absent from them than what they contain: “les choses et les lieux n’avaient pas de nom, ou en avaient plusieurs; les gens n’avaient pas de visage” (98) [things and places had no names, or had several of them; the people did not have faces]. Even the memories Perec does have have an empty, blank quality. While Perec must contend with absent and isolated memories, he must also reckon with the tendency of both remembering and writing to warp and fictionalize the facts of the past. As an autobiographer without memories, he must find clues to his own identity not just in the wisps of memory he does have, but also in the way in which his recollection of those memories changes over time. In describing his first memories, Perec acknowledges the potential for them to be contorted simply by the process of remembering them:
30 Mais deux premiers souvenirs ne sont pas entièrement invraisemblables, même s’il est évident que les nombreuses variantes et pseudo-précisions que j’ai introduites dans les relations—parlées ou écrites—que j’en ai faites les ont profondément altérés, sinon complètement dénaturés. (26)
My two first memories are not entirely implausible, even if it is evident that the numerous variants and pseudo-precisions that I have introduced in the accounts—spoken or written—that I have made of them have profoundly altered them, if not completely denatured them. These memories are plausible, but potentially “completely denatured” by his creation of “variants” and his tendency towards “pseudo-precision”. Perec’s acknowledgement of this sharpens the reader’s attention towards the differences between an event as it was experienced at the time and the memory of that event. Later in the text, Perec presents two autobiographical pieces written fifteen years before, accompanied by footnotes with his commentaries at the time of writing, set off from the rest of the autobiographical section of the book in bold face. These footnotes, which eventually eclipse the length of the text upon which they comment, do not clarify the main text13. On the contrary, they put into question the very possibility of an autobiographical text and highlight the differences between the Perec who wrote fifteen years ago and the one sitting at the typewriter now. Without other family members to corroborate Perec’s memories, they hardly have the status of memories at all. Perec, and the reader with him, are put into the position of a detective or historian sifting through sometimes conflicting documents. For Perec, the irony of this action is sharp: he is not the owner of his own memories, only a curator who has come later to sift through the archive. Without other people, his memories are like the memories of another person. What Perec can do is rigorously interrogate his own “denaturations” of his memories, as they hold clues to his change over time. It is in Perec’s “relation” of his memories that the contortions occur. Writing, in particular, is a slippery and difficult medium in which to relate these memories. In itself, writing about his memories cannot lead Perec to a true story of his childhood. On the contrary, the more he writes about his memories, the further he gets from whatever truth there might be in them. At the beginning of W, as he is explaining the provenance of the W story, Perec describes the circumstances of his reinvention of the story. After remembering the existence of the W story he created in childhood, he writes, Une fois de plus, les pièges de l’écriture se mirent en place. Une fois de plus, je fus comme un enfant qui joue à cache-cache et qui ne sait pas ce qu’il craint ou désire le plus: rester caché, être découvert. Je retrouvai plus tard quelques-uns des dessins que j’avais faits vers treize ans. Grâce à eux, je reinventai W et l’écrivis, le publiant au fur et à mesure, en feuilleton, dans La Quinzaine littéraire, entre septembre 1969 et août 1970. (18)
13 Philippe Lejeune also makes this observation. The notes, he says, “go off in every direction and leave the original construction in tatters” (92).
31
One more time, the traps of writing put themselves into place. One more time I was like a child who plays hide-and-seek and who does not know what he fears or desires most: to stay hidden, to be discovered. Later I found some drawings I made around thirteen years old. Thanks to them, I reinvented W and wrote it, publishing it gradually, as a series, in the Quinzaine littéraire, between September 1969 and August 1970. These two paragraphs are set off from the rest of the text of the chapter with two carriage returns, a separate thought from Perec’s sudden recollection of the existence of the W story and the paragraphs that follow this section, which outlines the project of the current book. At first glance, these paragraphs would seem to be in the wrong chronological order. Perec begins by describing the circumstances of writing before he tells the reader of his having rewritten the story with the help of his childhood drawings. Taken as a chronological telling of how the W text was rediscovered and recreated, it would seem that Perec decided to, or was tempted to, rewrite the W story before finding the drawings that would be of help to him. Whenever the moment at which the “les pièges de l’écriture se mirent en place”, Perec is telling us that writing is composed of pièges, traps or tricky bits. It is in writing that Perec hesitates between hiding and being discovered, and writing itself can reveal and conceal at the same time. Writing is thus, in part, inherently fictional in the sense that it is the creation of a hiding place as well as the revelation of Perec’s experience. Writing is also inherently spatial, the hiding places it offers are pockets of textual space. Composed of pièges, the stories writing can relate are not straightforward. His autobiography is fictional partly due to the vagaries of memory and to the layers of slightly different memories, and partly because they exist in writing. In “Les lieux d’une ruse,” an essay on his experience in psychoanalysis, Perec discusses experiencing a similar phenomenon when he wrote down his dreams: Très vite, j’étais arrivé à une telle pratique que les rêves me venaient tout écrits dans la main, y compris leurs titres . . . j’ai fini par admettre que ces rêves n’avaient pas été vécus pour être rêves, mais rêvés pour être textes, qu’ils n’étaient pas la voie royale que je croyais qu’ils seraient, mais chemins tortueux m’éloignant chaque fois davantage d’une reconnaissance de moi- même. (69-70)
Very quickly I became so practiced that the dreams came to my hand already written, complete with their titles . . . I ended up admitting that these dreams were not experienced to be dreams, but dreamed to be texts, that they were not the royal road that I thought they were, but rather winding paths that each time got me further away from an understanding of myself. Instead of a one-way street, in which the waking Perec recorded the dreams of the sleeping Perec, Perec-the-dreamer (or Perec-the-rememberer, or Perec-the-writer) began to create narratively satisfying dreams, fictions. And it is not clear where this is occurring: did Perec begin to dream in narrative? Or does the process of writing “trap” the dream and convert it to narrative? These too-perfect dreams, like writing itself, grew to conceal instead of reveal.
32 This passage in W in which Perec considers the pièges of writing itself performs some of these pièges or “tricky bits”. First, the first paragraph of the section is chronologically ambiguous: he offers no indication of the context of this thought, no sequential narrative in which to situate it. The reader is thus left guessing where this floating passage might situate itself in time. When did “les pièges d’écriture se mirent en place”? For the reader, those traps are being created in the moment they read the paragraph.We can also see here the way in which details of a story might seep into a metaphor: Perec the writer is now “like” a hidden child, but Perec the child really was hidden. The metaphor points to the particular challenges of telling his particular story. The pièges are not just in writing: he is trying to uncover or reveal a story that, as a child, he was commanded to forget in order to survive. Writing, and, thus, reading, encourage the creation of chronological or causal connections. The placement of the first paragraph about the “pièges de l’écriture” encourages a reader to situate it within the story Perec is telling about the genesis of W. The rememberer and writer wants to impose a logic, an order, a chronology on the free-floating memories at his disposal. Yet the process of writing endangers those very memories, threatening to deform them. To create the wrong relationships between them changes the shape of the missing memories. Later in the text, Perec returns to the difficulties of writing about his parents and of his memories. No matter how precise he is, no matter what emotional filigrees he adds, “il [lui] semble qu[’il] ne parviendrai qu’à un ressassement sans issue” (62) [that he will only get as far as a rumination without an end/way out]. In finding more documents and continuing to interrogate his own memories, Perec can only write himself into a cul-de-sac. The problem n’est pas, comme je l’ai longtemps avancé, l’effet d’une alternative sans fin entre la sincérité d’une parole à trouver et l’artifice d’une écriture exclusivement préoccupée de dresser ses remparts: c’est lié à la chose écrit elle-même, au projet de l’écriture comme au projet du souvenir. (62-63)
Is not, as I have for a long time claimed, the effect of an endless oscillation between the an as-yet undiscovered language of sincerity and the artifice of a writing exclusively preoccupied with shoring up its own defenses: it is linked to writing itself, to the project of writing as much as the project of remembering. The problem is thus not in Perec’s writing per se: it is not his inability to find a language of sincerity, or that his own writing is specifically concerned with hiding or protecting him. It is writing itself that is the problem. He cannot write his way towards a more sincere, a more true, memoir. Writing is naturally insincere and “preoccupied with shoring up its own defenses.” Yet writing is all he can do. The alternative is silence, not writing anything at all. Admitting (and expressing his frustration with) this paradox—that writing is the wrong tool, but the only one in his tool chest—Perec writes, Je ne sais pas si je n’ai rien à dire, je sais que je ne dis rien; je ne sais pas si ce que j’aurais à dire n’est pas dit parce qu’il est l’indicible (l’indicible n’est pas tapi dans l’écriture, il est ce qui l’a bien déclenchée); je sais que ce que je dis
33 est blanc, est neutre, est signe une fois pour toutes d’un anéantissement une fois pour toutes. (63)
I don’t know if I do not have anything to say, I know that I am not saying anything; I do not know if what I would have to say is not said because it is unsayable (the unsayable is not concealed in writing, it is that which caused/triggered it in the first place); I know that what I say is blank, is neutral, is a sign once and for all of an annihilation once and for all. Perec begins by saying he isn’t sure if he doesn’t have anything to say, leaving open the possibility that he has something to say, then seems to depreciate his efforts by admitting, “I know that I’m not saying anything.” A word-for-word literal translation of that line is something like, “I know that I am not saying nothing,” that is, he is saying something. This ambiguity in the French allows Perec to maintain both that he is saying something and, at the same time, not saying anything. In these two lines he treads very carefully, using negation to get around writing a word as seemingly insignificant as “quelque chose,” a stand-in for the something he may or may not be saying. In the next clause he is able to use “ce que” to indicate the something he might say, but couches it in the conditional tense—“ce que j’aurais à dire”—then kills the possibility of this “ce que” definitively by adding that this “ce que” “n’est pas dit parce qu’il est l’indicible.” This passage stands on the precipice of silence, nearly unable to exist in the presence of “l’indicible.” Here, as Perec says, his words are “blanc” and “neutre,” colorless in the face of the “ce que” he cannot seem to say. His apophatic use of negation is a textual “anéantissement” that stands as a symbol of the annihilation his memoir contends with. Writing, especially in this context, is problematic. It can never say what Perec has to say, since “l’indicible” is the trigger for writing, not something one can come upon through writing. In this paragraph, with its numbing repetition of “je,” “rien,” “dire” and “sais;” its negation and circumlocution, Perec is trying to annihilate writing to come towards expressing “un anéantissement une fois pour toutes.” His writing here is as “blanc” and “neutre” as his memories. If Perec’s lack of certitude about his past leaves him with empty spaces instead of a memories, then what creates or delineates that space? A trajectory, a pathway in space, for instance, might define the shape of the memory, which is as close as Perec can get to the memory itself. Perec’s textual monument is composed of these pathways or trajectories. In the second chapter, Perec discusses why he has chosen to rewrite the W story that he created, and then forgot, as a boy. It is not that he wishes to recapture his lost memories so much as use the “fragile intersection” (prier d’insérer) between the old text and the new to gain information about his own story, to find its shape (he calls it a chemin, or path): Aujourd’hui, quatre ans [après 1970], j’entreprends de mettre un terme—je veux tout autant dire par là <
34
Today, four years [after 1970], I am undertaking to put an end/limit—I mean as much to “trace the limits” as “to give a name”—to this slow deciphering. W does not resemble my olympic fantasy any more than that fantasy resembled my childhood. But in the network that they form/weave, as in the reading that I do of them, I know that there is inscribed and described the path that I have followed, the development of my story and the story of my development. Pere wants to “mettre un terme” by which he means not just to name, but to put a end to his “slow deciphering” of the W story he created as a child. By “dechiffrement,” Perec means that his reinvention of the story is a kind of deciphering, an interpretation of the previous story. He had been publishing the rewritten W story serially in the Quinzaine Litteraire, and now wishes to put the story within the bounded limits of a book. The phrase he chooses to make his project in publishing W more precise (“tracer ses limites”) means not just to put an end to something, but to find its contour, to “map out” the boundaries of the story. Perec’s rewritten W story, then, is a kind of tracing around the original story, which he does not remember. Perec’s characterization of his project as “tracing the limits” of his story instantiates a theme of mapping or graphing that is picked up in the last line of the paragraph. His first W text, his later rewriting and his childhood all “tissent” [form or weave] a “reseau” [network]. The two stories and the childhood that is their oblique subject are interesting to Perec not in themselves, but in the network of relations that they set up between them. The texts of W, Perec writes in an insert to the book [what to call this?], cast “une lumière lointaine . . . l’un sur l’autre” (prier d’insérer). [a distant light . . . on one another] If we imagine the network they create as a set of nodes with lines connecting them, then those relationships are what give Perec clues to the shape of his childhood, to the shape of the textual monument he is creating. The lines that connect the nodes form a tracing of the missing memories. This network functions on two levels: as a literal “inscription” of his path and a more abstract representation of it. In it, Perec writes, can be found “inscrit et décrit le chemin que j’ai parcouru”. [Inscribed and described the path that I have followed]. An inscription can be formed by taking away something in order to leave a mark or by the addition of something, like words in ink, by someone or something that is no longer there. An inscription is thus a marker of absence, providing clues to the shape of what left the impression or the trace. Yet Perec’s path is also decrit” [described] by this network. Decrire can mean to describe, as in English, from Latin “write down, copy, sketch, represent” (“Describe”). The network is thus not just the trace of his path (the inscription), but also a representation (description) of it. The verb decrire can also, as in the English, mean to trace the outline of a shape, to “suivre une forme” (“Decrire”). To “describe” something can mean to follow the outline of something not otherwise visible. This second meaning of decrire is significant in this context, since Perec wants to use the book to “trace the limits” of the W story. These limits intimate the shape of his otherwise invisible “chemin.” Perec repeats the parallel structure of “inscrit and decrit” in the final clause of the sentence. The network “inscribes and describes” “le
35 cheminement de mon histoire et l’histoire de mon cheminement.” [The progress of my story and the story of my progress] The term “cheminement” is rooted in the word chemin, or path, a reference back to the idea of his missing childhood as a path traced in a network. Perec employs similar vocabulary when, later in the text, he discusses his relationship to writing. While “ce que j’aurais à dire” [what I would have to say] can’t be said, perhaps because it is “l’indicible,” Perec refuses to renounce writing (63). After characterizing his writing as “signe une fois pour toutes d’un anéantissement une fois pour toutes” [sign once and for all of an annihilation once and for all], he continues, C’est cela que je dis, c’est cela que j’écris et c’est cela seulement qui se trouve dans les mots que je trace, et dans les lignes que ces mots dessinent, et dans les blancs que laisse apparaître l’intervalle entre ces lignes: j’aurai beau traquer mes lapsus . . . je ne retrouverai jamais, dans mon ressassement même, que l’ultime reflet d’une parole absente à l’écriture, le scandale de leur silence et de mon silence. (63)
That is what I am saying, that is what I am writing and that is all there is in the words I trace, and in the lines these words draw, and in the blanks that reveal the space between those lines: I can track my slips all I want . . . I will never find, even in my own rumination, anything but the ultimate reflection of a voice absent from writing, the scandal of their silence and of my silence. Perec makes a clear link between writing and the idea I’ve elaborated above of limning, or tracing, around an otherwise invisible shape. His writing only serves as a “signe” of “anéantissement,” that is, a visible sign of something that is absent. Here, writing means to “trace” words, which produce “lines.” In this passage Perec insistently employs the language of drawing and tracing, spatializing his writing to imagine not words that can communicate some deep truth, but words and lines that can only form a tracing or a network over or around that truth. Reading means to see the lines he’s traced and to also see the empty space that those lines reveal. What is ultimately revealed by this writing is “l’ultime reflet d’une parole absente à l’écriture.” [the ultimate reflection of a voice absent from writing] The words on the page, their presence, is a mirror image or reflection of that absent voice. The “scandal” is not that Perec has not written before (he has, after all), it is that writing as such and his own writing can only be silent about this mysterious “parole” that is absent from writing. Perec continues, Je n’écris pas pour dire que je ne dirai rien, je n’écris pas pour dire que je n’ai rien à dire. J’écris: j’écris parce que nous avons vécu ensemble, parce que j’ai été un parmi eux, ombre au milieu de leurs ombres, corps près de leur corps; j’écris parce qu’ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile et que la trace en est l’écriture; l’écriture est le souvenir de leur mort et l’affirmation de ma vie. (63-64)
I am not writing to say that I will say nothing, I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I write because we have lived together, because I have been one among them, shadow among their shadows, body close to
