Miranda, 15 | 2017, « Lolita at 60 / Staging American Bodies » [En Ligne], Mis En Ligne Le 18 Septembre 2017, Consulté Le 16 Février 2021

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Miranda Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English- speaking world

15 | 2017 Lolita at 60 / Staging American Bodies

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/10470 DOI : 10.4000/miranda.10470 ISSN : 2108-6559

Éditeur Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

Référence électronique Miranda, 15 | 2017, « Lolita at 60 / Staging American Bodies » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 18 septembre 2017, consulté le 16 février 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/10470 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/miranda.10470

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SOMMAIRE

Les 60 ans de Lolita

Introduction Marie Bouchet, Yannicke Chupin, Agnès Edel-Roy et Julie Loison-Charles

Nabokov et la censure Julie Loison-Charles

Lolita, le livre « impossible » ? L'histoire de sa publication française (1956-1959) dans les archives Gallimard Agnès Edel-Roy

Fallait-il annoter Lolita? Suzanne Fraysse

The patterning of obsessive love in Lolita and Possessed Wilson Orozco

Publicités, magazines, et autres textes non littéraires dans Lolita : pour une autre poétique intertextuelle Marie Bouchet

Solipsizing Martine in Le Roi des Aulnes by Michel Tournier: thematic, stylistic and intertextual similarities with Nabokov's Lolita Marjolein Corjanus

Les « Variations Dolores » - 2010-2016 Nouvelles lectures-réécritures de Lolita Yannicke Chupin

Staging American Bodies

Staging American Bodies – Introduction Nathalie Massip

Spectacle Lynching and Textual Responses Wendy Harding

Bodies of War and Memory: Embodying, Framing and Staging the Korean War in the United States Thibaud Danel

Singing and Painting the Body: Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins’ Approach to Corporeality Hélène Gaillard

“It’s so queer—in the next room”: Docile/ Deviant Bodies and Spatiality in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour Sarah A. Dyne

“The Presence of a Monstrosity”: Eugenics, Female Disability, and Obstetrical-Gynecologic Medicine in Late 19th-Century New York Lauren MacIvor Thompson

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Hors-Thème

Was citizenship born with the Enlightenment? Developments of citizenship between Britain and France and “everyday citizenship” implications Djordje Sredanovic

Ariel's Corner

Theater

“The Power of Emotion : A Conversation with Katherine Brook and Shonni Enelow” Conversation with Katherine Brook and Shonni Enelow Katherine Brook et Shonni Enelow

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare and Anatomy of a Suicide by Alice Birch Performance Review William C. Boles

Interview with Anna Weinstein, Series Editor of “PERFORM : Succeeding as a Creative Professional,” Routledge (2017) Interview with Anna Weinstein Chris Qualls

This is not America : Angels in America au Théâtre du Sorano, Toulouse, Novembre 2016 Entretien avec Aurélie Van Den Daele (Deug Doen Group) Alice Clapie

Poetry, Politics and Popcorn : Angels in America at the National Theatre Performance Review Alice Clapie

Film, TV, Video

Compte-rendu des journées d'étude : "Stankey Kubrick, Nouveaux Horizons". Université Bordeaux-Montaigne, Librairie Mollat, cinéma Utopia, 16 - 17 mai 2017 / Organisées par Jean-François Baillon et Vincent Jaunas Vincent Jaunas

Compte-rendu de Journée d’étude : Frederick Wiseman, « Ordre et résistance » Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, Cinémathèque de Toulouse, 19 mai 2017 /Organisée par Zachary Baqué (CAS) et Vincent Souladié (PLH) Youri Borg et Damien Sarroméjean

Conference report: 23rd SERCIA Conference: “That's Entertainment!” Spectacle, Amusement, Audience and the Culture of Recreation in the Audiovisual Contexts of English-speaking countries Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy, September 7-9, 2017 / Conference organized by Michele Fadda and Sara Pesce Fanny Beuré et Najoua Hanachi-Grégoire

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Music, dance

To the Lighthouse (1927): a choreographic re-elaboration Jean-Rémi Lapaire et Hélène Duval

Présentation publique du livre de Manon Labry, Pussy Riot Grrrls (Éditions iXe, collection Racine, 2017). Librairie Floury, Toulouse, Jeudi 15 juin 2017 Philippe Birgy

Music and thrill(er)s: an interview with American novelist Peter Farris Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

Photography

Another Walker Evans Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, 26 April-14 August, 2017 Daniel Huber

Two Bodies of American Photographic Work from the 1960s and 1970s Joel Meyerowitz: Early Works, Rencontres d’Arles, 3 July-27 August, 2017 / Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970-1983, Rencontres d’Arles, 27 May–24 September 2017 Daniel Huber

British painting

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ‘At Home in Antiquity’ Leighton House Museum, Londres, 7 juillet-29 octobre 2017 Bénédicte Coste

Recensions

Marielle Macé, Styles. Critique de nos formes de vie Jérémy Potier

Armelle Sabatier, Shakespeare and Visual Culture–A Dictionary Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard

Hélène Machinal, Gilles Ménégaldo, Jean-Pierre Naugrette, Sherlock Holmes, un nouveau limier pour le XXIe siècle. Sylvie Crinquand

Silvia Pellicer-Ortin, Eva Figes' Writings. A Journey through Trauma Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

Françoise Clary, Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River Christine Dualé

Agnès Derail and Cécile Roudeau (eds.), James Fenimore Cooper ou la frontière mélancolique : The Last of the Mohicans et The Leatherstocking Tales Wendy Harding

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Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans. Françoise Coste

Catel & Bocquet, Joséphine Baker Christine Dualé

Christine Savinel, Gertrude Stein : Autobiographies intempestives Monica Latham

Noelia Hernando Real, Voces Contra la Mediocridad : la Vanguardia Teatral de los Provincetown Players, 1915-1922 Rovie Herrera Medalle

Marie-Laure Ryan. Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu. Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative : Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Wendy Harding

Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance Jean-Daniel Collomb

Frédéric Leriche, Les États-Unis : Géographie d'une grande puissance Anne Stefani

Roy McFarlane, Beginning With Your Last Breath Eric Doumerc

Kokumo Noxid, Dub Truth Eric Doumerc

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Marie Bouchet, Yannicke Chupin, Agnès Edel-Roy and Julie Loison-Charles (dir.) Les 60 ans de Lolita Lolita at 60

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Introduction

Marie Bouchet, Yannicke Chupin, Agnès Edel-Roy and Julie Loison-Charles

1 It has been over sixty years since Lolita first appeared in its green-clad double volume in 1955 in Paris, published by Maurice Girodias (Olympia Press). During those six decades, the nymphet that Nabokov carved out of American poshlust has made her way through all the clichés of magazines and tabloids, but also through the history of literature and the history of language (one can now look up the noun “lolita” in dictionaries). Lolita has also shaped a very specific way of being a reader, mainly because of its intertextual layering which plays with the stereotypes of Romantic poetry and detective novels, and because of its very unique narrative stance and traps. This way of being a reader has in its turn influenced writers, as can be traced in the novel’s numerous ripples in contemporary literature.

2 Yet, what could one hope to say about Lolita that has not been said in six decades of criticism, annotations and commentaries ? As Brian Boyd states in his 2008 essay “Lolita: What We Know and What We Don’t,” critics have probably not yet unraveled all the threads of the delicate and intricate weave of the text: “There is much, much more we need to learn about Lolita” (Boyd 17).

3 Some light had been shed on the dark zones of the text in the third issue of Miranda1 back in 2010, but following the conference2 and events organized in September 20153 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Lolita’s publication in Paris, the French Vladimir Nabokov Society invited scholars to provide new readings or elements of research so far unknown or not yet exploited by critics. The essays in this Miranda issue renew our perspective on Lolita through three different angles: history, intertextuality, and literary posterity. The first two essays contextualize the history of Lolita’s publication, so as to contrast it with our context of reception. They are grounded on new research material coming from the archive of the French publishing house Gallimard in Paris, to which Agnès Edel-Roy and Julie Loison-Charles were granted access for the first time.

4 If Nabokov often claimed his indifference to social or political issues, his work has seldom triggered indifference among his contemporaries. In her contribution entitled “Nabokov et la censure” / “Nabokov and censorship,” Julie Loison-Charles envisions the various forms of censorship, whether they be political or moral, endured by Nabokov’s novels, from a renewed perspective. Indeed it is now established that Lolita

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was “the heroine of all censorships,” according to the novel’s first publisher, Maurice Girodias (Le Monde, July 15, 1977). Loison-Charles shows however that the banishment of Nabokov’s novels is somehow the quintessential form of their relationship to politics, since Nabokov’s works published in Russian as an émigré were forbidden in soviet Russia. Later on, the political censorship in Russia was mirrored by censorship within the émigré community, when the fourth chapter of The Gift was denied publication by Sovremennye Zapiski, because the editors disagreed with Nabokov’s vision of Nikolay Chernychevsky4 in it. After World War 2, it is with his novel written in English, Lolita, that Nabokov, now an American citizen, spurred a raging controversy over “a novel you cannot put in anyone’s hands” (Alain Nicolas, « Nabokov ou la méprise », L’Humanité, November 25, 1999). Thanks to her work on the Gallimard archive in particular, Loison-Charles reconstitutes Girodias’s long struggle against the French moral censorship, but she also focuses on the international aspects of Lolita’s censorship, and on Nabokov’s own stance, repeatedly rejecting the idea that the novel was obscene. According to him, the novel should only be judged by aesthetic/literary standards—which today’s puritan Russia still refuses to do.

5 If the novel in English met with many problems when it was published in France because of censorship, it took three years for the French version of Lolita to be published, but for a variety of different reasons. Agnès Edel-Roy retraces the stormy and tense relationship of Vladimir Nabokov with the French translator of Lolita, Eric Kahane, also the brother of Maurice Girodias, while Kahane was painstakingly and slowly translating Lolita into French for Gallimard, from 1956 to 1959. Quoting so-far unpublished exchanges between Nabokov’s agent at Gallimard, Michel Mohrt, the translator and Vladimir or Vera Nabokov, Edel-Roy presents the dramatic dimension of this triangular communication across the Atlantic Ocean, marked by threats of contract breach and complications brought about by staff shifts and postal delays. In her contribution Edel-Roy also underscores the part played by important literary figures such as Queneau, Sartre or Pasternak—a part they played more or less consciously.

6 Focusing then on the reception of Lolita, yet this time not by institutions but by academic critics, Suzanne Fraysse interrogates for the first time the practice of annotating Lolita. Indeed Lolita is Nabokov’s first novel to have been published in an annotated form, as early as 1970, with notes based on Appel’s and Proffer’s academic work5, all reviewed by Nabokov himself6, and while the notes themselves triggered various debates among Nabokov scholars, the very practice of annotating the novel has never been questioned. Fraysse argues that annotations constitute a preeminently political field where the issues of authority and legitimacy are constantly rehearsed, and in which dealing with the desire-driven narrative appears to be tricky to handle.

7 Many annotations of Lolita unveil the intertextual references carefully woven into the text’s network of patterns, and the contribution by Wilson Orozco follows one of Lolita’s referential threads, by exploring the novel’s relationship to a hypotext up-to-now largely ignored, Possessed, by Curtis Bernhardt (1947), one of the two movies Humbert actually claims he saw with Lolita7. Orozco’s paper shows how Possessed, another story of obsession and love, provides a reference that embeds the plot of Lolita and therefore creates a mise en abyme effect. His paper also unveils some striking similarities between the film and the novel, especially regarding the unreliability of the narrative source, and the importance of psychoanalytical confession in both works, from a structural and thematic point of view.

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8 As for Marie Bouchet’s paper in this issue, it provides an insight into a different type of intertextual game, as it does not focus on literary, artistic or filmic allusions, but delves into Nabokov’s integration of non-literary material taken from post-World War 2 American mass culture into the textual fabric. Thanks to the preparatory notes to the novel kept at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Bouchet not only analyzes Nabokov’s techniques of absorption of the non-literary material—production of reality effects, parody, intermedial games, puns, pattern-building—but also compares them with his more traditional intertextual practice, so as to consider anew the role of popular culture in his aesthetics.

9 Going through the intertextual looking-glass, and examining the posterity of Lolita some sixty years later, the last two papers of this Miranda issue deal with how Lolita became a hypotext for other novels published after 1955. In her article, Corjanus underlines the literary connections between Lolita and the first chapter of Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes, which focuses on Martine’s alleged rape by Abel Tiffauges. The genesis of Tournier’s book is crucial as his first chapter was first drafted in 1958, which is only three years after Lolita was published in Paris. Corjanus sheds light on lexical and stylistic similarities between Nabokov’s and Tournier’s languages, such as the male equivalent of Nabokov’s “nymphet,” the “faunlet”. Corjanus goes on to show that Tiffauges’s perception of Martine is highly reminiscent of the way Humbert sees Lolita, as Tiffauges sexualizes and solipsizes Martine. Corjanus also reveals that the two books are connected through a third text, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which weaves the intertextual references between Nabokov and Tournier even more tightly.

10 Looking at Lolita and its legacy nowadays also invites to reflect upon the impact the novel has had over 21st-century writers who drew their inspiration from what Yannicke Chupin calls the “Ur-text”. In her paper dedicated to three novels published some sixty years after Nabokov’s most famous novel—Alissa Nutting’s Tampa (2013), Amity Gaige’s Schroder (2013), and Sara Stridsberg’s Darling River, Les Variations Dolores (2011) —Chupin observes that recent rewrites of Lolita tend to veer away from the political and feminist nuances that tinted many Lolita-inspired novels in the 1990s to seize more literary elements of Nabokov’s novel, whether it be its transgressive plot, its many-layered structure, its narrative intricacies or its unreliable narrator, showing how such variety in the variations on the Lolita theme reflects the novel’s core richness and complexity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appel, Alfred Jr.. “Backgrounds of Lolita”. Triquarterly: 17 (1970): 17-40. This essay appears in a somewhat remodeled form in his introduction to The Annotated Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1995. xxxiii-lv.

Appel, Alfred Jr.. “Notes”. The Annotated Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1995. 319-457.

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Boyd, Brian. “Lolita: What We Know and What We Don’t”. Cycnos: 24, 1 (2007): 215-246. Egalement disponible en ligne. 11 août 2017: http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1079

Chupin, Yannicke. « Journée d’études « Les Soixante ans de Lolita » / “Lolita’s Sixtieth Anniversary”. Transatlantica: 1 (2015). Mis en ligne le 14 décembre 2015, consulté le 11 août 2017: http://transatlantica.revues.org/7563

Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982.

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. Preface and notes by Alfred Appel Jr. (1970). New York: Vintage, 1995.

Proffer, Carl. Keys to Lolita. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968.

NOTES

1. https://miranda.revues.org/323 2. https://transatlantica.revues.org/7563 3. https://www.vladimir-nabokov.org/association/manifestations/2016-01-25-15-09-59 4. Chernychevsky was one of the spiritual forefathers of the Leninist doctrine. 5. Alfred Appel Jr.’s “Backgrounds of Lolita”, “Notes”, and Carl Proffer’s “Keys to Lolita” (see works cited). 6. Nabokov played with the function and figure of the annotator in Pale Fire (1962) and as Vivian Darkbloom in Ada (the set of footnotes he wrote for the 1969 novel was published for the first time with the second edition of the book, in 1970). 7. “Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed… Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres” (Nabokov, 262).

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Nabokov et la censure

Julie Loison-Charles

1 Le roman le plus connu de Nabokov reste Lolita, comme en atteste la trace que ce livre a laissée dans la culture populaire (héritage visuel dans la culture manga et la mode féminine, références dans des chansons françaises ou anglo-saxonnes) et plus généralement dans la langue : une lolita, avec sa perte de majuscule symptomatique de l’antonomase, est maintenant perçue principalement comme une jeune fille à la sexualité précoce désireuse d’entamer une relation sexuelle avec un homme plus âgé. Le lien avec le roman de Nabokov est souvent rompu dans cette vision contemporaine de la nymphette et toute trace d’abus et de violence envers elle semble effacée, ou du moins passée au second plan. Pourtant, paradoxalement, c’est cette perversion qui a propulsé le roman sur le devant de la scène en en faisant ce que beaucoup nomment une « cause célèbre ».

2 Dans cet article, il ne s’agit nullement de revenir sur la grande qualité du roman Lolita sur un plan esthétique mais de mettre en lumière la manière dont il a été reçu, ou plutôt rejeté, et ce pour des raisons morales, par différentes institutions gouvernementales et judiciaires. Par bien des aspects, la réception de Lolita et sa censure sont représentatives des difficultés que nombre de grands auteurs rencontrèrent au 20ème siècle pour faire publier leurs ouvrages en langue anglaise dans les pays anglo-saxons. Ainsi, pour plusieurs d’entre eux, Paris fut la ville où leurs livres, acclamés aujourd’hui mais décriés à l’époque pour leur obscénité supposée, purent enfin voir le jour : Nabokov dut se résoudre à publier en France en passant par la maison Olympia Press, tout comme avant lui Henry Miller (chez Obelisk Press) ou James Joyce1 (chez Shakespeare and Company) ; D. H. Lawrence, lui, publia L’Amant de Lady Chatterley à Florence.

3 Pour donner un aperçu des déboires judiciaires que le roman Lolita a connus, je m’appuierai sur la correspondance de Nabokov mais surtout sur les archives Gallimard. Celles-ci, qui n’ont jamais été publiées, m’ont été rendues accessibles par M. Éric Legendre, des éditions Gallimard, et ce grâce au Professeur Maurice Couturier, chercheur et traducteur de Nabokov, notamment du roman Lolita, chez Gallimard. Mais cet article met également en perspective les différents types de censure dont a souffert Nabokov, notamment durant la première moitié de sa carrière, où il écrivait en russe.

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Nabokov et la censure en Russie

4 Avant d’être l’écrivain américain ayant donné le jour à Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov avait publié neuf romans en russe, ainsi que des poèmes et des nouvelles, entre autres. Aucun de ces écrits ne traitait de l’amour d’un homme d’âge mûr pour une jeune adolescente2, et pourtant tous furent soumis à la censure3. En effet, l’œuvre russe de Nabokov était interdite en URSS, mais cela était dû aux raisons politiques que l’on connaît : les Nabokov étaient ce que l’on appelle des « Russes Blancs » et le père de Nabokov avait appartenu au gouvernement provisoire renversé par les Bolchéviques en 1917, ce qui en faisait un opposant politique au régime soviétique.

5 Si les écrits en langue russe de Nabokov étaient interdits en URSS, ils étaient diffusés en Europe, notamment auprès des émigrés russes. Or, là aussi, Nabokov vit son art partiellement muselé pour des raisons politiques. Ainsi, le chapitre 4 de son dernier roman russe, Le Don, ne fut pas publié par Sovremennye Zapiski car, comme l’écrit Maurice Couturier, « la représentation de Tchernychevski fournie par ce texte ne correspondait absolument pas à celle qui faisait loi parmi les émigrés russes » (Couturier 1979, 25).

6 Si ce chapitre fut censuré, c’est qu’il contenait une biographie peu flatteuse de Nikolaï Tchernychevski, écrite par le narrateur du Don, Fiodor Godounov-Tcherdyntsev. Or Tchernychevski fut une grande source d’inspiration pour l’esthétique soviétique puisqu’il codifia durablement l’esthétique réaliste russe en mettant l’art au service du réel ; les Soviétiques, eux, le mirent au service du Marxisme4. L’idéologie de Tchernychevski est notamment exposée dans son roman Que faire ? (publié en 1863) et l’admiration de Lénine pour ses idées était telle qu’il intitula son propre traité révolutionnaire (publié en 1902) de la même manière, Que faire ? Paradoxalement, même si Sovremennye Zapiski était une revue littéraire assez libérale, et non affiliée à l’URSS, ses éditeurs refusaient d’écorner une figure majeure comme Tchernychevski. Dans son introduction au Don, Nabokov souligna bien l’ironie inhérente au refus de la revue Sovremennye Zapiski de publier son chapitre quatre : La principale revue d’émigrés Sovrémennye zapiski, publiée à Paris par un groupe d’anciens membres du Parti social révolutionnaire, fit paraître le roman en feuilletons (nos 63-67, 1937-1938), en omettant cependant le chapitre quatre qui fut écarté pour les mêmes raisons qui poussent Vassiliev, dans le chapitre trois (p. 219-220), à le rejeter, et cela à cause de la biographie qu’il contient : un assez bel exemple de la vie se trouvant dans l’obligation d’imiter l’art même qu’elle condamne. (Nabokov 2010, 3)

7 Dans l’extrait du chapitre trois en question, l’éditeur Vassiliev souligne que c’est la dimension antisociale de cette biographie qui le pousse à rejeter le manuscrit de Fiodor. C’est donc une raison politique qui motive ce refus et, de l’aveu de l’éditeur, aucune considération esthétique n’est pertinente : "Voici votre manuscrit", dit soudain Vassiliev, fronçant les sourcils et lui remettant la chemise. ‘Prenez-le. Il ne saurait être question que je participe à sa publication. Je supposais que c’était un travail sérieux, et il se trouve que ce n’est qu’une improvisation téméraire, antisociale et malveillante. […] Il y a certaines traditions de la vie publique russe qu’un écrivain honorable ne se permettrait jamais de tourner en ridicule. Il m’est absolument indifférent que vous ayez du talent ou pas : tout ce que je sais, c’est que brocarder un homme dont les œuvres et les souffrances ont été une

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nourriture pour des millions d’intellectuels russes est indigne de tout talent.’ (Nabokov 1937, 219-220 ; c’est moi qui souligne)

8 Les œuvres russes de Nabokov furent donc soumises à une censure politique alors que Lolita, écrit en anglais, a été interdit pour des questions de morale.

9 Cependant, les deux types de censure qu’a connus Nabokov ne peuvent totalement se diviser le long de la démarcation linguistique de sa carrière. D’une part, Lolita fut également interdit en URSS5 (qu’il s’agisse de la version autotraduite par Nabokov en 1967, d’autres traductions introduites illégalement par des éditions samizdat, ou de la version en anglais) : s’il est assuré que le roman fut interdit en raison des origines de Nabokov, et donc pour des raisons politiques qui s’appliquaient à l’intégralité de son œuvre, d’autres sources mentionnent que le roman fut interdit en raison de sa pornographie supposée. D’autre part, c’est en russe que Nabokov aborda pour la première fois la question taboue de la pédophilie, dans sa nouvelle « L’Enchanteur » (Nabokov 1986). Nabokov n’eut cependant pas à faire face à des questions morales pour cette œuvre première puisqu’elle ne fut publiée qu’après sa mort. Nabokov reconnut bien volontiers le rôle de précurseur que cette nouvelle russe avait pour son chef d’œuvre américain. Dans sa postface au roman, « On a book entitled Lolita », il l’évoquait en ces termes : a prototype of my present novel, a short story some thirty pages long. I wrote it in Russian, the language in which I had been writing novels since 1924 (the best of these are not translated into English, and all are prohibited for political reasons in Russia). (Nabokov 1955, 293 ; c’est moi qui souligne)

10 L’objectif de cette postface était de nier l’immoralité de Lolita, et donc de la prémunir de la censure. Or il est intéressant de remarquer que, dès la première page, Nabokov informe son lectorat anglophone qu’il a déjà été victime de la censure politique en russe. En pleine guerre froide, l’intention était peut-être de suggérer une similitude de méthodes peu flatteuse entre l’URSS et les milieux intellectuels de l’Ouest.

11 Car avant d’être soumis à la censure par des gouvernements occidentaux, Lolita a été victime d’un autre type de censure, celle des éditeurs.

Lolita, ou le combat contre la censure

La recherche d’un éditeur aux Etats-Unis

12 Lorsque Nabokov décide de publier Lolita, il est professeur à la prestigieuse université de Cornell aux Etats-Unis : cet emploi sort enfin sa famille d’une précarité qui a duré une grande partie de leur exil et, surtout, il donne à Nabokov une stabilité qui lui permet de se consacrer à ses deux passions, l’entomologie et la littérature. Le sujet de Lolita l’incite donc à approcher les maisons d’édition avec une demande expresse : ne publier le roman que sous un pseudonyme afin de ne pas embarrasser son université et de ne pas perdre cet emploi. Mais, comme il le souligne dans la postface de son roman, le sujet révulse les éditeurs éventuels : The four American publishers, W, X, Y, Z, who in turn were offered the typescript and had their readers glance at it, were shocked by Lolita to a degree that even my wary old friend F.P. had not expected. (Nabokov 1955, 294)

13 Le refus de publier Lolita s’explique donc par le fait que les éditeurs jugeaient immoral le sujet du roman6. Comme le souligne John de St Jorre dans son livre Venus Bound : The

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Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and its Writers, il s’agissait plus précisément d’une autocensure de la part des éditeurs : This was Senator McCarthy’s America, where crossing the frontiers of convention in any literary or artistic endeavor could easily be equated with communist subversion and the practitioner hounded into oblivion. Moreover, American publishing in the mid-1950s was still in the dark ages, constrained by legal sanctions without and self-censorship within. (De St Jorre, 120)

14 Et c’est sans nul doute un genre d’autocensure similaire qui poussa Nabokov à proposer son livre sous un nom d’emprunt, tout autant que sa lucidité, quant à ce que beaucoup percevraient dans Lolita : une perversion, non une œuvre d’art. Et selon Edward de Grazia, avocat spécialiste du premier amendement américain7, c’est ce désir d’anonymat qui compliqua la publication américaine du roman : Publication of Lolita under a pseudonym in the United Stated in 1954 would certainly have made difficult any legal defense of the novel. There would have been no apparent way for the publishers’ lawyers to present evidence of the author’s literary distinction or reputation, a matter crucial to successful defense. (De Grazia, 247)

15 En effet, dissimuler le nom de Nabokov signifiait qu’il était impossible de faire référence à ses œuvres antérieures, et donc de démontrer que l’auteur de Lolita était un artiste depuis longtemps, reconnu qui plus est, et non un pornographe à la recherche d’un succès de scandale. Par ailleurs, si Nabokov refusait d'assumer la paternité du roman, l’accusation aurait pu arguer que cela signifiait qu’il savait qu’il y avait quelque chose de douteux et répréhensible dans ce livre. De plus, de Grazia souligne que ce n’est pas nécessairement la peur de la censure qui guidait les éditeurs, mais la crainte des coûteux procès qui en découleraient : Nabokov’s Lolita could, I believe, have been successfully defended against charges of obscenity if a reputable publisher had brought it out in the mid-fifties. But the predictable legal expenses of a long legal battle to defend the novel were such that only a large and stable house, or a bold one, could have expected to publish Lolita successfully at that time. (De Grazia, 251)

16 Loin d’être stable ou même dotée d’une bonne réputation, c’est finalement la maison d’édition The Olympia Press, basée à Paris et dirigée par l’audacieux Maurice Girodias8, qui accepta de publier le roman.

L’Affaire Lolita en France9

17 Girodias était le fils de Jack Kahane, fondateur de The Obelisk Press, qui publia notamment Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer), Lawrence Durrell (The Black Book) et Anaïs Nin (The Winter of Artifice). Dans les années 1950 et 1960, trois hommes combattaient la censure littéraire dans le monde anglo-saxon : Barney Rosset aux Etats-Unis, John Calder au Royaume-Uni, et Maurice Girodias, qui publiait à Paris des ouvrages en langue anglaise. Ce dernier était connu à la fois pour la publication de littérature érotique mais aussi pour avoir accepté des auteurs dont personne d’autre ne voulait ; l’un n’allait pas sans l’autre puisque les revenus venant des ouvrages érotiques servaient souvent à financer des livres plus littéraires d’écrivains tels que Miller, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet ou Apollinaire.

18 Girodias publia Lolita en septembre 1955 mais le roman passa presque inaperçu jusqu’à ce que l’écrivain britannique Graham Greene déclare, dans le Sunday Times de Noël

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1955, qu’il s’agissait d’un des trois meilleurs romans qu’il avait lus cette année-là. En réponse, fin janvier 1956, le rédacteur en chef du Sunday Express, John Gordon, dénonça Lolita en ses termes : « the filthiest book I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography. » (De Grazia, 259) D’autres personnalités de la scène littéraire ou des journalistes prirent parti pour ou contre le roman10, et le Home Office (ministère de l’Intérieur britannique) aurait fait pression sur le ministère de l’Intérieur français : la Brigade Mondaine rendit visite à Girodias dans ses bureaux d’Olympia Press en 1956 et demanda à prendre vingt-cinq livres pour les consulter, dont Lolita. Le 25 décembre de cette même année, un arrêté signé du ministre de l’Intérieur Jean Gilbert-Jules tomba : ces vingt-cinq livres étaient interdits à la vente et à la publication, et ce, en vertu de l’article 14 de la loi du 29 juillet 1881 sur la liberté de la presse. Or, comme Girodias le souligne dans son introduction à son édition de 1959 de Lolita (Nabokov 1959, 6), cette loi ne peut normalement porter que sur les écrits politiques ; par ailleurs, elle ne concerne que la presse, comme son nom l’indique, et non les livres, comme le rappelle Couturier (2011, 123).

19 Girodias décida d’intenter un procès au gouvernement français et publia en avril 1957 un pamphlet, L’Affaire Lolita – Défense de l’écrivain. Nabokov refusa de prendre part au pamphlet ou au procès, car il ne souhaitait pas se mêler de la « lolitigation », ainsi qu’il l’appelle dans une lettre à Girodias en mars 1957 (Nabokov 1991, 210). Comme Nabokov l’explique à Jason Epstein, rédacteur en chef de Random House, dans un courrier en date du 20 février 1957, défendre en France la publication de son roman en anglais n’est pas essentiel pour lui puisque sa publication en français y est assurée : I wish, of course, to give every possible support to Olympia, though personally I do not care if the ban will be lifted or not, since Gallimard is going to publish the French translation anyway. (Nabokov 1991, 203)

20 Girodias remporta son procès contre le gouvernement puisque, le 14 janvier 1958, le tribunal administratif annula l’interdiction prononcée par le ministère de l’Intérieur. Cependant, avec l’arrivée au pouvoir de De Gaulle en mai 1958 et les difficultés présentées par la guerre d’Algérie, le pouvoir de l’Etat se renforça et, lorsque le ministère de l’Intérieur fit appel de la décision du tribunal administratif, le conseil d’Etat confirma l’interdiction des vingt-cinq livres, dont Lolita, dans une décision en date du 17 décembre 1958. Cette fois-ci, le texte de loi invoqué était l’article 14 de la loi du 16 juillet 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse.

21 A partir de fin décembre 1958, donc, le roman Lolita publié par Olympia Press était de nouveau interdit. Or, en avril 1959, la version française du roman, traduite par Eric Kahane (le frère de Girodias) parut, mais elle n’était, elle, pas soumise à cette interdiction. Girodias s’appuya sur cette contradiction pour intenter un nouveau procès contre le gouvernement ; il demanda des dommages et intérêts, cette fois en arguant que le principe d’égalité des citoyens avait été violé. Le 21 juillet 1959, après que Girodias eut accepté de retirer sa plainte, le ministre de l’Intérieur leva l’interdiction portant sur Lolita, mais pas sur les vingt-quatre autres ouvrages.

La censure de Lolita dans le reste du monde (ou presque)

22 De nombreux autres pays ont opposé résistance au roman : le 22 juillet 1959, Claude Gallimard fut informé que des exemplaires de Lolita avaient été saisis dans trois librairies de la région de Constantine en Algérie (archives Gallimard) ; la Belgique interdit le roman entre le 15 février 1960 et le 28 mars de la même année11 et, dans sa

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lettre ouverte en date du 11 mars 1960 adressée au ministre de l’Intérieur belge, M. René Lefebvre, Girodias mentionne que le seul pays où le roman est encore interdit (à part la Belgique donc) serait la Birmanie, puisque la censure en Argentine a finalement été levée (archives Gallimard, Girodias, 11 mars 1960). Les pays anglo-saxons ne furent pas en reste puisque l’Australie interdit le roman en 195512, le Canada en 1958, et la Nouvelle-Zélande en 1960. En date du 13 novembre 1956, Nabokov informa Jason Epstein que Lolita aurait été interdite aux Etats-Unis et au Royaume Uni en lui transmettant une coupure de presse stipulant : OLYMPIA PRESS BANNED TITLES Practically all English titles printed by Olympia Press in Paris (sorry, we cannot give the address) have been banned in England and America. Latest to be banned by U.S. Customs is ‘Lolita’, a new novel by Vladimir Nabokov, which was called ‘one of the best novels in 1955’ by Graham Greene in The Sunday Times. (Nabokov 1991, 193)

23 Mais les choses ne sont pas tout à fait claires, pour le Royaume-Uni par exemple. En effet, si l’on en croit les annotations de Dmitri Nabokov sur les lettres de son père Vladimir, le roman ne fut pas interdit (Nabokov 1991, 198) ; c’est également ce qu’écrit John Calder dans The Garden of Eros : The Story of the Paris Expatriates and the Post-War Literary Scene : « British Customs, surprisingly, cleared the book. » (Calder, 198) Mais, selon d’autres sources, le Home Office ordonna aux douanes britanniques de saisir tout exemplaire entrant au Royaume-Uni (Capon et Scott), ce qui dura jusqu’en 1957 ; Graham Greene écrivit d’ailleurs à Nabokov en janvier 1957 : I thought Lolita a superb book + I am now, as a director of a publishing firm in England, trying to arrange its publication. In England, one may go to prison, but there couldn’t be a better cause! (Nabokov 1991, 198)

24 Cependant, ce n’est qu’en 1959 que Lolita parut au Royaume-Uni chez Weidenfield & Nicholson13 : en effet, les éditeurs attendaient la promulgation d’une loi, the Obscene Publications Act (De Grazia, 261 ; De St Jorre, 147-148), comme George Weidenfield l’expliqua à Nabokov le 28 janvier 1959 : we should not publish before this new bill has become effective. […] Under the new bill not only will literary merit be taken into account in deciding the fate of the book but the defence will be able to call witnesses to testify to the book’s merits. (Nabokov 1991, 279)

25 Aux Etats-Unis, il n’y eut jamais de procès, même si certaines bibliothèques interdirent la présence de Lolita sur leurs étagères (De Grazia, 269). Par contre, pour ce qui est des douanes américaines, elles saisirent bien quelques ouvrages en 1956 mais ne donnèrent pas suite (Nabokov 1991, 194), ce qui rassura Girodias comme Nabokov quant à une publication américaine. Le 23 mars 1957, Nabokov écrivit à Ivan Obolenski pour le remercier de son intérêt pour publier Lolita mais qu’il préférait attendre les résultats du procès français ainsi que l’opinion de la Cour Suprême qui statuait à ce moment-là sur la question de l’obscénité (Nabokov 1991, 211-212). Le 24 juin 1957, le verdict de la cour suprême fut rendu dans la décision Roth versus United States ; elle allait par la suite être convoquée pour protéger toute production ayant la moindre importance ou valeur, qu’elle soit littéraire, artistique ou sociale ; c’était donc une décision majeure dans la lutte contre la censure : During the next several decades American artists and writers and their publishers, producers, exhibitors, distributors, and managers would base their struggle to gain freedom from censorship upon the premise established in Roth that artistic expression was meant to be protected as fully by the First Amendment as were religious and political expression. (De Grazia, 321)

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26 Quand cette décision de justice fut rendue, Nabokov exprima sa déception car elle n’avait pas statué clairement sur ce qu’était ou non l’obscénité, et il douta qu’elle puisse faire quoi que ce soit pour Lolita (Nabokov 1991, 222). Cependant, cette décision rendit possible une version américaine du roman, qui parut l’année suivante, en 1958, chez Putnam.

Censure et valeur littéraire

27 C’est cette question de valeur, artistique notamment, qui est évoquée dans la loi britannique de 1959, The Obscene Publications Act14, tandis que Roth versus United States affirme plutôt que les seules œuvres qui peuvent être interdites, et donc non protégées par le premier amendement, sont celles n’ayant pas la moindre valeur sociale pouvant les racheter : All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance […] have the full protection of the guaranties, unless excludable because they encroach upon the limited area of more important interests. But implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance15.

28 C’est cet argument de valeur esthétique que Nabokov utilisa pour ne pas se joindre à Girodias dans son procès contre le gouvernement : My moral defense of the book is the book itself. I do not feel under any obligation to do more. […] On the ethical plane, it is of supreme indifference to me what opinion French, British or any other courts, magistrate or philistine readers in general, may have of my book16. (Nabokov 1991, 210)

29 Il insista également en plusieurs endroits sur la distinction entre littérature et obscénité : I know that LOLITA is my best book so far. I calmly lean on my conviction that it is a serious work of art, and that no court could prove it to be ‘lewd and libertine’. All categories grade, of course, into one another: a comedy of manners written by a fine poet may have its ‘lewd’ side; but LOLITA is a tragedy. ‘Pornography’ is not an image plucked out of context; pornography is an attitude and an intention. The tragic and the obscene exclude each other. (Nabokov 1991, 194)

30 Il reconnaissait cependant avoir abordé l’un des trois sujets tabous de l’époque et effrayé ainsi les éditeurs potentiels : Their refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself, for there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106. (Nabokov 1955, 295)

31 Nabokov souligna souvent à quel point il ne voulait pas d’un succès de scandale, et que c’était bien la qualité littéraire du roman qui primait à ses yeux, notamment quand il écrivait dans son essai « On a book entitled Lolita » : « Lolita was the record of my love affair with the […] English language. » (Nabokov 1955, 298) Or il est certains critiques qui virent dans les qualités du roman une raison supplémentaire de décrier le roman. Ce fut le cas pour Orville Prescott du New York Times : ‘Lolita’ is not crudely crammed with Anglo-Saxon nouns and verbs and explicitly described scenes of sexual violence. Its depravity is more refined. Mr. Nabokov,

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whose English vocabulary would astound the editors of the Oxford Dictionary, does not write cheap pornography. He writes highbrow pornography (Prescott).

32 Si beaucoup ont été choqués par le sujet tabou de Lolita, c’est son écriture qui devrait secouer, bouleverser les lecteurs. L’écrivain Léonid Guirchovitch décrit justement sa redécouverte de la langue russe de Nabokov dans son autotraduction de Lolita en évoquant les tabous et interdits littéraires que l’écrivain bilingue avait su briser : Ce ne sont pas les idées de Nabokov qui ont influencé les jeunes écrivains mais son style. […] Il bousculait tous les tabous avec brio. Ma première lecture a été bouleversante du fait de cette liberté avec laquelle Nabokov a mis en pièces tous les interdits qui pesaient sur moi. (Guirchovitch, 89)

Conclusion : Lolita et la censure, 60 ans après

33 Lolita a désormais soixante ans, mais régulièrement, des bibliothèques aux Etats-Unis font face à des demandes de retirer le livre de leurs étagères (Marsh) ou des enseignants sont remis en question pour l’avoir mis au programme en littérature américaine17. L’exemple le plus récent du fait que la question de la censure de Lolita n’a pas vieilli, soixante ans après sa publication, se trouve en Russie.

34 En 2011, un représentant officiel de l’église orthodoxe de Russie, Vsevolod Chaplin, a appelé les autorités à interdire Lolita de Nabokov et Cent ans de solitude de Gabriel Garcia Marquez dans les établissements d’enseignement secondaire car ces romans « justifiaient la pédophilie » (Associated Press, ma traduction). En 2013, durant la représentation d’une adaptation du roman à Saint-Pétersbourg, le metteur en scène a été roué de coups et traité de pédophile, tandis que le musée Nabokov dans cette même ville et la maison d’enfance de Nabokov dans la campagne pétersbourgeoise se sont vus couverts de graffiti portant la même insulte (Idov). Toujours en 2013, les procureurs de la région de Stavropol ont exigé que les écoles locales se débarrassent de leurs exemplaires de Lolita et d’autres ouvrages, russes comme étrangers, car ceux-ci n’étaient pas compatibles avec la mission d’éducation de ces écoles, ils effrayaient les enfants et encourageaient le crime (Krainova). Cette démarche est possible en Russie en raison de la loi fédérale réprimant la « propagande de l’homosexualité et de la pédophilie auprès des mineurs » qui est entrée en vigueur le 17 mars 2012 à Saint- Pétersbourg18.

35 De même qu’en décembre 1958, la deuxième interdiction française touchant Lolita s’appuyait sur la loi du 16 juillet 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse, la censure russe prétend protéger les enfants d’un livre qui n’est nullement affiché comme étant destiné à un public mineur. Force est de constater que ces décisions de justice tendent à confirmer l’adage selon lequel, malheureusement, l’histoire se répète.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Alladaye, René. « Le Cas Lolita », Cycnos 9 (2008). 21 juillet 2017. http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1174

Associated Press. « Russian church urges ban on Lolita ». In CBC News, 28 septembre 2011. 23 septembre 2015.

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Calder, John. The Garden of Eros: The Story of the Paris Expatriates and the Post-War Literary Scene. 2013. Richmond: Alma Books, 2014.

Capon, Felicity et Scott, Catherine. « Top 20 books they tried to ban ». In Telegraph, (20 octobre 2014). 21 juillet 2017.

Couturier, Maurice. Nabokov ou la Tentation française. Paris : Gallimard, 2011.

---. Vladimir Nabokov. Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme, 1979.

De Grazia, Edward. Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. New York: Random House, 1992.

De St Jorre, John. Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and its Writers. New York : Random House, 1994.

Edel-Roy, Agnès. « Lolita, ou ‘l'ombre d'une branche russe’. Etude de l'auto-traduction », Miranda [Online] 3 (2010). 21 juillet 2017.

« Editeurs, les lois du métier ». Exposition numérique. 21 juillet 2017.

Girodias, Maurice. Lettre ouverte à René Lefebvre, 11 mars 1960, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard.

Godin, Huguette. Lettre à Gaston Gallimard, 23 décembre 1956, Paris. Paris: Archives Gallimard.

Girodias, Maurice. « Publisher’s Digression ». In Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita. 1955. Paris: Olympia Press, 1959.

Guirchovitch, Léonid. « Vladimir Nabokov ». Transfuge 6 (mars 2005) : 88-89.

Idov, Michael. « The Turn Against Nabokov ». In The New Yorker, 27 février 2013. 21 juillet 2017.

Krainova, Natalya. « Stavropol Prosecutors Seek to Ban Nabokov in Schools ». In The Moscow Times, 22 novembre 2013. 21 juillet 2017.

Lay, Amy. « Lolita ». In « Banned » Exposition numérique, 9 octobre 2013. 21 juillet 2017.

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Marsh, Kathy. « ‘Lolita’ could be pulled from shelves ». In Wesh.com, 24 janvier 2006. 21 juillet 2017.

Nabokov, Dmitri et al. (ed.). Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977. 1989. Londres : Vintage, 1991.

Nabokov, Vladimir. « L’Enchanteur ». 1986. Trad. Gilles Barbedette. In Vladimir Nabokov. Œuvres romanesques complètes. Ed. Maurice Couturier, trad. Maurice Couturier et al. vol. ii. Paris : Gallimard, 2010. 551-601.

---. Le Don. 1937. In Vladimir Nabokov. Œuvres romanesques complètes. Ed. Maurice Couturier, trad. Maurice Couturier et al. vol. ii. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.

---. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. San Diego: Harcourt, 1982.

---. « On a book entitled Lolita ». In Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita. 1955. In Vladimir Nabokov, Novels, 1955-1962. Ed. Brian Boyd. New York: Library of America, 1996. 1-298.

---. « Russians Writers, Censors and Readers ». In Lectures on Russian Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt, 1981. 1-12.

Prescott, Orville. « Books of the Times ». In New York Times, 18 août 1958: 27.

Roscoff, Nadia. « On Literary (Ab)normality: Lolita and Self-Translation ». Université d’Alberta, 2015. 21 juillet 2017.

NOTES

1. Dans la préface à Lolita, il est fait mention de la décision de justice qui rendit possible la publication de Ulysses de Joyce en 1933 : « see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey, in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book. » (Nabokov 1955, 4) 2. La nouvelle « L’Enchanteur », qui traite de ce sujet et dont il est question plus loin, ne fut pas publiée du vivant de Nabokov. 3. Sur la censure en Russie et en URSS, lire « Russians Writers, Censors and Readers » (Nabokov 1981). Nabokov insistait souvent sur le fait que la censure sous les Tsars était moins forte et pernicieuse que pendant l’URSS, et soulignait la relative liberté dont disposaient les écrivains russes juste avant la Révolution : « The system of censorship that he [Tsar Nicholas I] evolved lasted till the 1860s, was eased by the great reforms of the sixties, stiffened again in the last decades of the century, broke down for a short spell in the first decade of this century, and then had a most sensational and formidable comeback after the Revolution under the Soviets. » (Nabokov 1981, 3) 4. Je remercie Agnès Edel-Roy pour ses explications sur l’esthétique et la politique russes. 5. Sur la réception de Lolita en URSS, puis dans la Fédération de Russie, lire Edel-Roy (2010) et Roscoff (2015), 193-216. 6. Dans sa postface, Nabokov fait référence à ce qu’il nomme « this idiotic accusation of immorality » (Nabokov 1955, 296). 7. Il défendit notamment la publication de Tropic of Cancer de Miller et de Naked Lunch de Burroughs ; sa victoire au tribunal en 1966 pour le procès Burroughs mit fin à la censure littéraire aux Etats-Unis.

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8. Pour un portrait de l’éditeur Maurice Girodias et une chronologie des lois sur l’édition en France, voir la version numérique de l’exposition de la BPI « Editeurs les lois du métier » : http:// editeurslesloisdumetier.bpi.fr/bpi_loi-edition/fr/index.html 9. Sur ce sujet, lire aussi : Couturier (2011), 110-134 ; Boyd (1991), 299-301 et Alladaye (2008). 10. Ainsi, Huguette Godin, chargée du courrier littéraire international à l’AFP, exprime la double tension dans laquelle la promotion de Lolita plaçait tout journaliste ou maison d’édition : « J’ai lu ‘Lolita’ : je pense que c’est évidemment un livre ‘impossible’ dans l’état actuel de la législation et des mœurs. Je pense aussi que c’est un livre remarquable, à plus d’un point de vue. » (Godin, 23 décembre 1956) 11. Le 20 avril 1960, la maison Gallimard fut informée par un certain D. Pichon (archives Gallimard), du département étranger Hachette à Bruxelles, que l’interdiction de la vente de Lolita en Belgique venait d’être levée et incluait un extrait du Moniteur (l’équivalent belge du Bulletin officiel français) relatif à l’affaire : « Considérant que la circonstance d’un complément d’enquête justifie de lever en ce moment l’interdiction de la vente, de l’exposition en vente, de l’introduction et de la distribution de la publication étrangère de Lolita (Wladimir Nabohof [sic]) ; Sur la proposition de Notre Ministre de l’Intérieur, Nous avons arrêté et arrêtons : Article 1er : Les dispositions de l’article 1er de Notre arrêté du 15 février 1960 sont rapportées en ce qu’elles concernent l’interdiction de l’introduction en Belgique en vue de commerce ou de la distribution, de la vente, de l’exposition en vente et de la distribution de la publication étrangère de Lolita (Wladimir Nabohof [sic]). Art. 2 : Notre Ministre de l’Intérieur est chargé de l’exécution du présent arrêté. Donné à Bruxelles, le 28 mars 1960. » 12. Certains textes de loi relatifs à l’interdiction en Australie sont reproduits sur le blog que les archives nationales australiennes ont créé à l’occasion d’une exposition sur la censure en Australie, notamment à l’entrée dédiée à Lolita : http://blog.naa.gov.au/banned/2013/10/09/ lolita/ 13. John Calder avait obtenu de Girodias les droits pour Lolita mais Nabokov s’y opposa : « [a trial] had gained me the reputation in some circles of being soft on communism […]. Vladimir Nabokov, like nearly all émigrés from Russia and Eastern Europe, was very right-wing and opposed to liberalism of any kind. He made it clear to Girodias that he did not want me to be his British publisher. » (Calder, 151-2) 14. Voir l’intégralité de la loi à cette adresse : http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1959/66/ pdfs/ukpga_19590066_en.pdf 15. Voir l’intégralité de la décision de la cour suprême à cette adresse : https:// supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/354/476/case.html 16. Notons que Nabokov avait déjà réfuté la prise en compte d’arguments moraux pour estimer la valeur esthétique d’une œuvre quand il était professeur de littérature. Ainsi, dans son cours sur Madame Bovary, il évoquait en ces termes le procès contre Gustave Flaubert : « Indeed, the novel was actually tried in a court of justice for obscenity. As if the work of the artist could ever be obscene. That was exactly a hundred years ago. In our days, our times… But let me keep to my subject. » Ce sujet était pour lui tellement trivial que ces quelques mots sont les seuls qu’il consacre au procès contre Flaubert dans son cours (Nabokov 1982, 125). 17. Voir par exemple la page de l’exposition numérique « Lolita » évoquant le débat soulevé quand Lolita fut proposé au programme de littérature américaine de l’université nationale australienne : http://blog.naa.gov.au/banned/2013/10/09/lolita/ 18. Notons que Milonov, l’auteur de cette loi, a reçu le 14 septembre 2015 une décoration de la part du président Vladimir Poutine pour son travail consciencieux…

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RÉSUMÉS

Cet article met en lumière la tension entre art et politique dans la carrière de Nabokov. Avant de devenir un auteur américain, Nabokov a souffert de censure politique dans son pays d’origine, sans que les qualités littéraires de son œuvre ne soient prises en compte. Puis, cet article étudie la manière dont le roman Lolita a été reçu, ou plutôt rejeté, par différentes institutions gouvernementales et judiciaires, en France et dans le monde. Ce rejet n’était pas motivé par des raisons esthétiques mais morales, et par bien des aspects, la censure de Lolita est représentative des difficultés que de grands auteurs tels que Nabokov, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence ou Henry Miller ont rencontrées au 20ème siècle pour faire publier leurs ouvrages. La correspondance de Nabokov et des extraits d’archives Gallimard inédites donneront un aperçu des déboires judiciaires que le roman a connus. Finalement, les qualités esthétiques des œuvres littéraires furent prises en compte par les institutions judiciaires, ce qui permit de lever toute censure à l’encontre de Lolita.

This article sheds light on the tension between art and politics in Nabokov’s career. Before he became an American author, Nabokov was subjected to political censorship in his motherland, with a complete disregard of and lack of interest in the literary qualities of his novels. Then, the article studies how Lolita was banned in different countries, be it in France or elsewhere in the world. The reason for this ban was not aesthetics but ethics. In many respects, the censorship Lolita suffered from is an illustration of the difficulties that great authors such as Nabokov, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller were subjected to when it came to publishing their novels in the 20th century. Nabokov’s letters and exclusive archives from Gallimard will show some of the judicial mishaps / streaks of bad luck that Nabokov’s novel met with. In the end, literary quality was made part of judicial decisions and it is thanks to its aesthetic value that censorship on Lolita was finally lifted.

INDEX

Keywords : censorship, perversity, trials, Olympia Press Mots-clés : censure, perversion, procès, Olympia Press

AUTEURS

JULIE LOISON-CHARLES Maître de conférences Université de Lille [email protected]

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Lolita, le livre « impossible » ? L'histoire de sa publication française (1956-1959) dans les archives Gallimard

Agnès Edel-Roy

1 Dans « Les jardins d’Éros », deuxième tome de son autobiographie intitulée Une Journée sur la terre, Maurice Girodias, l’éditeur parisien de la célèbre première édition anglaise de Lolita en 1955, résume en quelques paragraphes les moments décisifs qui ont marqué l’histoire de la publication de la traduction française de Lolita : Queneau avait été l’un des premiers découvreurs français du livre de Nabokov, dont je lui avais envoyé un exemplaire dès sa parution. […] [I]l était avant tout l’un des conseillers les plus influents des Editions Gallimard, et c’était à ce titre qu’il avait convaincu ses pairs de m’acheter les droits français de Lolita et, mieux encore, de commander la traduction à Eric, qui pourtant n’avait guère de références. C’est bien grâce à Raymond Queneau que la noble maison Gallimard prit ce double pari. (Girodias 1990, 345-46)

2 Selon Girodias, le traducteur pressenti par Raymond Queneau est son jeune frère, Eric Kahane, que l’écrivain français avait eu comme élève à l’école bilingue de Neuilly-sur- Seine, au début de l’Occupation1. La suite du récit de Girodias présente une considérable ellipse temporelle qui gomme ce que fut la véritable histoire de l’éprouvante traduction de Lolita par Kahane : Eric avait empoché l’argent de son contrat et était allé se mettre au soleil à Biot, sur la Côte d’Azur, pour réaliser la première grande œuvre de sa vie, plein de foi et d’enthousiasme. Le résultat s’était révélé tout à fait excellent. Queneau et ses collègues de chez Gallimard en étaient ravis, et ce fut sans doute cela qui nous permit de surmonter la crise, lors de l’interdiction de Lolita. (Girodias 1990, 346)

3 L’interdiction en question, en décembre 1956, est celle de la première version anglaise de Lolita : or Girodias comptait sur la publication par Gallimard de la traduction française du roman pour « démontr[er] l’inanité d’une interdiction [en France] portant seulement sur la version anglaise » et « gagner [s]on procès au Tribunal administratif » (Girodias 1990, 348). Mais il lui faudra s’armer de patience.

4 L’histoire de la publication de cette première traduction française de Lolita est en effet jalonnée d’un certain nombre d’épisodes théâtralisés que masque la présentation faite par Girodias dans son autobiographie. Pour la première fois depuis cette publication, la

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consultation dans les archives Gallimard du dossier « Lolita », qui comprend principalement la correspondance afférente, permet à la fois d’établir une chronologie de ces épisodes et de préciser les difficultés et les points d’achoppement qui ont retardé la sortie en France de Lolita2.

5 Les principaux interlocuteurs de cette correspondance sont : pour Gallimard, l’éditeur Michel Mohrt3, chargé de suivre l’avancement de la traduction et, tâche encore plus difficile, d’être l’intermédiaire entre l’auteur et le traducteur ; Eric Kahane, le traducteur finalement retenu par Gallimard après quelques rebondissements, et parfois Maurice Girodias ; Doussia Ergaz, l’agent français de Nabokov (c’est elle aussi qui avait fait lire le manuscrit anglais de Lolita à Girodias) ; l’écrivain lui-même, Vladimir Nabokov, qui enseigne à l’université de Cornell, à Ithaca (New York), et, vers la fin de la période, sa femme, Véra, qui se substitue parfois à lui. Cette correspondance est quasi complète, il ne manque que quelques lettres dont nous signalerons l’absence si besoin. Le dossier « Lolita » des archives Gallimard comporte aussi de précieuses notes internes qui aident à éclairer certaines zones d’ombre.

6 Trois principaux facteurs ont pesé sur le déroulement de la publication française de Lolita : les circonstances, la difficulté du livre et la personnalité de son auteur.

7 S’agissant des circonstances, on peut signaler qu’au moment où se pose la question du choix du traducteur, Nabokov est déjà en mauvais termes avec Girodias (à cause principalement de la question de la répartition des royalties que reverserait un éditeur américain s’il publiait Lolita). D’autre part, en France, la version anglaise de Lolita est, comme nous l’avons déjà rappelé, interdite à la vente depuis décembre 19564. Girodias attaque donc l’Etat français, et se propose au début de 1957 d’écrire un pamphlet pour soutenir sa cause, intitulé L’Affaire Lolita.

8 Autre difficulté, celle du danger que Lolita pourrait faire courir à la maison d’édition Gallimard puisqu’elle avait déjà eu deux publications interdites en vertu des dispositions annexes de la loi de 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse. Comme le signale Girodias, « [q]u’une troisième interdiction intervienne dans le délai fatidique de 12 mois, et [l]a maison [Gallimard] aussi grande et fabuleuse fût-elle aurait été soumise au système incroyable de la pré-censure… » (Girodias 1990, 179-80).

9 La deuxième complication, qui ne surprendra pas, tient à la difficulté du livre. Le 23 décembre 1956, Huguette Godin, chargée du courrier littéraire international hebdomadaire de l’Agence France Presse, fait part à Gaston Gallimard de son sentiment à propos du roman de Nabokov : J’ai lu Lolita. Je pense que c’est évidemment un livre ‘impossible’ dans l’état actuel de la législation et des mœurs. Je pense aussi que c’est un livre extraordinairement remarquable, à plus d’un point de vue. (Godin, 23 décembre 1956)5

10 En dépit des affirmations de Girodias, ce n’est pas à Eric Kahane que Raymond Queneau a demandé de traduire Lolita mais à Blaise Briod, d’origine vaudoise et connu pour ses traductions de Goethe et de Rilke, contre « une somme forfaitaire de 150 000 francs » (Queneau, 3 août 1956). C’est le 2 avril 1957 que, dans un courrier à Michel Mohrt, Maurice Girodias recommande son propre frère, précisant que « Raymond Queneau le connaît bien » (Girodias, 2 avril 1957).

11 Le 5 avril 1957, dans une note interne intitulée : « Traduction de Lolita, de Vladimir Nabokov », Michel Mohrt informe Claude Gallimard que Blaise Briod a finalement renoncé à traduire Lolita, ajoutant :

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La traduction de cet ouvrage est difficile, et même très difficile. Le livre a une qualité littéraire remarquable, et on ne peut évidemment pas se contenter d’une traduction banale. La traduction française doit être autant que possible à la hauteur de l’original. (Mohrt, 5 avril 1957)

12 Il indique alors à Claude Gallimard le fragment du roman qu’a traduit Kahane pour être inséré dans le pamphlet de son frère. Cette traduction lui paraît bonne et il a donc pris contact avec Kahane qui estime, dans une lettre du 6 avril 1957, que « cette traduction représente six bons mois de travail à plein temps » parce que « chaque ligne de Lolita est un défi au traducteur » (Kahane, 6 avril 1957). Le traducteur a conscience que [s]es ‘prétentions’ pour Lolita dépassent les tarifs normaux. Mais c’est un livre exceptionnel qui demande […] un effort spécial tant du traducteur que de l’éditeur, et son succès dépendra pour une bonne part de la valeur de la version française. (Kahane, 6 avril 1957)

13 En plus des 300 000 francs qu’il demande pour cette traduction, il veut aussi un pourcentage sur les ventes : 2 % sur les 20 000 premiers exemplaires et 3 % au-dessus. Faut-il croire, à ce sujet, ce qu’affirme Maurice Girodias dans son autobiographie ? La demande avait été acceptée avec ironie par les responsables des Editions Gallimard, car personne n’imaginait que la version française de Lolita se vendrait au-delà de 3 000 ou 4 000 exemplaires. On considérait le livre plus comme une curiosité un peu scandaleuse que comme un vrai ouvrage de fond et, sur la base des projections de ventes, il était évident que jamais le traducteur ne toucherait un sou grâce à son droit d’auteur. (Girodias 1990, 346)

14 Rien dans les archives Gallimard ne permet de corroborer cette affirmation ; par contre, et par un retour de balancier que Girodias n’avait sans doute pas anticipé, c’est bien cette clause qui a ensuite donné à Eric Kahane une certaine aisance financière dont Girodias, coutumier des faillites, a profité dans la suite de sa carrière d’éditeur.

15 Le 15 avril 1957, Michel Mohrt informe Kahane que ses conditions sont acceptées et lui envoie le contrat à signer pour la traduction de Lolita. C’est avec une avance de 50 000 francs que le traducteur part sur la Côte d’Azur, à Biot, traduire le roman de Nabokov – traduction qu’il doit rendre pour le mois de septembre 1957. Or, après bien des rebondissements, c’est deux ans plus tard, le 30 avril 1959, que sera mise en vente la traduction française de Lolita. L’intransigeance nabokovienne n’est pas étrangère à ce délai mais elle n’en est pas la seule explication.

Mai-décembre 1957 « L’éternelle affaire NABOKOV »

16 Aussitôt le contrat signé, s’ouvre une première période, de mai à décembre 1957, qu’un Michel Mohrt désespéré finit par qualifier, le 2 décembre 1957, d’« éternelle affaire NABOKOV ».

17 En mai et juin 1957, il va d’abord falloir convaincre Nabokov, qui ne le sait pas encore, d’accepter que ce soit le frère de Girodias qui traduise Lolita. Le 7 mai 1957, Vladimir Nabokov écrit à Gaston Gallimard pour, premièrement, l’informer de sa satisfaction que le prestigieux éditeur français ait accepté cette « œuvre qui [lui] tient au cœur » et, deuxièmement, s’entretenir avec lui de la difficulté qu’en représente la traduction : Ce qui m’inquiète c’est la difficulté de trouver un traducteur capable de produire une version française de mon livre qui soit à la fois fidèle et artistique. Les essais de traduction que Mme Ergaz a eu l’obligeance de m’envoyer jusqu’ici n’étaient

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malheureusement pas à la hauteur de la tâche. Non seulement manquaient-ils de fidélité ; ils révélaient aussi une connaissance insuffisante de l’anglais. (Nabokov, 7 mai 1957)

18 On note au passage que la conception nabokovienne de la traduction, « à la fois fidèle et artistique », est bien celle qu’il a invariablement professée. Afin de justifier la condition qu’il énonce pour la première fois dans cette lettre, revoir le texte français avant son envoi à l’imprimerie, l’écrivain insiste sur ce qui constitue l’une des difficultés du roman : « le nombre dans Lolita* (*d’allusions à6) des coutumes etc. américaines, ainsi que des vers anglais etc. qu’un étranger n’est pas obligé de connaître » (Nabokov, 7 mai 1957). Comme possibles traducteurs, l’écrivain propose Michel Chrestien car « [s]on style [lui] paraît excellent et il semble connaître l’anglais à fond »7, ou encore Marcel Stora, « qui, en 1939, a fait une acceptable traduction de [s]on roman La Méprise pour [Gallimard] » (Nabokov, 7 mai 1957) ; de plus, et cela va mettre Michel Mohrt dans l’embarras, l’écrivain fait envoyer par Doussia Ergaz la liste des erreurs qu’il a relevées dans la traduction par Kahane de l’extrait publié dans L’Affaire Lolita. Or, Michel Mohrt avait déjà signé le contrat de traduction liant la maison d’édition à Eric Kahane et c’est dans une lettre datée du 10 mai 1957 qu’il apprend à l’écrivain que non seulement ils ont déjà choisi Eric Kahane parce que sa traduction d’une trentaine de pages « nous a paru assez bonne, en dépit de quelques faiblesses, comme on peut toujours en trouver » (Mohrt, 10 mai 1957), mais aussi que Kahane est le propre frère de Maurice Girodias, ce qu’ignorait Nabokov. La traduction, précise l’éditeur, a été promise par le traducteur avant la fin de l’été 1957. Cette précision est cruciale pour la suite car c’est en février 1956 que Nabokov a signé avec Gallimard le contrat pour la traduction en français de Lolita. Si l’original de ce contrat ne figure pas dans les archives Gallimard, il s’y trouve une note interne, établie par Dionys Mascolo, le 16 mai 1956, qui en reprend les quatre clauses, présentées ainsi :

19 Clause 1 : 200.000 francs

20 8 % 5.000 exemplaires

21 10 % 10.000 exemplaires

22 12 % ensuite

23 Clause 2 : Droits de reproductions 50 %

24 Clause 3 : Relevés de compte 30 juin et 31 Décembre

25 Clause 4 : Délai de publication : 18 mois.

26 Cette quatrième clause est à retenir car Nabokov, lui, saura s’en souvenir l’année suivante, au plus fort de son exaspération.

27 La réponse de Nabokov à Mohrt est rapide et sèche : « J’avoue que j’ai été fort contrarié d’apprendre que la traduction de Lolita avait été confiée à M. Kahane » (Nabokov, 1 er juin 1957) ; mais l’écrivain obtempère assez facilement, à condition que Gallimard l’autorise à faire « tous les changements dans le texte de M. Kahane qui [lui] paraitront [sic] nécessaires » et que le traducteur lui envoie « son texte a [sic] mesure que son travail avance » (Nabokov, 1er juin 1957). Dans sa réponse du 4 juin, Michel Mohrt s’empresse d’accepter ces deux conditions et joue la carte de l’apaisement : « J’écris à Mr Kahane pour lui demander de vous faire parvenir le début de sa production. Vous pourrez, peut-être, déjà vous rendre compte si l’esprit et le style du livre sont respectés. » (Mohrt à Nabokov, 4 juin 1957) Le même jour, il informe donc Kahane de l’accord de Nabokov quant au choix du traducteur ainsi que de ses exigences : « Je vous

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demanderai […] de bien vouloir expédier à Mr Nabokov ce que vous avez déjà traduit quand vous en serez satisfait. Je crois en effet qu’il pourra nous éviter de nouveaux déboires et redresser votre traduction dans le sens qui lui convient. » (Mohrt à Kahane, 4 juin 1957)

28 La tension toutefois monte d’un cran car Eric Kahane ne l’entend pas de cette oreille ; sa réponse du 24 juin manque dans le dossier « Lolita » des archives Gallimard mais on peut en reconstituer la teneur dans la réponse de Mohrt, envoyée le 28 juin, où l’éditeur se défend tout d’abord de partager les préventions de Nabokov à l’égard du traducteur de Lolita, puis précise : Je suis tout à fait d’accord avec vous sur le fait qu’on ne peut pas demander à un traducteur de travailler en ayant sur le dos l’auteur du livre. Si je vous ai suggéré d’envoyer une partie de votre traduction à Mr ? [sic] Nabokov c’est parce que je croyais pouvoir vous éviter peut-être de futurs déboires, mais je comprends parfaitement que vous ne soyez pas disposé à le faire. (Mohrt, 28 juin 1957)

29 Michel Mohrt cependant met en garde le traducteur. Nabokov non seulement n’est pas un écrivain commode mais, qui plus est, il maîtrise le français : Je vous dis tout de suite, que je ne publierai pas ce manuscrit sans l’avoir montré à l’auteur, étant donné son état d’esprit. […] Vous le savez sans doute, Mr. Nabokov a écrit des livres en trois langues : le russe, l’anglais et le français. Bien que n’écrivant plus en français, il estime qu’il connaît parfaitement notre langue et c’est pourquoi il se montre si vétilleux sur la traduction de ses ouvrages. (Mohrt, 28 juin 1957)

30 Kahane ne répond pas et les échanges s’interrompent pendant l’été. S’ouvre alors une seconde phase, de septembre à décembre 1957, au cours de laquelle Kahane ne va cesser de repousser la livraison de sa traduction, Nabokov de s’inquiéter de ce silence, et Mohrt de tenter d’obtenir par tous les moyens le début de la traduction afin de calmer la fureur nabokovienne croissante.

31 Le 13 septembre 1957, Kahane reporte une première fois la livraison de sa traduction : Voici quelques nouvelles de Lolita. La traduction progresse de façon que je crois satisfaisante mais, hélas, beaucoup plus lentement que je ne le prévoyais. Malgré une discipline quotidienne et sévère, je me vois dans l’incapacité matérielle et technique de vous livrer le manuscrit avant l’automne, à une date que je vous préciserai dès que je pourrai le faire avec la certitude de ne pas nous leurrer l’un et l’autre. Lolita, j’en ai fait l’expérience, ne s’accorde pas avec des méthodes stakhanovistes et, au point où j’en suis, un ‘bâclage’ serait trop tragique pour que j’ose m’y résoudre. Croyez pourtant que je ne flâne pas et que je mets tout en œuvre pour pouvoir vous apporter ce travail au plus tôt. (Kahane, 13 septembre 1957)

32 Quant à Nabokov, il est de plus en plus angoissé. Après une première lettre à ce sujet, envoyée le 3 octobre 1957, il tente une nouvelle fois, le 12 novembre, d’avoir des nouvelles de la traduction de Lolita : Je suis très inquiet au sujet de la traduction de Lolita. [N]ous voilà au milieu de novembre et non seulement la traduction n’est-elle pas achevée, – je n’en ai pas encore vu les premières pages. […] C’est vraiment désolant ! […] N’y a-t-il pas moyens d’insister auprès de M. Kahane qu’il m’envoie incessamment la première partie de sa traduction ? Ne pourriez-vous le lui demander formellement ? Comme vous le savez sûrement, il y a dans Lolita un nombre considérable d’allusions littéraires. Si le traducteur ne connait [sic] pas toutes mes sources, comment se débrouillera-t-il ? Pourquoi M. Kahane ne me consulte-t-il pas au sujet

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des difficultés imprévues qu’il vous dit avoir rencontré [sic] ? (Nabokov, 12 novembre 1957)

33 Ce n’est que le 21 novembre que Mohrt reçoit enfin des nouvelles de son traducteur : Kahane prétend qu’il avait la grippe ! Même si cette solution lui déplaît, écrit Kahane « puisqu’elle [l]’empêche de relire et corriger à froid et ‘de haut’ l’ensemble de l’ouvrage terminé » (Kahane, 21 novembre 1957), il propose de calmer un peu Nabokov en lui envoyant le manuscrit du tome I aussitôt qu’il l’aura apporté en décembre à Michel Mohrt. Dans sa réponse du 26 novembre, Mohrt somme Kahane d’écrire au plus vite à Nabokov pour lui annoncer l’arrivée prochaine du texte et l’éditeur finit l’année épuisé, s’adressant ainsi à Doussia Ergaz le 2 décembre 1957 : « Je ne peux faire mieux que de transmettre aux uns et aux autres toute cette correspondance qui commence à devenir fastidieuse. » (Mohrt, 2 décembre 1957)

Janvier-juillet 1958 « Tant de soin, d’exactitude, de fidélité »

34 Kahane a tenu parole : début décembre, il est rentré de Biot à Paris avec le manuscrit de la traduction du premier tome de Lolita, envoyé à Nabokov dans la foulée à la mi- décembre, puisque le 1er janvier 1958, Nabokov retourne à l’éditeur vingt-et-une pages de corrections se rapportant aux cent cinquante-sept premières pages de la traduction française de Lolita. Malgré les modifications dont il demande que le traducteur les prenne toutes en compte (« même si quelques unes [sic] d’entre elles lui paraissaient insignifiantes »), l’écrivain est très satisfait de ce qu’il a découvert : « [J]e ne m’attendais guère à tant de soin, d’exactitude et de fidélité de la part d’Eric Kahane. Je l’en félicite, ainsi que moi-même. » (Nabokov, 1er janvier 1958)

35 Les premiers mois de 1958 marquent donc une accalmie dans cette relation triangulaire tempétueuse entre l’auteur, son traducteur et son éditeur. Pnin est en cours de traduction par Michel Chrestien et Nabokov cherche à placer chez Gallimard la version française de Conclusive Evidence, déjà traduit par Yvonne Davet pour les Editions de La Table Ronde ; c’est à cette occasion d’ailleurs que Véra Nabokov commence à prendre le relais de son mari (sa première lettre à Michel Mohrt date du 12 janvier 1958).

