UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title LIterature, Representation, and the Image of the Francophone City: Casablanca, Montreal, Marseille Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9nj845hz Author Jones, Ruth Elizabeth Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Literature, Representation, and the Image of the Francophone City: Casablanca, Montreal, Marseille A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies by Ruth Elizabeth Jones 2014 © Copyright by Ruth Elizabeth Jones 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Literature, Representation, and the Image of the Francophone City: Casablanca, Montreal, Marseille by Ruth Elizabeth Jones Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Patrick Coleman, Chair This dissertation is concerned with the construction of the image of the city in twentieth- century Francophone writing that takes as its primary objects the representation of the city in the work of Driss Chraïbi and Abdelkebir Khatibi (Casablanca), Francine Noël (Montreal), and Jean-Claude Izzo (Marseille). The different stylistic iterations of the post Second World War novel offered by these writers, from Khatibi’s experimental autobiography to Izzo’s noir fiction, provide the basis of an analysis of the connections between literary representation and the changing urban environments of Casablanca, Montreal, and Marseille. Relying on planning documents, historical analyses, and urban theory, as well as architectural, political, and literary discourse, to understand the fabric of the cities that surround novels’ representations, the dissertation argues that the perceptual descriptions that enrich these narratives of urban life help to characterize new ways of seeing and knowing the complex spaces of each of the cities. As second cities, Casablanca, Montreal, and Marseille invite comparisons to urban capitals, comparisons that, through the French language, become ii focused on Paris as an exemplary urban form. The specificity of urban detail on the micro- scale and general absence of macro-scale descriptions of the city in each of the novels questions the validity of an urban image that is dependent on comparisons with a distant center or attempts to raise a city’s profile through development. Instead, as this dissertation argues, the literary representation of each of these second cities is the basis of a way of seeing Casablanca, Montreal, or Marseille as a total environment that makes space for narrative and memory, as well as perspective and perception. The novelistic construction of subjectivity and perspective creates a fiction, or imaginary, of urban experience that responds to theorizations of the urban subject in sociology, philosophy, and architecture. In their descriptions of urban space, the novels play on the differences between a collectively formed, and officially sanctioned, image of the city and individual urban imaginaries that bring memory, perception, and atmosphere into the experience of the urban environment. iii The dissertation of Ruth Elizabeth Jones is approved. Lia Brozgal Sylvia Lavin Patrick Colelman, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 iv Introduction 1 Questions of Image 6 Memory, the City, and the Text 15 French, Francophone, and Second Cities 22 Chapter Summaries 25 Conclusion 30 Casablanca 32 A Growing Metropolis 38 Simple Past, Complex Modernities 46 Lost Voice, Lost City 61 Geometry and Modernity 72 Open Ruins 79 Conclusion 88 Montreal 92 Visions of Montreal in the 1960s 99 Context and Intertext: Critical Assessments of Maryse 108 Modernism and Representation 118 Nationalism, Postmodernism, Politics, and Memory 124 The Representational Domestic 128 Cinematic Window Frames 135 Conclusion 141 Marseille 145 Marseille's Urban History 152 Mediterranean Noir 163 Architectural Crime and Chourmo 173 Absence and Abstraction 182 City of Fragments 189 Conclusion 201 Conclusion 207 Bibliography 214 v Ruth Elizabeth Jones received her AB Honors cum laude in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College in 2006. Her publication “Looking for the Devil’s Bar: Exploring Urban Space from Montreal to Mexico City in Francine Noël’s La conjuration des bâtards” appeared in the winter 2013 volume of Quebec Studies. She has presented papers at the conferences of the American Comparative Literature Association (2014, 2013), the Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association (2012), the American Council for Quebec Studies (2012), and the American Canadian Studies Association (2013, 2011, 2009), as well as being an invited speaker at Dartmouth College (2013). She has been the recipient of the Mary and Melvin Hershenson 1933 Prize in Comparative Literature (Dartmouth College 2006), the Shirley and Ralph Shapiro International Student Fellowship, (UCLA 2008-2010), the Chancellor’s Prize Summer Mentorship Award (UCLA 2009, 2010), the Prix Jean-Cléo Godin (Centre de récherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture québécoises (CRILCQ), Université de Montréal 2013), and the Dissertation Year Fellowship (UCLA 2013-2014). vi Introduction At the end of Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, the narrator looks out from the towers of the cathedral over the medieval city on the morning of Esmeralda’s death. “Une lumière très blanche et très pure faisait saillir vivement à l’œil tous les plans que ses mille maisons présentent à l’orient. L’ombre géante des clochers allait de toit en toit d’un bout de la grande ville à l’autre.” [The pure white light brought out vividly the endless varieties of outline which its buildings presented in the east, while the giant shadows of the steeples traversed building after building from one end of the great city to the other.]1 This brief image recalls two other, much longer, descriptions from earlier in the novel. Book three of Hugo’s tragedy of Quasimodo begins with a chapter that provides an extended description of the architecture of Notre Dame, followed by another that describes in great detail the city seen from the tower heights. Woven together by the sounds of bells, this initial image of Paris becomes an extension of the space of all the scenes that follow it. In the final moment when the text looks out over the waking city, the whole of the narrative up to that point, the monument, and the fabric of the Paris established in those early pages combine to fill the second, briefer view. The text invests places that, to its nineteenth-century readers, bore the scares of successive revolutions with a renewed symbolic sense in the continuous fabric of the city’s history. The image of Paris viewed from the heights of Notre Dame is an example of the perspective that Michel de Certeau has indelibly linked with the illusion of readability: the bird’s eye view that allows a simplification of the movement and complexity of urban space.2 The effectiveness of this view rests on assumptions about its relationship to the city: it allows enough to be seen that the structure can be understood by a viewer who, by virtue the 1 Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, (Paris: Ollendorf, 1904), 417. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, trans. Walter J. Cobb (New York: Signet, 1965), 492. For all citations where both the original and a published translation are cited, the citation will take this form the first time it appears in the text. Subsequent citations of the same original and translation will list first the page number of the original, followed by a comma, followed the page number for the corresponding reference in the translation. Translations that appear in the text of this dissertation following their original and that are not referenced in this manner are my own. 2 See Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidein: arts de faire. 1 panorama this elevated perspective allows, acquires control over the space captured in the image. This mastery is an impossible goal; as de Certeau’s observations show, ground-level movements allow users to subvert the structures that the bird’s eye perspective reveals. Furthermore, when we consider that a city is the construction of layers of systems and organizations, from social structures to traffic patterns to sewers, it becomes clear that an all-encompassing view of the city is only possible through a representation that can reveal multiple layers of information. Yet the view from above remains a particular frame of urban space and the limits it defines become clear in the relationship between the view and the city captured by the panorama. In the context of nineteenth-century Paris, Hugo’s description asks the Parisian reader to reintegrate the cathedral into a monumental understanding of the city by offering Notre Dame as a way of seeing as well as a structure with meaning and history for the urban environment that surrounds it. The image also sits on the cusp of the total transformation of the city under the directive of Baron Haussmann in the 1850s, allowing the twentieth century reader, Parisian or not, to doubly temproalize this view of the city. Paris comes to Hugo’s reader through history, literature, and memory, through its 1830s form, the representation of the medieval city, and a reader’s experience of the recent past. In the context of the narrative, this particular section of text plays on the totalizing panoramic view off the narrative that precedes it, anchoring the viewer’s position in an understanding of the intricacies and mysteries of the cathedral as much as in the scene that unfolds from its height. Paris is not the subject of this dissertation, nor is the nineteenth-century novel: in the chapters that follow I will examine the twentieth-century representation of three cities that offer different examples of the varied urbanisms of the French speaking or Francophone world. Still, Hugo’s description of Paris is an important image, one relevant to the methodology and theoretical framework of my work.