36 their bodies; I write because they have left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the affirmation of my life. Here, Perec denies a nihilistic writing, which would only say that it will say nothing or that will demonstrate he has nothing to say. On the contrary, this part of the passage is marked by affirmation absent from the previous paragraph, which began, “Je ne sais pas si je n’ai rien à dire, je sais que je ne dis rien.” [I don’t know if I do not have anything to say, I know that I am not saying anything] Here that circumlocution and negation is replaced by a simple positive statement: “J’écris.” His previous proximity to his parents, his having been a “corps près de leur corps” [body close to their bodies] leaves in him (not on him and thus visible) a “marque indélébile,” [indelible mark] an indentation that marks their previous presence. The trace of that mark, that indentation, is writing. Writing is twice removed from the presence of his parents: it is not even the trace of their absence, it is only a visible sign of of that trace. Writing is thus not a way to approach the presence of his parents, but is rather an indication of the shape of their absence. And this writing, he continues, is not the memory of their life, but the “memory of their death,” a memory of absence rather than presence. At the same time, writing is “the affirmation of [his] life”. The presence of the word on the page is a ratification of Perec’s living presence as a writer at the same time as it is a sign of his parents’ absence. Writing straddles this divide between absence and presence. On the one hand, W is a new, amnesiac creation, a work that moves forward in space and is undeniably present as text on the blank page. On the other hand, it is always the indication of an absence, the words a reminder absence of the writer who wrote them and the text a testament to the absence of the “parole absente à l’écriture” that triggered the text yet remains outside it. Writing thus cannot communicate Perec’s thoughts in a straightforward manner. W, in its dizzying complexity, represents an attempt to use words not as simple vehicles of communication, but as a way to trace a shape around what is absent and unsaid or unsayable. As I have outlined above, Perec creates a “réseau” or network of connections between the various texts of W to say something in “leur fragile intersection” that is not said outright in any of the texts (how to cite the “prière d’insérer”?). The shape created by this network is the shape of Perec’s monument. What do these intersections or nodes look like? How is this network created? Perec uses doubles, common themes or words across the texts, to create the network of W. The final line of Chapter II both describes and illustrates this process, showing that W is not merely double in the way of any autobiography, it is doubly doubled: “je sais que se trouve inscrit et décrit le chemin que j’ai parcouru, le cheminement de mon histoire et l’histoire de mon cheminement” (18). From a certain perspective, this process is common to any writer of autobiography: the writer is both progressing through a story and, at the same time, documenting the progress of his or her own life. This double syntactic doubling (“inscrit et décrit” and “le cheminement de mon histoire et l’histoire de mon cheminement”) of the sentence, however, reflects the fact that W is composed not just of Perec’s two W stories, but also of “la lecture que j’en fais,” [the readings that I do of them], his
37 autobiographical pieces and his later emendations of them. Like the letter double-U that forms the title of the story, W is a text in which doubles resonate to form a network across texts. Bernard Magné calls the doubles formed between the autobiographical text and the W story “sutures.” His term is apt: a suture is a specifically surgical term to describe the stitching back together of a wound. W most certainly deals with a psychic wound, and the suture itself is a way of sealing up the gap between two things that had once been whole. Yet the suture, by virtue of being necessary, draws attention to the separateness of these two things; they will always have the mark of their suture to indicate their separation: the very act of binding calls attention to the unnatural separation of the two sides of the wound. Perec uses “sutures” to stitch the W story and the autobiographical text together, showing, as his “prier d’insérer” explains, that it is as though “aucun des deux ne pouvait exister seul” (prier d’insérer). [neither could exist on its own] For Magné, sutures take the form of sometimes quite subtle similarities of word choice between the two texts such that each chapter is “stitched” to the ones that precede and follow by one or more suture. He notes, for instance, that Chapter X mentions “une porte de bois condamnée,” and Chapter XI “la porte de chêne.” (Magné 42) In Magné’s interpretation, W is an Oulipian text, constructed formulaically and precisely with the sutures he identifies. The content of the sutures may or may not be significant; it is the fact that they stitch the text together from chapter to chapter that is important. Here, I will concentrate on several sutures or doubles in Perec’s text for which the content is significant. Such connections between the texts, whether they appear in consecutive chapters or not, form the nodes of Perec’s interpretive network. In the W story, there is a literal double: a younger and an older character both named Gaspard Winckler. Their relationship in the story is indicative of the way doubles function between Perec’s texts. In the W story, the protagonist of the first section, Gaspard Winckler, learns that he has a kind of double: his false identification papers actually belonged to a real person, a young boy who has recently disappeared at sea after a shipwreck in the Tierra del Fuego, off the coast of Argentina. While the bodies of the others were found, no trace can be found of young Gaspard Winckler. Perec plays with the idea that Winckler and his “homonyme noyé,” [drowned homonym] by virtue of sharing a name, may also have other connections between them. This underscores the significance of other puns in his work (such as fils [son] and fils [threads]): like Winckler and his namesake, these syntactic connections have consequences and meaning outside of the linguistic realm (65). Winckler is asked by Otto Apfelstahl, a representative of an organization that helps to find those lost at sea, to travel to the Tierra del Fuego to search for the original Gaspard Winckler. Apfelstahl does not explain, and Winckler does not ask, why Winckler is better suited to this task than anyone else. The precise connection between the two Wincklers is never specified, though there seems to be some relationship of duty, something that the elder Winckler owes to the younger. The elder Winckler is doubly a double: he shares a name with the younger Winckler and he is also a double for Perec himself. Like Perec’s father (who died of a wound at the beginning of the Second World War), the elder Winckler’s father also died “suites d’une
38 blessure” (15). [as a consequence of an injury] And, like Winckler, he is in search of a mysterious young boy with whom he shares a name. In Perec’s case, this young boy is himself. Yet Winckler is not Perec’s only double in the W story. The younger Winckler is also similar to him: his mother’s name is Caecilia, while Perec’s mother’s French name was Cécile. Caecilia, like Cécile, dies a horrible death, the exact circumstances of which are unknowable. Otto Apfelstahl explains to the elder Winckler that, having been injured by a falling trunk during the shipwreck, Caecilia “tenta, pendant plusieurs heures sans doute, d’atteindre, puis d’ouvrir la porte de sa cabine; lorsque les sauveteurs chiliens la découvrirent, son coeur avait à peine cessé de battre et ses ongles en sang avaient profondément entaillé la porte de chêne” (84). [tried, likely over several hours, to reach, and then to open the door of her cabin; when the Chilean rescuers found her, her heart had scarcely stopped beating and her bloody nails had deeply gashed the oak door] The infamous image of the traces of victims’ nail marks in the gas chambers leaps to the mind of the reader, a leap which is confirmed near the end of the book in an autobiographical chapter. “Plus tard,” in Paris, Perec writes, “je suis allé avec ma tante voir une exposition sur les camps de concentration . . . Je me souviens des photos montrant les murs des fours lacérés par les ongles des gazés” (215) [Later I went with my aunt to see an exhibition on the concentration camps . . . I remember photos showing the walls of the ovens lacerated by the nails of the gassed victims] This detail forms an undeniable connection, a double, between the W story and the autobiography and between Caecilia and Cécile. His choice of detail here is telling: the nail marks are indentations, inscriptions, that indicate but cannot approach the experience of the person who made them. The doubles in W encourage us to extrapolate, to find depths of meaning not directly approached by any of the individual texts on their own. Having established the relationship between Perec and the young Gaspard Winckler, and between Caecilia and his mother, Cécile, a moment in the conversation between the elder Winckler and Otto Apfelstahl takes on greater weight. Apfelstahl explains that on the morning of the crash no location coordinates were entered into the ship’s log and, later that day, the ship turned around to retrace its path. This evidence brings Apfelstahl to what he calls “une conclusion unique” [“only one conclusion” (59)] regarding the reason for this lapse: the young Gaspard Winckler had already disappeared and, in the panic over losing the boy, the ship’s captain failed to note the ship’s position and instead immediately turned the ship around to look for him (86). Yet the elder Gaspard Winckler does not think this is the only explanation. He puts forth another possibility: “cela peut vouloir dire aussi qu’ils l’avaient abandonné et qu’ensuite ils s’en étaient repentis” (86). [This might also mean that they abandoned him and afterwards regretted their action] Mapping this story onto Perec’s own life, we get a hint of the orphan’s double bind: did Perec abandon his mother? Or is it possible that she abandoned him? On the one hand, Perec must contend with the guilt of having left his mother behind, of having survived when she did not. On the other, he faces the pain of being abandoned by her. Aligning the young Gaspard Winckler with Perec also sheds light on another topic that Perec never addresses directly. At some point after the liberation, Perec
39 must have realized that he would never see his mother again. According to David Bellos’ biography, Perec’s family never had an open conversation about his mother’s disappearance: when he returned to Paris, she was simply not there (91-92). In W, Perec does not discuss how he came to learn this fact in the absence of any direct conversation. The W story, however, furnishes some clues to his emotional landscape at the time. Chapter 29, an autobiographical chapter, discusses Perec’s experience of the Liberation. While he has few memories of the Liberation itself, he calls the following school year (when he was still in Villard de Lans) a “sorte d’année zéro dont je ne sais pas ce qui l’a précédée” (183). [A sort of year zero preceded by the unknown] The following chapter details the experience of the “novice” on the island of W. Children on W lead a happy life, sequestered from the horrors of the competitions the male adults must undergo and the rapes the women must undergo. Thus when a male child leaves the children’s compound, he experiences shock and misery that the older athletes are unable to mitigate: Comment expliquer que ce qu’il découvre n’est pas quelque chose d’épouvantable, n’est pas un cauchemar, n’est pas quelque chose dont il va se réveiller brusquement . . . comment expliquer que c’est cela la vie, la vie réelle, que c’est cela qu’il y aura tous les jours, que c’est cela qui existe et rien d’autre . . . Il y a cela et c’est tout. (190-191)
How to explain that what he finds is not something horrendous, is not a nightmare, is not something from which he will suddenly wake up . . . how to explain that this is life, real life, that this exists and nothing else . . . There is this, and that’s all. The novice’s transition to the adult world is also a kind of “year zero,” an entrance into the real life that he will lead from now on. While Perec cannot communicate the shock he experienced after the Liberation, he can explain the novice’s shock. The world after the Liberation is, and forever will be, a world without his mother, and a short time later, a world in which everyone knows that the camps existed. Yet this experience of shock is not narrated as the novice’s experience, but rather in the context of an older athlete’s hypothetical failed attempt to explain to the new novice what his life will be like. This is perhaps a move to empathize with his aunt and uncle, who never explained about his mother’s death. Yet Perec’s doubles, helpful as they are in uncovering some of his undiscussed emotional landscape, are not one-to-one: they are frequently slightly inexact. The names Cécile and Caecilia, as similar as they are, are not the same name. The elder Gaspard Winckler’s father died when he was six years old, while Perec’s mother died when he was six. Like Perec’s description of the island of W—it has “la forme d’un crâne de mouton dont la mâchoire inférieure aurait été passablement disloquée” [the form of a sheep’s skull whose lower jawbone has been quite dislocated]—the doubles across his texts never quite line up (93). The doubles in W function more like the mysterious coat of arms the elder Gaspard Winckler encounters on his letter from Otto Apfelstahl. Among other intriguing symbols, there are several that Winckler is unable to puzzle out: les trois autres, en dépit des efforts que je fis pour les comprendre, me demeurèrent obscurs; il ne s’agissait pas pourtant de symboles abstraits, ce
40 n’étaient pas des chevrons, par exemple, ni des bandes, ni des losanges, mais des figures en quelque sorte doubles, d’un dessin à la fois précis et ambigu, qui semblait pouvoir s’interpréter de plusieurs façons sans que l’on puisse jamais s’arrêter sur un choix satisfaisant. (19)
The three others, despite my efforts to understand them, remained obscure to me; they nonetheless not abstract symbols, they were not chevrons, for example, nor stripes, nor lozenges, but figures that were somehow double, of a design at once precise and ambiguous, which seemed to be able to be interpreted in several different ways without it being possible to decide on a satisfactory choice. At first, Winckler cannot even seem to describe the mysterious shapes; he describes them by what they are not: not chevrons, not stripes, not lozenges. All he can say is that they are “en quelque sort doubles:” [figures that were somehow double] they are not exactly double, yet they are not anything else. Objects that are “en quelque sorte doubles,” but not exact copies are like mirror images, or the relationship between a photograph and the original14. Perec pays careful attention to this exact inexactness of photographs, noting, for instance, in a photograph of him with his mother, “on voit qu’elle a un gros grain de beauté près de la narine gauche (à droite sur la photo)” (75). [One sees that she has a large beauty mark near her left nostril (on the right in the photograph)] The idea of the mirror image, or transpositions of that sort, comes up frequently in W. Perec mentions his “‘gaucherie contrariée’” (184) [“‘frustrated left- handedness’” (135)], which manifests itself in an inability to differentiate between all kinds of oppositions: “l’accent grave de l’accent aigu, le concave du convexe, le signe plus grand que (>) du signe plus petit que (<) et d’une manière plus générale tous les énoncés impliquant à plus ou moins juste titre une latéralité et/ou une dichotomie” (185). [The accent grave from the accent aigu, the concave from convex, the greater than sign (>) from the less than sign (<) and in a more general manner all of the utterances that imply more or less justifiably a laterality and/or a dichotomy.] Yet despite his professed inability to differentiate between these kinds of transformation, Perec builds the text’s symbol system from just these types of moves. The X symbol, Perec writes, is the “point de départ enfin d’une géométrie fantasmatique dont le V dédoublé constitue la figure de base dont les enchevêtrements multiples tracent les symboles majeures de l’histoire de mon enfance” (110). [at any rate the starting point of a fantastical geometry of which the split V constitutes the basic figure, the multiple imbrications of which map out the major symbols of my childhood] Permutations or transpositions of X create the W, the swastika, the letters SS and the star of David. I will discuss several of the many significations of the X symbol in a later section. For now, I will concentrate on the mirror image, a transposition of an image across an axis, as a specific kind of inexact double. That is, it is at once just the same as its reflection, but at the same time exactly the opposite: “en quelque sorte double”.
14 In “The Transition from W to M in Life A User’s Manual,” Jacques Roubaud comments on the importance of reversabiity and mirroring in Perec’s work.
41 At first glance, Perec’s first memory, of identifying a Hebrew letter to the delight of the family that surrounded him, would seem to be far afield from his schematic transpositions of the X symbol, yet this memory illustrates how inexact doubles function in the text to multiply meanings. He recalls, Tout le monde s’extasie devant le fait que j’ai désigné une letter hébraïque en l’identifiant: le signe aurait eu la forme d’un carré ouvert à son angle inférieur gauche, quelque chose comme
et son nom aurait été gammeth, or gammel. (27)
Everyone is going into raptures over the fact that I had designated a hebrew letter by naming it: the sign would have had the form of a square open at its lower left corner, something like
and its name would have been gammeth or gammel. The letter in the text looks nothing like a gimel, as Perec notes in his footnote to this passage: “Il existe en effet une lettre nommée <
42 towards the bottom, the straight line that forms that flat part nearly but not quite reaching the left side of the curve. Mem, of course, is the the first syllable of memoire. Thus far, we’ve seen how reflected images both are and are not similar to their partner. It seems significant here that Perec’s identifying letter, the first letter of his signature, is, “à la rigueur,” related to, yet also exactly unlike, a sign implying memory. In W, the object and its mirror image are inaccessible to one another. Even though they are related, they reside in different realms. On one side of the mirror (or the camera), sits George Perec the child and his mother, with a beauty mark near her [left] nostril. On the other side sits the adult Perec, seeing an image of his mother with a beauty mark on the [right] side. Perec’s relation of his memory of the Hebrew letter also highlights a central tension in W between openness and enclosure. While the “network” of the W texts define a shape, it does not define a closed shape; there is always an empty space. The “Hebrew letter” and Perec’s initial are doubles of one another, but also utterly different, since one is a reflection of the other. This relationship is emblematic of the other doubles in W, which are never exactly the same. This inexactness is not a result of Perec’s sloppiness. If the doubles are the “nodes” that make up the “network” of the texts, then exact doubles would only have paths that lead to one another. The inexactness of the doubles enables the reader to imagine more than one relationship between the nodes, more than one path. That is, it allows for the reader’s interpretive action to continue. In quite another context, in the W story, Perec explains that the multiple hierarchies of the island create a “réseau de relations” [network of relationships] between the inhabitants (201). But the organizers take pains to create competitions that do not enable one team to become the permanent victors in order to avoid “une sorte de système en circuit fermé” (127). [a sort of closed-circuit system] In perhaps a similar sense, Perec does not let the doubles of his text refer exclusively to one another. Returning again to the context of Perec’s memory of the Hebrew letter, we see this tension between openness and enclosure. Before my citation above, Perec presents the “cadre” [setting or frame] for the memory: Le premier souvenir aurait pour cadre l’arrière boutique de ma grand-mère. J’ai trois ans. Je suis assis au centre de la pièce, au milieu des journaux yiddish éparpillés. Le cercle de la famille m’entoure complètement: cette sensation d’encerclement ne s’accompagne pour moi d’aucun sentiment d’écrasement ou de menace; au contraire, elle est protection chaleureuse, amour: toute la famille, la totalité, l’intégralité de la famille est là, réunie autour de l’enfant qui vient de naître (n’ai-je pourtant pas dit il y a un instant que j’avais trois ans?), comme un rempart infranchissable. (26)
The first memory is set [framed] in the back of my grandmother’s shop. I am three years old. I am seated in the center of the room; Yiddish papers are strewn about. The family circle encloses me completely: this sensation of being encircled is not accompanied for me by a feeling of being crushed or of menace; on the contrary, it is a feeling of warm protection, love: the whole family, the totality, the entirety of the family is there, gathered around the
43 child who has just been born (though did I not just say a moment ago that I was three?), like an uncrossable rampart. This passage has an overwhelming theme of enclosure. It is itself a “cadre” (setting or frame) for the memory, an enclosure within which the story will take place. The rest of the passage is almost a study in synonyms for enclosure and completeness: “cercle,” “m’entoure,” “encerclement,” “totalité,” “intégralité,” “un rempart infranchissable”. Yet even here there is an opening out of the memory: Perec breaks the “frame” of the narrative to insert a comment within the very narration of the memory: “(n’ai-je pourtant pas dit il y a un instant que j’avais trois ans?)”. Aside from this break, however, there is only the warm enclosure of the family: no one is missing. Literally in the middle of this “rempart infranchissable,” Perec remembers identifying a sign that is incomplete, “un carré ouvert à son angle inférieur gauche” (26). This is the letter of his own name. His own identity within the tight family circle is to be incomplete, or, thought of another way, open. Perec in some sense confirms this interpretation several chapters later when he explains the origins of his last name: “En hébreu, cela veut dire <
15 Marcel Benabou notes that this passage is one of several instances where Perec gives erroneous details about Jewish matters (79). While it is true that the name Peretz, from which Perec’s name comes, is related to “hole or gap,” Benabou notes that his subsequent statement, that “Beretz, comme Baruk ou Barek, est forgé sur la même racine que racine que Peretz” (56) [“Beretz, like Baruch or Barek, is formed from the same root as Peretz” (35)], is false.