36 Le 11 février 1958, Michel Mohrt fait parvenir à Nabokov le reste de la traduction de la première partie de Lolita que Nabokov renvoie avec ses corrections le 11 mars 1958. L’écrivain est toujours satisfait du travail de Kahane, et précise qu’il doit impérativement recevoir la traduction du tome II avant le 15 mai, date de son départ d’Ithaca pour un voyage de deux mois. Puis, de la mi-mars à la fin juin 1958, Nabokov et Mohrt échangent principalement autour du roman Invitation au supplice : Nabokov en effet voudrait voir publiée chez Gallimard la traduction de Jarl Priel, excellente selon lui, mais la décision de la maison d’édition tarde à venir car certains lecteurs de la maison n’aiment pas ce roman.

37 Le 25 juin 1958, Mohrt relance Kahane : « Où en est Lolita? Que devenez-vous ? Pourquoi me laisser si longtemps sans nouvelles de vous et de votre travail ? » (Mohrt, 25 juin 1958) Il précise subir d’incessantes pressions de Gaston Gallimard et de Nabokov et l’informe envisager de « confier la fin de la traduction à quelqu’un d’autre, au risque d’avoir un texte moins bon » (Mohrt, 25 juin 1958).

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38 C’est presque un mois plus tard, le 22 juillet 1958, qu’Eric Kahane donne enfin de ses nouvelles, expliquant que la traduction a encore pris du retard (principalement, pour des raisons médicales) mais déclarant : « Je m’y suis cependant rattelé et compte vous la livrer, sans faute, dans les prochaines semaines. » (Kahane, 22 juillet 1958)

39 En dépit de cette promesse, la crise entre Nabokov et son traducteur n’a pas encore atteint son apogée.

Août-décembre 1958 Crise et dénouement

40 S’ouvre en effet une période grosse de tensions. Nabokov, qui ne supporte plus d’attendre la deuxième partie de cette traduction, suspecte Girodias et Kahane de s’être entendus pour retarder la publication française de Lolita car c’est la seule traduction qui ne rapporterait rien à Girodias : en effet, rappelle Nabokov, elle est exclue du contrat le liant à Girodias pour le versement du tiers des droits étrangers. Dans une lettre datée du 16 août 1958, Nabokov estime avoir été assez patient et il rappelle à Michel Mohrt que cela fait trente mois qu’il attend la sortie française de Lolita et qu’en conséquence il propose de garder la première partie traduite par Kahane mais de trouver un autre traducteur pour la seconde. Il se produit alors un événement inattendu. L’acmé de la crise est imminente, pourtant Eric Kahane n’en est plus le seul responsable.

41 Le 1er novembre 1958, Vladimir Nabokov dénonce en effet son contrat avec Gallimard pour la traduction française de Lolita, en invoquant la clause 4 relative au délai de dix- huit mois au cours duquel Lolita aurait dû paraître après la signature du contrat en février 19568. La seule chose qui pourrait le faire changer d’avis serait que Gallimard engage l’un des traducteurs qu’il a recommandés auparavant.

42 Que s’est-il passé pour que l’écrivain en arrive à cette extrémité ?

43 Le 2 octobre en effet, Kahane avait assuré Mohrt qu’il serait « de retour à Paris le 20 octobre avec Lolita sous le bras », ce dont l’éditeur a immédiatement informé Nabokov dans une lettre du 6 octobre, et ce que Kahane a effectivement fait, à cette réserve près qu’il n’a remis que cent trente-neuf pages, conservant les cent dernières pages pour une ultime relecture.

44 Dans l’intervalle, Véra avait écrit le 12 octobre à Michel Mohrt : My husband thinks (and he is sure you will agree) that, unless you already have received from Mr Kahane the complete French text of Lolita, there is no sense in waiting any longer. He hopes you have tried in the meanwhile to find a good translator to finish the translation. (Véra Nabokov, 12 octobre 1958)

45 Le 27 octobre, Mohrt avait répondu à Véra que Kahane avait tenu parole et lui avait remis de la page 223 à la page 362 de la deuxième partie de Lolita, qu’il expédiait ce même jour à l’écrivain ; c’est pourquoi, le 5 novembre 1958, il expédie un courrier à Nabokov, où il concède avoir été « un peu surpris par la teneur – et […] aussi par le ton » de la lettre du 1er novembre, dans laquelle l’écrivain dénonce son contrat avec Gallimard, jusqu’à ce qu’il comprenne la cause véritable à l’origine de l’agacement de Nabokov. L’explication que Mohrt lui fournit dans cette même lettre est cocasse : c’est parce que sa secrétaire, depuis la rentrée de 1958, n’envoyait pas les courriers à l’écrivain par voie aérienne mais par voie terrestre, ce qui en retardait la réception, que

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les efforts de Kahane pour venir à bout de la traduction de Lolita ont failli être ruinés par l’impatience justifiée de Nabokov.

46 Les tensions cependant ne sont pas encore tout à fait apaisées, car il manque encore la fin de la traduction. La dernière lettre de Kahane à Mohrt est une brève missive manuscrite : « Il me reste à vous livrer une quarantaine de pages dactylographiées, que vous aurez, retapées et définitivement revues, à la fin de la semaine. En toute hâte. » Sans mention de date, on peut supposer qu’elle a été envoyée à la fin novembre et qu’elle accompagne la livraison des quatre-vingt-sept pages de la deuxième partie de Lolita que Mohrt envoie à Nabokov le 1er décembre. Enfin, c’est le 11 décembre 1958 que Mohrt fait parvenir à l’écrivain – par express ! - les toutes dernières pages du roman.

47 C’est donc à partir de la mi-décembre que l’écrivain travaille à la révision de l’avant- dernière partie de la traduction, en attendant l’ultime livraison qu’à la fin de décembre il n’a pas encore reçue. Il continue d’apprécier la traduction de Kahane, malgré la faiblesse des connaissances botaniques et ornithologiques du traducteur : As I told you, it is a superb job on his part, but of course there are many inevitable revisions (for instance, I have had to correct numerous botanical and ornithological terms and to rewrite in toto some of the inlaid poetry). This kind of revision requires a good deal of concentration and time. I reserved my Christmas vacation for this work. I have now completed the batch you sent me, pages 223-450, but I have not received the end of the book (chapters 31 to the end) [.] (Nabokov, 27 décembre 1958)

48 C’est dans une lettre du 3 janvier 1959 que Véra Nabokov informe Morht qu’ils ont bien reçu les dernières pages de Lolita ; elle lui demande aussi d’abonner son mari à L’Argus de la Presse (Nabokov souhaitant recevoir les recensions à venir de Lolita dans la presse française) et elle commence à s’enquérir de la date de sortie du livre en France afin qu’ils puissent planifier leur venue à Paris pour cette occasion. Le lancement du livre, répond l’éditeur, est prévue courant avril.

49 Michel Mohrt reçoit enfin les corrections des dernières pages de la traduction le 13 janvier 1959 mais l’aventure de la première traduction française de Lolita n’est pas terminée. Outre les allers et retours des épreuves du roman entre Kahane et Nabokov (épreuves que ce dernier finit de revoir définitivement à la mi-mars 1959), l’écrivain tient à ce que soit ajoutée à sa Lolita française la traduction de l’essai, « On a Book Entitled Lolita », qu’il avait rédigé pour la défense de son roman et qui a été ajouté comme postface à la première édition américaine de Lolita publiée par Putnam en 1958. Cet ajout n’est pas sans rapport avec ce qui suit et a singulièrement compliqué la vie de Michel Mohrt pendant ces premiers mois de la fabrication de Lolita : à savoir, la bataille autour du copyright de la traduction française que se livrent Nabokov, Gallimard et Girodias.

Janvier-mars 1959 Les questions du copyright et de la publicité

50 Dans sa lettre du 27 décembre 1958, Nabokov avait en effet demandé que le copyright soit inscrit à son seul nom et qu’il soit uniquement fait mention de l’édition américaine de Lolita par Putnam : Another thing that is most essential to me is that every copy you publish carry the following line "©1955 by Vladimir Nabokov" (I am the sole owner of the copyright).

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I also wish that it be stated on every copy that you have followed the American (Putnam) edition in your translation, since the American text is the only complete one. (Nabokov, 27 décembre 1958)

51 Michel Mohrt ne peut accepter que la maison Gallimard n’apparaisse pas au copyright, il fait donc à Nabokov la proposition suivante : On me précise qu’il est nécessaire que figure sur chaque exemplaire de Lolita la mention du copyright ainsi libellé : copyright 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov and Gallimard. La mention du nom de Gallimard est indispensable pour protéger la traduction. Il n’est généralement pas fait mention sur nos ouvrages traduits de l’étranger du nom de l’éditeur étranger. Tenez-vous absolument à ce que le nom de Putnam figure sur les exemplaires ? (Mohrt, 9 janvier 1959)

52 Si, le 11 février 1959, Nabokov accepte cette proposition (qui a le mérite d’écarter Olympia Press), Maurice Girodias, lui, n’entend pas se laisser faire et, le 18 février 1959, il écrit à Gaston Gallimard : Je me permets de revenir sur ma précédente demande concernant l’insertion dans votre édition de Lolita d’une mention indiquant l’origine de l’ouvrage, telle que : "Traduction de l’Edition originale publiée par The Olympia Press, Paris 1955 ; révisée et complétée d’après l’édition Putnam, New York, 1958." Cette formule aurait l’avantage de refléter exactement les conditions dans lesquelles votre version a été établie. Étant donné le rôle que ma maison a joué dans l’histoire de ce livre, j’espère vivement que ma demande ne vous paraîtra pas déplacée […]. (Girodias, 18 février 1959)

53 Dans sa réponse à Girodias, Michel Mohrt tente de contourner la difficulté en suivant sur ce sujet les préconisations faites par Nabokov dans sa lettre du 27 décembre 1958 : Dans l’"A propos de Lolita", qui doit paraître en post-face, dans notre édition, l’édition de l’OLYMPIA PRESS est mentionnée. D’autre part, l’auteur, à la fin de l’"A propos", m’a demandé d’ajouter une note, en bas de page, indiquant également l’édition Putnam. Je pense donc que cette double mention suffit et qu’il n’y a pas lieu de publier en tête de l’ouvrage la phrase que vous nous suggérez. Ceci irait d’ailleurs à l’encontre de nos habitudes qui sont de ne pas mentionner le nom de l’éditeur étranger. (Mohrt, 25 février 1959)

54 Girodias refuse immédiatement cette proposition, arguant même du rôle qu’aurait joué sa maison d’édition dans l’établissement du manuscrit anglais : Je dois néanmoins vous dire que nous ne nous sommes pas bornés à imprimer et à vendre Lolita, mais que nous avons joué un rôle appréciable dans l’établissement de la version originale, en obtenant de l’Auteur qu’il apporte à son manuscrit des transformations indispensables. (Girodias, 26 février 1959)

55 Afin de mettre un terme à cet échange, et d’opposer un refus ferme et définitif à la demande de Girodias, Mohrt, dès le lendemain, confirme la position des éditions Gallimard de ne pas mentionner le nom de l’éditeur étranger mais il avance aussi un argument plus subtil, en citant Nabokov lui-même : Voici, dans une lettre du 18 janvier, ce que M. Nabokov me disait : ‘You are mistaken in thinking that the French translation of Lolita has been made from the Olympia edition. This is not so. When last spring I prepared the Putnam Edition I changed an entire paragraph in the Olympia Edition and made several other corrections through-out the book. All these alterations I have incorporated in the French translation when revising it. Moreover, there will be the addition of the afterpiece which appeared in the Putnam edition but not the Olympia one. I would very much like you to say in your edition that the Putnam edition was used. This

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would assist the bibliographer, but any mention of the Olympia edition would be utterly misleading.’ (Mohrt, 27 février 1959)

56 Dans ces conditions, et puisque le texte de la traduction fait référence à l’édition américaine modifiée et complétée par Nabokov, il est difficile pour Girodias de maintenir sa requête.

57 A la fin du mois de février 1959, Vladimir Nabokov attend encore les épreuves finales de la traduction française de Lolita. Quelques détails, mais d’importance aux yeux de l’écrivain, sont encore à finaliser et concernent la publicité du roman.

58 Le 28 février 1959, Véra Nabokov met en garde Michel Mohrt : My husband wants me to say that in no case and under no circumstances would he want any endorsement or comment by Sartre to appear on the book or in any publicity material. Another thing to which he would strongly object would be any reference linking up in any way Lolita and Dr. Zhivago (e.g. the "deux écrivains russes" kind of thing), which he considers to be a very mediocre concoction in the banal Soviet style. Is there any truth in the rumor that Mr. Girodias of the Olympia Press intends to call the night club he is building, Lolita ? If this is true, are you going to object ? (Véra Nabokov, 28 février 1959)

59 Si Mohrt s’empresse de rassurer les Nabokov en leur précisant bien que Gallimard ne fera usage ni de Jean-Paul Sartre (ce vieil ennemi littéraire de Nabokov) ni de Boris Pasternak, il ne pourra empêcher que la comparaison entre les deux écrivains « russes », l’un « soviétique », l’autre « russe blanc », ne devienne l’un des poncifs journalistiques de la réception de Lolita, surtout depuis l’attribution, le 23 octobre 1958, du prix Nobel de littérature à Pasternak (prix que l’écrivain soviétique s’est vu contraint de refuser le 29 octobre 1958). Cette comparaison, que redoutait Nabokov, se trouve par exemple dans l’une des premières recensions de la traduction française du roman, intitulée « Le cas Nabokov ou la blessure de l’exil », publiée le 15 août 1959 dans la Revue des Deux Mondes et reprise par l’auteur dans le volume de ses souvenirs sur le romancier. En conclusion de son article, le critique littéraire, dont le pseudonyme est Jacques Croisé, fait un parallèle entre les deux romanciers : N’est-il pas amusant que deux Russes triomphent la même année comme ‘best- sellers’ aux Etats-Unis ? Pasternak et Nabokov, de tendances et de moyens d’expression aussi opposés que possible. Le premier exprime, dans une langue à dessein simplifiée, ce qui est permanent dans le peuple russe, le deuxième, avec une sophistication tout occidentale, le cauchemar d’une humanité sans amarres… (Schakovskoy 165)

60 Nabokov a lu cette recension, qu’il n’a pas du tout appréciée, avant de partir pour sa tournée française de promotion de Lolita. Il en connaissait bien l’auteur, Jacques Croisé étant le nom de plume de Zinaïda Schakovskoy, la sœur de la première femme de son cousin germain, le compositeur Nicolas Nabokov. Quand le romancier n’était encore qu’un émigré russe réfugié en Europe, Zinaïda Schakovskoy l’avait aidé à plusieurs reprises, en organisant à Bruxelles, où elle résidait, des soirées de lectures en 1932, 1936, 1937 et 1939. Malgré cela, le parallèle qu’elle établit entre Pasternak et Nabokov, lequel est clairement en défaveur du dernier, recevra une réponse plus que sèche, lors de la venue des Nabokov à Paris en octobre 1959.

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Avril-octobre 1959 « La ruée vers Nabokov »

61 Depuis le 30 avril 1959 en effet, la Lolita française vole enfin de ses propres ailes, et Paris attend avec fébrilité la venue du père de la nymphette. Mais il faudra patienter. Le 1er juin 1959, Nabokov commence par remercier chaleureusement Jacques Festy, qui avait été en charge des épreuves et de la fabrication de Lolita : Je tiens à vous remercier de l’envoi des deux exemplaires (un exemplaire sur pur fil et un exemplaire ordinaire) de Lolita. […] La parution de Lolita dans cette élégante série me fait un vif plaisir. Je vous serais reconnaissant de bien vouloir dire à M. Gallimard que je suis ravi des soins qui ont été apportés à la traduction et à la présentation de Lolita 9. (Nabokov, 1er juin 1959)

62 Les Nabokov partent ensuite pour l’un de ces périples américains qu’ils affectionnaient tant et ce n’est qu’en octobre 1959 qu’ils arrivent à Paris pour participer à la promotion du livre et se prêter au jeu des réceptions et des interviews. Le succès est au rendez- vous et le Paris mondain et littéraire se presse pour tenter d’apercevoir le créateur de Lolita. C’est ce que Bernard Pivot, alors tout jeune journaliste au Figaro littéraire, décrit dans un article malicieux, publié le 31 octobre 1959 et intitulé « La ruée vers Nabokov » : Pour voir Vladimir Nabokov et son épouse, il fallait, entre le thé et le dîner, il fallait le mériter. C’était une question de courage et de stratégie. Rue Sébastien-Bottin, aux éditions Gallimard, un salon circulaire. Plein, noir d’invités, masse bruissante. Quelque part, de l’autre côté, le père de Lolita. Courage, donc ! (Pivot 1959)

63 Se frayant tant bien que mal un passage au travers de la cohue des personnalités du monde littéraire français (parmi eux, Raymond Queneau, Dominique Aury, Henri Bosco, Roger Nimier,…), il découvre enfin celui par qui le dernier scandale littéraire du vingtième siècle est arrivé : Lui, en complet gris, cravate de laine bleue, avec sur le sommet du crâne une auréole de cheveux ; elle, souriante, en robe de moire noire, avec autour du cou deux rangées de perles et sur les épaules une étole de vison. Vladimir Nabokov boit du champagne. Dès qu’il a vidé une coupe on s’empresse de lui en redonner une autre. […] Chacune de ses paroles est recueillie par une douzaine d’oreilles attentives. Mais voilà qu’on s’écarte de lui ! On lui tourne le dos. Reste un seul journaliste. La conversation a lieu en anglais… (Pivot 1959)

64 Le journaliste ne remarque pas cependant le drame qui se joue à cette réception. Zinaïda Schakovskoy a relaté l’incident dans son ouvrage de souvenirs sur Nabokov, A la recherche de Nabokov : « Mon tour arriva […], j’allais l’embrasser et le féliciter ; mais quand il me vit, Vladimir se ferma en quelque sorte. Il me serra à peine la main, et faisant semblant de ne pas me reconnaître, il me dit : "Bonjour, Madame." (Schakovskoy 52) La version originale russe a paru en 1979, deux ans après le décès de l’écrivain, aussi n’a-t-il pu rectifier cette image négative de lui léguée à la postérité. Selon nous, c’est moins le parallèle avec Pasternak qui a blessé Nabokov que l’accusation d’inhumanité faite à propos de Lolita. Secondé par sa femme, il tente en effet de l’invalider dans les interviews qu’il donne lors de son séjour parisien, par exemple lorsque le couple défend le roman face à Jeanine Delpech qui évoque les lettres de lecteurs scandalisés : Les critiques en général trouvent [Lolita] odieuse ; moi, je la plains : c’est une orpheline, seule dans la vie avec un quadragénaire exigeant. En écrivant sa dernière

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rencontre avec Humbert, je pleurais, comme Flaubert à la mort de Madame Bovary. – Elle pleure toutes les nuits, et les critiques n’entendent pas ses sanglots, dit Mme Nabokov. (Delpech 2)

65 Si Bernard Pivot ne parvient pas à interviewer Nabokov à cette occasion, il prendra sa revanche en réussissant à convaincre l’écrivain de participer en 1975 à un numéro spécial de son émission télévisée, « Apostrophes ». Cette fois-ci, c’est en français que Nabokov charme non seulement Bernard Pivot mais aussi le public plus large des téléspectateurs français, campant son personnage favori, celui d’écrivain cosmopolite, comblé par sa célébrité et farceur. À Pivot qui, au cours de l’émission, lui demande s’il lui verse encore un peu de thé, Nabokov répond : « Oui, un peu de thé, il est un peu fort, vous savez ! » (Pivot 2004). C’est que le whisky a la couleur du thé, facétie dont se délecte Vladimir Nabokov, l’émigré russe enfin transformé en célébrité planétaire par le « Cyclone Lolita » (Nabokov 1965, 52).

66 Si la première traduction française de ce livre « impossible » (Godin, 23 décembre 1956) fut éprouvante pour le traducteur comme pour l’auteur et son éditeur, « [l]e succès du livre en France », précise Maurice Couturier, « ne s'est jamais démenti […]. Les éditions Gallimard en vendent plus de vingt mille exemplaires chaque année, ce qui constitue sans doute un record dans l'édition française » (Couturier 2001), – tant Lolita, fillette américaine se rêvant en starlette, « morte en couches le jour de Noël 1952 à Gray Star » (Nabokov 2010, 808) et devenue une figure mythique, est certes « [p]etite par la taille » mais dorénavant « grande par la renommée » (Pivot 1959).

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Couturier, Maurice. « Lolita et la France ». Text of a talk given at the Nabokov Museum. St. Petersburg, Russia, Spring 2001. 23 août 2017. https://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/coutlol1.htm

Delpech, Jeanine. « Nabokov sans Lolita ». Les Nouvelles Littéraires (29 octobre 1959) : 1-2.

Girodias, Maurice. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 2 avril 1957, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Gaston Gallimard, 18 février 1959, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 26 février 1959, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Une Journée sur la terre. t. II, Les Jardins d’Éros. Paris : Éd. de la Différence, 1990.

Godin, Huguette. Lettre à Gaston Gallimard, 23 décembre 1956, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

Kahane, Eric. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 6 avril 1957, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

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---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 13 septembre 1957, Biot. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 21 novembre 1957, Biot. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 22 juillet 1958, Biot. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 2 octobre 1958, Biot. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, [fin novembre 1958 ?], [Paris]. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

Loison-Charles, Julie. « Nabokov et la censure ». Miranda [Online] 15 (2017). 06 octobre 2017. https://miranda.revues.org/11223

Mascolo, Dionys. Note Contrat, Vladimir Nabokov, « Lolita », 16 mai 1956, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

Mohrt, Michel. Note à l’attention de Monsieur Claude Gallimard, « Traduction de ‘LOLITA’, de Vladimir Nabokov », 5 avril 1957, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Vladimir Nabokov, 10 mai 1957, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Eric Kahane, 4 juin 1957, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Vladimir Nabokov, 4 juin 1957, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Eric Kahane, 28 juin 1957, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Michel Chrestien, 15 novembre 1957, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Doussia Ergaz, 2 décembre 1957, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Eric Kahane, 25 juin 1958, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Vladimir Nabokov, 5 novembre 1958, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Vladimir Nabokov, 9 janvier 1959, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Maurice Girodias, 25 février 1959, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Maurice Girodias, 27 février 1959, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

Nabokov, Véra. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 12 octobre 1958, s. l. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

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---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 28 février 1959, New York (New York). Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lettre à Gaston Gallimard, 7 mai 1957, s. l. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 1er juin 1957, Ithaca (New York). Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 12 novembre 1957, s. l. Paris : dossier « Lolita ». Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 1er janvier 1958, Ithaca (New York). Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Michel Mohrt, 27 décembre 1958, Ithaca (New York). Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Lettre à Jacques Festy, 1er juin 1959, s. l. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

---. Feu pâle. 1962. Traduit de l'anglais par Raymond Girard et Maurice-Edgar Coindreau. Paris : Gallimard, collection « Du monde entier », 1965.

---. Lolita. 1955. In Vladimir Nabokov. Œuvres romanesques complètes. Ed. Maurice Couturier, trad. Maurice Couturier et al. vol. ii. Paris : Gallimard, 2010.

Pivot, Bernard. « La ruée vers Nabokov », Le Figaro littéraire (31 octobre 1959).

Pivot, Bernard, Nabokov, Vladimir. « Vladimir Nabokov » [interview de Vladimir Nabokov par Bernard Pivot, Apostrophes, 30 mai 1975]. Les Grands entretiens de Bernard Pivot [dvd video]. Réal. Roger Kahane. Paris : Gallimard, INA, 2004, 71 minutes.

Queneau, Raymond. Lettre à Blaise Briod, 3 août 1956, Paris. Paris : Archives Gallimard, Fonds Nabokov, dossier « Lolita ».

Schakovskoy, Zinaïda. A la recherche de Nabokov. 1979. Traduit du russe par Maurice Zinovieff. Lausanne : L’Âge d'homme, collection « Petite bibliothèque slave », 2007.

NOTES

1. Si les deux frères ne portaient pas le même nom, c’est parce que l’aîné, lui, n’avait pas quitté Paris pendant l’Occupation et s’était fait fabriquer une fausse carte d’identité au nom de leur mère, Girodias (le nom de leur père, Kahane, étant un nom juif). 2. Nous tenons à exprimer notre gratitude à la maison d’édition Gallimard et, en son sein, à Eric Legendre, pour nous avoir autorisée à consulter ces archives et à citer cette correspondance largement inédite. 3. Michel Mohrt (1914-2011), spécialiste de littérature nord-américaine chez Gallimard, a aussi été écrivain et membre de l’Académie française. 4. Voir Julie Loison-Charles, « Nabokov et la censure », Miranda [Online] 15 (2017). 06 octobre 2017. https://miranda.revues.org/11223 5. Dans la correspondance de cette époque-là, aussi bien manuscrite qu’en tapuscrit, les conventions pour faire référence à un ouvrage étaient d’en placer le titre entre guillemets, ou de souligner, voire de le mettre en capitales. Nous avons choisi de respecter la convention actuelle qui est de mettre en italiques les titres d’ouvrages. 6. Ajout manuscrit.

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7. C’est Jean-Jacques Dumorest, collègue de Nabokov à Cornell, qui lui a fait connaître Michel Chrestien en lui faisant lire l’un de ses ouvrages, Cher Monsieur Moi (1953). Si Chrestien n’a donc pas traduit Lolita, Mohrt lui confie en novembre 1957 la traduction du roman suivant, Pnin (paru la même année aux Etats-Unis), tout en le mettant en garde à propos de la personnalité du romancier : « Je ne vous cache pas que Nabokov est un auteur impossible et extrêment exigeant. » (Mohrt, 15 novembre 1957) 8. Il nous semble aussi possible que Nabokov ait été très contrarié par le succès français d’un autre roman, écrit par un auteur russe soviétique : Le Docteur Jivago de Boris Pasternak, dont la traduction française a été publiée par Gallimard, le 26 juin 1958. Si Kahane avait respecté les délais, l’édition française de Lolita aurait pu précéder celle du roman de Pasternak, à qui le prix Nobel de littérature est décerné le 23 octobre 1958, soit une semaine avant que Nabokov ne dénonce son contrat avec Gallimard. 9. Dans cet extrait, nous avons rétabli les accents, omis par Nabokov dans l’original.

INDEX

Mots-clés : censure, France, Gallimard, Lolita, Olympia Press, traduction Keywords : censorship, France, Gallimard, Lolita, Olympia Press, translation

AUTEURS

AGNÈS EDEL-ROY Professeure agrégée de Lettres modernes, doctorante en Littérature comparée Université de Paris-Est Créteil [email protected]

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Fallait-il annoter Lolita? Was it a good idea to annotate Lolita?

Suzanne Fraysse

1 Lolita a été le premier texte de Nabokov à bénéficier d’annotations, et il est aussi celui qui a fait l’objet du plus grand nombre d’éditions annotées. Qui plus est, ces annotations ont elles-mêmes été étudiées par des critiques qui en sont parfois venus à se demander s’ils n’auraient pas succombé à une fièvre métacritique (Warner 167). Un tel scrupule est sans doute excessif, puisque l’étude des notes intéresse les théoriciens depuis longtemps — il suffit de penser aux études de Genette sur le paratexte et de Derrida sur le parergon — et constitue même aujourd’hui un champ à part entière, notamment à la suite des travaux d’Anthony Grafton et d’Andreas Pfersmann sur l’histoire de l’annotation.

2 Jusqu’à présent, les critiques nabokoviens ont essentiellement déploré les erreurs et les aveuglements d’annotateurs naturellement bien moins compétents qu’eux. Mais aucun n’a vraiment remis en cause l’utilité ou la pertinence des notes, aucun ne s’est vraiment demandé si la pratique notulaire était même compatible avec le romanesque, et en particulier avec un roman du désir tel que Lolita. Il y a là un impensé de la critique nabokovienne auquel je voudrais m’intéresser.

3 La pratique notulaire pose en effet des questions esthétiques, éthiques et politiques qui ont fait couler beaucoup d’encre au cours des siècles. Les attaques contre les scoliastes qui prétendent orienter la lecture, contrôler la réception, et déterminer un usage socialement acceptable du texte ont d’ailleurs souvent été féroces, en particulier à l’époque des Lumières, période de remise en cause de l’autorité. Scriblerus, Mathanasius, Hinkmar Von Repkow incarnent l’annotateur pédant et fantasque dont Nabokov ressuscite la figure dans Pale Fire1. Pourtant, il convient de ne pas céder à un anti-intellectualisme primaire et d’examiner plutôt la grandeur et les misères d’une prose notulaire qui, dans le cas de Lolita, soulève des questions particulièrement complexes, parce qu’elles ne peuvent échapper à la dynamique du désir et de la domination qui sous-tend le roman.

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La légitimation d’une œuvre sulfureuse

4 Réfléchir aux éditions annotées conduit à appréhender les textes à travers l’activité sociale qui les porte, et non pas comme des objets autarciques qui seraient l’expression d’une conscience créatrice, ou d’une collaboration entre auteur et lecteur modèles. En effet, la publication d’éditions annotées révèle l’acceptation d’un roman par un champ social qui reconnaît ainsi sa valeur. Or, on le sait, avant d’obtenir la consécration, et la protection, d’éditions annotées, Lolita a mille fois failli périr : son auteur a envisagé de brûler le roman, plusieurs maisons d’éditions l’ont refusé, et après avoir été publié par un éditeur à la réputation douteuse, il a déchaîné les passions dans les journaux et s’est retrouvé victime de la censure dans plusieurs pays. Doter un tel roman d’un appareil critique, c’est lui fournir un « cadre herméneutique » (Maingueneau 56), c’est-à-dire un environnement protecteur, lié à la garantie que le texte mérite une étude attentive. Le texte paraît sous l’escorte d’un spécialiste, d’un universitaire, bref de quelqu’un que personne ne soupçonnera de chercher à corrompre la jeunesse. Il quitte le champ de bataille pour entrer dans la salle de classe, de bibliothèque, ou de colloque doté de tout le prestige que l’on reconnaît aux textes dignes d’être annotés et transmis, au risque de perdre sa force subversive.

5 Lolita semble d’ailleurs appeler un lecteur assez semblable à celui qu’imposent la tradition éditoriale de l’annotation savante ainsi que l’éthique universitaire. Proffer note que le roman semble destiné à être lu par des érudits et Appel s’identifie à ce savant barbu auquel Humbert prétend s’adresser (Appel 415). Lorsqu’il évoque sa première rencontre avec l’œuvre de Nabokov, Couturier se revoit sous les traits d’un « jeune universitaire » (Couturier 1998, 7). Tous se montrent soucieux de travailler au renforcement de la communauté universitaire dans laquelle ils prétendent acclimater le roman, ne manquant pas de citer les divers protagonistes qui la composent. Nabokov ferait-il mentir Bakhtine lorsqu’il affirmait qu’un auteur ne destine pas son œuvre aux spécialistes de la littérature et n’aspire pas « à la mise en place d’une équipe de chercheurs » (Bakhtine 1979, 387) ? Sans doute est-il le lointain héritier de Dante et de Pétrarque, de Ben Jonson ou de La Ceppède qui cherchaient par le biais de l’érudition à plaire aux princes, ainsi que le souligne Pfersmann (Pfersmann 146). Cette érudition permet en effet à Nabokov de courtiser la faveur sinon des princes, du moins des universitaires. Mais ce cadre universitaire protecteur dans lequel il tente d’insérer son œuvre menace aussi de la fragiliser : il la réduit à un prétexte à examens, concours, et autres rituels sociaux et la rend dépendante d’un lectorat en voie de disparition, à l’heure où l’enseignement de la littérature s’essouffle.

6 Toujours est-il que sous la triple pression de Nabokov, des maisons d’édition, et du milieu universitaire auquel il appartient, l’annotateur est amené à jouer le rôle d’un professeur s’adressant à un public moins savant que lui, faisant penser au tuteur qui, selon Kant, interdit si volontiers aux hommes l’usage autonome de leur entendement. Dans cet esprit, Appel donne même des conseils pédagogiques à ses lecteurs, qu’il fantasme tantôt comme des collègues à qui il conseille d’utiliser un enregistrement en classe (Appel 446), tantôt comme des étudiants à qui il donne des devoirs à la maison : « study guide : [...] play some of these hits while reading » (Appel 387). Appel joue son rôle avec un certain humour, et même parfois avec une certaine gêne. Ainsi, il remarque que la note destinée à traduire « chère Dolorès » en anglais est insultante pour les lecteurs bilingues (Appel 387). À vrai dire, l’annotateur, qui s’adresse aussi à

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ses pairs, n’a pas la tâche facile : le spécialiste risque toujours de trouver ses explications évidentes, ou lacunaires, voire erronées. Couturier hésite par exemple à expliciter « Elsinor » : le nom, dit-il, « renvoie bien sûr au château où se déroule l’intrigue d’Hamlet de Shakespeare » (1639).2 Ce « bien sûr » que je place en italiques est manifestement le symptôme d’une difficulté bien naturelle à cibler le lectorat, potentiellement moins ignorant qu’il n’est censé être.

7 Paradoxalement donc, l’annotateur est soumis à un jeu institutionnel qui le place en position de maîtrise. Non seulement il doit « faire le professeur », quitte à reconnaître ses moments d’impuissance,3 mais il doit accepter les exigences de l’éditeur qui l’emploie. Les annotateurs se font en général discrets sur le sujet. Les annotations de la Library of America sont précédées de quelques lignes qui explicitent la philosophie des notes (elles ne feront pas double emploi avec les dictionnaires4). Les autres éditions reposent sur des contraintes implicites : les notes doivent être courtes, aussi factuelles que possible, et ne porter que sur un segment très bref du texte. Et il ne doit pas y en avoir « trop », budget oblige. Ces contraintes constituent parfois de véritables entraves : l’espace compté des notes et leur nombre limité font obstacle à la force expansive naturelle de la lecture ; le caractère pointilliste de la note entraîne une myopie du regard et une fragmentation du propos (que les renvois de note à note et les listes thématiques au sein d’une même note tentent de compenser) ; enfin, l’approche « factuelle » se révèle souvent un leurre comme en témoigne par exemple Gleize, annotateur de Ponge pour la Pléiade, lorsqu’il évoque les dialogues parfois conflictuels avec des éditeurs qui “ souhaitent que soient réduites au minimum les notes dites interprétatives (toujours trop longues) au profit de notes explicatives (par définition brèves et précises, supposées objectives ou neutres) ”. Comme si toute note, y compris celle qui consiste à simplement fournir le sens littéral d’un mot ancien ou d’un néologisme, ne relevait pas d’un parti pris, d’un présupposé herméneutique idéologique, [...] d’un commentaire donc, assumé comme tel, revendiqué (Gleize 18).

8 Cette dérobade devant l’interprétation sert principalement à asseoir l’autorité du professeur censé brider sa subjectivité afin d’écrire sinon au nom de la « vérité », du moins au nom de la communauté des spécialistes. Boyd adopte la manière impersonnelle et lapidaire caractéristique des annotations de la Library of America. A contrario, Proffer et Appel révèlent assez librement leurs opinions personnelles mais se voient vertement rappelés à l’ordre par une Pifer qui taxe de tels manquements à la posture professorale de « kinbotisme » (Pifer 3). Placé en position de maître, l’annotateur n’est paradoxalement plus libre de sa parole. Il socialise l’œuvre en se socialisant lui-même, acceptant un jeu de rôles qui peut avoir ses gratifications narcissiques, mais qui implique un certain renoncement à la liberté du « je ». Tous les annotateurs n’acceptent pas volontiers cette abdication, et l’on voit se déployer tout un spectre de postures, qui vont du détachement impassible d’un Boyd à la décontraction studieuse, mais enjouée, d’un Appel.

9 Ces contraintes génériques, éditoriales et universitaires sont particulièrement problématiques dans le cas d’une œuvre telle que Lolita : le roman ainsi socialisé se voit certes sanctuarisé, mais également marginalisé dans des lieux qui exigent le refoulement des forces érotiques qui étaient venues inquiéter le champ social : les éditions annotées de Lolita suggèrent un mode de lecture normé et socialement acceptable qui ôte au roman sa pointe assassine. Dans le cas de la Pléiade, l’apparence matérielle même du texte manifeste ce refoulement : le roman revêt une couverture

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pleine peau souple dorée à l’or fin (23 carats) qui lui confère une respectabilité bourgeoise contre laquelle s’emporte Alain Satgé dans Tu n’écriras point : même les feuillets de la Pléiade, « impalpables et comme abstraits [...] ôtent toute saveur à la lecture, communiquant aux récits les plus colorés leur ennui universitaire et clérical » écrit-il (cité par Leclerc 218). Force est de reconnaître que la posture professorale n’est pas la plus appropriée pour évoquer le désir, et ses chantres. Appel et Proffer hésitent l’un à citer Sade (Proffer 141), l’autre à inclure les strophes les plus scabreuses d’une chanson grivoise (Appel 401). Un autre lecteur, Naiman, ayant osé voir une anagramme obscène dans le mot « chestnut », déclenche une polémique si vive sur internet qu’il lui faut prendre longuement la plume et invoquer l’autorité de Shakespeare afin de se faire pardonner d’avoir vu « the cunt » dans « chestnut » (Naiman, 2006). Pour sa part, Couturier souligne bien la « connotation érotique » du mot « chestnut », mais préfère citer une anecdote tirée de Tristram Shandy, respectable classique, et oublier la sulfureuse anagramme (Couturier 1690-1). Naiman a sans doute raison de suggérer qu’une telle réticence à traiter des jeux de mots obscènes chez Nabokov est due à une gêne vis-à-vis du thème sexuel du roman ainsi qu’à une réticence des annotateurs à admettre qu’ils ne sont pas de purs esprits, mais qu’ils ont aussi un corps (Naiman 3). Ce corps n’apparaît en effet guère chez les annotateurs, sauf chez Appel, qu’il est possible de se représenter en jeune universitaire barbu, marié, père d’une petite Karen de 7 ans, cultivant des relations d’amitié avec les Nabokov et osant exprimer librement son point de vue malgré l’injonction à se taire paradoxalement faite à l’annotateur.

10 Les annotations ne refoulent toutefois pas complètement le sexuel. Appel évoque d’ailleurs ces chercheurs, « bons pères et bons époux », traquant un contenu érotique placé « sous clé » (Appel 440), fort semblables à ces érudits que Humbert imagine lisant Lolita tout en suçant la pomme d’une canne phallique.5 La critique nabokovienne n’a pas manqué de reprendre les métaphores très masculines du roman pour évoquer cette excitation érotique de la lecture, ce plaisir sensuel qui est celui de la chasse, de la poursuite amoureuse, mais aussi de la masturbation intellectuelle à laquelle se livrent tous ceux qui veulent goûter la pomme du savoir. Il y a chez tous les annotateurs de Lolita ces moments d’extase herméneutique, de reconnaissance passionnée, ces orgasmes interprétatifs qui font penser à cet instant où Humbert voit Lolita pour la première fois... et reconnaît quelqu’un d’autre. Appel s’enflamme au point de ne pas résister au plaisir de résoudre une énigme...qui ne se trouve pas dans Lolita mais dans Speak, Memory (Appel 395). Le « carmen » du roman (sa force poétique) engendre, selon un jeu de mots que Couturier juge « piètre », des car-men sujets aux transports amoureux, mais aussi des barmen, sujets à l’ivresse poétique, et qui sont pour ainsi dire la face cachée des austères savants qui censurent les amoureux fervents ( to bar signifie « interdire » en anglais) et des juges qui ont censuré le roman (un bar-man étant un homme du barreau).

11 Ce refoulement du sexuel n’est pas non plus total dans le champ social qui résiste en fait avec une certaine vigueur à cet enfermement dans l’establishment universitaire. En témoigne par exemple la récupération du roman par la culture populaire qui s’obstine à faire de la nymphette un sex symbol. Le roman d’ailleurs n’aurait pas pu avoir la célébrité qui est la sienne s’il n’avait pu s’évader du milieu universitaire, comme Lolita des griffes de son érudit bourreau. Il faut s’y résoudre : le succès du livre repose sur un malentendu ou peut-être, plus exactement, un refus d’entendre ce que les professeurs, Nabokov en tête, ont à dire du livre.

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Humbert lecteur modèle ?

12 Or la posture professorale est justement celle de Humbert, qui non seulement rédige des manuels de littérature française et anglaise mais se comporte souvent en annotateur. Dès la première page, il décompose le nom de Lolita en trois pièces détachées prêtes à être numérotées et explicitées, fragmentant le prénom comme les annotateurs fragmentent les textes, et répondant à l’injonction que Nabokov formulait devant ses étudiants : « Literature must be taken and broken into bits, pulled apart, squashed » (Nabokov 1981, 105). Plus loin, il donne encore l’exemple, déchiffrant les fragments textuels abandonnés par Quilty sur les registres d’hôtel en ce qu’il faut bien considérer comme l’ébauche d’une pratique notulaire. On ne s’étonnera donc pas si les annotateurs, qui se retrouvent à rivaliser avec Humbert, en viennent parfois à s’identifier à lui. Alfred Appel s’amuse à remarquer que les initiales de son nom et de son prénom sont identiques, comme celles de Humbert Humbert (Appel 361) avant de se mettre à pasticher Humbert, inventant des mots tels que « sexistics » (Appel 324) ou « at first wince » (Appel 418).

13 Comment d’ailleurs un annotateur pourrait-il vraiment résister à la séduction d’un narrateur qui se trouve être, comme lui, spécialiste de littérature, et qui incarne des valeurs élitistes qu’il a des chances de partager ? Lolita élabore une sorte de we-code (Amossy 68) à partir d’une dichotomie entre culture bourgeoise et culture populaire, culture européenne et culture américaine, culture classique et culture de la jeunesse, et même, culture masculine et culture féminine. Les annotateurs trahissent leur collusion avec Humbert lorsqu’ils se font l’écho de telles oppositions.6 Appel affirme ainsi que Humbert s’exprime parfois en français parce que Nabokov aurait cherché à établir un contraste ironique entre Humbert, qui s’exprime dans ce que Appel considère comme « la langue de la culture et du génie » (Appel 431), et les Américains dont la culture lui paraît manifestement inférieure (Appel 395). Appel s’étonne que Nabokov ait condescendu à s’intéresser, certes « de manière sélective », à un tel matériau, et semble tenir pour acquis que les lecteurs ignorent tout de cette culture populaire qui fait les délices de Lolita ; il se sent alors obligé de renvoyer le lecteur à des ouvrages de référence sur la question (Appel 387). Boyd tend pour sa part à privilégier les références savantes, et pour expliciter l’expression « conquering hero » (Boyd 876), il évoque comme Appel Thomas Morell et Haendel, mais pas la publicité pour Viyella qu’Appel avait pourtant fait reproduire dans ses annotations, et que Nabokov décrit d’ailleurs dans Lolita. Pour sa part, Proffer estime inutile de consacrer la moindre note à cette culture « inférieure » : A commentary on subjects mildly satirized in the book, middle class ladies, teen magazines, movies, motels, girls’ schools, summer camps, car colors, newspapers, hitchhikers, tour books, tourist maps, science, psychiatry and modern sex education, to name only a few – would be pointless (Proffer 118).

14 Cette culture est ainsi cavalièrement censurée, parce qu’elle n’a guère sa place dans le cadre d’une édition savante. Appel, qui devait par la suite se spécialiser dans l’étude du cinéma et du jazz, ne partageait sans doute pas les préjugés de Humbert (et de Proffer) à l’égard de la culture populaire. Mais il ne trouve rien à redire aux propos sexistes de Humbert sur les femmes écrivains. Bien au contraire, il entreprend de le défendre en ces termes: « He’s referring to the kind of deathless trite prose long produced by women for women (e.g. the Harlequin romances, whose male authors adopt female

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pseudonyms to be “credible” ») (Appel 358). Autrement dit, selon Appel, banalité rime avec féminité au point que pour être publié chez Harlequin, un homme doit se faire passer pour femme. Appel récidive quelques pages plus loin, évoquant sans broncher « les clichés des romans féminins populaires » (Appel 363). Puis, au mépris des convenances génériques, il entreprend de raconter une anecdote personnelle : When I was writing this note, I called up to my wife in the adjacent room, asking her if she remembered all the details in Bluebeard. “I know the story,” replied Karen, my seven-year-old daughter, running into the room (this was in 1967). I showed her the passage in Lolita and after helpfully identifying sister Ann, she read H.H.’s dirge for Bluebeard. “Poor Bluebeard,” she quoted. “Poor Bluebeard? He was awful! What kind of book is this ? (Appel 422)

15 Cette saynète condense les oppositions du roman, mettant en scène un homme, Appel lui-même, adulte cultivé occupé à des travaux de plume, et une petite fille qui vient de lire un conte populaire. Mais elle dramatise également deux modes de lecture, la lecture savante d’un annotateur et la lecture spontanée d’une enfant qui réagit émotionnellement à ce qu’elle lit et pose une question morale.

16 Or l’enfant a raison : Barbe Bleue est abominable. Appel, qui s’identifie à l’intellectuel barbu imaginé par Humbert, sinon à Humbert lui-même, devinerait-il que, dans les éditions annotées, les « clés » servent aussi à enfermer le cadavre des femmes et des enfants assassinées ? Proffer poignarde plusieurs fois Lolita, comme le note justement Pifer (Pifer 6). L’assassinat des jeunes filles a lieu en direct dans une anthologie française, intitulée Les Lolitas. L’auteur, qui s’abrite sous le pseudonyme de Humbert K, place en exergue une citation de Baudelaire, qui définit en ces termes la jeune fille dans « Mon cœur mis à nu » : « une petite sotte et une petite salope ; la plus grande imbécillité unie à la plus grande dépravation. Il y a dans la jeune fille toute l’abjection du voyou et du collégien » (Humbert K. 5). La citation est manifestement censée légitimer la brutalité stupide des propos tenus sur Lolita dans la préface de cette anthologie, propos qui font écho à la méchanceté de Humbert lorsqu’il juge que Lolita est au fond vulgaire, pénible et dépravée.

17 En réalité, aucune lecture ne peut véritablement ignorer les questions morales posées par Lolita. Bien que Nabokov ait affirmé que son livre ne défende aucune morale, son roman est comme tous les romans une structure verbale de type as if, qui propose au lecteur une expérience de pensée impliquant un jugement moral et non pas seulement esthétique. Il ne faut pas oublier l’enfant qui pleure dans la nuit, les femmes battues, humiliées, trompées, le barbier qui a perdu son fils. Il ne faut pas, comme le fait Humbert, réduire le récit de la mort d’un soldat à un épineux problème de traduction. C’est ainsi que Nabokov ne se contredit pas lorsqu’il soutient tantôt que son roman n’est pas didactique et tantôt qu’il est l’œuvre d’un moraliste sévère. Le roman ne formule pas une morale explicite, mais amène ses lecteurs à faire une expérience mentale difficile qui relève de l’éthique – que les lecteurs en aient conscience ou non. Et à vrai dire, la petite Karen se livre à une lecture morale et émotionnelle que son père ne s’autorise pas, mais que revendique pourtant Nabokov lorsqu’il confie à Appel que la dernière rencontre entre Humbert et Lolita doit nous mettre la larme à l’œil (Appel 443). Aussi surprenant que cela puisse paraître, cette lecture de la sensibilité, héritée de la Nouvelle Héloïse, imprègne d’ailleurs les cours de Nabokov. C’est ainsi par exemple qu’il désigne à l’attention de ses étudiants les personnages de Madame Bovary qui méritent vraiment leur compassion, le père Rouault, Justin, Berthe et la petite bonne de Lheureux (Nabokov 1980, 144). Il y a là une spirale critique de type hégélien : le lecteur

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doit renoncer à la lecture « naïve » de type Karen, et lire comme son père, ce savant au sourire si narquois, mais il doit aussi dépasser cette lecture érudite et adopter la posture éthique qui était celle de l’enfant. Faute de quoi il se rendra coupable de la même cruauté que Humbert.

18 Bien plus, il serait temps d’observer que dans le rapport de force qui oppose Humbert à Lolita, ce n’est pas le « tyran » qui gagne, mais la petite fille qui ourdit en silence le complot contre son oppresseur. A la fin du roman, c’est même elle qui livre à Humbert le nom qu’il a cherché en vain. C’est elle qui détient la clé, c’est elle qui sait ce que Humbert cherche si désespérément à savoir. De ce point de vue, le véritable double de Nabokov dans le roman est bien davantage Lolita que Humbert, parce que c’est en effet Lolita qui, en tant que maître de silence, incarne la position de Nabokov, détenteur de ce savoir secret que l’annotateur cherche à conquérir au prix de tant d’efforts.

19 Les lecteurs naissent libres et doivent le rester, disait Nabokov (Nabokov 1981, 12). L’annotateur, prisonnier d’un genre paralittéraire, marchant sur les traces d’un pervers narcissique, a bien du mal à conquérir cette liberté que Lolita incarne, au même titre que la petite Karen. On pourra faire grief à Nabokov de hiérarchiser et de « genrer » les approches intellectuelles et émotives suivant les stéréotypes de son époque. Mais il est important de voir que le roman permet d’opérer le renversement des valeurs attachées à ces stéréotypes.

Le contrôle de la réception

20 Il faut pourtant bien remarquer que la question de la petite Karen (« what kind of book is this ? ») était justement celle que les censeurs avaient adressée à Nabokov. Les annotations, qui déplacent l’attention des enjeux éthiques aux enjeux littéraires, protègent l’œuvre d’un jugement moral qui peut menacer l’existence même de l’œuvre au sein du champ social. L’escorte notulaire constitue ainsi une stratégie de séduction du lecteur, lui permettant d’établir une connivence avec un roman qu’elle rend acceptable parce qu’elle l’inscrit dans un espace social respectable, celui de la culture savante.

21 Les annotations ralentissent également la lecture, brisent la linéarité de la lecture, et préviennent ainsi tout jugement hâtif. Elles s’imposent de façon plus ou moins discrète selon les éditions : les appels de note sont absents dans l’édition de la Library of America, placés en marge du texte dans Vintage, et dans le corps même du texte dans la Pléiade. Ces interruptions intempestives de l’annotateur peuvent parfois irriter : consulter une note quand on lit un roman, c’est un peu comme répondre au téléphone lorsqu’on fait l’amour, note ainsi un humoriste (Pfersmann 11). Comme Humbert, le lecteur semble condamné à un perpétuel coitus interruptus. Appel l’avait bien compris : l’annotateur est un savant barbu, cousin des nageurs barbus qui privent Humbert des délices qu’il s’apprêtait à goûter dans les bras d’Annabel.

22 Cette volonté d’attirer l’attention sur les détails du texte participe d’une volonté de résistance aux tentatives d’envoûtement de Humbert (un nom que Humbert fait d’ailleurs rimer avec « Mesmer »). Il y a là une éthique de résistance à l’épanchement lyrique, à l’abandon amoureux, qui rappelle la tradition savante des romans annotés contre laquelle Cervantès, Balzac ou Mann s’étaient opposés en leur temps au nom de l’illusion romanesque. Entre les deux conceptions du romanesque qui s’opposent ainsi

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depuis l’âge classique, Nabokov choisit la tradition savante de l’annotation, comme le montrent à l’évidence son commentaire à Eugene Onegin ainsi que Pale Fire7 et Ada.

23 Ce même esprit anime Proffer et Appel lorsqu’ils critiquent les speed readers. Mais si l’annotation ralentit bien la lecture en donnant matière à réflexion grâce à ses arrêts sur image, elle se substitue aussi au travail de recherche du lecteur, et revient en fait à accélérer la lecture. Appel, conscient de la difficulté, rédige alors une note dans laquelle il renvoie le lecteur à une encyclopédie au lieu d’expliquer ce qu’est un « yucca moth » (Appel 390). Nabokov procède de même dans Ada: « Tofana : allusion to aqua tofana (see any good dictionary) » (Nabokov 1969, 463). En général cependant, les notes épargnent au lecteur un long labeur en lui montrant comment déjouer les ruses et les pièges du texte, en récapitulant les apparitions d’un motif, ou en identifiant les allusions intertextuelles.

24 Pire, en devançant les interrogations du lecteur, l’annotateur tue le manque chez le lecteur. A l’heure d’internet, il est d’ailleurs permis de se demander si les bases mêmes du jeu nabokovien (et du jeu notulaire !) ne sont pas sapées, puisque de très nombreuses interrogations trouvent leur réponse en quelques clics. Toujours est-il que prétendant seconder le texte en facilitant la lecture, l’annotateur va en fait à l’encontre de l’intérêt du texte qui est d’opposer une résistance au lecteur, de le frustrer afin de mieux le motiver. Au fond, vouloir abolir la réserve du texte, c’est en fait vouloir en finir avec lui. Il faut s’en souvenir avant de céder au rêve mortifère de tout expliquer, en particulier à l’heure d’internet.

25 Pfersmann identifie une nouvelle difficulté lorsqu’il note que « entre l’aide à la lecture comme invitation à la réflexion et la détermination autoritaire du sens d’un texte, il n’y a souvent qu’un pas » (Pfersmann 289). Soulignant un détail du texte, l’annotation définit ce qui mérite d’être commenté et plonge le reste du texte dans l’ombre. Appel invente même la « non-annotation » (Appel 334), destinée à éviter aux futurs exégètes de chercher une allusion là où, selon lui, il n’y en aurait pas. Ailleurs, il bride l’interprétation: « ah-ah-ah : simply the sound of a three-folding “harmonica” door » (Appel 438). Ce « simply » péremptoire qui restreint le champ des interprétations possibles est d’autant plus surprenant qu’Appel note par ailleurs dans le roman les trois apparitions de ce « ah » que le son de la porte nous invite à relier (Appel 339). De même, Proffer affirme candidement le caractère purement décoratif de la plupart des allusions intertextuelles dans Lolita (Proffer 19). Rien à voir là où l’annotateur n’a rien vu. Parfois encore, l’annotateur choisit arbitrairement entre plusieurs hypothèses. Couturier ignore ainsi délibérément l’interprétation qu’Appel faisait du nom de Charlotte (il y voyait une allusion à la Charlotte de Werther) afin d’imposer une autre référence, plus excitante à son avis : le nom de Charlotte Haze évoquerait celui d’une prostituée londonienne du 18ème siècle, une certaine Charlotte Hayes dont Apollinaire parle longuement dans sa préface à l’édition française de Fanny Hill, le célèbre roman de Cleland (Couturier 1653).8 Goethe ou Cleland ? La multiplicité des explications possibles finit par miner l’autorité de l’annotateur. Le texte résiste d’ailleurs à son appropriation autoritaire par le scoliaste et oppose les fantaisies de son jeu au sérieux d’un annotateur impuissant à suivre les fils d’une rêverie sans fin. Car l’espace de la note est compté. Boyd peut alors revenir sur la note qu’Appel consacre aux chiens des Farlow et montrer dans un article fouillé la richesse thématique de leurs noms (Boyd 2008). Mais cette expansion de la note n’épuise pas le sujet, et pour cause : la pensée associative est une dérive sans fin. Il est d’ailleurs à craindre que des annotations du roman sur

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Internet tourneraient vite au cauchemar, ainsi que le remarque Yvan Leclerc, parce que, chaque signe fonctionnant comme appel de notes, le lecteur deviendrait « l’homme du labyrinthe », errant dans la médiathèque universelle (Leclerc 224).

26 C’est ainsi que, croyant donner des clés de lecture, les annotateurs verrouillent en fait les portes une à une, un peu à la façon dont Humbert ferme toutes les portes de Pavor Manor, et empêchent la libre circulation du lecteur. Les lecteurs attentifs ont pu observer qu’en dépit des précautions de Humbert, Quilty continue cependant à passer de pièce en pièce, au mépris de toute logique. Boyd souligne le fait que dans sa traduction russe du roman, Nabokov n’a pas voulu corriger cette erreur: « Quilty could not be trudging from room to room since H.H. had locked their rooms, but this is okay on second thought and need not be corrected in your edition » (Boyd 1993, 884). Certes, l’annotation ferme les portes, mais le lecteur reste libre de ses mouvements, selon la logique paradoxale du rêve, et du jeu littéraire.

27 Mais surtout, en prétendant apporter au lecteur le complément indispensable de l’œuvre, les annotateurs imposent l’image d’un texte incapable de se défendre tout seul. Appel montre que les noms de « Lester » et de « Fabian » se combinent pour produire « lesbian », comme s’il était sûr que, sans son explication, le texte raterait son effet. Nabokov lui-même semble parfois avoir eu ses doutes expliquant par exemple dans les notes d’Ada que le mot « kamargsky » est un mot valise fait de « Camargue » et de « komar » qui signifie « moustique » en russe. Triste destin des plaisanteries qu’il faut laborieusement expliquer.

28 Qui plus est, les annotateurs tendent à réduire le texte à un simple jeu de devinettes. A vrai dire, Nabokov a fait beaucoup de tort à son œuvre en concluant son autobiographie par l’évocation du jeu qui consiste à retrouver ce que le marin a caché dans une image. Les lecteurs n’ont pas manqué de comparer le texte nabokovien à ce jeu, qui leur est alors apparu comme « divertissant et intelligent », mais pas très « profond » (Proffer 78). Il est dans l’intérêt de l’œuvre d’en finir avec cette conception de la littérature comme encodage et décodage que les annotations de Lolita tendent à promouvoir. Il faut penser les romans de Nabokov non pas comme des textes à énigme mais comme des textes à mystère, et montrer ce qui dans Lolita résiste à l’analyse. Comme l’explique Maingueneau, offrir un cadre herméneutique à un texte, « c’est surtout montrer qu’il y a quelque chose qui échappe » (Maingueneau 57). Si la tâche du lecteur consiste ainsi à trouver le site où la clarté s’obscurcit, il faut bien reconnaître que les annotations ne sont pas le meilleur lieu pour accomplir ce programme puisque leur fonction consiste au contraire à élucider le texte.

L’autorité de l’auteur

29 Cette conception du texte comme jardin regorgeant d’œufs de pâques cachés par un père généreux pour des enfants gourmands suppose un auteur pleinement conscient de ce qu’il met dans le texte et que son lecteur doit trouver, et donc favorise cette illusion d’un auteur en pleine maîtrise de son texte qui semble avoir obsédé une critique nabokovienne implicitement infantilisée. Nabokov tenait à perpétuer cette illusion, allant jusqu’à interdire ses romans à des freudiens forcément sceptiques et peu enclins à jouer ce jeu-là. De fait, la critique nabokovienne s’est révélée plutôt imperméable aux théories annonçant la mort de l’auteur... à moins qu’elle n’ait préfiguré la mort de la théorie elle-même. Sans doute, est-ce dû au fait que, par un mélange de séduction et

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d’intimidation qui fait songer à la manière de Humbert vis-à-vis de Lolita, Nabokov était parvenu à convaincre ses critiques de ne s’emparer qu’en tremblant des clés de Barbe-bleue. Couturier considère Nabokov comme tyrannique, et Proffer comme sadique. Mais Nabokov est surtout un auteur soucieux de défendre ses droits à travers la condamnation de deux travers de lecture : le kinbotisme, cette tendance à oublier l’auteur et à ne lire que soi-même dans le texte des autres, et le Humbertisme, qui consiste au contraire à chercher l’auteur (en l’occurrence Quilty)...afin de le tuer. Mais respecter les droits d’un auteur ne revient pas à renoncer à ses droits de lecteur.

30 Nabokov semble cependant souvent avoir réussi à convaincre ses annotateurs de redouter de devenir la proie de leur proie. Proffer par exemple prétend redouter que Nabokov ne l’épingle comme un papillon. Cette paranoïa critique contient toutefois sa part d’hypocrisie : l’annotateur, qui se prétend entièrement soumis à un auteur tyrannique, légitime ainsi ses interprétations. Les éditeurs, qui demandent souvent à leurs annotateurs de s’en tenir aux allusions « avérées », encouragent d’ailleurs ce biais, particulièrement frappant chez Appel : il n’hésite pas à se faire le porte-parole de Nabokov, encourageant même ses lecteurs à écouter la voix enregistrée de Nabokov qui, selon Appel, révèlerait l’homme qu’il était vraiment (Appel 446). Couturier, qui regrette parfois de ne pas avoir cherché à rencontrer Nabokov, note symptomatiquement qu’il « croit entendre la voix de Nabokov » (Couturier 1697). Et même s’il a pu affirmer s’être rebellé contre la « tyrannie » de Nabokov, il a cependant souvent recours dans ses notes à des arguments d’autorité fondés sur l’intention de l’auteur, et n’hésite pas à citer souvent les échanges entre Appel et Nabokov. Boyd préfère parfois avoir recours aux définitions de Nabokov plutôt que celles du dictionnaire pour traduire des mots du langage courant tels que « baba » en russe ou « fruit vert » en français. Dans certains cas, ce respect de l’autorité de l’auteur repose sur une confiance excessive, comme lorsque Couturier oublie de vérifier si Nabokov a bien raison de croire que l’héroïne du Comte de Monte-Cristo s’appelle Dolorès (Couturier 2011, 141).9 Les annotateurs vérifient cependant souvent scrupuleusement leurs informations, et Appel n’hésite pas à avouer qu’il n’a parfois pas réussi à savoir si les informations fournies par Nabokov sont fiables ou non. Toutefois, l’idée que Nabokov puisse se tromper, comme tout le monde, et qu’il échoue parfois à incarner la toute- puissance paternelle, cette idée-là est bizarrement assez récente.

31 Naturellement, tous les annotateurs n’entendent pas la voix de Nabokov de la même façon : Appel considère par exemple que Ray exprime le point de vue de Nabokov lorsqu’il voit dans la scène de l’abîme une apothéose morale (Appel 324), mais Couturier objecte : « Nabokov ne partage évidemment pas les préoccupations éthiques de Ray comme il est écrit dans la postface » (Couturier 1629). A de tels moments, on comprend à quel point l’auteur n’est ni une chose biographique, ni une chose grammaticale, mais un objet virtuel que les annotateurs construisent à leur façon, une illusion indispensable au tour de magie critique. On pourrait appeler « posture pythique » cette façon de deviner l’intention de l’auteur et de faire passer pour « évident » ce qui manifestement ne l’est pas si l’on en juge par cet exemple.

32 Entre la justification triomphante de l’interprétation par l’approbation de l’auteur et l’invalidation d’une « coïncidence » (en général dénoncée chez un rival), il existe toute une gamme de lectures qui rusent avec le maître-étalon intentionnaliste et revendiquent simplement une forte présomption. Couturier écrit ainsi : « Nabokov ne voulait sans doute pas jouer sur le mot nichon comme le dit Alfred Appel mais faire

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référence à Thomas Pichon » (Couturier 1633). Or, dans la mesure où les notes d’Appel ont été relues par un Nabokov censé être tyrannique, on s’étonne que celui-ci n’ait pas corrigé Appel avant que Couturier ne s’avise de le faire. Dans de tels cas, « Nabokov » semble n’être que le nom donné par l’annotateur à son intime conviction. Des formules d’intimidation telles que « évidemment » ou « sans conteste » court-circuitent la démonstration...qu’il serait de toute façon difficile à faire dans une note. Il faut observer en passant que les allusions trouvées par les annotateurs, et attribuées à l’auteur à des fins de légitimation, jouent un rôle non négligeable dans la création d’un Nabokov omniscient.

33 Une autre ruse est l’annotation par prétérition dont Appel se fait une spécialité : il remarque par exemple qu’il y a une « Lola » dans L’Ange bleu (1930), mais ajoute que Nabokov n’a jamais vu le film de Josef Von Sternberg (Appel 332). Couturier reprend la référence d’Appel (qu’il oublie de citer), et même la développe, mais omet le caveat d’Appel (Couturier 1632). Un tel exemple montre que les annotateurs résistent mal au désir de s’affranchir de la tyrannie intentionnaliste. Il est cependant très rare que les annotateurs aillent jusqu’à s’opposer à l’auteur. Cela arrive pourtant, comme par exemple lorsque Couturier avance que Lolita « n’a rien d’un conte de fées, quoi qu’en dise Nabokov dans une lettre à Alfred Appel » (Couturier 1713). Une telle note est risquée car elle sape le mode de justification utilisé par ailleurs. Dans le même esprit, Boyd préfère penser que Nabokov s’est « trompé », qu’il ne faut pas accorder trop d’importance à une chronologie « erronée », et qu’il est donc impossible de justifier textuellement le fait que Humbert ait pu imaginer les évènements de la fin du roman. Une telle lecture, affirme-t-il, « n’apporte rien et fait perdre presque tout, et ne repose que sur un chiffre facilement rectifiable » (Boyd 79). Je suis tentée de suivre Boyd, et pense en effet qu’il y a des lectures plus stimulantes que d’autres, mais j’observerai cependant que dans son analyse, l’aune de l’interprétation a cessé d’être le respect de l’écrit pour devenir la satisfaction de l’interprète, ou sa conviction fondamentalement injustifiable de savoir ce que Nabokov avait vraiment voulu écrire, en dépit de ce qu’il a vraiment écrit.

L’élaboration des ethe

34 Il va de soi que le désir d’auteur se fait particulièrement sentir lorsque le narrateur d’un roman est odieux, comme c’est le cas dans Lolita. Il est symptomatique de ce qu’Amossy appelle une « résistance à une interaction retorse et embarrassante » (Amossy 2009, 10). Tous les annotateurs cherchent ainsi à souligner la façon dont l’auteur manifeste sa présence « en surplomb » des personnages.

35 Mais ils font bien davantage, et élaborent dans les coulisses du texte l’ethos de l’auteur en relation dynamique avec leur propre ethos d’annotateur. J’emprunte le mot « ethos » à Aristote qui traite non de la capacité de la parole à refléter l’être réel du locuteur, mais traite de l’image que le locuteur construit discursivement. Ainsi que le souligne Amossy, cette construction discursive est intimement dépendante des règles de l’institution discursive et d’un imaginaire social (Amossy 2010, 38). Dans le cas d’une édition annotée, la place des notes en fin de volume et leur taille de police inférieure indiquent assez leur caractère subalterne, le clivage entre texte « obligatoire » et notes « facultatives », et partant, le rapport hiérarchique que l’édition annotée instaure entre auteur et annotateur.10 Nabokov et ses annotateurs ne sont donc pas totalement libres

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de s’inventer discursivement, mais doivent se situer par rapport à certains stéréotypes concernant le rôle d’un « auteur » et celui d’un « annotateur ». Nabokov semble avoir eu une conscience aigüe de cette dramaturgie, s’inquiétant dans sa postface d’avoir l’air « de faire semblant » d’être Vladimir Nabokov ou répondant obligeamment aux questions d’Appel (Appel 325).

36 Il faut cependant observer que les annotations d’Appel démentent souvent l’image d’un Nabokov tyrannique qui a pu s’imposer parfois. Certes, Nabokov s’immisce dans les notes d’Appel (comme Appel s’immisce dans Lolita). Mais il laisse Appel libre de faire les rapprochements qu’il souhaite, se contentant de préciser sa pensée, mû par le désir légitime de ne pas être tenu pour responsable d’idées qui ne seraient pas les siennes. Plus surprenant, les annotations créent un contraste étonnant entre l’ethos dit et l’ethos montré : Appel nous dit en effet que Nabokov a une culture immense et une mémoire prodigieuse, mais il nous montre un Nabokov trahi par sa mémoire, qui ne se souvient plus très bien de Finnegan’s Wake (Appel 413), ni du personnage de B.D. auquel Humbert fait allusion (Appel 430). Il ne sait plus non plus s’il a vraiment vu le film de Jules Dassin, Brute Force (Appel 436). De même, l’image d’un auteur scrupuleusement attentif au moindre détail est-elle démentie par le fait que Nabokov ne corrige pas les erreurs manifestes de Appel, comme par exemple lorsqu’il baptise le détective employé par Humbert du nom de Bill Brown, alors qu’il s’agit en fait du nom de la personne que trouve ce détective (Appel 429).

37 Couturier pour sa part durcit souvent le trait, créant l’image d’un auteur arrogant, « méprisant » (Couturier 1686) ou ayant une « confiance illimitée en ses talents » (Couturier 1710), bref, jouant pleinement le rôle enviable d’un auteur dont l’annotateur ne peut être que l’humble serviteur. Inquiet du rôle qu’il doit lui-même jouer, il dénonce la volonté supposée de Nabokov d’assujettir son prédécesseur, Appel. Il présente ainsi une lettre de Nabokov sur le symbolisme des couleurs comme un « correctif » qu’Appel aurait été obligé d’insérer, même si Appel affirme avoir choisi de l’incorporer aux notes à cause de son intérêt (Appel 364). Certes, Appel peut mentir diplomatiquement, mais reste qu’il n’a pas été contraint de renoncer aux propos qu’il publie et que Nabokov « corrige ». De façon encore plus frappante, Couturier prétend ailleurs que Nabokov aurait effectivement censuré Appel : « Nabokov avait refusé que le nom de cet entraîneur soit divulgué, autorisant cependant Appel à indiquer la date de sa naissance et celle de sa mort » (Couturier 1677). Couturier, bravant l’interdit, révèle alors le nom de cet entraîneur de tennis, William T. Tilden II. Ceci permet à Couturier de se présenter comme un lecteur libre de la tyrannie d’un auteur auquel Appel n’aurait pour sa part pas eu le courage de s’opposer. Sauf que Couturier se livre ici à un tour de passe-passe. Il est vrai que, dans la première note qu’il consacre à Tilden, Appel prétend ne pas vouloir révéler l’identité d’un homme qui avait eu des démêlés avec la justice et cite Nabokov qui lui aurait conseillé de ne pas « déranger son fantôme » (Appel 393). Mais Appel révèle bien le nom de l’entraîneur dans la seconde note qu’il lui consacre, et il renvoie le lecteur à la note précédente (Appel 418). Couturier feint donc de ne pas avoir compris ce petit jeu très nabokovien qui consiste à amener le lecteur à se livrer à un travail d’enquête textuel, ce qui lui permet une gestion très avantageuse des divers ethe en jeu. Entre parenthèses, la première note que Appel consacre à l’homosexualité de Tilden affirme qu’il faut entendre un sous-entendu grivois dans l’expression « ball boys » qu’emploie Humbert. Il est très étonnant de voir que Nabokov

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n’a pas protesté, alors qu’une lecture très semblable avait valu à Rowe les foudres de Nabokov (Nabokov 1973, 306).