44
Indeed there is no natural landing area on the coast, but rather shallows that reefs just below the water make extremely dangerous, basalt cliffs, abrupt, rectilinear and without footholds, or furthermore, to the west, in the region corresponding to the sheep’s occiput, pestilential swamps. The island of W is not just isolated, but dangerously so. Anyone approaching the island would find it difficult, if not impossible, to disembark. The imagery—basalt cliffs, pestilential swamps—make it clear that W’s isolation is not pleasant. W’s third fortress is a literal one. The elderly, women and children live in an area of the island called “la Forteresse.” The fortress itself, which is the seat of the secretive government, is a forbidding miniature of the island of W: “Ce nom même de Forteresse vient du bâtiment central, une tour crénelée, presque sans fenêtres, construite dans une pierre grise et poreuse, une sorte de lave pétrifiée, et don’t l’aspect évoquerait assez celui d’un phare” (103). [The very name Fortress comes from the central building, a crenelated tower, almost without windows, constructed from porous gray stone, a sort of petrified lava, whose appearance more or less resembles a lighthouse] Like the island, the Fortress is gray and impenetrable, not even offering visual access by means of a window. The athletes, imprisoned on the island, are in turn excluded from this fortress. The young Gaspard Winckler also has aspects of a fortress. He is a deaf mute, “un garçon malingre et rachitique, que son infirmité condamnait à un isolement presque totale” (40). [A frail and scrawny boy whose infirmity condemned him to almost total isolation] Given the importance of islands in the text, Perec’s use of the term “isolement” here takes on additional significance. Winckler, cut off from the world by his infirmity, is not just a potential visitor to W; in a sense, he is the island of W. David Bellos mentions that Perec had read Bruno Bettelheim’s book on infantile autism, The Empty Fortress, which influenced the story of the young Gaspard Winckler (440). In the book, Bettelheim considers infantile autism to be a child’s pulling away from connection with the world. The autistic child is an “empty fortress,” infinitely well-protected from the cruelties of the outside world but consequently empty on the inside. Perec does indeed seem to have this description in mind when he describes the young Gaspard Winckler. Doctors say that no physical ailment has caused his deaf-mutism, which “ne pouvait imputée qu’à un traumatisme enfantin” (40). [Could not be blamed on anything else but a childhood trauma] Bettelheim, himself a concentration camp survivor, makes a specific connection between cases of infantile autism and the “dehumanizing” effect of the camps (8). The closed fortress, especially as it relates to an autistic child, is thus not just a structure closed upon itself, but also a thing disconnected from the rest of the world. Perec picks up this theme of isolation and disconnection in the first autobiographical chapter after the “point du suspension” in the middle of the text. Using a cascading series of metaphors, Perec evokes drastic isolation. “Les souvenirs,” he begins, “existent, fugaces ou tenaces, futiles ou pesants, mais rien ne les rassemble” (97). [Memories exist, ephemeral or persistent, frivolous or weighty, but nothing links them] His memories themselves are thus isolated, floating like islands. These memories, he writes, “sont comme une écriture non-liée, faite de
45 lettres isolées incapables de se souder entre elles pour former un mot, qui fut la mienne jusque’à l’âge de dix-sept ou dix-huit ans” (97). [Are like an unlinked handwriting, composed of isolated letters incapable of knitting themselves together to form a word, which was mine until the age of 17 or 18 years old] Here, Perec links his isolated memories with writing, referring here to actual handwriting, to the image of the letters on a page. The letters cannot resolve themselves into connected words, a problem that evokes obliquely Perec’s use of letters in W: W, G, X and the G of his signature all appear in isolation. Yet “écriture” can also mean “writing,” in the larger sense. Indeed, the memories in W are literally written in an “écriture non- liée,” divided among chapters interspersed with another text, shot through with gaps and appearing indirectly in the W story. In the same sentence, Perec adds another layer of metaphor, now comparing his memories not just to his handwriting, but to ces dessins dissociés, disloqués, dont les éléments épars ne parvenaient presque jamais à se relier les uns aux autres, et dont, à l’époque de W, entre, disons, ma onzième et ma quinzième année, je couvris de cahier entiers: personnages que rien ne rattachait au sol qui était censé les supporter, navires dont les voilures ne tenaient pas aux mâts, ni les mâts à la coque, machines de guerre, engins de mort, aéroplanes et véhicules au mécanismes improbables, avec leurs tuyères déconnectées, leurs filins interrompus, leurs roues tournant dans le vide; les ailes des avions se détachaient du fuselage, les jambes des athlètes étaient séparées des troncs, les bras séparés des torses, les mains n’assuraient aucune prise.
These disjointed, dislocated drawings, in which the scattered elements almost never managed to link themselves up, and with which, in the era of W, between about age 11 and 15, I covered entire notebooks: figures with nothing to attach them to the ground that was supposed to support them, ships whose sails did not hold onto the masts, nor the masts to the hull, machines of war, vehicles of death, airplanes and vehicles with improbably mechanisms, with their tailpipes disconnected, there ropes interrupted, their wheels turning in the void; the wings of airplane detached from the fuselage, the legs of athletes separated from their trunks, the arms separated from their torsos, their hands assured of no grip. Like a mirror image of Perec’s memory of the family circle, this passage is a study in synonyms for dislocation: “dissociés,” “disloqués,” “épars,” “ne jamais se relier,” “rien ne rattachait,” etcetera. These drawings are impossible: each of the images need to be supported by the ground or one another to really function. Yet the paragraph within which this catalogue of disconnection occurs is itself obsessively connected16. Metaphors link the memories to the handwriting to the drawings. And the second sentence of the paragraph is one continuous sentence of 19 lines. The tension here between the formal connection of the passage and its description of disconnection is a tension that occurs throughout W. While Perec
16 In “A Poetics of Quandary. Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance and the Figure of Assemblage,” Ross Chambers offers a compelling reading of emptiness, disconnection and connection in the text.
46 thematizes isolation at every textual level, from the structure of the chapters and the multiple texts to the isolation of W and the “fortress” of the young Gaspard Winckler, he simultaneously thematizes radical connection. The isolated texts of W are connected by doubles or sutures; they are “inextricablement enchevêtrés” (prier d’insérer). [inextricably tangled] At the moment of departing, or, to push my point, disconnecting from his mother, Perec remembers that his she had bought him a comic book that he says pictured a character, Charlot, doing a parachute jump in which “le parachute est accroché à Charlot par les bretelles de son pantalon” (80). [The parachute is hooked to Charlot by the suspenders of his pants]. He also recalls that his arm was in a sling, but, since his aunt insisted this was not the case, he speculates that he was actually wearing a “suspensoir” [“suspensory bandage” (55)] after an operation for a hernia (a memory his relatives also cast into question). Thinking back on these memories that are at once evocative and suspect, Perec reflects, Un triple trait parcourt ce souvenir: parachute, bras en écharpe, bandage herniaire: cela tient de la suspension, du soutien, presque de la prothèse. Pour être, besoin d’étai. Seize ans plus tard, en 1958, lorsque les hasards de service militaire ont fait de moi en éphémère parachutiste, je pus lire, dans la minute même du saut, un texte déchiffré de ce souvenir: je fus précipité dans le vide; tous les fils furent rompus; je tombai, seul et sans soutien. Le parachute s’ouvrit. La corolle se déploya, fragile et sûr suspens avant la chute maîtrisée. (81)
A triple feature runs through this memory: parachute, arm in a sling, herniary bandage: this suggests suspension, support, almost a prosthesis. To be, a stay is necessary. 16 years later, in 1958, when the chance of military service made me an ephemeral parachutist, I could read, in the very moment of the jump, a deciphered text of this memory: I was thrown into the void; all the strings were broken; I fell alone and without support. The parachute opened. The canopy deployed, a fragile and sure suspense before the fall is mastered. The reader need not guess about the importance of connection to Perec: he interprets these memories himself, carefully making the connections, both thematic and linguistic, between the arm in a sling, Charlot’s suspenders and the suspensoir for a hernia. The parachute memory comes towards an explanation for the persistent theme of connection in the text: the strings that connect him to the parachute are to enable him to survive in “le vide”: only in the face of absence and radical disconnection from the world does connection matter. Concentrating on the word suspension, one remembers the points de suspension between parts I and II of the book. With regard to the W story, Perec writes, il commence par raconter une histoire et, d’un seul coup, se lance dans une autre: dans cette rupture, cette cassure qui suspend le récit autour d’on ne sait pas quelle attente, se trouve le lieu initial d’où est sorti ce livre, ces points de suspension auxquels sont accrochés les fils rompus de l’enfance et la trame de l’écriture.
47 it begins by telling one story and, all of a sudden, launches into another: in this rupture, this break that suspends the tale around one does not know what expectation, can be found the initial place from which this book comes, these ellipses [points de suspension] to which are hooked the broken strings of childhood and the framework/weft of writing. Perec here links three meanings of the word suspense. First, the idea of something that is stopped: the first W story is suspended after chapter XI. Second, Perec says the rupture that suspends the first story takes place in points de suspension, an ellipsis. An ellipsis indicates that something has been left out, but, at the same time, it connects two parts of a text from which a piece is missing. Finally, Perec plays on the idea that something suspended might be hooked to or hung (accroché) from something. Suspense thus takes on contradictory meanings: it is both a connection between things (points de suspension), a kind of hook, and a halting or interruption. Perec is being quite literal in this passage: between chapters XI and XII of the text (between the first and second parts), there is a page that is blank except for points de suspension “(...)” (89). It is here, Perec tells us quite clearly, that W has its genesis17. The first part ends with Perec’s departure for Villard de Lans and begins again on the island of W. There is no explanation of how the W story has moved from the scene between the elder Gaspard Winckler and Otto Apfelstahl to the narrative describing the island of W. We may perhaps surmise that Gaspard Winckler is the narrator of this section, since at the beginning of the W story he writes that he has decided to must finally reveal the story of his voyage to W, but he does not introduce himself or refer to anything that might have happened to him personally on the island (13). He has purposely “adopt[é] le ton froid et serein de l’enthnologue,” (14) [adopted the cold and serene tone of the ethnologist] what anthropologist Thomas Nagel calls, in a book of the same title, “the view from nowhere.” We never learn how Winckler may have gotten onto the island of W, nor if he finds the younger Gaspard Winckler there. If the word suspension crystallizes the relationship between connection and isolation, what I call the X motif in W embroiders and complicates this concept still further18. Noting that the X is the only noun in the language that is a sole letter, he goes on to ponder the ramifications of X. It is Signe aussi du mot rayé nul—la ligne des x sur le mot que l’on n’a pas voulu écrire—signe contradictoire de l’ablation [en neurophysiologie, où, par exemple, Borison et McCarthy (J. Appl. Physiol., 1973, 34: 1-7) opposent au chats intacts (intact) des chats auxquels ils on coupé soit les vagues (VAGX), soit les nerfs carotidiens (CSNX)] et de la multiplication, de la mise en ordre (axe des X) et de l’inconnu mathématique, point de départ enfin d’une géométrie fantasmatique dont le V dédoublé constitue la figure de base et
17 Claude Burgelin makes this point in his commentary on W: “Ces pointes de suspension signifient la rupture, mais aussi l’accrochage” (139). [The ellipsis signifies rupture, but also hooking together] “Comme si,” [as if] he continues, the two halves of the text around the ellipses “lançaient des ponts suspendus au- dessus du vide” (139). [cast suspension bridges over the void] 18 The following analysis by no means exhausts all of the meanings that X takes on in Perec’s text.
48 dont les enchevêtrements multiples tracent les symboles majeurs de l’histoire de mon enfance. (109-110)
Also a sign of the word struck out—the line of xs on the word that one did not want to write—contradictory sign of excision [in neuropsychology, where, for example, Borison and McCarthy (J. Appl. Physiol., 1973, 34: 1-7) compares intact cats (intact) to those whose vagus nerve (VAGX) or whose carotid nerve (CSNX) have been cut] and of multiplication, of sorting (the X-axis) and of the mathematical unknown, starting point, at any rate, of a fantastical geometry of which the split V constitutes the basic figure, the multiple imbrications of which map out the major symbols of my childhood. Perec rings most of the changes on the possible, and contradictory, meanings of the X symbol. It is the mathematical unknown, that which we search for, as well as the sign of “the word we did not want to write;” it stands both for what we seek and what we want to get away from. This contradiction is particularly relevant to W, since Perec struggles precisely with the relationship between the unknown and the word that cannot express it. The X symbolizes not just the covering up of the word we did not want to write, but also the excision of something. Perec’s bracketed scientific example opens the door to rather violent associations: the reader thinks here of the clinical X symbol standing in for dead cats, their nerves severed. The X is the “point de départ,” the origin, in graphical terms, for the “fantastical geometry” of the symbols of Perec’s childhood. Yet the X may also indicate the stitch that binds things together as well as serve as the symbol for a buried treasure: X marks the spot. X is thus both a symbol of severing and one of connection, the symbol of something missing, but also the indication of where something might be found. Perec’s X symbol thus paradoxically stands for, on the one hand, connection and binding and, on the other, excision and absence. The tension between these two meanings extends to Perec’s description of his father’s tomb, and his mother’s lack of one. Perec offers two narratives of his only visit to his father’s grave. In these two sections we can note a tension between, on the one hand, a lack of precision and, on the other, a sense of a tight boundary. In the first narrative, Perec explains that the hospital in which his father died: est maintenant redevenu une petite église déserte dans une petite ville inerte. Le cimetière est bien entretenu. Dans un coin pourrissent quelques bouts de bois avec des noms et des matricules.
J’allai une fois sur ce que l’on peut appeler la tombe de mon père. Cétait un premier novembre. Il y avait de la boue partout [12].
has now gone back to being a small deserted church in a dead town. The cemetery is well kept up. In a decaying corner some pieces of wood with names and ID numbers.
I went once to what might be called my father’s tomb. It was a first of November. There was mud everywhere [12].
49 This passage is characterized by a certain sense of disappearance and imprecision. The hospital in which Icek Perec died was transformed during wartime for the purpose. It no longer bears the trace of that use, it has gone back to being a church. Perec presents the church as doubly nowhere: it is deserted, not a destination for people in the town. And the town itself is “inerte,” it is the middle of nowhere. His father’s tomb is not even fully at tomb: it is “ce que l’on peut appeler la tombe de mon père”. [What one could call the tomb of my father] Again, imprecision reigns: whatever Perec visited, it could be called a tomb, but isn’t. The footnote to this passage retells the story of Perec’s visit to the grave at greater length and in greater detail. In this version, the motif of imprecision gives way to one of precision : Je n’ai pas eu à chercher longtemps parmi les deux ou trois centaines de croix du cimetière militaire (simple carré dans un des coins du cimetière de la ville). La découverte de la tombe de mon père, des mots PEREC ICEK JUDKO suivis d’un numéro matricule, inscrits au pochoir sur la croix de bois, encore tout à fait lisibles, m’a causé une sensation difficile à décrire.
I did not have to search long among the two or three hundred crosses of the military cemetery (simple square in one of the corners of the town cemetery). The discovery of my father’s tomb, of the words PEREC ICEK JUDKO followed by an ID number, stenciled on the wooden cross, still completely legible, caused in me a sensation that is difficult to describe The grave is in a specific, bounded place, in a military cemetery that is “a simple square” at the corner of the town cemetery, and his father’s name and ID are “tout à fait lisibles”. Unlike in the first passage, this time Perec states outright that he visited “la tombe de mon père,” not just something that could be called that. The ID number on the grave is legible, and so is the older Perec’s vision of this visit. Perec continues, describing the emotions he experienced on his visit. He felt, “sous le jeu,” that is, underneath his feeling of performing a role, d’autres choses: l’étonnement de voir mon nom sur une tombe (car l’une des particularités de mon nom a longtemps été d’être unique: dans ma famille personne d’autre s’appelait Perec), le sentiment ennuyeux d’accomplir quelque chose qu’il m’avait toujours fallu accomplir . . . un balancement confus entre une émotion incoercible à la limite du balbutiement et une indifférence à la limite du délibéré, et, en dessous, quelque chose comme une sérénité secrète liée à l’ancrage dans l’espace, à l’encrage sur la croix, de cette morte qui cessait enfin d’être abstraite . . . comme si la découverte de ce minuscule espace de terre clôturait enfin cette morte . . . Je revins à Paris crotté jusqu’en haut des mollets. Chaussures et costume furent nettoyés, mais je m’arrangeai pour ne plus jamais les remettre. (58-59)
other things: the astonishment of seeing my name on a tomb (because one of the particularities of my name has for a long time been its uniqueness: no one else in my family was named Perec), the irksome feeling of carrying out something I had always needed to . . . a confused hesitation between an uncontrollable emotion at the limit of stammering and an indifference at the
50 limit of what can be purposeful, underneath, something like a secret serenity linked to the anchoring in space, to the ink on the cross, of this death which finally ceased to be abstract . . . as if the discovery of this minuscule space of earth finally brought to a close that death . . . I returned to Paris covered with mud up to the top of my calves. The shoes and suit were cleaned, but I arranged it so as to never put them on again. The military cemetery is a doubly bounded place: a square within the boundary of the cemetery. And within this double boundary lies the tomb, which “clôturait” his father’s death. Clôturer means both to bring to a close and to enclose. Both of these meanings of the term are relevant in this passage: the tomb has literal boundaries: his father is in this place and no other. Yet it also brings his death to a close, since it is no longer “abstract.” This “clôture” does not just pin his father’s death to a certain moment in the past, but also gives it boundaries within both time and space. His emotions are “balancement confus” between an “incoercible” emotion that approached stammering and “une indifférence à la limite du délibéré”. Yet these feelings, even the ones that are “uncontrollable,” and seem like they could be boundless, nonetheless waver between boundaries. Like the cemetery, his emotions are bounded; they approach limits, but they do not traverse them. Perec experiences a “secret serenity” related to “l’ancrage dans l’espace” and to “l’encrage sur la croix”. The juxtaposition and the wordplay here between “ancrage” (anchoring) and “encrage” (inking) carries particular weight in the context of W. To write, to put ink on the page, is also to be anchored in space. Ancrage can also mean to take root or become rooted. I press a bit on this connotation of the word because of a theme of earth and dirt that runs through the passage. Perec’s careful description of his emotions at his father’s grave is geological: he starts with a surface emotion, the impression of “une scène que j’étais en train de jouer: quinze ans plus tard, le fils vient se recueillir sur la tombe de son père” (58). [A scene I was acting: fifteen years later, the son comes to reflect at his father’s tomb] Yet, he writes, “sous le jeu, d’autres choses” (58). Underneath everything is that feeling of “sérénité secrète” that the boundaries of his father’s grave give him. Yet the grave, that “minuscule espace de terre,” is only bounded in two dimensions. The third, depth, remains boundless. Perec’s emotions, similarly, waver between limits, but are also layered vertically, deep in the earth. The earth that covers the bounded, limited grave does not respect those limits: Perec leaves covered with mud, taking with him the part of the grave that cannot be bounded, a fact disturbing enough that, even though they were cleaned, he never wears the suit and shoes again that he wore that day (59). Boundaries, then, are precious, and Perec particularly associates them with his father. He never mentions whether his mother’s photographs have frame, but he kept his father’s in a “cadre de cuir” that had been a gift (46). In a footnote, he reflects, “C’est à cause de ce cadeau, je pense, que j’ai toujours cru que les cadres étaient des objets précieux.” (55) [It is because of this gift, I think, that I have always believed frames were precious objects]. I would argue that it is not just because he was given a nice frame for his father’s picture: the cadre, the boundary or constraint, is precious in and of itself. It can “clôturer” a death that, unbounded, would invade other areas of Perec’s emotional life.
51 Perec’s father’s tomb is bounded, at least in two dimensions, a contrast to what Perec has to say about his mother’s grave: Ma mère n’a pas de tombe. C’est seulement le 13 octobre 1958 qu’un décret la déclara officiellement décédée, le 11 février 1943, à Drancy (France). Un décret ultérieur, du 17 novembre 1959, précisa que, <
*
(62)
My mother does not have a grave. It was only on October 13, 1958, that she was declared officially deceased, on February 11, 1943, in Drancy (France). A subsequent decree, from November 17, 1959, clarified that “if she had been a French national,” she would have had the right to distinction of having “died for France”.
* This mention of Perec’s mother’s tomb, or lack thereof, is part of an extremely long footnote, number 26, the last of the chapter. There, the older Perec comments on the autobiographical piece he wrote earlier. This paragraph addressing the way his mother is officially remembered serves, in a way, as a tomb itself: a remembrance and an inscription. Whereas his father’s actual tomb is definitely within a boundary, this tomb lies outside the limits of the text in a footnote. The inscription on this textual tomb is also marginalized. After the heuristic official declaration of the date and place of her death (neither of which are accurate, since this date marks her leaving Drancy alive) [check Bellos], Perec quotes a later decree that “<
52 explorateurs et géographes n’avaient pas achevé, ou, plus souvent encore, n’avaient même pas entrepris le reconnaissance de son tracé et sur la plupart des cartes, W n’apparaissait pas ou n’était qu’une tache vague et sons nom dont les contours imprécis divisaient à peine la mer et la terre. (94)
Explorers and geographers have not completed, or, still more often, have not even attempted to map its outline and, on most maps, W did not appear or was nothing but a vague nameless smear whose imprecise contours barely divided the sea and the land. While the island itself has precise boundaries, the maps that would document it are imprecise. W, it seems, cannot be seen, nor can its limits be set down precisely on paper. Similarly, Perec’s mother’s death, which did occur on a particular day at a particular place, is invisible to Perec and cannot be written about in a precise way, by Perec or anyone else. Even the official voice of France, whose business it is to be precise, must settle for heuristics. Perec associates the island of W clearly with his mother’s actual place of death. As the W story progresses, the island devoted to olympic sport begins more and more to resemble a concentration camp. The W resident will see the vanquished athletes return, gris de fatigue, titubant sous le poids des carcans de chêne; il les verra s’affaler d’un coup, la bouche ouverte, la respiration sifflante; ils les verra un peu plus tard se battre, s’entre-déchirer pour un morceau de saucisson, pour un peu d’eau, pour une bouffé de cigarette. (190)
grey with fatigue, stumbling under the weight of the oaken yokes; he will see them collapse all at once, wheezing; he will see them a bit later fighting, tearing one another apart for a piece of sausage, for a little water, for a puff of a cigarette. Perec’s details here neatly evoke stories of the concentration camps: forced laborers fighting for scraps. Through his description of W, Perec imagines the conditions under which his mother may have lived. Yet Perec does not associate the island of W solely with his mother. The viewer of this scene is a hypothetical W “novice,” a newcomer to the adult area of the island. Above I made a connection between the experience of the newly arrived novice and Perec’s “year zero” after the Liberation and his return to Paris. If Perec is associated with the W novice, then the island of W is also not a concentration camp. It is, if anything, the Ile de France19. The island of W, an isolated fortress-island, is walled off from the rest of the world, and the story of W is kept separate from the autobiography, confined to its own chapters. Yet the meaning of the island of W, despite these precautions, cannot be bounded. It is both the concentration camp and the Ile de France, the location of Perec’s mother’s tomb and, simultaneously, the place where Perec must live.
19 Myoung-sook Kim notes that in Perec’s work the city functions as “espace contraint,” which might be translated as constraint space.
53 Perec’s parents’ tombs and the island of W are thus simultaneously bounded and open, shot through with the space that enables connection. In this final section of the chapter, I would like to propose a way to understand these paradoxes as, at least partly, a model of writing and reading that creates a textual monument to something that has been forgotten or never known. When Perec returns to Paris (the Ile de France), he has forgotten the city and is unable to make sense of what he sees. Entering the city by the same station he left years earlier, when his mother had stood on the platform to see him off, Perec recalls, “En sortant de la gare, j’ai demandé comment s’appelait ce monument: on m’a répondu que ce n’était pas un monument, mais seulement la gare de Lyon” (214) [Leaving the train station, I asked what this monument was called: I was told that it wasn’t a monument, only the Gare de Lyon.] Why would the young Perec make this mistake? The Gare de Lyon looks important, “monumental” in the sense of something large and imposing. Unfamiliar with the city, Perec assumes that this imposing building is not functional, like a train station, but rather stands to the memory of something, memorializes something. And for Perec, it does. He only dimly remembers it, but this was the last place he saw his mother (Bellos 89). It seems clear in this passage that he does not associate his departure from Paris with the station he reenters years later. The Gare de Lyon, if it is a monument, is a monument to a memory that Perec does not quite have. One might also say that Perec has mistaken a landmark for a monument. One might use the giant clock on the Gare de Lyon to get one’s bearings in Paris, even if the station is not a monument like the Eiffel Tower. Landmarks make a city navigable. When he returns to Paris, at first Perec does not have the landmarks he needs. He will henceforth live with his aunt and uncle in Passy, but he is unable to make sense of the neighborhood: Deux jours plus tard, ma tante m’a envoyé chercher du pain en bas de la rue. En sortant de la boulangerie, je me suis trompé de direction et au lieu de remonter la rue de l’Assomption, j’ai pris la rue de Boulainvilliers: j’ai mis plus d’une heure à retrouver ma maison. (214)
Two days later my aunt sent me to get bread at the end of the street. Leaving the bakery, I got lost and instead of going back up rue de l’Assomption, I took the rue de Boulainvilliers; it took me more than an hour to get back to my house. The two streets looked the same to Perec; he had no visual cues to guide him back to his house. These two memories of returning to Paris, of not understanding how to read the city and having no landmarks with which to navigate, recall Perec’s observation about his memories of his time in Villard de Lans: “Ce qui caractérise cette époque c’est avant tout son absence de repères: les souvenirs sont des morceaux de vie arrachés au vide. Nulle amarre. Rien ne les ancre, rien ne les fixe” (98). [What characterizes this time above all is the absence of landmarks: the memories are pieces of life snatched from the void. No mooring. Nothing anchors them, nothing fastens them.] Returning to Paris, Perec re-experiences the drifting nature of his wartime life. The memories themselves cannot be landmarks because there is nothing to connect one to the other. Like the Gare de Lyon, incomprehensible because Perec cannot put it in context, the memories could only
54 be landmarks if he could create some relationship between them. Without a network of landmarks, that is, places with which Perec had associations, the rue de l’Assomption is identical to the rue des Boulainvilliers. Thus landmarks in isolation are not landmarks at all: they only become prompts to memory in relation to one another, when they form a network. In Espèces d’espaces a “journal d’un usager de l’espace” (prier d’insérer) [journal of a space user] published a year before W, Perec discusses the experience of visiting a new city. At first, the new city is an “espace neutre, non encore investi, pratiquement sans repères” (125-126). [Neutral space, not yet invested, practically without landmarks] A visitor kills time in the new city, passing by “une statue. C’est celle de Ludwig Spankefel, le célèbre brasseur” (125). [a statue. It’s that of Ludwig Spankerfel, the famous brewer] But after a short time, the visitor begins to “invest” the space, to make sense of it: Deux jours peuvent suffire pour que l’on commence à s’acclimater. Le jour où l’on découvre que la statue de Ludwig Spankerfel di Nominatore (le célèbre brasseur) n’est qu’à trois minutes de son hôtel (au bout de la rue Prince- Adalbert) alors que l’on mettait une grande demi-heure à y aller, on commence à prendre possession de la ville. (126)
Two days can suffice to being to acclimatize oneself. The day one discovers that the statue of Ludwig Spankerfel di Nominatore (the famous brewer) is not but three minutes from one’s hotel (at the end of Prince Adalbert street) though one had previously spent a long half hour to get there, one begins to take possession of the city. The statue, which at first was just an object among others, something to look at while killing time, has been, at the end of two days, invested with special meaning. The statue does not just represent Ludwig Spankerfel but also the proximity of the visitor’s hotel. The statue, then, has not become a landmark until the visitor has located another landmark, the hotel and created a relationship between the two. Like the literal landmarks a visitor or city dweller uses to navigate and to remember, the nodes of W, the criss-crossing network of references and doubles that connect his texts, only fulfill their function in relation to one another. The reader “navigates” through W using these landmarks. In Perec’s manuscript for Espèces d’espaces he wrote a section called “Monuments” that he did not choose to put in the published version of the book. In this unpublished passage, he reflects further on the relationship between his own memory and experience and monuments as such: MONUMENTS Quand je suis revenu à Paris, après la guerre, j’ai demandé quel était ce monument. On m’a répondu que ce n’était pas un monument, mais la Gare de Lyon. Elle était pourtant monumentale. Qu’est-ce qu’un monument? Si c’est un édifice que l’on visite, dira-t-on que l’aérogare d’Orly est un monument (elle reçoit devantage [sic] de visiteurs que la Tour Eiffel)
55
Il y a peu de monuments à la campagne. (l’église? le monument aux morts?) (79, 12, 2)
MONUMENTS When I returned to Paris after the war, I asked what was this monument. I was told that it was not a monument, but the Gare de Lyon. It was monumental nonetheless. What is a monument? If it is a building that we visit, could one say that Orly Airport is a monument (it receives more visitors than the Eiffel Tower)
There are few monuments in the country (the church? the monument to the dead?) Why isn’t the Gare de Lyon a monument? Is a monument merely a building one visits? The train station and the airport are not just buildings people visit. They are buildings through which people move. They connect one place with another place; networks of trains and planes converge there. This suggests that a monument may not be a simple building, but an itinerary, a path through a network. For Perec, memory relies on a network: a memory on its own, unconnected from others, is almost not a memory at all. Thus a monument, a structure that supports memory, must be a connected network whose nodes connect to other ones in multiple ways. To return to the statue of Ludwig Spankerfel, a monument like a statue has incomplete meaning when considered alone. When it becomes a landmark, a node in a network specific to the individual, it assumes a fuller meaning. The memories in Perec’s text, and the doubles he sets up between the texts, are not monuments in and of themselves; they are landmarks, helping both Perec and the reader make personal sense of his memories that are “sans repères” [check that]. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition of “landmark” is “an object set up to mark a boundary line” (“Landmark”). The nodes of Perec’s text cannot provide us with his missing memories. They do, however, mark off their boundaries.
56 Leaving the Garden: Living Monuments in El carrer de les Camèlies
Mercè Rodoreda’s El carrer de les Camèlies differs in several significant ways from Perec’s and Kofman’s texts. Rodoreda’s text is a novel, not an autobiography (although it does contain significant autobiographical information20). It takes place in Barcelona, not Paris, and it is written from Rodoreda’s exile in Geneva, in Catalan, not in French.That this text is in certain ways so different from the other two throws into relief their intriguing similarities. All three texts involve a painful and divisive wartime period, and all three are meditations on the relationship between historical and personal memory, and on monuments of the war period and the postwar. Finally, the meditation in all three texts involves the creation of a unique textual space that lays the foundation for a more nuanced monument than a simple chronological account or a physical monument. If Kofman’s text is about intersubjective space (a space I call the home) and Perec’s text is about the network of one’s own memory (which I call the map), Rodoreda’s text is about balancing memory with the tendency to ossify the past: that is, it treats the question of how to remember the past but not be trapped by it. Rodoreda seeks to create a monument that incorporates the present and allows for change and growth, a living monument. She does this by constructing a synchronous network of symbols, contrasting this network with a tendency to look to the past and towards one’s “roots. “Rootedness” implies fixedness; rooted monuments do not admit polysemy or change. For Rodoreda, both textual monuments and physical monuments may have this immobile quality, which contains an element of violence or constraint. At several points in El carrer de les Camèlies, the protagonist is violently fixed with a name or a mark. In contrast to these scenes of violent inscription stands Rodoreda’s vast and polysemous symbolic network. In El carrer de les Camèlies, writing and language can be violent, pinning meaning and identity in one place like the name etched on a tombstone, but they also have the potential to provide freedom through the circulation of symbols, a process of signification and resignification. Rodoreda thus contends with a tension between, on the one hand, those physical monuments and the acts of writing, which is also a monumentalizing practice, that pin meaning in one place and, on the other hand, those monumentalizing processes that allow for a degree of polyvalence and freedom. This tension may also be seen on the difficult border between collective and personal memory. Collective memory does not exist as such, independent of individuals. As Halbwachs writes, “the memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories” (On Collective Memory 40). On the other hand, the way that a collective has agreed or come to remember something, and the things it chooses to remember and forget, molds the individual’s recollection. “The past is not preserved,” writes Halbwachs, “but reconstructed on the basis of the present” (40). The individual has no access to the pure, preserved past, but only to the memories that he or she can create, which are shaped by the larger collective. The issue of what remains in collective memory, and how it remains there, is of particularly
20 Carme Arnau thoroughly traces the autobiographical elements of the text in Memòria i ficció en l’obra de Mercè Rodoreda.
57 urgent interest to Rodoreda, writing as she was during the Time of Silence, when Republican and Catalan suffering was either officially (and thus also eventually unofficially) forgotten and, when it was officially remembered, differed greatly from the way the victims remembered it (Camino 3). If we follow Halbwachs in thinking that memory is constructed through a kind of dialogue between “collective frameworks” (40) and the individual, we see how an individual can influence the creation of collective memory as much perhaps as the “collective frameworks” can influenced what is remembered and how. Thus Rodoreda’s insistence on the maleability and mobility of memory is an insistence on the individual capacity and need to modify collective memory. Like the physical monuments produced by a society, language may also be considered a manifestation of the Halbwachs’ “collective frameworks.” Language creates a common space between people and both defines and binds a collective society. Through that language, a group may experience, share and create a common heritage. On the other hand, that binding function of language can be restrictive. El Carrer de les Camèlies is a textual monument out of language that is polyvalent, and both personally and collectively significant. In creating such a monument, Rodoreda is advocating for a writing that binds a community together but does not suffocate it in doing so. This loose binding allows individuals and the memories they possess to allow the larger “collective framework” to grow and change. A few central images express the tension between Rodoreda’s synchronous symbol network and monumentalizing practices that arrest the flow of meaning and are oriented exclusively towards the past. First, she treats the paradox of a stone angel or a stone bird: the angel is an image of flight and movement, but the stone angel can do nothing of the sort. A bird is a similar image of freedom and flight, yet in El carrer de les Camèlies, birds are often associated with stones. The second set of images are a pair: the cemetery and the garden. A cemetery is filled with immobile stone monuments, promising a fixed, unchanging memory that only looks backwards21. In the garden, the flowers may, like the monuments, carry associations with them, but they are also alive, able to grow and change22. For Rodoreda, the best garden is ungated: just as the stone monument in the cemetery constricts possibilities for memory, the gated garden constrains the flowers inside, fixing them in one space like the tombs in the cemetery. The story of Cecília’s life proceeds chronologically, stretching from just before the Spanish Republic to the postwar economic boom (post-1959). Cecília’s
21 The motif of the cemetery also appears in her short story “Semblava de seda” (1978). In the story, a woman whose lover has died far away visits a local cemetery where she obscures the words on a tomb because “no em deixaven creure el que jo volia creure: que el mort que jo estimava, el meu, estava enterrat allí” (330). [“they kept me from believing what I wanted to believe: that the dead man I loved, mine, was buried there” (227)] At the end of the story she encounters a black angel and a voice that tells her that “el meu mort era l’àngel, que a dintra de la tomba no hi havia res” (334). [“the angel was my dead man and nothing lay inside the tomb” (232)] As in El carrer de les Camèlies, the protagonist chafes against the fixity of words etched on a tombstone and learns that the dead are mobile. 22 The theme of flowers appears throughout Rodoreda’s work, in particular in the novel Jardí vora el mar (1967) and in the short story collection Viatges i flors (1980).
58 narration, however, is sometimes anti-chronological, moving from the effect of an event back to the event itself. The network of symbols in the text similarly pulls against reading chronologically, inviting the reader to follow the thread of a symbol (for instance, the appearance of stones in the text) and make connections between past and present. Such a reading is more synchronous than chronological, as the appearance of a symbol recalls to mind its other appearances. At times, the reader does not understand the full weight of a symbol until later in the text, recontextualizing its previous appearances. El carrer de les Camèlies thus has two structures: the chronological structure and the one created by her dense symbolic network. Because a reading of the text necessitates considering more than one moment in the text at a time, a quick summary of the text may help orient the reader of this piece. El carrer de les Camèlies is the story of a beautiful woman, Cecília, who was found as an infant by a night watchman outside of a garden gate in Barcelona, on the street named in the novel’s title. Pinned to her clothing is a piece of paper with “Cecília Ce” written on it. Cecília grows up with adopted parents, Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena. She continually searches for clues to her parentage, in particular to the identity of her father, and runs away from home twice in search of him. Once she goes to the Liceu Opera House in search of him, thinking he may be a musician. She spends the war years with her adopted family, then runs away for good with her first lover, Eusebi, to live in a shantytown on the outskirts of Barcelona. After Eusebi is arrested and a subsequent lover dies, Cecília becomes a street prostitute and eventually a kept woman. Her living situations become progressively more oppressive and unpleasant, finally culminating in imprisonment in the apartment of a lover, Eladi, who forces her, over a long but unspecified period of time, to drink to the point of hallucination. After this episode, she is left on the street and rescued by an acquaintance who nurses her back to health. After she recovers, her fortunes change and she becomes a wealthy demimondaine in possession of her own home. Throughout, she is often pregnant, but always either aborts or miscarries the fetus; she never has a child. The text ends with Cecília in conversation with the night watchman who found her. He tells her that she had been originally left at the gate of another family on the street, but he decided that Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena, childless, would prefer to raise a baby. He also confesses that he was the one who pinned the name to her clothing, naming her after a girl he had been in love with who had died. There is mention of a plant or a flower on nearly every page of the text, and Cecilià is specifically associated with a number of flowers. Gardens also take on special importance as places of beauty and refuge, but also, particularly when Cecília is a child, as a place with a gate. Often an early passage presents the guiding ideas and images of a text. In El carrer de les Camèlies, the second paragraph is such a passage. The night that Cécilia was found, an unusual thing happened in the garden of her adoptive parents: Però el més gros va ser que aquella nit va florir el cactus sense terra. Al jardí del darrera hi havia una paret escrostada amb l’arrebossat que saltava i, abans de saltar, feia panxes perquè per sota les paneroles treballaven a fer-se
59 caus, i al peu d’aquella paret, coberta de rosers, els millors amb roses blanques, hi havia un cactus gegant. Un hivern de neu la terra es va gelar i el cactus es va morir de mig en avall i el tros que va quedar de mig en amunt va viure perquè d’amagat havia anat fent arrel en una esquerda d’aquella paret de rosers i panerols, i aquella arrel s’alimentava de maó i de morter vell i donava vida al cactus que sortia amunt, més amunt de la paret, a tafanejar el jardí del costat. I allà dalt de tot, a la nit del dia que m’havien trobat, hi va sortir una flor rovellada de fulla a la banda de fora i blanca de llet passades les primeres fulles, amb una bogeria de cabellera despentinada a dins de tot.