38 La rivalité entre annotateurs produit parfois des effets cocasses. Couturier critique la note d’Appel sur « proud flesh » et « aimerait bien savoir où Appel a trouvé que ce titre se traduirait en français par « tissu bourgeonnant ou fongosité » (p. 447) » (Couturier 1719). Il traduit pour sa part par « chair fière » et explique que Quilty trouve « absurde » que l’on ait pu traduire « proud flesh » par « fierté de la chair » parce qu’il a en tête une image phallique. Comprenne qui pourra. Or, quelques clics sur internet montrent qu’Appel avait raison, que « proud flesh » est bien un terme médical qui désigne une mauvaise cicatrisation. Couturier tombe ainsi dans le piège tendu par Nabokov malgré l’avertissement de Quilty, et malgré la bonne indication d’Appel ! Un tel exemple montre à quel point le terrain critique est un lieu de tensions et de rivalités entre les fils de la tribu nabokovienne. Dans un article consacré aux annotations d’Appel, Pifer s’en donne à cœur joie, observant qu’Appel appelle le Dr Canivet « Carnivet » et le père Rouault « Roualt », et concluant qu’il donne un bien mauvais exemple aux étudiants auxquels il prétend s’adresser...et auxquels elle s’adresse elle- même du haut de la chaire encore chaude. Le fils se rebelle parfois contre le père, tel Dolinine lorsque, poussant jusqu’à la caricature la posture professorale, il juge que le travail de Nabokov sur Eugene Onegin est « une demi-défaite ». Il est vrai que Nabokov lui-même n’était pas toujours tendre, ainsi que Dolinine ne manque pas de le rappeler : « using every opportunity to trample on his predecessors for both an unpardonable howler and a trifling misprint, he seldom avows his indebtedness to them or pays tribute to their real achievements » (Dolinine 127). La loi du genre ressemble parfois à la loi du Far-West.

39 Au terme de l’analyse, l’idée que l’annotation soit indispensable suppose une conception collaborative de la lecture, vis-à-vis de laquelle Nabokov semble avoir éprouvé une certaine ambivalence : d’un côté, il affirme que le lecteur doit irriguer l’œuvre de son propre sang (Nabokov 1981, 105), insistant sur le fait que les lecteurs naissent libres et doivent le rester (Nabokov 1981, 12) ; mais d’un autre, il affirme qu’il n’aime pas les jeux (Nabokov 1973, 117), ou les arts qui, comme le cinéma, (Nabokov 1996, 1673) impliquent la participation d’autrui. Dans Ada, il devance d’ailleurs ses futurs annotateurs. Ceci ne l’empêche toutefois pas de « collaborer » avec Pouchkine ou Lermontov. Ainsi que le note Warner: « Nabokov seems irresistibly driven to suggest various improvements on Lermontov’s original work, to hint at alternate, more artistically satisfying paths for his author » (Warner 168). Warner s’enchante d’une liberté créatrice qui indigne au contraire Dolinine: « each genre dictates its own rules and what is appropriate in the fictitious reality of a novel or the personal discourse of an essay may look preposterous and vain in the austere frame of scholarly exegesis » (Dolinine 127). Il blâme Nabokov d’avoir produit un texte du type My Pushkin au lieu d’un commentaire « objectif ». Une telle résurgence du positivisme à la fin du 20ème siècle a de quoi surprendre.

40 Chacun est bien sûr libre de suivre les exemples qu’il admire. Mais il me semble que l’œuvre a tout à gagner à ce que nous préférions au Nabokov « tyrannique » le Nabokov qui a su résister à la posture de maîtrise pour s’adonner à une pratique vagabonde, libre mais responsable de la lecture. Il faut pour cela rompre avec ce que Dagron appelle « la fiction d’une subjectivité détentrice une fois pour toutes du sens » (Dagron 215).

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41 Pour résister à la sclérose d’une pratique pédante condamnée aux marges de l’œuvre, il convient de penser la lecture autrement, et peut-être pour cela revenir à Bakhtine qui, le premier sans doute, avait su affirmer que l’auteur a des droits inaliénables sur le discours, mais que l’auditeur en a aussi, ainsi que tous ceux dont les voix résonnent dans les mots trouvés par l’auteur (Todorov 1981, 83). Or c’est précisément parce que chaque mot reste rempli par la voix d’autrui qu’il est impossible d’abandonner la parole au seul locuteur. Chaque énoncé est rempli des échos et des rappels d’autres énoncés auxquels il est relié à l’intérieur d’une sphère commune de l’échange verbal. Il les réfute, les confirme, les complète, prend appui sur eux. Si la voix de Nabokov est si forte, ce n’est pas parce qu’il est tyrannique, mais parce qu’il donne justement à entendre une multitude d’autres voix.

42 La pratique intertextuelle à laquelle Nabokov nous invite est une exploration de l’histoire de la langue, et des textes à laquelle le lecteur doit se livrer en archéologue, rendant ainsi aux mots leurs rêves perdus. Il faut bien comprendre ceci pour se convaincre que le dialogisme n’a pas à être intentionnel. C’est ce que souligne justement Dagron : Penser, parler, écrire ou lire, c’est mobiliser un trésor de la mémoire constitué d’un matériau disponible, d’énoncés préconstitués, de lieux disponibles que le discours pourra mobiliser à volonté. Ces formes ou ces lieux tirés du dépôt de la mémoire sont la matière première de l’énonciation et ne constituent pas des concepts qui renverraient à une intentionnalité. Ils sont pensés comme des traces, les véhicules de cette expression impersonnelle qui définit une culture ; à ce titre leur signification reste virtuelle et indéterminée. La trace est porteuse d’une puissance de signifier, non d’une signification donnée une fois pour toutes (Dagron 204).

43 Il faut donc en finir avec une conception du texte nabokovien fondée sur des notions d’encodage et de décodage qui ne peuvent que conduire à l’épuisement du texte, en finir avec la crainte infantile d’un maître castrateur, et mêler sa voix au concert des autres voix. C’est à ce prix que Lolita aura toujours quelque chose à nous dire, dans 60 ans encore.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Amossy, Ruth. La Présentation de soi ; ethos et identité verbale. Paris : P.U.F., 2010.

Angel-Perez, Elizabeth et Pierre Iselin (eds.). S’entregloser : commentaire et discours dans la littérature anglophone. Paris : P.U. Paris-Sorbonne, 2009.

Appel, Alfred (ed.). The Annotated Lolita. New York : Vintage books, 1970.

Bakhtine, Mikhail. Esthétique et théorie du roman. D. Olivier (trad.). Paris : Gallimard, 1978.

---. Esthétique de la création verbale. A. Aucouturier (trad.). Paris : Gallimard, 1979.

Barney, Stephen. Annotations and its texts. New York : Oxford U.P., 1991.

Bourdieu, Pierre. La distinction : critique sociale du jugement. Paris : Minuit, 1979.

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---. Les Règles de l’art : genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris : Seuil, 1998.

Boyd, Brian. The American Years. Princeton : Princeton U.P., 1993.

---. “Nabokov’s fallibility.” in Lolita, a Casebook. E. Pifer (ed.). New York : Oxford U.P., 2003.

--- (ed.). Lolita. New York : Library of America, 2014.

---. “Lolita: What We Know and What We Don’t.” mis en ligne le 20 mars 2008, visité le 10 mars 2016, URL: http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1079.

Compagnon, Antoine. Le Démon de la théorie. Paris : Seuil, 1998.

--- (ed.). De l’autorité. Colloque annuel du collège de France. Paris : Odile Jacob, 2008.

Couturier, Maurice. « Les Scansions du mythe » in Lolita. Paris : Autrement, 1998.

--- (ed.). Lolita. Paris : Gallimard, Biliothèque de la Pléiade, 2010.

---. La Tentation française. Paris : Gallimard : 2011.

Derrida, Jacques. « Le Parergon. » in La Vérité en peinture. Paris : Flammarion, 1978.

Dolinine, Alexandre. “Eugene Onegin.” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. V. Alexandrov (ed.). New York : Routledge, 1995.

Durantaye, Leland de, “Emendations to Annotated editions to Lolita.” The Nabokovian, 58, (Spring 2007) 6-20.

Dagron, Tristan. « Annotation et commentaire » in Notes. Etudes sur l’annotation en littérature. Jean- Claude Arnould et Claudine Poulouin (eds.). Rouen : P.U. de Rouen, 2008.

Genette, Gérard. Seuils. Paris : Seuil, 1987.

Gleize, Jean-Marie. « Noter, notuler, marginer, écrire. » in Notes. Études sur l’annotation en littérature. Jean-Claude Arnould, et Claudine Poulouin (eds.). Rouen : P.U. de Rouen, 2008.

Grafton, Anthony. Les Origines tragiques de l’érudition : Une Histoire de la note en bas de page. Paris : Seuil, 1995.

Humbert K., Les Lolitas. Paris : Librio, 2001.

Leclerc, Yvan. « Annoter sur papier et sur écran. » in Notes. Études sur l’annotation en littérature. Jean-Claude Arnould et Claudine Poulouin (eds.). Rouen : P.U. de Rouen, 2008.

Maingueneau, Dominique. Le Discours littéraire. Paris : Armand Colin, 2004.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York : Penguin, 1962.

---. Speak Memory. New York : Putnam, 1966.

---. Ada. New York : Penguin, 1969.

---. Strong Opinions. London : Weidenfeld, 1973.

--- (Trad.). Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse. 1964. New Jersey : Princeton U.P., 1975.

---. Lectures on Literature. F. Bowers (ed.). London : Pan Books Ltd, 1980.

---. Lectures on Russian Literature. F. Bowers (ed.). London : Pan Books Ltd 1981. 1981.

---. Lolita, A Screenplay. 1961. New York : The Library of America, 1996.

Naiman, Eric. « A Filthy Look at Shakespeare’s Lolita. » Comparative Literature, 58, (2006) 1-23.

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Pfersmann, Andréas. Séditions infrapaginales, Poétique historique de l’annotation littéraire (17ème-21ème siècles). Paris : Droz, 2011.

Pifer, Ellen. “Finding The “Real Key To Lolita : A Modest Proposal.” in Cycnos, volume 24, n° 1, mis en ligne le 20 mars2008. Visité le 10 mars 2016. URL : http://revel.unive.fr/cycnos/index. html ? id =1036

Proffer, Karl. Keys to Lolita. Bloomington : Indiana U.P., 1968.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bahktine, le principe dialogique. Paris : Seuil, 1981.

Warner, Nicholas. « The Footnote As Literary Genre: Nabokov’s Commentaries to Lermontov and Pushkin » Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 30, N° 2 (1986), 167-182.

Zimmer, Dieter (ed.). Lolita. Reinbek bei Hamburg : Artemis & Winkler, 1995.

NOTES

1. Scriblerus est le nom donné par Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, Gay et Parnell au personnage de l’annotateur pédant. Mathanasius est le commentateur burlesque dont Thémiseul de Saint- Hyacinthe se moque dans Le chef-d’œuvre d’un inconnu (1714), satire de l’annotation savante. Hinkmar von Repkow est un faux savant vaniteux dans Notes sans texte de Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener (1745), autre satire de l’érudition. 2. Les lecteurs français connaissent plutôt ce château sous le nom d’Elseneur. 3. Couturier consacre ainsi une note à « une enfant charmante et fourbe » à seule fin de remarquer que, s’il s’agit là d’une citation, « personne n’a pu à ce jour [la] localiser » (Couturier 1637). Proffer avoue qu’il n’a pas compris maintes allusions, et qu’il reste sans doute bien des allusions qu’il n’a même pas réussi à reconnaître comme telles (Proffer 21). 4. Mais elles font souvent double emploi avec les traducteurs automatiques. 5. Cette canne est dissimulée dans l’expression « enchanted hunters », ainsi que le souligne Quilty sur un registre d’hôtel lorsqu’il signe de cette anagramme : « Ted Hunter, Cane, N.H. » : un bon chasseur, un bon lecteur, doit avoir une bonne canne. 6. Boyd affirme que Nabokov était indifférent aux hiérarchies sociales (Boyd 1990, 15). Pourtant, sa critique du philistinisme lui fait souvent retrouver les accents de Humbert, qui n’a pas de mots assez durs pour critiquer Charlotte, et sa prétention à usurper les insignes culturels de la classe sociale à laquelle elle rêve d’appartenir. L’héritier se gausse d’une petite bourgeoise, et spécifiquement de ce qui caractérise le plus la mentalité petite-bourgeoise selon Bourdieu, l’aspiration sociale (Bourdieu, 1998, 41). 7. Pale Fire reprend d’ailleurs la tradition de la prose notulaire si populaire au 18 ème siècle (on pense à Swift, Pope, Voltaire, et surtout Rousseau dans La Nouvelle Héloïse). 8. Mais Couturier omet de remarquer qu’une certaine Charlotte Hays apparaît dans le roman, outrageusement maquillée, qui tente de séduire Humbert à grand renfort d’œillades. 9. Elle s’appelle en fait Mercédès. 10. Proffer renverse cette hiérarchie puisque ses « clés » occupent tout le terrain et renvoient à un texte invisible.

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RÉSUMÉS

Cet article étudie les éditions annotées de Lolita publiées par Proffer, Appel, Boyd et Couturier comme un lieu éminemment politique où se posent en permanence des questions d’autorité et de légitimité. Quatre fonctions essentielles de l’annotation sont ici étudiées dans cette perspective : -Tout d’abord, les éditions annotées opèrent la légitimation sociale d’une œuvre « sulfureuse » au risque d’en atténuer la force érotique subversive. -Elles reproduisent ensuite les valeurs élitistes incarnées dans le roman par un pervers narcissique et posent la question de la légitimité d’une pratique fondée non seulement sur le prestige culturel mais aussi sur une domination sociale figurée dans Lolita par les manœuvres d’intimidation d’un érudit français vis-à-vis d’une jeune américaine. -Elles formulent également un guide de lecture à l’usage des lecteurs qui protège l’œuvre de ses « mauvais » lecteurs, mais risque aussi de lui nuire en restreignant de façon indue la liberté du lecteur. -Elles distinguent la voix de l’auteur de celle de Humbert, ce qui est capital pour un roman dont le narrateur est odieux. Les annotations constituent une coulisse du texte où l’ethos de l’auteur et celui de l’annotateur se construisent dans une dynamique interactive. L’article suggère d’en revenir à une conception bakhtinienne de l’intertextualité comme pratique libre mais responsable, respectueuse des droits de l’auteur, du lecteur et de tous ceux dont les voix résonnent dans le texte, afin de libérer la lecture de toute stratégie d’intimidation herméneutique.

This paper focuses on the annotated editions of Lolita by Proffer, Appel, Boyd and Couturier to show how annotations constitute a preeminently political field where the issues of authority and legitimacy are constantly rehearsed. Four important functions of annotations will be examined in this perspective: -First of all, annotated editions grant social legitimacy to a “scandalous” novel at the expense of its subversive erotic force. -They reproduce the elitist values embodied in a narcissistic pervert in the novel and raise the question of the legitimacy of a practice based not just on cultural prestige but on social domination just as in Lolita a French scholar tries to browbeat an American girl. -They formulate an “how-to-read” guide to the novel which may protect it from “bad” readers but which may also spoil it by unduly restraining the reader’s freedom. -They distinguish between the author’s voice and Humbert’s in a way which is crucial for a novel in which the narrator is obnoxious. The analysis focuses on the dynamic interplay by which the images of the author and of the annotator are constructed in the wings. This paper advocates a return to Bakhtin’s view of intertextuality as a practice respectful of the rights of the author, of the reader, and of all those whose voices ring through the text: this view may liberate reading from all forms of interpretive bullying.

INDEX

Mots-clés : Lolita, annotations, autorité, légitimité, distinctions sociales, ethos, interaction, intertextualité. Keywords : Lolita, annotations, authority, legitimacy, social distinctions, ethos, interaction, intertextuality

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AUTEURS

SUZANNE FRAYSSE Maître de conférences Aix Marseille Univ, Lerma, Aix-en-Provence, France [email protected]

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The patterning of obsessive love in Lolita and Possessed

Wilson Orozco

Introduction

1 Nabokov’s work is well known for its complexity and its convoluted plots, something which is particularly true of Lolita, which is rich in patterns, repetitions and mises en abyme. The latter take the form of intertextual relations, references to painting, popular culture or cinema (and, in fact, Nabokov’s relation to the cinema has been the subject of many papers and books). Two films are mentioned in the novel: Possessed and Brute Force. In what follows, a comparison will be made between the former and the novel in terms of the repetition of the obsessive love present in both works. Humbert and Louise are obsessive lovers and their obsessions paradoxically lead them to develop aggressive feelings towards the beloved—to the point of physical violence or at least the phantasy of it. Those obsessions are also a manifestation of their mental instability, something which makes them extremely unreliable narrators in a context of a confession they make, resulting in the text we read or the film we see. While Humbert explains and justifies his acts in his confession, however, Louise is made to talk to a psychiatrist. The purpose of this analysis is to find common patterns in the novel and the film in the terms of obsessive love, hostility towards the beloved, madness, unreliable narration and confession.

Patterning in Lolita

2 Authors like Fraysse (2008) and Bouchet (2010), the latter especially in her “analysis of embedded structures and meta-artistic devices in Lolita,” have studied what, thanks to them, now appears evident: the patterns implicit in Nabokov’s work and first pointed out by Appel Jr. (2012). These patterns are, for him, a manifestation of Nabokov’s involuted narrative—apparent in his writing because “[an] involuted work turns in

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upon itself, is self-referential, conscious of its status as a fiction, and […] allegorical of itself […]” (Appel 2012, xxiii). Besides: Nabokov’s passion for chess, language, and lepidoptery has inspired the most elaborately involuted patterning in his work. Like the games implemented by parody, the puns, anagrams, and spoonerisms all reveal the controlling hand of the logomachist ; thematically, they are appropriate to the prison of mirrors. (Appel 2012, xxviii)

3 All of the above, that is to say, parody, puns, anagrams and spoonerisms are characteristics of Lolita. It is, therefore, no wonder that reading this novel is a challenging experience. For her part, Bouchet states, with regard to that involution, that Lolita “also provides embedded structures that function as typical mises en abyme” (Bouchet 13), that is, elements which mirror the whole or some part of the novel. Such mises en abyme can also be understood as the work-within-the-work described by Alfred Appel Jr. as the “self-referential devices in Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at oblique angles” (Appel 2012, xxix).

Cinema as mise en abyme

4 The use of popular culture, and of film in particular, are examples of the mises en abyme mentioned above. In fact, Lolita could be categorized as a kind of encyclopedia of popular culture in the form of cinema, songs, advertising, etc., making it one of the most surprising and complex works of art of the 20th Century. The presence of cinema in Nabokov’s work is particularly important. It has been analyzed primarily by Appel (1974) and Wyllie (2003, 2005, 2015), the latter offering a specific study of formal filmic devices and the stylistic recreations made by Nabokov’s narrators (2003).1 These motifs could in fact be examples of mises en abyme, repetitions, doubles and mirrors, which, along with confinement, are recurrent in film noir too. 2 Signs of self-reflexivity in Nabokov’s work are, as noted earlier, usually made evident through the use of cinema: This notion of participating in a self-declared and acknowledged piece of creative artifice has since been acknowledged as a key element of the overall cinematic aesthetic, but it was also to become a recurrent theme of Nabokov’s Russian and English fiction. (Wyllie 2003, 14)

5 And as “Nabokov's characters […] take their cinema-going seriously” (Wyllie 2005, 222), we can understand why Humbert and Lolita are such obsessive moviegoers. In the case of Humbert, it enables him to have the chance of stealing Lolita’s affections, and in Lolita’s case, of indulging in her passion, dreaming of someday becoming one of the film stars she sees on the screen, just like Margot in Laughter in the Dark (Nabokov 1989). But, most importantly, cinema in Lolita appears not only at the level of content but also at a formal level: Nabokov's excitement [with film] parallels the fervor with which many of his protagonists pursue their cinematic dreams. This ‘keenness’ also extends to his manipulation of the processes, styles, and techniques of film-making in his fiction, which both generates a thematic context for the preoccupations of his movie- obsessed characters and introduces a new narrative and perceptual dimension that impacts upon fundamental notions of time, memory, mortality, and the imagination. (Wyllie 2005, 217-218)

6 Lolita contains constant references to cinema in the form of movies alluded to without mentioning their titles, something which led to the critics making guesses. Tadashi

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Wakashima (n.d.), for example, identified one such film as John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952)—a movie which does not fit the narrative time in Lolita, but which is nonetheless alluded to in Humbert’s once destroyed but rewritten diary: Thursday. Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman, Lolita and I. Warm dusk had deepened into amorous darkness. The old girl had finished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she and L. had seen sometime in the winter. The boxer had fallen extremely low when he met the good old priest (who had been a boxer himself in his robust youth and could still slug a sinner). (Nabokov 2012, 45)

7 There are also allusions to cinema in the movie magazines Lolita reads (Bouchet 5), and comparisons and descriptions in the book are often film-based—for example Charlotte is constantly compared to Marlene Dietrich. So, it is no surprise that with such an emphasis on cinema, the novel attracted an early and very successful film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick (Agirre 15).

Explicit Films in Lolita

8 Humbert Humbert, like every good romantic hero (see Manolescu), gives us detailed insights into his thoughts and feelings, whether deriving from a cold landscape or from what he finds in hotels or reads in newspapers. The journeys he makes seem to be a repetition, clearly separated in time. Repetitions, by the way, are abundantly present in Nabokov’s work, particularly in Lolita. As Boyd explains: What enabled Nabokov to explore pattern in time in entirely new ways was the gradual mastery he acquired over the recombination of fictional details. He transmutes a recurrent element sufficiently for the repetition to be overlooked, he casually discloses one piece of partial information and leaves it up to us to connect it with another apparently offhand fact, or he groups together stray details and repeats the random cluster much later in what appears to be a remote context. (Boyd 300)

9 Those repetitions could, for instance, take the form of the journeys Humbert and Lolita made together. Evidently the most painful moment for him is when he loses his Lolita and starts looking for her and Quilty. In this Lolita-less journey, he offers plenty of literary and geographical data, besides news of current events. But he finally gets tired of searching and decides instead to go to The Enchanted Hunters hotel, the place where he was the happiest of men with the nymphet, just to practice what he knows best: remembering. He goes back to that paradigmatic place because a “curious urge to relive my stay there with Lolita had got hold of me. I was entering a phase of existence where I had given up all hope of tracing her kidnapper and her” (Nabokov 2012, 261). But as Humbert prefers reading to “reality,” he changes his mind and goes to the local library to check the events of that fatal summer when he was in The Enchanted Hunters almost as a fugitive: “Anyway, I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed…Brute Force and Possessed were coming on Sunday, the 24th, to both theatres” (Nabokov 2012, 262). This is, to say the least, curious and paradoxical. Of the two hundred-odd films which Humbert claims to have seen with Lolita, only those two titles are actually mentioned, and both of them are in fact real films: Brute Force was directed by Jules Dassin (1947) and Possessed by Curtis Bernhardt (1947). In any case, there is no doubt that Nabokov (as well as his characters) took cinema seriously. He even indicates that he bore the aforementioned films in mind expressly for the purpose of the novel: “I saw both [of

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them], and thought them appropriate for several reasons. But I don’t remember why… […]. I guess I should have said more about them” (cit. in Appel Jr. 1974, 210). Appel Jr. also states that both movies have a lot to do with the novel because “the titles gloss H.H.’s circumstances, and Brute Force—a prison film, which Nabokov thought he had seen—is thematically apt” (2012, 436). But, given the hypotexts found in Lolita, especially those involving feelings of idealization, hostility towards the beloved, his or her disappearance and a subsequent obsession, only Possessed will be taken into account for the purposes of the present analysis.3

Possessed

10 Possessed is the narration Louise makes to a psychiatrist about her obsessive and unrequited love for David and her subsequent killing of him. At the beginning of the story, David only sees in her the chance to have some fun. He is more interested in worldly and artistic pleasures, and sees Louise’s demands to marry him as a burden, until he finally tells her it’s better for them to break up. Louise ends up alone, considering the attachment to her beloved man the greatest of her obsessions. At the same time she works as a nurse, taking care of Mrs. Graham, who thinks Louise and her husband Dean are having an affair. As a result of this belief, she ends up committing suicide by jumping into a lake. She apparently suffered from delusions, the same delusions we find later on in Louise. Dean, along with his two children, Wynn and Carol, together with Louise, go to live in Washington. Some time later, Louise sees David and, as that disturbs her again, she takes the decision to quit her job in order to escape from him. But as Dean is secretly in love with Louise, he asks her to marry him. Louise accepts but makes it clear that she doesn’t love him. In the end, David and Carol fall in love and plan to get married. This makes Louise angry to the point of killing David—to abort, in a way, his plans.

11 One structure Possessed and Lolita have in common is that of the love triangle. David doesn’t love Louise, he loves Carol, and Louise doesn’t love Dean, she loves David, in the same way as Humbert doesn’t love Charlotte but her daughter, and Lolita doesn’t love Humbert, but Quilty. The person loved obsessively is at the end absent, and a confession is made at the beginning of the story to explain the reasons for that absence. So, in order for that explanation to be possible, a jury or a psychiatrist have to be brought in to advance the telling of the story. As Gabbard and Gabbard observe, “psychiatric consultations have offered filmmakers the perfect device for unearthing dark secrets and simplifying exposition” (Gabbard & Gabbard 6). Both Louise and Humbert have ended up in psychiatric hospitals, with Humbert the more expert habitué of them, even playing sarcastically with his “carers” by inventing dreams just to have the pleasure of listening to the interpretations derived. In this respect, the novel differs greatly from the film. In other words, while Louise is made to talk through narcosynthesis, Humbert laughs at psychiatry (which is, furthermore, a recognized Nabokovian trait; he famously hated Freud and psychoanalysis). Another difference is the place of narration. Although both narratives are set in enclosed spaces, while Louise tells her story from a psychiatric hospital (because of the breakdown ensuing from her having killed David), after having killed Quilty, Humbert writes from prison the text we have in our hands. And he has shot his enemy after making us believe during the novel that he was about to kill other characters (Valeria, Charlotte, Mr.

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Schiller, and even Lolita). This is similar to Louise, who, in her state of delusion, made us believe she shot Carol, although the actual victim turns out to be David. In any case, the shootings at the end of both narrations are a common element to both novel and film.

12 Thus, Possessed contributes to these patterns in Lolita that relate to the tendency of Humbert to present hypotexts that have to do with tragic love, something which is rewritten, of course, by the Lolita hypertext, if we accept Genette's palimpsestual theory (1997), in which literature is nothing more than the recreation or rewriting of previous literature as parody and pastiche. The link between Lolita and these “tragic” hypotexts has been analyzed extensively by Appel Jr. (2012b), who looks, for example, at the recurrence of Poe’s work in Lolita, and, especially, the famous link between the American poet’s “Annabel Lee” and Humbert’s Annabel Leigh. Elsewhere, Fraysse (2008) and Proffer (1968) highlight the misleading hypotext of Prosper Merimée’s Carmen (2011).4 Likewise, Wyllie (2000) examines the relationship between one of the songs Lolita sings and the Carmen hypotext. As the song goes: And, О mу charmin', our dreadful fights. And the something town where so gaily, arm in Arm, we went, and our final row, And the gun I killed you with, О mу Carmen, The gun I am holding now.

(Drew his .32 automatic, I guess, and put a bullet through his molľs eye.) (Nabokov 2012, 61)

13 The song could be a parody of an actual song that also deals with killing the beloved, perhaps the classic Frankie and Johnny in Sam Cooke’s 1947 version: Sheriff arrested poor Frankie, Put her in jail the same day: He locked her up tight in that jail-house, And he threw the key away. (cit. in Wyllie 2000, 450)

14 The full lyrics contain similar elements of love, betrayal, obsession and revenge. These elements are also found in Possessed and particularly in Lolita: Not only is this rendition of Frankie and Johnny significant in its relevance to the noveľs plot, but also in its thematic elements, particularly its cinematic style and its associations with the American Western and gangster movie, which are to feature in Humbert Humbert's depiction of Quilty's murder: ‘(Drew his .32 automatic, I guess, and put a bullet through his moll's eye.).’ The theme of revenge is also central to Humbert Humbert's scenario, reaffirming the sense of him as the innocent wronged, and thus justifying his actions. (Wyllie 2000, 449)

15 The traits of the aforementioned hypotexts give both Possessed and Lolita a certain noir atmosphere, which Wyllie specifically examines in the novel: Most distinctive is Humbert Humbert's assumption of the role of noir hero, the figure faced with a dilemma […]. Humbert Humbert plays out this role most explicitly in his revenge scenario, which is introduced by the allusions to gangsters and molls in his ‘Carmen’ song […], and concluded at the end of the novel when he runs his Melmoth into a ditch […]. (Wyllie 2005, 225)

16 To this we have to add another common element: a final scene in which the killer or mourner retells the story and reconstitutes the beloved one through a text, whether written or filmic.

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Madness, confession and unreliable narrators

17 One characteristic shared by Humbert and Louise is that they both suffer a loss of balance, which we learn about little by little. In Louise’s case, it includes a change in her physical appearance. She goes from being an elegant and polite woman, representing “tenderness” (as David puts it) to someone who ends up looking like a psychopath killer, as the following stills from the film show:5

18 Humbert too undergoes a transformation, in his case from homme de lettres to murderer –something even he admits: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (Nabokov 2012, 9). Thus, he anticipates a possible ending at the beginning of the novel. The combination of writer and killer makes him the typical “rational” killer so

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present in Poe’s work –an author he seems to admire. Here Chesterton’s definition of madness could help us to understand Humbert’s behavior: “Everyone who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail ; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it ; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. (Chesterton 73)

19 In both stories, mental illness also seems to be present, appearing from the start in the form of possession. Humbert sees himself as a nympholept who behaves as if a greater force were in control of his life (and he makes us believe that is the case). This trait is also present in noir films, in which characters are “sometimes Caught, sometimes Possessed, often Spellbound” (Sanders 101). In both characters, possession implies an absence of moral responsibility, since both are driven by something which they cannot control. In this sense, the title Possessed itself displays a rich semantic isotopia: it refers, for example, to the classic relationship between madness and possession. This relationship is made apparent in Lolita when Humbert believes he is possessed because he is a victim of the devil’s scheme: “[…] for all the devil's inventiveness, the scheme remained daily the same. First he would tempt me –and then thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain in the very root of my being” (Nabokov 2012, 55).

20 Humbert and Louise also experience possession as lovers. Louise is possessed by madness, not by David (which in psychoanalytical terms would represent a significant narcissistic wound). At the same time, David is possessed by Louise in death, as if killing the beloved were the way to possess him or her forever. When the beloved has been lost or has disappeared, possession also takes the form of an obsessive, persistent repetition of their names. Humbert, on the one hand, constantly repeats my Carmencita or my Lolita. Louise, by contrast, does not use the possessive adjective, because she certainly does not see David as her creation as Humbert does with a textual Lolita. It is still interesting, however, to note how she constantly repeats his name: “David ? I’m looking for David…David ? David, I’ve been looking everywhere for you, […]” (Bernhardt) while she wanders the streets of Los Angeles aimlessly just before being interned in the hospital. She repeats his name around six times, the same number of times she shouts it at the end when she finds out she has killed him as shown here in this expressive fade which mixes the shooting with her screams:

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21 That screaming of the name causes her to go into a deep sleep, denying reality. David is now pure nostalgia, just a reason for the existence of the movie. Those desperate screams correspond to Humbert’s, who also somewhat hysterically repeats “Heart, head –everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer” (Nabokov 2012, 109). And the realization that he will love Lolita forever leads him to make his final confession in which he manifests his true love: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita” (Nabokov 2012, 309). Lolita is also the first and the last word of Nabokov’s novel, just as Possessed begins and ends with the name, David. That recurrence expresses the fact that the text we read –or see– is an attempt to reconstitute the loved one who has disappeared, and both texts, filmic and written, are an excuse to bring him or her back. Film and novel end up being about David and Lolita, a homage to both lost loves. Finally, possession is evident at the textual level too, as Humbert at one point states: “What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita” (Nabokov 2012, 62). Therefore the nymphet will be possessed forever in the text while David will be possessed in Louise’s memory. In other words, a possessed Louise has possessed him, whereas Humbert has possessed Lolita too—first physically and then finally for eternity in the text we read.6

22 If both characters are possessed by mental instability, who, then, is in charge of the diagnosis ? With regard to the novel, in the preface it is the editor, John Ray, Jr., who offers his views on the text and on Humbert himself. He has edited the text, placing himself above it, organizing it and making omissions: we read what he lets us read. And he was chosen to be the editor because, as he states, he was the author of “a modest work (‘Do the Senses make Sense ?’) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed” (Nabokov 2012, 3). That is why he brands Humbert’s pages as “strange” (3) and links Humbert’s case with psychiatric studies: at least 12 % of American adult males –a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication)– enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H.H.” describes with such despair ; that had our

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demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster ; but then, neither would there have been this book. (Nabokov 2012, 5)

23 The editor also thinks of Humbert as a horrible and abject person, as “a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity” (Nabokov 2012, 5). His moral diagnosis is both paternalistic and condescending: As a case history, ‘Lolita’ will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles […] ; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader ; […] the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac –these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends ; they point out potent evils. (Nabokov 2012, 5)

24 Whereas in Lolita John Ray Jr., a parody of a psychiatrist, receives a text and diagnoses its author, in Possessed Louise is made to talk at the beginning of the story so we can understand the strange state she is in. It is as if a mysterious secret needed to be revealed, which is why the presence of the psychiatrist is so important. In relation to this, according to Doane, “the study of hysteria and the films of the medical discourse are quite close in their revelation of a curious and dynamic interaction between the narrativization of the female patient and her inducement to narrate, to become a storyteller as a part of her cure” (Doane 217). In Possessed, Louise is made to retell her past, which is why flashbacks are so frequent. For they allow the psychiatrists to make elevated pronouncements about what they learn of her story (and although their patriarchal account of the heroine’s condition has a definite ideological component), their major function in the film is to provide a bridge into flashbacks containing the Crawford character's life story. (Gabbard & Gabbard 6-7)

25 In Possessed the retelling of the past has the purpose of permitting understanding of the “patient’s” situation or the achievement of a catharsis. For example, here Louise, under the effects of narcosynthesis, is asked to talk by the doctor. He is clear about his methods: if she wants to be helped, she has to reveal all her secrets, and the best way to start is to try to elucidate the mysterious name of David, the one she repeated obsessively every time she saw a man on the street.

26 In relation to this talking cure, Doane declares that light “is the figure of rationality in [Possessed]. But light also enables the look, the male gaze, it makes the woman specularizable” (Doane 221). For that reason, Gabbard & Gabbard point out that this kind of film also “appropriates psychiatry as an important element in women's search for identity” (Gabbard & Gabbard 53). In fact, Louise’s treatment is so paternalistic that the psychiatrist gives his verdict long before he has listened to her, diagnosing her as an “intelligent” but “frustrated” woman. And in sexist and patriarchal terms, this frustration has to do with unrequited love or the loss of the beloved man. As Doane insists, the diagnosis is depicted “as over-possessiveness, as a relentless desire for a man who no longer loves [a woman]” (Doane 209). In other words, Louise wants to possess her lover but at the same time she is possessed by something stronger than her, and so she needs to be observed by the male psychiatrist. Finally, according to Doane, we also witness that the “woman's narrative reticence, her amnesia, silence, or muteness all act as justifications for the framing of her discourse within a masculine narration” (Doane 216). The psychiatrist, for example, constantly offers justifications for his necessary intervention: Ten years ago I could have prevented this. Five, even two years ago, it could’ve been prevented. It was there for any psychiatrist to see.

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[…] It’s a clear case of psychosis. Completely unbalanced […]. We human beings act according to certain patterns of behavior. Sometimes, why exactly we don’t know yet the pattern is broken, the wires are crossed, the mind cannot evaluate, judge, or even function properly. Shock follows shock, until eventually the mind gives way. The brain loses control and the body sinks into coma. Then in a biblical sense we might say that such a person is possessed of devils and it is the psychiatrist that must cast them out. (Bernhardt)

27 In contrast, in Lolita, John Ray Jr., refers, with more sarcasm and black humour, to the need for psychiatric intervention by saying that “[…] had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psycho-pathologist, there would have been no disaster ; but then, neither would there have been this book.” (Nabokov 2012, 4).

28 In terms of the mental instability we have discussed so far, one further element to consider is the nature of Humbert and Louise’s narration—one which is characterized by unreliability and which is defined in general terms by Chambers as “misreporting, misreading, misevaluating, underreporting, underreading, underregarding” (Chambers147). The product of such narrations will manifest itself in “unindentified interlocutors, erased events, the collapse of one voice into another” (Chambers 149)— all traits common to postmodern narration (Shen & Xu 45). In Possessed, that unreliability is displayed when Louise refuses to reveal all of her secrets. After the doctor has asked what her name is, why she is in Los Angeles and why she is running away from it, Louise immediately goes on the defensive, clarifying to the doctor that she is not going to tell everything.

29 So how can we believe in a narration that from the very beginning is presented as partial ? In this context, another point to consider is that Louise’s flashbacks sometimes reach the point of hallucination. There is a constant confusion in her narration because she appears to experience things which then prove to be false, such as when she seems to have killed Carol because of her engagement to David, something which proves to be part of her delirium. On the other hand, the nature of Lolita’s text is quite undetermined: it was written in prison by Humbert in just a few weeks, then passed to a lawyer, and then passed to an editor who makes modifications. Humbert, the man who loves to lie, includes a diary in the novel—a diary he once had to destroy and which he presents to us as rewritten from memory. In other words, there is an evident indeterminacy of the real truth of Lolita’s text.

Conclusions

30 We are presented here with two unreliable narrations concerning an obsessive love, the whole story told, in the confessional mode, and in a long analepsis, to a psychiatrist in the case of Possessed, and to the members of a jury in the case of Lolita. Both the psychiatrist (as in Hitchcock’s Psycho) and the editor in Lolita are figures that exist at a meta-textual level, explaining and reordering the story, and interpreting the mental state of the narrators. Both versions are in this way articulated by an authoritative figure who seems to have the last word. Furthermore, confession is at the heart of both film and novel. Thus Humbert must tell his dreams to psychiatrists (although he invents them), and he has had to previously confess his past loves to Charlotte. Finally he ends up making a long confession in prison where he reveals, “I am writing under observation” (Nabokov 2012, 10). However, one big difference between film and novel is

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that in Lolita psychoanalysis and psychiatry are subjected to sarcasm and ridicule. In Humbert’s case any contact he had with psychiatry was not sought out, whereas near the end of the film the psychiatrist affirms the value of psychiatry and justifies its intervention in the case of Louise.

31 At the beginning and at the end of both works, we find the beloved’s name mentioned in a desperate call: David and Lolita. The film therefore fits the main isotopies of the novel as a specular motif: feelings of aggressive hostility, the theme of the dead or missing lover, obsession, mental instability, confession, unreliable narration and remembering someone beloved.7 Besides, both novel and film share a common noir atmosphere because Noir themes and moods include despair, paranoia, and nihilism ; an atmosphere of claustrophobic entrapment ; a nightmarish sense of loneliness and alienation ; a purposelessness fostered in part by feelings of estrangement from one’s own past even as one seems driven to a compulsive confrontation with that past. Film noir presents us with moral ambiguity, shifting identities, and impending doom. Urban locales give noir films authenticity, adding texture to their psychologically dense and convoluted plots. (Sanders 92)

32 The irony in both texts is that what is loved the most ends up being destroyed or annihilated. Humbert makes us believe he will kill Lolita, but he actually kills Quilty. Louise makes us believe she killed Carol, but the victim actually turns out to be David. In this sense, one of the main topics of both film and novel is the “crime of passion”. In both of them the character who is killed is also one of the elements of a love triangle: Louise kills her ex-lover so he cannot marry Carol ; Humbert kills Quilty for having stolen his Lolita. In the end, both Lolita and Possessed are manifestations of art at the service of love, even if those characters end up hurting what they love the most –as Nabokov expressed so masterfully in much of his work (Montero 19).

---. « Popular music in Nabokov’s Lolita, or Frankie and Johnny: a new key to Lolita ?» Revue des études slaves 72.3-4 (2000): 443-452. Print.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agirre, Katixa. « Lolita de Vladimir Nabokov: historia de una obsesión (fílmica)». Álabe 1 (2010) : 1-15. Print. 8 Sept 2017

Appel Jr., Alfred. Nabokov’s Dark Cinema. Nueva York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Print.

---. « Notes [to The Annotated Lolita]». The Annotated Lolita. Londres: Penguin Modern Classics, 2012. 319-456. Print.

---. « Preface, Introduction [to The Annotated Lolita]». The Annotated Lolita. Londres: Penguin Classics, 2012. v-lxvii. Print.

Bernhardt, Curtis. Possessed. Warner Bros., 1947. Film.

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Bouchet, Marie. « “The Enchanted Hunters and the Hunted Enchanters: The Dizzying Effects of Embedded Structures and Meta-Artistic Devices in Lolita, Novel and Film”». Sillages critiques 11 (2010) : n. pag. Web. 4 feb. 2016.

Boyd, Brian. The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Print.

Chesterton, Gilbert. « The Maniac». On Lying in Bed and Other Stories. Calgary: Bayeux Arts, 2000. 71-75. Print.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Nueva York: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Dassin, Jules. Brute Force. Estados Unidos: Universal Pictures Distributors Corporation of America, 1947. Film.

Davidson, James A. « Hitchcock/Nabokov: Some Thoughts on Alfred Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov». Images. N.p., s. f. Web. 9 sep. 2015.

Doane, Mary Ann. « The Clinical Eye: Medical Discourses in the “Woman’s Film” of the 1940s». Poetics Today 6.1/2 (1985): 205-227. Print.

Fraysse, Suzanne. « Worlds Under Erasure: Lolita and Postmodernism». Cycnos. N.p., 2008. Web.

Gabbard, Glen, y Krin Gabbard. Psychiatry and the Cinema. Washington, DC: American Psychiatry Press, 1999. Print.

Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: literature in the second degree. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Web. 5 feb. 2016.

Hitchcock, Alfred. Shadow of a Doubt. USA: N.p., 1943. Film.

Manolescu, Monica. « Humbert’s Arctic Adventures: Some Intertextual Explorations». Nabokov Studies 11 (2008): 1-23. Print.

Mérimée, Prosper. Carmen. Recuperado de amazon.com, 2011. Print.

Montero, Rosa. « Fresas e hipopótamos». Lolita. Madrid: Funambulista, 2004. 7-19. Print.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Laughter in the Dark. Nueva York: Vintage International, 1989. Print.

---. The Annotated Lolita. Londres: Penguin Modern Classics, 2012. Print.

Proffer, Carl. Keys to Lolita. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Print.

Proust, Marcel. Albertine disparué. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1992. Print.

Sanders, Steven M. « Film Noir and the Meaning of Life». The Philosophy of Film Noir. Ed. Mark T. Conard. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006. 91-105. Print.

Shen, D., y D. Xu. « Intratextuality, Extratextuality, Intertextuality : Unreliability in Autobiography versus Fiction». Poetics Today 28.1 (2007) : 43-87. Web.

Wakashima, Tadashi. « Double Exposure: On the Vertigo of Translating Lolita». N.p., s. f. Web. 20 may 2015.

Wyllie, Barbara. « “My Age of Innocence Girl” —Humbert, Chaplin, Lita and Lo». Nabokov Online Journal IX (2015): 23-26. Print.

---. « Nabokov and Cinema». The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. Ed. Julian Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 215-231. Print.

---. Nabokov at the Movies. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2003. Print.

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NOTES

1. Popular culture also serves to define the nymphet in the novel and create a distance between her and Humbert’s high culture, as well as to express disgust towards Quilty, himself a film director (Wyllie 2003, 128). On the many references to popular culture, Nabokov’s research into it, and especially the subtext of Charles Chaplin’s life in relation to Humbert’s, see Wyllie (2015). Referring to other forms of art, Wyllie states that Nabokov’s narrator/protagonists “often explicitly emulate the theater, as they do painting or literature […], but also, and at the same time, in combination with filmic images and devices” (2003, 30). 2. With respect to doubles, if we look carefully at some of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, especially Shadow of a Doubt (1943), we can understand from their use why comparisons have been made between Nabokov and the English film director (Davidson; Wyllie, «Nabokov and Cinema»). As Wyllie also observes, apart “from their ‘humour noir’ Nabokov and Hitchcock shared other key characteristics –a penchant for puzzles and game-playing, a fascination with ways of seeing and voyeurism, with complex patternings of themes and imagery, doubles and doubling, and a sophisticated manipulation of narrative conventions” (Wyllie 2005, 218). 3. Appel Jr. would perhaps agree with this choice as he asserted that Possessed “is more immediately appropriate” because Humbert’s unrequited love and obsession for Lolita sends him “to a madhouse a year after Lolita’s departure” (1974, 211), which is partially the fate of Louise, the protagonist of the film. Brute Force does not provide so strongly a mise en abyme of the Lolita plot basically because of Joe Collins’ relation to his beloved: there is no love triangle, he tries to escape prison to see her again and, most importantly, he has never abused her. 4. Albertine disparue (Proust) is another hypotext worth noting. 5. For an analysis of women depicted as psychopaths in films, see The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Creed). 6. Allusions to physical and visual possession are profuse in Lolita: “I had possessed her –and she never knew it” (Nabokov 2012, 21); “Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her” (Nabokov, 2012, 43) and “I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and how to do it, without impinging on a child’s chastity; after all, I had had some experience in my life of pederosis; had visually possessed dappled nymphets in parks” (Nabokov 2012, 55). In terms of physical possession, Humbert believes too that “watching” is “possessing” but in a safer way. 7. And in Louise’s particular case, the “dynamic interaction between the narrativization of the female patient and her inducement to narrate, to become a story-teller as a part of her cure” (Doane 217).

ABSTRACTS

Repetitions, doubles, and mises en abyme are a constant in Nabokov’s work and Lolita is one of the best examples. One of those repetitions in time and space has to do with Humbert Humbert going back over the times when he was happy with the nymphet in 1947. He finds that in that year the film Possessed was premiered. If a comparison is made between that movie and the novel, both text and film seem to reflect each other. The main purpose of this article is to show that the film is a mise en abyme of the novel because both novel and film display the same pattern of obsessive love, which includes idealization, feelings of hostility, obsession with the disappearance of the

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beloved and a textual and filmic reconstitution by way of unreliable narrations through plenty of flashbacks and analepses.

Répétitions, doubles, et mises en abyme sont une constante dans l'œuvre de Nabokov, et Lolita en est l'un des meilleurs exemples. Une de ces répétitions dans le temps et l'espace est quand Humbert Humbert se remémore les événements lorsqu’il était heureux avec la nymphette en 1947. Il constate alors que cette année-là le film Possessed est sorti dans les salles de cinéma. Si l’on établit on fait une comparaison entre ce film réel et Lolita, le texte et le film semblent se refléter l’un l’autre. Le but principal de cet article est de montrer que le film est une mise en abyme de Lolita parce que les deux suivent le même modèle d'amour obsessionnel : idéalisation, sentiments d'hostilité, obsession de la disparition du bien-aimé et une reconstitution textuelle et filmique aux narrations peu fiables à l’aide de nombreuses analepses.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Lolita, mise en abyme, Possessed, motif, cinéma. Keywords: Lolita, mise en abyme, Possessed, patterning, cinema.

AUTHOR

WILSON OROZCO Lecturer University of Antioquia [email protected]

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Publicités, magazines, et autres textes non littéraires dans Lolita : pour une autre poétique intertextuelle

Marie Bouchet

1 Si les critiques n’ont pas encore terminé l’annotation de Lolita1, roman dont l’épaisseur intertextuelle fait que de nombreuses références aux littératures anglaise, américaine, française, russe, espagnole, italienne, latine, orientales, etc. sont régulièrement débusquées et font montre à la fois de l’immense érudition de Nabokov et de son goût pour les énigmes et les jeux de mots, ces mêmes critiques se sont moins penchés sur un aspect tout à fait unique de l’intertextualité de ce grand roman, à savoir les modes d’insertion, dans le texte littéraire, de langages et d’images qui ne sont en principe pas les matériaux premiers de la littérature, car ils sont issus de chansons, de magazines, de guides de voyage, de la publicité, ou encore d’instructions pour utiliser des produits ou occuper des lieux. Si la critique a perçu dans cette abondance de références à the American way of life de l’après-seconde guerre mondiale une satire sociétale 2, elle s’est rarement attachée à étudier d’un point de vue littéraire comment ces référents sont tissés dans la trame textuelle. Notre étude entend donc renouveler le regard porté sur ces référents en les analysant avec les mêmes outils que les allusions intertextuelles à Shakespeare, Poe ou Proust, et, in fine, proposer une redéfinition du rapport que Nabokov entretient avec le trivial dans son esthétique.

2 En mêlant références à la culture savante (beaux-arts, littérature, mythologie…) et citations de ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler la culture populaire3, Nabokov s’inscrit dans une tradition ancienne (comme le montrent les analyses de Rabelais menées par Bakhtine), mais aussi dans la tradition moderniste dans laquelle son art d’écrire s’est développé quand il était en Europe, de ses années d’études à Cambridge (1919-1922) jusqu’à son départ pour les États-Unis en 1940. Comme le note Andreas Huyssen, « modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other : an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture »

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(Huyssen VII), et Nabokov pose un regard critique sur les images et le langage produit par la société de consommation américaine. Bien qu’indifférent (voire critique) à l’égard des expérimentations formelles d’un Duchamp ou du pop art, Nabokov s’inscrit pourtant dans la veine des artistes qui, notamment aux États-Unis, accordent une place très importante aux objets et systèmes de représentation de la vie quotidienne dans leur art, et, avec Lolita, il produit une œuvre souvent considérée par la critique comme son premier roman post-moderniste. Notons par ailleurs en préambule que, pour Nabokov, se déploie dans la culture populaire, et surtout dans les aspirations culturelles de la classe moyenne, ce qu’il appelle la poshlost, terme vaste que Sergej Davydov définit ainsi : « It refers to the broad range of cultural, social, and political phenomena under the category of “inferior taste”. Nabokov elaborates on the concept in his book Nikolai Gogol (1944) » (Davydov 628). Nabokov définit la poshlost de la sorte : « Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudoliterature — these are obvious examples » (Strong Opinions 101). Nabokov inclut de nombreux auteurs et artistes dans cette catégorie, qui ne se limite donc pas à la culture populaire, mais cette notion devait être rappelée pour traiter notre sujet.

3 Comme nous le verrons, Lolita présente plusieurs modes d’insertion de codes non- littéraires, qui eux-mêmes relèvent de plusieurs techniques littéraires : la création d’effets de réel4, la parodie, l’intermédialité, la réappropriation des termes non littéraires dans les jeux de mots, l’utilisation des codes non-littéraires dans le complexe système de motifs et d’échos qui tisse la trame textuelle (en effet, les passages où Humbert Humbert cite ou parodie des textes non-littéraires sont souvent les lieux privilégiés de l’entrelacement de motifs importants). En outre, le plus souvent, ces divers modes d’insertion du texte non-littéraire sont associés, et même si les diverses parties de cette étude sont centrées sur l’une ou l’autre de ces techniques à des fins de démonstration, il est important de garder à l’esprit qu’elles sont mises en œuvre conjointement dans la trame textuelle. Grâce aux notes préparatoires au roman conservées à la Bibliothèque du Congrès, il s’agira de comparer la manière dont Nabokov combine le matériau non-littéraire à son écriture avec sa pratique intertextuelle plus traditionnelle, afin d’identifier la place et le rôle de ces références dans sa poétique.

L’intertextualité comme outil de critique de la société de consommation

4 Lorsque Nabokov s’est lancé dans la composition de Lolita, cela ne faisait que huit ans qu’il s’était installé aux États-Unis, et le milieu universitaire intellectuel où il évoluait en temps normal5 ne lui donnait pas beaucoup l’occasion de se plonger dans la culture qu’il avait besoin de recréer autour de son héroïne : un univers de sodas et sundaes consommés dans des roadside diners, de chansons sirupeuses de crooners jouées sur des juke-box, de conseils de beauté et de mode à caractère prescriptif, de publicités dont le message est pris pour argent comptant, d’idéal de vie calqué sur celui des stars d’Hollywood, dont on copie les tenues, coiffures, véhicules, manières de parler. Les premiers critiques du roman (eux-mêmes issus de l’élite intellectuelle du pays) ont très fréquemment mis l’accent sur le portrait de la classe moyenne américaine d’où est issue la protagoniste, allant jusqu’à voir dans l’œuvre non seulement une satire de la société

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américaine, mais également une œuvre anti-américaine (une accusation qui blessa profondément l’auteur6). En effet, tout comme Adorno7, Nabokov déplore la pauvreté esthétique et la niaiserie d’un certain nombre de productions culturelles dites de masse (pulp fiction, science-fiction, romances à l’eau de rose, comédies musicales)8, et se moque des aspirations intellectuelles de la classe moyenne en la parodiant.

5 L’insertion de référents textuels issus de la culture populaire par la parodie permet donc de critiquer la société de consommation des années 1950, et l’outil parodique est lui-même rendu particulièrement efficace par la structure narrative du roman. En effet, grâce au point de vue de son narrateur Humbert Humbert, qui se présente comme un intellectuel européen raffiné et donc choqué par la vulgarité du nouveau monde, l’auteur parvient à un subtil mélange intertextuel mêlant références littéraires canoniques et citations triviales, qui illustre combien Nabokov a su s’approprier ces codes nouveaux pour mieux les détourner. L’une des sources non-littéraires les plus importantes du roman sont les magazines, dont le rôle dans l’intrigue et dans le tissu textuel du roman est capital. L’objet de la présente analyse n’est pas de retracer toutes les occurrences du thème des magazines, mais nous pouvons brièvement énumérer les plus importantes d’entre elles. Rappelons tout d’abord que les magazines font partie intégrante du décor à 342 Lawn Street : ils sont en effet mentionnés dès les premières impressions que Humbert a des lieux–« But there was no question of my settling there. I could not be happy in that type of household with bedraggled magazines on every chair » (Lolita 37). Humbert utilise ensuite l’un de ces magazines comme prétexte pour pouvoir toucher Lolita lors de la scène où il se masturbe contre elle sur le divan du salon par un dimanche matin ensoleillé (chapitre 13, 1ère partie) : les magazines sont donc logiquement présents dans la liste des « props » (Lolita 57)—les accessoires de cette scène répertoriés par Humbert dans la parodie de didascalies qui ouvre le chapitre. Notons aussi que c’est justement parce qu’elle descend s’acheter un magazine dans le hall de l’hôtel des Enchanted Hunters que Lolita rencontre Quilty (Lolita 138). Enfin, parmi les derniers objets lui restant de Lolita dont Humbert se débarrasse pour tenter de guérir son cœur brisé, figure « an accumulation of teen magazines » (Lolita 254). Toutefois, les magazines (qu’ils soient féminins, de décoration, destinés aux adolescentes ou consacrés aux stars d’Hollywood) ne sont pas que des accessoires utilisés pour faire progresser l’action du roman (comme dans la scène du chapitre 32 où Lolita rencontre Quilty parce qu’elle vient chercher un magazine), pour produire des effets de réel (la description de la maison de Charlotte), ou comme auxiliaires de caractérisation : leur langage et leurs images sont également finement intégrés à la trame textuelle du roman. Les magazines permettent ainsi de manière récurrente à Humbert de définir les standards culturels de la nymphette (qu’il méprise) : « Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things » (Lolita 148, c’est moi qui souligne).

6 Nabokov s’approprie les codes linguistiques des magazines et invente par exemple des titres, dénonçant ainsi, par le jeu parodique, la naïveté du lectorat de ce type de publication : le magazine Glance and Gulp (Lolita 47) qui s’échange entre les habitants de la maisonnée Haze comme les livres d’une bibliothèque indique bien, par le biais de l’allitération, que tout ce qui y est aperçu est immédiatement gobé, avalé sans aucune forme de mise à distance. Nabokov utilise aussi de manière récurrente les guillemets pour insérer des fragments de textes non-littéraires, ce qui permet de placer ces

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citations à une distance ironique, et de souligner la différence entre le vocabulaire érudit et soigné du narrateur et le lexique publicitaire : We came to know — nous connûmes, to use a Flaubertian intonation — the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court, or what the Tour Book of the Automobile Association describes as “shaded” or “spacious” or “landscaped” grounds. (…) But I did surrender, now and then, to Lo's predilection for “real” hotels. (…) Most tempting to her, too, were those “Colonial” Inns, which apart from “gracious atmosphere” and picture windows, promised “unlimited quantities of M-m-m food”. (Lolita 146-147)

7 En-dehors de la conjonction de références littéraires et non-littéraires, on notera le recours aux guillemets, qui créent immédiatement une aura de suspicion autour des mots qu’ils accompagnent ; ils agissent comme des agents de rupture du lien entre signifiant et signifié, car ils trahissent le caractère vide, mensonger de ces adjectifs commerciaux non mérités. Ce type d’interdiscursivité a donc un statut fort différent des citations littéraires dont Humbert émaille son manuscrit, et qui ont pour fonction de valider sa posture d’expert9, d’intellectuel, d’homme de goût en qui l’on peut avoir toute confiance. Il s’observe donc ici, par la citation de textes non-littéraires, une inversion de la fonction de la citation, qui devient ici l’objet de suspicion.

8 Une autre source textuelle non-littéraire que Nabokov a absorbée et intégrée à son roman provient des voyages que l’auteur fit à travers les États-Unis avec son épouse Véra pour chasser les papillons, lors desquels il séjourna dans de nombreux motels. Les notes préparatoires aux romans contiennent ainsi des copies de diverses instructions destinées aux clients (certaines copiées de la main de Véra), dont on retrouve la trace moqueuse dans le roman. Les notes préparatoires conservées à la Bibliothèque du Congrès comprennent cette citation inscrite par Véra : « do not throw rags in toilet ; a waste basket is provided in your cabin for this purpose. Do not throw grease ( ?) in toilet »10. Dans le roman, Nabokov recrée des instructions que cite Humbert : Some motels had instructions pasted above the toilet (on whose tank the towels were unhygienically heaped) asking guests not to throw into its bowl garbage, beer cans, cartons, stillborn babies. (Lolita 146)

9 La liste qui occupe cet extrait s’apparente à un catalogue surréaliste, mais combine également un effet de réel (Barthes 82), du fait de la description méticuleuse, et une insinuation morbide qui renvoie à l’avant-propos de John Ray Jr. où le sort de Lolita, qui meurt en couches en donnant naissance à une enfant mort-née, est révélé obliquement. L’effet premier de moquerie de la part de Humbert l’Européen, qui a grandi dans un hôtel de luxe de la Côte d’Azur, se double donc d’effets analeptiques et proleptiques à visée structurelle. Notons qu’il s’agit là de caractéristiques structurelles partagées par la plupart des textes-dans-le-texte du roman (voir analyse de l’extrait du Who’sWho un peu plus loin), tels que la carte postale envoyée par Lolita, la lettre de Charlotte, la chanson de Carmen Barmen, le poème écrit après la disparition de l’héroïne, ou encore le papier en-tête des Enchanted Hunters.

10 Dans son entreprise parodique, Nabokov imite également la typographie de ces textes rencontrés le long des routes : « TIMBER HOTEL, Children under 14 Free » (Lolita 146). Cette citation produit un effet de réel et attire l’œil, pour mieux mettre en valeur le caractère économique de l’offre commerciale, en écho à la manière insistante qu’a le narrateur d’énumérer combien ces voyages lui coûtent, et combien le fait que Lolita soit si jeune est intéressant d’un point de vue pécuniaire—ce qui attise aussi son désir : « I derived a

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not exclusively economic kick from such roadside signs as TIMBER HOTEL, Children under 14 Free », (Lolita 146, c’est moi qui souligne). La réification de Lolita en objet de consommation dans la société humbertienne de consommation n’en est que renforcée : un vaste réseau sémantique qui parcourt le roman ne cesse en effet de traiter Lolita comme un objet, un article dans un rayon11. Par un effet de miroir pervers, Lolita incarne à la fois la consommatrice idéale—« She it was to whom ads were dedicated : the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster » (Lolita 148)—et l’objet de consommation dont Humbert ne peut se passer. Il est donc possible de considérer l’omniprésence du langage commercial, pécuniaire et publicitaire au sein du texte poétique humbertien comme le signe de la transformation de Lolita en objet de consommation (concept de commodification). L’omniprésence du lexique publicitaire dans un texte qui se présente comme un chant d’amour peut être interprétée comme une forme d’intertextualité diffuse, voire systémique, car elle relève de la stratégie nabokovienne souterraine qui sape la rhétorique humbertienne et expose les aspects les plus insoutenables de la relation du narrateur à Lolita.

11 La critique de la société de consommation est donc d’autant plus subtile que son modèle de consommation sans frein est dupliqué par Humbert qui consomme sexuellement sans frein l’orpheline qu’il emmène de motel en motel. Nabokov procède de manière similaire en ce qui concerne sa critique de la culture de masse américaine, mais en alliant des dispositifs intertextuels et intermédiaux.

Structure du roman et culture de masse

12 Le système de la culture de masse qui relie la publicité, les conseils publiés dans les magazines, le culte des célébrités, et les objets qu’il faut consommer, n’est pas perçu par les personnages américains du roman (notamment Charlotte et Lolita), alors qu’il est clairement identifié et critiqué par Humbert Humbert : She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that that appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land — Starasil Starves Pimples, or “You better watch out if you’re wearing your shirttails outside your jeans, gals, because Jill says you shouldn’t”. 12 (Lolita 148)

13 D’une manière encore plus subtile, Nabokov se sert même du système qui régit la culture de masse et la société de consommation—la création de besoins chez le consommateur via la publicité qui utilise des célébrités en les érigeant en modèles— pour la trame même de son roman, et notamment, pour tisser le motif de la présence de Clare Quilty (motif que le lecteur est précisément invité, par relecture, à retracer). En effet, la présence de Quilty dans le texte, très subtilement encodée et imperceptible à la première lecture, est presque systématiquement liée à la culture de masse américaine. La première occurrence complète de son nom et de sa profession se trouve dans un autre texte-dans-le-texte non-littéraire, le soi-disant extrait de l’édition de 1946 du Who's Who in the Limelight, l’un des rares livres disponibles dans la prison depuis laquelle Humbert rédige son récit. Cet ouvrage recense les noms de ceux qui composent le monde de l’industrie du spectacle, parmi lesquels : Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N.J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The Strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for children are notable. Little Nymph (1940) traveled 14,000 miles and

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played 280 performances on the road during the winter before ending in New York. Hobbies : fast cars, photography, pets. (Lolita 31)

14 Cette entrée du Who’s Who abonde, à la deuxième lecture, en références qui indiquent que Quilty est bien celui qui a volé Lolita à Humbert : le titre de son grand succès The Little Nymph, la présence d’une homonyme de Lolita dans l’entrée suivante du dictionnaire, la mention de son acolyte Vivian Darkbloom, l’importance de ses pièces pour enfants, ses passe-temps qui font écho à la course-poursuite du deuxième périple des protagonistes, à ses pratiques photographiques perverses, et à Lolita elle-même, que Humbert appelle à de nombreuses reprises « my pet ». Notons par ailleurs qu’il est indiqué ici que Quilty a d’abord fait carrière dans la publicité, ce qui constitue un point commun supplémentaire avec son double Humbert Humbert, dont la mère était en outre « une dame qui aimait les éclairs » / « A lady who loved lightning », puisqu’elle meurt foudroyée. L’encodage proleptique se poursuit dans le paragraphe qui suit immédiatement la citation ci-dessus. Humbert y illustre sa capacité à copier le code du Who’s Who en inventant une entrée pour Lolita où se dessinent des références au meurtre du dramaturge (rappelons qu’à ce stade du roman le lecteur sait que Humbert est un meurtrier mais ignore toujours l’identité de sa victime) : « Born 1935. Appeared (…) in The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! » (Lolita 32). Si Humbert n’a que les mots avec quoi jouer, ce passage montre qu’il est déjà passé maître dans l’art de copier et parodier le langage du monde d’Hollywood.

15 Quilty est donc, dès sa première apparition dans la trame textuelle, établi comme une célébrité13, mais Nabokov ne se contente pas d’insérer de manière subtile le langage de ce monde des stars : l’auteur intègre également à son texte les images de la société du spectacle telles que la société de consommation les reproduit dans la publicité. Ainsi, la deuxième convocation de Quilty sur la scène du roman est faite de manière intermédiale, par le biais d’une image, celle de la publicité que Lolita a punaisée au mur de sa chambre : « A distinguished playwright was solemnly smoking a Drome. He always smoked Dromes. The resemblance was slight » (Lolita 69). Cette courte ekphrasis d’une publicité (fictive) est l’un des indices de l’identité du rival de Humbert, et elle joue un rôle structurel d’autant plus important que juste auparavant Humbert a décrit une autre publicité, celle du « Conquering Hero », publicité bien réelle retrouvée et reproduite par Alfred Appel dans les notes au roman (Lolita 369), dont le protagoniste ressemble effectivement à Humbert, et qui a dû amuser Nabokov car cette publicité cite un poème épique de Thomas Morell, et produit donc une conjonction de références high brow (savantes) et low brow (populaires). Les deux rivaux Humbert et Quilty, ou plutôt les deux faux frères, sont donc tous deux présentés de la même manière, via une ekphrasis peu conventionnelle, puisqu’il s’agit ici de décrire des publicités et non des œuvres d’art.

16 Lors de l’occurrence suivante du nom de Quilty, c’est à nouveau son statut de célébrité et de protagoniste d’une publicité qui est rappelé, lorsque Lolita le reconnaît dans la salle à manger des Enchanted Hunters : “Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?” said Lo in a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room. “Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?” (…) “Course not,” she said with a splutter of mirth. “I meant the writer fellow in the

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Dromes ad.” Oh, Fame ! Oh, Femina ! (Lolita 121)

17 Lors de sa dernière apparition sur la scène du roman, Quilty mâche sa dernière cigarette Drome14, en une sorte de fusion entre lui-même et le produit qu’il promeut, mais ce qu’il faut souligner ici c’est l’insistance de Humbert sur le lien entre les publicités de magazine, la célébrité, et le lectorat féminin de ces magazines : « Oh, Fame ! Oh, Femina ! », où l’on peut sans doute détecter un jeu de mots bilingue sur le mot « Fame » et « femme » quand « Fame » est prononcé à la manière française. Le roman montre en effet que les magazines féminins, qu’ils soient destinés aux adolescentes ou aux adultes, ou qu’ils soient plus spécifiquement consacrés aux stars de cinéma, jouent un rôle de premier plan dans la vie quotidienne, la culture, les goûts, le comportement et les aspirations des deux personnages féminins principaux du roman, Charlotte et Lolita. Les deux publicités arrachées à un magazine et affichées dans la chambre de Lolita représentent ainsi, de manière intermédiale, le lien entre son existence et celle des célébrités représentées sur papier glacé, tout en fournissant deux éléments essentiels de caractérisation, de développement de l’intrigue, et de structure.

18 Notons par ailleurs que Nabokov, dans sa première version du scénario de Lolita, avait prévu une courte séquence de préparation de ce passage important du roman, où l’on devait voir Lolita déchirant la publicité où figure Quilty : « The last issue of “File” lies on the turf near the deck chair. She contemplates the back cover, then rips it off and takes it upstairs to her room, leaving the rest of the magazine on the chair »15. « File » est bien sûr une anagramme du célèbre magazine « Life », qui représente, par son titre même, les aspirations de toute une société à avoir une vie semblable à celle des stars16. Humbert ne cesse de rappeler combien le comportement de Lolita est lié à ce qu’elle lit dans les magazines : « I knew she would let me do so, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches » (Lolita 48), et comme l’a démontré Monica Manolescu, il se sert de la fascination de Lolita pour le monde des célébrités via son propre physique qui correspond aux canons masculins hollywoodiens (Manolescu 167-168) pour la séduire et la manipuler.

19 Dans la version finale du scénario, Nabokov a même ajouté un détail de la publicité pour les cigarettes Drome, le slogan/les pseudo-mots du célèbre dramaturge vantant les mérites de ces cigarettes : « I can write without a pen but not without a Drome » (Screenplay 72). Le ridicule du slogan rappelle des slogans similaires que Nabokov parodie ici, et qui étaient justement très fréquents dans les publicités pour les cigarettes Camel, pour lesquelles, à la fin des années 1940 et tout le long des années 1950, des dizaines d’acteurs, chanteurs, ou ténors d’opéra ont été utilisés selon un schéma visuel identique et dont voici quelques exemples :

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Camel ad, 1950

Camel ad, 1951

Camel ad, 1952

20 En faisant ainsi appel à la mémoire visuelle et à la culture populaire de son lecteur17, Nabokov parvient à introduire à la fois un jeu de mots visuel et linguistique sur le mot « Drome », qui rappelle le mot « dromedary » / dromadaire, une sorte de double simplifié d’un « camel » / chameau (le dromadaire comme chameau à une bosse), et indique aussi une incohérence que le naturaliste Nabokov n’avait pas manqué de remarquer, à savoir que le paquet de Camel est illustré par un dromadaire et non un chameau, comme le voudrait la logique, ainsi qu’Alfred Appel l’a noté.