But the biggest thing was that the dirtless cactus flowered that night. In the back garden there was a crumbling wall with the plaster falling off and, before falling off, bellied out because underneath the wood lice had made themselves a hideout, and at the foot of that wall, covered with rosebushes, the best with white roses, there was a giant cactus. One snowy winter the earth froze and the bottom half of the cactus died and the top part that remained lived because it had secretly made roots in a crack in that wall with the rosebushes and the wood lice, and that root lived on brick and old mortar and fed the cactus, which kept growing upwards, higher than the wall to peek into the neighboring garden. And at the top of it, the night they found me, there appeared a flower with rust-colored outer petals and milky white ones inside, with wild disheveled hair at the center. With this image of the “cactus sense terra,” Rodoreda introduces thematic and stylistic elements that will reappear, amplified, in the rest of the text. The passage begins in medias res with “però” [“but”], inaugurating an intimate, conversational style: a person speaking to a friend might begin a sentence with “but.” The sentence creates an implied intimacy with the reader not just through its conversational tone but also by referring to the cactus as though the reader is already familiar with it: it is “el cactus sense terra”[the dirtless cactus] that flowers, not a dirtless cactus. The definite article implies that the reader already knows about the dirtless cactus and needs only learn about what happened to it the night that Cécilia arrived. This intimacy positions the reader as already a part of Cecília’s community, even though the reader does not yet know anything of her or her experiences. This paradoxical combination of intimacy and strangeness points up a central concern of Rodoreda’s text, which I have sketched out above: the uneasy but crucial relationship between personal memory and collective memory, and the ways in which personal and collective significations may coexist. I call the technique Rodoreda uses to achieves this effect of of problematic intimacy “backwards narration.” By presenting an event to the reader that only comes to acquire meaning in the sentences that follow, Rodoreda not only implies intimacy with the reader, but also underscores the essentially backwards-looking nature of the narrator. Backwards narration reverses the order of cause and effect: the universe of El carrer de les Camèlies is not one where causes create effects. Sometimes effects create causes, and sometimes the only thing binding two ideas to one another is proximity in time or the conjunction i [and].
60 Rodoreda associates the dirtless cactus with Cécilia herself: it only flowers each year on the day Cécilia was found. Those who see the flower “qued[en] com enaiguats de tan bonica que la van veure” [“just about drown[ ] in its beauty”], while Cecília herself also receives constant attention to her beauty. Yet the cactus’ beauty is not classical, its flower has “una bogeria de cabellera despentinada” [“wild disheveled hair”], an image of Cécilia’s own wildness or desire for freedom. Like the cactus, Cecília is a flower who is not happy being contained within the garden. She too grows tall enough to “tafanejar el jardí del costat” [“peek into the neighboring garden”] and escape. Cécilia must also spend most of the book nourishing herself on “maó i de morter vell” [“bricks and old mortar”] that is, on the city streets instead of in a green garden. At the same time, it is also not hard to imagine this “cactus sense terra” as an image for Catalans after the civil war, perhaps especially of the Catalan exiles, many of them writers and artists, who “transplanted” themselves elsewhere. The Catalan word terra does mean dirt, as in the English translation, but also has the more figurative meaning of “land,” or “country,” making this analogy more obvious. Following the analogy, the “hivern de neu” [“snowy winter”] mentioned in the passage would be the war and its aftermath, which literally killed many Catalans and figuratively froze and damaged the culture of Catalunya, both in the sense of art and literature and in the sense of shared heritage. During Franco’s reign, Catalan culture was “underground” or in exile, like the roots that “de amagat” [secretly] take nourishment from unlikely sources and, despite hardship, create a strong growing plant that can see beyond its assigned borders and produce a beautiful, wild flower. Rodoreda’s backwards narration technique, in which cause and effect do not necessarily have a clear relationship, is also evocative of the exigencies of postwar life under Franco. When the actual causes of the extreme difficulties of postwar life cannot be discussed, the effects are apparent even at the level of language and basic logic. This “cactus sense terra” passage sets up a network of relations, the ramifications of which the rest of the book explores: flowers as symbols both of Cécilia and the “flowering” of Catalan culture, roots as both something that anchor and as sources of nourishment that can be mobile and flexible, and the garden as a place of beauty and refuge and, at the same time, as an enclosed place that plants and people may wish to escape. Indeed almost as soon as Cecília is conscious, she tries to leave the garden of her adopted parents, Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena. Their garden, supposedly locked to keep out thieves, is also Cecília’s prison. A bit like the cactus, she “mirava aquells ferros que no em deixaven sortir, I un dia vaig pensar que saltaria la paret I fugiria carrer avall” (22) [“stared at those iron bars that kept me in, and one day I thought I’d jump the wall and get away down the street” (15)]. This scene prefigures Cecília’s future, in which she will be confined by one lover only to escape to another lover’s prison. If Rodoreda associates Cecília with the hardy and freedom-loving cactus, she also associates her with the rose, a plant that, in this book, does not grow wild and is transplanted from one confined garden to another. On a visit to a nursery, Cecília sees many different kinds of roses, including “una de vermella, sola i de les més
61 vermelles, amb quatre gotes d’aigua per les fulles, com si plorés” (28). [“A red one, all by itself and one of the reddest, with a few drops on its petals, as if it had been crying” (19)] Cecília herself is “diferent, perquè sola” (44) [“different because all alone” (34)] and, near the end of the book, attends the opera alone, in a red dress. Cecília is most specifically associated with roses in an early scene in Senyor Jaume’s garden. Cecília and Senyor Jaume return from the nursery with a rosebush, which Senyor Jaume carefully plants. After checking that the bush is straight, Senyor Jaume em va fer anar a buscar el tinter. Me’l va fer aguantar i amb una cua de fulla ben sucada va esborrar el nom que el roser tenia escrit en una fusteta groga lligada a la soca amb un filferro i es va posar a escriure a la banda de la fusteta on no hi havia res escrit. M’ho va fer llegir i havia escrit: Cecília. (29)
sent me to fetch a bottle of ink. He had me hold it while with the edge of a leaf he’d dipped in it he blacked out the name of the rosebush written on a little piece of yellow wood tied to the trunk with a wire and started writing on the side of the wood where there’d been nothing written. He made me read it and it said: Cecília. (20-21) Paradoxically, this passage both foreshadows and recapitulates the circumstances of Cecília’s own naming. At the end of the text, Cecília learns that the night watchman who found her wrote her name on the paper found pinned to her clothing: her name did not come from one of her parents. Like the rose bush, whatever name Cecília had before she was “transplanted” to Camellia Street was supplanted by a name chosen by a man who seems to have known nothing about Cecília or her parents. In this scene, Senyor Jaume, Adam-like,23 expresses his authority by choosing the name of the bush. This expression of Senyor Jaume’s power is accompanied by indications of Cecília’s powerlessness. Her only actions in the passage are those that Senyor Jaume makes her do: “em va fer anar a buscar el tinter” [he made me go and find the inkwell], “me’l va fer aguantar” [he made me hold it], “M’ho va fer llegir” [he made me read it]. Cecília is here both the object receiving the name and Senyor Jaume’s instrument. Kathleen Glenn mentions the expression of ownership implicit in such scenes of naming in Rodoreda’s work (Glenn 110-111). Name-giving in her texts is not a neutral act; it carries with it the power and ownership implied in Adam’s first naming of the animals in Genesis. Rodoreda’s repetition of fer (to make or create) makes this point clear: the word means both compulsion and creation: he made me. These two naming scenes—of the rosebush and Cecília herself—are also both scenes of writing. When the night watchman names Cecília, he does so by pencilling her name on a piece of paper. Senyor Jaume uses “una cua de fulla” [“the edge of a leaf”] to ink her name onto the wooden label. Rodoreda is associating writing directly with expressions of power, more specifically, of the power of one
23 “So out of the ground Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2.19). Adam’s naming of the animals formalizes the dominion over them promised in Genesis 1.26-1.28.
62 person over another. The leaf, like Cecília, is used here as an instrument by Senyor Jaume. Here, writing is an expression of power and permanence. While Senyor Jaume is not violent towards Cecília, Rodoreda uses the language of compulsion to describe her actions. And the name he affixes to the rosebush is fixed and indelible: it is written in permanent ink on “una fusteta groga lligada a la soca amb un filferro” [“a little piece of yellow wood tied to the trunk with a wire”]. The name and the plant are permanently linked. The garden is a pen in Senyor Jaume’s hand and, at the same time, it is a book in which things are written and may be read. Later in the text Rodoreda literalizes this idea. Cecília visits the house of an eccentric elderly general with a keen interest in botany. On one visit, “se’n va anar del saló, va tornar carregat amb un llibre molt gros, es va asseure, em va fer acostar la cadira ben a la vora de la seva, va obrir el llibre per on li va semblar i, clavant un dit al mig d’una flor, va dir, ¿veu?, la mostassa” (119). [“he went out, came back with a big book, sat down, made me move my chair so it was right next to his, opened the book where he wanted to, stuck his finger on a flower and said, ‘See? That’s mustard.’” (98)] Here, the garden is literally a book in the possession of a man who points out the names of the plants to Cecília. Like the other scene, Cecília’s only action is compelled by her companion: “em va fer acostar la cadira” [he made me bring the chair over], creating a connection between names, plants and power. Again, the garden is a book, but Cecília is not the writer, she is a word on the page. Another scene between Cecília and the general solidifies the connection between books, plants and people. The general tells her “que de dalt de tot d’una llibreria havia baixat un llibre amb herbes enganxades I que em parlaria del crit de la mandragora” (122). [“how he’d gotten a book with leaves pasted in it down from the top of a bookshelf and he’d tell me about how mandrakes scream” (101)] Mandrakes, whose roots resemble a human body, are said to scream when they are removed from the ground. Like Cecília, at least metaphorically, mandrakes are both plants and humans. Despite the subcurrent of compulsion and autocratic male power, these three scenes—the naming of the rosebush and the two botany lessons with the general— are relatively benign. Senyor Jaume is not cruel to Cecília, and part of the reason he treats her like a child is that she is one. Cecília’s relationship with the older general, while odd and infantalizing, is a definite respite from the truly cruel treatment she is concurrently receiving from her lover Marc. Another scene, however, underscores the pain writing can cause. In order to leave Marc and attract a new lover, Cecília purchases a pink dress and a corset with “un dibuix que feia branques i fulles” (130) [“a design made of leaves and branches” (107)] to go underneath it. The corset makes her look like “una sirena” [“like a real vamp” (107)]. She goes to sleep in it in order to get used to it, but wakes up very uncomfortable: Em vaig despertar com si anés amb una armadura. Tenia el cos adolorit i havia somiat que m’ofegava lligada a dins d’un sac; es veu que la cotilla m’havia anat estrenyent i me la vaig haver de treure com si m’arrenqués una pell perquè la cremallera s’havia espatllat. Quan em vaig passar les mans pels costats, per reposar-me’ls, me’ls vaig trobar tan rasposos que em vaig mirar al mirall. Tenia a la pell el dibuix de les branques i les fulles de la goma. (131)
63
I woke up feeling like I was wearing a suit of armor. My body ached and I’d dreamt I was suffocating tied up in a sack. The corset had been squeezing me and I had to take it off like I was tearing off my skin because the zipper was stuck. When I ran my hands along my sides to soothe them, the skin felt so bumpy that I looked in the mirror. You could see the pattern from the elastic leaves and branches on my skin. (108) While this is not exactly a scene of writing, it is a scene where garden elements are making an inscription on Cecília’s body, marking her like the paper with her name on it and the wooden label on the rose bush. Here, the pain of the inscription is clearer: in order to be beautiful and attract a lover, Cecília must suffer a painful transformation into a plant. She feels suffocated and confined by the corset, like a woman in a sack (a reference to Gilda’s fate in Rigoletto, the opera that Cecília twice fails to see). In order to escape from the corset, she must tear at her skin, and even then the impression of the leaves and branches remains. If Cecília is, as Carme Arnau calls her, a “dona-flor” [woman-flower] or a “dona-vegetació” [woman-vegetation], she is a flower or a plant who prefers to grow outside of the garden (94). While Cecília asks for a red dress at the end of the novel, making her look like a rose, as a child a red dress was a punishment for setting fires. Senyora Magdalena explains to a curious nun how per fer-me passar el vici, com que sabien que el color vermell era un color que no m’agradava, m’havia fet un vestit vermell, que jo havia sobrefilat les costures, i que el dia que l’havia estrenat havia corregut escales amunt, m’havia tancat a la torratxa i anava d’una banda a l’altra mig boja, de paret a paret. (33)
to break my bad habit, since they knew I did didn’t like the color red, she’d made me wear a red dress and forced me to hem the seams, and the first day I put it on I ran upstairs and locked myself in the tower, where I paced around like I was crazy, from side to side. (24) This passage associates the red dress with fire—when she wears it, her adopted parents call her “la flama” (33) [“the flame” (24)]—but it also resembles the lone rose Cecília sees at the nursery. Like the suffocating corset, the rose-red dress makes Cecília feel imprisoned in her own skin. Near the end of the novel, when Cecília is finally sitting in the Liceu opera house clothed in her red dress, she feels out of place: “Allà dintre no hi havia res que fos meu i a fora hi havia els carrers i l’aire” (197). [“There was nothing of mine inside there and outside there were streets and air” (166)] One hundred sixty pages after we learn of her childhood hatred of red dresses, Cecília is still a rose seeking to escape the garden walls. Even the height of postwar privation, Cecília would still rather be free than comfortably confined. After going hungry as a street prostitute, Cecília finds a lover who offers her food, comfort and security in his home. Yet, after a while, Cecília realizes she would prefer to “fer senyors per la Rambla” [“work the Rambles”] than stay confined to Cosme’s house: Vaig començar a sortir cada tarda perquè no podia més. Em feia por. I enyorava fer senyors per la Rambla. Passejar a les tres de la matinada i mirar
64 el rellotge del Liceu i tocar la paret del carrer Vermell i la reixa del parc. (100)
I started going out every afternoon because I couldn’t stand it anymore. And I felt like working the Rambles again. To walk around at three in the morning and look at the clock on the opera house and touch that wall on Red street and the iron gate outside the park. (82) Cecília wants the freedom to wander and to touch the gate to a park. These three places: the opera house, carrer Vermell and the park gate form a habitual circuit for Cecília, a circuit associated with freedom. The first time she makes this circuit, she is planning to ask an official to release her first lover, Eusebi, from prison: Un dia vaig anar a parar davant de la reixa del parc, i em vaig aturar plantada de cara al verd, sense poder entrar, tot i que el verd em calmava. Un altre dia em vaig ficar en un carrer molt estret amb tot de roba estresa que regalava d’aigua. Amb prou feines si es veia el cel. Però vaig pensar que l’Eusebi encara en veia menys darrera de la seva reixa. A l’entrada hi havia una casa amb la paret qui feia panxa enfora i hauria donat qualsevol cosa per veure-la caure. Era el carrer Vermell i em va quedar clavat a la memória. (71-72)
One day I stopped at the gate to the park and stood there looking at the trees and grass, unable to go in even though all that greenery soothed me. Another day I went down a very narrow street with lots of washing hung out to dry and dripping water. You could hardly see the sky. But I thought how Eusebi could see even less through his bars. On the corner was a building with bulging walls. I would have given anything to see it cave in. It was Red Street and it stayed fixed in my memory. (58) The park, like the garden of Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena, has a reixa, a grille or wrought-iron fence. Reixa also means bars, like the bars of a prison. The word thus links the gated garden with the real prison that confines Eusebi. Cecília does not mention why she cannot enter the park, but her association of the reixa of the park with “la seva reixa,” Eusebi’s bars, implies that she thinks of the gated park as confining. And after all, Cecília is first found outside a garden gate, found and named by a man who specializes in being outside of gates, the night watchman. From the very beginning, Cecília is associated with being an outsider, someone on the margins. The wall of carrer Vermell, Red Street, hearkens back to the image of the dirtless cactus at the beginning of the novel. Like the wall on carrer Vermell, the wall that supports and secretly nourishes the cactus also “feia panxa” [bellied out], but did not fall. Both walls are figures for strength in adversity. The wall in which the dirtless cactus grows gives it the nourishment it needs to grow higher than the garden gate. The bulging wall on carrer Vermell also provides a kind of nourishment, giving Cecília the strength to be free. It is on carrer Vermell that Cecília begins her work as a street prostitute, and where she longs to return after being confined in Cosme’s house. Cecília’s desire for freedom, however, is really the desire to retrace her steps, to search for her “roots.” The two times she runs away from Senyor Jaume and
65 Senyora Magdalena’s garden she does so in order to find her father. The first time she leaves, it is after having a vision of her father’s face. On the street, she encounters “un ocell blanc amb la cresta de color de rosa, el bec endintre, cap al coll, i una pota lligada amb una cadena de llautó” (18). [“a white bird with a pink crest, his beak turned inward toward his neck and one claw tied to a brass chain” (11)] The colors of this chained bird echo the colors of the rosebush that Senyor Jaume will later plant in the garden and name after Cecília. On the bush the “rosetes eren rosades, feien poms, però eren d’un rosa que tirava a blanc en les més obertes” (29). [“The roses were pink, in clumps, but the pink was whitish in the oldest ones” (20)] The bird Cecília encounters—an animal chained in a garden—is thus an image for her own situation, her own self. At the end of the book, the reader learns of another caged bird who does not want to be free per se, but wants to be free to return to his original home. The night watchman who found Cecília as an infant tells this story from her childhood that the reader has not encountered before. He specifically associates Cecília and this bird, a link already created at the beginning of the text when Cecília encounters the chained bird. He speculates that Cecília’s mania de fugir em venia d’aquell ocell que quan l’havíem canviat de la gàbia de caçar-lo a la gàbia de viure s’havia passat dos dies i dues nits, burxa que burxa, amb el bec entre ferro i ferro per eixamplar-los i fugir. L’havien trobat de panxa enlaire amb el cap damunt del zenc i el voltant del bec moll de sang. (209-210)
urge to run away had come from a bird that, when we’d transferred it from the cage where we’d trapped it to the cage where it was going to live, had rammed its head between the bars for two days and two nights to push them apart so it could fly away. They’d found it lying belly up with its head on the metal floor and its beak covered in blood. (177-178) The bird, transferred, like Cecília, from one home to another, has a suicidal desire for freedom. Kept in by metal bars, like the garden gates that keep Cecília in, the bird strains to escape. Cecília, too, strains and rages against her cage. She fears being caught running away because “me les trobaria a sobre i em tancarien perquè no em pogués tornar a escapar, i que em moriria tancada encara que piqués amb els punys i amb els peus. I que morta i plana mai més no podria anar a buscar el meu pare” (17). [“the next thing I knew they’d grab me and lock me in my room so I couldn’t run away again and I’d die locked up, pounding on the door and kicking it. And once I was dead and buried, I wouldn’t be able to look for my father” (10)] The bird is only frantic to escape after having been transferred from the first cage, in which it was originally caught, to the second, in which it will live. Similarly, Cecília desires freedom not in order to have new experiences, but rather to find something—a home, a parent—that she had previously lost. At the end of the book, the night watchman asks her what she has done with her life. She considers responding that “l’havia passada buscant coses perdudes i enterrant enamoraments” (214). [“I’d spent it searching for lost things and burying dead loves” (182)] Cecília’s search for her roots is ultimately unsuccessful. Instead of learning about her origins, Cecília’s searches lead her to forge connections between herself
66 and other people and objects in a horizontal, synchronic network of meaning. Over the course of the book, objects and people become substitutes for one another as a search for one object leads to her finding another, which she subsequently loses and searches for. Instead of learning about her past, and thus creating a diachronic and vertical relationship between herself and a root or origin, Cecília herself and the objects and people that are important to her stand as substitutes or symbols of one another; every person and object is also a symbol or substitute for something else, meaning that in the universe of El carrer de les Camèlies, there is no originary object or person that is the referrent of all of these symbols. In this text, people and objects form a circulating network. The first time Cecília runs away, she does not find the father she is looking for, but she does find a chained bird. Later, she goes in search of the chained bird, which she is also unable to find. The second time she runs away she goes to the opera to observe the musicians, since her neighbors on Camellia street speculate that her name—Cecília is the patron saint of music—and her long fingers indicate that her father is a musician. She does not manage to see the musicians, but she is escorted home by a family friend, Maria Cinta, and her lover. On the ride home, Cecília recalls that “li vaig ficar una mà entre l’americana i l’armilla, ben amunt per sota del braç, i l’hi vaig deixar allà dintre. I la mà i jo estàvem bé” (25). [“I stuck my hand between his jacket and his vest, way up under his arm, and left it there. And the hand and I both felt good” (17)] Cecília does not find her father, but she finds a man who is father-like, who “feia olor de fum de fumar i olor d’olor” (25) [“smelled of tobacco smoke and cologne” (17)] with whom she can create the fantasy of an affectionate moment with a father. The next time she travels in a car, she recreates this scene alone: “I tot el camí vaig tenir la mà ficada el seient i el respatller i figurava que sentia el olor de fum de tabac” (35). [“all the way I kept my hand between the seat and its back and imagined I was smelling tobacco smoke” (26)] Much of Cecília’s searching and wandering, then, has at its root not just the desire for escape, but the desire to return to previous experiences and to find again various objects that are ultimately connected to her parents. A hairpin serves as a figure for this tendency of symbols to circulate in the text. The pin is a polyvalent symbol, incorporating a cascade of associations with important people in Cecília’s life. It is “un passador amb tres estrelles de brillants” (39), [“a pin with three diamond stars” (30)] that Cecília asks for and receives as a gift from her first lover, Eusebi. Cecília’s possible mother is associated with a hairpin: Senyora Magdalena recalls that “una dona vestida de negre, amb un passador que li brillava en els cabells, s’havia aturat unes quantes vegades a mirar el jardí . . . Aquella dona duia una criatura de bolquers a coll, que devia ser jo” (14). [“a woman dressed in black with a shiny hairpin had stopped and looked in their garden a few times . . . the woman was holding a baby who must have been me” (7)] The three stars on the pin link it to other instances of stars in the text and, from there, to the people the stars symbolize. Cecília associates her father, for instance, with stars because she first sees his face in a vision that includes them: “encara desperta, havia vist caure del sostre una pluja d’estrelles de tots colors I entre tantes estrelles, molt esborrada, havia vist la seva cara” (17). [“while I was
67 drifting off to sleep, I saw a shower of stars in all the colors of the rainbow falling from the ceiling, and among them I saw his face, looking very blurred” (10).] Cecília herself is also associated with stars. Standing at the window of the house on Camellia Street, she sees “una estrella molt grossa cap a la banda de les muntanyes. El senyor Jaume es va acostar, va mirar cap on jo mirava i em va dir que era l’estrella brilladora, la meva” (26). [“a huge star above the mountains. Senyor Jaume came up close, looked where I was looking, and said that was the brightest star, mine” (17).] Her star reappears on her body later in the text, when Senyora Matilde, a woman in the shantytown who tells fortunes, reads her palm: “Em va dir que no veia gran cosa perquè les ratlles de la meva mà amagaven la veritat. Fins que em va veure una estrella a la muntanyeta, i va riure” (59). [“She told me couldn’t see much because the lines of my palm hid the truth. Till she saw a star on my hand and laughed” (46).] It is ironic that the lines on Cecília’s hands “amagaven la veritat”: she and others are constantly looking at her body, particularly her hands and her ears, for clues to her true parentage. The “ratlles” (lines) on her hands that conceal the truth are thus aligned with the line of text pinned to her when she was found: they assign a name to the baby, a name that was chosen not by her parents, but rather by the night watchman who found her. While the scene with the fortuneteller is ambiguous,— why does the “estrella a la muntanyeta” make her laugh?—it is clear that her discovery of the star changes her impression of Cecília’s fortune. After she sees it, she is able to read Cecília’s cards and make concrete and accurate predictions about her future. The hairpin with three stars, combining as it does figures for Cecília’s mother, father and herself, a symbol for her connection to them, assumes totemic importance in the text. When she was working as a street prostitute, she [Va] començar a buscar per la barraca. No sabia què buscava. Hi havia alguna cosa que em feia falta per respirar i que jo no sabia què era ni on era. Vaig trigar hores a saber-ho, però quan se’m va acudir em va semblar que ho havia subut tota l’estona sense adonar-me que ho sabia, com si tingués un tros de cervell adormit. El que buscava era el passador de les estrelles. (80)
began to look around the shack. I didn’t know what I was hunting for. There was something I needed to breathe and I didn’t know what or where it was. It took me hours to remember, and when I finally did, it was like I’d known it all along without realizing it, as if part of my brain was asleep. I was looking for the hairpin with the stars. (65) Cecília needs something “per respirar” [“to breathe”], a contrast with the corset scene, in which she finds that something is suffocating her. In both cases, though, she is looking for freedom. Cecília at first cannot forge the mental connection between her desire or restlessness and the hairpin. When she realizes that she is looking for it, she is able to connect with “un tros de cervell adormit” [a part of the brain that is asleep]. Her subsequent search for the hairpin leads her unconsciously to the building where Maria-Cinta lived. As with the scene in the shack, Cecília must realize that she has arrived at her building, to connect her present to her past. When she goes into the building, she does not find Maria-Cinta, but rather is reunited with Paulina, an old friend who had worked as a maid for the neighbors of Senyor Jaume
68 and Senyora Magdalena. Even when it is absent, the hairpin both symbolizes and literally creates connection, enabling Cecília to find Paulina again. The hairpin, like several other objects in the text, is associated both with connection and substitution. Cecília substitutes her own hairpin for her mother’s, the feeling of her hand between the seat and the back of the car for the sensation of her hand in a man’s vest, the affection of Maria-Cinta’s lover for the affection of her father. Objects, and even people, enter into circulation in the text, one a substitute for another. After Cecília leaves the home of Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena, they find Cecília’s hairpin and associate it with her so strongly that it begins to assume, for them, almost magical properties. The night watchman recalls, Un dia es van barallar per un passador, que devia ser el que m’havia regalat l’Eusebi, i després se’l prenien i se l’amagaven, i era com si es pensessin que el qui el tingués em podria fer tornar estrenyent-lo fort. (210)
One day they had a quarrel over a hairpin, which must have been the one Eusebi’d given me and then they’d taken and hidden it, and it was like they thought that whoever had it could being me back by squeezing it. (178) Like Cecília, her adoptive parents invest the hairpin with the ability to connect them to others, to communicate. In a sense, Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena are right to invest this pin with so much meaning and power: Cecília is attracted by the hairpin and at several points in the book goes in search of it, and because both Cecília and the couple assign so much meaning to the pin, it does connect them. A hair pin is, of course, a fitting symbol of connection. Like the compass in John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” which symbolizes the connection between two lovers, one of whom must travel (the foot that “must obliquely run” (34)) and the other who stays at home (the “the fix'd foot” (27) whose “firmness makes my circle just” (35)), a hair pin connects two separate legs at a single point. The hair pin, a passador in Catalan, from the verb passar (to pass, as in through a space or the passage of time), symbolizes the circulation of meaning into which objects and people enter in El Carrer de les Camèlies. Another pin, which appears at both the beginning and the end of the text, also symbolizes connection. As a baby, Cecília is found with the words Cecília Ce scrawled on a piece of paper, which was attached to her clothing with a safety pin, an imperdible. Unlike the passador, which may pass from hand to hand, the imperdible attaches Cecília to her name permanently: the word imperdible means “unloseable.” Those who find her assume that Cecília’s parents pinned the paper to her, and as such that the paper holds important clues to her parentage. A neighbor, “que es fixava en tot, el va fer adonar que Cecília estava més ben escrit que no pas Ce. I això volia dir que la persona que havia escrit el meu nom no l’havia pogut acabar d’escriure perquè es veu que quan escrivia Ce la mà li tremolava, que ho havia escrit plorant” (12). [“who never missed anything, pointed out that the ‘Cecília’ was clearer than the ‘C.’ Which meant that whoever had written my name couldn’t finish it because she was crying and her hand shook when she tried to write” (6)] The neighbor cleverly reads the
69 clues offered by the paper pinned to Cecília to tell a plausible story about the circumstances of her abandonment24. At the end of the text, however, Cecília, and the reader along with her, learns that instead of being a link to her parents, to her roots, her name was in fact chosen by the night watchman in homage to a girl he once loved: I aleshores va callar una bona estona, i va rumiar i va tornar a riure… Em va dir que el nom me l’havia posat ell. Que quan era petit estimava molt una nena veïna que es deia Cecília. Sempre estava malalta i es va morir. El dia que se la van endur per enterrar-la, la seva mare va sortir al carrer desesperada amb els ulls vermells de plorar, va estirar els braços i va cridar dues vegades: ¡Cecília, Cecília! Mentre em canviava de graó va pensar que m’haurien de posar un nom i que seria bonic que em digués Cecília Cecília. (217)
Then he kept quiet for a while, thinking about something, and he started laughing again. . . . He told me he’d named me himself. That when he was a kid he’d been madly in love with a girl named Cecília. She was always sick and finally she died. The day they took her away to be buried, her mother came out of the house frantic, with her eyes all red from weeping, and spreading her arms she cried “Cecília, Cecília!” While he was shifting me from one step to the other he thought they ought to give me a name and wouldn’t it be nice if it was Cecília Cecília. (185) Cecília is named after a dead girl, and as such is entered into a circuit of desire and longing, of substitution. The imperdible symbolizes her permanent entrance into this circuit. Names are usually not unique and thus link their bearers with others who have or have had that name. Naming thus enters a person into the world of polyvalent symbols. Underscoring her lack of roots, we learn here that Cecília was intended to have her own first name as a last name: Cecília Cecília is not part of any family tree. Many years later, the night watchman explains why the “Cecília” is more clearly written than the “Ce”: “Va escriure una vegada Cecília i quan ho anava a tornar a escriure van obrir una finestra d’una revolada I es va espantar. Li va caure el llapis I no va poder trobar-lo” (217). [“He wrote Cecília once and when he was about to write it again a window flew open and he got scared. He dropped his pencil and couldn’t find it” (186) ] The night watchman was not crying as he wrote the name: he was frightened. Fear at a loud sound caused him to drop his pencil and leave Cecília’s second name unfinished. The neighbor’s interpretation at the beginning, as astute as it is, is quite wrong. The beginning and end of the text, which give us different facets of the circumstances surrounding the discovery of Cecília, highlight the failure of both reading and writing. The neighbor fails to read the correct information on the paper, and the night watchman fails to write Cecília’s intended name completely. In El carrer de les Camèlies, this failure is fecund. Without binding roots, without a complete name, and with ambiguous clues to her identity, Cecília’s identity is not fixed. She is free, like the symbol of the passador, to circulate.
24 In the Catalan, the person whose hand supposedly shakes is not identified as male of female.
70 Everyday objects and names form a circuit or network of symbols. More traditional memorial objects, that is, objects purposely chosen as mementos, also enter into this circuit. One such memorial object is a stone that Cecília picks up to memorialize a baby she aborted. While she is living in the shantytown and working as a street prostitute, Cecília finds herself pregnant. Senyora Matilde “[es] va fer avortar només amb una branqueta de julivert per fer passar l’aire” (78). [“Gave [her] an abortion with just a sprig of parsley to let some air in” (63)] Senyora Matilde, who also tells fortunes, is an intermediary between the present and the future and between life and death. She performs abortions using an ancient technique and, in other circumstances, would probably also be a midwife. She is thus also the one who presides over the fetus’ burial. Cecília recalls, La senyora Matilde em va dir que havia fet un sot una mica lluny de les barraques i que a la nit ho havia anat a enterrar ficat a dintre d’una galleda. Havia abocat la galleda i després ho havia ben colgat de terra i al damunt hi havia posat una pedra molt grossa i una de molt petita per saber on ho havia enterrat i perquè cap gos no ho pogués desenterrar. Vaig anar lluny de les barraques i no vaig veure cap pedra grossa ni cap pedra petita juntes, però vaig agafar una pedreta qualsevol i me la vaig ficar en el portamonedes. (78- 79)
Senyora Matilde said she’d dug a hole a little outside the shantytown and gone at night with it in a pail to bury it. She’d dumped it out of the pail and packed down the earth and then put a big stone on top with a little one on it so she’d know where it was buried and no dog could dig it up. I walked out that way and didn’t see any big stone with a little one on top of it, but I picked up any old stone and dropped it in my purse. (63-64) Senyora Matilde places a small stone on top of a large one both as a marker and as protection, so that the grave is not disturbed by dogs. While the grave is doubly marginalized, since it is located in an imprecise place on the outskirts of a shantytown, which is itself on the outskirts of the city, Senyora Matilde says she has given it a human burial, with care and ceremony. But when Cecília goes to visit the grave, she cannot find it. A grave carries with it the promise of fixity: that a person is really dead and that they are in this place and no other. In this case, Cecília’s inability to find the grave implies several possibilities and no definite answers. Perhaps Senyora Matilde was not telling the truth about the burial, or perhaps Cecília went to the wrong place (there may be more than one place “una mica lluny de les barraques” [“a little outside the shantytown”]), or perhaps a dog was able to move the stone. In the absence of definiteness, Cecília chooses “una pedreta qualsevol” [“any old stone”] and puts it in her purse. The “pedreta” becomes a portable memorial, a representation of her baby that Cecília can put back inside her, or in her purse, to carry with her. Unlike the hairpin with the stars, the particular stone that Cecília picks up does not reappear in the novel. Other stones, however, do appear and the meaning that Cecília has given to this stone attaches to them as well. Near the end of the novel, Cecília meets an ex-lover, Cosme, on the Rambles. When they were together, Cecília had a miscarriage. When he comes close to her, “sentia un pes a l’estómac
71 com si m’hagués empassat una pedra” (200). [“[She] felt a weight in [her] stomach like [she’d] swallowed a stone” (169)] The stone she had previously put in her purse has reappeared in her stomach. Cosme mentions the child she miscarried while they were together: Sempre que em mirava veia aquella criatura morta abans de temps, que ens lligava perquè havia sortit de nosaltres, I quan es va adonar que era per sempre adéu Cecília, havia fet fer per un amic seu un dibuix de color sèpia d’una nena una mica grandeta; li havia explicat com la volia, amb els cabells arrissats; li havia demanat que sota el dibuix hi posés el meu nom amb lletres boniques. I deia que, per una mena de misteri, aquella nena del dibuix que no era enlloc s’assemblava una mica a mi; com si en el dibuix, jo, que havia estat la seva dona, m’hagués convertit en la sevia filla . . . La pedra m’anava pesant a dintre de l’estómac. (200-201)
Every time he looked at me he’d see that girl dead before her time who tied us together because she’d come from both of us, and when he realized it was goodbye forever Cecília he’d had a friend do a sketch in sepia of a little girl; he’d told him how he wanted her, with curly hair, sitting down, and he’d asked him to print my name in pretty letters under the drawing. And he said that through some kind of mystery the girl in the drawing looked a little like me, as if I, who’d been his woman, had become his daughter in that sketch . . . That stone kept getting heavier inside my stomach. (169-170) The portrait Cosme commissioned makes Cecília herself a substitute for or symbol of the daughter she miscarried. Cecília is already named for a girl who died young, and thus Cosme is extending the symbolic network of desire and longing to another generation: Cecília is both named by the night watchman for a girl a generation older than her who died, as well as merged with the image of her own dead daughter. Like the moment when the night watchman names Cecília and when Senyor Jaume names a rose bush “Cecília,” this is another scene of naming, in which a man bestows the name Cecília. In this text, naming takes place in writing and puts people and objects into symbolic circulation. The stone in Cecília’s stomach, itself already a symbol of a dead child, grows heavier with the new symbolic weight of the portrait. Cecília and the stone are now linked. Stones appear elsewhere in the text in what is at first a confusing context. Cecília has lunch with an old general she meets in a café, where she is intrigued by his claim that “la seva ánima estirava les dels morts” (117). [“his soul attracted dead spirits” (96)] He says he goes to funerals of people he does not know in order to attract them. The general himself, as a collector of souls, is associated with the dead and the underworld. His apartment, likewise, is linked to death and the past. Even though it has many windows, it is still dark. Inside, the general has an empty birdcage and a tapestry depicting a medieval scene. Cecília is intrigued by the tapestry and notices in particular that “a terra, en un tou d’herba, hi havia una pedra que semblava un ou a dins d’un niu” (119). [“on the gound, in a clump of grass, there was a stone that looked like an egg in a nest” (98)] In this house of death, the egg, a symbol of new life, is a stone. The symbolism of the stone gains a new dimension here: Cecília’s dead children are like stone eggs, symbols of arrested life. The
72 general’s empty birdcage stands open because he let his birds go free, but the empty cage may also be a home for the bird that never hatched from the stone egg. The next time Cecília visits the general, she returns to the tapestry and the stone egg, cementing the importance of the image and preparing the reader to pay attention to the relationship between stones and birds. Before this visit, Cecília had had a bad experience with men in her apartment building—in an elevator they try to unbutton her blouse, and she stamps on one of their feet with her heel—and she is relieved to be at the general’s house: “Vaig entrar al pis del general com si entrés al cel i mentre m’esperava en aquell saló tan gran em vaig acostar al tapís a mirar la pedra del niu i la vaig tocar” (126). [“I entered the general’s apartment like it was heaven and while I was waiting in his huge sitting room, I went up to the tapestry to look at that stone in the nest and I touched it” (104)] Despite the strangeness of the apartment and the darkness, it is a place of refuge for Cecília. Contrary to other places she has lived and visited, she is not a prisoner there: the general’s birdcage is open. In certain ways, it is like a return to childhood, with the general lecturing her about different plants. But, again, unlike her childhood, she is not a prisoner, the cage is open. Cecília says she came to the general’s apartment “com si entrés al cel” [“as though I was entering heaven”]. The apartment is a refuge from the sordidness of her life, but heaven is also a place for the dead. There, she touches the image of the stone in the nest, a symbol of memory of the dead. At this point in the text, it is not clear why Cecília would be fixated on this stone egg, and the reader is thus primed to pay attention to other instances of stones. At the end of the text, the night watchman relays a story from Cecília’s childhood that the reader (and perhaps also Cecília) had not been aware of. I have already cited part of that story in order to make clear the symbolic link between Cecília and the birds in the text. The final lines of that story forge clear links between Cecília, birds and stones. The night watchman recalls that Cecília’s passion for running away came from a caged bird she had had as a child who died by bashing its head against the bars of its cage in its desperation to return to its first cage. Cecília recalls that after the bird died, “Jo em vaig endur la gàbia buida al costat del llit, hi vaig ficar una pedra i deia que a dintre de la pedra hi havia l’ocell. Es veu que era molt estranya” (209-210). [“I kept the cage beside my bed with a stone I’d put in it, saying the bird was inside that stone. You could see I was very odd” (177-178)] When, many chapters earlier, Cecília saw the stone in the nest in the general’s tapestry, she was attracted to it at least partly because it brought back this childhood memory. This late passage definitively ties together the bird and stone motifs. As I mentioned above, the night watchman makes clear the relationship between Cecília’s experiences of imprisonment (and desire for freedom) and the image of the caged bird. The final sentences shed light on the mystery of the stone egg at the general’s house. Cecília keeps “la gàbia buida” [the empty cage] next to her bed, but the cage is not entirely empty. In it is a stone, and in the stone, the young Cecília said, is the bird. Like the “pedreta” she carries to remember her aborted baby, the stone in the cage is a concrete memento of something dead. That the stone contains the bird is paradoxical: birds fly, they are in a way defined by their ability and desire to fly, and stones are immobile.