21 En décrivant une publicité qu’il invente de toutes pièces, Nabokov duplique par la parodie le système de représentation publicitaire, et en dénonce subtilement la nature

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factice. En effet, en créant une fausse publicité, il rappelle le caractère mensonger de toutes les publicités, qui produisent des images destinées à faire croire au consommateur qu’elles font partie de son univers : les publicités tentent d’oblitérer leur propre processus de représentation afin de permettre une meilleure identification du consommateur avec le monde qu’elles promeuvent. Comme il l’avait énoncé dans son étude consacrée à Gogol et publiée en 1944, les publicités de magazine offrent un exemple parfait de poshlost : « The rich poshlust of advertisements of this kind is due (...) to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser » (Nicolai Gogol 67).

22 Les analyses précédentes donnent ainsi à voir une fonction de l’interdiscursivité non- littéraire avant tout d’ordre dénonciateur, sur plusieurs plans, puisqu’elle permet non seulement de critiquer la société de consommation et la culture de masse, mais aussi de créer une trame souterraine qui dénonce les agissements de Humbert Humbert. Toutefois, le rapport qu’entretient Nabokov à son nouvel environnement américain est complexe, et les occurrences intertextuelles qui empruntent à des sources de la culture populaire ne sauraient être réduites à cette posture critique. Comme l’a énoncé Suellen Stringer-Hye: « Nabokov’s own attitudes toward popular culture are problematic. He seems on the one hand to detest its vulgarity while on the other to celebrate its vigor » (Stringer-Hye 158). Le rôle de premier plan qu’il confie aux publicités de Quilty et Humbert dans le roman illustre la relation paradoxale que l’écrivain entretient avec le trivial ; dans sa postface à Lolita il affirme en effet : « Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity » (Lolita 315).

De la parodie au ré-enchantement, un autre aspect de l’intertextualité low brow du roman

23 L’ambivalence de Nabokov à l’égard de ce qui relève de la poshlost se laissait déjà percevoir dans son ouvrage consacré à Gogol, dans lequel il regrettait tout autant la présence de la poshlost au fil des pages gogoliennes qu’il s’émerveillait de la capacité de l’auteur à transformer en chef-d’œuvre exquis une image des plus sordides18. Notre étude propose d’étudier à présent la manière dont les stratégies interdiscursives nabokoviennes procèdent à un ré-enchantement des référents vulgaires empruntés à la culture populaire par une appropriation des codes linguistiques non-littéraires qui permet d’en révéler le potentiel poétique.

24 Comme cela a été vu plus haut, Nabokov se montre très habile à parodier et créer des publicités et des slogans, et le narrateur de son roman illustre la même habileté à manipuler les codes de la publicité : malgré son statut d’universitaire, nous apprenons aussi qu’Humbert Humbert, issu d’une famille de commerçants, a lui-même travaillé dans la publicité pour parfums : In New York I eagerly accepted the soft job fate offered me: it consisted mainly of thinking up and editing perfume ads. I welcomed its desultory character and pseudoliterary aspects, attending to it whenever I had nothing better to do. (Lolita 32)

25 Parmi les envolées lyriques, les jeux de mots et les références littéraires qui caractérisent la prose de Humbert, ce dernier glisse donc un certain nombre d’expressions directement tirées de la publicité. Par exemple, pour désigner la proposition de mariage que lui a faite Charlotte, il utilise l’expression « the Amazing

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Offer (Lolita 71) »—expression dont les majuscules rappellent immédiatement celles des slogans destinés à faire succomber le client par des offres sans pareille. De même, lorsqu’il s’agit de donner à Lolita les somnifères qu’il a essayés sur Charlotte et dont il espère que la puissance lui permettra de caresser Lolita à son insu, il emploie naturellement le langage publicitaire auquel Lolita est si sensible. Après avoir sorti les « Purple Pills » de leur boîte, il en fait l’article, tel un bon agent commercial : “Blue!” she exclaimed. “Violet blue. What are they made of?” “Summer skies,” I said, “and plums and figs, and the grapeblood of emperors.” “No, seriously — please.” “Oh, just Purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want to try one?” Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously. (Lolita 122)

26 On remarquera ici la manière dont Nabokov mêle le langage commercial et poétique. Les images lyriques se succèdent (mais manquent de convaincre Lolita), les allitérations font vibrer la surface des mots, les jeux de mots déploient les potentiels du signifiant (« purpills », « strong as an ox or an ax »), tout en mimant la syntaxe typique des slogans publicitaires, qui procède à l’élision du sujet de la phrase, et en introduisant du lexique prétendument scientifique qui achève de gagner la confiance de la nymphette qui tend la main. Une telle hybridité langagière qui mêle la syntaxe et le lexique caractéristiques du langage publicitaire aux traits stylistiques de la poésie trouve son point de rencontre dans le système allitératif à l’œuvre ici, puisque le recours aux allitérations est un signe distinctif commun aux codes publicitaire et poétique.

27 La manière dont Nabokov composa son texte révèle cette hybridité intrinsèque : une comparaison des sources non-littéraires de Lolita au texte final nous permet de davantage percevoir comment cette interdiscursivité mixte, ou trans-classe culturelle, s’est construite. Pour écrire Lolita, Nabokov s’est largement documenté sur de nombreux sujets qu’il ne maîtrisait pas (comme le fonctionnement d’un revolver ou l’évolution anatomique des fillettes), et il a également pris de nombreuses notes sur des éléments de la société de consommation américaine qu’il découvrait encore. Le manuscrit du roman, rédigé sur des index cards19 (fiches bristol) a été brûlé par Nabokov, bristol après bristol, dès que son épouse en avait tapé un à la machine, car dans les années 1950 l’auteur, craignant pour son poste à Cornell, envisageait encore de publier le roman de manière anonyme (Boyd 2011, 27) et redoutait sans doute de conserver un tel récit homodiégétique écrit de sa main. Il ne reste donc que les notes préparatoires au roman, qui sont conservées à la Bibliothèque du Congrès, mais celles- ci sont de toute première importance pour cette analyse croisant critique génétique et études intertextuelles. Elles contiennent en effet de nombreuses citations extraites de divers magazines pour adolescentes (Miss America, Movie Teen), de publications spécialisées dans la vie des stars de Hollywood (Movie Love, Screenland), ou encore de magazines féminins, ouvrages ou catalogues de décoration. Certaines de ces notes ont été plus ou moins directement citées dans Lolita, et nous proposons à présent d’examiner plusieurs exemples de la manière dont Nabokov a inséré ces textes non- littéraires dans son roman afin de savoir si ce matériau moins « noble » que les références littéraires ou artistiques est traité de manière spécifique par l’auteur.

28 Le premier exemple est tiré d’une index card intitulée « 17, sept. 1952 [on menstruation] », sujet que l’on imagine peu connu de Nabokov, qui en outre n’a pas eu de fille mais un fils. Sur ce petit bristol, Nabokov a recopié plusieurs éléments, et l’on voit qu’il a déjà adapté ses notes à une possible utilisation dans le roman :

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Greedy as a young robin you started snatching up… crumb of information… about how they [older girl friends] had just “fallen off the roof” or how “Grandma was visiting”. Probably, though we hope not, you heard references to “the curse” ... Then, on the morning before our thirteenth birthday, it happened We were, simply, menstruating. When will my uterus, asked Lo, start to build a thick soft wall on the chance that a possible baby may have to be bedded down there (…)20.

29 Toutefois, dans le texte final, et contrairement à ce que suggère la fin des notes, l’auteur n’a pas repris la parcelle de dialogue entre adolescentes griffonnée sur ce bristol en attribuant ces paroles à Lolita, mais a intégré ces extraits de magazine à la voix de Humbert, en y adjoignant d’autres codes linguistiques : Has she already been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery of the Menarche? Bloated feelings. The Curse of the Irish. Falling from the roof. Grandma is visiting. “Mr. Uterus [I quote from a girls’ magazine] starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance a possible baby may have to be bedded down there.” The tiny madman in his padded cell. (Lolita 47)

30 Certaines caractéristiques stylistiques identifiées plus haut sont à nouveau mobilisées ici (les allitérations, l’utilisation des majuscules, l’insertion d’une citation entre guillemets), mais nous souhaiterions souligner ici la juxtaposition de clichés (« mother nature »), de métaphores populaires directement empruntées au magazine pour adolescentes, du procédé infantile de personnification « Mr. Uterus », et du terme scientifique médical « Menarche » désignant la première menstruation (ce terme ne faisant pas partie du langage courant, Alfred Appel élucide son sens dans une note). Le texte-source initial est donc à la fois parodié, complexifié, densifié, enflé en quelque sorte tout comme ces « sensations de ballonnement » (« bloated feelings ») évoquées ici. Un certain malaise est produit par cet enchaînement de prose savante et de langage immature, sans doute destiné à attirer l’attention du lecteur sur le sujet même de ces phrases, qui pose une question capitale : Lolita est-elle toujours une enfant, ou est-elle devenue une femme fertile ? L’hybridité nauséeuse des codes est en outre comme dupliquée dans le jeu polysémique très particulier produit par l’image du mur capitonné (« a thick soft wall ») extraite des magazines recopiés, car cette métaphore est ici reliée à une référence aux séjours en hôpital psychiatrique de Humbert, ce qui établit, de manière assez morbide, un parallèle entre l’utérus de Lolita et une cellule où l’on enferme les aliénés. De la sorte, le désir de Humbert pour le corps de Lolita, et notamment ses organes sexuels (« My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix » Lolita 165) est une fois de plus subtilement mis en parallèle avec la folie et la perversion du narrateur21. L’on remarquera que lorsqu’Humbert déploie les allusions intertextuelles à Poe, Dante ou Ronsard, un malaise de ce type n’est pas suscité : c’est précisément la juxtaposition de codes savants et populaires qui permet de saper la rhétorique humbertienne.

31 Cet exemple illustre donc le travail littéraire effectué à partir des matériaux non- littéraires collectés dans les magazines que l’auteur a lus, mais présente également d’autres caractéristiques du style nabokovien : le goût de Nabokov pour les mots rares, sa manie des allitérations, la récurrence des jeux de mots et le choix de métaphores qui font écho à un motif récurrent du roman et contribuent à en tisser la trame (ici, l’état mental du narrateur et le crime qu’il s’apprête à commettre). Ce travail à partir des magazines féminins et des magazines pour adolescentes a permis à Nabokov de se familiariser avec les intérêts de ses nouvelles compatriotes, et surtout, avec leur

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langage, notamment dans le but de créer des personnages aussi vraisemblables que possible, confirmant ainsi l’idée de Christine Raguet selon laquelle l’illusion de réalité s’ancre dans le langage (Raguet-Bouvart 208). Comme l’a expliqué Philippe Hamon, « ce n’est jamais, en effet, le “réel” que l’on atteint dans un texte, mais une rationalisation, une textualisation du réel, une reconstruction a posteriori encodée par et dans le texte [...] » (Hamon 129). Dans Lolita, cette textualisation du réel passe par le dispositif intertextuel, à mesure que Nabokov intègre à la fiction des éléments tirés de textes non-littéraires. Les citations qui suivent reproduisent les notes de Nabokov reprenant des éléments de deux magazines, Miss America et Movie Love : I Miss America November (acquired August 30) 10 cents “Atlas” comics. “The Best in Teen Tales” “Don’t be fat” ads, one of them urging the purchase of “the exciting new TUMMY FLATTENER [exciting what?] Patsy Walker [change to something else] Nossir Daddums [Dad in purple suit forbidding shoulder-length red-head to see school (or college) chum who writes poetry for her. Her tears about the size (and exactly same outline) as her small brother’s freckles only more oval II Miss America (cont.) “Atlas” [change this] “Learn to draw” ad Another Patsy Walker episode [they are “students”. Apparently high school but look like college girls and boys] [check meaning of word “dud” its origin, etc.] III Miss America Nov. 1952 Ad: Need extra spending money? [selling samples of gorgeous Christmas cards] Some more Patsy W. and Hedy Wolfe (the bad girl dark hair, fat father with cigar whereas Mr W. has little moustache and good looking) (…) Yet another shape ad. Front zipper that trim tummy, nips hips. I Movie Love Oct. (Aug. 30) 10 cents Ad: Reduce your appearance instantly, girdle: creates slimmer figure that invites romance (…)22

32 Toutes ces citations tirées de Miss America et Movie Love ont été utilisées par l’auteur pour composer le passage suivant, qui semble nous faire feuilleter ces magazines grâce à une syntaxe resserrée, produite par l’accumulation de phrases courtes, voire nominales, qui font référence à des choses très diverses, sans lien entre elles (ainsi que le soulignent les points qui séparent les phrases de manière incisive), et qui produisent un effet catalogue : One day I removed from the car and destroyed an accumulation of teen-magazines. You know the sort. (…) Invite Romance by wearing the Exciting New Tummy Flattener. Trims tums, nips hips. Tristram in Movielove. Yessir! The Joe-Roe marital enigma is making yaps flap. Glamorize yourself quickly and inexpensively. Comics. Bad girl dark hair fat father cigar; good girl red hair handsome daddums clipped mustache. Or that repulsive strip with the big gagoon and his wife, a kiddoid gnomide. Et moi qui t’offrais mon génie... (Lolita 254)

33 Comme le souligne Yannicke Chupin, cette liste « anarchique, parataxique et allitérative » « fait écho à la rapidité et à l’efficacité de la publicité américaine », elle est composée de « fragments visuels et linguistiques qui sont pour lui le reflet de la culture

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de masse américaine » (Chupin 55), et qui par l’absence de coordination et de subordination permet de juxtaposer les éléments sans les hiérarchiser (Chupin 56). Si l’on peut, comme Yannicke Chupin, voir dans ce choix syntaxique un moyen d’opposer la langue américaine, cette « langue du slogan, une langue qui doit son staccato caractéristique à l’accumulation de monosyllabes » (Chupin 55) à la langue française et ses circonvolutions syntaxiques dans des phrases interminables, on peut aussi interpréter la structure syntaxique de l’extrait ci-dessus comme l’équivalent verbal de l’action de feuilleter l’un de ces magazines pour adolescentes, en écho au geste que Nabokov a lui-même effectué pour prendre ces notes. En effet, contrairement à ce que pressent Yannicke Chupin, peut-être du fait de l’absence de guillemets, Humbert ne « feint » pas « de recopier différents magazines » (Chupin 55) : ainsi qu’en attestent les notes préparatoires au roman, il s’agit ici de fragments véritablement recopiés de magazines réels, que Nabokov recombine pour produire à la fois un effet de réel, une parodie, mais aussi, comme le voit Rachel Bowlby, un hommage à la poésie produite par la publicité (Bowlby 177) : le lecteur ne peut qu’être impressionné par le vertige allitératif et assonantique de ce passage, la virevolte de clins d’œil intertextuels (Sterne, Tristan et Iseult23, Chateaubriand, Musset), l’explosion néologique évoquant les personnages de Dick Tracy et Kerry Drake par Alfred Andriola24 : « gagoon », qui fait résonner « gag », « goon » et « baboon » ; « kiddoid », adjectif dont le suffixe -oid indique qu’il signifie « ayant l’aspect d’un enfant » ; « gnomide » qui mêle le gnome et le bromure (bromide en anglais). Notons enfin le jeu intermédial ouvert par les deux derniers fragments, où l’on est visuellement saisi par la force évocatrice de la courte ekphrasis sans prédicat qui reprend les caractéristiques de la bande dessinée Patsy Walker notées par Nabokov et oppose les deux personnages principaux, Patsy Walker et Hedi Wolfe grâce à un parallèle syntaxique parfait : « Bad girl dark hair fat father cigar ; good girl red hair handsome daddums clipped mustache ».

34 La manière nabokovienne de rendre littéraire un matériau textuel et iconique initialement étranger à la prose poétique éminemment érudite de l’auteur s’illustre également dans une parodie à double niveau, littéraire et non-littéraire, développée par Humbert à des fins de critique de la société de consommation et de moquerie de Charlotte—deux stratégies qui visent à valoriser l’image du narrateur aux yeux du lecteur. Le narrateur consacre ainsi un long passage de son récit aux efforts déployés par Charlotte pour redécorer sa maison après leurs noces. Ce faisant, Humbert s’applique à suivre un topos littéraire bien connu—la demeure d’un personnage est un portrait oblique de celui qui l’occupe—mais Nabokov souligne subtilement ce topos grâce au titre de l’ouvrage (inventé) dont Charlotte suit les prescriptions : Your Home Is You. En fait, dans ce passage, le cliché littéraire est complètement subverti, car du fait des prescriptions de la société de consommation, Charlotte décore sa maison non pas selon ses goûts et sa personnalité, mais selon la mode et les standards de l’époque. On notera ainsi dans le passage suivant le champ lexical de la loi ou de la religion qui soulignent l’absence de décision libre de la part de Charlotte : She rearranged the furniture — and was pleased when she found, in a household treatise, that “it is permissible to separate a pair of sofa commodes and their companion lamps.” With the authoress of Your Home Is You, she developed a hatred for little lean chairs and spindle tables. She believed that a room having a generous expanse of glass, and lots of rich wood paneling was an example of the masculine type of room, whereas the feminine type was characterized by lighter-looking windows and frailer woodwork. The novels I had found her reading when I moved in were now replaced by illustrated catalogues and homemaking guides. (Lolita 78)

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35 De manière symptomatique, le remplacement des romans par des catalogues et des guides de décoration reflète non seulement l’invasion des objets de la société de consommation dans l’espace domestique, mais surtout l’invasion du lexique consumériste dans l’espace textuel, qui utilise l’effet catalogue, les répétitions (doublées d’allitérations), et les mots mêmes de ces catalogues : With the zest of a banal young bride, she started to “glorify the home.” Knowing as I did its every cranny by heart (…) I had long entered into a sort of emotional relationship with it, with its very ugliness and dirt, and now I could almost feel the wretched thing cower in its reluctance to endure the bath of ecru and ocher and putty-buff-and-snuff that Charlotte planned to give it. She never got as far as that, thank God, but she did use up a tremendous amount of energy in washing window shades, waxing the slats of Venetian blinds, purchasing new shades and new blinds, returning them to the store, replacing them by others, and so on, in a constant chiaroscuro of smiles and frowns, doubts and pouts. She dabbled in cretonnes and chintzes; she changed the colors of the sofa (…). (Lolita 77)

36 Humbert emprunte ici les termes mêmes des catalogues édictant la mode de l’époque, durant laquelle la tendance était à l’écru, comme l’indique le camaïeu de beiges introduit par la métaphore humoristique du bain (« the bath of ecru and ocher and putt-buff-and-snuff »). Les noms de couleur que l’on trouve dans les catalogues ou les nuanciers commerciaux sont un élément récurrent des notes préparatoires au roman : Nabokov a souvent noté des noms de couleurs de divers biens de consommation (vêtements, voitures…) en y ajoutant certains de son invention qui révèlent le potentiel poétique du langage commercial. La virtuosité avec laquelle Nabokov manipule les codes de ce langage trouve une déclinaison remarquablement poétique dans la liste des couleurs de maillots de bain à la disposition d’Humbert dans le magasin aquatique : « Swimming suits ? We have them in all shades. Dream pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black » (Lolita 107). Contrairement à d’autres passages étudiés, cette palette de couleurs ne résonne pas d’allitérations ni d’assonances, mais est plutôt d’une variété sonore qui duplique celle des modèles parmi lesquels le narrateur peut faire son choix. Les métaphores qui définissent ces couleurs jouent également sur des registres très variés : image glacée, métaphore florale, couleur abstraite du rêve, le savoureux « oolala black » où se lisent le français « ouh la la... » et un mélange anagrammatique de Lo et de Lola, mais aussi, dissimulé derrière le lexique anatomique savant, un clin d’œil érotique : le mot « glans », selon les notes érudites d’Alfred Appel, renvoie au « conical vascular body which forms the extremity of the penis » (Lolita 374).

37 Dans l’extrait consacré à la rénovation intérieure orchestrée par Charlotte, Nabokov s’amuse également à reprendre, cette fois sans les saper par un commentaire méprisant ou une métaphore comique, les principes de décoration qui reflètent les clichés de l’époque sur le genre via un parallèle lexico-syntaxique en chiasme qui permet d’opposer les deux sexes : « a room having a generous expanse of glass, and lots of rich wood paneling was an example of the masculine type of room, whereas the feminine type was characterized by lighter-looking windows and frailer woodwork ». La présence de ce lexique commercial dans le texte littéraire est un élément caractéristique de Lolita : en effet, les autres romans et nouvelles de la période américaine de l’auteur ne sont pas autant nourris de cette observation de son pays d’adoption ni de sa découverte de la langue anglaise (ou plutôt américaine) non- littéraire. Cette hybridation entre langue populaire et langue poétique sert plusieurs objectifs et produit plusieurs effets conjoints : elle manifeste par la parodie le goût de

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l’auteur pour le jeu sur les codes et sur le langage, tout en permettant à la fois une critique de la société de consommation et un émerveillement devant la multiplication d’objets et surtout de mots pour dire ce monde en prolifération constante. Rappelons en outre que la parodie est aussi un outil métatextuel puissant, comme le souligne Linda Hutcheon : « Parody is one of the major forms of self-reflexivity » (Hutcheon 2). L’hybridation des codes littéraires et non-littéraires sert donc aussi le réflexe post- moderne d’attention au texte lui-même, et au geste recréateur du monde de l’écrivain : « [the creative artist] must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of recreating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world » (Strong Opinions 32). Le travail de documentation et de recherche entrepris par Nabokov pour recréer le monde de son héroïne qu’il découvrait atteste de ses efforts pour connaître ce monde, et la confrontation des quelques notes de travail exposées dans cette étude nous permet d’entrevoir la manière dont Nabokov a entrelacé les mots et images qu’il découvrait dans son nouvel environnement et le registre poétique majeur qui est le sien.

38 Il reste encore de nombreuses sources à identifier et des dispositifs à analyser, mais il paraît important de souligner la part essentielle que joue ce matériau non-littéraire dans le développement de la langue littéraire américaine de Nabokov. La variété des registres que permet le jeu intertextuel nabokovien produit une ouverture du signifiant littéraire vers d’autres codes, tout en illuminant des aspects de la banale quotidienneté sous le faisceau de la littérature. Lolita démontre qu’il n’y a pas nécessairement concurrence entre culture de masse et littérature dans l’esthétique nabokovienne, contrairement à ce qui a pu être vu par certains critiques, qui de la sorte ont suivi la perspective humbertienne et ont condamné comme lui Lolita, la société américaine et les objets et textes de son quotidien par comparaison à la « noble » littérature et aux « beaux » arts. Notons toutefois qu’une tendance plus récente de la critique nabokovienne tend à renverser cette perspective25, telle Rachel Bowlby, qui voit dans la culture de masse la force vive de l’écriture du roman : the driving force of the novel’s language (…) is not so much its recognizable continuation of a literary tradition as its incorporation into the mass-cultural modes that make up Lolita’s American world. (Bowlby 172)

39 Le roman embrasse en fait la nature ambivalente de l’héroïne qui lui donne son titre. Car si Lolita est le parfait reflet de la culture dans laquelle elle grandit26, elle suscite à la fois un désir brûlant et une forme de mépris chez Humbert, qui explique même que sa vulgarité, dérivée des publicités et des magazines, est justement l’une des conditions pour être une authentique nymphette : « What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet — of every nymphet, perhaps ; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures » (Lolita 44, c’est moi qui souligne) 27. La beauté de l’héroïne, que le roman célèbre du premier au dernier mot, vouant Lolita à l’éternité des pigments picturaux, est celle de cette Amérique vulgaire et la poshlost, que Nabokov, sur les traces de Gogol, rend merveilleuse sous sa plume de poète et son regard de peintre28.

40 Comme le rappelle Bruce Bégout dans son ouvrage intitulé Lieu Commun, et comme l’ont perçu Emerson et Thoreau « la culture américaine s’est édifiée en fonction d’un intérêt essentiel pour la quotidienneté » (Bégout 15), la vie de tous les jours, « the near, the low, the common »29, et Nabokov, en adoptant la langue américaine pour sa création littéraire et les États-Unis comme espace où poser son regard toujours en éveil, s’inscrit

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pleinement dans cette tradition, tout en l’enrichissant de la perspective lumineuse d’un étranger nouvellement arrivé : Se tenant dans une position de dedans-dehors, sur le seuil même de la familiarité, ni trop proche ni trop loin, [l’étranger ou le voyageur] est l’homme qui peut nous apprendre de quoi le quotidien est réellement fait. (Bégout 2005, 38)

41 En entrelaçant textes et images du quotidien à sa langue littéraire éminemment riche, Nabokov permet en retour d’illuminer « une part de cette vie courante [qui] se dérobe du fait même de sa surprésence » (Bégout 2002, 12). La forme d’interdiscursivité qu’il a développée dans Lolita a permis de mettre les outils intertextuels (parodie, citation, pastiche) et littéraires (jeux de mots, effets sonores, stylistiques, syntaxiques, métaphoriques) au service d’une poétique du vulgaire et du banal, tant dans ses objets que ses mots—un manifeste esthétique qu’il l’énonçait dès 1925 dans sa nouvelle « A Guide to Berlin » : I think that here lies the sense of literary creation : to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times ; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right : the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade. (Stories 157, c’est moi qui souligne).

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Chupin, Yannicke. « “Do You Mind Very Much Cutting Out The French ?” Le français de Humbert dans Lolita de Vladimir Nabokov ». Revue française d’études américaines : 115 (2008) : 50-59. Consulted May 30, 2016. www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-d-etudes-americaines-2008-1-page-50.htm.

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NOTES

1. Sur la base des notes de Carl Proffer (Keys to Lolita), intégrées ensuite dans l’appareil critique et annotatif de Alfred Appel Jr., d’autres travaux sont régulièrement publiés dans The Nabokovian, Nabokov Studies ou sur le forum Nabokv-L et identifient d’autres motifs ou références intertextuelles au sein du roman. 2. Par exemple, Donald Malcolm ou Richard Schickel (cf. bibliographie). 3. La notion de culture populaire « souffre à l’origine d’une ambiguïté sémantique » (Cuche 79), née des différentes définitions possibles du mot « culture », entendu soit au sens large comme ensemble des manifestations d’une société humaine donnée (rituels, langage, habitus, productions, etc) ou au sens plus restrictif d’ensemble des productions de type artistique ou de divertissement (littérature, musique, peinture, cinéma, etc). Nous entendrons l’expression

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« culture populaire » dans sa première acception, qui permet non seulement d’inclure la deuxième définition, mais correspond aux aspects du roman qui seront étudiés ici, puisque notre étude s’attache à tous les aspects populaires (par opposition à l’élite) de la société américaine d’après 1945. Pour désigner cette culture spécifique qui émerge dans un contexte d’expansion économique faisant émerger la société de consommation, la critique nabokovienne américaine utilise également le terme un peu plus restrictif de « culture de masse » (Appel, Bowlby) pour désigner les éléments de la culture matérielle, visuelle ou textuelle qui relèvent du quotidien, de la consommation, des objets de la vie courante. Nous utiliserons également ce terme lorsque nos analyses prendront pour objet des éléments directement liés à la consommation de masse. 4. Cf. Barthes, 81-90. 5. Il le décrit ainsi dans l’un de ses entretiens : « I came to America in 1940 and decided to become an American citizen, and make America my home. It so happened that I was immediately exposed to the very best in America, to its rich intellectual life and to its easygoing, good-natured atmosphere. I immersed myself in its great libraries and its Grand Canyon. I worked in the laboratories of its zoological museums. I acquired more friends than I ever had in Europe. My books — old books and new ones — found some admirable readers » (Strong Opinions 26). 6. Voir la postface au roman, « On A Book Entitled Lolita » (Lolita 315), ou sa déclaration : « Well, I can only repeat that I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist. Whether or not critics think that in Lolita I am ridiculing human folly leaves me supremely indifferent. But I am annoyed when the glad news is spread that I am ridiculing America » (Strong Opinions 25). Il affirma par ailleurs : « Satire is a lesson, parody is a game » (Strong Opinions 75). 7. Dans son essai co-écrit avec Max Horkheimer « The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception » publié en 1947 Adorno développe une analyse acerbe de la structure de la culture de masse qui produit à la fois les produits et les consommateurs de ces produits culturels populaires, et dépeint la culture de masse comme une force dégradante, totalisante et par-dessus tout uniformisante (1255-1258). 8. Par exemple : « I loathe popular pulp, I loathe gogo gangs, I loathe jungle music, I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories. I especially loathe vulgar movies — cripples raping nuns under tables, or naked-girl breasts squeezing against the tanned torsos of repulsive young males » (Strong Opinions 117). 9. Comme le rappelle Antoine Compagnon, les citations que produit un auteur « sont nécessaires afin de qualifier le sujet (son “esprit” et non immédiatement son discours), de montrer qu’il a lu, qu’il sait, c’est-à-dire qu’il a le droit de prendre la parole » (Compagnon 318). 10. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Manuscript Division. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Lolita, Index cards (unnumbered). Notes in English (1950-1955), container 11, folder 6 of 6. 11. La réification de Lolita est un procédé récurrent dans le roman, mais nous voudrions attirer l’attention sur l’expression « fast article » pour la désigner, qui fait retour à deux reprises dans les notes préparatoires au roman, et qui est utilisée directement dans le roman par Lolita elle- même : « You must be confusing me with some other fast little article » (Lolita 222). Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Manuscript Division. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Lolita, Index cards (unnumbered). Notes in English (1950-1955), container 11, folder 4 of 6. 12. Citation précisément tirée, selon les notes de Nabokov, du numéro de Screenland de Sept 1952, avec une modification onomastique : « Loretta Young » est devenue « Jill ». Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Manuscript Division. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Lolita, Index cards (unnumbered). Notes in English (1950-1955), container 11, folder 4 of 6. 13. Dans l’occurrence suivante, Charlotte le présente comme une référence évidente que Humbert devrait connaître, lorsqu’elle mentionne son dentiste : « Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright » (Lolita 64). 14. « “Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette

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yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.” He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it. » (Lolita 297) 15. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Manuscript Division. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Lolita. A Screenplay. Draft in English, on index cards, n. d., container #16, folder #2, index card #28. 16. De manière assez ironique, une série de photographies de Nabokov et son épouse dans leur quotidien à Montreux paraîtra dans Life en 1964. 17. Comme il le note dans la nouvelle « Lance », Nabokov a bien conscience de l’impact des images de la publicité sur l’imagination : « I am somewhat disappointed that I cannot make out her features. All I manage to glimpse is an effect of melting light on one side of her misty hair, and in this, I suspect, I am insidiously influenced by the standard artistry of modern photography and I feel how much easier writing must have been in former days when one's imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tire company's pictorial advertisement » (Stories, 635). 18. « But a different lot and another fate await the writer who has dared to evoke all such things that are constantly before one's eyes but which idle eyes do not see—the shocking morass of trifles that has tied up our lives, and the essence of cold, crumbling, humdrum characters with whom our earthly way, now bitter, now dull, fairly swarms; has dared to make them prominently and brightly visible to the eyes of all men by means of the vigorous strength of his pitiless chisel. Not for him will be the applause, no grateful tears will he see, no souls will he excite with unanimous admiration; (…) for the judgment of his time does not admit that a man requires a good deal of spiritual depth in order to be able to throw light upon an image supplied by base life and to turn it into an exquisite masterpiece (…) » (Nicolai Gogol 105-106). 19. Avec Lolita, Nabokov met au point le système d’écriture qui sera le sien jusqu’à sa dernière œuvre inachevée, à savoir la rédaction de ses romans sur des petits bristols dont il n’utilise en général que le recto, et qu’il numérote et réorganise à sa guise. Cette technique lui permet de commencer la rédaction où il le souhaite, et d’ajouter au fil de l’écriture des bristols pour mettre en place le système complexe de motifs qui sont entrelacés dans ses œuvres. 20. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Manuscript Division. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Lolita, Index cards (unnumbered). Notes in English (1950-1955), container 11, folder 3 of 6. 21. Rappelons que Humbert envisage de se servir de l’utérus de Lolita comme source de production de nymphettes (« a litter of lolitas » Lolita 300), ce qui lui permettra de toujours assouvir son désir, une fois passé le court intervalle, entre neuf et quatorze ans, où les nymphettes peuvent éclore, même si cela implique de recourir à l’inceste entre père et fille puis entre grand-père et petite-fille (Lolita 174), qu’il présente comme la solution idéale. 22. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Manuscript Division. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Papers, Lolita, Index cards (unnumbered). Notes in English (1950-1955), container 11, folder 3 of 6. 23. Samuel Schuman voit dans « Tristram » un clin d’œil à Sterne qui souligne le caractère satirique de cet extrait via la référence intertextuelle (Schuman 2), mais la référence à l’amour, grimée dans le titre bien réel du magazine d’où Nabokov a tiré un certain nombre des phrases et expressions qui suivent la référence à Tristan, pourrait aussi être une allusion au récit courtois de l’histoire de Tristan et Yseult, histoire d’amour tragique et réciproque qui sert de contrepoint à celle de Humbert et Lolita, et à celles qui sont narrées dans ce type de magazine, que ce soit les aventures sentimentales en bande dessinée de Patsy Walker ou les tumultueuses amours de Marylin Monroe et Joe di Maggio (« the Joe-Roe marital enigma making yaps flaps »). 24. Voir note d’Alfred Appel illustrée par un dessin de Nabokov (Lolita 430-431). 25. Michael Wood a été l’un des premiers à considérer Humbert « less of a snob than many of his scholarly readers, who have seen in Lolita a condemnation of America’s shallow, mass-managed culture » (Wood 115). En outre, au fil des entretiens, Nabokov ne cesse de rappeler son affection

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et son attachement à la fois pour les États-Unis et pour Lolita. Une récente biographie qui s’attache uniquement à la vie américaine de Nabokov est parue et se donne pour objet de démontrer l’attachement de Nabokov pour son pays d’adoption (Robert Roper. Nabokov in America, On the Road to Lolita. New York : Bloomsbury, 2015). 26. « Dolores styles herself with the detail and generality of mass culture […] Her New World ideals fix only on a synchrony of movie stars, jukeboxes, and the right sneakers, sandals, and loafers […] Dolores’s America, like little Dolores herself, nestles in assorted clichés » (Rothstein 28). 27. Stringer-Hye voit ce trait comme également ce qui séduit le lecteur : « Many cultured readers condemn, along with Humbert, Lolita’s shallowness, her taste for fudge, pop music and gooey sundaes. Yet it is the eerie vulgarity of her charms that seduces Humbert first, and the reader next, into her enchanted sphere ». (Stringer-Hye 154) 28. « I think I was born a painter—really!—and up to my fourteenth year, perhaps, I used to spend most of the day drawing and painting and I was supposed to become a painter in due time. But I don’t think I had any real talent there » (Strong Opinions 17). 29. Ralph Waldo Emerson, « An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837 », in Nature; Addresses and Lectures (1849).

RÉSUMÉS

Cette étude s’attache à interroger les dispositifs intertextuels de Lolita en revenant non pas, comme d’ordinaire, sur l’interdiscursivité proprement littéraire ou artistique, mais sur la manière dont sont intégrés des textes et des images qui relèvent de la culture de masse des États- Unis après 1945. Grâce aux notes préparatoires au roman conservées à la Bibliothèque du Congrès, cette étude propose de comparer la manière dont Nabokov combine le matériau non- littéraire à son écriture avec sa pratique intertextuelle plus traditionnelle, afin d’identifier la place et le rôle de ces références dans sa poétique.

This paper focuses upon intertextuality in Nabokov’s Lolita, but not through literary allusion. Instead, this study analyzes the way the author integrates non-literary material taken from post- World War 2 American mass culture into the textual fabric. Thanks to the preparatory notes to the novel kept at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, one can compare the way Nabokov weaves the non-literary elements into the fabric of his writing with his more traditional intertextual practice, so as to define the role of popular culture in his aesthetics.

INDEX

Keywords : Nabokov, Lolita, mass culture, popular culture, magazine, advertizing, ad, intertextuality, intermediality, genetic criticism Mots-clés : Nabokov, Lolita, culture de masse, culture populaire, magazine, publicité, intertextualité, intermédialité, critique génétique

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AUTEURS

MARIE BOUCHET Maître de Conférences Université de Toulouse [email protected]

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Solipsizing Martine in Le Roi des Aulnes by Michel Tournier: thematic, stylistic and intertextual similarities with Nabokov's Lolita

Marjolein Corjanus

Introduction

1 In this paper we aim to show how Nabokov's Lolita (1955) might have been a source of intertextuality for a specific storyline in Le Roi des Aulnes (1970), Michel Tournier's best- known novel. The first chapter of Le Roi des Aulnes contains a short but crucial episode featuring the car mechanic Abel Tiffauges and the schoolgirl Martine. We will first describe how the works of Nabokov and Tournier could be related intertextually. In the subsequent analysis we will describe several striking similarities between both novels, comparing the use of certain words, the physiognomy and psychology of the protagonists and their description of rape and sexual abuse. The reference of both writers to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as an intertextual source is also relevant here.

The 1950s: Lolita and Martine

2 In his extensive study Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years, Brian Boyd describes how by the end of 1953 Nabokov had finished the corrected typescript of Lolita (Boyd 1991, 227). In the following year, five prominent American publishers turned it down, not willing to risk publishing this explosive manuscript. By this time, Nabokov, even more confident about his new book, “could no longer rest until it was published,” as Boyd puts it, and contacted his agent in Paris for further help (Boyd 1991, 255-256, 262). This is how eventually, in 1955, The Olympia Press in Paris accepted it for publication.

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3 In his book Nabokov ou la Tentation française, Maurice Couturier describes how the worldwide success of Lolita started in France. Soon, both the distinguished publisher Gallimard and the Nouvelle Revue Française showed interest in a French translation. Couturier argues that French literary censors and law enforcers might never have taken action against this publication if the well-known English writer Graham Greene had not written a very positive review of Lolita in the Sunday Times (see also Boyd 1991, 293). The literary polemic that ensued alerted the British government, which confiscated copies of the novel that were imported. In 1956, upon British request, the French Home Office banned the novel for two years (Couturier 121-122). However, Lolita was “on the move,” as Boyd puts it, and by the end of 1956, Nabokov had already been contacted by four American publishers, before Putnam's Sons eventually published Lolita in 1958 (Boyd 1991, 296, 357).1

4 Couturier points out how the Parisian literary scene only took notice of Lolita after the scandal and court rulings it caused and when news broke of its best-selling success in the United States (Couturier 197-201). To quote Boyd, “by the end of 1956, the French press had singled out Lolita from all the other books on the banned list, and by January 1957 the whole matter had become known in France as ‘l'affaire Lolita’.” (1991, 301)2

5 Eventually, after several legal proceedings featuring the active involvement of Nabokov's publisher Maurice Girodias, the French ban was lifted in 1958. “Il est vrai que cette affaire avait fait grand bruit,” Couturier states (131). Once the French translation of Lolita was published by Gallimard in 1959, the French literary press responded widely, by means of reviews and several interviews with the author (Couturier 201-211).

6 Although Nabokov (1899-1977) and Tournier (1924-2016) were partly contemporaries, they probably did not cross paths in the Parisian literary scene. In 1940, Nabokov and his young family left France and emigrated to the United States. He only returned in 1959 to promote the French translation of Lolita and in later years his visits to Paris were brief and infrequent.3 (Couturier 101-107) At the time of Lolita’s publication and subsequent succès de scandale, Tournier was a journalist and translator before joining publishing house Plon as an editor in 1958. During this period, he most certainly witnessed the publicity Lolita attracted, but was far from entering literary circles himself and publishing his literary debut, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967).4

7 What is vital for analysing similarities between Lolita and Le Roi des Aulnes is that the origin of Tournier's second novel can be dated as early as 1958, when he wrote a first version of it. It is known that this early draft corresponds with the first chapter of the final version of Le Roi des Aulnes, which is set in pre-war France and contains the storyline of Martine.5 Tournier took up the manuscript again in 1968 after the success of his first novel (Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française) allowed him to dedicate himself full-time to his writing career. His second novel Le Roi des Aulnes, published in 1970, was awarded the Prix Goncourt shortly afterwards and met with international acclaim.

Tournier and intertextuality

8 Thanks to his work in the publishing field and being an avid reader, Tournier was always extraordinarily well-read and well aware of the status quo of literature in general.6 As for his literary sources, Tournier always boasted: “La part proprement

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inventée est minime dans mes romans.”(23 novembre 1970, 28) What's more, he was always the first to point out which writers had inspired his work.7 In his intellectual autobiography Le Vent Paraclet (1977) for example, Tournier generously indicates the emprunts he made for the three novels he had written by then. Furthermore, Le Vol du Vampire offers a collection of reviews of writers and their works and as such can be seen as a rather explicit invitation to use them as a frame of reference for the analysis of his own work.

9 Michael Worton has published extensively both on the theory of intertextuality in general and on the intertextuality of Tournier in particular, focusing on the writer's ideas on the subject as well as analyzing his process of writing and rewriting. In his article “Intertextuality: to inter textuality or to resurrect it?,” Worton provides an important observation when it comes to Tournier's view on his own intertextuality: “Tournier's own analyses of his novels are, however, not only descriptive, but also directive and even prescriptive; his comments may help the reader to decode his novels–but only in the way he desires,” and: “Tournier's explicit revelation of a source may help the reader to understand his intentional and pre-textual agonistic drives, but it also blocks a free intertextual reading of the text [...]” (1986, 15, 17).

10 So it would be wise not to ignore the extratextual and intertextual information Tournier so willingly provides, but to escape this control and to put the main focus on the content and structure of his literary writings instead. As such, although Tournier never acknowledged any influence by Nabokov in his essays and other writings, this is not to say that he didn’t read Lolita or any other novels by Nabokov.

Comparing Lolita and Martine

11 Tiffauges's arrest over the alleged rape of Martine constitutes a turning point in Tournier's novel, as it leads to the protagonist leaving France for Germany to participate in the Second World War. The description of the interaction between Martine and Tiffauges comprises about six pages, implicit references included. Their contact starts with brief eye contact outside her school, after which he gives her several rides home.8 She usually descends at a deserted construction site of an apartment building that leads to her house. She takes the staircase of the unfinished immeuble that is referred to as the cave. It is there that Martine is assaulted, whereupon she accuses Tiffauges. Their last encounter is the confrontation at the police station (Tournier 1975, 197). The Martine storyline stretches from page 163 when they first meet, to page 205, which describes the judge's verdict.

Similarities on word level

12 To start with, some interesting similarities on world level can be found between Lolita and Le Roi des Aulnes, such as the word faunelet. The term “faunlet” is a coinage by Nabokov and is associated with Humbert's idea of a nymphet in the very first pages of Lolita.9 It is a term the French translator of Lolita cannot but translate as “faunelet” (Nabokov 1977, 29). Both the French and the English word are seldom used. Nevertheless, Tournier uses the French word in Le Roi des Aulnes (leading up to Tiffauges's first contact with Martine) : “Je me dirige vers ma voiture où j'installe le faunelet à côté du faune qui va le surveiller.” (171-173, 182)10

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13 Apart from this, in describing Martine's physical appearance, Tiffauges pays particular attention to her legs (“elle a tiré sa jupette sur ses jambes” [182]), her knees (“genoux écorchés” [163]) and her socks (“socquettes blanches” [161]). This is reminiscent of the way Humbert looks at Lolita, often describing her legs as well. An example in the French translation of Lolita can be found: “un mètre quarante-huit en chaussettes, debout sur un seul pied” (Nabokov 1977, 15). An early mention of a “genou écorché” can also be found (Nabokov 1977, 33).

Humbert Humbert vs Abel Tiffauges: protagonist similarities

14 In both Lolita and the first chapter of Le Roi des Aulnes, it is clear to the reader whose perspective is adopted: we read Humbert's and Tiffauges's own words in a stream of consciousness. Humbert Humbert writes his text retrospectively several years later to defend himself at his trial, whereas Tiffauges, a car mechanic and garage owner, writes his diary more or less simultaneously, giving his personal interpretation of his daily life. Here, it is up to the reader to judge the reliability of this narrator, which is key to the reading experience both of the depiction of the girl and of the crimes committed, as we will see further on.

15 Just like Humbert, who only feigns his love for Charlotte Haze, Tiffauges is not really interested in adult women.11 In the first pages of Le Roi des Aulnes, his girlfriend Rachel breaks up with him, which marks his last intimate relationship with any adult person. And similar to Humbert, Tiffauges has no real friends and can be considered an Einzelgänger, a solitary eccentric . Both behave like predators when it comes to following, pursuing or chasing the young children of their liking. In The Annotated Lolita for example, Humbert compares himself to a “predator” when eagerly awaiting an opportunity with Lolita, whom he calls his “prey” (Nabokov 2000, 42). Similarly, in his diary entry dated March 15, 1939, Tiffauges relates how he has been taking pictures and recording sounds for weeks of girls near their school when he notices Martine for the first time. Thinking about the boys’ school he himself attended, he writes that for him the female child is: “une terra incognita que je brûle d'explorer” (Tournier 1975, 163). And in a later entry dated June 10, 1939, Tiffauges uses the words “mes chasses” (“my hunts”) and “gibier” (“prey”) when thinking about Martine (184).

16 There is even some physical resemblance between the two protagonists as they are both tall, physically strong and dark haired. Humbert Humbert insists on describing his “hairy hands” (see for example Nabokov 2000, 123) and Abel Tiffauges does something similar in Le Roi des Aulnes: “cette main sinistre aux doigts velus et rectangulaires, à la paume large comme un plateau” (55).12

17 What's more, the Hotchkiss in which Tiffauges gives Martine several rides home reminds one of the rambling car journeys that Humbert embarks upon with Lolita, with the difference that Humbert never intends to take the girl home.

18 The city of Paris constitutes another link between the two novels. The first chapter of Le Roi des Aulnes takes place entirely in Paris, where Tiffauges lives and works. It is in Paris that Humbert Humbert, who has some French ancestry and also works as a teacher of French, has his first nymphet experience (Couturier 136-139). In Nabokov ou la Tentation française, Maurice Couturier notably explores the French background of Nabokov's novel and points out how Nabokov actually wrote the first draft of Lolita in Paris during his stay there in 1939 (Couturier 134-135).

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Solipsizing Martine: the similar perspective of Humbert and Tiffauges

19 One of the most disturbing elements in Lolita is that Humbert Humbert fails (or refuses) to see Lolita as the person she really is. He only has his own, illusory image of the girl, making use of her as he pleases, which finds its conclusion in the infamous phrase: “Lolita had been safely solipsized.” (Nabokov 2000, 60) It seems that Nabokov, known for his predilection for word play and neologisms, derived this striking but rare verb from the philosophical term “solipsism,” a combination of the Latin words solus (“alone”) and ipse (“self”).13 Originally meant as a theory according to which no other worlds but one's own mind can be known, the term in a modern sense is also associated with “extreme egocentrism” (“Solipsism”).

20 In her article “A ‘Safely Solipsized’ Life: Lolita as Autobiography Revisited,” Anna Morlan describes the “solipsistic bubble” that Humbert creates around Lolita: “Humbert's representation of Lolita [...] is so intense that for quite some time he himself fails to recognize, or perhaps succeeds in ignoring, the real girl, Dolores Haze, that he ‘safely solipsizes’[...] into his Lolita.” (5)14 Humbert's perception of Lolita as an independent person with an identity of her own only comes when, at the end of the novel, he meets her again, two years after her “escape”.15

21 In Le Roi des Aulnes, Tiffauges creates a similar solipsistic world around his contacts with Martine. In accordance with his own moods and intentions, he uses various and often conflicting denominations to describe the girl, ranging from madone (166), to elfe (182), and goguenard (i.e. “mocking” [194]). 16 He describes how she insisted on not being dropped off at her home and writes: “comme j'ai aimé la complicité un peu coupable qui se nouait entre nous!” (182) This can be seen as an ambiguous allusion to the potential inappropriateness of his contacts or intentions with her, perhaps foreshadowing future, more negative events. The complicity that is suggested here, is only expressed by Tiffauges and might not at all be shared or felt by Martine.

22 Besides, both novels are characterized by erotic projections of the young girls, putting great emphasis on their alleged femininity. One example can be found in Lolita when Humbert describes how he considers her irregular and childish way of walking as being very indecent: Why does the way she walks—a child, mind you, a mere child!—excite me so abominably? Analyze it. A faint suggestion of turned in toes. A kind of wiggly looseness below the knee prolonged to the end of each footfall. The ghost of a drag. Very infantile, infinitely meretricious. (Nabokov 2000, 41)17

23 In his descriptions of the schoolgirl Martine, Tiffauges does something quite similar. In her monography Michel Tournier: Exploring Human Relations, Mairi Maclean dedicates a section, “The Female Child Eclipsed” (180-182), to the interaction between Tiffauges and young girls.18 Maclean shows how Martine plays a key role in the image Tiffauges develops of little girls: “From the beginning he sees her as [...] a miniature femme fatale.” (180) Tiffauges describes Martine as “une fillette d'une étonnante beauté, très femme déjà, me semble-t-il, malgré son torse plat et ses genoux écorchés.” (Tournier 1975, 163) This feminising perspective is also evident when Tiffauges offers Martine a ride home : “Elle n'a rien répondu, mais elle m'a suivi, et en s'asseyant dans la voiture

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dont je tenais la portière ouverte, elle a tiré sa jupette sur ses jambes dans un geste délicieusement féminin.” (182)

24 Van Peteghem argues that Nabokov's narrative theme of solipsization permits him to construct the modern literary myth of the “nymphet” (132). Early in the novel, Humbert Humbert describes his concept of the “nymphet”: Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who [...] reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets’. (Nabokov 2000, 16)19

25 This word and this concept keep returning in the following pages and chapters, where Humbert Humbert's qualifications of Lolita as a devilish, fatal nymphet are multiple. As part of his definition of the “nymphet” he also writes: “You have to be an artist and a madman [...] in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs [...] the little deadly demon among the wholesome children” (7).

26 Although in Le Roi des Aulnes the word nymphette is not used, the way Tiffauges describes young girls strongly resembles Humbert's thinking: [C]e sont des femmes naines. Elles trottinent sur leurs courtes jambes en balançant les corolles de leurs jupettes que rien ne distingue—sinon la taille—des vêtements des femmes adultes. C'est vrai aussi de leur comportement. J'ai souvent vu des fillettes très jeunes—trois ou quatre ans—avoir à l'égard des hommes une attitude très typiquement et comiquement féminine [...]. (Tournier 1975, 204)20

27 In wordings echoing Humbert's description of the fatal, demoniac nymphet, Tiffauges insists it is Martine who spots him before he actually discovers her: “Je l'ai remarquée, mais il serait plus juste de dire que c'est elle qui m'a remarqué. C'était fatal.” (163) Maclean points out how Tiffauges concludes after his arrest “that Martine herself has directed these accusations against him. [...] She thus becomes a ‘diablesse’ in his eyes.” (Maclean 180) In his diary, Tiffauges suggests she has deliberately and maliciously testified against him : “Ma plume se refuse à coucher sur le papier la centième partie des mensonges—faufilés de menus faits vrais—qu'elle a accumulés pour me perdre.” (Tournier 1975, 198) In this way, both Humbert and Tiffauges convince themselves (and perhaps their readers) that the female child is the only one to blame for their devilish wrongdoings.

28 As another example of how Martine's real identity is displaced by an illusion, one can cite how Tiffauges is enchanted by the fact that Martine actually has three sisters. In his diary he writes : “Comme je voudrais connaître ces autres versions de Martine—à quatre ans, à neuf ans, à seize ans—comme un thème musical repris par des instruments et à des octaves différents !” The phrase that follows, shows Tiffauges's egocentrism : “Je retrouve là mon étrange incapacité à m'enfermer dans une individualité” (182-183).

29 Lastly, Tiffauges's conclusion, after his arrest, that girls, as miniature adult women, do not deserve an existence of their own, can be considered as another strong attempt at solipsizing young girls in general.21 “Et d'abord, qu'est-ce qu'une petite fille ? Tantôt petit garçon ‘manqué’, comme on dit, plus souvent encore petite femme, la petite fille proprement dite n'est nulle part. [...] Je crois que la petite fille n'existe pas en effet.” (204) He even concludes: “la fillette n'est qu'une fausse fenêtre,” and: “J'ai été victime d'un mirage.” (205) Paraphrasing Humbert Humbert, one could say that in this way Martine has been safely solipsized.

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Lewis Carroll: intertextual similarities22

30 At an intertextual level, both Lolita and Le Roi des Aulnes contain connotations that could be linked to the same source: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. As Alfred Appel points out in The Annotated Lolita, Nabokov always expressed his fondness for the work of Lewis Carroll, and even called him “the first Humbert Humbert” (381).23 In his annotations, Appel includes several allusions to Alice in Wonderland in Nabokov's works and in Lolita especially, mentioning Nabokov's predilection for “auditory wordplay” as a possible intertextual source.24

31 Tournier, for his part, explicitly stated from an early stage how the work of Lewis Carroll inspired his writing. In a 1971 interview, “Comment j'ai construit le Roi des Aulnes,” Tournier quotes a phrasing by Carroll on young girls that even reminds one of Nabokov's concept of the nymphet:25 Bien entendu j'ai relu le Petit Poucet, et j'ai vu que l'ogre mangeait des enfants, de préférence des petits garçons. C'était le contraire de Lewis Carroll qui avait une grande passion pour les petites filles, il les photographiait passionnément (c'est d'ailleurs aussi mon héros), et un jour il eut cette phrase absolument admirable que je me suis dépêché de reprendre en la retournant : ‘J'adore les enfants, à l'exception des petits garçons’. (84)26

32 Here, Tournier thus states that, for his own fiction, he turned around Carroll's predilection for young girls into just the opposite. This is exactly what Tiffauges writes in his diary when he is incarcerated after his contacts with Martine have led to his arrest: “J’adore toujours les enfants, mais à l’exception désormais des petites filles.” (204)

33 In Le Roi des Aulnes, the word “Mabel” might account for another intertextual link with Lewis Carroll. In his diary, Tiffauges uses this name several times.27 According to Mairi Maclean, the word is an abbreviation of “Mon Abel”, once invented by Tiffauges's school friend Nestor.28 However, this name is also used in Alice in Wonderland, for example when Alice wonders whether she might have become one of her girlfriends: “I must have been changed for Mabel! [...] I must be Mabel after all [...]. No, I've made up my mind about it: if I'm Mabel, I'll stay down here! [...] I shall only look up and say ‘Who am I, then?’” (23-24). At this point, Alice is very puzzled about who she is (“Who in the world am I?” [22]), which again reminds one of a girl whose identity is being obliterated. In Le Roi des Aulnes, the word “Mabel” occurs in the first encounter with the school class Martine is part of: “Nous reverrons bientôt, Mabel, les chemisettes et les socquettes blanches, les robes d'été et les culottes courtes !” (161) If considered that “Mabel” does not refer to a nickname for Abel Tiffauges but to a particular type of girl, the text could be read very differently. The last time Tiffauges uses the name “Mabel” is in the page leading up to the cave incident: “Du calme, Mabel, retiens ta colère, fais taire tes imprécations. Tu sais bien maintenant que la grande tribulation se prépare, et que ton modeste destin est pris en charge par le Destin!” (194) Within the interpretation suggested here, this statement sounds much more like a menace (of sexual initiation) directed towards a young girl.

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Martine and Lolita: describing crime

34 The ambiguous way in which sexual abuse and rape are described in both novels is known to have unsettled many a reader. The novel Lolita builds up to the end of the first part, which can be seen as the most poignant yet controversial and highly ambiguous passage of the novel, describing both Humbert's excitement, his abuse of Lolita, a “wincing child” (Nabokov 2000, 135), and Humbert going on errands and buying her treats and sweets as well as “a box of sanitary pads” (141).

35 If Nabokov’s description of the way Humbert oversteps his final boundary with Lolita is explicit, the description of the rape in Le Roi des Aulnes is itself quite implicit. One could say that in Lolita, crime and criminal are obvious and that in Le Roi des Aulnes only crime is obvious: “les conclusions de l'expertise médicale qui ne laissent aucun doute sur la réalité du viol.” (197) The only source that the reader can turn to for an account of Tiffauges's most dramatic encounter with Martine, the cave incident, is Tiffauges's own diary entry, which is vague and ambiguous. Tiffauges relates how he drops Martine off at the usual spot and then writes he doesn't remember how long he stays in his car: “Je ne saurais dire combien de temps s'écoula” (195). When from his car he hears a “painful cry coming from the building” (“un hurlement déchirant provenant de l'immeuble” [195]), one can wonder whether it is even possible to hear a cry at such a distance from within a car. Tiffauges goes into the cave and finds her crying and bleeding. He then states she cries for help in the direction of the door “where I saw the figure of a man appear” (“où je vis se profiler une silhouette d'homme” [195]). It is not clear whether this man is her attacker leaving or somebody else coming for the rescue. Until then, one might still believe Tiffauges has nothing to do with the crime. Then Martine starts pointing at him as her attacker (“Lui, lui, lui!”) and in his diary Tiffauges admits: “Là j'ai perdu la tête.” (196) He tries to flee. It is now up to the reader to decide, based upon this ambiguous account, whether Tiffauges is guilty or not.

36 At the end of the first part of Lolita, when Humbert has finally had his way with the girl and then told her that her mother has died, he is the only person she can turn to for consolation. The concluding sentence is ominous, scandalous and ambiguous at the same time: “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” (Nabokov 2000, 142)

37 Tiffauges's description of the scene after the cave incident is equally ambiguous. He writes how he takes Martine's pulse “with authority” (“avec autorité” [195]) and makes her sit up, expressing how he tries to do this “[...] with all the gentleness I was capable of” (“[...] avec toute la douceur dont j'étais capable” [195]). Again, the text is unclear as to how capable he actually is of treating her gently. On his arrest, Tiffauges is interrogated for six hours but keeps denying any guilt. In view of the evidence gathered on him, Tiffauges's appointed lawyer considers pleading a “mental disability” (“débilité mentale” [201]) but the examining magistrate (“juge d'instruction”) decides otherwise. The judge is very clear in his statement towards Tiffauges: “votre dossier est lourd, très lourd” (205). He explains that Tiffauges would most likely have been charged with rape and brought to trial had not the war and his enlistment been imminent. He thus orders a nonsuit and allows Tiffauges to walk free. However, some of the judge's words counterbalance his earlier statement: “cette petite Martine est peut-être une mythomane, comme souvent les fillettes de son âge” (205). The overall ambiguity surrounding the cave incident thus remains intact.

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Conclusions

38 In the above we have described the similarities that can be found between Nabokov's Lolita and the storyline of Martine in Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes. The comparison shows the use of similar words and main characters that share many features. We have analyzed how Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland has been a source of intertextuality for both novels. On a psychological level, however, fundamental resemblances have shown how Tournier must have incorporated Nabokov's concepts of “solipsizing” and the “nymphet” in the episode with Martine. The identity of both Lolita and Martine is obliterated by the illusionary image the protagonists create of them. Their perspective is essential for the way in which sexual crime is described and perceived in both novels.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2001.

Corjanus, Marjolein. “Judging the Martine case in Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes - The reception of a storyline and the role of the author.” Paper presented at the ASCA International Workshop. University of Amsterdam, 28 March 2012.

---. “La réception de l'œuvre de Tournier aux Pays-Bas : historique de la reconnaissance par la critique littéraire néerlandaise.” In Michel Tournier - La réception d'une œuvre de Michel Tournier, en France et à l'étranger. Ed. Arlette Bouloumié. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013. 179-193.

---. “Vroege receptie van Tourniers Le Roi des Aulnes in de Nederlandse literatuurkritiek (1970-1972).” Nederlandse Letterkunde, 20 :1 (2015) : 59-84.

Couturier, Maurice. Nabokov ou la Tentation française. Paris : Gallimard, 2011.

Grayson, Jane. “Nabokov and Perec.” Cycnos, 12:2 (25 June 2008). 14 Sept. 2017. http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1471.

Ladensen, Elisabeth. Dirt For Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita. New York: Cornell University Press, 2007.

Maclean, Mairi. Michel Tournier - Exploring Human Relations. Bristol: Bristol Academic Press, 2003.

Martin-Roland, Michel. Michel Tournier - Je m'avance masqué. Paris : Éditions Écriture, 2011.

“Meretricious”. Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. 15 Sept. 2017. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meretricious.

Morlan, Anna. “A ‘Safely Solipsized’ Life: Lolita as Autobiography Revisited.” Miranda, 3 (2010). 14 Sept. 2017. http://miranda.revues.org/1673.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. 1959. E.H. Kahane trans. Paris : Gallimard Folio, 1977.

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---. The Annotated Lolita. 1970. Ed. Alfred Appel Jr. London: Penguin, 2000.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. “Lolita: Solipsized or Sodomized?; or, Against Abstraction - In General.” In A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism. Ed. Walter Jost et al. Oxford : Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004. 325-339.

“Solipsism”. Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. 15 Sept. 2017. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/solipsism

Tournier, Michel. “Je suis comme la pie voleuse.” Le Monde (23 novembre 1970) : 28.

---.“Treize clés pour un ogre.” Le Figaro littéraire (30 novembre 1970) : 21.

---. Le Roi des Aulnes. 1970. Paris : Gallimard Folio, 1975.

---.“Comment j'ai construit Le Roi des Aulnes.” Les Cahiers de l'Oronte, 9 (1971) : 76-89.

---. Le Vent Paraclet. Paris : Gallimard, 1977.

---. Des Clefs et des serrures. Paris : Le Chêne/Hachette, 1979.

---. Le Vol du vampire. Paris : Mercure de France, 1981.

---. Petites Proses. Paris : Gallimard Folio, 1986.

---. Les Vertes lectures. Paris : Gallimard Folio, 2007.

Van Peteghem-Tréard, Isabelle. “Le Solipsisme littéraire ou la mytho-poétique de la nymphette dans Lolita.” In Étymologie et exégèse littéraire. Ed. Yannick Le Boulicaut, Cahiers du Centre interdisciplinaire de recherches en histoire, lettres et langues. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2011. 123-139.

Vray, Jean-Bernard. Dossier to Le Roi des Aulnes. Paris: Gallimard Folio Plus edition, 1996. 511-554.

Worton, Michael. “Intertextuality: to inter textuality or to resurrect it?” In Cross-References: Modern French Theory and the Practice of Criticism. Ed. David Kelley et al. Leeds: Society for French Studies, 1986. 14-23.

--- (ed.). Michel Tournier. London: Longman, 1995.

NOTES

1. See also Elisabeth Ladensen's book Dirt for Art's Sake. Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita, which contains a chapter on the publication history of Lolita (187-220). As Ladensen observes Lolita “is the only English-language work to have been banned for obscenity in France but not in America” (188). 2. In her comparison of the work of Georges Perec and Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Grayson provides a description of the attention Nabokov received by the French reading public during that period: “If Nabokov was not exactly a household word in the 1960s and 1970s he had very definitely a place in the French intellectual scene” (1). 3. See Grayson's article again: she points out how collaborators of the French literary working group OuLiPo came up with the idea of inviting Nabokov to join their group at the end of the 1960s. On Nabokov's (unknown) response, she speculates: “And even in the relatively mellow period when he was flushed with the success of Lolita and showing a certain amount of interest in left-wing French intellectuals and younger writers, it is hard to conceive of him having consented to make the journey from Montreux to Paris to monthly group meetings.” (2) 4. Couturier nevertheless describes a meeting in 1959 at Gallimard where Nabokov crossed paths with a good friend of Tournier's, Roger Nimier (212).

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5. See the dossier by Jean-Bernard Vray for the 1996 edition of Le Roi des Aulnes (511-554). Vray states: “Mais il avait rédigé d’abord une première ébauche de ce livre, en 1958. Le titre était Les Plaisirs et les pleurs d’Olivier Cromorne. Il correspondait à la première partie du Roi des Aulnes. Il s’agissait d’un récit à la première personne du singulier qui constituait le journal d’un garagiste. Ce récit prenait fin en 1939 avec l’entrée de la France dans la guerre.” (Vray 517) See also Tournier's own words in Le Vent Paraclet on this first version (1977, 193-194). The structure of this first chapter, which solely consists of the protagonist's diary with its short entries and fragmented text, would lend itself very well to reuse. What's more, the next chapter (II, “Les pigeons du Rhin”) presents a clear break with the first one as the diary structure (called “Les Ecrits sinistres”) is abandoned and does not return until the fifth chapter of the novel, whereas chapter two starts with Tiffauges being relocated from Paris to Alsace and then to Germany in 1940. 6. In a recent collection of interviews with journalist and writer Michel Martin-Roland, Tournier comments upon how he started as a writer: “ce qui me manquait c'était l'approche des choses. [...] Entrer dans la description d'un visage, d'une personne, d'une maison, d'un meuble, c'est difficile, mais c'est indispensable. Alors j'ai lu. [...] J'ai tout lu!” (Martin-Roland 62) He later adds: “Je n'arrêtais pas de lire et je continue.” (Martin-Roland 65) 7. In the case of Le Roi des Aulnes for example, Tournier provides his own guidelines in newspaper articles, such as “Treize clés pour un ogre”, (30 novembre 1970, 21). And in his interview with Le Monde, he mentions the sources he used for Le Roi des Aulnes: “Ce livre est en outre si inspiré de Flaubert qu'il constitue une véritable anthologie de cet auteur...” (23 novembre 1970, 28) See also his long interview for the magazine Les Cahiers de l'Oronte from 1971. 8. It remains unclear as to how many rides Tiffauges gives her. The text suggests some kind of habit: “Elle se fait toujours déposer devant l'immeuble en construction” (183) and “J'étais allé chercher Martine à la sortie de l'école, comme à l'accoutumée” (194). 9. “When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me: I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right...” (Nabokov 2000, 17). See also Alfred Appel's note on “faunlet” in The Annotated Lolita (340). The theme of the nymphet will be discussed in the next pages. 10. In Lolita, there is even a reference to the Erl King when Humbert Humbert describes the pursuant Clare Quilty as a “heterosexual Erlkönig” (Nabokov 2000, 240). 11. See Boyd: “Marrying Charlotte only for access to Lolita, Humbert is calculatingly dishonest from the start.” (1991, 233) 12. In the French translation of Lolita “my hot hairy fist” (Nabokov 2000, 123) becomes “mon poing fébrile et velu” (Nabokov 1977, 197). 13. See Van Peteghem's article “Le Solipsisme littéraire ou la mytho-poétique de la nymphette dans Lolita”. 14. Likewise, for Rabinowitz, solipsizing Lolita comes down to erasing her subjecthood and agency, silencing her own voice and thinking (335). 15. See also Boyd: “She is no longer a nymphet, no longer a projection of his fancy, but a real person whom he loves just as she is.” (1991, 249) 16. The word “elfe” reminds one of Nabokov's “fateful elf” (Nabokov 2000, 18). 17. Referring to the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, the rare adjective “meretricious” means either “related to prostitution” or “tawdry and falsely attractive” (“Meretricious”). In the French translation that Tournier most probably read, the word becomes “impudique” (Nabokov 1977, 68). 18. Maclean's book provides an interesting cross-section of Tournier's work, focussing purely on the various human relationships in his fictions, such as those of twins, homosexual or heterosexual couples, and man and child (both boys and girls). As far as we know, Maclean is the only academic to compare Tiffauges's perceptions of young girls with those of Humbert Humbert,

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protagonist of Lolita, without, however, going so far as to indicate Lolita could have been a source of intertextuality for Le Roi des Aulnes (180, 205). 19. See also the remarks Couturier makes on the word “nymphette” (144-148). 20. Lolita's initial age (twelve) is mentioned on several occasions (Nabokov 2000, 107, 124). Although Martine's age is not mentioned explicitly, one can conclude from the descriptions that she is about the same age. The age gap between her sister of nine and her sister of sixteen also suggests this (Tournier 1975, 182-183). 21. Or, as Maclean puts it: “Tiffauges argues the female child entirely out of existence.” (181). 22. Both novels share similarities with another text: Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le Métro (1959). Boyd points out how Queneau was inspired by Nabokov's novel (1991, 299). The streetwise and precocious Zazie who roams the streets of Paris independently reminds one of both Martine and Lolita. (See also Couturier 159-160) 23. Here, Appel also remarks that Nabokov translated Alice into Russian in 1923. 24. See, for example, his comments in note 131 (382). 25. His words (and the article in general) strongly prefigure his wordings in his intellectual autobiography Le Vent Paraclet, especially the chapter on Le Roi des Aulnes (Tournier 1977, 69-147). In his collection of essays Des Clefs et des serrures, dedicated to art and photography, Tournier uses a large part of his chapter on “L'image érotique” to describe his view of Lewis Carroll's life and works (1979, 103-108). Pages 104 and 105 actually feature a large photograph of a sleeping girl, taken by Carroll himself. Tournier repeats his words from 1971 stating: “L'un des premiers à avoir découvert les ressources érotiques de la photographie fut le surnommé Lewis Carroll.” (1979, 107). He further states that: “Son jardin secret, sa passion brûlante close sur elle-même, c'était la petite fille impubère (âge idéal: dix ans).” (107). Almost the exact wordings can be found in Tournier's essay collection Petites Proses (1986, 151-154) and his collection Les Vertes lectures (2007, 105-109). 26. As to photography, Tiffauges's passion to take pictures of children (see for example Tournier 1975, 161) plays an important role during his trial, when these photographs are found in his apartment and used as evidence against him. Alfred Appel suggests the photography theme in Lolita, featured both as a preference of Humbert and as a hobby of Quilty, might also be linked to Lewis Carroll (Nabokov 2000, 382). 27. See Le Roi des Aulnes (60, 62, 65, 161, 194). 28. See Maclean (180) and note 8, where she also points out “Mabel” can be interpreted as “Ma Belle” (216).

ABSTRACTS

When Lolita was published in France in 1955, the then aspiring writer Michel Tournier most certainly witnessed the succès de scandale that Nabokov's novel soon became. What is vital for analyzing similarities between Lolita and Le Roi des Aulnes, Tournier's best-known novel (Prix Goncourt, 1970), is that Tournier wrote a first version of its first chapter in 1958. Several striking similarities can be shown between Nabokov's Lolita and a specific storyline in the first chapter of Le Roi des Aulnes that features the interactions between the male protagonist Abel Tiffauges and the schoolgirl Martine. Comparison shows the use of identical words like faunelet and many physical and psychological features that both protagonists share. Most resemblance

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can be found, however, in the way Humbert and Tiffauges perceive Lolita and Martine respectively. The identity of these girls is obliterated by the erotic and illusory images the male protagonists project upon them (“solipsizing”). This perspective is essential for the way in which rape and sexual abuse are described and perceived in both novels. The reference of both Nabokov and Tournier to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as an intertextual source for their novels is also relevant here.

Lorsque Lolita fut publié en France en 1955, le futur écrivain Michel Tournier a sans doute été témoin du succès de scandale que le roman de Nabokov a vite connu. Ce qui est essentiel pour l'analyse comparative entre Lolita et Le Roi des Aulnes, le roman le plus célèbre de Michel Tournier (Prix Goncourt 1970), est qu'en 1958 déjà, Tournier écrivait une première version du premier chapitre. Plusieurs ressemblances remarquables se laissent apercevoir entre Lolita et ce premier chapitre du Roi des Aulnes, où sont décrites les interactions entre le protagoniste Abel Tiffauges et l'écolière Martine. La comparaison montre l'usage de mots identiques comme “faunelet” et plusieurs traits physiques et psychologiques que les deux protagonistes ont en commun. Une forte analogie se trouve également dans la manière dont Humbert et Tiffauges perçoivent Lolita et Martine respectivement. L'identité de ces deux jeunes filles est balayée par les images illusoires et érotiques que projettent les protagonistes sur elles (“solipsiser”). Cette perspective est essentielle pour la façon dont le viol et l'abus sexuel sont décrits et vécus dans les deux romans. Dans ce cadre, il faudra aussi indiquer la référence que font les deux auteurs à Alice au Pays des Merveilles de Lewis Carroll comme source intertextuelle pour leur roman.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Lolita, Le Roi des Aulnes, solipsiser, Alice au Pays des Merveilles Keywords: Lolita, Le Roi des Aulnes, solipsizing, Alice in Wonderland

AUTHORS

MARJOLEIN CORJANUS Independent scholar [email protected]

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Les « Variations Dolores » - 2010-2016 Nouvelles lectures-réécritures de Lolita

Yannicke Chupin

1 Au colloque de la Société française Vladimir Nabokov à Biarritz, en avril 2016, le pionnier des études nabokoviennes françaises, Maurice Couturier, dévoilait le titre de son prochain roman : Le Rapt de Lolita. Quelques mois plus tard, en novembre 2016, paraissait un recueil de nouvelles, intitulé Lolita, Variations sur un Thème, fruit d’un collectif d’écrivains français réinterprétant le mythe de Lolita aujourd’hui1. La métaphore musicale, qui constituait également le sous-titre donné par l’écrivain suédoise Sara Stridsberg à sa lecture-réécriture de Lolita—Darling River, Les Variations Dolores—traduit la double polarité de toute réécriture. « On ne peut varier sans répéter, ni répéter sans varier », souligne Genette (1999, 101)2. La variation implique la reprise d’un thème mais aussi l’altération d’une mélodie qui épouse d’autres formes, évoluant au gré du temps et des contextes sociaux, politiques et culturels. Dans les années 1990, alors qu’explosait ce qu’on a appelé la troisième vague du féminisme, les réécritures de Lolita foisonnèrent, adoptant les contours d’une époque qui insistait sur l’indépendance et la prise de pouvoir de la femme dans la société. Deux auteurs, Kim Morrissey dans son recueil Poems for Men who Dream of Lolita (1992) et Pia Pera avec Lo’s Diary (1999) offrirent à Dolores Haze la parole dont Humbert l’avait privée dans son manuscrit, en reconstituant son journal de 1947 à 1952. Ces reprises littérales ont ouvert la voie à une veine de réinterprétations, telles que celles d’Emily Präger (Roger Fishbite, 1999) ou de Nancy Jones (Molly, 2000), qui émancipèrent l’adolescente tout en la dotant d’une maturité sexuelle qui ne correspondait pas à celle du roman, mais davantage à la transformation parallèle du personnage en icône populaire, qui excède, voire contredit, le texte auquel elle doit son origine. À l’aube du nouveau millénaire, le mythe de Lolita dépassait les frontières occidentales et devenait un flambeau politique grâce au mémoire de l’écrivain iranienne Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), traduit en trente-deux langues et en tête des listes des meilleures ventes du New York Times des semaines durant. L’écrivain et critique Erik Morse juge le texte de Nafisi emblématique de cette première décennie du millénaire qui redéfinit la notion de jeunesse féminine

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au Proche et Moyen Orient. Cette jeunesse sera ensuite galvanisée par des figures de proue de l’adolescence telles que Malala Yousafzai, Sihem Habchi, ou le groupe des Femen3.

2 Après ces vagues de féminisation puis de politisation, et d’émancipation intellectuelle, que devient Lolita dans les textes de nos écrivains contemporains ? Cet article explore les variations Lolita qu’on a vu fleurir ces dernières années pour tenter de dégager les nouvelles perspectives de la lecture-réécriture de Lolita au 21e siècle. On s’aperçoit qu’à une forme d’instrumentalisation du personnage succèdent des fictions littéraires à part entière, s’éloignant du mythe et des transformations qu’il a subies pour revenir à la substance même du roman de Nabokov, à sa trame, à ses nuances, à sa complexité narrative ou à ses zones d’ombre. Au-delà des amalgames de la presse littéraire qui s’empare bien souvent de l’antonomase « Lolita » dès que se noue dans un roman une relation entre une jeune fille et un homme plus âgé, comme ce fut le cas récemment pour le best-seller de Joël Dicker, La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert (2012), ces nouvelles lectures de Lolita dialoguent étroitement avec le chef-d’œuvre de Nabokov. Alors âgée de soixante ans, Lolita continue à libérer cette ferveur créative donnant lieu à des hommages inventifs, comme cette fantaisie de Pierre Bayard, qui, en 2014, s’emparant de la théorie des univers parallèles, dans Il existe d’autres mondes, dévoile l’existence de l’original de Lolita, une étudiante américaine de seize printemps et prénommée Annabelle, que Nabokov poursuivit comme un fou sur le campus de Wellesley avant d’écrire le roman de sa vie (Bayard 99-107). Dans Vengeance du Traducteur (2009), Brice Matthieussent réinvente une Dolores Haze qui, dans les marges d’un texte aux intonations kinbotiennes, aurait échappé à ses sinistres amants et réalisé ses rêves hollywoodiens devenant « une ravissante actrice américaine » (Matthieussent 95).

3 La question est alors la suivante : lorsqu’on relit Lolita au 21 e siècle, qu’y choisit-on ? Est-ce toujours et encore l’iconicité de l’héroïne ? Le versant transgressif d’une histoire amour ? Ou plutôt une forme de complexité narrative, de richesse thématique et d’extravagance du style ? Les trois reprises qui ont retenu notre attention ici sont trois objets littéraires qui se détournent de l’iconicité légendaire et populaire de Lolita pour explorer et réinventer d’autres facettes du roman. Deux d’entre elles offrent le filigrane d’une structure narrative et thématique commune à l’Urtext à travers le destin d’un nouveau Humbert (Nutting et Gaige), tandis que la troisième, reprenant la veine de la filiation littérale, puise dans la mythologie personnelle de l’auteur pour éclairer les zones les plus sombres du roman (Stridsberg).

Tampa, Alissa Nutting (2013)

4 La double perspective choisie par Alissa Nutting est la transgression et l’inversion des genres. La comparaison repose ici sur la création d’un Humbert Humbert au féminin, qui constitue d’ailleurs un des arguments de la quatrième de couverture (« We had to wait half a century for a female Humbert. It was worth it »). A l’image de l’Urtext nabokovien, la réécriture adopte ici le point de vue du prédateur. Elle se distingue des nombreuses reprises venant combler l’absence du point de vue de la victime dans le roman de Nabokov. Si l’imitation est présente, au sens genettien du terme, c’est l’imitation du scandale et de la transgression. Avant même qu’on ouvre le roman, l’analogie avec Lolita commence par l’histoire de sa distribution, puisque certaines librairies américaines et australiennes ont refusé de vendre cette histoire de pédophile

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en talons, rappelant ainsi la censure dont le chef-d’œuvre de Nabokov fut l’objet soixante ans auparavant4.

5 Celeste Price, âgée de vingt-six ans, est un avatar de Humbert, qui dans le seul but de satisfaire son furieux désir sexuel pour de jeunes garçons, devient professeur de littérature dans le collège d’une banlieue américaine. Elisant rapidement une proie en tout point parfaite, elle entretient une relation avec un élève, puis un deuxième, dans un schéma d’obsession dévorante pour son idéal masculin. Nutting décalque donc le schéma nabokovien de liaison illicite entre un professeur de lettres et un jeune esprit à initier, qui a fait, avant Tampa, d’autres émules comme Love in a Dead Language (1999) de Lee Siegel, et plus récemment, L’Attachement, de Florence Noiville (2012).

6 La trame diégétique s’appuie sur les ficelles nabokoviennes. Comme dans Lolita, la narratrice donne une genèse à cette forme de déviance sexuelle. L’épisode Annabel formait dans le texte de Nabokov le maillon téléologique permettant au narrateur de justifier sa différence, et l’épisode « Evan Keller » lui répond dans Tampa. A l’âge de quatorze ans, Céleste a offert sa virginité à ce jeune garçon plus petit qu’elle. La sensation de puissance qu’elle a retirée de leur relation est à l’origine de cette fixation. De même que Humbert déclinait les critères de son désir dans sa célèbre définition de la nymphette5, Céleste, en contact chaque jour avec des hordes d’adolescents en ébullition hormonale, jette son dévolu sur un profil précis : l’éphèbe de quatorze ans, au tournant de la métamorphose adulte (« at the very last link of androginy that puberty would permit—undeniably male but not man » [Nutting 25]). Comme pour Humbert, la vie conjugale joue pour la protagoniste le rôle de couverture sociale. Le confort matrimonial se résumait en quelques mots pour Humbert : « a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin » (Nabokov 25) ; il est la garantie d’un confort luxueux pour une héroïne qui a dû se résoudre à un métier peu lucratif mais qui circule en Corvette. Enfin, tout comme Humbert, Celeste doit consentir à une relation sexuelle avec le père de sa jeune proie pour faciliter sa relation avec le jeune homme. Mais comme dans Lolita, un deus ex machina tragique survient au milieu du roman, qui lui permet de se débarrasser de ce père embarrassant sans se salir les mains.

7 Cette reprise de la trame se situe donc dans le registre parodique. On y lit aussi, dans l’inversion des rôles et dans l’exagération de la reprise, un écho au pastiche d’Umberto Eco, sa nouvelle « Nonita » qui, renversant non pas les sexes, mais les âges du prédateur et de la proie, met en scène un adolescent brûlant d’amour pour une octogénaire décatie : Nonita, fleur de mon adolescence, angoisse de mes nuits. Pourrais-je jamais te revoir. Nonita. Nonita. Nonita. Trois syllabes, comme une négation faite de douceur. No. Ni. Ta. Puissé-je me souvenir de toi jusqu’à ce que ton image se fasse ténèbres et ta demeure sépulcre. Je m’appelle Umberto Umberto […] (Eco 39).

8 Au-delà du jeu avec son propre prénom, le texte d’Eco tirait sa verve humoristique de cette inversion et de la description hyperbolique de cet amour inconditionnel. Le texte de Tampa semble également vouloir rivaliser avec l’humour nabokovien. Il évacue la dimension tragique au profit du rire et de l’exagération, bien que la trame contienne tout son lot de péripéties tragiques, mais Nutting n’explore pas le pathos.

9 Seulement la farce ne dure jamais qu’un temps, et alors qu’Eco se livrait à un exercice d’une demi-douzaine de pages, dans le cas de Nutting, c’est le format romanesque (293 pages) qui nuance la valeur de cette reprise. L’exagération parodique repose sur une

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simplification des personnages que Nutting réduit à des archétypes monochromes et prévisibles, parfois caricaturaux. Humbert procédait de la même manière—nous pensons à Miss Opposite, Miss Pratt, et en réalité à toute la galerie de ses personnages, Charlotte Haze incluse. Mais que se passe-t-il lorsque cette simplification affecte la narratrice elle-même, comme c’est le cas dans Tampa ? Le schéma de l’obsession reste en effet statique tout au long des dix-huit chapitres. Alors que Humbert finit par s’éprendre de la jeune femme adulte, de surcroît enceinte, que devient Lolita, Celeste est résolument attirée par un profil et non un individu. Alors que le collégien enamouré grandit, Celeste le remplace. La divergence majeure avec le roman de Nabokov tient au fait que le lien amoureux du prédateur pour sa victime n’existe pas dans Tampa. La voracité nymphomaniaque dénuée de tout investissement affectif qui caractérise Celeste est une donnée invariable du roman. La déviance sexuelle est par ailleurs si bien assumée par le personnage que les stratégies narratives complexes de Humbert pour couvrir son vice n’auraient aucune pertinence dans ce roman qui explore le versant transgressif en donnant à son héroïne une voix décomplexée par la fureur de ses désirs. Cette radicalisation du désir permet le déploiement d’une verve parodique savoureuse mais fait obstacle à toute forme d’investissement éthique. Enfin, contrairement à Eco qui doublait sa parodie d’un pastiche, la narratrice de Tampa invalide le dicton de Humbert selon lequel on peut toujours compter sur un meurtrier pour une prose alambiquée (« You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style » ; [Nabokov 2] ]. L’écriture de Céleste n’est pas alambiquée. Elle est aussi vive et goulue que ses pulsions. La première phrase du roman ne trompe pas sur la facture générale du roman: « I spent the night before my first day of teaching in an excited loop of hushed masturbation on my side of the mattress, never falling asleep » (Nutting 2). La langue de Tampa, contemporaine et hyperbolique, souvent très drôle, a pour ambition de provoquer et choquer le lecteur, non de l’émouvoir. Toute forme de poérotisme nabokovien, pour reprendre le terme de Maurice Couturier, en est exclue. Cette réécriture repose sur l’extrapolation du motif de la transgression. Le potentiel scandaleux du roman n’est-il pas ce qui le définit ? Peut-on réécrire Lolita sans en explorer le versant transgressif ?

Schroder, Amity Gaige (2013)

10 C’est la prouesse étonnante réalisée par Amity Gaige dans son roman Schroder, paru la même année que Tampa. « Son cousin littéraire le plus proche est Lolita, sans la pédophilie », écrit un journaliste du Los Angeles Times dans sa présentation du roman (Brown). Ces mots ont de quoi surprendre. Aurait-on jamais pu réécrire Moby Dick sans la baleine ? L’auteur de cette gageure est, elle aussi, américaine et Schroder est son troisième roman. Le roman opère une reprise très serrée du schéma diégétique et du dispositif narratif sur lesquels s’appuie Lolita. Curieusement, ni l’éditeur, ni la presse ne se sont emparés de cette gémellité littéraire, à l’exception du journaliste du Los Angeles Times et de Kathryn Schulz, qui dans le New York Magazine illustre sa recension par la couverture de Lolita dont auteur et titres auraient été biffés et remplacés par le nom de Gaige et Schroder (Schulz).

11 L’histoire se situe en 2008, dans l’État de New York et est rapportée par un immigré du vieux continent. Eric Schroder et son père ont quitté l’Allemagne de l’Est à la fin des années 70, pour s’installer aux États-Unis alors qu’Eric n’avait pas dix ans. Dans le

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présent de la narration, Eric est un père de famille fraîchement divorcé. Il n’est pas connu sous ce nom, Schroder, mais sous celui de Kennedy, car, à l’âge de quatorze ans, il s’est forgé une fausse identité, optant pour ce patronyme puissamment américain, se glissant petit à petit dans la peau d’un jeune citoyen américain, et entretenant le doute sur sa parenté avec la famille présidentielle. Le choix savamment pensé du pseudonyme et de ses connotations n’est pas sans rappeler celui de Humbert : And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesmer Mesmer” and “Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best (Nabokov 308). The surname wasn’t hard to choose. I wanted a hero’s name, and there was only one man I’d ever heard called a hero in Dorchester. A local boy, a persecuted Irishman, a demigod (Gaige 5).

12 La trame principale reprend de Lolita sa deuxième partie, le voyage en voiture d’un père et de sa fille à travers les États-Unis, dans un contexte de fuite et d’illégalité car Schroder a kidnappé Meadow, sa fille — ici biologique — de six ans, dont il a perdu la garde. La métaphore de la route américaine comme synonyme de liberté est l’une des reprises thématiques, mais c’est aussi et comme dans Lolita, une métaphore tragicomique, car, pour Eric comme pour Humbert, la destination finale du voyage est la prison. Comme dans le roman d’origine, l’aventure prend fin à l’hôpital, où Meadow est admise suite à une crise d’asthme. Confondu grâce à cette hospitalisation, le kidnappeur rédige cette confession depuis sa cellule. Entre temps, dans cette Jaguar dont la banquette arrière est jonchée de canettes de sodas et de papiers de bonbons rappelant le décor nabokovien, on retrouve quelques emprunts à la paranoïa qui dévorait Humbert alors que se succédaient les voitures dans le rétroviseur : We were mostly through the suburban bottleneck of Albany when I became aware of something in my rearview mirror. A big black shadow of a car that had been lurking several lengths behind. I took a gratuitous left. The car followed. I took a random right. Again the car followed. (Gaige 61)

13 Le silence et la beauté des paysages de Nouvelle-Angleterre font écho aux pages du voyage de Lolita, à travers la description du paysage, de la pluie et du silence mais aussi à travers l’absence des enfants, qui comme dans Lolita, sont enfermés dans les établissements scolaires tandis que Schroder et Meadow parcourent l’Amérique : In February, the flora and fauna are dead, the traffic turns the snow the color of tobacco juice, the children are shuttered away in their schools, and the long days are silent. The cats grow wet and skinny, and the rain grows hard and bitter, as if it is not rain but the liquid redistribution of collective conflict; it’s a frigid rain, a rain that pricks the skin of any upturned face, a damning rain that makes men eke corks from bottles. O February, you turn our hearts to stone. (Gaige 30-31)

14 La comparaison ne s’arrête pas à la trame du roman, car le dispositif narratif repose, comme celui de son antécédent littéraire, sur le mode de la plaidoierie d’un narrateur non fiable rédigeant son manuscrit en prison. A l’instar de Lolita, la tonalité juridique des premières pages glisse rapidement vers le genre confessionnel :

What follows is a record of where Meadow and I have been since our disappearance. My lawyer says I should tell the whole story […]. It’s hard not to think about them anyway, my potential listeners. Lawyers. Juries. Fairy- tale mobs. Historians. But most of all you. You—my whip, my nation, my wife. Dear Laura. If it were just the two of us again […]. (Gaige 1)

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15 À cette double énonciation s’ajoute la coloration poétique des lignes de Schroder, à travers le rythme ternaire (« my whip, my nation, my wife ») et la métaphore utilisée à l’encontre du jury (« Fairy-tale mobs »), qui rappellent la poésie allitérative et rythmique de Humbert et ses allégations contre le jury via l’intertexte de Poe (« exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns » [Nabokov 9]). Ajoutons que le prénom de son épouse, Laura, resserre le lien à Nabokov, dont le roman posthume, The Original of Laura, paraît en 2009, soit quelques années seulement avant Schroder.

16 Comme dans Lolita, le récit procède par grandes analepses : Schroder revient épisodiquement sur un passé douloureux qui crée la chaîne causale justifiant le mensonge gouvernant sa vie, notamment la perte de sa mère, qui disparaît, comme celle de Humbert, dans ses premières années : Mine was a tale that, by certain lights, was the truest thing I had ever written. It involved the burdens of history, an early loss of a mother, a baseless sense of personal responsibility, and dauntless hope for the future. (Gaige 5)

17 Le portrait du narrateur s’étoffe à mesure que le manuscrit s’écrit et fait revivre dans l’esprit du lecteur les images de l’exil mélancolique que dépeint Humbert dans les premiers chapitres de Lolita, à savoir une vie de dilettante et de dandy émigré. Schroder est l’avatar allemand du jeune Humbert parisien qui publiait de tortueux essais universitaires et débatait de cinématographie avec les expatriés russes : In my free time, I worked erratically on my research (see page 15) and played soccer with a bunch of foreign transplants on a hill we borrowed from the College of Saint Rose. (Gaige 9) Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. (Nabokov 16)

18 Enfin, le thème du double qui structure la narration de Lolita se retrouve dans Schroder à travers l’oscillation pronominale entre la première et la troisième personne. Grâce à une reprise de ce schéma, Gaige traduit la complexité d’un moi tentant de se disculper des accusations qui pèsent sur lui, comme le faisait Humbert : For the record: the groom never told the bride that he was related to the Kennedys of presidential fame. This has been reported in the papers, and the groom categorically denies it. […] The groom will admit that once or twice late at night with his female peers at Mune College, he did not sufficiently debunk the rumor of himself as a second cousin twice removed to the Hyannis Port Kennedys. (Gaige 13) But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row. (Nabokov 19)

19 La duplicité se fait jour également dans la scission intérieure du personnage, liée aux langues qu’il parle. L’idiome américain a été parfaitement intégré par cet émigré, mais son manuscrit est semé de courtes phrases en allemand, la langue de l’enfance qui, ici, semblent exprimer le refoulé, tandis que des interjections françaises et des locutions latines rappellent le pédantisme de son précurseur.

20 Cette préciosité narrative permet à Gaige de revisiter et de développer de petites manies proto-postmodernes de Nabokov. Son héros se complaît dans les digressions et notes de bas de page kinbotiennes sur la typologie du silence, objet de ses recherches6. Elle fait également écho à l’hybridité du texte de Nabokov en incluant dans le texte un scénario que Schroder écrit pour sa femme, qui rappelle le poème à la gloire de Lolita

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que Humbert insère dans son manuscrit. Le roman déploie par ailleurs différents modes d’écritures et réécritures du réel, du fait divers aux infos télévisées, du journal à la littérature, qui l’associent à l’hybridité générique du roman de Nabokov.

21 Si le héros de ce livre n’est pas pédophile, la narration est soumise au même vacillement psychologique que celui qui caractérisait le manuscrit de Humbert. La ressemblance n’est plus à démontrer lorsque, cédant à une forme de pathologie narrative incontrôlée, Schroder répète la phrase « I let you down » sur quatre pages (255-258), développant littéralement l’instruction de Humbert à son typographe dans le plus court chapitre de Lolita : This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. […]. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head—everything.Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer. (Nabokov 109)

22 Le titre retenu par Gaige, qui, à l’inverse du roman de Nabokov, est celui du protagoniste masculin, donne la clé de la modulation opérée ici. Contrairement à nombre de reprises de Lolita se focalisant sur le personnage éponyme du roman, la lecture se concentre exclusivement sur la profondeur du personnage de Humbert. Le potentiel affectif du personnage de Meadow, à l’instar de celui de Lolita, n’est pas exploré7. Du roman de Nabokov, cette réécriture reprend davantage la complexité de la narration et de la caractérisation que le versant polémique. Une référence à Nabokov, qui se fait sur le mode allusif par l’intermédiaire de la petite fille, nous éclaire sur la position de Gaige : “When you grow up. What do you want to be famous for ? Everybody wants to be famous for something.” “I want to be a lepidopterist.” Not unkindly, Meadow added, “Lepidopterists study butterflies.” “You’re not going to be famous for that.” (Gaige 137)

23 Ce that souligné par les italiques traduit l’ironie de l’auteur sur la raison de l’immense célébrité de Nabokov, qui est précisément le thème qu’elle ne reprend pas ici. Car la relation de Schroder à sa fille est celle de l’amour fou, mais de l’amour paternel. L’absence de relation transgressive permet à Gaige de rendre justice à un roman que certaines institutions continuent à écarter des programmes en raison de son contenu sulfureux.

Darling River, Les Variations Dolorès, Sara Stridsberg. (2010)

24 La relation sexuelle illicite est également absente du texte de Sara Stridsberg, bien qu’une sexualité consentie et protéiforme y soit omniprésente. Cette troisième relecture est la plus littérale. Comme en témoigne l’appendice titulaire de ce roman (Les variations Dolorès) la présence de la Lolita nabokovienne y est pleinement assumée. Darling River est un texte entièrement structuré par la figure de Dolores, que Stridsberg refaçonne pour la faire coïncider avec l’univers personnel qui habite sa fiction.

25 Le roman repose sur une architecture complexe de cinq trames distinctes revenant tour à tour, sans ordre apparent, dans les cinq blocs narratifs intitulés « Le Destin », « Le Temps », « Le Miroir », « La Maladie », et pour finir, « La Solitude » qui n’occupe que trois pages. Trois de ces trames, intitulées « Darling River (Lo) », « Le Livre des

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Morts », et « Le Jardin des Plantes », reprennent des thématiques purement nabokoviennes tandis que les deux suivantes « Sur la Mappemonde maternelle » et « Encyclopédie » viennent créer des liens entre les mythes littéraires et les sujets qui hantent l’écriture de Sara Stridsberg.

26 L’extraction diégétique la plus proche du texte-source est celle du « Livre des Morts ». Contrairement aux deux autres romans qui reposaient sur l’imitation, cette section comble une béance du récit de Nabokov, celle des dernières journées de Lolita et de sa disparition, le jour de Noël 1952 à Gray Star. Ce cas, envisagé par Genette dans son traité de la réécriture, constitue précisément « une continuation elliptique : chargée de combler une lacune ou une ellipse médiane sur un mode analeptique, remontant de cause en cause, jusqu’à un point de départ » (Genette 1982, 242). En effet, Stridsberg, partant du 25 décembre 1952, jour de l’accouchement et de la mort de Lolita et de sa fille, suit une linéarité à rebours de la chronologie. La première image est celle d’une Dolores, encore pleine d’espoir, s’apprêtant, sur le lit de la maternité qui est aussi son futur lit de de mort, à donner naissance à son enfant : La sage-femme passe le rasoir sans penser qu’entre les jambes de Dolores toujours hâlées et gluantes et tremblantes et nues enfle une bulle de chewing-gum rose et que dans sa tête un parfum de fraises et de soleil et d’espérances explose. (Stridsberg 34)

27 L’hypotexte nabokovien est assimilé et comme réverbéré par Stridsberg, car la fusion entre le motif symbolique de l’innocence, la « bulle de chewing-gum rose », et celui du sang et de la mort, nous renvoie au meurtre de Quilty dans les derniers chapitres de Lolita : I hit him at very close range through the blankets, and then he lay back, and a big pink bubble with juvenile connotations formed on his lips, grew to the size of a toy balloon, and vanished. (Nabokov 304)

28 Les passages suivant cette première scène retracent le voyage à Gray Star, remontant le temps. Dolores, sur la banquette arrière d’une voiture conduite par Richard Schiller, fait le deuil de ses rêves hollywoodiens pour songer désormais à l’innocence et la blanche pureté de l’Alaska. Mais, dans une tonalité propre à Stridsberg, son corps est de plus en plus violenté par la maternité tandis qu’une écriture de la morbidité se concentre sur les sensations de fièvre, de froid et de douleurs corporelles. Au travers des récits de cauchemars qui se succèdent, le texte produit quelques allusions à la vie de Dolores avant Richard, à son beau-père (Stridsberg 34, 112, 207 passim) et ses cadeaux, comme ce livre consacré au chant des oiseaux qui ne lui a jamais plu (Stridsberg 304) et à sa mère disparue dans un accident de voiture (Stridsberg 206).

29 Le récit est écrit à la troisième personne mais il adopte le point de vue de Dolores et offre ainsi au lecteur un accès à son intimité psychique, grâce à la technique de la transvocalisation qui consiste à transférer le point de vue sur un autre personnage que celui de l’hypotexte (Genette 1982, 412). Mais Stridsberg offre une reprise moins littérale que personnelle et donne à Dolores un espace d’expression qui lui permet d’échapper à la lecture stéréotypée du personnage de l’adolescente américaine. Le prénom retenu par Stridsberg, « Dolores », pas une seule fois Lolita, renforce l’autonomie d’un personnage qui n’est ici pas soumis à la médiation et la transformation opérées par le regard et l’écriture du personnage masculin. Dans La Vengeance du traducteur, de Brice Matthieussent, une note de bas de page donnant la voix à Dolores Haze revient sur l’importance du prénom de l’état civil aux dépens des surnoms que déclinait Humbert, Lolita restant le pire de tous :

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Tu peux bien m’appeler ta Dodo, ta Dora, ta Dollie, ta Loli, ta Lola, ta Loli, mais jamais Lolita, c’est beaucoup trop vulgaire. Je suis Dolores pour l’état civil et pour toi tout ce que tu voudras, sauf Lolita [...]. Plusieurs fois pourtant je t’avais dit que je détestais ce prénom, qu’il me ramenait vers une époque malheureuse de mon existence. (Matthieussent 143)

30 Comblant les béances, le texte permet au lecteur d’accéder à ce que Humbert regrettait de n’avoir qu’entr’aperçu de Lolita – « a twilight, and a palace gate – dim and adorable regions » (Nabokov 284)8, déroulant les réminiscences heureuses, des rêves d’avenir, mais aussi, une série de cauchemars, qui incluent souvent celui qui est appelé dans le texte son « beau-père », ainsi qu’un leitmotiv sur le mystère qui a entouré la mort de sa mère : Maman est sortie dans la rue en courant avant d’être écrasée par une voiture. Quand je suis rentrée, son corps avait déjà été enlevé. Je ne sais même pas où elle est enterrée (Stridsberg 206). « Où est enterrée maman ? » « Qui l’a écrasée ? » « Maman… » « Mama… » « Mami… ». (Stridsberg 214)

31 La deuxième sous-partie directement liée au texte de Nabokov est intitulée « Darling River (Lo) ». C’est la plus volumineuse dans l’économie du roman, auquel elle donne son titre et son centre de gravité narratif. Cette trame présente une deuxième Dolores, qui doit son prénom au roman d’un Nabokov identifié allusivement, comme chez Gaige, par sa passion pour la lépidoptérologie, ainsi que par ses origines russes : Pendant mon enfance, mon père était passionné par un écrivain russe en exil, par ailleurs collectionneur de papillons, et s’était du même coup servi d’un de ses romans pour me baptiser […]. Dolores signifie douleurs et je songe que cela pourrait tout aussi bien vouloir dire roses. (Stridsberg 23)

32 C’est une filiation de texte en texte qui s’opère ici et qui, créant un nouveau personnage distinct de la Lolita de Nabokov, ne cesse pourtant de renvoyer à son antécédent, le texte de Nabokov. Il est fait allusion à l’héritage littéraire de Lolita dans une scène du roman où cette nouvelle Dolores cherche, à la Bibliothèque Nationale, « un livre qui parle de moi » (Stridsberg 85), et qui lui permettrait de déchiffrer les mystères de sa destinée : « Je cherche des messages secrets dissimulés dans les volumes anciens » (Stridsberg 85).

33 Comme pour Schroder, cette trame reprend le schéma d’un père et de sa fille sur la route en l’absence de la mère et d’une relation incestueuse. D’autres reprises thématiques jalonnent leurs voyages, comme le tennis et la jupette de Lo ou les bandes dessinées. Le père de Lo est un chasseur, enchanté par l’alcool et les prostituées. Le voyage, comme celui de Humbert et Lo, n’a pas de réelle destination : Les saisons défilaient et nous roulions. Nous roulions dans la canicule, dans la neige dans les cendres, à travers les bois de bouleaux […]. (Stridsberg 13). Nous nous promenions en cercles toujours plus concentriques. (Stridsberg 17)

34 Comme dans Lolita, et comme dans la reprise de Gaige, le voyage n’est pas synonyme de liberté car il dessine les contours d’un enfermement psychique et d’une isolation sociale : « Nous sommes toujours seuls » écrit la narratrice (Stridsberg 15). Ces circonvolutions sont ternies par une pellicule de décrépitude qui recouvre le paysage et qui va s’en prendre bientôt au corps de Dolores. Car ce corps, toujours vêtu de socquettes blanches, de robes d’enfance de plus en plus serrées, se couvre de vésicules,

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de taches noires et est bientôt avili par une maladie mystérieuse, que tente de soigner un médecin de Saint-Pétersbourg. Ajoutons que cette Dolores n’est pas une jeune fille innocente. A moitié alcoolique, le soir, elle rencontre ses nombreux amants au bord de la rivière pendant que son père courtise des prostituées.

35 Derrière l’hommage à Nabokov, c’est donc un contre-récit qui se dessine. Il ne reste rien, ou presque, de la figure iconique de Lolita. Ce sont les violations auquel Humbert a soumis une enfant qui sont, ici, le fruit d’une extrapolation créative. Ce chant de l’expérience exhibe la dégradation du corps féminin. À la fin du livre, Dolores atteint bientôt l’âge de 36 ans, sans qu’on ait vu le temps passer, et connaît les pires affres d’une féminité morbide : avortement, maladies, enlaidissement et décrépitude. La symbolique et les motifs nabokoviens, toujours très présents, sont soumis à cette contamination mortifère, comme ce papillon mort que Lo imagine sortir de sa bouche : « Je me regarde si longtemps dans la glace que j’ai l’impression qu’un papillon va sortir de ma bouche. Un papillon à tête de mort » (Stridsberg 86).

36 Enfin, une troisième trame revient sur l’anecdote génétique du singe du Jardin des Plantes, que Nabokov donnait comme source d’inspiration du roman (Nabokov 311). Dans cette sous-partie, un scientifique du jardin parisien, socialement isolé et repoussé par les femmes, cherche par tous les moyens à faire dessiner une femelle chimpanzé, la captive et la victime de son obsession. Chaque chapitre est le récit d’un mois d’expériences infructueuses, au terme desquelles le singe finit par se soumettre et produire une esquisse représentant le grillage de sa cage. Mais à travers cette extrapolation fictive de l’anecdote génétique, Stridsberg offre une nouvelle interprétation du motif de la captivité qui structure Lolita et développe la métaphore du désir masculin de recréer un idéal féminin.

37 Or, ce motif traverse toutes les trames narratives : le corps de la femme dans ce livre est sans cesse soumis au regard de l’homme. Si Stridsberg donne voix à deux Dolores, ce n’est pas tant pour émanciper l’adolescente que pour montrer les conséquences de cette réification de la figure féminine du roman. La première Dolores est brisée par le deuil progressif de ses rêves hollywoodiens avant de mourir dans l’enfantement, tandis que la seconde est hantée par la peur que sa maladie n’écarte ses amants. S’il est un hommage à Nabokov, le roman de Stridsberg est également un contre-récit qui s’inscrit dans la réflexion sur la féminité esquissée par les réécritures de Lolita depuis la fin du 20e siècle. Mais contrairement aux réécritures qui le précèdent, il multiplie les réflexions à travers l’entrelacement des trames narratives et des personnages. La réflexion alors générée ne s’arrête pas à l’image de la femme-enfant, mais l’étend à toutes les figures féminines du roman, Dolores, Lolita, les prostituées que rencontre le père, mais aussi les figures maternelles et solitaires, qui constituent la quatrième trame de cette reprise.

38 À l’occasion de ce soixantième anniversaire, nous observons que même si elle a atteint un âge canonique, la fille-enfant de Nabokov n’a pas pris une ridule, car elle continue de prospérer à travers les textes qu’elle n’en finit pas d’engendrer. On ne pourra s’empêcher de noter l’origine féminine d’un grand nombre de ces relectures- réécritures, ce qui, dans les années quatre-vingt dix, a pu s’expliquer par la volonté de rendre justice à un personnage féminin séquestré par la prose masculine. Mais ces nouvelles lectures dépassent la revendication féministe. Si Nutting, dans l’inversion des genres qu’elle opère, offre une imitation ludique du potentiel littéraire scandaleux de la pédophilie, Gaige et Stridsberg s’emparent d’une facette sombre de chacun des

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personnages principaux pour en éclairer la complexité. Ce que ces trois lectures- réécritures soulignent, plus d’un demi-siècle ayant passé, c’est la richesse prismatique de l’ouvrage-source. Dans un entretien, Sara Stridsberg compare Lolita à une galerie des glaces (2011). La profondeur du roman de Nabokov l’apparente, dit-elle, à jeu de miroirs, où Lolita et Humbert, diffractés, génèrent une série infinie de réflections, d’images, parfois d’ombres, mais aussi de surfaces sur lesquels les écrivains et héritiers littéraires continuent de projeter leurs lectures du 21e siècle.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Artus, Hubert. « Stridsberg se paye le mythe de Lolita dans Darling River ». Rue 89. 11 mai 2001, consulté le 31 mai 2016.

Beigbeder, Frédéric. Au secours, pardon. Paris : Livre de Poche, 2008.

Brown, Janelle. « A Real Impostor’s Tale Inspires Fascinating Fiction in Schroder ». Los Angeles Times, 21 février 2013, consulté le 31 mai 2016. < http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/21/entertainment/la-ca-jc-amity-gaige-20130224>

Couturier, Maurice. Le Rapt de Lolita. A paraître.

Dicker, Joël. La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert. Paris : Fallois-L’Âge d’homme, 2012.

Eco, Umberto. « Nonita ». In Pastiches et Postiches. Trad. Bernard Guyader. Paris : Messidor, 1988, 39-45.

Gaige, Amity. Schroder. New York : Twelve, 2013.

Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. Paris : Editions du Seuil, 1982.

---. « L’Autre du même », dans Figures IV. Paris : Seuil, 1999, 101-107.

Jones, Nancy. Molly. New York : Crown Publishers, 2000.

Loison-Charles, Julie. « Nabokov et la censure ». Miranda [Online] 15 (2017). 06 octobre 2017. https://miranda.revues.org/11223

Matthieussent, Brice. La Vengeance du traducteur. Paris : P.O.L., 2009.

Morrissey, Kim. Poems for Men who Dream of Lolita. Regina : Coteau Books, 1989.

Morse, Erik. « A Portrait of the Young Girl : On the 60th Anniversary of Nabokov’s Lolita. An Interview Series ». Los Angeless Review of Books, January 13 2015. Consulté le 31 mai 2016. < https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/portrait-young-girl-60th-anniversary-nabokovs-lolita- part-iv-interview-series/> .

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. Dir : Alfred Appel. New York : Vintage, 1991.

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehra n : A Memoir in Books. New York : Random House, 2003.

Noiville, Florence. L’attachement. Paris : Editions Stock, 2012.

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Nutting, Alissa. Tampa. New York : Harper and Collins Publisher, 2013.

Pera, Pia. Lo’s Diary. Trad. Ann Goldstein. New York : Foxrock, 1999.

Präger, Emily. Roger Fishbite. London : Chatto & Windus, 1999.

Schulz, Kathryn. « Kathryn Schulz on Amity Gaige’s Novel Schroder ». New York Magazine, 18 février 2013. Consulté le 31 mai 2016. http://www.vulture.com/2013/02/kathryn-schulz-on-schroder-by-amity-gaige.html

Siegel, Lee. Love in a Dead Language. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Stridsberg, Sara. Darling River— Les Variations Dolorès. Trad. Jean-Baptiste Coursaud. Paris : Stock, 2011.

Turine, Natalia (dir.). Lolita, Variations sur un thème, recueil de nouvelles de Claire Berest, Philippe Besson, Catherine Locandro, Nicolas Rey, Christophe Tison, Emilie Frèche, Murielle Magellan, Emmanuelle Richard, Richard Millet, Maurice Couturier. Paris : Louison éditions, 2016.

Williams, John. « Desperate Dad: Amity Gaige Talks About ‘Schroder’« . The New York Times, 6 février 2013. Consulté le 31 mai 2016.

NOTES

1. Les écrivains Claire Berest, Philippe Besson, Catherine Locandro, Nicolas Rey, Christophe Tison, Emilie Frèche, Murielle Magellan, Emmanuelle Richard, Richard Millet, Maurice Couturier, acceptèrent de revisiter l’œuvre de Nabokov dans une nouvelle, et, sollicités par la maison d’éditions Louison, ont signé une nouvelle dans cet ouvrage préfacé par Maurice Couturier (Turine [dir.], Lolita, Variations sur un thème, Paris : Louison éditions, 2016). 2. Dans son court article « L’autre du même », Gérard Genette reprend la métaphore musicale de la variation pour évoquer les problématiques liées à la réécriture en littérature et en musique, et en particulier celle de la double notion de différence et d’identité engendrée par toute reprise (Genette 1999, 101-107). 3. L’analyse de cette nouvelle pensée de l’adolescence féminine est amorcée par Erik Morse dans le numéro spécial consacré à l’anniversaire de Lolita dans le Los Angeles Review of Books. La quatrième section de ces entretiens dresse notamment un inventaire des différents contextes qui ont jalonné la réécriture de Lolita dans la deuxième moitié du 20 e siècle : < https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/portrait-young-girl-60th-anniversary-nabokovs-lolita-part-iv- interview-series/> 4. On se reportera ici au travail de Julie Loison-Charles sur Lolita et la censure dans ce même numéro, et notamment la question de son interdiction dans certaines bibliothèques américaines. 5. « Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets” ». (Nabokov 16) 6. Dans les entretiens, Gaige se défend curieusement de la comparaison avec Lolita mais cite Pale Fire comme source d’inspiration. Voir l’entretien réalisé par John Williams et paru dans le New York Times : « Desperate Dad: Amity Gaige Talks About “Schroder” » 6 février 2013. 7. Cette réécriture prend donc le contrepied des nombreuses reprises publiées dans les années 1990, comme celles de Pia (Lo’s Diary, 1999), Nancy Jones (Molly, 2000), d’Emily Präger (Roger Fishbite, 1999) puis plus récemment de Frédéric Beigbeder, (Au Secours Pardon, 2008), qui

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s’efforcent de donner la voix et la profondeur humaine qui manquaient au personnage de l’adolescente dans le manuscrit de Humbert Humbert. 8. « I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions ». (Nabokov 284)

RÉSUMÉS

Lorsqu’on réécrit Lolita au 21 e siècle, qu’en retient-on ? Est-ce l’iconicité de son héroïne ? Le versant transgressif d’une histoire amour ? Ou sa complexité narrative et thématique ? Après être revenu sur les nuances féministes et politiques qui ont teinté nombre de réécritures de Lolita au tournant du siècle, le présent article se penche sur les plus récentes reprises pour tenter de dégager les nouvelles perspectives de la lecture-réécriture de Lolita aujourd’hui. L’analyse porte en particulier sur trois romans entretenant une relation étroite avec le texte original. Tandis que Tampa, d’Alissa Nutting, exploite le thème de la transgression en recréant un Humbert Humbert au féminin, Amity Gaige, dans Schroder (2013), exclut le thème de la pédophilie, pour revisiter le thème de l’exil et du road trip américain d’un père et de sa fille. Enfin, l’écrivain suédoise Sara Stridsberg, dans Darling River, Les Variations Dolores, offre une relecture fragmentée, multiple et personnelle de Lolita qui, en poursuivant des fils esquissés par Nabokov, éclaire encore davantage la complexité de son original.

When creating a new version of Lolita in the 21st century, what do authors retain from Nabokov’s masterpiece? Is it the myth and the icon or is it the diegetic thread? Is it the extravagant prose or the transgression and taboo? After reviewing the feminist or political nuances that tinted many a rewriting of Lolita at the turn of the century, the following article seeks to examine the more recent perspectives offered by the rewriting of Nabokov’s masterpiece in the 21st century. The analysis focuses in particular on three novels that claim close affinities with Lolita. Alissa Nutting’s Tampa (2013) exploits the theme of transgression by creating a feminine Humbert craving for sex with teen boys, while Gaige excludes pedophilia to focus instead on the theme of European exile and of the illicit father-and-daughter roadtrip. Darling River, Les Variations Dolores (2011) by Swedish author Sara Stridsberg is an intensely personal and multilayered rewriting of Lolita that, along with Gaige and Nutting, powerfully illustrates how Lolita’s avatars still shed light on the complexity of their original.

INDEX

Mots-clés : Lolita, mythe, réécriture, variation, hommage, parodie, pastiche, palimpseste, transgression, tabou, pédophilie, road novel Keywords : Lolita, myth, rewriting, variation, tribute, parody, pastiche, palimpsest, transgression, taboo, pedophilia, road novel

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AUTEURS

YANNICKE CHUPIN Maître de conférences. Université de Cergy-Pontoise /Agora (EA 7392) [email protected]

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Nathalie Massip (dir.) Staging American Bodies Mettre en scène le corps américain

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Staging American Bodies – Introduction

Nathalie Massip

1 On Monday, August 14, 2017, protesters toppled the statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina. Dedicated to the “memory of the boys who wore grey,” the statue had been erected in 1924 and, like many others of its kind, stood outside a government building. The event came in the aftermath of the violent clash between white nationalists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, two days before. The “Unite the Right” march had been organized to protest a plan to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee, a hero of the Confederacy, from Emancipation Park in Charlottesville. While the removal of Confederate statues had already stirred controversy before the Virginia deathly event, notably in New Orleans, it was given new and accelerated impetus throughout the nation in the days and weeks that followed.

2 A majority of removals were sanctioned and organized by state and local authorities. Yet, in some cases, crowds literally took the matter into their own hands. Such was the case in Durham: “With a strap tied around the neck of the statue, protesters spat, kicked and gestured at the mangled figure after its base was ripped from the granite block.” (Horton) Considering that the event described is the tearing down of a statue, the violence and symbolism of the act, evoking mob rule and lynching, may be surprising. Yet, as “dead people cast in bronze or carved in stone, [statues] symbolize a specific famous person while in a sense also being the body of that person.” (Verdery 5; italics in the text) Therefore, removing a statue has a double effect: not only does it mark a physical erasure from the public landscape, akin to an amputation, but it also desacralizes the person it stands for: As it is deprived of its timelessness and sacred quality, the ‘sacred’ of the universe in which it had meaning becomes more ‘profane.’ The person it symbolized dissolves into an ordinary, time-bound person. (Verdery 5)

3 As the statue falls down, the body loses its godlike characteristic and becomes a mere mortal.

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4 The dismantling of Confederate monuments also corresponds to an erasure of visible signs embodying the legacy of the racist Jim Crow era. The majority of these monuments were erected between the 1890s and the 1920s, that is to say when segregation was institutionalized and the Jim Crow system ruled African Americans’ lives, sometimes in a most violent way. While the myth of the “Lost Cause” was taking hold in the Southern psyche, monuments were being erected to celebrate, if not glorify, the soldiers, generals, and political leaders who had lost the war, yet had fought for what was considered as a noble cause. Just as Thomas Dixon’s 1905 The Clansman and D. W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation depicted Klansmen as vigilante heroes, Confederate statues carved and/or cast the triumph of white supremacy in stone and/or in bronze: “Monuments commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings. […] [They] make heroes and triumphs, victories and conquests, perpetually present and part of life.” (Danto 153) As for the location of these monuments, on public places and outside government buildings, not only does it legitimize this institutional racism, but it also serves as a painful reminder “of who has the power to choose how history is remembered in public places.” (Foner)

5 In the case of the Durham statue, the staging of the removal was all the more striking and powerful as it was a public event. Taking place in broad daylight, it was filmed and broadcast on social media in the minutes that followed the episode. Were it not for the catharsis of collective anger that one may witness on videos of the incident, it would be possible to see the fall of this bronze body as a street performance, a clownish figure standing tall on a pedestal one second, then crumpled ridiculously on the ground the next. If “[the] body is both an internal, subjective environment and simultaneously is an object for others to observe and evaluate” (Johnston XV), then its staging reveals as much about one’s identity as about others’ expectations and conceptions of what this identity ought to be.

6 The essays collected here explore the various ways in which American bodies have been staged and represented throughout history and through various media: photography, paintings, drama, literature, movies, scientific reports, poetry, memorials… Just as the Confederate statues are legacies of a racist, cruel past, as well as sites of present brutal clashes, violence permeates the essays in this issue, be it physical (the violence enacted on bodies), pictorial (the depictions of impaired, maimed, assaulted, or wounded bodies), or psychological.

7 The issue opens with Wendy Harding’s essay on spectacle lynchings of the early 20th century. Harding demonstrates how lynchings, as staged and public displays of violence, were meant to confirm and reinforce racial divisions. Exhibiting lynched bodies not only served as a message to the black community but, also, asserted white power and domination. The troubling images that remain of these public, theatricalized, executions, whether pictorial or textual, extend their effect over space but, also, crucially, over time, thus perpetuating racial violence and affecting modern audiences. Harding’s analysis of various works by African American writers, from Richard Wright to Ta-Nehisi Coates by way of Toni Morrison, shows the difficulty of tackling both the violent acts and their representations while, at the same time, breaking the cycle of white supremacy and black victimhood, in order to ponder the meaning of violence and, ultimately, empower blacks.

8 The violence of these “ritualized lynchings” and of their representation echoes Thibaud Danel’s depiction of war as an “embodying event.” Using the example of the Korean

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War, Danel shows that bodies of war and bodies of memory are inextricably linked, as the representation and staging of the former influence the way the war is remembered. Referring to a variety of representations of bodies of war, including posters, movies, and memorials, Danel demonstrates how the staging of bodies tells us more about the political dimension of memorialization and commemoration than about the war itself.

9 Similarly, Hélène Gaillard reveals that the depictions, both textual and pictorial, of bodies by poet Walt Whitman and painter Thomas Eakins, and the reactions they triggered, are meaningful testimonies of Victorian society’s prudish attitudes toward corporeality and corporeal matters. Analyzing the artists’ aesthetics against the 19th- century backdrop of medical and technological progress, Gaillard draws parallels between Whitman’s and Eakins’ representations of bodies, especially the way they brought together the spirit and the soul. In so doing, the artists elevated the status of the body to that of agent of democracy and equality.

10 Deviant bodies are the topic of Sarah Dyne’s article, which reassesses Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play, revised many times for film and stage, The Children’s Hour. Using Foucault’s theory of discipline and docile bodies as well as a recent trend in queer theory, which deals with the notion of time (“chrononormativity”), Dyne explores both the way Hellman exploits and articulates temporal and spatial elements, and the connections between space, time, and sexuality at work in The Children’s Hour. In so doing, Dyne shows how Hellman delves into and represents issues of power, female intimacy and sexuality, and morality prevalent in late 19th- and early 20th-century American society.

11 The same social anxieties surrounding turn-of-the-century American women inform Lauren MacIvor Thompson’s essay. Analyzing a New York medical doctor’s notebooks, written between 1885 and 1902, Thompson pinpoints the connections between eugenics, the development of the specialties of obstetrics and gynecology, and the professionalization of American medicine. Physicians’ fascination with and study of female bodies, which led to the birth and development of the OB-GYN disciplines, elevated the practice of medicine into a profession. As the latter became more and more standardized and the expertise and authority of practitioners grew, medical discourse gained in legitimacy. So did its impact on women’s subordination; immigrant and working-class women, more particularly, attracted a lot of attention, as their sexuality was seen as a threat to the integrity of American society, therefore spurring the development of eugenics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Birth of a Nation (The), dir. D. W. Griffith, Epoch Producing Corporation, 1915.

Danto, Arthur C. The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. Amsterdam: G + B Arts, 1998.

Dixon, Thomas F. The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. 1905. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1970.

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Foner, Eric. “Confederate Statues and ‘Our’ History.” The New York Times. Aug. 20, 2017. Sept. 8, 2017.

Horton, Alex, “Protesters in North Carolina Topple Confederate Statue Following Charlottesville Violence,” The Washington Post. Aug. 14, 2017. Sept. 8, 2017.

Johnston, Jessica R. The American Body in Context: An Anthology. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001.

Verdery, Katherine. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

AUTHOR

NATHALIE MASSIP Maître de conférences Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, membre de l’Université Côte d’Azur (UCA) [email protected]

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Spectacle Lynching and Textual Responses

Wendy Harding

1 Among the many horrific accounts of the lynching of African Americans,1 there is one that stands out as being paradoxically both anomalous and paradigmatic. On April 20, 1911, Will Potter was arrested in Livermore, Kentucky for shooting a white man.2 According to The New York Times report he was taken to the local opera house and “his body was riddled with bullets from the guns of an audience of half a hundred determined avengers” (April 21, 1911; quoted and discussed in Dray 177-8). The Kentucky newspapers reported that there was an admission charge to attend the lynching: “Those who purchased orchestra seats were allowed to empty their guns into the hanging figure, while those in the gallery only had one shot” (Smith, McDaniel and Hardin 332). The New York Times report plays up the theatrical dimension, calling the lynching “a melodrama” staged against a backdrop of “woodland scenery arranged for the presentation of a much milder drama.” The Livermore lynching is unusual because it is the only one I have come across that took place inside a theatre, but it also reproduces a pattern. First, it gathers the community in a ritual that affirms racial divisions, and second, it stages scenes of extreme violence. Indeed the violence of racially motivated lynching goes hand in hand with the aim to make a spectacle out of the victim and to make that spectacle available for public consumption.3 Exhibition, whether through the staging of the event or in the diffusion of texts and images recording it, is integral to the lynching ritual. Moreover, the persistence of textual and visual representations of the ritual means that the terror they inspire does not lessen over time.4 Images of mutilated black corpses hanging from Southern trees have continued to haunt the nation’s collective memory, and they have evoked multiple forms of response in the works of African American artists and writers. Lynching imagery burns itself into one’s consciousness, demanding explanations and eliciting counter-representations. I will first consider how the ritual of lynching helped produce the racial distinctions defining the communities that practiced it. To that end, my discussion of representations of the Livermore incident will be followed by an analysis of some of the photographs reproduced in James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching

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Photography in America.5 Then I will discuss how the diffusion of photographs and reports representing lynchings enforced racial divisions on a wider territorial scale. Finally, I will examine some of the ways in which African American writers have responded to the violence of those representations.

The Lynching spectacle and the performance of race

2 The spectacle of lynching—the event itself—was staged by and for the white communities, and participating in it was a way to confirm the racial categories structuring American society through their enactment.6 The performative dimension of the ritual is acknowledged in newspaper reports that resort to theatrical metaphors. Not surprisingly, this is particularly evident in accounts of the lynching at the Livermore opera house. In a follow-up to its initial report, The New York Times ironized about the distribution of roles at the event: “In the residents of Livermore, the dramatic sense is strongly developed, and it is quite certain that the Negro who made in the Livermore opera house his first and last appearance on any stage will never again offend the delicate and tender sensibilities of his fellow townsmen” (April 22, 1911; Dray 178). The glib tone of the reports illustrates the low value assigned to black lives, even as it ironizes about the qualities attributed to the two races in the construction of racial difference. The white spectators assert their racial prerogative by lynching the black offender. The newspaper report does not need to designate the spectators’ race; merely by noting that the victim was “Negro,” it defines the audience as white. Will Potter was one among thousands of other African Americans put to death in cruel and unusual ways in the decades spanning the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.7

3 Through repetition, albeit with variation, the torture and murder of suspected wrongdoers acquired a ritual structure and sense. Like religious rituals, lynching served to bond the white community and to assert its power.8 African Americans were assigned the role of scapegoats in the drama of lynching. The typical accusation involved their imputed lust for white women. In fact, any form of encroachment on the white community’s prerogatives, from economic success to a nonsubmissive attitude, could set the process in motion.9 But, in contrast to the rituals Girard discusses,10 the sacrifice of the black pharmakos does not bring about the healing of social fractures. Instead, the ritual confirms the divided social order of post-Civil War American society by fashioning the victim into an icon of the abjection that signifies the binary opposite of whiteness. Thus, in participating in the lynching ritual, people affirm their membership in the dominant race.11 In response to shifting social and economic dynamics like the rise of consumer culture (Hale) or the fluctuations in the cotton market (Tolnay and Beck) the white community renewed and reiterated this most brutal performative act. Rites of terror consolidated the social divisions encoded in the Jim Crow laws.

4 As part of the lynching ritual, white participants would inscribe on the victims’ bodies the signs of their subordination to white rule so that their mutilated corpses came to emblematize racial difference. As Foucault insists: “torture forms part of a ritual. It is an element in the liturgy of punishment; … it is intended, either by the scar it leaves on the body, or by the spectacle that accompanies it, to brand the victim with infamy” (Foucault 34). When the lynching party had done its work, the victim’s body would

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often be displayed in a public place as a message to the community at large. This practice deliberately violates cultural customs that aim at honoring the dead, thereby showing the white supremacists’ disdain for the black victims, their families and their community.

5 This public torture was visually documented, and the photographs of the mutilated victims were circulated in the community. Ample evidence of this phenomenon is found in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, the book that gathers James Allen’s collection of lynching memorabilia. The lynching ritual focuses on the body, asserting white power by attempting to reduce the transgressor to a thing deprived of humanity. To this end, black bodies were cut up like meat both before and after death, with less respect or compassion than people show for animals. One of the artefacts in Allen’s collection is a set of three postcards showing the lynching of Frank Embree (July 22, 1899, Fayette Missouri). The set was bound together with purple thread. The triptych shows the lacerated victim from front and back and then displays his corpse hanging from a tree (Allen et al., Figures 42-44). The naked man stands in the foreground above the clothed observers, mounted on a wagon with hands chained together (Appendix, Figure 1).12 His body contrasts with those of the observers, all of whom are dressed in hats and jackets or waistcoats that proclaim their status as respectable citizens. The print heightens the contrast between the victim’s dark skin and hair and the crowd’s white shirts that merge with the pale sky in the background.

6 Burning the body reduced it to an even more grotesque deviation from the human form. One particularly horrifying postcard shows a charred corpse hung from a utility pole in the center of Robinson, Texas (Appendix Figure 2).13 Another way to abase the African American body was to make it into a figure of fun. In the photograph on the half title page that opens the Without Sanctuary collection, 14 a man’s corpse has been seated in a chair and his face grotesquely painted so that it looks like a clown’s. A hand holding a stick like a puppeteer props up the head (Appendix Figure 3). In another photograph, the spectators have placed a hat on the victim’s head. With his neck broken by the rope, the man looks like a comically pathetic marionette hanging from a string (Appendix Figure 4; cf. Allen et al. Figure 93). Besides illustrating black degradation, these photographs also convey the disturbing holiday atmosphere of the lynching ritual. The victims’ bodies are displayed like exhibits at circuses or freak shows, and the white community gathers round them in a celebratory mood, having suspended work and school for the occasion.

7 Officially, by the end of the 19th century, American justice had moved toward the modern forms of punishment that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish— incarceration and private executions. The lynching ritual corresponds to the older modes of public torture and execution in which the immensity of the crime justified the immeasurable suffering of the offender. The extreme cruelty of the punishments exacted on the bodies of those who transgressed racial boundaries recalls those that the regicide Damiens suffered (Foucault 3-5). Offences against the white community apparently constituted a form of lèse-majesté that was felt to require an extreme response.

8 Usually, vigilante justice operates where official structures are lacking, but this was not the case in the states where most of the racially motivated lynchings took place. In those states, African Americans accused of crimes could have expected speedy convictions by all-white juries. Why then did the community ignore legal procedures

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and revert to practices that resembled the archaic modes of torture, mutilation, and execution? Clearly, the lynching ritual showed the community that despite the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, African Americans were excluded from the rights and privileges accorded to American citizens. The lynchings that took place right outside the courthouse and in front of the town’s eminent citizens give ample proof of their disenfranchisement. A photograph found in Texas gives a visual record of one such lynching; it shows a man hanging from a tree in front of a courthouse whose architecture “suggests a Texas origin” according to the notes in Without Sanctuary (Appendix Figure 5).15

The violence of representation

9 While the actual performances of the lynching ritual are obviously not recoverable for analysis, their traces persist in the many images and writings produced in response to them. In fact capturing a visual record was an integral part of the lynching ritual’s violence. Pictorial or textual images of lynched black bodies restage the original murders, so that looking at the souvenir pictures or postcards and reading the accounts is the equivalent of attendance by procuration. Indeed, Horst Bredekamp insists that: “A form of feedback has probably always existed between acts of violence like lynchings and their photographic diffusion, to the extent that photographs were considered as part of the execution and the fact of looking at them as equivalent to participating in that execution” (Bredekamp 212).16 Photographs extended the spectacle far beyond its immediate moment, thereby enlarging the community of both participants and victims.

10 Through representation, the lynching ritual helped fashion the mythology of race. Those members of the public who saw themselves as white would find their claim to superiority confirmed in the representations of lynching. Those identified as black would see the reverse. The texts and images describing the rituals of terror ensure that their effect spreads over time and space. The testimonies to events renew them for the present, reinforcing their message of racial difference. Thus, they continue to inflict personal injury on African Americans, all the more so as racial divisions in America continue to be enforced through acts of violence. Responding at the start of the 21st century to the photographs collected in Without Sanctuary, Hinton Als writes: “I looked at these pictures, and what I saw in them, in addition to the obvious, was the way in which I’m regarded, by any number of people: as a nigger. And it is as one that I felt my neck snap and my heart break, while looking at these pictures” (Allen et al. 39). Als feels that the photographs address him personally, and his response is physical, felt in both heart and neck. Lynching is the ultimate form of racial marking; it defines its immediate victims as subalterns, even sub-humans, and that stigma extends to those who in any way resemble them. Thus Als continues: “I don’t know many people who wouldn’t feel like a nigger looking at these pictures, all fucked up and hurt, killed by eyes and hands that can’t stand yours” (Allen et al. 40). His comment on Allen’s collection suggests that the violence of racism resides in the eyes that see those with darker skin as abject and yet do not look away, as well as in the hands that act on that stigmatization either by taking part in the lynching, by taking the pictures, or by circulating them afterwards.

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11 Photographs, as Barthes so memorably insists, differ from other images in that their viewers “can never deny that the thing has been there” (Barthes 1981, 76; Barthes’ italics). And in a remark that seems particularly relevant to lynching photography, he writes: “In every photograph there is the always stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered” (Barthes 1977, 44). Some of the lynching images reveal that it was precisely the indexical nature of photography—its indisputable connection to the real—that encouraged the lynchers to pose with their victims. The photograph discussed above (Appendix Figure 4), in which one man points to the hanging body with his cane, draws the viewer’s eye not only to the lynch victim, but also, in a form of mise en abyme, to the witness’s own presence. In another photograph in which the white observers pose in front of the bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith (Allen et al., Figure 31), a man points to the bodies hanging above him with his finger, while looking directly at the camera (Appendix Figure 6; detail, Appendix Figure 7). These photographs, especially the latter, are reminiscent of Christian iconography where the pointing figure bears witness. In the Grunewald crucifixion (Appendix Figure 8), as in many other representations of the Passion of Christ, John the Baptist stands at the left of the cross, pointing with his right index finger, while in his left hand, he holds a book to show that Christ’s killing fulfills the Old Testament prophesies. The anachronistic prophet figure thus illustrates that the death has a purpose in the scheme of salvation. In contrast, the lynching photographs show that the victims are unequivocally annihilated. The only thing their deaths redeem is their purported infringement of white supremacy.

12 Images of the event travesty the most common purpose of privately owned photographs, which usually feature family members and seek to suspend time, keeping loved ones alive in memory even after they die.17 In the lynching photographs, the victim’s inert bodies contrast with those of the white spectators whose attitudes and expressions testify to their continuing vitality, to the triumph of life. In particular, the smiling couple in the left hand corner of the photograph of the lynching of Shipp and Smith seem happily engaged in the ordinary rituals of courting, while, under magnification, the photograph reveals, troublingly, that the girls clutch “ragged swatches of dark cloth,” souvenirs from the victims’ clothing (Allen et al., 176).

13 For the whites, a spectacle lynching was an important community event that local newspapers announced in advance. The spectators posed before the camera with their victims as if commemorating a festive celebration, and their photographs ensured that the lynching scene would have an afterlife. Some of the postcards in James Allen’s collection contain handwritten messages commenting on the photographic image. The postcard showing the charred corpse of Jesse Washington bears the following message from a young man to his parents: “This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe” (Allen et al., Figure 26). This use of the term for an outdoor picnic to describe the burning of a human being is not uncommon; Allen finds “repeated references to eating found in lynching related correspondence, such as ‘coon cooking,’ ‘barbecue,’ and ‘main fare’” (174-175). This discourse hints at the lynchers’ awareness that their ritual violates the rules of human decency. The irony that intimates violations of the taboo against cannibalism mediates the discomfort that their acts might have occasioned. At the same time, the culinary terms acknowledge the eminently social function of the ritual. For a young white man, attending a lynching was a rite of passage, a sign of his membership in his community.18

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14 Whether collected in family albums, made into postcards for keeping or for sending to friends and relatives, or published in newspapers, pamphlets or books, photographs of lynchings circulated through the nation’s territory and, in the process, accumulated textual commentary that either justified or condemned the events that produced them. Evidence of the national debate about lynching is gathered in a book published by P. L. James in 1893, the year of the events that it chronicles. It bears the very explicit title The Facts in the Case of the Horrible Murder of Little Myrtle Vance and its fearful Expiation at Paris, Texas, February 1st, 1893, with Photographic Illustrations. The book is unusual in the methodical way in which it structures the account of the lynching as a Texan morality play.19 It provides a double account of events: first, a dramatic narrative illustrated by photographs adopts the running metaphor of a morality play in which the sinner meets a fiery end; then, a collection of archival material such as newspaper reports, letters, and telegrams documents contemporary public opinion either for or against the lynching.

15 The narrative describing the lynching begins with a portrait of the villain. His depiction echoes the stereotyped racial profiles developed by 19th-century physiognomists, who claimed that the brains of black males were considerably smaller than those of other races and that this demonstrated their inferiority (Wiegman 53-55): A brawny muscular body, surmounted by a small head, developed wholly in the direction of the animal passions and appetites; devoid of any humanizing sensibilities, or sympathies, a quiet, industrious servant when sober, a fiend incarnate, when in liquor, such, briefly stated, is a view of the general character of Henry Smith, whose name and fame have been sounded down every avenue of the civilized world since February 1, 1893. (James 3)

16 Implicitly, a man of this racial type is tolerated as long as he knows his place as “a quiet, industrious servant,” but when he abandons that role, he becomes “a fiend incarnate.” The narrative relates how the rape and murder took place at “the scene of … devilish debauchery” chosen by the villain. A photograph of the murder scene with the caption “THE FINDING OF THE CHILD’S DEAD BODY” accompanies the text. The photograph suggests that in order to supplement the images taken at the lynching, the participants actually reenacted some of the scenes.

17 As in the medieval morality plays, the whole community participates in a drama that unfolds in such an orderly and pre-scripted manner that the author can divide it into four acts. In Act I little Mabel Vance is found to be missing: “The curtain rises on the afternoon of January 26th, 1893, and the play begins” (James 5). In Act II, the child’s body is discovered and “the people of Paris laid the desecrated body away to rest and then the curtain was raised upon the next act (8). The crime calls for justice, and the hunt for the perpetrator begins in Act III: “The capture was made and the fall of night formed the sable curtain which closed out the third act of the tragedy” (James 12). With a metaphor that echoes 16th-century revenge tragedy, the text makes the setting of the lynching an agent in the theatrical production as the earth’s rotation provides lighting effects and the night’s “sable curtain” falls on the third act.20 The final act stages the terrible retribution visited on the murderer: “a scaffold ten feet high was firmly erected, with every appliance necessary for the final act in the tragedy. … It rose up like a grim specter and bore the verdict of a united people upon its ominous front in the one word “Justice!” (James 14) Like the ghost in Hamlet, the “grim specter” of the scaffold cries out for revenge. Then the “play” culminates in the immolation of Henry Smith, a final act in which the whole community participates: “Slowly, impressively the

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cortege completed the circuit of the public square, passing down Church street toward the scene of the last act (James 18-19). In case Henry Smith’s ordeal in this “passion- play of Texas” recalls for us Christ’s suffering, the narrator presents it as the inversion of the crucifixion. Smith is cast as the “arch-villain” and his torments anticipate the fires of hell. In structuring events in this theatrical manner the writer lends dignity to a lynching that some of the contemporary commentators that he quotes in his book condemned for exceeding the boundaries of a purportedly civilized society.

18 Representing lynching as theatre prepared the spectators to anticipate a certain outcome. They would expect events to follow the generic conventions sketched out in the related discourse. Nevertheless, the meaning of the lynching spectacle was contested. The defenders of lynching argued that punitive violence was the only way to protect white womanhood and that “brutish black rapists” merited their horrific punishments. The critics charged that the lynchers’ behavior demonstrated the dehumanizing effects of their racist culture.

19 In circulating beyond the communities in which a lynching took place, the images that denoted black abjection could be made to take on new signification. The anti-lynching lobby used them to reverse the intended message. Just as abolitionists located runaway advertisements published in Southern newspapers and reproduced them in their own antislavery publications,21 organizations like the NAACP repurposed lynching photographs to turn their stigmatizing force back against the white perpetrators.22 In one group photograph redirected to the nation in a NAACP circular published in 1935, men, women and children surround the lynch victim, whose lifeless body fills the center of the frame (Appendix Figure 9).23 The text beneath the photograph commands viewers to avoid looking at the central figure: “Do not look at the Negro. His earthly problems are ended.” We are asked to concentrate instead on the figures in the background. There we see a cluster of people “neatly dressed” in summer clothes, as if for a Sunday outing, smiling for the camera. The text directs attention away from the victim in order to point out the callous way in which the white race dehumanizes its members in denying the humanity of its sacrificial victims.

20 The same tactic of repurposing lynching images can be found in a poster that appeared on the Senate chamber wall during the debate on an anti-lynching bill in 1937.24 Two photographs of burned bodies attached to trees accompany a text that denounces the impunity that such horrific travesties of justice meet with (Appendix Figure 10). The gruesome details of this lynching in Duck Hill, Mississippi were read at the hearings in the House of Representatives. The bill passed in the House but was filibustered in the Senate, and like other anti-lynching bills it failed to become law.