73 This network that Rodoreda creates, in which people and objects participate in a circulation of meaning, bears a resemblance to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “the rhizome.” Rhizome is a botanical term for a root structure that has no central taproot, but rather “sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its length” (“Rhizome”). In the introduction to Mille plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari contrast the book-as-tree model with the “rhizomatic” text. Whereas the book-as- tree is hierarchical, with a central stem and branches, a rhizome-text is “fait de plateaux, communiquant les uns avec les autres à travers des micro-fentes” (33). [composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across micro- fissures” (22)] None of these plateaus is more or less important than another, and thus a rhizomatic text does not lead anywhere. Rather, it keeps concepts in free circulation: Contre les systèmes centrés (même polycentrés), à communication hiérarchique et liaisons préétablies, le rhizome est un système acentré, non hiérarchique et non signifiant, sans Générale, sans mémoire organisatrice ou automate central, uniquement défini par une circulation d’états. (32)
In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. (21) This description of a rhizomatic text fits well, at several levels, with the structure of El carrer de les Camèlies. The symbols I have traced above do not lead to a center, to a central idea. They are polyvalent and in constant circulation. A bird, for instance, symbolizes Cecília, yet Cecília herself stands in for other absent women. The reader of Rodoreda’s text cannot follow the thread of symbolism to get to a central message of the text, and everything that is symbolized is also in turn a symbol for something else, as Deleuze and Guattari say of the rhizome, “n’importe quel point d’un rhizome peut être connecté avec n’importe quel autre, et doit l’être” (13). [“any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (7)] These multiple connections between symbols in the text do not lead to any fixed referent. The rhizome, because it is non-hierarchical and connected at multiple points, is resilient. A non-rhizomatic plant with a central root can be killed if that root is severed. The rhizomatic plant is unthreatened if a piece of its root system is cut off: “Un rhizome peut être rompu, brisé en un endroit quelconque, il reprend suivant telle ou telle de ses lignes et suivant d’autres lignes” (16). [“A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (9)] This quality of the rhizome recalls the miraculous dirtless cactus that blooms in Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena’s garden: “Un hivern de neu la terra es va gelar i el cactus es va morir de mig en avall i el tros que va quedar de mig en amunt va viure” (9). [“One snowy winter the ground froze and the bottom half of the cactus died, but the top half lived” (4)] The analogy between the dirtless cactus and the rhizome is not perfect: the cactus is not rhizomatic and survives not because it was able to continue to grow along the other lines of its root system, but rather because its central root was able to nourish itself on mortar “d’amagat” (9).
74 [secretly] Yet the larger idea—of a plant that can withstand and flourish even when a part has been severed—is the same. A central, if not the central, characteristic of the rhizome is its radical connection: each part must be connected to all the others. This enables the rhizome to survive when its parts are severed. In El carrer de les Camèlies, as well, we see radical connection at several levels of the text25. As I have mentioned above, one of the most important objects in the text, the passador with three stars, is a symbol of connection. This passador not only holds hair in place but also connects Cecília to her mother and father, and to her adopted parents. On the narrative level, Cecília remembers her story by the events that are linked to it in time, not in terms of cause and effect. With regard to a story about how she and her neighbor Paulina wore homemade eyeliner in public, Cecília mentions, “de tot això me’n recordo molt bé I ho explico perquè va ser el dia que vaig tornar a veure l’Eusebi” (54). [“I remember all this so well and I’m describing it because that was the same day I saw Eusebi again” (42)] In Cecília’s universe, there is no cause and effect. Memories can only survive by being connected one to another. Yet, like the rhizome, the system of symbols in El carrer de les Camèlies has what we might call redundancy: each symbol is multiply connected to the others, the better to survive a loss. Near the end of the text, a disconnection of one kind makes another kind of connection possible. When Cecília meets her ex-lover, Cosme, on the street she is wearing a red beaded dress she’d had made especially for a visit to the opera, though she finds herself happier out on the Rambla under the lime trees. When she encounters Cosme, she doesn’t recognize him; he looks “que acabés de sortir d’un cementiri” (199). [“like he’d just escaped from a graveyard” (168)] As he speaks to her of their child that she miscarried, she pulls away from him: “Vaig enretirar-me. La faldilla em tibava i es devia haver trencat algun serrell.” (200) [“I pulled away. My skirt stretched and one of the strings of beads must have snapped.” (169)] Later, after falling asleep in the dress at home, she collects the beads. The sentence describing this moment is stretches over the divide between chapters 49 and 50: Hi havia tot de granets escampats pel llençol i els vaig començar a espolsar mig d’esma . . . Semblaven anissos…
L … com els que em donava el vigilant quan jo era petita. (203-204)
There were beads all over the sheet and I absent-mindedly started brushing them off . . . They looked like aniseed.
L
25 This emphasis on community and connection is also a central component of Rodoreda’s most famous work, La plaza del Diamant. Joan Resina explores the theme of connection in that text in his book Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity.
75 . . . Like the aniseed the night watchman used to give me when I was little. (171-172) This is a model at the sentence level of the way the text is structured by contiguity and connection. First, instead of connection, we have breakage. The beaded string on the dress is broken, and the granets spill onto the bench and later onto the bed. Yet, separated from the dress, the beads look like aniseeds, reminding Cecília of the aniseeds she received as a girl. Cecília’s breaking away from Cosme, and the literal breakage of the beaded string, jog her memory, creating a connection between the granets on the dress and the aniseeds of her childhood. The broken string and the loose seeds even connect one chapter to another. Chapter XLIX ends with an ellipses, and chapter L begins with one. The three dots are separate, like those granets, but nonetheless link one chapter to another. A single sentence interrupted by an ellipses links the two chapters. The Catalan word for bead, gra (here it is granet, a small bead), is also the word for grain, as in seeds. Thus the beaded dress that Cecília wears to the opera is also a seeded dress, linking her yet again to the plant world and linking a symbol of femininity—a lovely dress—to the plant world, as the patterned corset did eighteen chapters before. When Cecília, in her seeded dress, encounters Cosme, he reminds her that the baby they created together “ens lliga[ ] perquè havia sortit de nosaltres” (200). [“Tie[s] us together because she’d come from both of us” (169)] Meeting Cecília again, Cosme also wants to link her with death. They are connected by a dead baby and he himself looks “que acabés de sortir d’un cementiri” (199). [“like he’d just escaped from a graveyard” (168)] In pulling away and breaking the thread on her dress, Cecília severs those connections in favor of one relating to life, as she associates the loose granets with aniseeds. In this scene with Cosme, Rodoreda creates a tension between a connection with the dead and a connection with life. This tension illustrates two competing monument or memorial models in the text. One one side everyday objects and people become concretizations of memory, referring to one another in ceaseless rhizomatic circulation. Objects and people become monuments for and to one another. Thus the stone is the baby, and the baby is also Cecília (in Cosme’s portrait), while Cecília is also the bird who rebells against his cage and that bird, in turn, is a stone that young Cecília places in the empty cage. These monuments are in motion, alive. In addition to these small, circulating monuments, El carrer de les Camèlies also treats the traditional monuments found in the cemetery. The cemetery is a significant space in the text: Cecília visits it with her first lover, Eusebí, then returns to it in a nightmarish vision. Both the general and the night watchman also discuss their visits there. Unlike the first set of monuments, the ones found in the cemetery do not circulate. They are fixed in the ground. The cemetery offers a place, but only one place, for a visitor to provoke memories of the past and the dead. Yet even though the tombs are stationary markers, the dead souls they represent are mobile. In El carrer de les Camèlies, “els morts no eren al cementiri” (209). [“dead people don’t stay put” (177)] Instead, dead souls become dancing flames, leaving their bodies and bones behind. Cecília frequently thinks about something Eusebi told her when they were children, that flames come from the bones of the dead, and that you can see them at night in the
76 cemetery. 26Later, when she is trapped in the home of a lover, Eladi, she remembers those flames as she takes a mental trip to the underworld, or what Carme Arnau calls her “viatge . . . <
I stared at the folds in the curtain in that half light and all of a sudden the folds smoothed out and I started seeing the cemetery. The shadow began to get bigger, like it was growing out of the ground, till it hid the curtains from top to bottom and side to side. Eusebi and I were kids, everything was misty, there were niches half covered by cans of yellow and purple pansies. From time to time you could see folds in the curtains which twisted the things in front of them. (129) The curtain is a portal to the cemetery. In this passage, the cemetery is not a single place on the edge of the city, but is always there, one with the city, lying underneath or behind everyday objects. Eladi’s bedroom and the cemetery are not different places: Cecília can see both the folds of the curtain and the cemetery at the same time. In this text, the metropolis and the necropolis are one place.
26 Rodoreda is likely referring to will o’the wisps or, in Catalan, focs follets. They are pale lights observable in swamps, thought to be produced by the gasses caused by organic decay ("Ignis Fatuus”).
77 In her vision of the cemetery, Cecília goes in search of her roots: “L’Eusebi i jo ens enfilàvem a les escales negres amb rodes i les sotraguejàvem per fer-les anar endavant; era difícil perquè pesaven massa, però jo volia veure si a les parets dels nínxols hi havia noms que comencessin amb C” (156). [“Eusebi and I climbed some black ladders on wheels and shook them to make them roll forward; it was hard because they were so heavy, but I wanted to see if there were any names beginning with C on the wall with the niches” (130)] The wheeled ladders recall library ladders, and thus the cemetery becomes an archive in which Cecília might find some record of herself, though she is unsuccessful. Later in Cecília’s vision, “hi havia flames que corrien desesperades perquè no trobaven els ossos d’on havien sortit” (156). [“Some flames were running around frantically because they couldn’t find the bones they’d come out of” (130). Like Cecília herself, who searches the niches for “els ossos d’on havi[a] sortit,” [“the bones [she’d] come out of”] the dead do not only leave the cemetery, they can leave and not find their way back. The image of “flames . . . desesperades” [frantic flames], souls unable to find their bodies, recalls the tragedy of mass graves. A mass grave has no headstone, no fixed place where a body is linked to the name on the stone. Even when they are exhumed, mourners may find it difficult or impossible to identify exactly which bones belong to a loved one. The cemetery at Montjuic (which Cecília visits in her vision) is home to a mass grave of about 4,000 Republicans called El Fossar de la pedrera [The Grave of the Quarry] (“Fossar de la Pedrera”).27 In this vision, the souls of the dead are “frantic” because they have been separated from their place in the ground, their permanent resting place. Cecília’s personal tragedy of not knowing her mother and father is linked here with the collective tragedy of the Republicans and Catalans after the war. While, following Halbwachs, a collective cannot remember something all by itself, being only a “collective framework” for individual memories, individuals can add their recollections to the collective and thus change the framework. Here, Rodoreda’s insistence upon the existence of these “flames . . . desesperades,” who have no official tombstones to commemorate them (and thus are, in official memory, forgotten), also demands their inclusion in the collective memory. Yet despite the horror of separating the souls of the dead from their bones, later in the text Cecília imagines a more positive aspect of the mobility of the dead. In her conversation with the night watchman, she thinks, M’agradaria . . . que en el nínxol després m’hi fiquessin a mi, amb els seus ossos arraconats perquè hi cabessin els meus, I potser a la nit seríem una flama I faríem el boig pels caminets del cementiri i per sota d’aquells pensaments de llauna pintada de groc i de morat, o bé estaríem tancats i quiets a dintre del record d’una persona. (213)
I thought I’d like to be put in the same niche, with his bones pushed aside so mine could fit too, and maybe at night we’d be one flame and go crazy in the
27 That the Republic mass grave is called a “quarry” implies a rich relationship between the motif of stones in El carrer de les Camèlies and collective mourning during the postguerra.
78 cemetery lanes and under those cans with the purple and yellow pansies, or else we’d keep still, locked inside someone’s memory. (181) Whereas previously Cecília is like the unhappy flames desperate to find their bones, in this passage she imagines choosing the bones she belongs to. Instead of searching for her niche, she imagines deciding to share a niche with the night watchman. Indeed, the night watchman is a fitting father-figure for her. Like Cecília, he is also literally a person on the margins, who stands outside of the gate to keep watch. He gave her her name, entering her into a circle of substitution, loss and desire. Yet the name he gives her is rootless: his incomplete naming leaves Cecília free from a family name and a history. She will never find her own name on a cemetery niche because she has no family name. While this fact causes her pain and loss, it also leaves her free and unbounded, able to choose her own family. Unlike bones under the ground, the flames can merge into one. The flames follow the first model of monumentality I mentioned above: they are mobile and able to connect. The flames, instead of standing separate like the gravestones or the niches, create connections and community between people. After telling Cecília that “els morts, amb el temps, fugen del cementiri” (213) [“after a while the dead leave the cemetery” (181)], the night watchman mentions that “els morts feien un núvol d’amor” (213). [“all those dead souls made a cloud of love” (181)] As flames capable of merging, they can connect to form a unified, loving community. The unfixed flames have freedom that the bones do not. They can merge, and they can also “f[er] el boig pels caminets del cementiri.” [“go crazy in the cemetery lanes”] Yet they only have this freedom when they are not “quiets a dintre del record d’una persona.” [“still, locked inside someone’s memory”] Being remembered, it seems, can paralyze the flame, the soul of the remembered person. Yet this ability of another’s memory to quiet a flame shows that the living and the dead are connected. The memory of the living influences the dead, not just the other way around. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the discourse in El carrer de les Camèlies about monumentalizing can be understood in relation to the situation of Catalan culture in the postwar reign of Franco: a culture in exile, a culture perhaps looking backwards, a culture that may be prostituting itself by accepting oppression during an economic boom. And thus Rodoreda’s two models of monuments, which we might think of as the rhizome model and the cemetery model, are as much about monumentalizing Catalan culture as about monumentalizing individual losses. In an interview with Montserrat Roig, a Catalan author a generation younger than her, Rodoreda spoke of writing in Catalan in exile as “el mateix que voler que floreixin flors al Pol Nord” (168). [The same as trying to grow flowers on the North Pole]. Her statement makes a clear link between language, specifically writing, and flowers. This is a traditionally Catalan metaphor. The jocs florals, a literary contest first celebrated by Occitan-speaking troubadours and then revived during the nineteenth century Catalan renaixença, awards flowers as prizes. Since 1923, couples in Catalunya have exchanged books and roses on the Dia de San Jordi. Flowers are a metaphor of life, growth and the future, while at the same time a link to past Catalan culture.
79 When we encounter flowers in El carrer de les Camèlies, then, we can also think of language and culture. Flowers, after all, are “cultivated.” Rodoreda takes this traditional metaphor from the jocs florals, which link flowers and language, a step further by thinking not just of the flowers themselves but also of their context. Like Senyor Jaume’s garden, where “l’aire no hi venia de la manera que les [vares de Jessè] haurien volgut per estar contentes,” (28) [“The air wasn’t right and . . . [the tuberoses] weren’t happy there” (20)] flowers do not always thrive in the gated garden. Some of them, like the dirtless cactus at the beginning of the novel, struggle to scale the garden wall. Similarly, Rodoreda herself is far from the gated garden of Catalan culture. The flowers she grows are outside the garden walls. There is in this text, then, a tension between within and without. Between things that are fixed or trapped and things that are free. We see this tension between flowers confined within the garden gates and those outside, and between the fixedness of the cemetery and the fluidity of both the flames of dead souls and the rhizomatic symbol system Rodoreda creates. A cemetery is like a garden of planted people, but the seeds never grow. As a child, Cecília seized on this idea: Preguntava si quan enterraven les persones també els enterraven el cap, i m’aguantava el cap com si tingués por que em caigués a terra. I aquella mania em va durar molt de temps . . . deia que no volia que m’enterressin el cap, que les cames i els braços tant em feia, però el cap no. (210)
I asked . . . whether when people were buried they buried their heads too, and I held onto my head like I was afraid it would fall off. And that nuttiness lasted a long time . . . I kept saying I didn’t want them to bury my head: that I didn’t mind about my arms and legs, but not my head. (178) Cecília, a dona-flor, does not mind being planted, transferred to the garden of the cemetery, but she needs her head above ground so she can continue to grow. The promise of the cemetery is fixedness: it promises to fix a person, a soul, in a particular place underneath a stone. And on that stone is inscribed, indelibly and permanently, the name of the person underneath. This fixing of people (and animals) in a certain place, as with Cecília’s longing to leave Senyor Jaume’s garden and the bird that bashes his head against his own cage, involves violence. Naming, the fixing of a label on a person, also, in this text, involves a certain violence insofar as it is an expression of power of one person over another. The scene in which Senyor Jaume names the rose bush is one of coercion. This makes the cemetery, a place where bodies are fixed in the ground and names etched in stone, a place of violence, or at least one of restriction. Cecília, who had an incomplete name pinned to her with an imperdible manages to sidestep this imprisonment of a name, a history and the closed garden gate. Yet Cecília, as the protagonist and, arguably, the heroine of the novel, stands as an ambiguous symbol for Catalan culture and its position towards its own history, to monumentality. On the one hand, Cecília is the dirtless cactus at the beginning of the text. She is able to survive in exile from her own history and finds her sources of nourishment in crumbling cement. Over the course of the novel she goes from passive victim to active participant in her own life, eventually acquiring the material comfort, if not the love, that she needs.