Writers’ responses to lynching

21 The redeployment of lynching images and the creation of texts that countered the ideology of white supremacy ultimately helped in the struggle to gain legal rights for black citizens. However, their diffusion also had the effect of spreading the terror that lynching aimed to promote. Once seen, the images are so deeply burned into the mind that any words that evoke them can inspire fear. In fact, in the autobiographical account of his youth, published in 1948, Richard Wright even claimed that words are more powerful than direct experience:

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I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already been conditioned to their existence as if I had been victim of a thousand lynchings. […] The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. (Black Boy 72-73)

22 Scenes of lynching haunt Wright’s fiction and poetry as well as many other works by African Americans. Though the anti-lynching propaganda helped change laws, it did nothing to change the assignment of roles in the ritual. Whatever moral interpretation one assigns to lynching, whites still play the part of the executioners while blacks are the victims.

23 A number of plays written in the first decades of the 20th century attempt to address the problem of representation.25 The tactic that playwrights adopted was not to stage lynching but to have it recounted either as an event in the remembered past—as in Angelina Wells Grimké’s Rachel (1916)—or, or, as an off-stage occurrence, in the manner of Greek tragedy—as in Georgia Douglass Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South (ca. 1925). The plays focus on the grief of the victims’ families, in particular on the figure of the sorrowing mother. In this way, those African American playwrights answer back to the supremacist assertion that lynching protects white womanhood. Not only do their plays show the speciousness of that argument, they also represent the repercussions of racial violence on black families. Nonetheless, the problem with these plays’ tragic resolutions is that they fail to provide the catharsis necessary to tragedy. Bloodletting cannot bring a return to order because in a racist society violence is itself order rather than its disruption.

24 The distinctively African American form of the blues employs a different tactic, exposing the contradictions of black life in poetic laments that do not resolve them, but permit an ironic distance from them. The blues might even have been invented as a way for the community to face the challenge of living with the ever-present threat of being lynched. Although blues lyrics tend to concentrate on personal troubles, Adam Gussow has argued that some of the songs also refer covertly to lynching. In one blues lyric, the singer contemplates suicide in a manner that resonates strangely with lynching: “Gonna build me a scaffold. I’m gonna hang myself/ Cain’t get the man I love, don’t want nobody else” (Gussow 382). Another song evokes a similarly suicidal impulse: Goin’ down to de railroad, Lay ma head on de track I’m goin’ to de railroad, Lay ma head on de track— But if I see de train a-comin’ I’m gonna jerk it back! (Hughes, Essays 213; Gussow 2).

25 The song from which these lines are taken is a bluesy reworking of a spiritual from slavery time that grafts the tragi-comic lines about a flirtation with suicide onto the older song. For Gussow, they refer obliquely to the way in which a lynching was sometimes covered up by placing the victim’s body on the railroad tracks to be further mutilated by the passage of a train (Gussow 2-3).

26 The blues is a way of coping with the “painful details and episodes of a brutal experience” (Ellison 79).26 The most poignant reference to lynching in a blues lyric is Abe Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit,”27 made all the more memorable by Billie Holiday’s haunting interpretation. The song turns the spectacle of horror back onto the Southern

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community, subverting its idyllic self-portrait as the “gallant south” into a nightmarish scene. Monstrous hybrids haunt the land in the form of “strange fruit” with “bulging eyes and […] twisted mouth.” The “scent of magnolias” mingles with that of “burning flesh.” The rottenness of the corpses infects the whole land, tainting the white community in the process. This song, as well as poems that embrace the blues aesthetic, like Jean Toomer’s “A Portrait in Georgia” from Cane (1923) or Langston Hughes’s “Song for a Dark Girl” (1927), borrow images from the lynching ritual to show the hypocrisy at the heart of the white Southern community. These evocations do not change the attribution of roles, but they expose the falsity of claims that it upholds law and decency.

27 Since lynching has been essential to the construction of racial difference, it has become entwined with ideas of African American identity. Richard Wright’s poem, “Between the World and Me,” gives a forceful account of the workings of this cultural mythology. It stages a recurrent literary topos—the discovery of the remains of a scene of lynching. It takes the blues form—“an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (Ellison 79)—and shows how the personal becomes general. Empathy with the lynched victim replicates the original insult, shaping African American subjectivity.

28 Walking in the woods, Wright’s persona “stumbled/ suddenly upon the thing...” The word “thing” has a double significance as both an affair, the business that took place in the woods, and an inanimate object, the dehumanized remains of a man. The poem lists all the elements that allow the speaker to reconstitute the lynching scene. The ashes and bones in the “grassy clearing” belong to a body that was once clothed in the garments that now lie “vacant,” “empty,” “ripped” and “lonely.” The last item of clothing in the list, “a pair of trousers,” announces the victim’s race and gender, for they are “stiff with black blood,” an obvious reference to castration. In emasculating the victim, the lynchers alleviate the cultural anxieties centering on black masculinity, although the specter of the sexual power attributed to black men lingers on in the adjective “stiff.” The dismembering and burning of the human body leaves the woods with a “charred stump,” “a blunt/ finger,” “torn limbs,” and burnt “veins.” And while the human victim can no longer protest, a burned sapling points “accusingly,” a pathetic fallacy intimating that nature cries out against “the thing” that has occurred.

29 In counterpoint to all these empty or broken things, the poem lists the objects left behind by the lynch mob: “buttons, dead matches,/ butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a/ drained gin-flask, and a whore’s lipstick.” In juxtaposing the remnants of a scene of torture and those of a festive community gathering, the poem evokes, in negative as it were, those lynching photographs that seem designed to celebrate the collectivity through a group portrait with a corpse. One can easily reconstitute the lynching scenario from the traces that the speaker describes, because it has been reenacted so frequently in American communities and reproduced so voluminously in texts and images. Indeed, the first word of the poem is “And,” a word that starts 12 of the poem’s 54 lines and thereby suggests through anaphora the nightmarish recurrence of the scene that follows.

30 The speaker’s discovery of the corpse is like a return of the repressed; the bones are “slumbering /forgottenly” until “the sooty details of the scene rose” like a ghost returning with a message for the living. In the course of the poem, the scene evoked metonymically in the opening stanza through the scattered objects takes on flesh. But

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in this replay the speaker himself is the victim who swallows his own blood, whose skin is coated with hot tar, and who is finally doused in gasoline. In a parody of resurrection he is immolated: “And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs.” In the end the speaker’s own body mirrors the remains he discovers. His own flesh becomes the abject “thing” that he found in the woods. Wright’s protest poem dramatizes the violence of lynching by reproducing it in the pattern of empathic repetition evoked by Hinton Als. The scene reconstituted by Wright’s speaker from its traces becomes the ritual he experiences in the flesh. The boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, do not hold. What begins as a lament for an unknown victim becomes the speaker’s own death song. While he assumes the pre-scripted role of victim, his executioners join with him in a recurring ritual that reduces existential possibilities to the nightmarish replaying of the same spectacle of violence.

31 The recursiveness of social configurations of race can be seen in the way in which the title of Wright’s poem echoes the opening line of W.E.B. Du Bois’s justly celebrated work, The Souls of Black Folk. That book begins, “Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question…” (Du Bois 1). Wright signifies on this famous line by re- signifying it: “the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting/ themselves between the world and me....” In the poem, racial difference is felt much more strongly than Du Bois’s veil, an image that suggests the almost unacknowledged, almost intangible ways in which the African American population is barred from access to the privileges that Americans claim. In Wright’s poem blackness is produced with matches, tar and gasoline. Division does not simply mean “two warring ideals in one dark body” (Du Bois 3); it means being literally torn to pieces.28 Taking up Du Bois’s phrase decades later and using it for the title of his autobiographical meditation Between the World and Me, Ta- Nehisi Coates describes racism as: “a visceral experience, … it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, breaks teeth” (10). Coates echoes Wright here, suggesting that the violence of lynching actually produces racial difference.29

32 In the works produced before the Civil Rights era, the indignation of protest doubles with bluesy lamentations for the way things are. The desire to change the status quo wars with the sorry reality of America’s racial history. Even in the 21st century, decades after the successes of Civil Rights protests, lynching still looms large as a possible final act in the drama of individual black lives. The bodies that the American cultural imagination perceives as black still inspire the fantasies and fears that make them vulnerable to attack. These fantasies and fears are the underside of the American Dream analyzed so perceptively by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me. Reprising Du Bois’s words and the title of Wright’s poem, Coates addresses his son on the burden of being born black in a land of white privilege. His letter to his son is a thoughtful, deliberative act of remembrance for past and present victims as well as an accusing portrait addressed to America, in the tradition of anti-slavery and anti- lynching literature. Coates explains how violence is necessary to maintain America’s racial divide because: “there is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream” (105). African Americans live in constant fear, fear that too often translates into violence against the people in their own communities and families. For Coates this explains why his father beat him “with more anxiety than anger” (15) and why “extravagant boys” had recourse to “a catalogue of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that [they] were in firm possession of everything they desired” (14). They were all “girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the

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Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away” (14). Although blacks rarely witnessed those scenes first hand, the traces left in photographs, in oral accounts, and in texts are enough to raise those ghosts.

33 The problem faced by artists and writers is that to represent lynching in any fashion is to contribute to perpetuating the cycle of terror, but to choose not to represent it is to leave representation in the hands of the racists. How then can black writers confront the problem of racist violence without making the black reader “feel like a nigger” (Als in Allen et al. 40)? To begin to change the cultural attribution of roles, writers would need to invent new rituals and new myths. In John Wideman’s ironic novel, The Lynchers, published in 1973, the characters try to reverse the ritual and stage the lynching of a white policeman, but at the end of the narrative, the only victims are African Americans. The novel stages the ineffectuality of violent alternatives to non- violent activism. The conspirators’ attempt to simply reverse the roles only justifies increased repression.

34 Toni Morrison finds a more effective way to circumvent the dualism of racist violence in her fiction. Instead of focusing on the dynamics of white supremacy and black victimhood like the earlier protest fiction or reinforcing the racial divide by having black executioners murder white victims, as in Wideman’s reversal of the pattern, Morrison’s novels largely place white characters off-stage, beyond the range of vision of the black community. Her 1975 novel, Sula, offers perhaps the best example of her oblique literary strategy for figuring supremacist brutality. The events narrated in the novel’s first chapter take place in 1919, a year that records numerous acts of violence asserting white supremacy. Black soldiers returning from the European front were particular targets, since their uniforms and medals suggested that they might be tempted to claim equal status with their white counterparts. The narrative features Shadrack, a soldier who has come back “blasted and permanently astonished by the events of 1917” (7). After being discharged from hospital, he is picked up by police who mistake his disorientation for drunkenness. An internally focalized narration stages a coded drama of lynching in Shadrack’s center of consciousness. Describing his struggle to untie the shoelaces that the nurse has tied in double knots, the narrator declares that “his very life depended on the release of the knots” (12). Without actually representing it, the narrative evokes the struggle of the hanged man against the rope that strangles him. My interpretation might seem far-fetched except that this scene is a prelude to Shadrack’s inauguration of National Suicide Day, an event that has “to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it” (14). In the ritual that he enacts every year on January third, he walks through the black neighborhood “with a cowbell and a hangman’s rope calling the people together. Telling them that this was their only chance to kill themselves or each other” (14). This ritual recalls the blues lyric about building a scaffold. It concerns the only violence that the black community can hope to control—that which they themselves inflict. In this way, Shadrack introduces order into the community without harming any of its members.

35 Another instance of ritual violence in Sula is Eva’s immolation of her only son. Through this act Eva tries, paradoxically, to restore the manhood that her son has lost during his absence from the Medallion community. Plum returns from the war a heroin addict and Eva descends painfully on her crutches from her habitual place in her bedroom to deal with the problem. In drenching her son with gasoline and applying the torch, she

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imitates the white lynchers’ actions, but her reasoning is the opposite. When Hannah asks her later why she killed Plum, she explains that he was “being helpless and thinking baby thoughts and dreaming baby dreams and messing up his pants again…” (70). She burns him not to humiliate him and reduce him to nothing, but to save him. The burning thus has a sacramental dimension: as Eva pours on the gasoline, Plum imagines “the great wing of an eagle pouring a wet lightness over him” (47). The description of the murder of Plum inverts the logic of lynching, staging violence as compassion, and destruction as salvation.

36 In Sula Morrison imagines new rituals that borrow from the dominant scenario but change it, allowing violence to empower the black victims. Eva Peace’s missing leg has the status of a legend in the Medallion community. When her husband abandons the family and they are on the verge of starvation, Eva disappears for several years and returns to Medallion minus one leg. The circumstances of the amputation are mysterious, but one of the explanations—that she “stuck it under a train and made them pay off” (31) recalls the blues lyric about the lure of the railroad track. Rather than being seen as a handicap though, Eva’s missing leg becomes a source of wealth and power.

37 Later, Sula’s gesture of cutting off the tip of her finger parallels the story of the missing leg and makes its connection with lynching more explicit. Sula responds to the white boys who threaten her and Nel by “pull[ing] out Eva’s paring knife” and cutting off the tip of her finger: “Her aim was determined but inaccurate. She slashed off only the tip of her finger. The four boys stared open-mouthed at the wound and the scrap of flesh, like a button mushroom, curling in the cherry blood that ran into the corners of the slate” (55). With this strange image of the flesh becoming vegetal, the text weaves a rich mesh of connected suggestions. Sula’s gesture evokes the division of the victim’s body that is part of the lynching scenario. Fingers, toes, charred bones, or pieces of clothing or hair were prized souvenirs of spectacle lynchings.30 At the same time, the “mushroom” flesh and “cherry blood” intimate rape. However, the food imagery also suggests that Sula’s sacrificial violence has a sacramental quality. In mutilating herself she anticipates and forestalls the threat posed by the girls’ white tormenters. In a powerfully suggestive new ceremony, Sula resemiotizes some of the elements of the supremacist ritual.

38 In the logic of Morrison’s novels, rituals of black-on-black violence are, paradoxically, the sole means of protecting black bodies in a racially divided society. A similar pattern is found in Beloved, where the slave mother’s only way of saving her daughter from slavery is to murder her: “If I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her” (200). The circular structure of Sethe’s declaration confirms that, like the acts of violence in Sula, her action mimics the exactions of the whites. The essential difference is that mutilating one’s own body or that of a loved one is a way of reclaiming one’s identity by extracting it from the mythic structure that upholds white supremacy.31

39 These innovative Morrisonian rituals evoke lynching to challenge the whites’ scopic privilege. They resemble the challenge issued by some of the anti-lynching texts evoked earlier, in turning the gaze onto the whites, but they manage to invest this reversal with a terrible force. In Beloved in particular, the mutilated black body takes on a power that resembles the terrifying head of the Medusa on Athena’s shield. In fact, Sethe becomes a figure of the Medusa for the white slavecatchers, as she stands before

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them, her “eyes with no whites […] gazing straight ahead” (151). The white men who come to claim Sethe’s family have to avert their eyes from the spectacle. This passage is written in free indirect discourse and seen from the white men’s point of view and its emphasis is on the impossibility of looking: They didn’t look at the woman in the pepper plants with the flower in her hat. They didn’t look at the seven or so faces that had edged closer in spite of the catcher’s rifle warning. Enough nigger eyes for now. Little nigger-boy eyes open in sawdust; little nigger-girl eyes staring between the wet fingers that held her face so her head wouldn’t fall off; little nigger baby-eyes crinkling up to cry in the arms of the old nigger whose own eyes were nothing but slivers looking down at his feet. (150)

40 Through anaphora, the text marks the reversal of the usual specular configuration. The whites cannot bear to look because the “nigger eyes” have become obsessively present for them. Most important, Sethe’s gaze cancels them out, making them disappear: “But the worst ones were those of the nigger woman who looked like she didn’t have any. Since the whites in them had disappeared and since they were as black as her skin, she looked blind” (150). To meet the Gorgon’s gaze, according to Jean-Pierre Vernant, is to be exposed to “the powers of the otherworld in their uttermost alterity, that of death, night, and nothingness” (301).32 Instead of meeting the slavecatchers in fear, Sethe confronts them heroically with an image of their own violence, reinforced by the power of love. Like the Gorgon, Sethe displays “a monstrousness based on a systematic scrambling of all the categories that the organized world distinguishes and that, in that face, mingle and interfere” (301-302).33 Sethe’s ambivalence, like Sula’s, makes her a pariah in her community, for these women refuse the asymmetrical configuration of power in the racial duality invented by the whites. They become heroic figures because of their aberrance from those social norms.

41 In conclusion, the ritualized lynchings of the early 20th century staged spectacles that aimed to enforce the color line rather than to uphold justice. Their enactment bonded members of the white community and assigned them the privileged roles of executioners and spectators, while the only roles available for blacks were those of victims. The white participants branded black bodies as abject, marking them with the stigmata of criminality and then photographing them and diffusing their images like modern versions of the Italian pittura infamante. Because of their persistence as icons that proclaim the vulnerability of black bodies, images of lynching continue to instill fear into members of the black community. Through its representations, spectacle lynching continues to serve as a theater of power that coexists with America’s federal institutions and renders them impotent. African American writers have to respond to that theatre of power that so forcefully assigns roles. Among the aesthetic strategies I have examined, Toni Morrison gives the most original and the most empowering reply to spectacle lynching. Rather than simply trying to counter one ritual of violence with another in a Nietzschean stand-off, she reassigns roles, so that the African American community take the parts of victims, executioners, and spectators. The spectacle is no longer aimed at indoctrinating, but at distancing. It forces readers, both black and white, to reflect on the meaning of violence rather than to take their places and their cues in a pre-scripted display of supremacy and abjection.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, James, Hinton Als, John Lewis, and Leon Litwack. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000.

Apel, Dora. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

---. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Bayley, Harold. The Shakespeare Symphony, an Introduction to the Ethics of the Elizabethan Drama. London: Chapman and Hall, 1906.

Bredekamp, Horst. Théorie de l'acte d'image. Trans. Frédéric Joly and Yves Sintomer. Paris: La Découverte, 2015.

Brundage, William Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002.

Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903.

Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues.” Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. 77-94.

Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015. https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-second-edition-summary.pdf

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Frisken, Amanda K. “‘A Song Without Words: Anti-Lynching Imagery in the African American Press, 1889-1898.” The Journal of African American History, 97 (Summer 2012): 240-269.

Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1977.

Gussow, Adam. Seems like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2002.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Vintage, 1998.

James, P. L. The Facts in the Case of the Horrible Murder of Little Myrtle Vance and Its Fearful Expiation at Paris, Texas, February 1st, 1893, with Photographic Illustrations. Paris, Texas: P. L. James, 1893.

Kato, Daniel. Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State. New York: Oxford UP, 2015.

Lindsey, Rachel McBride. “‘THIS BARBAROUS PRACTICE’: Southern Churchwomen and Race in the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942,” Journal of Southern Religion 16 (2014). http://jsreligion.org/issues/vol16/lindsey.html.

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Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870. New York: Columbia UP, 2009.

Markovitz, Jonathan. Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2004.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

---. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973.

Nevels, Cynthia Skove. Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness Through Racial Violence. College Station: Texas A. & M. UP, 2007.

Perkins, Kathy A., and Judith L. Stephens, eds. Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.

Peterson, Christopher. Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2007.

Pfeifer, Michael James. Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Raiford, Leigh. “Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory.” History and Theory 48 (2009): 112-29.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. The End of American Lynching. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2012.

Smith, Gerald L., Karen Cotton McDaniel, and John A. Hardin, eds. The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia. Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky, 2015.

Tolnay, Stewart Emory and E.M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930. Chicago: University of Illinois P., 1995.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Mythe et Tragédie en Grèce Ancienne. Paris: La Découverte, 1986.

Waldrep, Christopher. The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Wideman, John Edgar. The Lynchers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, 2011.

Wright, Richard. “Between the World and Me.” Partisan Review (July 1935), 18-19.

Wright, Richard. Works / Black Boy, the Outsider, Later Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991.

Young, Harvey. “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching.” Theatre Journal 57.4 (2005): 639-57.

APPENDIXES

Appendix

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Figure 1

The lynching of Frank Embree (July 22, 1899, Fayette Missouri)

Figure 2

The lynching of Jesse Washington (May 16, 1916. Robinson, Texas)

Figure 3

Circa 1900, location unknown. (Allen et al. 165).

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Figure 4

Figure 5

Unidentiﬁed corpse of African American male. Gallows, courthouse-jail, and windmill in background.

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Figure 6

Figure 7

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Figure 8

Detail from the Grunewald Cruciﬁxion Figure 9

NAACP Anti-Lynching poster (1935) Figure 10

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NOTES

1. I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their comments. Their suggestions, particularly concerning historical perspectives on the subject, were very helpful. 2. Some accounts give his name as Porter. 3. Grace Hale argues that with the development of consumer culture, the market for spectacles of black otherness grew, “and spectacle lynchings became a southern way of enabling the spread of consumption as a white privilege” (205). 4. Hale asserts that “spectacle lynchings became more powerful even as they occurred less frequently because the rapidly multiplying stories of these public tortures became virtually interchangeable” (206). After a period of relative silence on the part of historians, a large number of studies of the phenomenon have been published over the past decades, partly in response to the museum exhibition of James Allen’s collection of lynching photographs and its publication in 2000 in the book, Without Sanctuary : Lynching Photography in America. A conference at Emory University in 2002 in conjunction with the exhibition brought together more than 90 historians to discuss the theme “Lynching and Racial Violence in America : Histories and Legacies.” 5. The popular conception of lynching locates it in the American South and imagines its victims as exclusively African American. This is not strictly true, as documented victims also come from other racial and ethnic groups, and lynching took place in other areas of the country. Pfeifer’s chronological and geographical survey of lynching in Chapter One of Liberalizing Lynching : Building a New Racialized State finds that the practice was “rare in the mid Atlantic and New England yet comparatively prevalent in the Midwest and West and abundant in the South” (36). W. Fitsburg Brundage explains that “Lynching, like slavery and segregation, was not unique to the South, but it assumed proportions and a significance that were without parallel elsewhere” (Brundage 3). 6. In The End of American Lynching Ashraf Rushdy discusses how theatre and lynching are similar (58-59).

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7. Statistics and dates for these lynchings cannot be established unequivocally. A 2015 report by the Equal Justice Initiative asserts that between 1877 and 1950, 3,959 black people were killed in “racial terror lynchings” in a dozen Southern states. 8. Cf. Hale’s argument in Making Whiteness. Lynching historian Christopher Waldrep argues that “Lynching implied a killing carried out by a coherent community, an expression of localized popular sovereignty of the sort Southern white conservatives advocated” (68). 9. Steward Tolnay and Elwood M. Beck carried out an extensive study, published in their book A Festival of Violence, that correlates fluctuations in the price of cotton to incidents of lynching. In the cotton states, increases in lynching corresponded to decreases in the price of cotton. They show too that the number of lynchings dropped when the demand for black labor rose, notably with the northward migration of the 1920s. 10. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard argues that societies create cohesion through the ritual exclusion of a chosen scapegoat. The violent sacrifice of the chosen victim resolves the conflicts among group members. 11. Cynthia Skove Nevels validates this hypothesis in her study of five lynchings in which immigrants of different European nationalities, whose membership in the dominant community was not secure, played crucial roles in launching the ritual. 12. Cf. Allen et al., Figure 43. I thank James Allen for allowing me to reproduce photographs from his collection. Given the distressing effect these photographs have on viewers, I have chosen to include them in an Appendix at the end of this article rather than in the body of the text. 13. Allen identifies the postcard as “The lynching of Jesse Washington. May 16, 1916. Robinson, Texas” (Allen et al., Figure 26). 14. The notes on the plates in Without Sanctuary describe the postcard in the following way : “The bludgeoned body of an African American male, propped in a rocking chair, blood-spattered clothes, white and dark paint applied to face, circular disks glued to cheeks, cotton glued to face and head, shadow of man using rod to prop up the victim’s head. Circa 1900, location unknown. Gelatin silver print. Real Photo postcard. 5 3/8 x 2 7/8" (Allen et al. 165). 15. Without Sanctuary describes the photograph (Plate 2) in the following manner : “Unidentified corpse of African American male. Gallows, courthouse-jail, and windmill in background. Nine onlookers, two young boys. 1900-1915. Location unknown. Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 3 x 5 in. The architectural details of the courthouse in the background suggest a Texas origin. Found in Texas” (Allen et al. 166). 16. My translation. « Une sorte de rétrocouplage exista probablement de tout temps entre les actes de violence tels que les lynchages et leur diffusion photographique, dans la mesure où les photographies étaient considérées comme un élément même de l’exécution et le fait de les regarder comme une participation à cette exécution » (Bredekamp 212). 17. See Barthes’s moving account of his search for a photograph that “accords with [his] mother’s being and [his] grief at her death” (Barthes 1981, 63-71). 18. This is the meaning that Richard Wright gives it in his short story “Going to Meet the Man.” 19. Hale argues that this lynching was distinctive in that it was “the first blatantly public, actively promoted lynching of a southern black by a large crowd of southern whites. Adding three key features—the specially chartered excursion train, the publicly sold photograph, and the widely circulated, unabashed retelling of the event by one of the lynchers—the killing of Smith modernized and made more powerful the loosely organized, more spontaneous practice of lynching that had previously prevailed” (207). 20. Harold Bayley lists some quotations from Tourneur, Beaumont and Fletcher and Marston, among others, in which the night is figured as a black or sable curtain (308-309). 21. See Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print for a discussion of the work Theodore Weld and his wife, Angelina Grimké, and her sister, Sarah Grimké, accomplished in sorting through thousands

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of Southern newspapers to gather the documentation on slavery for Weld’s 1839 American Slavery as It Is : Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (Loughran 354-359). 22. See the discussions by Dora Apel and Amy Wood. Amanda K. Frisken demonstrates that from the 1890s African American newspapers published drawings depicting lynchings to protest against racial violence and to counter the illustrations in the supremacist press (for example, the National Police Gazette) depicting black men as rapists. 23. Rachel McBride Lindsey identifies the victim as Rubin Stacy. Lindsey contextualizes the photograph as an effort to sway public opinion in favor of anti-lynching legislation : “by framing racially-motivated vigilantism as crime threatening white communities as well as black, as a scourge on democracy instead of specific murderous acts.” 24. Senator Bennett Clark (D-Mo.) admitted being responsible for the poster’s appearance (Wood 198). 25. A number of these plays are gathered in the collection edited by Kathy A Perkins and Judith Stephens. 26. “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (Ellison 79). 27. The poem first appeared under the pseudonym Lewis Allen in the New York Teacher (1937) and later in the New Masses. Billie Holiday recorded it in 1939. 28. Later on in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois suggests the terror that sustains America’s racially divided society when he speaks of the birth of his son : “Holding in that little head—ah, bitterly ! —he unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand—ah, wearily !—to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw the shadow of the Veil as it passed over my baby, I saw the cold city towering above the blood-red land” (209). The “blood-red land” conflates Georgia’s red clay and the spilled blood of black Americans, while “the cold city” suggests the indifference of the dominant community. 29. Leigh Raiford argues that for African Americans, lynching and lynching photographs have constituted a sort of “primal narrative” of the black experience of citizenship (117). 30. Harvey Young studies this practice at length in his essay, “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching,” discussing how lynching keepsakes serve as souvenirs, fetishes and remains. In Dusk at Dawn W.E.B. Du Bois recounts how he joined the fight against lynching in earnest when, after Sam Hose had been lynched in front of two thousand spectators, he saw “that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store” in Atlanta, for sale as souvenirs. See the discussion in Phillip Dray’s opening chapter. 31. As Christopher Peterson points out, for Sethe “To kill her own daughter is to claim that daughter as her own over and above the master’s claim. […] But if to kill is to claim as one’s own, then the reverse is also true : the claim of possession is always violent” (78). 32. My translation. « Exposé au regard de Gorgô, l’homme s’affronte aux puissances de l’au-delà dans leur altérité la plus radicale, celle de la mort, de la nuit, du néant » (Vernant 301). 33. My translation. « Une monstruosité basée sur un brouillage systématique de toutes les catégories que le monde organisé distingue et qui, en ce visage, se mêlent et interfèrent » (Vernant 301-302).

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ABSTRACTS

The spectacle lynchings of the early 20th century performed a ritual that assigned roles and distributed racial identities in American society. Representation was an essential component of the ritual, ensuring its diffusion in the images and narratives produced in response to the events. Beginning with a discussion of the lynching photography gathered in James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, this essay goes on to consider the difficulties that African American writers confront in responding to the images that cast their people in the role of victims. Richard Wright’s poem “Between the World and Me” illustrates how representations of the lynching ritual induce a recurrent cycle of terror that haunts his black speaker. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 book demonstrates how the political, literary and existential problem endures. Recognizing how representation ensures the replication of racial divisions, Toni Morrison evokes the lynching spectacle in ways that scramble its categories and suggest new configurations of power.

Les spectacles de lynchages du début du 20ème siècle accomplissaient un rituel qui assignait des rôles et définissait les identifications raciales au sein de la société américaine. La représentation était une composante essentielle du rituel facilitant sa diffusion à travers les images et les récits produits à la suite des événements. Partant d’une discussion des photographies de lynchage contenues dans l’ouvrage de James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, cette étude analyse les difficultés auxquelles les écrivains afro-américains doivent faire face pour traiter les images qui placent leur peuple en position de victimes. Le poème de Richard Wright, “Between the World and Me,” illustre la façon dont les représentations du rituel de lynchage déclenchent un cycle récurrent de terreur qui hante l’énonciateur noir. Le livre de Ta-Nehisi Coates publié en 2015 montre la persistance de ces problématiques aussi bien existentielles que politiques et littéraires. Tout en reconnaissant le rôle des représentations dans la reproduction des clivages raciaux, Toni Morrison évoque le lynchage spectacle dans des termes qui redéfinissent ses catégories et suggèrent de nouveaux rapports de forces.

INDEX

Keywords: African American, blues, identity, lynching, photography, representation, race, Beloved, Sula, Between the World and Me, “Between the World and Me” Mots-clés: afro-américain, blues, littérature, lynchage, photographie, représentation, race, Beloved, Sula, Between the World and Me, “Between the World and Me”

AUTHORS

WENDY HARDING Professor Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Bodies of War and Memory: Embodying, Framing and Staging the Korean War in the United States

Thibaud Danel

1 This study of the Korean War (1950-3) endeavors to analyze the war phenomenon in its countless bodily representations of then and now. Based on the distinction that war and memory are fundamentally embodied, this diachronic research will make the best of the specificities of the war in Korea to inquire into the porous nature of the theoretical line that historically relates and yet inevitably divides the two. Since bodies are shaped by war as much as they shape war, bodies of memory can indeed be expected to abide by the same dynamics.

2 The overall purpose of this paper is to determine why war can be described as an embodying event or, more specifically, how the bodies of war contribute to shape the bodies of memory and thereby affect how the war will be remembered. As representations, bodies shape the cultural and historiographic divide that still exists between the different actors of the Korean War. Whereas in the United States the conflict became known as the “Forgotten War” after British historian Clay Blair published his famous The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950-1953 (1987), it remains very actual in the Korean Peninsula where new bodies are still being found today. And yet, as many scholars have suggested, the war has been forgotten on the US soil because it took place far from home, in “a country they did not know” (as the plaque reads at the Korean War Memorial in Washington, DC) and, apart from the revisionists, who argued that the war was a civil war and consequently moved away from the traditional ‘free world vs. communism’ paradigm, most people still overlook its local causes and consequences.

3 A first concern, then, in dealing with the use of bodies in a process of remembrance and forgetfulness, will be to address the corporeality of war in theory before attention is paid to the Korean War itself. To start with, it will be compelling to determine to what extent the body (as a concept encompassing numerous bodies) can not only represent, but also relate war. Drawing on what M. Joly once called the “body-war diptych”, this

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paper will then take the case of the Korean War to study how the American body was framed in the war theater during the war. Finally, it will reflect on the memorialization of the bodies of war as a staging process shifting the focus away from the war onto its remembrance and commemoration.

Theoretical framework

4 Using the corporal metaphor of birth to describe the causal relationship that exists between war and history, French polemologist G. Bouthoul once argued that “History was born out of war.”1 For that reason, war ranks among the oldest topics of historiography. Since it is “fundamentally embodied,” as it was more recently argued, the war phenomenon “occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways.” (McSorley 1) If the war phenomenon is indeed an embodying event, it suggests that the body is the smallest common denominator to represent war. In this respect, bodies are endowed with some relational quality enabling them to relate war, in all the meanings of the term. Conversely, as it will be contended, they can also be denied their relationality and be reduced to “invulnerable” war machines as soon as they are given a function that serves the State apparatus, and become part of it.

The body and the representation of war

5 Despite its apparent centrality, the body struggled to make its mark in official war histories which often remain as remote from the soldiers who fought them as from the civilians who died because of them.2 As disembodied war histories failed to offer any critical thinking about the bodies of war, it might appear that the day-to-day corporeal experience of war has mostly been neglected to the benefit of more quantitative approaches to war historiography. For that reason, the Korean War is often remembered for the total number of US military deaths it caused, estimated at 54,246 by the Pentagon, after only three years of conflict. By comparison, total US military deaths for the Vietnam War were estimated at 58,209 (between 1961 and 1975). Counting bodies, as during the Vietnam War, was also a means to determine which side was winning. Such quantitative reductionism cannot comprehensively account for the cultural and political realities constitutive of war. Though it may certainly conjure up a clear picture of how ferocious the Korean War was in retrospect, it fails to give full account of the dead bodies of war as socialized constructs (Lock 135) and might eventually prove erroneous.3

6 As the etymology of the phrase suggests, the corporal reality of war (or corporeality4) cannot be reduced to casualty statistics, body counts and other miscellaneous data sources, especially when they exclude non-military personnel or indigenous civilian victims. As it involves actors other than soldiers, war is unmistakably more than just the sum of a belligerent’s total military deaths. A more organizational approach to the corporeality of war reveals that the body, in its most abstract interpretation, is also used to represent the United Nations as “a world body” that excluded North Korea but acknowledged the sovereignty of South Korea; or any other “political body” beyond the military-civilian dichotomy. In this respect, other relevant occurrences include “propaganda” bodies and, perhaps more interestingly, bodies “still in existence” like UNTOCK (Sandler 2015).5

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7 In more linguistic and rhetorical terms, when war historians qualify the body (for example, the “demoralized body” of a platoon mentioned by Hastings 2015), they insist on more qualitative aspects of historical research and provide a view from the ground, giving access to the multiple layers of reality making up not only the war phenomenon, but also the human experience of war. By the same token, historians may also use the concept to refer to the “body of records” that they used to build their narrative, and posit it as more or less reliable.6 All these different meanings exist because the body is a relational concept in the first place.

The body as a relational concept

8 In a cultural perspective, the body is thus the least common denominator to grasp what is meant by the corporeality of war. As it embodies war, the body must be understood as something more than a representation. As prolific scholar K. McSorley recently demonstrated, war is enacted and reproduced through some “affective dispositions, corporeal careers, embodied suffering, and somatic memories that endure across time and space” and the body implies a myriad of “embodied practices, structures of feeling and lived experiences” through which the war phenomenon “lives and breeds.” (McSorley 1-2) Already in Kant’s transcendental approach to the body, embodiment referred to the forms of intuition which constitute a subject’s experience (Hengehold 90). Drawing on the Kantian body, Deleuze suggested that it had to be conceived as an intensive reality (Parr 37).

9 The concept of corporeality lies at the crossroads between history and memory. Taken as a relational concept or as a “relational thing” (Harvey 98), the body models the boundaries between real experience and knowledge, on the one hand, and psychological events, or acts of speculation and imagination, on the other (Hengehold 105). War, understood as a set of intersubjective and interactive bodily practices, is regulated by formally distinct codes which vary from one culture to another and give the war its color. As suggested by many Korean War Memorials, for instance, the most recurring feature giving the war its color would be the nylon twill hooded ponchos US soldiers used as extra covering for warmth or to produce tent shelters in the winter. Initially introduced in 1950 (Stanton 244-5), they were integrated into the design of the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington DC and that of many other local memorials. Not only do they show “the appetite for mediated representations of war,” they also reveal “current popular fears about vulnerability of the body” (McSorley 78, 86-87) and expose a particular body experience as they act as a reminder of the extreme weather conditions those suggestively heroic soldiers found themselves in.

10 It follows that the body may be described as the product of several “relations,” “actions” and “reactions,” that is to say, a number of characteristics or qualities that will single it out as the body of a combatant, a victim, a witness, a veteran, an enemy, a hero etc. War being “the most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate” (Scarry 71), specific modes of embodiment may manifest in various ways to convey the corporeal experience of the war phenomenon and, in turn, shape its memory. This, as it will be argued, presupposes that the embodied nature of war and the bodily issues it encapsulates, like corporal violence, can be disavowed as a

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result of social and cultural conventions. Once deprived of its relational quality, in other words, the body becomes part of the war machine.

The body as war machine

11 The corporeality of war as a transdisciplinary concept cannot escape some theoretical considerations on politics and culture to understand how the body is shaped in the context of war. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari once affirmed, any State apparatus must capture the body of the soldier and shape it into a war machine. Understood as such, the body is shaped by the world of machinery (Pick 212), which means that it is disciplined and transformed according to specific expectations whose norms, codes and territories are fixed by culture and may—or may not—vary from one conflict to another. In fact, the evolution of the body seems to be determined not only by the damage war inflicts upon it, but also by an interplay of specific bodily practices, from prewar military training to post-war memorial ceremonies, regulated by the control mechanisms and institutions constitutive of what M. Foucault called the “anatomo- politics of the human body” or biopower (Foucault 1990, 135-136).

12 Though unquestionably theoretical, this problem of power relations between the military and politics popped up in many instances throughout the Korean War, most notably in debates over the use of the nuclear bomb. With the State being deprived of any war machinery of its own (Deleuze and Guattari 2), the dividing line between the military and political power is not invariably clear, even more so in post-war Korea where authoritarian régimes continued to develop immediately after the Panmunjom Armistice Agreement (27 July 1953). Originally rejecting the contention that wars “required the supreme military commander to have absolute leadership in every respect” (Ludendorf), some political theorists (Beck and Clausewitz) agreed on the idea they were essentially a “continuation of politics” (Handel 243).

13 Since the body becomes both an object and a target of power (Foucault 1991, 136), biopower instigates the dehumanizing tendencies characteristic of war: the way enemy bodies are treated, the prisoner-of-war and repatriation issue, or even cases of corporal violence against non-combatants are all patent manifestations of these tendencies. Conversely, the body as the “site of common human vulnerability” (Butler 2003, 15) implies that any conflict “risks the contingency… of sensory and affective experience of war” (McSorley 9) as it gives all the belligerents the possibility of crossing the friend/ foe divide beyond military imagination and political ideologies (Cole 34). The possibility actually existed during the Korean War because, as a civil war, it opposed the two parts of a country that had never been separated until then: the language and culture were the same on both sides of the 38th Parallel. Considering Korea was separated after Japan’s defeat in 1945, this reflected a constant concern on behalf of the men and women who fought to defend a country and a people that they did not know as there was no way non-Korean soldiers could distinguish between the two sides, except by their uniforms. The body, when incorporated to the war machine, negates a part of the corporeal experience of war and limits it to the message the State apparatus wants to vehiculate.

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The bodies of war

14 Given that the notion of representation is a multifaceted one, it follows that the representation of bodies (the body-image) must be distinguished from the bodily experience of war (the lived body). This in turn suggests that the body should be understood as an all-encompassing concept wavering between the different models we introduced. To enrich these models, we will consider three different media that served to “frame” the Korean War to analyze how the Korean War was embodied then. In theory, these models echo J. Butler’s thesis that there existed three ways of framing. First, to “bring the human into view in its frailty and precariousness” which arguably corresponds to the lived body in that it insists on the relational quality of the body and “allows us to stand for the value and dignity of human life, to react with outrage when lives are degraded or eviscerated.” Second, there are “frames that foreclose responsiveness” which are more redolent of the body-image insofar as they negate one’s emotional response and limit the bodies of war to mere representations. There finally exist “alternative frames” whose content “would perhaps communicate a suffering that might lead to an alteration of our political assessment of the current wars” (Butler 2009, 77) which, as it will be contended, roughly echoes the idea that the body can be used as part of the war machine to communicate and condition one’s view of the war.

War propaganda

15 The study of war propaganda provides a first insight into the war phenomenon and its bodily representations. Propaganda indeed cultivates a certain artistic taste of the bodies of war, regardless of the ideology that produces them in the first place (though they reflect different ideologies in the end). In both the Fascist aesthetics used by DPRK and US mobilization posters, soldiers are depicted as strong and proud to serve.7 Because national identities always reflect “a body of people who feel that they are a nation,” as R. Emerson put it (102), nations (or groups of nations) can thus be embodied, just as the soldiers and the civilians embody different aspects of the same war. As such, body-images of soldiers making the Korean War were meant to stand for specific ideals and reflect a particular national and historiographic discourse accordingly.

16 Every belligerent in the war theater used more or less artistic images of the body for propaganda, though in different ways. Yet all have in common that nations were embodied by, at least, one body, preferably a soldier but not exclusively. North of the 38th Parallel, soldiers were represented in the form of “idealized bodies” symbolizing North Korea’s military might and determination while the “frail bodies” of women and children were used to denounce US misdeeds, thereby blurring the boundary between the body-image and the lived body. Conversely, enemy bodies tended to be vulgarized to the extreme. In North Korea, propaganda posters in English were sometimes made to lull American soldiers out of the war. On one of them, an obese Uncle Sam is shown making money out of the blood of soldiers and putting it in a big bag with the inscription “war profits” written in big red letters.8 Furthermore, the body of war captives could be used for propaganda (Young 2014, 59), in Maoist China (Issermann 102) as in South Korea.9

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17 In propaganda as in military strategy, the body personifies the war phenomenon and can be used to play on the power of affect to turn public opinion for or against the war. 10 In the 1952 presidential campaign, the Republican Party cited the high—and often exaggerated—number of casualties to gain in popularity (Young 2014, 18). Aside from partisan and ideological rifts, both national and international, new historians—though in reality the idea was not so novel (Stone 1952)—have also emphasized that the US had to “sell” (Barron 18) the Korean War to similarly influence public opinion at a time when drastic cuts on the defense budget had been made. War propaganda then capitalized essentially on a “blood campaign” (Casey 323) promoting not only the importance of medical teams in Korea, but also the role of women in the fighting,11 as during the Second World War.

18 Of course, body representations used in war propaganda emphasized very little of the corporeal experience of war because they had an irremediable political character causing the bodies of war to be reduced to national identity and ideology, hinging on the war machine model. While North Korea made—and still makes—posters to suggest the violence committed by (or against12) American invaders, the South tended to appeal directly to the enemy and referred to the common experience of the front to convey their political ideas. Consistent with the psychological warfare tactics promoted by the US Far East Command when the war broke out, South Korean leaflets thus depicted the United Nations instead of the US,13 turning the American body into a larger geopolitical “world body” while, on the contrary, North Korea tended to limit it to the US exclusively (Sandler 2002, 201).

War pictures

19 As they sometimes happened to be used for propagandistic purposes, war pictures (in the loose sense of the term, thus including movie pictures) make up another area of investigation into the bodily representations of the conflict in Korea because they seemingly take a more invigorating look at the war phenomenon and acquire their meaning through the discourse they communicate (Barthes 1964, 67-68; Barthes 1970). In the early days of the war, leaflets issued by the UN comprised pictures of soldiers taking military training or helping the locals to promote the idea that this was a “collective action to enforce peace,” that all the nations engaged in Korea were fighting under “a flag that stands for peace, collective security and the progress of all peoples,” that the people were welcoming (UN-DPI). This certainly reflected the official discourses of the Truman years, and especially MacArthur’s, because the Korean War was effectively considered as another “crusade” (Diehl 13) in the aftermath of the Second World War. Soldiers were thus to abide by a Just War doctrine they were supposed to embody to make American participation to the conflict legitimate.

20 In the first months of the war the media reflected official political and military thinking, as the picture of MacArthur in the 10 July 1950 issue of Time embodying Truman’s “police action” suggests (with the caption “His job: to police the boundaries of chaos”). Journalism had by then already become “a primary companion to war” (Cole 32) which meant that war correspondents and photojournalists were regularly commanded to limit their coverage of military operations in the war theater, thereby impacting on the mediation of the Korean conflict between the public on the home front and the soldiers in the battlefield. It did not mean that they moved away from the

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corporeal experience of war, but they surely selected certain pictures to reflect official views, even after the war, as shown for example in a photograph where an American soldier is seen standing amongst the dead bodies of his brothers-in-arms (Potter 1954). Official war reports generally focused on Communist war crimes, fiddling with different quantitative and qualitative representational strategies of depicting bodies to exacerbate ideological rifts (Young 2014).

21 The representations of American bodies of war changed in December 1950 after MacArthur decided in favor of censoring any picture that would contradict Truman’s National Security Council’s top-secret document known as NSC-68. The latter is pivotal to understand how the war was to be depicted at home: soldiers fighting under the UN flag embodied not only the polarization of power opposing “the slave society” and “the free world”, but also “the rapid buildup of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world” as the document reads.14 After photojournalist David D. Duncan published a photo-essay for Life, the press began to use his quite anti- heroic images of ordinary soldiers facing danger away from home to question the war’s goals (Marien 334-335). Among these were pictures that broke with the usual depictions of the war as they showed handfuls of wounded soldiers, sometimes even carrying improved machine guns as they were ill-equipped, as well as corpses piled away in a truck. Instead of pride, power and freedom, their bodies suggested pain, sorrow, powerlessness or even death (only the boots of dead American privates were shown).

22 Given that they were inspired by reports provided by official discourses, war films—like war pictures—were controlled too. Despite such restrictions, S. Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets (1951) started a cinematographic tradition that has remained quite a recurring theme in Korean War historiography and commemoration. Fuller’s previous movie (The Steel Helmet, 1951), the first American movie to depict the Korean War, had already reworked the conventions of the movie genre as it introduced a cynical war veteran who reflected Fuller’s views (whereby individualism is necessary for survival), but the movie was never really considered as subversive as Fixed Bayonets (except by Victor Riesel).15 In the absence of any “Ramboesque” heroes (a phrase used by historian Paul M. Edwards in his Guide to Films on the Korean War), the latter paid much attention to the lived experience of war as it depicted the bodies in dismay of exhausted US soldiers as well as the psychological warfare and internal dissensions they were confronted to on the battlefield, especially in the cold of winter.

23 In Fixed Bayonets, US soldiers are deprived of their humanity. This dehumanizing inclination is reflected in shots showing disembodied legs running, thereby obfuscating or disfiguring the aesthetic characteristics of the war body and leaving only a biological and powerless body instead, a form without content. The film shows privates of different nationalities evoking their living conditions on the battlefield, a means that Fuller used to share his own war experience during the Second World War. His film employed many actors but only a handful among them were credited. In full gear, during the night, they are barely recognizable, perhaps to make them more like ordinary, unexperienced people and bring their vulnerability into the open. What makes the movie even more compelling, however, is how the bodies of soldiers become like narratives, moving away from an action-based depiction of war to start asking questions about it.

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War narratives

24 As R. Schickel once argued about war movies, it seems that war narratives, a third area to investigate, generally fall into two denominations: “there are those that […] capture the carnage and turn that imagery into antiwar statements and there are those that simply use the topic as an occasion for heroic adventure.” (Fuller VII) While Fuller’s arguably escaped both, these two categories have in common that they shed light on the narrative aspect of framing bodies that become scripted: on the one hand, in the form of normative binaries like heroes and antiheroes, allies and enemies, aggressors and victims, paragons and counterexamples etc. On the other hand, in the form of alternative frames which, as Butler assumed, “reveal human vulnerability and spark political response” (Conley-Zilkic 327) as in Fixed Bayonets in which the rear guard platoon deals with “people that are not exactly friendly” rather than enemies.

25 As he wanted to turn his wartime recollections of the Second World War into a screenplay (Fuller VIII), Fuller used the Korean War to emphasize depression and fatigue, the war experience the bodies that lived it: “You’re not aiming at a man. You’re aiming at the enemy. Once you’re over that hump, you’re a rifleman.” War bodies are dehumanized and mechanized as the enemy becomes something other than a man, while the shooter becomes something more than a man (a “rifleman”), like a hybrid. This quote not only illustrates the body as a war machine, it also mirrors Butler’s alternative frames. What is interesting here is that the soldier makes explicit his realization that he and his brothers-in-arms are war machines, but the very realization also suggests that he is not ready to be like that, a feeling that anyone can relate to. A few brief exchanges are particularly noticeable as they still echo contemporary debates in Korean War historiography: Private 1: They told me it was going to be a police action. Private 2: Why didn’t they send cops ?

Ramirez: Tell me, Sarge, why were we picked for this job ? Rock: Regiment’s saving the cream for the rougher stuff ahead Whitey: Cream ? Well, what are we, skimmed milk ?

26 As shown by the quotes, in the form of explicit questions, the film mirrors Fuller’s political response to the Korean War. As the soldiers are turned into discursive manifestations of that response, they allegedly become textual bodies or, to extend the metaphor, like pieces of testimonial evidence framed by a specific historical and historiographic discourse which will determine the way the frames should be read to make sense as representations.16

27 The point here is that the soldiers embody an alternative discourse. Indeed, it is precisely because the movie asked questions about the war that it was considered subversive. In retrospect, moreover, their narrative has become part of the corpus of war (in textual terms). Such scripted bodies, it must be said, are not limited to fiction. As they reflect specific historical narratives, they may also be found in non-fiction as, for instance, in the Korean War Atrocities Report to the Senate published as a result of Korean War hearings which took place in early December 1953, 128 days after the Armistice Agreement was signed (Potter 1954). The hearings compiled the testimonies of veterans focusing on Communist war crimes only. The corporal mistreatment of POWs was regularly emphasized as the testimonies described the physical abuse and torture inflicted on US soldiers. It is not surprising to find congruence between fiction

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and non-fiction in the cultural representations of the war, such as in the movie The Steel Helmet (1951) where some North Korean soldiers are shown dressed as civilians. The tendency of using one’s body to trick the enemy was mentioned in the battle reports, which were later used to write and justify the most “abhorrent” aspects of the war.17

28 Conversely, the Chinese National Red Cross published a compilation of testimonies by American (and British) soldiers which it presented to the UN during the war, hence turning the war machine against itself. Although it was quickly dismissed as war propaganda, the report was entitled Out of Their Own Mouths and focused on the corporal violence inflicted on Korean locals by the soldiers, like the collective rape of a thirteen-year old, native civilians who were buried alive, napalmed bodies, the frequent bombing of non-military personnel, mass graves etc. There were three or more ditches in which a mass heap of dead bodies was strewn about. […] There were probably 1,000 or more human beings. […] The rotten odor of human flesh laid heavy on the morning breeze (National Red Cross of China, 43-44).

29 Other cases of corporal violence in the Chinese report mentioned that American soldiers had been instructed to shoot at anything dressed in white (IV), mutilated bodies with their hands tied behind their backs (20), bodies dismembered by US soldiers such as those of local women whose wombs were ripped open by bayonets (49) etc. All these allegations certainly desacralized American soldiers as it compared the US to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan while it naturally celebrated the good treatment of captives, north of the 38th Parallel.

The bodies of memory

30 Today, such cases of bodily violence evoke current and continuing debates in Korean War historiography, notably after the Nogeun-Ri Incident raised the genocide question.18 They show us how the bodies of war were staged to establish a friend/foe divide. In this part, it will be compelling to analyze why the bodies of war did more than simply serve propagandist purposes on both sides. By shaping the bodies of memory, the bodies of war also determined its historiography and coincidently gave new life to oral histories either supporting or rejecting it. Indeed, it will be argued that, through the staging of the bodies of memory, the legacy of testimonies and the memory of historical events—what P. Bourdieu would have called the “memory pad” of the body to designate its accumulated history (Bourdieu 2000, 141)—have thus challenged the informative or evaluative speech and acts of language (what R. Barthes called “la parole informative”19) that seem to constitute consensus narratives about the Korean War and how it should be remembered.

Memorializing the bodies of war

31 The memorialization of war bodies taken as discursive productions mediatized by language cannot be alienated from the social practice making them knowledgeable.20 Taking bodies of memory as social forms redolent of Bourdieu’s habitus21 is an effective approach to understand how narratives about the body are built in the practice of justification and reformulation, “like a social project of mutual cooperation and of discursive change” (Andrieu 14). The staging of bodies of memory through the process of memorialization and rememoration (Nora) implies that the meanings that the bodies

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of war convey are produced and reproduced during collective acts of remembrance. In this respect, the memorialization of the Korean War cannot simply be explained by the “memorial mania” (Doss 2010) that has swept across the US since the 1980s. Many of these bodies of memory were produced to fit into the design of war memorials. Given that most were the result of local initiative, these memorials virtually reflect the democratization and ensuing multiplication of “private memories” foreshadowed by P. Nora (292). Although they all have in common that they depicted the lived experience of war, the way they were staged may also differ considerably from one state to another, reflecting a divided body of nations with different local concerns and, to some extent, different visions of the events.

32 In theory, each of these memorial sites has some historiographic value in the way bodies were staged to depict scenes of daily life in and behind the front line (the Atlanta memorial dedicated in 1993, the Cape and Islands memorial in Hyannis dedicated in 2000, the Hudson County War Memorial in Jersey City dedicated in 2002 etc.), from the grinding faces of the statues in Washington DC conveying movement, fatigue and depression to the lonely soldier standing still on a map-like representation of the 38th Parallel in Cedar City (Utah), representing trench warfare and suggesting the US never crossed it. As pointed out earlier, most architects chose the nylon twill hooded ponchos soldiers used in the winter to illustrate the Korean War. The statues were made with more or less sophisticated combat boots, perhaps to symbolize the unpreparedness of US soldiers as realistically as possible.22 The Korean War Memorial in Springfield, Illinois (dedicated in 1996) chose to emphasize the participation of different branches of the Army embodied by a soldier, a marine, an airman, a guardsman and a sailor set into a bronze bell looking outward.

33 Bodies used for the memorialization of the Korean War may vary significantly in terms of the representations they give. Yet they all seem to have privileged an arguably informative and factual approach in their respective designs, with some significant exceptions. When the project was voted, it was decided that the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, like many other memorials, would incorporate the figures of both total US and UN deaths, though there were little discrepancies in the exact number of deaths.23 But unlike local memorials (Pittsburgh notably), it did not include all the names of those who died in Korea. Instead, the ghostly figures in the Wall of Remembrance stand for the forgotten ones, including women and religious minorities (like Jews). Also, and perhaps more surprisingly given its (inter)national resonance, the federal memorial did not include the figures of civilian casualties on both sides or in- between, unlike, for example, the History Wall in the Texas Veterans’ Memorial where the estimated number of civil and military deaths (on both sides as well as in-between) was carved at the top of the main structure. Interestingly, each panel contains part of a narrative of the conflict, with a short section about the pre-war context. What the whole narrative does not indicate, as it reduces the war to informative speech (Barthes), is how they were killed, who took their lives or how those who witnessed, and perhaps even caused, these deaths live(d) with the trauma on both sides.

Unearthing forgotten bodies

34 As the concept of representation entails a process of substitution (a thing for a sign), the bodies of war can be remembered just as they can be forgotten. Since the 1980s, and

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the democratization of South Korea in 1987, memories of the conflict have fought back as war bodies began to be unearthed, figuratively and literally. The American veteran’s body constitutes one of these “traces” (in Butler’s sense of the term24) challenging Korean War historiography. In the US, evidence of the “return of the veteran” (Edwards) can be found in a couple of quite recent films, T. Burton’s Big Fish (2003) and C. Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008), featuring two Korean War veterans coming to terms with their past, though in completely different fashions.25 The return of the veteran was also symbolized in magazines (like The Graybeards) published for former servicemen in the form of pictures or letters, as well as in military paintings to call up the role played by some infantry divisions, such as the 40th and 65th Regiments, which included people from the US informal ‘empire’ (Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico etc.).26 For example, R. Reeves depicted National Guard units from the multiethnic 40th Infantry Regime in The Sunshine Division in Korea (2001) after they were deployed to Korea in February 1952 to relieve the 24th Division.27 Similarly, The Borinqueneers (1992) by D’Andrea depicted the 65th Regiment, a Puerto Rican-manned unit that departed Puerto in 1950 on August 26th and sailed to Korea on October 1 st (Rottman 34-35), driving back Chinese troops.

35 Aside from US veterans, Korean civilians provided another trace of the forgotten bodies of the Korean War. As new dead bodies were still unearthed in Korea by the 2000s, different means have been employed to acquiesce the forgotten realities of war, especially after South Korea declassified some archives, including photographs capturing atrocities committed against Korean bodies by the South and endorsed by the US.28 Few, however, were reported in the media and US misdeeds in Korea during and after the war have still not been acknowledged,29 even after the revelation of the Nogeun-ri Incident for which Clinton disputably apologized.30 The news of the massacre did not really surprise American revisionist and post-revisionist Korean War historians who had formerly exploited war photographs incriminating US soldiers to call the violence of the conflict to attention as proof that it was a civil war (Halliday and Cumings). These photographs included pictures of napalmed women and children, or POWs in North Korea.31 It follows that the unearthing of the victimized bodies evidences a different image of the US than the one originally intended.

36 Interestingly, by way of comparison, the strategy of unearthing the forgotten bodies of the Korean War is key to North Korean historiography of the conflict, as evidenced for example in Kim Il-Sung’s official biography (Baik 1973). Due to North Korea being a highly centralized state, the official discourse framing the history of the war, which it regards as the continuation of the War of Liberation for the Fatherland (“조국해방전 쟁”), naturally appears to be monolithic when seen from the outside, as it can be found everywhere, such as in museums, movies, posters in the street or during public ceremonies, or even military art. In these paintings, the same propaganda strategies were used—the dehumanized figure of the American soldier suggests his lack of humanity towards the frail bodies of old people, young women and toddlers. It follows that Korean civilian figures who were caught between the controlled body of the US and North Korean soldiers remain unaccounted for in the memorialization of the war. This suggests that while some bodies are sacred, others are unfit and perhaps even abject as they defile official historical discourses by shedding new light on aspects of the war that tend to be forgotten, such as war crimes for example.

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Staging bodies of memory

37 As B. Schwartz suggested in his essay on national memory, “commemoration, like ideology, promotes commitment to the world by producing symbols of its values and aspirations.” (Schwartz 11) Bodies of memory become enclaved within a particular historiographic reading advocating a totalizing view of the war and fixing its reading accordingly. As a war serves many purposes—in Bouthoul’s words, it is “polytélique” (poly + telos) (Bouthoul 40)—American soldiers are consecrated as symbolic bodies of evidence that ‘justify’ the war as a result of their sacrifice, giving corporate existence to the values and inspirations which condone the course of historic events according to a specific monotelic evolutionary and evaluative historiographic pattern (a single telos) and concurrently exculpate the US from its responsibility in the conflict as they exclude key historic actors (such as North Korea but also China) from collective acts of remembrance.32

38 The key word to illustrate this telos here is “freedom,” as found in G. H. Bush’s speeches at the time the site for the Korean War federal memorial was dedicated, as well as in the phrase “Freedom is not free” that was used to illustrate it. The latter is a derivative trope which infers meaning to the sacrifice of American bodies. By opposing “the free world” to slavery, instead of emphasizing the struggle for freedom that postcolonial societies were originally going through, this famous phrase also contributed to export the Cold War in every corner of the world in that it gave concrete evidence, to the Western world, of Communist expansionism in post-colonial Asia. For the same reason, in order to represent the free world, the consecration of American bodies of memory was meant to be more inclusive in respect to the diversity of the US population. The Korean War was indeed the first that the US fought with a desegregated—or rather desegregating—army.33 By the time it broke out, the “American dilemma” (G. Myrdal) that had ever so slightly threatened the international reputation of the US during the Second World War had (partly) been resolved.34

39 As of today, however, Korean bodies continue to suffer from misrepresentation when it comes to memorializing the civil war that ripped the peninsula in the early 1950s. To be represented, the Korean body has to be consistent with a given set of discourses and practices to fill the signifying blank left by the symbolic function of war in the creation of identities and boundaries in the post-colonial world. If it cannot be consecrated, the Korean body then becomes part of the abject, i.e. what is unfit to depict (like Duncan’s pictures at the time). The bodies of war are key to this twofold process of consecration and abjection because, as they are shaped into—and staged as—bodies of memory, they not only become scripted, they also become increasingly politicized and socialized (Grosz 31), like idols—or simulacra. In that respect, they are endowed with more pragmatic functions, nationally and internationally, as they become the location (in Durkheim’s sense of the term35) of specific practices turning them, as objects and targets of power, into nothing more than war machines.

Conclusion

40 As entailed by such human phenomena as war and memory, the body does not necessarily reflect a free and self-determining mind. Indeed, not only do wars have strict codes that shape the body, they also become the focus of a broader civilization

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process (Elias) that transcends them inexorably. Bodies of war and memory formalize, in Foucault’s terms, the episteme36 of the war, one we tried to deconstruct using the body in all its acceptations, literal and metaphorical. The body proved to be flexible and multidimensional enough a concept to be taken in terms of representations exclusively. Because of its relationality, it clearly raises cultural and historiographic stakes making the understanding of the war phenomenon even more complex because it moves away from traditional paradigms to shift the focus onto the war phenomenon as it was bodily lived and as it was remembered from one country to another. It is also essential to understand what separates the Korean War as it happened from its memorialization, commemoration and politicization on both sides of the Pacific.

41 What this study tried to show was that, beyond ideologies, the consecration of bodies of war as bodies of memory is pivotal to the religious structuring inherent to the construction of national identities (in the US as in Korea37) or international identities (the UN) around certain values. When new bodies of war are unearthed, unsurprisingly for a conflict known as the “Forgotten War,” they ever so slightly redefine the corporeality of war—how the war was bodily lived—and shed light on aspects of the war that had so far been ignored during its commemoration. As far as US-Korea relations are concerned, there are numerous political and civic implications to this: insofar as the episteme of war constrains alternative discourses, it simultaneously creates the possibility of its own revocation. As it was recently illustrated by the conjoined twins in T. Burton’s Big Fish, (South) Korea is now torn between two corporeal realities in which the US has a central role to play, one which it needs not only to remember, but also to acknowledge. On the one hand, there is the Korean War as it is currently presented in US historiography, that is, as a conflict that erupted early in the Cold War, opposing the two blocs and subordinating Korea to their “values.”38 On the other hand, there is the reality of the Korean War as a post-independence civil war which, due to the meddling of two expansionist superpowers, has torn a whole country into two irreconcilable parts.

42 This study finally attempted to open new perspectives on the study of war and memory, and what they reveal about civilizations all around the world. Collective acts of remembrance reflecting the periodicities of political life on both sides of the Pacific indicate two antagonistic trends. Firstly, it highlights the formation of an international body of collective memories of war but always in opposition to an antibody or a nobody. As they can dehumanize individual bodies to turn them into enemies, these organizational bodies of memory wield power of legitimate violence.39 Secondly, they give birth to a new social force reflecting local and national concerns as they also happen to have been contested.40 In any case, Korean War memories hold a determining place in the organization of strategic cultures. As these memories are always the products of a particular historical perception, commemoration endows the disincarnate ghost of the war with a body and shapes it according to specific discursive conventions pulling historic events out of their context and calling into question the cultural peculiarities of all the international actors that it seeks to incorporate into what could be called an exclusive regime of historicity.41

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

All the references listed below were consulted to write this paper, including some that are not directly cited.

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---. The History of Sexuality. vol. 1. R. Hurley trans. 1978. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.

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Lock, Margaret. “Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge.” Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 133-155.

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Moïse, Edwin E. “The Myths of the Tet Offensive.” In New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia: Continuing Explorations. Ed. Michael A. Aung-Thwin and Kenneth R. Hall. London, UK: Routledge, 2011. 229-254.

Moores, Shaun. Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption. London: SAGE, 1993.

National Red Cross of China (ed.). Out of Their Own Mouths, Revelations and Confessions Written by American Soldiers of Torture, Rape, Arson, Looting and Cold-Blooded Murder of Defenceless Civilians and Prisoners of War in Korea. Peking: Red-Cross Society of China, 1952.

Nora, Pierre. “Between History and Memory: Lieux de mémoire.” 1989. M. Roudebush trans. In Historiography: Critical concepts in Historical Studies. vol. IV. Ed. Robert M. Burns. London: Routledge, 2006. 284-302.

Parr, Adrian (ed.). Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Pick, Daniel. War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age. 1993. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 1996.

Piehler, G. Kurt. Remembering War the American Way. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1995.

---. “Commemoration and Public Ritual.” In The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Ed. J.W. Chambers. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. 169-171.

Potter, Charles E. Korean War Atrocities: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, Eighty-Third Congress, First Session, Pursuant to S. Res. 40. Washington DC: US G.P.O, 1954.

Reckwitz, A. “Toward a Theory of Social Practices. A Development in Culturalist Theorizing.” In European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002): 243-263.

Rottman, Gordon L. Korean War Order of Battle: United States, United Nations, and Communist Ground, Naval, and Air Forces, 1950-1953. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002.

Sandler, Stanley. The Korean War: No Victors, No Vanquished. 1999. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015.

---. The Korean War: An Interpretative History. London: Routledge, 2002.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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Stanton, Shelby L. US Army Uniforms of the Cold War: 1948-1973. 1994. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998.

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Sumners, Harry G. Jr. Korean War Almanac. New York: Facts on File Inc., 1990.

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UN-DPI (United Nations, Department of Public Information). United Action in Korea under Unified Command; Report to the Security Council. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1951.

Villahermosa, Gilberto N. Honor and Fidelity: the 65th Infantry in Korea, 1950-1953. Washington DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2009.

Warren, Lynne (ed.). Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography. London: Routledge, 2005.

Young, Charles S. Name, Rank, and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and Abroad. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2014.

---. “Operations Glory and Big Switch.” 2014. In The Ashgate Research Companion to the Korean War. Ed. James Irving Matray and Donald W. Boose. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2016. 409-420.

Digital images

“공산주의자들은 한국을 분할 하려고 애쓰고 있다. 유엔은 한국의 동일에 노력 하고 있다”, n.d. DigitalPosterCollection, keijo.knutas, 3 Jan. 2016. 20 Feb. 2016. .

“미제를 몰아내고 조국을 통일하자 !”, 2013. DigitalPosterCollection, keijo.knutas, 3 Jan. 2016. 25 Feb. 2016. .

“Be in Style in the Women's Army Corps”, 1951. DigitalPosterCollection, keijo.knutas, 22 June 2015. 4 Feb. 2016. .

“Elite Women Marines”, 1952. DigitalPosterCollection, keijo.knutas, 22 Jun. 2015. 5 Feb. 2016. .

Electronic references

“MacArthur Statue Prompts Protests in South Korea.” Taipei Times, 18 July 2005. 27 Feb. 2016. .

Catalinotto, John. “After 50 Years of Suffering: Tribunal Finds US Guilty of War Crimes in Korea.” International Action Center, 27 June 2003. 07 Feb. 2016. .

Danel, Thibaud-Pascal. “Le cinquante-et-unième état: Une dynamique expansionniste ?” De l'Amérique aux Amériques: dynamiques d'un continent patchwork (November 2014): 14pp. 15 Mars 2016. .

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Joly, Maud. “Corps en guerre. Imaginaires, idéologies, destructions.” Quasimodo 8 and 9 (Spring 2005). In Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés 30 (2009). 24 March 2010. 2 September 2015. .

Films

Big Fish, dir. Tim Burton, Columbia Pictures, 2003.

Fixed Bayonets, dir. Samuel Fuller, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1951.

Gran Torino, dir. Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros, 2008.

Steel Helmet, dir. Samuel Fuller, Lippert Pictures Inc., 1951.

NOTES

1. “[C]’est la guerre qui a enfanté l’histoire” (Bouthoul 5). My translation. 2. “La corporalité de la guerre... c’est s’approcher enfin de ceux qui combattent, restés souvent à l'écart de l'effort d’attention.” (Audoin-Rouzeau 314) My translation. 3. As it was the case with the total number of combat deaths in Vietnam. Cf. Moïse 239. 4. According to dictionary definitions of the terms, both corporal and corporeal are often used interchangeably. In this paper, however, it will be compelling to operate, in some instances, a distinction between the two. Whereas it seems more natural to use “corporal” (relative to the body) to talk about “corporal punishment” (violence done to physical bodies), for example, the adjective “corporeal” refers to something having (or being given) a corporeal existence. 5. UNTOCK stands for “United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea” though, as Sandler noted, the adjective “temporary” was later dropped (Sandler 2015, 27). Hastings 2015 similarly mentions the “growing body of Korean officials controll[ing] the bureaucracy of the South Korean Interim Government.” (38) 6. Hastings 2015 refers in this case to the absence of any “reliable body of records” in the Chinese archives (132). 7. Cf. “Best Dressed Men on Main Street !” (1950). In Life (18 September 1950, 158). 8. “미제를 몰아내고 조국을 통일하자 !” (“Let’s drive the US imperialists out and unify the fatherland !”, 2013). 9. A famous picture shows a Korean child forcibly tattooed with the South Korean flag (Young 2014). 10. S. Brewer has similarly emphasized the idea that “the goal was not to mobilize the population, but to elicit its passive support for a faraway conflict.” (Brewer 8) 11. Female soldiers were often depicted as nurses and, if not, even elite women marines were likely to be stylish, as they were shown wearing red lipstick, black mascara or eyeliner as in “Be in style in the Women’s Army Corps” (1951) and “Elite Women Marines” (1952). 12. North Korean propaganda, during the Korean War and still today during official (and televised) processions, depicts Korea as a single body taking the appearance of a bigger-than-life and powerful soldier crushing American soldiers. This is due to the fact that, for North Korea, the Korean War is not over as long as the US occupies South Korea. 13. The poster in question juxtaposed two pictures. The one on the left showed a Communist soldier ripping the peninsula apart along the 38th Parallel while, on the

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right, a UN soldier was depicted mending it. Cf. “공산주의자들은 한국을 분할 하려고 애쓰고 있다. 유엔은 한국의 동일에 노력 하고 있다.” (“Communists try to split up Korea. The UN is working towards Korea’s reunification.”) 14. “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” (April 14, 1950). In Naval War College Review. vol. XXVII (May-June 1975): 51-108. 15. As the two movies featured the same actor (Gene Evans), it could be said that the latter embodies two different visions of the war. Indeed, Fixed Bayonets depicts a mass of soldiers who need one another to survive, emphasizing the group over the individual (unlike The Steel Helmet). 16. The fact that the enemies are referred to as “the Reds”, for example, fits in with Cold War teleology and does not acknowledge the Korean War as a civil war. 17. “The wholly defensible, wholly abhorrent, task of warring against civilians was forced upon the Allied airmen by the Communist practice of hiding behind skirts in their stealthy approach to our all-but-beaten defenders of nonmilitant Korean—skirts, literally, skirts figuratively” (Karig 112). 18. The events at Nogeun-ri (also Romanized as No Gun Ri) have been referred to as an “Incident” or a “Massacre.” Since the Associated Press broke the story in 1999, historians have discussed the issue a lot (McFarland 327). In any case, Nogeun-ri has become synonymous with the killing of an estimated four hundred civil refugees, shot dead when US troops opened fire from the air and ground (Cho 57). Oral witnesses had talked about the events at Nogeun-ri for a long time before the massacre was acknowledged. Some authors even suggest that Nogeun-ri was “the tip of the iceberg” and that “less notorious incidents involving the killing of civilians” happened (Cho 53). 19. According to Barthes, the distance separating the event and its testimonies decreases as new technologies emerge, causing informative acts of language to substitute with reality or, in this case, with the corporal reality of war. As it can imitate reality “almost perfectly,” informative speech raises new methodological questions about war historiography (Barthes 1968, 13). 20. Drawing inspiration from P. Bourdieu and A. Giddens, A. Reckwitz underlined that “social practices are bodily and mental routines” (Reckwitz 256). Boltanski later focused on the “implicit grammatical rules” behind bodily social practices, which are “constituted by the evaluative judgments of ordinary actors” (Basaure 400). 21. Defined as “embodied history” (Bourdieu 1990, 56). 22. Historians will also appreciate the details found in the inner drawstrings and snap fasteners of the ponchos as much as the use of authentic photographs of that era. 23. There already existed a few minor discrepancies in the numbers mentioned by some fund-raising newspapers like Dear Abby which published a letter by Kathleen Cronan (a KWVA member) on 11 November 1988. It mentioned 54,263 deaths and 8,177 MIA while the majority of the press actually used the figures announced by the Pentagon four years after the war (54,260). These figures, however, had been made a little more precise (54,246) by the time the memorial project was voted. These discrepancies could imply that dead bodies were taken as part of a discursive strategy overvaluing or undervaluing casualty figures in order to make the Korean War more significant in the press. 24. J. Butler uses the word “traces” to refer to photographs when they provide “evidence that a break from the norm governing the subject of rights has taken place and that something called “humanity” is at issue here. […] The visual trace is surely not the same as the full restitution of the humanity of the victim. […] The photograph,

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shown and circulated, becomes the public condition under which we feel outrage and construct political views to incorporate and articulate that outrage.” It should be possible to apply this definition to other cultural artifacts, like films or paintings. Though they operate on different representational levels, the question of authenticity is no longer relevant if the possibility that the bodies they represent were staged is taken in consideration (Butler 2009, 87). 25. Edwards meant by the ‘return of the veterans’ that, unlike Vietnam War veterans, those who fought in Korea never obtained redemption (Edwards 36-37). 26. The growing attention of official Korean War historians to Puerto Rico (Villahermosa 2009) is quite recent and serves to put US history into question, notably in debates over its integration as the 51st state (Danel 2015). 27. The Sunshine Division is the modern nickname for the 40th Infantry Regiment, which is the National Guard division for California, Nevada, and Utah with member units from across the Western and Pacific US and Oceania. At the time though, it was known as the Grizzly Division (Rottman 31-32). 28. The Encyclopedia of 21st Century photography reads that “[t]he limited visibility of the war meant suppressed recognition of its signal complications. . . the comfortable remoteness of the war was set off against a decidely more psychological portrayal of combat in the pictures that did appear in the work of Max Desfor, Carl Mydans, Bert Handy (whose pictures of South Korean War crimes were explicitly censored)” (Warren 1641). 29. According to the International Action Center, American responsibility for war crimes in Korea would have been exposed in front of an international tribunal in June 2003 at the Interchurch Center of New York. The website quoted one of its most active members, John Catalinotto, present at the meeting: “Listening intently to the evidence were over two dozen jurists from 17 countries. […] After four sessions of deliberating over the testimony, this jury unanimously found the US government and military guilty of 19 counts of war crimes committed against Korea from 1945 until 2001.” While North Korean jurists were excluded, the meeting was the culmination of “over a year's work by the Korea Truth Commission” (Catalinotto). 30. Choi 2014 (10) noted that Clinton used the verb regret instead of apologize. 31. The strategy of publishing atrocities pictures on behalf of American historians runs counter to that used during the war, when senior Public Information officers decided that some could “serve a useful purpose in drawing international attention to the crimes of the enemy” (Casey 280). 32. As Clausewitz once argued, what “justifies” war is the extent of the sacrifices done for it. This argument, which compares to Bellah’s on civil religion, brings forward the supremacy of politics (Bouthoul 21-22). 33. Though Truman’s Executive Order 9981 (1948) provided for the desegregation of the Armed Forces, it was still being enforced during the early months of the Korean War (Sumners 63). 34. The inclusion of African-American bodies in the design of the federal memorial must be taken in the context of the memorial craze as the project was approved alongside two other memorials dedicated to the forgotten chapters of US history (Lynch, “3 sites approved to honor veterans”). 35. For Durkheim, the body is the location of the symbols through which individuals recognize themselves as belonging to a society (Schilling 216).

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36. The episteme is a “total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; the way in which, in each of these discursive formations, the transitions to epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization are situated and operate […] the lateral relations that may exist between epistemological figures or sciences in so far as they belong to neighbouring, but distinct, discursive practices” (Foucault 1972, 211-212). 37. Though statues of national heroes can be found in each of these countries, North Korea has the particularity that it has kept the body of its first president Kim Il- sung, known as the “Eternal President of the Republic” (“공화국의 영원한 주석”) under glass since 1994. 38. Before the democratic reconversion of South Korea in 1987, however, it would have been more difficult for the US to talk about a “victory” in East Asia. Such a retrospective historicist approach conveys the idea it was directly responsible for the democratization of the ROK which, in many respects, it was not. 39. The power of legitimate violence is constitutive of what N. Elias called the sociogenesis of the State and may in this respect be linked to the State apparatus and the war machine we described earlier. 40. As in 2005 when a South Korean memorial was vandalized (“MacArthur Statue Prompts Protests in South Korea”). A recent study showed that such debates occurred over the statue of MacArthur in Seoul because he wanted to use the nuclear bomb (Choi 95-114). 41. A regime of historicity was defined by F. Hartog as “the way in which a given society approaches its past and reflects upon it.” (Hartog 9)

ABSTRACTS

This study takes the case of the Korean War (1950-1953) to raise the question of the body as a means of representation in the staging of war and memory in the United States. Given that the “body-war diptych” (M. Joly) is pivotal to understand the corporality of war, this paper endeavors to study how bodies were used in propaganda, pictures, movies, narratives, ceremonies or historical reconstructions to shape the memory of war. Our first concern, thus, in dealing with the use of bodies in a process of remembrance and forgetfulness will be to address the corporality, or corporeality of war in theory before attention is paid to the Korean War itself and to the different historical, political and civic implications of its commemoration in the United States today. Then, considering that the body infers meaning to society in that it produces a symbolic order and impacts on its collective representations, it will be argued that the staging of the bodies of war and memory causes them to articulate a form of nonverbal discourse with a multiplicity of meanings as well as a more pragmatic, sometimes even political, function that must be acknowledged as it makes the history of the Korean War even more delicate to assess given that a “national” idea of the war came to replace its memory.

Cette étude prend le cas de la guerre de Corée (1950-1953) pour soulever la question du corps comme moyen de représentation dans la mise en scène de la guerre et de la mémoire aux Etats-

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Unis. Etant donné que le « diptyque corps/guerre » (M. Joly) est essentiel pour comprendre la corporalité de la guerre, cet article propose d’étudier comment le corps a été utilisé dans la propagande, les images, les films, les récits de guerre, les cérémonies ou les reconstructions historiques pour façonner la mémoire de la guerre. Aussi faut-il, avant d’étudier les usages du corps dans une dynamique de la mémoire et de l’oubli, aborder en premier lieu la corporalité, ou la réalité corporelle de la guerre, en théorie avant de nous intéresser spécifiquement à la guerre de Corée et aux différentes implications historiques, politiques et civiques de sa commémoration aujourd’hui aux Etats-Unis. Sachant que le corps donne du sens à la société du fait qu’il produit un ordre symbolique et affecte ses représentations collectives, on avancera l’idée que la mise en scène des corps de la guerre et de la mémoire induit une forme de discours non verbal dont les significations multiples ainsi que la fonction pragmatique, et parfois même politique, doivent être estimées en ce qu’elles rendent l’histoire de la guerre de Corée plus délicate encore à évaluer puisqu’elles substituent à la mémoire une idée nationale de la guerre.

INDEX

Mots-clés: guerre de Corée (1950-1953), études américaines, historiographie, représentation, mémoire Keywords: Korean War (1950-1953), American studies, historiography, representation, memory

AUTHORS

THIBAUD DANEL Doctoral student Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis [email protected]

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Singing and Painting the Body: Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins’ Approach to Corporeality

Hélène Gaillard

Introduction

1 It seemed only normal that at some point Walt Whitman, who claimed to be the poet of the body, met painter Thomas Eakins, known for being a careful observer of anatomy. Both living in the Philadelphia/New Jersey area with a similarly complex relationship with their audience, the two men esteemed each other highly. What they shared was a deep fascination for the body and this passion caused them much scandal and disapproval. After they first met in Camden in 1887, Thomas Eakins often visited Whitman both to photograph and paint him. The poet admired Eakins’ work and claimed that he “never knew of but one artist, and that’s Tom Eakins who could resist the temptation to see what they think ought to be rather than what is” (Goodrich 123). Like Whitman, Eakins was committed to realism and wanted to give a truthful rendition of the human body. Although critics still disagree on this matter (Folsom 1997, 33), photographs from Eakins’ 1880s naked series showing an elderly man looking a lot like Whitman seem to indicate that Eakins might have seen everything there was to see about the poet. If those photographs are of Whitman, they are certainly one of the rare examples of pictures of a 19th century writer posing in the nude. But the simple fact that this is an accepted possibility testifies to the poet’s unique apprehension of the body. Eakins’ own search for the naked truth led him to apply to himself what he taught his students, namely not to be ashamed of one’s corporeality, to acknowledge it as man’s ultimate truth and to master it so as to better depict it. To the artist, there was “no impropriety in looking at the most beautiful of Nature’s works, the naked figure” (Griffin 80). However, his aesthetic principles led him to be expelled from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in 1886 for having used nude models in his classes.

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2 If Eakins and Whitman had a vision of the flesh that dramatically differed from that of their contemporaries and shocked their audiences, they shared a common understanding of the body and together paved the way for a modern way of looking at physical appearances. The new perception they offered in their artworks also signaled a change in social terms: seen as the epitome of democracy, the flesh and how people thought of it became to them the symbol of equality. This paper will examine the similarities in Eakins’ and Whitman’s approaches to corporeality and the similar strategy they adopted to impose a new vision of the body in American culture. Although previous research has looked into the connection between the two American artists, this article aims at being a comprehensive study of the resonance of corporeal matters in Eakins and Whitman’s art. After focusing on the link between medical progress and the two artists’ aesthetics, this study will explore how Whitman and Eakins revised the status of the body in their art and will then analyze how they attempted to give corporeality a new social significance.

Reconsidering the Body

3 Starting with the heroic males of 6th century BC Greek art and rediscovered during the Renaissance, the nude in art was challenged in the Victorian age. In the Gilded Age, the depiction of human figures echoed the moral values of modesty and propriety of an era marked by scientific progress and looking for self-improvement. Nudity was hence rare in the American art of the second half of the 19th century. However, as the classical ideals of perfection and order defined a proper manner of representing bodies, a distinction between nudity and nakedness1, sensuality and pornography was made in order to continue enjoying human forms. In 1884, a New York court ruled that “mere nudity in painting or sculpture is not obscenity,” but the Woman's Christian Temperance Union still pressured art institutions into rejecting all kinds of representations—be they nude or naked—in art (Parker 114). Even though disclosing the reality of the human body was the object of the period’s scientific study, the Victorian approach to corporeality was still highly conservative and did not benefit from the redefinition of biology promoted by scientists. Major advances in medical science occurring throughout the 19th century marked the beginning of modern medicine. Charles Darwin’s breakthrough in biology changed the way people perceived the supremacy of the human being, Louis Pasteur proved that microorganisms could cause diseases, and Claude Bernard introduced the careful observation of pathology thus ensuring scientific objectivity in the medical field. These groundbreaking discoveries altered the romantic and religious apprehension of the body. Moreover, the development of new medical tools such as X-rays to facilitate surgery triggered the idea that bodies, just like machines, could be fixed if one had the right instruments. Although the main contributions came from Europe and more particularly from France, significant advances occurred on the other side of the Atlantic. The discovery of anesthesia in Boston in 1846 was a major achievement that turned European attention to American practices. Major innovations equally happened during the Civil War, which allowed a better treatment of gunshot wounds and the development of medical statistics and records (Porter 154-202).

4 Unsurprisingly, both Whitman and Eakins carefully followed the development of science and they translated their interest into their works. In a study of the poet’s

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curiosity for science, Harold Aspiz extensively surveyed the various sciences that influenced Whitman’s thinking (Aspiz 216-232). To some critics, Whitman’s approach to science was hindered by his religious faith and his beliefs in pseudoscience. Yet, his consideration for an empirical method led him to praise scientific principles: “Hurray for positive science, long live exact demonstration!” (LG 25) Whitman pays tribute to science in Leaves of Grass which he acknowledges in a letter to naturalist John Burroughs as “the first attempt at an expression in poetry […] to give the wonder and the imagination a new and true field—the field opened by scientific discovery” (Burroughs 56). As a self-taught man, Whitman got acquainted with science through popular articles and his journalistic work sometimes included reviews of new discoveries among which Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845), N. F. Moore’s Ancient Mineralogy (1859), George Combe’s The Principles of Physiology (1836), William Paley’s Natural Theology (1809) and Elias Loomis’ Elements of Natural Philosophy (1859) (White 7-30). To Stovall who also studied Whitman’s scientific contribution, “there is no evidence in the poems of the 1855 edition that anything more than the romance of science had interested him seriously” (Stovall 153). It can be objected that Whitman’s consideration of science remained auxiliary as exemplified by his conclusion that “scientific facts are useful yet they are not my dwelling” (LG 25). Yet, the body, medicine and biology were fields that deeply concerned him and were in fact his dwelling; as such, they significantly permeated his art. This approach is also central in the evaluation of Whitman’s placement within the romantic tradition. It testifies to the poet’s will to assign an American character to romanticism so as “to give something to our literature which will be our own.” In this case, it was the consideration for science and empirical observation that shaped the transcendentalist nature of Whitman’s poetry. Devoted to the understanding of the human body, Whitman deplored the horrors of primitive surgery in his journalism. He strongly supported the evolution of medicine that protected the integrity of the “sacred” body by avoiding amputation and monitoring deliveries. His volunteer service in hospitals during the Civil War reinforced his beliefs in the urgent need for medical progress. The poet’s fascination for the sacredness of the body is extensively voiced in Leaves of Grass: as the only poetic work of its era that refers more than two hundred times to the body and includes a full description of body parts, the collection of poems testifies to Whitman’s position as the poet of the body, if not the medicine poet. This peculiar stance for 19th-century poetry was also evidenced by the illustration for the original edition, a photo engraving depicting a relaxed middle-aged man who shared nothing with the superior, intellectual beings poets were supposed to be. From the first few lines, Whitman’s poetic persona makes it clear that Leaves of Grass is corporeal poetry: it is not sung by a voice but expressed through the physicality of the tongue. Reading Whitman’s poetry aloud requires practice with all mouth muscles. From the first stanza of “Song of Myself,” the poet’s use of repetition (myself-assume) and alliteration (spear-summer-grass) ensures fluidity as well as a sound-conscious reading. Its rhythm is accordingly natural and breaks free from the artificiality of traditional stanza forms and rhyming patterns. If the soul is invited, “Song of Myself” is beforehand a celebration of the body (LG 2). Concerns about health appear from the very first page as shown by the mention of “37 years old and in perfect health” (LG 1) and they are recurrent throughout the poems with references to amputations, pains, illnesses and childbirth. The concluding section of “I Sing the Body Electric” is a 36-line catalogue with more than one hundred bodily parts, from head to toe, ignoring neither

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“bowels,” nor male and female genitals. Many among Whitman’s contemporaries including his fervent supporter Emerson disliked this section and encouraged him to remove it, as they could see no point in such a literal enumeration. But Whitman objected and his refusal indicates how important this naturalist section was to him and to his readers: not only does it pay tribute to the finest pieces of natural creation but it also forces readers to reconsider their corporeality as it introduces some essential biological knowledge. Every single element of what constitutes “the meat of the body,” as Whitman puts it, shares equal importance in this list: they function as a whole and none must be disregarded.

5 Eakins’ own preoccupation for anatomy and the inclusion of this knowledge in his painting served the exact same aesthetic and didactic purposes. If it is said that the painter contemplated becoming a surgeon, his passion for the reality of the human body is beyond doubt. Along with his training in anatomy at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Eakins also attended medical courses in anatomy and dissection at Jefferson Medical College. His intention was to improve his artistic skills since as he stated to William C. Brownell in an interview, “one dissects simply to increase his knowledge of how beautiful objects are put together to the end that he may be able to imitate them” (Brownell 745). Eakins’ singular realism2 combining his interest for all types of subject matters and his use of modern tools (photography, motion study) came from his fascination for the flesh and what lies beneath it. To John Updike, “nudity and verity were linked with an unusual closeness” (Updike 80) in Eakins’ mind: realism had to be linked to an extensive knowledge of the human form. If he accurately rendered corporeality in his paintings and was one of the first artists to use photography, Eakins also strived to modify the perception people had of the body. Linked with his own training in medical sciences, his masterpiece The Gross Clinic (1875) staging Dr. Gross operating and teaching at the same time contains what it takes to change one’s perception of the body. Painted on the occasion of the centennial and conceived to promote medical progress, The Gross Clinic was dismissed for being obscene and disturbing. The reason why it was deemed improper for an exhibition in the centennial was not simply because it depicted open surgery. In The Gross Clinic, Eakins exhorts viewers to take a look at something hardly understandable at first sight: what exactly is going on the operating table is not immediately clear. To be able to make sense out of it, spectators need to carefully observe the visible parts of the patient who is reduced to an exposed buttock and thigh. In a comment for the New York Tribune in March 1873, an art critic noted the effort required from the viewer to examine the patient’s body: “a long and shapeless lump of flesh which we conclude to be a thigh” (Burns 190). In other terms, the public must act as anatomical students to reconstruct the scene, hence mirroring the own figure of the artist who painted himself in the bottom right corner of the audience. What one understands after complete examination is that the team of surgeons makes an incision in the patient’s thigh while another conducts the anesthesia by applying chloroform to the patient’s face. Known for being a specialist in conservative surgery, Dr. Gross and his assistants are saving the patient’s limb from amputation by curing a bone infection. Another example of the specular and anatomical challenge Eakins placed in the painting is the woman with clawing fingers. As her face is turned aside, it is the study of her fingers that can only help to comprehend the scene. Showing tension and anxiety, her twisted fingers indicate that she obviously shuns from the sight of the operation and might be close to hysteria. The proximity with Dr. Gross’s steady hand contrasts with the woman’s fingers and

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emphasizes the absence of control from the female figure’s part. Seemingly too emotional, she misses the opportunity to look at the body being operated and “can’t aid with wringing fingers,” a posture that recalls the vain gesture of assistance of Whitman’s poetic persona in “The Sleepers.” According to Eakins, just like art, knowledge and science primarily involve careful observation: this fact seems to be the underlying message in The Gross Clinic. It is highly significant that Eakins offered a print version of The Gross Clinic to Whitman soon after they first met. Indeed, the picture stages their ultimate goals: preserving the integrity of the body and forcing viewers to rethink the human form.

6 Originally meant to celebrate progress at the Centennial Exhibition, the painting was certainly meant to provoke a strong reaction. If it was initially dismissed, after some reconsideration the jury accepted Eakins’ work in the Exhibition’s medical pavilion. By doing so, they denied Eakins’ work its artistic value and paved the way for more negative criticism such as the review for The New York Times in 1879: “The ugly, naked, unreal thigh . . . the spurting blood . . . are bad enough.… This violent and bloody scene shows that at the time it was painted, if not now, the artist had no conception of where to stop. Power it has, but very little art” (Homer 81). The Gross Clinic was only envisaged in terms of scientific observation and was denied any artistic relevance. As Ruth L. Bohan stated, “the effective denial of the painting’s art value echoed the challenges to the literary merits of Whitman’s verse” (Bohan 113). What commentators said about Leaves of Grass—[Whitman’s] words are quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society” (Dana 3) or “We are bound in conscience to call it impious and obscene” (Alger 471)—strongly recalls the criticism Eakins received for his paintings. Whitman and Eakins certainly wanted to shock, that is to say, to surprise and disturb but they also had didactic purposes in mind as they wanted to educate their audience to a modern way of looking at bodies. Both saw their work and artistic identity questioned on account of their artistic and pedagogical motives. Because they suggested a new way of considering the body as a whole made of different parts whose surface could reveal the inside, they were censored in their pursuit of corporeal and spiritual realism.

Re-Presenting the Body

7 To Eakins and Whitman, the body was not the enemy of the soul, nor should it have a second-rate status. The two artists challenged the predominant 19th-century idea that established the superiority of the spirit, as opposed to the so-called baseness of physicality. They developed an approach to corporeality that deeply associated body and soul. In the conclusion to his long list of body parts in “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman’s poetic persona states that “O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say these are the soul,” thus establishing a link between spirituality, creativity and the body (LG 104). Eakins and Whitman’s efforts to scrutinize outward appearances are related to their beliefs that the flesh was connected to the spirit.

8 Whitman’s poem “Faces” accounts for the possibility to read physical features and to determine the essence from the observation of surfaces. If faces—the only part of the body fully disclosed to others—can provide insight into the inner soul, they require the ability to interpret signs. Trained from an early age as a typewriter, Whitman was well experienced in the reading of signs. In Walt Whitman’s Faces: A Typographic Reading,

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Barbara Henry interprets “Faces” as a poem based on double entendre in terms of types and fonts and thus, suggests Whitman’s deep interest in semiology (Henry 8). Whitman was well aware that judgment stemming from beauty would fail as “the ugly face of some beautiful soul” was no exception but he “was not tricked by it” (LG 107). Knowing that the poet was familiar with phrenology can also explain his insistence on the shape and size of facial types: the reason why he paid so much attention to “the grand faces of natural lawyers and judges broad at the back top” and “the faces of hunters and fishers bulged at the brows” (LG 105), is certainly because he was well acquainted with the pseudoscience that focused on the skull area to determine personalities. In the late 1840s, Whitman turned to phrenology, a theory stating that each human function— physical, sexual, moral, social, and spiritual—corresponds to certain brain areas so that the measurement of how the skull protrudes defines characters. One should bear in mind that, at the time, scientists had not yet dismissed phrenology and many believed it could cast light on some physiological and psychological truth. However, Whitman’s interpretation of bodies was not limited to reading the skull and relied instead on a diversity of mechanisms as exemplified in “I Sing The Body Electric”: The expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, (LG 95-96)

9 The title of the poem itself shows the importance of another scientific phenomenon in the understanding of corporeality. Electricity had intrigued scientists and the general public from the past centuries and Benjamin Franklin, among others, had contributed to a better comprehension of its functioning and use. In 1791, Italian physician Luigi Galvani introduced the principle of bioelectricity by proving that electricity was the medium by which nerve cells passed signals to the muscles. Whitman’s poetic imagery is based on the assumption that the body is in essence electric and that each of its components is driven by energy and generates magnetism. In a sense, it was proof that the flesh and the mind were connected. Whether it takes the form of an inner fire, a sexual drive or magnetism, electricity—this invisible and mysterious force—could unlock the secrets of humankind. The ultimate power of the body comes from its ability to connect to other bodies, and to breed others, a wonder that Whitman carefully examines in his poetry throughout the many references to sexual intercourse and reproduction. In “Song of Myself,” he refers to the principle of bioenergy that connects his own body to the world through “conductors,” associating sensations and sciences: “Mine is no callous shell, I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop, They seize every object and let it harmlessly through me” (LG 31). As it was seen as setting the body into animation and potentially producing more bodies, electricity was indeed related to the anima, the soul. As such, the flesh appears most expressive when bodies are in motion and reveal their sacred connection to the spirit. The bodycentrism that Whitman advocated focuses less on resting than on moving bodies. While the persona is at times static, lying on the grass or sitting, the people are mostly portrayed in action, at work or involved in physical activity. If Whitman considered the body as the most beautiful object, he also strongly advocated exercising as expressed in “Democratic Vistas” (1871): “[A] clear-blooded, strong fibred physique, is indispensable” or in “I Sing the Body Electric,” “And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful” (LG 102). In “The Sleepers”, the description of the “beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea” (LG 88)

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voices the poet’s belief that physical strain—itself related to beauty—can also bring out the best qualities of the soul: courage, self control and determination.

10 Strikingly similar connections between the body and the soul were established in Eakins’ paintings. He, too, was fascinated by the opportunity to read the soul through the body and to observe corporeal motion and energy. One of the aesthetic principles at work in Eakins’ work is the faithful rendering of his sitter’s outer appearance. Contrary to most of his contemporaries, he never tried to alter physical features so as to enhance the beauty of his models. Eakins did not strive to paint a younger or healthier Whitman but his uncompromising realism certainly brought out the type of beauty that both the painter and the poet associated with old age. In Eakins and Whitman’s thinking, an aging body was not the sign of decay or corruption. To the contrary, it signals “a wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person” as expressed in Whitman’s own poetry. The portrait Eakins painted of the poet matches Whitman’s description of the venerable farmer in “I Sing the Body Electric”: I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons, […] This man was a wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person, The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners, (LG 97)

11 In the painting, the emphasis on the upward movement of the eyebrows counterbalancing the drooping eyelids implies the old man’s inner strength. After the poet died, Eakins made a death mask and hand cast of Whitman with the help of his assistant Samuel Murray. The painter’s fascination for Whitman’s facial features and body parts unveils his desire to capture the essence of his being. Eakins’ anatomical knowledge and commitment to corporeal authenticity led him to focus on minute details, which often ended in aging his sitters. To Elizabeth Johns, “a room full of Eakins’ portraits is a room full of prematurely older sitters, of paintings almost like Wilde’s storied portrait of Dorian Gray, that showed what the living physiognomy did not yet reflect” (Johns 1991, 163). In many cases, the portraits never fully appealed to the person they depicted. For instance, Robert C. Odgen, an influential businessman and philanthropist, was extremely dissatisfied with his portrait and eventually decided to return the art to Eakins’ studio. As a result, the Philadelphian artist was far from being as popular as Sargent3 and was rarely commissioned for bourgeois portraiture. Out of the 247 paintings he completed, only 25 were commissioned. But if his body of work was rather limited, Eakins could choose to paint whoever he thought were interesting subject matters and often turned to people he knew personally or professionally.

12 A closer look at the portrait he painted of his own wife Susan exemplifies what has been referred to as Eakins’ psychoanalytical portraiture but testifies more to the painter’s commitment to realism and his effort to make the body match the soul. Many critics look at Eakins’ portrait of his wife Portrait of the Artist’s Wife and Setter Dog (1884-1889), completed only a few years after they got married, as unromantic and wonder about the reality of his feelings for her. Painted during the troubled time when Eakins was dismissed from the academy, faced multiple accusations and caused scandal in his wife’s family circle, the portrait is certainly an accurate representation of her nervous state. Her face is emaciated, her eyes are two small black holes and the dark circles under them signal extreme fatigue. Her left hand lies listlessly, palm up and curled fingers while her shoulders sag. She appears frail and the light blue color of her

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dress makes her recede even more. The dog lying at her feet mirrors her nervous exhaustion. Everything in her body language and facial features expresses lethargy. An 1886 photogravure of a previous version proves that Eakins reworked his wife’s portrait and emphasized the impression of frailty. The fact that she is directly looking at the viewer is a configuration that was uncommon in Eakins’ works; it might imply a sense of guilt from the artist who felt responsible for the household’s troubles. By accentuating her tiredness and aging her, Eakins completed a portrait of unflattering realism but he certainly reached his goal as he gave insight into her psychological state as well as his own distress. Contrary to Whitman, Eakins was not directly influenced by phrenology. However, after his training by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was famous for his typified characters, Eakins was receptive to the principles of physiognomy. Still, he adapted the theory by suggesting a link between outer physique and inner psychology.

13 Even though many portraits completed in this period exemplify neurasthenia, Eakins was also obsessed with bodies in motion. According to Johns, this was certainly the reason why he aged his models: “in a profound sense Eakins’ aging of his sitters is related to the preoccupations of other artists with change and with motion” (Johns 1991, 164). Contrary to the soul, the body, which is a moving object, is primarily subject to change and alteration. And just like Whitman, Eakins seemed to believe that interestingly, active bodies also accounted for the spiritual. The body in motion could tell about its inner drama as expressed in Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” where men and women are examined as they linger, pass by, swim, bend, march or wrestle. If Eakins was already well trained in the possibility of movement through anatomy, he also pioneered in the artistic use of photography so as to observe the actual body motion. Only a few artists of his time considered the advantages the camera could offer and many traditionalists simply rejected the inclusion of a machine into art. Whitman was among the few who praised the use of photography and acknowledged its artistic value, as stated by Roberta K. Tarbell: Whitman related to the new art of photography in several ways: as the natural media to serve democratic ideals, as an apparently realistic form of art relatively free of traditional affectations that he could use and did use as model to construct his poems (a new way of seeing), and as the format he preferred for portraits of himself. (Tarbell 167)

14 As for Eakins, if he continued to favor painting from the living model, he made extensive use of photography to capture the body’s movements. Introduced to motion photography by Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1870s, Eakins was interested in precision measurements on a single image. This was particularly useful in his representations of athletes, a subject matter that had been a preoccupation all along his career and led him to depict rowers, swimmers, wrestlers, boxers and dancers. If some critics relate Swimming Hole (1885) to section 11 of “Song of Myself” (Johns 1996) or the recount of the swimmer in “I Sing the Body Electric,” the painting can be primarily looked at as a study of body movement, a pictorial translation of motion photography including different stages of action and time. Eakins’ depiction of sculling —a subject for which he is uniquely identified in the early 1870s and was familiar with as an amateur oarsman—signals his obsession with the representation of moving bodies, strained muscles but also mental force. In The Biglin Brothers Racing (1873), the emphasis is on coordination, muscular exertion and physical strength but the viewers also get the sense that what animates the duo reaches beyond the physical: the sense of

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urgency created by the extension of the scull boat out of the picture frame and the appearance of another boat visible on the right is evidenced in the way the brothers look. Although this painting celebrates physical prowess, it also emphasizes the mental strength that sets the body in motion and makes it surpass its abilities. Willpower is also evidenced in Eakins’ famous painting The Champion in his Single Scull (1871). More ambivalent as it opposes motion and stasis, the scene painted to commemorate Schmidt’s victory paradoxically focuses on resting after practice time. The unique position of the athlete’s body, looking back over his right shoulder to face viewers, gives evidence of Eakins’ interest in anatomy but also serves to render the moment of quiet introspection. It is a peaceful time when his body and his mind are equally at rest. Blinded by the light, the champion frowns and slightly closes his eyes. Reacting to external influence, his bodily reaction and his desire to be in the spotlight serve as a reminder of what might animate the champion’s body during a race: dignity, peer support and self-accomplishment. Hence, not only did Eakins and Whitman revise the status of the body by showing its correlation with the spirit, but they also offered the sense that because it could be exercised, mastered and improved, it was the primary organ of democracy.

Re-Empowering the Body

15 As Ed Folsom pointed out in a lecture delivered in 1998 “What Do We Represent? Walt Whitman, Representative Democracy and Democratic Representation,” to Whitman, “Democracy begins with the body, because the place to begin to break down the distinctions […] was in frank recognition of the physical urges we all shared” (Folsom 1998). Eakins also posited that the body is an agent of democracy and equality since it can be modeled so as to turn the common man into an uncommon one. On canvas and in poems, both artists memorialized their own diversity of America: rowers, teachers, actresses, anthropologists, cowboys, dancers, men as well as women, often white but also black. Whitman’s inclusion of types was even wider “all men in all ages and lands” (LG 19), and he saw no distinction between men and women, as expressed in, “The body itself balks account, that of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect” (LG 95). His vision of humanity is truly equalitarian whereas the painter enhances the common man turned uncommon. Belonging to two different social classes, they had a different conception of democracy: Walt Whitman was self-educated and the son of a working class family from Long Island, whereas Eakins’ world was the Philadelphian professional upper-middle class. Undeniably, as art critic Lloyd Goodrich pointed out, “Both were democrats despising forms and conventions which hid the essential human being” (Goodrich 122), but one main difference must be taken into consideration: Eakins praised individuality and merit, while Whitman favored the whole of mankind and inherent equality. John Updike equally noted this major difference and claimed that “Whitman had a great subject: New York City, melting pot of an immigrant democracy. Eakins had, instead, troubled faces of the Philadelphia gentry” (Updike 80). But in any case, to both artists, democracy stemmed from the body.

16 In the 1870s, Eakins was one of the few painters to consider black people without artistic prejudice or condescension. The Dancing Lesson (1878) testifies to Eakins’ progressive thought and more equalitarian standpoint. The painting considerably differs from the depiction of black people rehearsing for or performing in a minstrel

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show. The interior scene painted with watercolor is not characterized by glee, humor and ignorance. To the contrary, the three men are deeply focused showing efforts, rigor or analysis, a fact that is observable by paying close attention to their bodies. Belonging to three different generations, they are all engaged in a profoundly formative act of instruction, a transmission of personal experience from one generation to the next. To Eakins, this only could grant merit and proved equality. The older man’s posture, standing and observing the boy with care while following the rhythm with one foot puts him on a par with others of Eakins’ great teacher figures such as Dr. Gross. His being dressed rather formally in a vest and short jacket with his top hat and cane on the chair near him adds to his dignified position as a dancing master and reminds of Eakins’ depiction of his own father watching over his two friends in The Chess Players (1876). The seated black youth playing the banjo with his head inclined toward the dancing boy is also fully focused, but the most interesting figure of the group is the younger boy. Holding his head high while striving to move with the music, his knees bent and his feet raised on his toes, he embodies Eakins’ vision of modeling and controlling the body so as to connect with others and share emotions. The presence of the well-known photograph showing Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad examining a book on the wall in the upper-left corner establishes a link between freedom and instruction and a connection between black and white lives. If this reference could also be regarded as a patronizing gesture, this painting points to Eakins’ belief in the power of the body to assert one’s place in society. Democracy—the power to the people—derives from the power of bodies. Eakins’ somacratic4 vision includes both intellectual and physical values. In this respect, his admiration for surgeons can be better understood for they embody both intellectual and manual accomplishments and share their skills and knowledge. Eakins’ praise for medical doctors as democratic agents is also certainly the reason why he chose to depict Dr. Gross, a local surgeon from a middle-class background, not directly performing surgery but sharing his knowledge and techniques as he acted democratically to improve both the body and spirit of man. Through this imagery, he also placed his work within the tradition established by Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp (1632) but with a heightened sense of drama and a broader inclusion of medical students. Eakins’ sense of democracy seems mostly based on the principle promoted in the 18th century by his fellow Philadelphian Benjamin Franklin advocating the equalitarian form of government as an opportunity for self-improvement. The underlying idea was that although all men are created equal, they should cultivate their own body and soul so as to become virtuous, strong and talented human beings. Franklin was himself inspired by John Locke’s discussion of political rights and educational theories dating back to 1690 (Power 104). In the Second Treatise of Government, Locke writes “God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated” (Locke 21). Eakins’ realistic treatment of the flesh was positively modern; yet, early 18th century ideology still inspired his democratic views.

17 If, to Eakins, democracy implies the equal right to spiritual and corporeal development, Whitman’s poetic persona does not set any physical or intellectual standards as shown in the opening of “A Song for Occupations”: Is it you that thought the President greater than you? Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser than you?

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(Because you are greasy or pimpled, or were once drunk; or a thief, Or that you are diesel’d, or rheumatic, or a prostitute, Or from frivolity or impotence; Or that you are no scholar and never saw your name in print, Do you give in that you are any less immortal? (LG 68)

18 From Whitman’s perspective, the simple fact of having a body grants universal equality: “I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy.” The meaning of “password primeval” has been discussed by many scholars since its meaning can include references from ancient history to mysticism. However, what seems of greater interest is the concrete terms in which democracy is established: it is based on visual, tactile and oral capabilities. Expressed in such material terms, it seems that the representamen—the element that can signify its object by the principle of repetition in Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic theory—of democracy is the body (Peirce 87). As human beings are composed of the same material substance, they are naturally granted equality: “By God, I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms” (LG 26). Whitman offered an understanding of democracy that challenged the traditional interests of the individual and the collective to make them identical: “O my Body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you” (LG 28). The human form does not involve hierarchy as proved by the long lists of bodily organs given in no particular order. Because the well-being of the whole body relies on the functioning of its components, corporeality is indeed a sign of democracy: “Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest” (LG 4). It necessarily rejects the idea of superiority or hierarchy and serves to signal the necessity of democracy. To Whitman, because the personal is collective, it is also political: his conception of the body politic linked the political body with the intimate body in an inextricable way. Not only does the episode of the slave auction in “I Sing the Body Electric” expose a personal corruption of the body but it also casts light on a flawed political system: “If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of a man, is the token of manhood untainted” (LG 102). Again, the term “token” which connotes the materiality and spiritual meaning of a sign places Whitman’s poetry in accordance with Peirce’s semiotic findings.5 Following the American philosopher’s theory and Whitman’s thinking, the body is a sign that operates at the three levels of significance: having a likeness with all bodies, it is an “icon” for the human form; in virtue of its causal connection with similarly shaped beings, it is an “index” of equality and it is finally a “symbol” of democracy after Whitman posited its universal value. Although sharing seemed crucial in Whitman’s appreciation of human integrity, the poet also insists on the idea of corporeal freedom and the impossibility to own another person’s body: “let the slaves be masters, I say man shall not hold property in man.” His poetic persona acts precisely as a body able to reconcile both parties. In the manuscript of an early version of “Song of Myself,” Whitman inscribed the desire to embody true democracy through a new vision of corporeality. The poetic persona has the ability to stand between opposites so as to unite and merge slaves and masters: I am the poet of the body And I am the poet of the soul I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters And I will stand between the masters and the slaves, Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike. (Whitman 1855)

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19 The homoerotic subtext of these lines foreshadows the Calamus poems and reminds of Eakins’ statements, such as “She [the female body] is the most beautiful object there is except a naked man” (Griffin 80) that revealed his homophile sensibility. But Eakins made clear in a letter to Edward H. Coates dated 1886 that gender or sexual questions should not compromise the celebration of bodies: “Should men make only the statues of men to be looked at by men while the statues of women should be made by women to be looked at by women only? Should the he-painters draw the horses and bulls, and the she-painters like Rosa Bonheur the mares and the cows?” (Werbel 83). Regardless of their orientations, it is clear that Whitman and Eakins advocated the celebration of all bodies, therefore hinting at the possibility of sexual attraction and homosexual desires. Eakins’ arcadia pictures in the vein of Swimming Hole or Arcadia (1883) rely on the Greek ideals of male comradeship, physical beauty and athletic bodies. Indeed, this classical style derived from a democratic empire could easily be transferred to 19th-century American bodies. Yet, within their new American context and considering Eakins’ frank realism, his paintings representing nude males were mostly seen in a homoerotic light, putting aside the somacratic discourse. If the importance of the sexual aspect of Whitman’s poetry is undeniable, the sexually charged Calamus poems were claimed to be political by its author. They are for sure both, as the love for all bodies and the interconnectedness of human forms are equally essential in Whitman’s definition of democracy as well as in Eakins’. The basis for democracy is to be found in the full acceptance of the body and the recognition of “the need of comrades,” a principle that can be visible in Eakins’ paintings The Gross Clinic or Swimming Hole and in Whitman’s poetry. Based on a diversity of male friendships, Whitman starts the fifth section of “Calamus” by showing that the ideal state of democracy—not yet reached in the America of the Gilded Age—will stem from the natural connection all human beings experience, as the bond between people is primarily physical. There shall from me be a new friendship It shall be called after my name, It shall circulate through The States, indifferent of place, It shall twist and intertwist them through and around each other Compact shall they be, showing new signs, Affection shall solve every one of the problems of freedom, Those who love each other shall be invincible, They shall finally make America completely victorious, in my name. (Whitman 1855)

Conclusion

20 To conclude, it is clear that because Whitman and Eakins were ahead of their time, they could not develop their corporeal aesthetics to a full extent. If they supported each other, they were rather isolated in the art world. That is probably one of the reasons why they constantly revised their works: Whitman never published many of his original lines and kept re-editing his Leaves of Grass throughout his life. The ceaseless manipulations of the poems from the first edition in 1855 to the deathbed version of 1892 imply that Whitman conceived his poetry as a body per se, one that he needed to model so as to make its appearance more acceptable. His statement about the “new and

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much better edition of Leaves of Grass complete—that unkillable work” (Reynolds 474) he finished in 1867 indicates the anthropomorphism of Leaves of Grass.

21 Similarly, Eakins sometimes conceived different versions of the same paintings to avoid scandal. The evolution in the versions Eakins painted of William Rush and his model— also known as William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River—testifies to the progressive awareness of corporeality. In the first painting he produced in 1876-77 on this subject matter, the attention was on the female body represented as a hybrid form of abstract feminine ideal and realistic female beauty as made visible by the two different ways of painting her skin. The sculptor himself stands in the dark background, making clear that he is not the main focus of interest. In this early version, Eakins had already failed to contextualize his female nude, provokingly drawing the clothes she had taken off in minute details in the foreground. To a commentator for The New York Times, this “ruined the picture” for the “presence in the foreground of the clothes of that young woman, cast carelessly over a chair […] gives the shock which makes one think about the nudity—and at once the picture becomes improper” (Sewell 45). The version Eakins completed in 1908—and which happens to be one of his last paintings—proves that, by the end of his career, the artist felt that the early 20th- century public was more willing to face the reality of the body. He ultimately refused to “mutilate”6 the female body and reached full body disclosure by favoring a frontal angle of the woman’s anatomy including her face and her pubic hair. Comparatively, Eakins received less negative reviews for this much bolder depiction of Rush and his model. As Western societies continued to revise their judgment on bodies, Eakins and Whitman’s legacy was gradually revived. In the 1950s, the Beat Generation paid tribute to Whitman’s corporeal approach and by the end of the 1980s, Eakins eventually emerged as a major figure in sexuality and gender studies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alger, William. “Review of Leaves of Grass.” The Christian Examiner 60 (1856): 471-473. Allison, Raphael C. “Walt Whitman, William James, and Pragmatist Aesthetics.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 20 (2002): 19-29.

Aspiz, Harold. “Science and Pseudoscience.” In A Companion to Walt Whitman. Ed. Donald Kummings. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 216-232.

Bohan, Ruth. Looking Into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850-1920. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.

Burns, Sarah. Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Burroughs, John. The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals. 1928. Ed. Clara Barrus. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1967.

Brownell, William C. “The Art Schools of Philadelphia”, Scribners’ Monthly 18 (1879): 737-750.

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Dana, Charles. “New Publications: Leaves of Grass.” New York Daily Tribune, 23 July, 1855: 3-4. Eakins, Thomas. The Paris Letters of Thomas Eakins. Ed. William Homer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Folsom, Ed. “Whitman Naked?: A Response.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 15 (1997): 33-35. ---. “What Do We Represent? Walt Whitman, Representative Democracy and Democratic Representation.” Fifteenth Annual Presidential Lecture presented at the University of Iowa. Iowa City, 1998.

Goodrich, Lloyd. Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work. New York: AMS Press, 1933.

Griffin, Randall. Homer, Eakins, & Anshutz: The Search for American Identity in the Gilded Age. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

Henry, Barbara. Walt Whitman’s Faces: A Typographic Reading. Jersey City: Harsimus Press, 2012.

Homer, William I. Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art. New York: Abbeville Press, 1992.

Johns, Elizabeth. Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

—-, “Swimming: Thomas Eakins, the Twenty-Ninth Bather.” In Thomas Eakins and the Swimming Picture. Ed. Doreen Bulger. Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1996.

Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. 1690. Ed. Richard H. Cox. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.

Nead, Linda. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. Routledge: London, 1992.

Parker, Alison M. Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Peirce, Charles S. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Porter, Roy. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Power, Edward J. Educational Philosophy: A History from the Ancient World to Modern America. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.

Reynolds, David. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Sewell, Darrel. Thomas Eakins. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Stovall, Floyd. The Foreground of Leaves of Grass. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1974.

Tarbell, Roberta K. Walt Whitman and the Visual. Arts. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Updike, John. Still Looking: Essays on American Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Werbel, Amy. Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

White, William. Walt Whitman’s Journalism: A Bibliography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. London: Harper Collins, 2015. ---. Selected Poems: 1855-1892. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2013.

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---. “Song of Myself” early manuscript. 1855. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin. Bailiwick, The University of Iowa Libraries. Nov. 8 2016.

NOTES

1. A nude involves an allegorical, idealized form of a human figure and as such is not perceived as a transgression of decorum whereas nakedness, a state that follows being stripped bare, implies the unveiling of physicality. To Lynda Nead, “nakedness is a sign of material reality; whereas nudity transcends that historical and social existence and is a kind of cultural disguise” (Nead 16). 2. Eakins was a precursor of realism in visual arts. His interest went beyond the depiction of folklore and everyday scenes of genre painting and aimed at representing things with objective reality. His attempt to scientifically observe the underlying natural forces accounting for a person’s likeness can also place Eakins within the naturalist tradition. 3. John Singer Sargent was a contemporary of Eakins. His painterly style was characterized by looser brushstrokes and carefully arranged backgrounds whereas Eakins’ realism was more focused on details and stronger compositions. Despite their differences, the two painters admired each other. 4. It seems relevant to coin the term somacratic derived from the Greek -soma, body, and -cratos, power, to refer to the power of the body according to Eakins, a power that was granted by the physicality of the flesh itself and that could lead to democracy. 5. Peirce’s theory of signs came in a paper entitled “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” and was published as early as in 1868. Its impact on Whitman’s poetry has never been fully explored so far; only the influence on Whitman of Peirce’s pragmatism has been the object of research (see Allison). 6. In a letter to his father written from Paris in 1868, Eakins said: “The French court is become very decent […] and when a man paints a naked woman he gives her less than poor Nature herself did. I can conceive of few circumstances wherein I would have to make a woman naked but if I did I wouldn’t mutilate her for double the money” (Eakins 210).

ABSTRACTS

In his famous collection of poems Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman (1819-1892) celebrates the connection between Man and Nature and explores themes of the body. Sensuality and eroticism are also prominently discussed to the degree that his publishers attempted to persuade the poet to remove some sections. Whitman’s focus on the body inevitably caused Leaves of Grass to be characterized as reckless and indecent. Whitman’s close friend, painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) also shared the poet’s fascination for the body and was even more vilified by critics for his detailed rendering of the flesh, his unrestrained study of human physiology and his insistence on seeing the human figure as the most beautiful object in nature. His uncompromising realism along with his supposedly indecent teaching caused his dismissal from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His masterpiece The Gross Clinic (1875) equally caused

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scandal and was described as repulsive and a degradation of art. The critical reactions to the vision of the body Whitman and Eakins shared show the impact of Victorian-age morality. This aesthetic prudery seemed particularly old-fashioned in the age of medical and technological progress and did not fit the strong link to Nature central to American culture from the early 19th century. This study focuses on the similarities in Whitman and Eakins’ treatment of the flesh and their mutual efforts to promote a new understanding of corporeality. Although previous research has looked into the connection between the two American artists, this article aims at being a comprehensive study of the social resonance of corporeal matters in Eakins and Whitman’s art.

Dans son célèbre recueil de poésie Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) fait l’éloge du lien entre l’homme et la nature et explore le champ charnel. L’érotisme et la sensualité des vers ont mené ses premiers éditeurs à tenter de convaincre Whitman de supprimer certaines sections du recueil. L’attention portée à la corporéité a fait qualifier l’ouvrage d’indécent et de malséant lors de sa première parution. Ami proche de Whitman avec lequel il partageait une véritable fascination pour l’anatomie, le peintre Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) fut, en son temps, lui aussi vilipendé pour ses représentations physiologiques détaillées et pour son étude poussée du corps humain, le plus bel objet conçu par la nature selon lui. Son réalisme sans compromis et son enseignement jugé impropre causèrent son renvoi de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts de Philadelphie. Son chef d’œuvre The Gross Clinic (1875) choqua également le public, scandalisé par la nature prétendument irrévérencieuse de son sujet. A travers la critique de la vision du corps que partageaient Whitman et Eakins se lit la persistance d’une moralité victorienne, une pruderie esthétique en opposition avec les progrès technologiques et médicaux de cette époque et une culture américaine qui, dès le tournant du 19ème siècle, prône l’harmonie de l’homme avec la nature. Axée sur le traitement du corps dans l’art de Whitman et d’Eakins, cette étude fait état des similitudes de leurs approches et de leurs efforts mutuels à faire accepter une vision moderne de la chair. Si les rapports entre les pratiques artistiques d’Eakins et de Whitman ont déjà fait l’objet de recherches, cet article porte non seulement sur le croisement du travail des deux artistes mais aussi sur les résonances sociales de leur nouvelle esthétique du corps.

INDEX

Mots-clés: peinture, poésie, esthétique, Etats-Unis, 19ème siècle, réalisme, corps, intermédialité Keywords: painting, poetry, aesthetics, United States, 19th century, realism, body, intermediality

AUTHORS

HÉLÈNE GAILLARD Maître de conférences, Université de Bourgogne Centre Interlangues TIL (Texte, Image, Language) EA 4182 [email protected]

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“It’s so queer—in the next room”: Docile/ Deviant Bodies and Spatiality in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour

Sarah A. Dyne

1 Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour (1934) reverberates with whispers of what lies just beneath the surface of polite conversation, echoing contemporary anxieties and sexual theories, including inversion, breeding, and eugenics. Despite its controversial subject matter and initial ban in several cities, The Children’s Hour was largely a critical and commercial success that has been performed almost continuously since its first production in the 1930s (Spencer 45). The play was even adapted twice for film, most famously in 1961 with Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, and James Garner in leading roles. The promotional poster for the 1961 film adaptation suggests that the story is about more than the fallout from a spiteful child’s rumor. The simple purple poster features a pen and ink sketch of Shirley MacLaine’s character, Martha, with her hand on Karen’s shoulder (Audrey Hepburn), and centered between the women at the bottom of the image is a small sketch of Joe Cardin, played by James Garner. Beyond the names of the actors, production information, and the title The Children’s Hour, the only word that appears on the poster is “Different…” Although this image was produced for a later film adaptation, its stark composition (Martha and Karen at the center with Joe standing erect below them) and selective wording suggests that normative difference is central to our understanding of the plot. It is this “difference” and its effects that I will examine, as The Children’s Hour reveals contemporary suspicions surrounding female intimacy and power, and highlights the fragility of hetero-patriarchal imperialism while exploring the consequences that arise when an agent of that heteronormative system (that is, one meant to produce docile bodies and citizens) becomes—or is exposed as—deviant.

2 The play is set in a privately owned and operated boarding school for girls that becomes the space where public and private spheres collide and conflict. Karen Wright

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and Martha Dobie, as headmistresses of the Wright-Dobie School for Girls, are meant to serve as agents of discipline and instruction, reinforcing heteronormative ideals in their pupils. Once an angry student lashes out by spreading a rumor that the women are lesbians, Martha and Karen must face the professional and personal fallout—a failed business, the end of their careers as educators, and social stigmas that lead to a broken engagement and ultimately a suicide. Their institution is no longer deemed fit because the women can no longer function as proper voices of authority in reinforcing societal expectations.

3 By the end of the play, Martha reaches an epiphany that the rumors which ruined her career and made her a social outcast were actually her true feelings. Once Martha confesses her romantic feelings towards her longtime friend and business partner, Karen, Martha’s body and mind are no longer “docile” (Foucault 1995, 136) participants in the heteronormative institution of the boarding school. I argue that when Martha ends her life offstage—whether out of desperation, as an act of defiance, as an act of erasure, or perhaps all three—she further subverts chrononormativity, ultimately “queering” the space that once served to reinforce norms she no longer embodies.

4 Many of the themes in The Children’s Hour reflect real, lasting contemporary social anxieties surrounding women, sexuality, and power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hellman drew inspiration for The Children’s Hour from William Roughead’s Bad Companions, which was published in Scotland in 1930, in which Roughead discusses a scandalous court case from Edinburgh in 1809 that made international (and even transatlantic) news (Gilroy 3). In the court case, a “malicious child” falsely accused her headmistresses of having “‘an inordinate affection’ for each other” (Gilroy 3), and this subtly-worded accusation ruined the lives of both teachers. Hellman’s adaptation of this story, in its original form, received mixed criticism, and the play was initially banned in New York, Chicago, and Boston. Hellman recalled that “It had been impossible to get any of Broadway’s leading ladies to take roles in the original production” (qtd. in Gilroy 3), because they worried about their reputations and thought that the production might be shut down by police for obscenity. As the theater has historically been a space known for suspended reality, subversive topics, and performance, this real-world reaction to the play’s content reflects contemporary anxieties about the “contagion” of homosexuality (Tuhkanen 1003). Despite concerns of obscenity, the play “scored a critical success” and “Hellman recalled there was talk it had a chance for a Pulitzer Prize” (Gilroy 3).

5 The play was adapted to film two years later, but because of production codes (specifically, the “Hays Code”1), the title was changed to These Three (Spencer 45) and the controversial homosexual plot was replaced by a heterosexual love triangle, in which Karen and Martha both desire Joe. This change is ironic when we consider Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985), in which Sedgewick claims that homosexual panic between men is assuaged by triangulation through conflict over a woman (21-3). The heterosexual plot of These Three essentially replaces overt homosexual panic for coded homosexual panic by employing similar triangulation between two women and one man. Sedgwick sees male homosocial desire triangulated by the object of a woman as inexplicably tied to power dynamics (25). Furthermore, “in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence”

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(Sedgewick 25). This triangulated relationship “may take the form of ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or some highly conflicted but intensively structured combination of the two” (Sedgewick 25). The women’s relationship always already hinges on patriarchal structures, as “(Lesbianism also must always be in a special relation to patriarchy, but on different [sometimes opposite] grounds and working through different mechanisms)” (Sedgewick 25). The revision to the plot in the These Three adaptation underscores the importance of its original thematic content. By inserting the man into the women’s relationship to reify heteronormative order, we see the encroachment of patriarchal power in the space of the Wright-Dobie School for Girls, which was intended to be run by and for women. Even in this attempt to scrub out the lesbian elements of the plot in favor of a heterosexual love triangle, the act of opting for a female-female-male triangle rather than a male-male-female one still complicates heteronormative power dynamics.

6 The Children’s Hour was later revived on stage in 1952 and adapted again in 1961, with its original lesbian theme intact, for a film starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. Even at its worst, when critics view the play and its film adaptations as melodramatic or exploitative of the queer community (Chaing), Hellman’s text continues to retain its cultural currency. The longevity of the play endures, and its 2011 revival in London’s West End starred Keira Knightley and Elizabeth Moss, two of Hollywood’s most critically acclaimed actresses. Although some recent reviews laud the performances given by Knightley and Moss but dismiss the script itself as “well-intentioned melodrama” (Billington), I suggest that the play’s long production history and lasting popularity stem not only from its revealing treatment of power dynamics and social stigmas associated with homosexuality, but also its complex treatment of embodied normative difference and its relationship to the temporal and spatial elements of the boarding school.

7 As part of its enduring legacy, The Children’s Hour has garnered much critical attention. Scholars tend to historicize The Children’s Hour based on Hellman’s use of the Edinburgh court case, images of the New Woman and flappers, the Great Depression, and McCarthyism. Other readings of The Children’s Hour focus on the morality of the play, the figure of the “evil” or “monstrous child” (such as those by T. Nagamani, Alice Griffen and Geraldine Thorsten, and Tanfer Emin Tunc), reflections of shifting contemporary views of sexuality and sensationalism, and the multiple adaptations of the text from stage to film (Westbrook). Although Hellman insisted that the play was “not about lesbianism” but rather the power of lies (Gilroy 4), the versions of the text that include the homosexual plotline are arguably the most effective when it comes to revealing contemporary cultural anxieties and challenging hegemonic systems of power.

8 Those scholars (including Brett Elizabeth Westbrook, Jenny S. Spencer, Mikko Tuhkanen, Benjamin Kahan, and others) who focus on homosexual aspects of the play typically do so within the context of censorship, the pathologization of homosexuality, and a social and political climate that fostered anxiety about women in positions of power. Largely overlooked, however, is the significance of the boarding school space as an extension of hetero-patriarchal imperialism, the connections between sexuality and time within the text, and the dramatic effect Martha’s suicide has on both the spatial and temporal elements at play in The Children’s Hour. I suggest that the efficacy of Hellman’s text hinges on her manipulation of spatial and temporal elements within the

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play; she ultimately subverts a number of heteronormative expectations associated with boarding schools in order to explore questions of power, female intimacy, morality, and social anxiety. I frame this reading of The Children’s Hour by drawing on the works of Michel Foucault and Elizabeth Freeman, and their theories of discipline and queer time, respectively, in order to explore the play’s underlying spatial and temporal elements as mechanisms of hegemonic systems for producing normative citizens.

Agents of empire

9 Mikko Tuhkanen provides one of the few examinations of how the Wright-Dobie School functions as a colonial space by identifying colonial subtexts of eugenic discourse within The Children’s Hour in its many references to “breeding,” as literal references to livestock or the social graces that mark members of high society. Tuhkanen explains that the Edinburgh court case from which Hellman drew her inspiration “anticipated the logics of racial sciences and sexology of the mid- to late-nineteenth century,” as the testimony of the child at the center of the court case was undermined based on her ethnic background2 (Tuhkanen 1003). Rather than engage typical elements of colonialism, however, Hellman’s text “ostensibly replaces the colonial discourse of race by a focus on the almost telepathic communicability of lesbian knowledge” (1003). The Children’s Hour, Tuhkanen suggests, “shifts from a discussion of ‘breeding’—where racial otherness infects white femininity with illicit sexual knowledge—to ‘reading,’ the danger of which is its contamination of the adolescent female mind” (1003). In other words, while The Children’s Hour represses elements of colonialism, it inadvertently brings them to light by revealing social anxieties about female sexuality rather than explicit discussion of race. The Wright-Dobie School, then, is meant to serve not only as an agent of empire, but more specifically as an agent of the hetero-patriarchal empire.

10 Boarding schools are unique spaces and pedagogical systems that function within modernist literature, to varying degrees, as extensions of an imperialist model that exists to reinforce hierarchical and heteronormative ideals and expectations in order to produce nationalized, gendered, and racialized citizens through the use of discipline. The Wright-Dobie School represents such a mechanism, but a number of factors (including a subverted distribution of power, sexual difference, and a fractured heteronormative timeline) ultimately prevent the school from succeeding as an instrument of the empire. That said, the textual portrayal of the school is mediated through the space of the theater. While I’m analyzing the published script, it is important to acknowledge that this text was envisioned for the stage and its multiple adaptations, whether on stage or screen, all provide additional layers of performative and heterotopic context, as Michel Foucault has defined both theatres and boarding schools as heterotopias. In his essay, “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault explains that “heterotopias” are real spaces that assume a symbolic purpose. They operate outside of but in conjunction with the rest of society. He identifies two primary types of heterotopias—heterotopias of “crisis” and of “deviation.” The first consists of “privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.,” and Foucault identifies boarding schools as such a space, a place where “the first manifestations of

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sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place ‘elsewhere’ than at home” (Foucault 1986, 24). Thus, boarding schools work outside of but to the benefit of society at large, especially in regard to the management of adolescent sexuality. Paradoxically, these spaces, feared to be ‘hot-beds of vice’ (qtd. in Tuhkanen 1010) because of the “dangerous proximity of pupils,” are the same spaces meant to foster normative citizens (Tuhkanen 1010). One way to address the concerns of proximity leading to homosexuality was through the careful management of space and time within the boarding school in order to establish discipline among students. To examine the spatial elements at play within the text, I turn to Foucault’s discussion of schools and docile bodies.

11 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explores how discipline is used to produce docile bodies—that is, bodies that have been groomed for maximum productivity upon entry into a given society. This concept sheds light on how the Wright-Dobie School is expected to function in relation to society at large. For Foucault, “discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (Foucault 1995, 138). Foucault identifies a number of controlled environments, like barracks, religious institutions, or schools, that employ various means of discipline—compartmentalization, time, action, and exercise—“for controlling or correcting the operations of the body” (Foucault 1995, 136). In other words, in addition to being a heterotopic space for adolescents in a state of “crisis” (that is, at a point of their lives where they are not yet prepared to participate in society at large) (Foucault 1986, 24), the boarding school (and subsequently the teachers who run it) becomes an agent of the empire, charged with the task of molding students into “proper” citizens. If this system is to effectively produce bodies that are groomed for their intended purpose (here, entry into society), there must be discipline (especially in regards to policing “appropriate” sexual behavior), regimen, and a clear distribution of power. However, in The Children’s Hour, we see a space that is no longer able to produce conforming citizens once the power dynamic has shifted from teacher to student and the “docility” of the teachers in charge of the school has been questioned; here, the Wright-Dobie School challenges the effectiveness of this system at large.

12 It is important to note that although the boarding school model was designed to function as a system for grooming students for productive citizenship through discipline, the approach and ultimate goal of education varied greatly according to gendered expectations. While boarding schools largely employed the philosophies and methods described by Foucault, and the number of such models “dramatically increased in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries,” the Edinburgh court case, and Hellman’s treatment of it in The Children’s Hour, “belies some cultural anxieties about same-sex institutions,” as contemporary sexology warned that same- sex institutions could foster homosexual encounters (Tuhkanen 1010).

13 Counterintuitive to these anxieties about same-sex institutions, especially those run by women, it was widely (though not definitively) seen as a cultural norm for women teachers to remain single during their time in the profession. Although when “teachers were self-employed, their marital status was a private concern,” there nevertheless were a number of public and private institutions that “refused to employ women, trying also to limit their teachers’ social contacts with single men” (Clifford 128). That

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said, “Official response to married teachers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” according to Geraldine Clifford, “was neither uniform nor inevitable” (Clifford 129). Despite the introduction of bills “to make a marriage bar the general rule” (Clifford 132) in 26 states during the 1930s, none were passed. In fact, a contradictory trend emerged, as “The presence of openly married women teachers rose during both the 1920s and 1930s” (Clifford 132). However, marriage bans for women teachers had become a popularized, mainstream myth by the time Hellman wrote The Children’s Hour, which complicates the fact that Karen intended to continue her work after marrying Joe. On the one hand, Karen’s intentions of teaching after marriage could have been viewed by contemporary audiences as already deviant behavior, but Karen and Martha’s position as sole proprietors and instructors of the Wright-Dobie School, allowed for some measure of flexibility. That is, Karen would be able to maintain her position as a professional educator despite social norms because the school was privately owned and because the marriage would be a reification of heteronormativity. On the other hand, while Karen’s engagement to Joe should have reinforced her status as a representative of heteronormative authority and protected her from suspicion, it nevertheless went against certain expectations for teachers and failed to shield her from rumors of lesbianism. Clifford explains some of these expectations, observing that “In a ‘homosocial [not homosexual] environment, the spectrum of legitimate female-female behavior was broad,’” and it was common for “generations of single women teachers” to live “with other women: perhaps a sister or widowed mother but often an unrelated single woman, frequently another teacher” (164). However, “Around the turn of the twentieth century, the term ‘homosexuality’ appeared, and Freudianism subsequently embellished earlier suspicions of ‘sex inversion’” (Clifford 164). This “popularized sexology” in mass culture led to “an abiding anxiety of close female friendships, especially in the context where male supervision is lacking,” which adds plausibility to the scandalous nature of the lie Mary Tilford tells in The Children’s Hour (Tuhkanen 1012). Thus, even though boarding schools were designed for the purpose of serving the hetero-patriarchal empire, boarding schools for girls “were seen as artificial environments” where the spread of uncontrolled reading and knowledge had the potential to injure girls’ “normal growth, inflicting them with physical and mental diseases” (Tuhkanen 1021).

14 In order to uphold institutional ideals and avoid such potential “injury” of uncontrolled (sexual) knowledge, we see a number of efforts to police sexuality and reinforce heteronormativity throughout The Children’s Hour: girls within the school are reminded during a sewing and elocution lesson that “courtesy is breeding and breeding is most to be desired in a woman. It is what every man wants in a woman” (Hellman 11); Martha is told she needs to “get a beau” of her own because “Every woman, no matter what she says, is jealous when another woman gets a husband” (Hellman 21); and Karen is told to “go back to Joe” because things are “too much” for her otherwise (Hellman 65). The discussion of “breeding” and on desirable qualities of “well-bred” women in the only pedagogical scene portrayed in the text highlights the gendered norms reinforced through the education the girls received at school; the school was essentially preparing the girls for entry into their expected positions within society as wives and mothers. These gendered expectations are reinforced through a system of institutionalized policing of sexuality, at all levels of the Wright-Dobie School. Hellman creates a system of women policing the sexuality of other women: Mrs. Mortar polices the students, Karen and Martha’s friendship is policed by the community at large, and Martha

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effectively polices herself through confession, expression of shame, and ultimate suicide. While these numerous references to “breeding” within The Children’s Hour do reinforce “the eugenic ideal of controlled reproduction […] subsumed under what is rather like its nightmare counterpart: the rapid, rabid procreation of unwanted elements,” they also point to the policing efforts within the institution of the boarding school in relation to sexuality (Tuhkanen 1022). Although this policing of sexuality implies a discourse of eugenic imperialism, I suggest that it also points to Foucault’s theory of docility and raises the question of controlled reproduction within the context of Freeman’s theory of chrononormativity. That is, these passages not only reveal cultural anxieties about having the “right kind” of citizens reproduce, but also how and when they do so.

“It isn’t natural until it’s proper”: chrononormative expectations

15 Foucault links the implementation of discipline for the purpose of producing docile bodies (as well as heterotopic spaces3) to the deliberate control and use of time: “Temporal dispersal is brought together to produce a profit, thus mastering a duration that would otherwise elude one’s grasp. Power is articulated directly onto time; it assures its control and guarantees its use” (Foucault 1995, 160). Bearing in mind this connection between spatiality, docility, and time, we are better able to understand how The Children’s Hour establishes and then subverts expectations of the hetero-patriarchal imperialist system. If Foucault’s discussion of the regimentation of time within imperialist institutions speaks to the discipline and control of behavior on a micro level (i.e., according to yearly, daily, and hourly schedules), then Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, and Rebecca Fine Romanow’s concepts of “chrononormativity” and “queer time” speak to heteronormative expectations on the macro level (i.e., the regimentation of time over the span of an entire life toward the goal of (re)productive citizenship).

16 Freeman explains that “Chrononormativity,” is “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (Freeman 3). Given the context of the boarding school’s role in preparing girls for gendered, heteronormative citizenship, I don’t think we would be out of line to read “productivity” here as reference to both career work and motherhood, especially given Mrs. Mortar’s constant reminders that the girls and women at the school are all expected to marry someday. Much like Foucault’s observation that schools control pupils through the use of compartmentalization and regimen, Freeman further explains that people are “bound to one another, engrouped, made to feel coherently collective, through particular orchestrations of time” (3). This orchestration of time is the “normative timeline,” which includes “paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (Halberstam 2). When this timeline is disrupted in a text, as it is with queer exchanges or homosexual/homosocial desire, we often see compressions or expansions of time which Freeman refers to as “queer temporalities […] points of resistance to this temporal order that, in turn, propose other possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present, and future others: that is, of living historically” (XXII). Furthermore, Romanow explains that: Those who inhabit queer time upset or disengage themselves from the normative progression of a life which is lived in order to fulfill the ‘logics of labor and

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production. […] If the notion of reproduction is removed from the timeline of life, if the present no longer pivots around the past and future, then the subject lives in ‘queer time,’ both freed and excluded from the normative societal expectations. (Romanow 6)

17 Queer temporalities can emerge from “textual moments of asynchrony, anachronism, anastrophe, belatedness, compression, delay, ellipsis, flashback, hysteron-proteron, pause, prolepsis, repetition, reversal, surprise, and other ways of breaking apart what Walter Benjamin calls ‘homogenous empty time” (Freeman XXII). We see some of these moments—specifically belatedness and compression—throughout The Children’s Hour. Indeed, Mary Tilford’s late arrival to her sewing and elocution class (and her resulting lie to cover for her belatedness) is the catalyst that sets the action of the play into motion. As we shall see, the opening scene, and the only pedagogical instruction in the play, is interrupted because Mary comes in late, telling a lie to avoid punishment for disrupting the regimentation of time during the school day. She is caught in her lie and subsequently punished, and her retaliation against authority undermines the entire system. This seemingly insignificant disruption of discipline and regimen ultimately leads to the dissolution of temporal cohesion (as we see toward the end of the play when Karen and Martha find themselves obsessing over the time of day and empty regimens), the institution of the boarding school itself, Karen’s personal participation within the heteronormative timeline, and Martha’s suicide. I suggest that the catastrophic result of Mary’s seemingly small disruption of time within the text points to the fact that temporality within the school was already skewed.