80 On the other hand, she is a prostitute, a somewhat damning image of Catalan culture. At the time the text was written and published, Spain was emerging from postwar economic misery into a period of greater prosperity. This enabled not only tourists from abroad but also Catalans themselves to overlook or accommodate themselves to Franco’s oppression for immediate material benefit. The pernicious side effects of this prosperity are a plot point in Alain Resnais’ film La Guerre est Fini, in which young revolutionaries seek to damage the nascent tourist industry through bombings. Like Cecília, Rodoreda seems to be saying, Catalans are prostituting themselves by accepting material prosperity at the cost of their own autonomy. In addition to her problematic line of work, Cecília is also unable to live in the present. She is fixated on finding her roots, her parents, making her life a search for something she will never find. The text, though it proceeds chronologically, can hardly be said to move forward. The plot only moves forward accidentally, as Cecília’s failed search for something from her past brings her to new experiences. Cecília’s inability to have a child can be seen in this light. A child is literally a way to move forward, to create a new generation. Cecília replaces her baby with a stone, which sits heavily in her stomach. Like the stones in the cemetery that promise (but fail) to keep the dead in one place, Cecília’s preoccupation with the past denies her a future. Several aspects of Cecília’s character imply that she is already dead. By the end of the novel, she is living in a house with stone flowers, like a funerary monument, as Senyora Matilde predicted: “Va dir que viuria en una casa amb roses, no a les finestres, sinó a dalt de les finestres, unes roses que no serien roses; que serien com les estàtues de les persones, estàtues de rosa. I que una nit, al costat d’una morta viva hi veuria un home trist” (59). [“She said I’d live in a house with roses, not in the windows but above the windows, roses that wouldn’t be roses but statues of roses, like statues of people. And how one night I’d see a sad man beside a dead woman who was alive” (46)] Whereas in her vision in Eladi’s apartment an angel “em volia donar un ram de flors de pedra,” (156) [“tried to give me a bouquet of stone flowers” (132)] inducting her into the world of the dead, here she has her own stone flowers. Given the preponderance of live flowers in the text, the stone flower becomes a symbol of petrified life. Senyora Matilde mentions “a dead woman who [is] alive,” an apt description of Cecília, a living woman who is also very close to the world of the dead. Inside the house with the stone roses, Cecília acquires a collection of angels: Vaig anar comprant més àngels i els feia dur tots a la torre. En tenia d’alts i de baixos, amb tirabuixons i amb els cabells estirats, amb una copa a la mà, amb una palma, amb un raïm. M’agradava entrar en el meu dormitori a les fosques, amb la llum de celístia que venia de la finestra, i em feien una mena de por que més aviat era una companyia. Com si s’haguessin de posar a dir el meu nom baixet. Però callaven drets i corcats i sense poder volar. (194)
I kept buying angels and having them delivered to my house. I had tall and short ones, with curls and straight hair, with goblets, palm branches, and grapes in their hands. I liked to go into my bedroom in the dark, with the
81 starlight streaming through the window, and it scared me in a way that sort of kept me company. As if they were whispering my name. But they were silent, stiff, worm-eaten, earth-bound. (163) Cecília’s crowd of angels makes her bedroom into a cemetery. Significantly, these angels are for sale: Cecília’s newfound riches enable her to make this cemetery- bedroom. The angels, like the stone in place of the bird are paradoxical: they are images of flight, transcendence and mobility that are nonetheless “silent, stiff, worm-eaten, earth-bound.” These statues, silent and unliving as they are, are a source of company for Cecília, who spends most of the text quite alone, focused on the past and the dead. Finally, Cecília’s actions in the world greatly resemble what the night watchman says of the activities of the dead: “vas pels carrers com una ànima en pena I fas el que feies quan eres viu” (209). [ [you] wander through the streets like a ghost doing what you’d done when you were alive (177)] Cecília, similarly, retraces her steps, searching for lost things and revisiting places. The text as a whole is narrated backwards, reflecting Cecília’s tendency to look backwards instead of forwards in time. For instance, when she tells of running away to visit the opera as a child, she begins at the end of the story: “Com la bufanda blava que el senyor Jaume es posava al coll al primer fred i no es treia fins que venia la calor, jo duia una bufanda de febre, ampla i flonja, que m’ofegava . . . Els remeis em marejaven i em cremaven” (21). [“Like the blue scarf Senyor Jaume put on at the first sign of cold weather and didn’t take off till spring, I had a scarf around my neck that nearly choked me . . . The medicine burned going down and made me groggy” (13)] The chapter describing her trip to the opera begins with a description of the suffocating bufanda de febre (“fever scarf”) she has to wear and the medicine she must take because she became sick after running away. After she describes her illness, Cecília finally says, “Tot per culpa d’haver-me escapat de casa per anar al Liceu” (21). [“All because I’d run away and gone to the opera” (14)] Her description of her trip to the opera—deciding to go over the garden wall, her walk to the Rambles, the opera itself and then finding Maria Cinta and her lover outside of the café—is narrated simultaneously with Cecília’s later experience of being ill: “Els dies que havia tingut més febre, amb una mena d’ulls que se m’havien fet per dintre veia el put blau I les plomes grises dels que guardaven l’entrada” (23). [“Those days when I had the worst fever, I imagined the blue shirt fronts and gray feathers on the guards at the entrance” (15)] We are reading not Cecília’s narration of her trip to the opera, but rather the memories of it she savors as she is at home with a fever. The end of the novel, following this theme of retracing, ends just where Cecília’s history begins, with the night watchman who found her. The very last lines of the novel recount the night watchman telling his wife he’d found “una nena com un gatet que es diria Cecília” (218). [“a girl like a kitten whose name was going to be Cecília” (186)] For Cecília, this would seem to be a happy ending. She and the night watchman laugh together, and she feels younger: “Tot era més gran i jo més petita . . . Em va mirar d’aquella manera que semblava que no mirés i es va posar a riure. Jo també vaig riure i era com si m’anés tornant petita” (215). [“Everything was bigger and I was smaller . . . He gave me a kind of look like he wasn’t looking and then started laughing. I laughed too and it was like I was getting younger and younger” (183)] She literally feels like she is going back in time.
82 Yet if there is a message in El Carrer de les Camèlies, it is that looking backwards is not the way forward. Rodoreda valorizes the book’s rhizomatic system of monuments, in which both people and objects have multiple connections with one another and are in movement, over stationary, “earthbound” monuments like gravestones and the stone angels that stand above them. Even the dead “no eren al cementiri” (209). [“don’t stay put” (177)]. The rhizomatic system is horizontal: the roots spread out rather than burrow down vertically, the way a taproot would. The rhizomatic symbol system forges connections horizontally rather than searching for a root, an origin, that is in the past. This means Rodoreda valorizes the here and now, the connections between members of the community right now, over a morbid tendency to look to, or even to live in, the past, an understandable tendency for oppressed Catalans under Franco. Over the stationary cemetery, Rodoreda favors the growing garden. Language itself is perhaps the ultimate rhizomatic symbol system. Words, like the symbols in El carrer de les Camèlies, form a dense, horizontal network of connections, growing and changing and forging connections between speakers. And language, like Cecília’s pedreta, is portable. It is hard to write in Catalan from exile, as hard as “growing flowers on the North Pole,” but it is possible. Rodoreda brought her language with her and carefully insured its continued survival, even in foreign soil28. And language, of course, a medium of communication, creates community among its speakers and readers while at the same time offering speakers a degree of freedom or privacy. The links Cecília forges between words and objects are specific to her, and thus language binds her to the rest of the community, but not so tightly that she cannot reserve private meanings. By virtue of putting these meanings into a published text, Rodoreda grafts these private meanings into the larger “rhizome” of language and memory, modifying it. The community language creates is not necessarily related to one’s “roots.” After all, Cecília, who is ignorant of her heritage, is Catalan because she speaks Catalan, not because she was born of Catalan parents. As Joan Resina observes, “Language is the communal space par excellence, where meaning is nothing if not the shared symbolization of experience” (126). The way objects and people function in El carrer de les Camèlies may be precisely expressed as “the shared symbolization of experience,” a living connection between members of a community. At the end of the text, the night watchman offers Cecília, and the reader, a companion image to the “cactus sense terra:” I tirant-se una mica endavant em va dir: ¿no te’n recordes del llimoner? I va ser com si el veiés. Una nit, quan jo tenia sis o set anys, el vent li havia esqueixat una branca i de bon dematí m’havien fet anar a buscar ràfia a asa
28 Rodoreda is celebrated for her large vocabulary in Catalan, especially for flora and fauna (Roig 171). In an article about Rodoreda for El País, Gabriel García Marquez wrote, “Un escritor que todavía sabe cómo se llaman las cosas tiene salvada la mitad del alma, y Mercé Rodoreda lo sabía a placer en su lengua materna.” [A writer who always knows what things are called has saved half of his soul, and Mercè Rodoreda knew how to name in her mother tongue as well as anybody] Marques, who treats the tragedy of forgetting the words for simple things in Cien años de soledad, makes clear the relationship between simply knowing the names for things and saving the soul of both of an individual person and a culture.
83 de l’estorer per lligar la branca i per embolicar-li la ferida. Ell i el senyor Jaume havien apuntalat la branca amb una forca i, fent forca, l’havien anat ajuntant a la branca grossa. Es van estar molta estona agafats a la forca, esperant, i jo no tornava, i quan vaig tornar no duia la ràfia . . . El senyor Jaume em volia matar. Sort que havia passat el nen d’uns veïns i l’havien enviat a comprar la ràfia i havien pogut embenar la branca, ben lligada a l’altre. I la branca va viure i feia unes llimones amb tant o més suc que les de les branques que no havien patit… (212-213)
And leaning forward a little, he asked “Don’t you remember the lemon tree?” And it was like he could still see it. One night when I was six or seven, the wind had cracked a branch and early the next morning they’d sent me to buy raffia at a shop which made straw mats so they could tie the branch and and bind the wound. He and Senyor Jaume had steadied the branch with a pitchfork and pushed it up near the thicker branch. They’d stood there for a long time holding that pitchfork and waiting for me to show up and when I finally came back I didn’t have the raffia . . . Senyor Jaume was ready to kill me. Luckily some neighbor’s kid had passed by and they’d sent him to buy the raffia and had managed to to bind the branch and tie it to the other one. And the branch survived and bore lemons as juicy or juicier than the ones on the branches that had always been okay. (180-181) Like the dirtless cactus, the branch of the lemon tree is interrupted, broken. But instead of the bottom dying off, as happened to the cactus, the community comes together to repair it, to “embolicar-li la ferida.” [“bind the wound”] No one person could save the branch; several people needed to work together. Cecília gets distracted on the way to the raffia shop, but even her individual failure can be overcome by another member of the community, the way a broken piece of the rhizome does not endanger the whole plant. The tree creates community, binding them together as they bind the tree, and it is saved by the whole community. As in Halbwach’s formulation, the collective memory (symbolized by the tree) and individual recollection mutually support and create one another. The fruit of the lemon tree have “tant o més suc que les de les branques que no havien patit.” [[are] juicy or juicier than the ones on the branches that had always been okay] If the tree is a figure for Catalan language and culture, then it can be repaired to produce wonderful “fruit,” but only with the participation of the whole community. The night watchman tells the story of the lemon tree after explaining it had been bulldozed after Senyor Jaume and Senyora Magdalena died. Yet it remains in memory, in one person telling the story to another, and in the pages of Rodoreda’s text. It is up to individuals to repair, nourish and augment the collective memory.
84 Conclusion: The Home, the Map, the Garden and the Monument
All three of the books in this dissertation are about a search for roots and origins. Cecília in El carrer de les Camèlies spends the novella searching for her roots, for her family, but ends up discovering that her particular roots do not lead her back in time to her origins, but instead connect her to the rest of her living community, to those who are alive and accessible to her, not dead and gone. Rodoreda’s text is a living monument garden, emphasizing the hardy, rhizomatic aspects of both memory and the community it helps to bind. For Perec and Kofman, a search for roots or origins is part of what it means to write a memoir. Kofman’s search for the answer to herself is accomplished through literal and figurative journeys that take her out of her home to the street and out of the text into other intertextual realms like the work of Freud and Hitchcock. Similar to the path along a Möbius strip, these excursions to the exterior lead inside. And thus the intersubjective space, a space I call the home, she creates with the reader allows her greater access to her own private depths. For Perec, his search for roots is his search for his own memories, which he cannot recover in a satisfying way. Instead of finding some relic, some original memory, he discovers—or at least communicates to the reader—how fragile, fallible and self-created memory is. Even the ones we think we feel sure of, Perec tells us, and upon which we build our identities are more fragile than we may wish to think. In W, Perec creates a series of personal landmarks that, in their “fragile intersection”, create a map of Perec’s memories, both accessible and inaccessible (prier d’insérer). In different ways, all three of these texts emphasize that the past is something constructed in the present. As Halbwachs says, “the past is not preserved, but reconstructed on the basis of the present” (On Collective Memory 40). The past, or the memory of it, is built by the author at the time of writing. It can be tragic to know that the past is self-created: Cecília never gives up the hope of learning who her parents are, and Perec and Kofman’s books are suffused with pain and mourning for people who, as Kofman writes, “m’a ‘lachée’ avant que je puis me décider de l’abandonner” (9). [“‘let go of’ me before I could bring myself to give it up”] The “real” past is inaccessible. Yet the constructedness of memory bears a liberating gift even as it takes away a comforting and cherished illusion: one can construct oneself. The absence of a parent, or parents, or memories does not mean that one is forever incomplete, or without roots that link to the rest of the community. Memory is not permanently located in other people, who may die and take memory with them. Because memories are constructed and recorded in the present, they cannot be lost. Thus, because memory does not have a fixed location, circulation is a guiding image in all three texts. For Perec, memory is constructed as a movement through paths in space, from one node to another as a tourist might navigate through a city by going from landmark to landmark. In El carrer de les Camèlies, memory and meaning in general cannot be fixed: they are always in circulation, a moving target. No object or person is the final referent or location of meaning. For Kofman, memory is created by movement through intersubjective space, a space between one’s own home and another’s, symbolized by her walk from Rue Ordener to Rue Labat via rue Marcadet.
85 In the Introduction, I wrote that thinking of these texts, and texts like them, as textual monuments helps us answer the question of why they emphasize space and are marked by formal innovation. Because these texts treat the search for roots and memory, they are already working against straight chronology, since the narrators are creating a dialogue between present and past that necessitates looking both backwards and forwards. This problematic, or at least unusual, relationship with time creates what Kestner calls a “secondary illusion” of space, since when we step out of textual chronology, we are creating atemporal narrative space (9). And thus these texts emphasize space because they must step outside of forward chronology. Yet these texts are not simply memoirs, or, in Rodoreda’s case, the story of a woman’s search for her parents. Each is also a critical meditation on memory and monumentality themselves. All three books, for instance, have important scenes in cemeteries, offering the reader a chance to consider the ways traditional monuments do, and do not, foster or encourage memory. Because these texts consider monuments critically, the potentially inherent spatiality of the memoir becomes purposeful, with the authors as mindful architects of their work. Perec, Kofman and Rodoreda’s texts are formally innovative. Perec employs interleaved text and nonstandard typography and formatting to create a textual space that fits his project. Kofman’s intertextual excursions and complex employment of chapter breaks (among other techniques) to do the same. Rodoreda uses backwards narration to create a new kind of textual space. Neither Perec, nor Kofman, nor Rodoreda incorporate the “secondary illusion” of space uncritically; the metatextual aspect of their texts allows them to consciously shape an appropriate textual monument. The analysis in this dissertation opens the door for investigation of the broader theoretical implications of twentieth century textual monuments. My considerations of narrative space bridge ideas of poststructural apophasis and narratological ideas of textual space from people like Bakhtin and Frank. In an apophatic approach to language, as put forth by Derrida and others, language refers only to itself and not to some originary meaning that lies behind it. Certain things—perhaps many things— are unsayable in language and thus a discourse of nothingness, of the space figuratively between the words, is as close as a writer may come to saying something. Such an apophatic discourse is a discourse of emptiness, or space, and thus may be amenable to narratalogical approaches to textual space. Perhaps instead of reading just the words, we might also read the spaces they create. Emphasizing the monumentality of text also points towards a common concern with space and circulation in both textual monuments and the physical monuments that were their contemporaries. Le Corbusier, Moholy-Nagy and Pingusson’s emphasis on the experience of the visitor and the space he or she occupies bears striking similarity to the ways in which Perec, Kofman and Rodoreda structure their texts, perhaps suggesting a common intellectual trend for both textual and physical monuments. We often envision a monument as something fixed and monolithic, but for Kofman, Perec and Rodoreda, the space within their textual structure is the most important part: it is a dynamic space within which meaning may circulate, a space the reader can explore and co-create, and a space where the past and the present
86 can meet. Textual monuments expand what both text and monument can be. They expand the possibilities for text because they emphasize the spatiality of text and, more generally, its quiddity. A book is a thing, a literal thing you can hold in your hand and a structure formed of narrative. And thus a text can subtly and complexly both convey and encourage a memory at the level of content, and at the same time, at the level of form or structure, speak in a metatextual way about memory practices and the nature of memory as such. Texts like these also expand the possibilities for a monument. We need not think of monuments as merely pieces of stone in plazas, or even as literal spaces one may visit. In different ways, Perec, Kofman and Rodoreda emphasize that memory is mobile, it is in circulation. Likewise, the monuments to those memories do not need to be located in a fixed place.
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