18 While Hellman constructs a conceptual representation of a boarding school mediated through the stage and literary plot, boarding schools already have a complicated relationship to larger hegemonic structures by existing as an agent of society while operating separately from it, both in and outside of imperial measurements of time. That is, if we think of time as an imperial construct,4 then the anxiety over concepts of time so often expressed in Modernist literature evidence alternate temporalities at play. This temporal alterity manifests in The Children’s Hour in the way schools measure the year and impose artificial measurements of growth onto a child’s academic career (academic vs. calendar year), which points to concerns over maintaining chrononormativity. One could argue, then, that Karen and Martha already inhabit a queer temporality because they are permanent residents within a transitory space that operates outside of, but in conjunction with, the heteronormative imperial timeline. While the Wright-Dobie school is meant to function as an imperial mechanism that reinforces heteronormative ideals in its students within a controlled, heterotopic space, the school itself would have already been a queered space to a certain extent, in the sense that it operates on an alternative schedule from the rest of society. While this alternative schedule is typical of most schools, Hellman’s portrayal of the Wright-Dobie school exaggerates its placement outside of normative time and space.

19 Romanow builds on Elizabeth Freeman’s (as well as Judith Halberstam’s) work, arguing that within these contexts, “the body, itself… becomes defined as the queerest space of all, working against the normative temporalities of the global, as the local sphere is also asked to shift to the normality of global time and space” (7). In a way, we can view Martha as an already queered character before her “epiphany” and subsequent confession, due to her status as a deviant body who operates outside of the heteronormative timeline and subverts imperial and societal expectations. Mrs. Mortar

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traces Martha’s possessive and “unnatural” (i.e., queer) attachment to Karen back to childhood while telling her how to reenter the heteronormative timeline: You’ve always had a jealous and possessive nature. Even as a child. If you had a friend, you always go mad if she liked anybody else. That’s what’s happening now. And it’s unnatural. Just as unnatural as it can be. I say you need a man of your own, and—(Hellman 21)

20 Mortar’s coded language links Martha’s close attachments to friends with homosexual desire while her use of the word “mad” suggests the presence of a sort of mental illness that could only be remedied by a relationship with a man. This scene not only echoes contemporary Freudian ideas about female sexuality but also functions as identification and policing of queer desire in an effort to force Martha into the heteronormative timeline she had so far avoided by purchasing a schoolhouse on a rural farm and focusing on her career rather than on finding a suitable mate. While Martha’s participation in chrononormativity is always questionable within the text, Karen is firmly set in her path on the heteronormative timeline for much of the play, thanks to her engagement to Joe Cardin, the town doctor and the only major male character in the play. Not only is Karen engaged to a man, she is engaged to the man. One might assume that Joe’s presence would secure Karen’s status as an authoritative voice of heternormativity, yet the weight of Mary’s accusation, paired with all of the existing queer spatial and temporal elements in the play (and her eventual separation from Joe) leaves her with outsider status. That said, Karen’s relationship with Joe was always filtered through her relationship with Martha. For instance, before Joe enters Act I, Martha and Karen discuss the engagement and Karen’s plans for maintaining her position at the school once she becomes a wife: MARTHA: (Slowly.) You haven’t talked about marriage for a long time – I mean, have you and Joe decided on – ? KAREN: Yes. We’ll get married as soon as the term is over. We’ll be out of debt by then and the school will be paying for itself. And Joe’s found a house. We’ll all go and look at it tomorrow. MARTHA. So soon ? Then we won’t be taking our vacation together ? KAREN. Of course we will. The three of us. MARTHA: I had taken for granted, I guess, that we were going to the lake, like we always do, just you and I. KAREN. Now there’ll be three of us. That’ll be fun, too. (Hellman 17)

21 Major life decisions that expected to be made between the two people in the heterosexual relationship (here, purchasing a home) are here interjected by the inclusion of Karen’s friend. If we recall Sedgewick’s concept of homosocial desire being triangulated and thereby legitimized by a member of the opposite sex, here we see the failure of that triangulation. The discussion between Martha and Karen continues, as Karen attempts to reassure her friend that the marriage will not interfere with the school they established together, but this conversation, like most conversations throughout the text that involve discussions of relationships, is punctuated by references to time—“You haven’t talked about marriage for a long time”; “We agreed a long time ago that my marriage wasn’t going to make any difference to the school” (Hellman 17). These reminders of time and, by extension, the larger heteronormative timeline in question, continue between Joe and his aunt, Mrs. Tilford, whose misinformed accusation leads to the failure of the Wright-Dobie School and Martha’s eventual suicide:

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MRS. TILFORD: When did you last see Karen ? CARDIN: This afternoon. MRS.TILFORD: Oh. Not since seven o’clock ? CARDIN: What’s happened since seven o’clock ? MRS.TILFORD: Joseph, you’ve been engaged to Karen for a long time. Are your plans any more definite than they were a year ago ? (Hellman 44)

22 The relationship between Karen and Joe is always referenced in tandem with time—the long time between their engagement allows Martha to become complacent in assuming that the marriage won’t affect her relationship with Karen (even though she accepts that the marriage will happen), while the same length of time causes Mrs. Tilford to question whether the marriage will or should happen, especially in light of the rumors that call Karen’s heterosexuality (and thus her viability as a spouse and mother) into question. These subtle links between time and sexuality, along with more overt discussions of the repetition and dissolution of time once regimen and discipline within the space of the school falls apart, work themes and complications of chrononormativity throughout the play. On a larger scale, similar temporal disruptions appear in the scene descriptions and actions of characters.

23 The Children’s Hour opens on an “afternoon in April” 5 (Hellman 6) and ends in November; the play begins after the start of the calendar year, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the school year, and ends before the calendar year is finished. We see not only an alternative arrangement of calendar time according to school semesters (Fall-Spring), but also a further manipulation of time—starting in the middle and ending prematurely. Additionally, we see the reversal of the marriage comedy plot— Karen is engaged at the beginning of the play, with the promise of a marriage and children; the anticipated chrononormative trajectory from maidenhood, to motherhood, to old age is interrupted by the question of homosexuality and Martha’s death. These temporal shifts and disrupted chrononormativity, paired with power reversals and normative sexual difference ultimately reveal Karen and Martha’s failure as agents of the imperial institution, leading to the queering of the space itself.

Deviant Bodies, Disrupted Timelines, and Queered Space

24 Within the space of the boarding school in The Children’s Hour, Karen and Martha are expected to regulate time and provide guidance, instruction, discipline, and structure for their students. According to the parameters set by Foucault and Freeman, however, the Wright-Dobie School is already a failed institution because rigor and discipline appear to be largely absent. Perhaps the only explicit example of discipline in action occurs in Act I, when Mrs. Mortar, failed actress and Martha Dobie’s widowed aunt, is overseeing a study session for the resident girls at the school. She attempts to act as an authority figure within this space, but she is consistently interrupted and even corrected by students, a gesture that subverts the power dynamic between teacher and student : MRS. MORTAR: A cue is a line given to the actor or actress to remind them of their next speech. CATHERINE: To remind him or her. (Hellman 10)

25 Catherine then proceeds to correct Mrs. Mortar for skipping two lines in the play they are reciting, blatantly undermining Mrs. Mortar’s position of authority despite her

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classmates’ disproval. Similar disruptions and reversals of power continue throughout the scene and the rest of the play. The most explicit reversal of power, of course, occurs when Mary tells the lie that destroys the lives of Karen and Martha.

26 Mrs. Mortar unsuccessfully tries to regain the high ground toward the end of the scene when she actively polices the actions and sexuality of the girls in the room when she hears them gossiping about boys : MRS. MORTAR: (Becomes aware of noise and raps on the table again.) I want this noise to cease. And I want that silly talk to stop. It is natural that young women should think of young men. But it is not natural until it is proper. (Hellman 11)

27 Propriety and social demands relegate “natural” behaviors and even negate them based on where the subject is in their progression through the heteronormative timeline. Such heterosexual pairings are expected of the girls, but only when the time is right, and only after they have finished their training in the disciplines, as we see in another of Mrs. Mortar’s lines: “courtesy is breeding and breeding is most to be desired in a woman. It’s what every man wants in a woman” (Hellman 11). Here, it is made clear that the girls are being groomed for their future roles as (re)productive citizens. Ironically, the only character who actively polices the girl’s actions and participation in the heteronormative timeline is the widowed aunt who has failed to be the best example of a successful (re)productive citizen. That is, Mrs. Mortar does not have a “successful” career, and the only remaining evidence of her potentially (re)productive heterosexual relationship is her title of “Mrs.”.

28 As we have already seen, not long after her ineffectual lesson, Mrs. Mortar gets into an argument with her niece, Martha, in which she labels Martha’s affection for Karen “unnatural.” The argument leads Martha to send Mrs. Mortar away from the school to resume acting. Mrs. Mortar takes offense to the dismissal, a dismissal that signaled her removal from the hierarchy of the institution. Predictably, the official accusations of lesbianism which shut down the school and ostracize Karen and Marta happen after Mrs. Mortar, the only person who could completely exonerate the women, has left. Mrs. Mortar returns from her trip a few weeks after the trial, and her timing condemns Karen and Martha, as her testimony could have cleared them of all charges of homosexuality and impropriety. In any other text, this would play out as a tragic coincidence, but when Mrs. Mortar returns, Karen, Martha, and Joe make it clear that Mrs. Mortar’s late return was intentional and that she had ignored multiple court summons. This is a temporal disruption and a reversal in power dynamics. Mrs. Mortar goes from being the broke, unsuccessful actress/widow aunt to being the lynchpin whose missing testimony condemns the school and her niece, Martha. Already, the authority of the adults within this space—and the ability for the Wright-Dobie School to perform its institutional goal—is on shaky ground.

29 While much of the criticism on this play focuses on the character of Mary as a ‘monstrous’ child, I suggest that what makes her ‘monstrous’ is not only the fact that she lies without hesitation or consideration of the repercussions, but also the way she manipulates adults by using her youth (and assumed “innocence”) in order to subvert the accepted hierarchy and power structure within a pedagogical space. While Karen laments that “it isn’t a new sin they tell us we’ve done. Other people aren’t destroyed by it” (Hellman 65), Mary is not, so far as the audience is aware, punished for her wrongdoings. I suggest that although Mary is no longer a docile body, according to the expectations of a student’s position in school, she goes without punishment because

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although she temporarily disrupts the power structure, she is not a representative of that structure in the same way that Karen, Martha, and even Mrs. Mortar, are. In fact, I suggest that the heterotopic qualities of the school—that is, as a transitional space and controlled environment in which students are able to grow, learn, and experiment within certain limits (Foucault 1986)—allows for minor deviations from social norms and heteronormative expectations. Furthermore, because we can probably assume that Mary will continue her trajectory on the heteronormative timeline, her temporary disruption of discipline (time, space, and behavior) within the school does not make her a “queer” figure in the same way that Martha’s epiphany and ultimate suicide does. If Mary disrupts the student/teacher power dynamic and Mrs. Mortar polices the girls, Martha effectively polices herself through confession, expression of shame, and suicide. However, these efforts to restore discipline and chrononormativity are for naught, as we are left with no indication that Karen will return to the heteronormative timeline of marriage and reproduction, no indication that the girls who attended the school received or will receive the education, discipline, and regimen they need to enter into the timeline at the “proper” moment.

30 After the heightened frenzy of Mary’s rumor, the curtain of Act III rises to reveal the same space as Act I, but the effects of disciplinary and temporal disruptions are evident: “The room has changed. It is not actually dirty, but it is dull and dark and uncared for. The windows are tightly shut, curtains tightly drawn” (Hellman 54). To this end, Jenny S. Spencer has observed that : The third act is crucial […] not only because of Martha’s suicide,” but also “because of the changed reality that Mary’s lie forces all the characters to face. As Act Three opens, the audience slowly comes to realize that the trial is over and Martha and Karen are living in a state of suspended animation. Time itself seems to have stopped (‘MARTHA: Haven’t you heard ? There isn’t any time any more’). (49)

31 Although Spencer does not say as much, this scene illustrates a shift from normative time to queer time. That is, the action of the play has been compressed into a mere seven months and the characters’ experience of time has been so fractured that time itself almost ceases to exist. While the school was never a vibrant machine of heteronormativity (indeed, it is portrayed as chaotic from the opening scene onward), we are ultimately left with a school that is spatially and temporally altered beyond recognition. Sari Biklen has observed that “school rules regulate both students and teachers. Teacher’s bodies are regulated by the very restrictions they establish for the children… adult’s days [are] controlled by needing to be placed in a supervisory position in relation to children” (Biklen 179). Once Karen and Martha are deemed unsuitable representatives of the heteronormative system they were meant to reinforce, the teachers are left without students to supervise and without the discipline and daily regimen that governed their own lives by extension. Without this structure in place, the women are left adrift. Martha unsuccessfully attempts to restore discipline and regimen with the mundane, repetitive task of bathing: “Six o’clock take a bath, like you’ve always done. You know yesterday, I took a six o’clock bath and I took another at four this morning […] I’m going to have a four o’clock bath and watch the light come up” (Hellman 54). Repetitive washing becomes the only daily activity Martha has to occupy her time and energy, a task that is at once mundane and possibly significant— an unspoken act of ritual cleansing. Even the act of eating—or not eating—and forced nostalgia becomes the only activities Karen and Martha have to focus on: “I’d like to be hungry again. Remember how much we used to eat at college ?” (Hellman 54). Here,

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and throughout the scene, the characters’ thoughts predominantly turn backwards in time. When they do look forward, it is only as far ahead as dinner, or at best, the next day. The only discipline and regimentation of time and space we see in the play is self- imposed by and on the teachers. Once their students are gone, all shreds of the already flimsy daily regimentation that fueled the mechanism of the school have disappeared, leaving the women adrift and without a clear function as agents within the heteronormative system.

32 At the climax of the play, after Karen and Martha come to the realization that their reputations and business is ruined and they have no place left to go, Martha realizes that the rumors, while originally fabricated, reflected her true feelings for Karen. Through the act of confession and by actively identifying as lesbian, Martha becomes the queer body referenced by Romanow and others. The scene in which Martha reveals her feelings to Karen reads more like a confession than a declaration of love : MARTHA: But maybe I loved you that way. The way they said I loved you. I don’t know—listen to me. KAREN: What ? MARTHA: (Kneels down next to Karen) I have loved you the way they said. (Hellman 66)

33 Martha’s stage directions have her kneel beside her friend, a posture loaded with both religious and social significance, at once evoking images of prayer, confession, or marriage proposal. Martha continues: “You’re afraid of hearing it; I’m more afraid than you… You’ve got to know it. I can’t keep it to myself any longer. I’ve got to tell you that I am guilty” (Hellman 66). Instead of providing a sense of redemption or relief, Martha’s confession and Karen’s subsequent refusal to accept it as truth, leaves Martha with little hope of restoring order to her life or her institution. After an emotional final conversation with Karen, Martha exits the stage. Moments later, the audience hears a shot.6 Karen remains still for a few seconds and springs to her feet just as Martha’s aunt runs downstairs. When Karen confirms that her friend is indeed dead in the next room, Mrs. Mortar panics. She pleads with Karen to call a doctor, but Karen assures her that there is nothing left to do.

34 The two sit quietly for a few moments, until Mrs. Mortar breaks the silence to express her discomfort: “MRS. MORTAR: We must do something. I’m afraid. It seems so queer— in the next room. (Shivers)” (Hellman 68). While this scene could be read as a reification of heteronormative ideology in its narrative punishment/erasure of the lesbian, I argue that Martha’s suicide ultimately shatters these expectations by altering the space of the boarding school and prematurely stepping out of the heteronormative timeline. Rebecca Romanow argues that within a colonial context, “the body, itself […] becomes defined as the queerest space of all, working against the normative temporalities of the global, as the local sphere is also asked to shift to the normality of global time and space,” and she sees the ‘postcolonial’ “as inhabiting queer space and time” (7). The Wright-Dobie School, no longer able to operate as an agent of hetero-patriarchal imperialism, becomes a “postcolonial” space for all intents and purposes. Within this framework—and once she assumes the label of queer—Martha’s body becomes the “queerest space of all” and ultimately alters the physical space of the schoolhouse.

35 Karen tells Mrs. Mortar not to be afraid, to which Mrs. Mortar replies: “It’s different for you. You’re young” (Hellman 68). Mrs. Mortar’s words suggest both the fact that she is essentially out of time (that is, near the end of her life AND removed from the heteronormative timeline) and the possibility of Karen returning to

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chrononormativity. Their conversation is then disrupted, of course, by Mary’s grandmother, who has news that the lie has been uncovered and that Karen and Martha’s names have been cleared—predictably moments too late. The exchange between Mrs. Mortar and Karen, however, implies a few important things. First, Mrs. Mortar unwittingly acknowledges that the formerly heteronormative space has been queered by the dead queer body of her niece in the next room. Secondly, the fact that her grief and fear are tied to her age implies that she realizes her potential for fulfilling her role as a participant in the heteronormative system—at least vicariously through her niece—is essentially gone. It is also implied that Karen, by contrast and by virtue of her youth, could potentially step back into the timeline and again become an agent of discipline and (re)productive citizen.

36 While Martha attempts to erase or censor herself, she disrupts chrononormativity and alters the space permanently. Once Martha alters the space, we are left with no tidy ending, no indication that Karen will recover, no idea of what will become of the “monstrous” child or other subjects left without the structure and discipline of the school. The space and characters appear irrevocably changed. The Children’s Hour ultimately highlights the fragility of the hetero-patriarchal imperialist model, as it reveals how the entire system can collapse under the weight of a malicious whisper from a child. Mary whispers the lie/truth to her grandmother—this unspoken truth is what causes the entire collapse of the system. The discursive system that produces the hierarchy has material, organic, physical, mortal consequences. In the end, Hellman leaves us with the uncertainty of a broken heteronormative timeline and a broken institution, and the moment of deviation is punctuated by an offstage shot.

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NOTES

1. “The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930,” was “dubbed the ‘Hays Code’ after Will H. Hays, the head of the organization that wrote the code. The Hays Code declares that movies are ‘entertainment’ but of a very peculiar kind which produces strange effects never encountered before as part of any entertainment, effects which threaten to compromise the morality of movie viewers so powerfully that moviemakers must censor themselves” (Tratner 54). The Hays Code, largely influenced by Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, was especially concerned with censoring and regulating “the morality represented in movies, particularly sexual and

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criminal morality” (Tratner 58). The Code applied eerily eugenic logic as it sought to counter what was perceived as “inherent in the structure of Hollywood movie production and distribution, namely, that movies tend to reduce people to herd-like followers. […] The Code even suggest[ed] that by keeping movies moral, they will ‘improve the race’” (Tratner 58). 2. The child in question, Jane Cumming, was born in India from a white British colonist and an Indian mother. The court decided that the source of Jane’s forbidden sexual knowledge and proclivity for lying stemmed from the fact that, “having spent her early years in India with her maternal family and ‘unfortunately wanting in the advantages of legitimacy, and of a European complexion’—that is, lacking in white skin and (hence) civilized character—had been exposed to a knowledge of women being able ‘to kindle each others’ lewd appetites’. It was also assumed that she had initiated the allegations because, being from a country of lesser morals, she hadn’t realized the criminality of tribadism” (Tuhkanen 1006). 3. In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault explains that “Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (Foucault 1986, 26). With heterotopias of crisis, such as the boarding school, “there are those [spaces] linked […] to time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect” (Foucault 1986, 26). 4. Greenwich Mean Time literally places London (the seat of the British empire) at the longitudinal center of the Earth. 5. Hellman’s decision to begin the play in April could be a nod to the famous line from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “April is the cruellest month” (Eliot 53). In the same way that the hopeful and fecund symbols of spring and renewal are subverted in The Waste Land (1922), The Children’s Hour subverts symbols of innocence and the promise of futurity (children, schools, engagement). 6. The method of Martha’s suicide is one of the few changes between the published 1934 script and the 1961 film adaptation. In the script, Martha shoots herself offstage. Hellman’s stage directions indicate that “The sound of the shot should not be too loud or too strong, as the act has not been sensational” (67). Karen pauses for a few seconds and then runs offstage toward the noise before returning moments later to explain to Mrs. Mortar what just happened. In the film adaptation, Martha hangs herself as Karen dramatically breaks down the locked door with a notably phallic candlestick. According to the World Health Organization, “Violent and highly lethal methods such as firearm suicide and hanging are more frequent among men, whereas women often choose poisoning or drowning, which are less violent and less lethal” (Ajdacic-Gross et al.). It is significant that both versions of Martha’s suicide are masculinized, as it further situates her as a queered character.

ABSTRACTS

This paper explores the spatial and temporal elements in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour by examining connections between bodies and spaces, and the ways in which a body, once it moves beyond expectations or confines of docility into deviance, effectively “queers” a space that is intended to reify and continue the heteronormative timeline. Drawing upon Foucault’s theories of docile bodies as described in Discipline and Punish and theories of chrononormativity as explained by Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, and others, this paper examines how the Wright-Dobie School functions as a failed agent of hetero-patriarchal imperialism, arguing that

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the breakdown of discipline, the fracturing of chrononormativity, and Martha Dobie’s offstage suicide ultimately work to queer the space of the boarding school altogether.

Cet article explore les éléments spatiaux et temporels dans Les Innocentes de Lillian Hellman en examinant les connexions entre corps et espaces, et les manières dont un corps, ayant atteint la déviance par-delà les attentes ou les limites de la docilité, « altère » efficacement un espace censé réifier et prolonger la chronologie hétéronormative. En s’appuyant sur les théories des corps dociles de Foucault telles que décrites dans Surveiller et punir et sur les théories de la chrononormativité telles qu’expliquées par Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, et d’autres, cet article étudie comment l’école Wright-Dobie joue le rôle d’un agent défaillant de l’impérialisme hétéro-patriarcal, en soutenant que l’échec de la discipline, la décomposition de la chrononormativité, et le suicide hors scène de Martha Dobie servent finalement à altérer l’espace de l’internat dans son entier.

INDEX

Mots-clés: internats, théorie queer, discipline, corps dociles, chrononormativité Keywords: The Children’s Hour, boarding schools, queer theory, discipline, docile bodies, chrononormativity

AUTHORS

SARAH A. DYNE Graduate teaching assistant Georgia State University [email protected]

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“The Presence of a Monstrosity”: Eugenics, Female Disability, and Obstetrical-Gynecologic Medicine in Late 19th-Century New York

Lauren MacIvor Thompson

1 Just before noon on 30 January 1889, physician John Milton Mabbott (1862-1938) delivered a 6-pound, 7-ounce stillborn baby boy at the Nursery and Child’s Hospital, located at Lexington Avenue and 51st Street in New York City. Dr. Mabbott carefully recorded in his notebook that the baby, the child of Swedish immigrant Laura Peterson, and her Danish immigrant husband, exhibited the classic characteristics of anencephaly, or the absence of portions of the brain and skull. Mabbott wrote, “On examination about 9 :30 AM the presence of a monstrosity was at once recognized…the scalp covering the forehead could be felt to terminate about 1 inch above the orbital arches and beyond this, there was a feeling to the finger of the surface of flattened diminutive cranial bones very thinly covered…with a slightly uneven layer of connective tissue presenting a smooth membranous surface…beyond this the finger detected a large opening in the cranium due to the absence of a large portion of the calvarium” (Mabbott, 1887-1902).

2 Mabbott also noted in his patient history for Peterson that she was “of somewhat nervous temperament” and that she had been especially disturbed during her pregnancy by meeting “a man on the street who had a hideous growth on the left side of his face, on which her thoughts had dwelt so much that she had feared marking her child.” Of her husband John, Mabbott explained that he “also had three epileptiform attacks during the last 4 months—never previously—and these have been a cause of anxiety.”1 Mabbott’s recordings in this case and others reveal the complexities of the historical intersection between disability, female reproduction, and understandings of heredity in Gilded Age New York. In the age of Darwin and Galton, these notes implied that the fetal “monstrosity” that Laura Peterson delivered may have had his development in utero affected by his parents’ environments and experiences.

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3 Mabbott’s published articles and three extant notebook volumes containing case studies and lecture materials cover the period 1884-1902. Through this relatively short period, his materials tell us a great deal about the place of the American medical profession in a moment where conceptions of disability and eugenics were beginning to profoundly influence society. As American physicians grew increasingly professionalized in the latter half of the 19th century, obstetricians and gynecologists who specialized in “the diseases of women” gained particular social stature.

4 While there is a rich literature addressing the connections between the making of American womanhood and the discipline of medicine as a whole, historians have paid less attention to the ways that eugenics contributed to the emergent specialties of obstetrics and gynecology, and helped define new conceptions of female disability. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Susan Burch, and Lindsey Patterson have argued, disability and gender are “historically situated co-constituted concepts” that together define the contours of power and hierarchy (Burch and Patterson 122; Garland- Thomson 1558). Disabled people and their conditions were often described, regardless of sex, in feminine terms, while medical texts explained that women were, by their very nature, disabled and undeserving of full citizenship.

5 The emergence of women in public life had unsettled notions of their place and purpose in the years after the Civil War, and society increasingly turned to medicine to explain the breakdown of separate spheres. The conflict over women’s rights was further complicated by the science of eugenics. A scientific theory developed by British scientist and philosopher Francis Galton, eugenics promoted the idea that the human race could perfect itself through better breeding, and discouraged reproduction among the “unfit.” Physicians and scientists also began using eugenics to insist that women’s social roles should be confined to motherhood, responsible to the state to produce eugenically fit children.

6 The theory of eugenics was enormously popular with Progressives, as it seemed to explain the root of all social ills and suggested that scientifically controlled reproduction was the solution. Medical historian Judith Roy has suggested that the histories of obstetrics and gynecology, eugenics, and heredity are ripe for integration, briefly noting that specialized gynecologic procedures developed in the 1870s and 1880s were eventually used for eugenic purposes, such as sterilization in the early 20th century (Roy). This essay offers one response to Roy’s recommendation that the eugenics movement be considered as part of the increasingly tight relationship between the development of the specialties of obstetrics and gynecology, and the broader professionalization of medicine. It was eugenics that spurred the professionalization of medicine, alongside the development of the OB-GYN specialty. In turn, OB-GYN stood at the forefront of broader eugenic concerns, since it was doctors like Mabbott who were on the front lines of diagnosing and treating patients who threatened the promise of being able to improve heredity as a whole.

7 Born to English parents on 14 July 1862 in Waterbury, Connecticut, John Milton Mabbott went on to have a long career in New York City as a doctor and medical instructor.2 Frequently featured in encyclopedias of prominent Americans at the time, his career trajectory was relatively standard for the era. He completed his medical training at the age of 22 at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1884, and went on to serve as house physician for St. Luke’s Hospital and as chief resident physician in the Nursery and Child’s Hospital (Herringshaw 422; Shrady 50). Mabbott

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then opened his own private practice, along with another physician, Dr. E.L. Partridge in 1890. He specialized in obstetrics, gynecology, and the diseases of children, with appointments first at New York Hospital as the attending obstetrician, and at the New York Infant Asylum, and also as a school health inspector under New York mayor William Lafayette Strong (Harrison 202).3 He also taught classes in the nursing training program at St. Luke’s and the New York Postgraduate Medical School and Hospital. He was elected a fellow at the New York Academy of Medicine in 1894 (Obituaries 515).

8 Physicians’ fascination with women’s bodies and their diseases constituted not only the creation of the specialties of obstetrics and gynecology, but also the professionalization of American medicine. Mabbott’s career, training, and professional trajectory was representative of a major transitional point. In the years prior to the Civil War, the profession had few regulations and “the barrier between the educated physician and quack” was porous (Kett). But by the time Mabbott entered his medical training, there was a major effort to organize and professionalize the discipline, even as many of the men leading this charge had widely varying professional backgrounds (Numbers 298). As Paul Starr has observed, a professional medical career in the 19th century “had no fixed pattern. Whether or not a physician went to medical school and if he did, for how long and with what general education, were all variable” (Starr 89). Mabbott had attended Waterbury High School in his hometown, and followed this with two years of what one of his biographies referred to as “special study” and then only three years of medical school, but this was typical even for the best-trained physicians of the time (Shrady 30).

9 A member of several prominent medical organizations, including the New York Academy of Medicine and the Medical Society of Greater New York, none of Mabbott’s early biographies mention a membership in the American Medical Association (AMA). Originally established in 1847, the AMA finally emerged as a “full-scale, broad-front professional association” in the second half of the 19th century (Mohr 225). Its major goal was to organize physicians, to improve the quality of medical education, and to eliminate rival sects of medicine it deemed incompetent and dangerous, such as followers of homeopathy or Christian Science. Yet, as Ronald Numbers has observed, only seven percent of the country’s physicians had joined the AMA by 1901 (Numbers 301). By the time of his death in 1938, Mabbott was finally listed as a member, probably only as a result of the organization’s effort after 1901, to automatically include the physician members of county and state medical societies (Obituaries 515).

10 Mabbott’s specialization in obstetrics and gynecology also symbolized the consolidation of medical authority (Adkins; Rothstein 207-216; Starr 76-77). Obstetrics (the branch of medicine dealing with pregnancy and childbirth) first emerged as a specialization in the 1830s, while gynecology with its focus on women’s reproductive systems, developed some twenty-odd years later. The “father of modern gynecology,” James Marion Sims, who performed much of his work on slave women in the late 1840s, pioneered many of the first gynecological examination tools such as the speculum, and developed surgical techniques designed to treat common conditions such as vesico-vaginal fistulas (a hole in the tissue between the bladder and vagina, usually resulting from prolonged labor) (Adkins). Mabbott in his notes occasionally referred to placing women for examination in the “Sims position,” or the use of the “Sims speculum” (Mabbott 1885-1890).

11 Mabbott himself specifically commented on the need for the standardization and professionalization of obstetrical practice. In April of 1893, he authored an essay for The

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New York Medical Journal, urging that regular obstetrical examination of patients by physicians be adopted as standard protocol in the field (Mabbott 1893, 402-404). He explained, [M]ethodical examinations during pregnancy may be urged in the interests of mother and child alike. There is no conflict between the two. Such examinations should become as much a part of routine practice as analysis of the urine...The practice under consideration comprises abdominal palpitation and auscultation, digital exploration per vaginam (and rarely per rectum), and external and conjoined manipulation by one or more persons. (Mabbott 1893, 403)

12 By practicing new techniques, obstetrical-gynecologic specialists hastened the exclusion of traditional midwifery practices from the events of pregnancy and birth. This was one of the most visible efforts to separate and elevate the American medical profession.4 Mabbott’s urging of specific protocols of obstetrical care sought to exclude midwives on the basis of their lack of competence and cleanliness. He argued, I am becoming more and more persuaded that midwives should not be permitted to assume the entire charge and responsibility of cases of childbirth. The midwife most assuredly can not be expected to make intelligent examinations during pregnancy. And, secondly, the average midwife seems to possess so little regard for ordinary cleanliness, not to mention asepsis and antisepsis, that she ought certainly not to be permitted to introduce her fingers into the vagina during labor on her own responsibility…let them, for the sake of humanity, be content to be good nurses…But, as with other nurses, let their work be under the direction and supervision of the medical profession. Reproduction may be looked upon by the optimist as a natural function which may be left to Nature. Fortunately, this is very frequently the case, but difficult and unnatural labors are sufficiently numerous, and maternal and infantile deaths resulting therefrom are sufficiently common…to warrant the profession and the people in demanding that the practice of midwifery should not be left in incompetent hands…Let the medical profession rise to the full sense of its own responsibility and insist upon the right to extend to private practice among all classes all the possible benefits of modern advancement in the science and art of midwifery. (Mabbot 1893, 403)

13 The New York physician grounded much of his criticism of traditional midwifery in two areas. He accused them of spreading infection, referring to the era’s increasing knowledge of bacteriology and hygiene. He sought to differentiate his own, more modern treatments, often noting how often he washed his hands with “soap and water” or used antiseptic tablets in the water before examination (Mabbott 1885-1890). The use of stricter, more sterile procedures by physicians became a way for them to relegate midwives to a much lower status in the management of women’s health. He also argued that the midwife’s “hold on certain classes of the community” represented the working classes’ atavistic insistence on retaining tradition even as the benefits of modern scientific medicine became readily available. This criticism was particularly directed at immigrant populations, whose customs Progressive reformers considered at the least, outlandishly foreign and at the worst, dangerous to the fabric of the republic.

14 Mabbott’s article, appearing in the New York Medical Journal in 1893 marked the beginning of the transformation of the role of the midwife in American childbirth. Few women at the turn of the century had their babies in a hospital setting. Indeed, “lying- in” or maternity hospitals were institutions designed mostly for working-class or indigent women, many of whom were bearing children out of wedlock. These hospitals had high morbidity and mortality rates, and puerperal fever outbreaks were a common occurrence. Historians Richard Wertz and Dorothy Wertz have noted that doctors in

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private practice like Mabbott often underreported cases, and middle and upper-class women with physicians in attendance at their home births often died at higher rates than poor women who were relegated to midwives’ care (Wertz and Wertz). Yet by 1910, only half of all births were still attended to at home by midwives, and it was becoming a mark of privilege to be attended to by a physician at a hospital (Ettinger).

15 Mabbott argued that the necessity for the hygienic management of a physician also extended to the patients themselves. During a talk for the New York Academy of Medicine’s section in Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1896, he warned that a female patient should “keep her hands away from her vulva and vagina as long as she is confined to bed” during labor (Mabbott 1896, 484). He justified himself with this narrative : A case of pyaemia came under the care of the writer two years ago in the New York Infant Asylum where the patient, a colored woman, admitted having examined herself with her finger within twenty-four hours after delivery to see how different she was from before. I have no doubt that it was this self-exploration which resulted in her death, as there was no other reasonable explanation and the same house staff and nurses were caring for other patients before and after the development of sepsis in this case without any other patient becoming septic. This etiology of sepsis is probably rare; it may be less rare than we think. When we are preparing our own hands for an obstetrical examination let us warn every patient of the dangers of contact with a hand not so prepared. (Mabbot 1896, 484)

16 Mabbott’s insistence that the patient had infected herself represented the medical community’s reluctance to admit anything that might damage their emergent reputations as professionals. By the time of Mabbott’s article publication, germ theory was relatively established, and Louis Pasteur had demonstrated that streptococci was mostly the cause of the infection (Wertz and Wertz). Instead, Mabbot’s linkage of poverty, ignorance, and incompetent medical care within the working classes echoed from a medical perspective many of the broader concerns of contemporary social and public health reformers (Leonard).

17 Yet Mabbott was not above admitting his mistakes on the occasion. In his 1893 notes on a case of patient morphine poisoning, he wrote at the top of the page in his casebook, “Lesson which perhaps I needed to learn,” and explained, In future, I shall feel disposed to proceed with greater caution, though I felt at the time and have felt all along that my treatment was justifiable…Such an event refreshes me anew that we hold our patients’ lives in our hands… In nine years practice this is my first experience with a case of morphine poisoning in which the morphine had been administered by a physician. That the physician was myself has not deterred me from reporting the case. (Mabbott 1885-1890)

18 It is important to note here that while Mabbott’s assessment of these patients reflected his (and other physicians) desire for authority and professional expertise, the patients themselves also had a hand in the making of medical expertise (Adkins 14). At the turn of the 20th century, many women of all classes sought out specialists in women’s conditions including pregnancy and childbirth in order to maximize their chances for health. Mabbott’s training was extensive, and it is unsurprising that he ran a successful private practice until his death in 1938. Yet medical power was not absolute over the patient. As Judith Walzer Leavitt has argued, although medical authority expanded in the early decades of the 20th century, “physicians struggled to establish the power of their words and their medicine” even as they “set the parameters of the discussion [which] gave them extensive authority” (Leavitt 647).

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19 For these reasons, the technological modernization of American society, and the emergence of scientifically-backed medical treatment, helped to significantly boost physician authority in the face of their still uncertain place in the professional universe. By the 1890s, new developments in technology and the American economy had transformed society’s structure. Labor unrest, the rise of corporate capitalism, and racial and ethnic tensions hastened by the aftermath of emancipation and rising immigration rates altered conceptions of men, women, and class frameworks. Physicians sought to take their place in the ranks of a newly emergent, professionalized, white-collar middle class, and were anxious to apply the new scientific principles to social problems. By eliminating medical practices like midwifery that were “primitive” amongst both the upper and lower classes alike, and practicing the most advanced medicine, physicians like Mabbott hoped to eliminate “socially and economically ‘inefficient’ drags on evolutionary and economic progress” (Baynton 2016). The professionalization of medicine and the delegitimizing of midwives and homeopaths represented the turn toward “scientific medicine.”

20 In the decades between 1880 and 1910, enormous advancements in pathology, bacteriology, anatomy, physiology, and embryology established the field of “scientific medicine” which was heralded as a major development in American medical practice (Haller 1981, 134; Haller 1997, XI). Sociology, psychology, and anthropology also drew on these developments in the harder sciences to establish research methods, testing, and the use of empirical data to prove hierarchical conceptions of race and gender (Bederman, Ross). All of these disciplines emphasized classification and typologies at their heart. Progressives drew upon scientific explanations of evolution and heredity to explain the workings of humanity and modern economic and social phenomena.

21 The discipline of eugenics would join these other scientific categories and make its mark on all of them (Kevles). Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, followed in 1871 by The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex not only established the prominence of the fields of biology and evolutionary theory, but also placed the idea of sexual difference and selection in both animals and humans at the heart of modern scientific inquiry.5

22 British scientist Francis Galton (who also happened to be Charles Darwin’s second cousin) had also published in 1865 a widely-read article for Macmillan’s Magazine entitled “Hereditary Talent and Character” that explored the idea that humans could control and improve their offspring’s mental qualities and “natural ability” through picking partners as carefully as breeders did for livestock (Galton 1865). He later termed this strategy as “eugenics,” derived from the Greek word eugenes, meaning “good in birth” (Galton 1883).6 By 1904, he would define eugenics in the American Journal of Sociology as “the science that deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage” (Galton 1904).

23 Galton’s theories electrified not only the scientific and medical communities but also the larger American public. Eugenics became a messy and wide-ranging movement, encompassing individuals and groups that did not agree on much except that the children of the future should be ‘better born.’ Eugenic proposals ran the gamut from pleas to let women freely select their sexual partners, to requiring health certificates for those seeking to wed, to involuntary sterilization of people deemed ‘undesirable.’ (Hamlin 161)

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24 As the eugenics movement popularized, trained experts joined the faculty of universities and founded organizations like the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders Association and the Eugenics Record Office. The Eugenics Record Office, located in Cold Spring Harbor, NY, coordinated research on heredity and maintained staff and facilities for field research and studies on pedigrees and family traits. Eugenicists like David Starr Jordan, Harry Hamilton Laughlin, and Charles Davenport published articles, books, and pamphlets on eugenics for other scientists but also for the general public. They also campaigned for compulsory sterilization laws, the first of which was enacted in Indiana in 1907.7 By the 1920s, the science and theory of eugenics would permeate numerous aspects of American life, including popular culture. Newspapers, magazines, and films featured eugenic storylines and advertisements, and “Better Baby” and “Fitter Families” contests attracted enormous numbers of attendants at state fairs and international expositions.

25 The field of medicine embraced eugenics as well. American physicians published volumes about why the problematic reproduction of working classes, immigrants, and people of color were especially responsible for the degeneration of society. Cincinnati medical society president Dr. Frederick W. Langdon quantified the eugenically perfect citizen for the journal American Medicine in 1901. Langdon (who was also the city’s mental sanitarium director) opened his essay by pronouncing that physicians were the most successful evaluators of people’s usefulness to “our modern civilization” since the “more important factors come almost continually under his observation.” Invoking a variety of turn-of-the-century American scientific and cultural tropes, he made the case over the next several pages that the best citizens would be Darwinian triumphs of adaptability and strength. The best citizens were well formed with proper physical and mental “organic balance,” a prudent religious sensibility that had “well-developed moral[s]” with respect to “marriage relations, the family and domestic instincts generally,” the ability to contribute to society in all its aspects “political, industrial, religious, fraternal, educational,” and a great capacity for economic production. Finally, Langdon opined that a perfect citizen would also pass on these traits of “constitutional vigor and functional versatility” to their offspring. He warned in italics: “The sterile are of brief value to the state” (Langdon 85).

26 These descriptors were meant to define men and male political and social responsibility. Nevertheless, Langdon spelled it out for his audience, perhaps because he was well aware of the changing climate for women’s rights in this period. He explained, It is evident that the ‘most useful citizen’ under all preceding conditions, must be of the male sex, not merely because of artificial laws to that effect, but by reason of the possession by that sex of more physical vigor and a nearer approach to organic balance for a greater portion of its life, other conditions being equal. (Langdon 85)

27 Yet he also tempered this statement, explaining that these conditions for good citizenship—particularly the need for the male citizen to support marriage and matters of the family—required women’s presence in public life. “[I]t is equally evident that a highly developed, well balanced female organism is an essential complement to the ‘most useful citizen’ as well as a necessary continuance of the type” (Langdon 85).

28 He reassured readers that women should feel consoled “in the thought that, from an economic standpoint, she is a specialist of the highest type, essential to the greatest usefulness of the ‘most useful citizen,’ if not his equivalent potentially as a citizen”

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(Langdon 85). In other words, the best female citizens were healthy and mentally sound, and their most useful economic function was to be a mother.

29 Closely tied to a woman’s eugenic fitness to produce children was her mental state. There was general agreement amongst medical practitioners, particularly gynecological or obstetrical specialists, that anxiety, nervousness, neurasthenia, and hysteria stemmed from the condition of women’s internal reproductive organs. Physicians warned that an epidemic of neurasthenic and insane women was the chief cause of infertility and the decline of the race. Harvard physician Edward H. Clarke advanced one of the most popular versions of this theory with his popular 1873 publication Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls (Clarke).8 Clarke advocated the idea that women should not attend school with men and that their study hours should be limited because their minds and bodies became too strained otherwise.

30 According to Clarke, women’s biology was their destiny. They especially needed to ensure that they did not attend school during their monthly period (Hamlin 74). He described one case, a patient he called “Miss A--, a healthy, bright, intelligent girl… ambitious as well as capable” but who had a “nervous” temperament and “paid no… attention to the periodical tides of her organization” (Clarke 65-66). He explained the strain of her studies as causing her to hemorrhage during her menstrual period, and grow increasingly pale and ill. She was never well again after completing her studies, and Clarke warned his readers that by the time she came to him for treatment she had “the delicacy and weaknesses of American women, and… is without children.”9

31 Well-regarded physician Dr. William Osler also explained the mental and physical problems of modern middle-class women in a draft of an article for the widely circulated publication, Ladies Home Journal. Though the article was never published, his explanation neatly summarizes the thinking of many physicians of the period. It is a thousand pities that the causes which have contributed to a product so unique as the American girl should be the very ones which favor instability and early breakdown. Of a frank and open nature without fear or the awkward shyness so often met with [in] her European sister she starts with greater advantages as there have ever before been enjoyed by women. Intense, energetic & emotional she is apt to be swept into the race at a pace far too rapid for the length of the course, and for those who drop out at the quarter mile or [before] the half mile post is reached, a majority do so from breakdown in the nervous system. (Osler)

32 Physicians like Clarke and Osler contributed directly to the broader thinking amongst prominent reformers that women’s entrance into public life and education in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were contributing to “race suicide,” wherein the “best classes” were not having babies, and rates of marriage among white native-born Americans were dropping. In this period, women in American society were undergoing what Robyn Muncy has termed a vast “transformation of female experience” (Muncy 3). Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, women began to enter the public sphere in order to attend universities and engage in volunteer reform work in increasing numbers. Particularly salient to this transformation was the emergence of the women’s rights movement and the cause of suffrage. As the social problems of industrial capitalism intensified in the early years of the 20th century, women activists linked the need for the vote and broader legal rights to advocacy for child labor laws, women’s working conditions, temperance, public hygiene, and other causes. While this had the effect of increasing (middle-class, white) women’s status, it caused medical experts, social commentators, and politicians alike to warn that women’s rejection of

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their home and motherly duties would result in major problems for society. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt acknowledged women’s new political roles, but warned “There are certain old truths…which no amount of progress can alter…the primary duty of the woman is to be the helpmate, the housewife, and mother” (Rose 24). He condemned middle and upper classes’ use of birth control, and warned that the children of immigrants and minorities would soon overtake the white, native-born population (Bederman).

33 Working-class women laboring in the industrial or retail sectors were even more suspect, since they had jobs that put them squarely in the public sphere amongst vulgar male colleagues who had no qualms about corrupting their innocence. As Kathy Peiss has shown, middle-class reformers disapproved of women wage earners who “devot[ed] their evenings to the lively entertainment of the streets, public dance halls, and other popular amusements,” even as “sexuality became a central dimension” of these women’s independence (Peiss 300). Vice-investigators and social purity reformers lamented these women’s lost respectability and publicized the dangers of their loose morals. Working-class and immigrant women’s sexuality became the focus of public anxiety with their illegitimate and socially menacing abilities to reproduce their immorality and defectiveness (Kline). And, at the far end of the spectrum of undesirable behavior were the sexual dangers wrought by “savages…idiots, criminals and pathological monstrosities” who might reproduce their defectiveness with impunity (Russett 63). Together, a fear of the unchecked spread of degeneration and disability underpinned these expressions of the need for reform.

34 Mabbott also subscribed to these ideas about mental status and female debility. His notes on patients with mental problems reveal the medical profession’s linkage between the perception of general female disability, and their dangerous ability to perpetuate their defects in their offspring. Only physicians had the power to recognize and prevent the perils of female mental disturbance. He wrote to a woman whose teenage daughter he had been treating, opining that her daughter was a “spoiled child” whose “prolonged and constant application to books and indoor pursuits impaired both her mental and physical condition. Her poor state of nutrition and menstrual irregularity indicates at least a partial physical basis for the [mental] symptoms she has developed.” He advised the mother that her daughter was developing “emotional insanity,” and that she needed to be under the constant care of a physician who could control her (Mabbott 1885-1890).

35 In another case, he noted that a patient named Jennie Moonie, whom he diagnosed with “acute melancholia” and “facial epilepsis” in March of 1888, had mental faculties that became “deranged” at night” and “labored under the delusion that doctors, nurses, and others about her were anxious to get rid of her, and that the medicine was poison intended to hasten the demise.” He then recorded that he had commanded the patient to take her medicine, and though she complied with “pleading and protest,” his next step would have been its “forcible administration or hypodermic injection” (Mabbott 1887-1902).

36 Mabbott viewed the women suffering from these disorders as special social dangers and physical vessels ominously bearing potentially deformed children. Women suffering from nervous disorders and accompanying physical weakness were also suspected to be members of a large, evolutionarily backward underclass defined by “arrested development and atavism” (Baynton 2001, 41). He expressed these twinned anxieties of

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disability and gender in his records on female patients he saw in his private practice. Many were middle and upper class, but others were working-class, often immigrants (like the Swedish-born Laura Peterson), and held jobs as domestics, in laundries, and other service positions. His notes nearly always mentioned their country of origin and their profession, and reveal that he often asked patients about their health experiences prior to moving to the United States.

37 He paid special attention to women who described having traumatic experiences, such as the Swedish-born Laura Peterson who delivered an anencephalic fetus. As Douglas Baynton notes, “Given the inchoate understanding of heredity, which even as late as the 1930s often included neo-Lamarckian ideas about the inheritance of acquired characteristics, defects were assumed to be not only heritable but also mutable, manifesting themselves in varied forms and having disastrous effects on succeeding generations” (Baynton 2016, 15). Though he never specifically acknowledged in his casebook the hereditation theories of Darwin, Galton, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck or August Weismann, Mabbott’s notations on the health and status of the infants he delivered illustrated his awareness of the problem of social degeneracy, where these defects might corrupt entire generations of future Americans.10

38 To Mabbott, the female body and the bodies of infants held important clues about his patients’ mental characteristics and abilities. Even when his patients experienced normal labor and deliveries, Mabbott also took care to cite in his logbook the size of the infants’ heads, using four different measurements including the inches and centimeters of the occipitofrontal and biparietal sections (Mabbott 1885-1890). Though the study of phrenology had its heyday in the antebellum period, experts nonetheless continued to connect physical measurements of the face and head to evaluations of health, personality, and intellectual ability (Gilman 98). In the 1880s and 1890s, medicine, anthropology and other disciplines began remodeling these older beliefs about physical measurements to make scientific determinations about biologically determined traits. Physicians connected feeblemindedness, insanity, idiocy, depravity, intemperance, and a myriad of other medical and social problems to a person’s physical measurements. By the end of the 19th century, experts like Cesar Lombroso were utilizing measurement data to assess and make recommendations regarding the social policy on criminals and prostitutes (Lombroso, Gibson and Rafter; Rafter).

39 Eugenic policy also drew connections between loose morals, ill health, and problematic heredity. Eugenicists like Robert Dugdale published family studies that purported to be able to trace degeneracy, alcoholism, crime, and illness from a common ancestor through succeeding generations (Dugdale). An entire family’s lineage could be destroyed through one member’s feeble-mindedness—which was often cast as a result of their sexual or alcoholic proclivities. Mabbott raised these fears in his patient case histories.

40 In the case of one patient named Linda Morris, age 23, he remarked at the top of his patient log page that she was the “wife of an actor” and “has had 8 induced abortions in the last 5 or 6 years.” He also noted, “She has been accustomed…to late and sumptuous dinners, drinking wine, champagne, and liquors freely and smoking cigarettes. She could drink almost any quantity without becoming intoxicated” (Mabbot 1887-1902).

41 His remaining notes on Mrs. Morris explained that she was pregnant, she had contracted what he called a “very offensive” venereal disease with vaginal discharge, and that she had been treated for syphilis just prior to her hospital admission. Mabbott

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also described Morris’ extremities as exhibiting signs of paralysis and “wasting,” along with dark pigmentation on her chest and abdomen, knees, ankles and other areas of her body, and face marred by swelling and acne. He ordered a “milk and limewater” diet along with vaginal douching and brandy. A subsequent examination revealed no fetal heartbeat and he anticipated a premature stillbirth (Mabbot 1887-1902).

42 Uneasy with the patient’s lack of progress, he telegraphed her mother in Omaha, Nebraska, and told her to come to New York as soon as possible, “as delivery will involve a crisis.” On 14 November 1889, Linda Morris went into labor and delivered a deformed, stillborn infant, who “had probably been dead 9 days.” The delivery was less traumatic than he expected. Mabbott noted there was no perineal laceration and that her general condition was “fully as good as during previous 24 hours.” Troublingly, her limbs did not improve and continued to be “painful, sensitive, useless, contracted” (Mabbot 1887-1902).

43 In December, other physician colleagues came to consult, and agreed that she was suffering from “multiple peripheral neuritis of probably alcoholic etiology.” They prescribed arsenic, strychnine, warm baths, and electricity as remedies, noting with surprise that Morris had “given no evidence of mental aberration, delusions, etc.” and that they felt she could recover fairly quickly with these treatments. Yet Morris died within a few weeks of her diagnosis, Mabbott noting it tersely in his casebook as “The case went on to a fatal termination within a few weeks after Dr. Starr saw her” (Mabbot 1887-1902).

44 In another case in August of 1892, he made notes on a fourteen-year-old female patient, writing at the top of the page “Case of Seduction ?” The word “seduction” was often used in the 19th century to mean “rape,” but it is clear that Mabbott was unsure if rape was the right way to describe this particular patient’s case. Her mother brought her in to see Mabbott, concerned that she was pregnant. After noting the girl’s irregular periods since the age of 11, he described her masturbatory habits as occurring “about every night for one year. ‘Happened’ to do it. No one taught her or suggested it. It never caused hemorrhage.” He also detailed what fingers she used and how many at a time (Mabbot 1887-1902). While his notes acknowledge the existence of women’s sexual feelings, his line of questioning for the patient also indicated that he connected the patient’s masturbation practices to her uncontrollable sexual impulses, painting her encounter with a thirty-two-year-old married man as inevitable (Degler 197).

45 He explained, “About three weeks ago, she laid down on outside of bed and allowed [the] man…to do what he wanted. Before that she tried to get out of the room but he locked the door” (Mabbot 1887-1902). Mabbott described that the patient had sex with the man at least two other times, and also recorded the details of his physical examination, writing that “the opening of the hymen is so large and the hymen so elastic that my index finger passes easily into [the] vagina without producing any pain.” He then described inserting more fingers, noting “[This] caused more pain than patient experienced at any of the supposed acts of intercourse.” He concluded that consensual sex, and not rape, had taken place because “the girl offer[ed] no resistance during the attempts alleged to have been made upon the bed” and his examination had produced no blood or tearing (Mabbot 1887-1902).

46 Mabbott’s notes reflected his understanding that both these patients’ cases represented eugenic dangers to society. Their moral and sexual misbehavior had resulted in their respective need for medical treatment, and both women were representative of the

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larger problem of degeneracy, wherein both their heredity and environment could be blamed for their situations. Their cases seemed to represent the “laziness, lawlessness, a weakness for liquor, and an appetite for unbridled sex” that spurred Progressive reformers in the coming decades to pass laws governing the sterilization of defectives (Lombardo 8). By close examination of women’s bodies, their functions, and their offspring, doctors like Mabbott established medical evidence for the vagaries of human behavior and defect. Not only did their examination and treatment methods define the parameters of disability, it also established the making of the American medical profession as one that was uniquely and authoritatively suited to define who was fit to participate as full members of society. Their conceptions of normality were based on their subjective evaluation of female bodily functions and physiological construction. These evaluations on a patient-by-patient basis allowed doctors to draw broad conclusions about women and ultimately about the nature of humanity itself.

47 Though his records are silent on his specific views about sterilization or euthanasia of “defectives,” Mabbott’s records also ultimately reveal that he stood at the vanguard of a “eugenic era” in American medicine, where the management of reproduction and perceptions of the danger of disability would set in motion some of the biggest controversies of the 20th century. By making themselves the judges of women’s capabilities, both physical and mental, American physicians cemented their importance in legal and cultural understandings of what constituted fit citizenship. Before there was Carrie Buck or Harry Haiselden’s film about the “Bollinger baby,” there was John Milton Mabbott and his medical practice in New York (Lombardo; Pernick).

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NOTES

1. Mabbott was describing the patient’s husband’s epileptic attacks, probably consisting of convulsions and other common symptoms of the condition. 2. Married to Kate Adele Ollive in 1895, they had one child, Thomas Ollive Mabbott in 1898, and resided at 19 5th Avenue in New York. Thomas earned a PhD in English, and became a renowned scholar of Milton and a longtime professor at New York’s Hunter College. His papers are held at the University of Iowa. See https://www.lib.uiowa.edu/scua/msc/tomsc450/msc429/ msc_429.html#PERSONAL 3. According to annual reports held by the Cornell University Weill Medical College Medical Center Archives, the original Nursery and Child Hospital eventually merged in 1910 with the New York Infant Asylum, maintaining buildings at both Lexington Avenue and 51st street, and Amsterdam Avenue and 61st street. By 1913, the Amsterdam location was expanded and the Lexington branch closed. In 1934, the organization merged with New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. 4. The campaign against abortion constituted another effort to consolidate the American medical profession. (See Reagan) 5. For an excellent and groundbreaking history of the relationship between Darwin and the late 19th-century feminism, see Hamlin. She examines how Darwinian evolutionary theory reformulated ideas about gender roles and shaped feminist thought at the turn of the 20th century. By delving deeply into Charles Darwin’s texts and their reception in the United States, she describes how reformers like Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Helen Hamilton Gardener, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman discovered that Darwinian principle could successfully shift the debate from “women’s souls to women’s bodies” and “[pave] the way for eugenics and birth control (XI).” Thomas Laqueur, Londa Schiebinger and others have also noted

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how modern Enlightenment science was rooted in discovering the relationship between natural law and gender and sex differences. See Schiebinger; Tedesco. 6. For a good summary of how Galton specifically developed his interest and theory in eugenics, see Gillham 7. For an excellent history and summary of the Indiana sterilization law, see Carlson. 8. Kimberly Hamlin notes that two hundred copies were sold in a single day in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, which became coeducational in 1870 (Hamlin 73). These were important questions at Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and other institutions for higher education for women. 9. There were a number of important rebuttals and companion pieces to Clarke’s work. See Howe, Maudsley. By the 1890s, the most important rebuttals were coming directly from feminist reformers, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who employed Darwinian theories to reject physician and eugenicists’ assessments of women’s “natural” roles. See Gilman. 10. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) developed the theory of acquired characteristics, arguing that because organisms’ exposure to new environments could cause modifications in their behavior, those changes themselves could also become heritable. 19th-century thinkers subsequently interpreted this to mean that parents’ behavior—whether moral or immoral—could be passed onto their children. Many physicians cautioned their pregnant patients to cultivate the most upstanding behavior and personal reflection in order to give their unborn children an advantageous start in life. German scientist August Weismann (1834-1914) expanded upon Lamarckian ideas of heredity by researching the nuclei of germ cells, concluding that heritable characteristics were transmitted unaltered through generations of descendants. This allowed eugenics researchers like Charles Davenport to assert that people’s disabilities and defects could be traced to numerous prior generations (Paul).

ABSTRACTS

This article analyzes the connection between eugenics, the professionalization of American medicine, and the development of the specialties of obstetrics and gynecology. Drawing upon the records of a physician practicing in New York City at the turn of the century, it examines how his evaluation and treatments of female patients’ bodies and their infants’ bodies constituted the growing emphasis on the dangers of disability to American society. Underlying the fear of defectiveness and degeneration was the fear that working-class women’s sexuality and immorality might be among those defects, and would facilitate their passage to future generations. The essay concludes that while medical authority was not absolute, the records of John Milton Mabbott reveal a transition point in the history of American medicine, where scientific medicine and the emergence of theories of inheritance, like eugenics, helped to legitimize physicians’ expert opinion.

Cet article étudie le lien entre l’eugénisme, la professionnalisation de la médecine américaine, et le développement des spécialités de l’obstétrique et de la gynécologie. S’appuyant sur les archives d’un médecin exerçant à New York à l’aube du 20ème siècle, il analyse comment son examen de corps de patientes et de leurs nourrissons, ainsi que les traitements prodigués, reflètent l’attention croissante portée aux dangers que le handicap représentait pour la société américaine. Derrière la crainte des déficiences et de la dégénérescence se cachait la peur de la sexualité et de l’immoralité des femmes de la classe ouvrière, qui menaçaient de transmettre

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leurs défauts aux générations futures. L’article conclut que si l’autorité des médecins n’était pas absolue, les dossiers de John Milton Mabbott révèlent un moment de transition dans l’histoire de la médecine américaine, où la médecine scientifique et l’émergence de théories de l’hérédité telles que l’eugénisme ont permis de légitimer l’expertise médicale.

INDEX

Keywords: medicine, disability, obstetrics, gynecology, eugenics, United States Mots-clés: médecine, handicap, obstétrique, gynécologie, eugénisme, Etats-Unis

AUTHORS

LAUREN MACIVOR THOMPSON Ph.D. Visiting Assistant Professor Kennesaw State University [email protected]

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Hors-Thème

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Was citizenship born with the Enlightenment? Developments of citizenship between Britain and France and “everyday citizenship” implications

Djordje Sredanovic

Introduction

1 Britain constitutes a peculiar case study in the area of citizenship, as British laws did not contain the word “citizenship” until the British Nationality Act of 1948. Although before that the institution1 of “subjecthood” worked in a comparable way, the 1948 Act was unique, as it made provision for six distinct citizenship statuses (most countries only have two – national and non-national), a number that further increased with the Immigration Bill of 1971. This article does not, however, aim to be simply a tale of British exceptionalism. By contrasting the British case to that of France, it aims to put forward the hypothesis that it was the successful diffusion of the French model that made most states in the world opt for the binary citizen/non-citizen or national/non- national model, effectively rendering the alternative British approach an insular case.

2 In the following pages, I will first present two different lineages of contemporary citizenship, valid for the British and the French case, respectively. I will argue that it is heuristically advantageous to study British subjecthood and French nationalité and citoyenneté2 as two different institutions. I will then present some possible explanations for the diffusion of the French model before turning to the history of British subjecthood/citizenship, showing how the latter developed in a separate fashion and how it seems to have recently shifted closer to the French model. I will conclude this article with an analysis of some aspects of everyday citizenship in Britain and France, showing the significant autonomy of everyday conceptions from the historical and institutional development of formal citizenship, as well as some effects that the formal dimension nevertheless seems to have on the notions of citizenship amongst ordinary people.

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Two different lineages of citizenship?

3 Academics (and others) have two common ways of describing the development of contemporary citizenship. Many start from the Magna Carta of 1215 to trace the history of English freedom and English citizenship, and present the French Revolution of 1789 as a partial transformation of the same freedoms. Others consider the Magna Carta and the successive similar British developments as privileges dealing with personal status rather than with general political norms, and point to similar institutions that existed in other countries across Europe – with the significant exception that the English institutions were the only ones to survive into the contemporary era.3 In this second lineage, the universalistic nature of the 1789 revolution is presented as without precedent. The absolute (illuminated) monarchies, with their removal of all the powers rival to the central one, anticipated the developments of the Revolution as much as the experience of British liberalism. Schnapper (58-69) is among the proponents of the first lineage, while Brubaker (1992) presents many of the aspects of the second – although the author himself indicates how this lineage can already be found in Marx.

4 For the scopes of this article, we can consider the two lineages of citizenship (which might be called “liberal” for the one starting with the Magna Carta, and “statist” for the one starting with the 1789 revolution) as the origins of two different institutions. British citizenship (subjecthood) was based on the limits placed on the power of the state, whereas French citizenship was based on the removal of all powers except those of the state. In the following pages, I will show how these approaches justify both the binary citizen/non-citizen French system, as well as the multiplication of statuses in British legislation.

The French model and its diffusion

5 Rogers Brubaker (1992) describes the French Revolution as the origin of both contemporary citizenship and the contemporary idea of “nation”. Other scholars are more nuanced in their positions: Peter Sahlins (2003, 2004), for example, shows evidence of significant citizenship reform in France already in the 1750s, although he agrees about the “revolutionary” significance of the French experience of citizenship reform. The 18th century has more generally been identified by both Anderson and Hobsbawm as the first period of emergence and construction of national identities, identities that both “popular” and “state” nationalisms then supraimposed to earlier historical periods.

6 Both Brubaker’s analysis of the history of citizenship in France, and Torpey’s analysis of the development of the passport clearly show how the revolutionary period was characterized in France by the construction of a uniform juridical and political internal space, by the abolition of internal barriers to movement, and by the definition of clear external frontiers, both in terms of territory and population. While initially open to foreigners who shared the ideals of the revolution, the nationality of Revolutionary France was rapidly well-delimited, excluding potentially hostile foreigners, as well as expatriates.

7 This clear-cut binary division between nationals and non-nationals is the most common way in which contemporary states deal with their citizenry. How can we explain this

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diffusion of the French model? Napoleonic conquests had a clear role in spreading the model: citizenship spread to most of Continental Europe together with the Code civil and the metric system. Wright further argues that France was hegemonic in the military, colonial, diplomatic and cultural fields for most of the modern and early contemporary period, rendering French a lingua franca. Here, I wish to focus on a single aspect among those presented by Wright: the role of French as the diplomatic language of record between the 1714 Treaty of Rastatt and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles (in which English was added as a second language), and more generally the hegemony of France and the French language that continued in the field of diplomacy even after 1919. Torpey shows how the emergence of the global passport system coincided with this period of French hegemony. While the first states to introduce passports took upon themselves to provide identification documents to the foreigners who entered the national territory, the diffusion of the practice meant that each state was subject to external pressure to define the confines of its population and to codify who was entitled to a national passport (in addition to the on-going need to define the national population in order to facilitate mass conscription). While the internal organization of France was a politically unacceptable model for many other states during most of this period, when faced with the need to define the external organization of the state (who was and who was not a national), imitating France, which hegemonized international diplomacy, was much more acceptable.

8 These factors of diffusion of the French model can also explain the British exception. Other than obviously resisting Napoleon, Britain was always the “other” hegemonic state: it was powerful enough and its empire was large enough to be free from the need to imitate France in regulating nationality. Colley argues that much of the political identification the national population established with Britain was the result of intermittent wars with France between the 18th and the 19 th century. According to Colley, the fear of foreign invasion was a strong factor in the emerging identification with the nation, together with Protestantism which, in opposition to French Catholicism, was a powerful “cement” for Great Britain (but, obviously, not for Ireland).

9 A more systematic analysis of the diffusion of the French model (and its exceptions) than the one I can offer in the limited space of this article would probably provide precious knowledge about membership in the contemporary world. At this point I will limit the discussion to some hypotheses about Latin America, which are particularly suggestive because of the role that Benedict Anderson attributes to the area in the formation of the contemporary idea of ”nation”. The figure of Simón Bolívar is notable in this context and not simply because of traditional portrayals that show him as inspired by Napoleon’s coronation to promote the values of the French Revolution in Latin America. Bolívar also tried to consolidate his crumbling power by attempting to introduce the Code civil (which was later effectively introduced in Chile in 1855, and from there spread to most of the continent – Mirow), showing how the French institutions of the time resonated with nascent (following Anderson’s hypothesis) nations.

10 One important context in which the binary national/non-national model was much less applied was that of the colonies – including the French ones. No colonial power renounced the opportunity to stratify the legal statuses of the populations of the colonies, thereby guaranteeing privileged conditions to European settlers and co- opting part of the native elites into the administration of the colonies. The history and

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the regulations of the statuses of colonial populations are far more complicated than those of non-colonized states. Nevertheless, once the colonized territories began the decolonization process, the binary model was again the most frequently chosen, even if this sometimes meant the disenfranchisement and sometimes the expulsion of part of the population. Indeed, Manby (2009) highlights how the colonial powers usually guided the creation of new legislation concerning citizenship, pressuring for simple approaches that gave clear citizen or non-citizen status to the entire population of nascent states. Manby also adds that in some African states later legislation complicated the issue by declaring some ethnic groups native to the national territory and diminishing, if not withdrawing, citizenship from those ascribed to other ethnic groups.

The British model

11 Ann Dummett, an authoritative scholar of the history of the British legislation of citizenship, describes the history of British subjecthood, nationality and citizenship as “extraordinarily confused” (2006, 554). This is not only because of the effects of the common law system, but also because of a relative lack of interest on behalf of the British Crown and Government concerning questions of nationality, which continued for a very long period. I argue here that a further cause for this kind of development of citizenship in Britain was an institutional concept of nationality focused on the freedoms from the state rather than on a clear relationship to the state itself.

12 British nationality has been governed by specific precedents for most of its history: court judgements, such as Calvin’s Case (1608) defined subjecthood as linked to birth having taken place on the territory of the kingdom (provided the parents were not “enemy” aliens or foreign diplomatic personnel) and kept in case of emigration.4 Such a way of defining subjecthood was not much different from what subjecthood had meant in France up to the French Revolution: in both cases those effectively concerned with subjecthood were mostly potential land inheritors, as well as merchants interested in avoiding limitations imposed on foreigners (see also Sahlins 2003, 2004). It was only with the 1789 revolution and the creation of an institution based on a clear political definition of the population of the state that a different kind of citizenship appeared and began spreading outside of France. British subjecthood, on the other hand, remained less defined and centred on the relationship of the individual to the monarch. Dummett and Nicol (1990) show how from 1608 to 1948 British subjecthood remained based on precedent and on sporadic legislative interventions that mostly recognized the precedents. Being born in the territories of the Crown meant becoming subjects for a significant part of the population. Obviously, vast exceptions existed for several groups: non-Protestants, women (and in particular married women), most of the colonized populations, black victims of slavery being the one population to lack any juridical personality. The limitation to the subjecthood of non-Protestants was finally lifted during the 19th century, with the abolition of religious oaths as part of the naturalization process5; juridical discrimination against women was abolished during the general shift to citizenship equality of the late 20th century (see Knop 2001). On the other hand, large parts of the colonial populations were continuously kept confined to lesser juridical statuses; indeed, some of the measures taken in the second half of the 20th century can be interpreted as echoing the same discriminations existing in this

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period against colonial populations (see the next paragraph). Even for the (large) discriminated populations, some lesser or dependent juridical status existed, all descending from some form of recognized relationship with the Crown. Banerjee for example shows how Indians relied on the 1858 proclamation of Queen Victoria, establishing direct crown sovereignty over India, to claim Imperial subjecthood and, indeed, citizenship. She also highlights how one of the main uses of this claim was to challenge the restrictions to settlement in the “white dominions”. At the same time the Empire had a significant influence on several institutional and social aspects of Britain. Thompson observes for example how the debate about the extension of voting rights (including women’s voting rights) and about the autonomy of Ireland were influenced by the presence of institutional solutions that were often more progressive in other parts of the Empire – including mostly white dominions, but also Jamaica.

13 Obviously, the institution of British subjecthood cannot be explained through the relative power of the Crown. For most of the period concerned, the British monarchs exerted less power over the British state than most of the monarchs on the Continent held over their states. Nor can this be explained by proposing that Britain was simply being backwards in terms of moving toward contemporary citizenship. While never completely defined in its external dimensions, the internal nature (the rights) of British subjecthood became progressively similar to what we refer to as “citizenship” today. For most of the period in question, British subjects (again, those outside the colonies) were more similar in their political roles to French citizens than they were to the nationals of the other Continental states. Moreover, there were other states in which the legislation on nationality referred to the relationship of the individual with the Crown, even if it was increasingly the relationship with the metropolitan state (colonies always being a more complex context) that featured at the centre of nationality and citizenship (see for example Donati, in particular 69-94).

14 Dummett and Nicol (1990, 82) underline how, after the late 18th century, British citizenship was set apart from most other cases by its lack of systematicity, but not necessarily by its lack of justice. Again, British citizenship was a different kind of institution, rather than simply being backwards. The authors argue that juridical factors, such as the rule of precedent, and the lack of a written Constitution (in addition to the lack of a popular revolution that could introduce a written Constitution) were behind these developments. I wish to add that the different nature of the citizenship institutions in Britain also played a role. In a context that saw citizenship primarily defined by the existence of political spaces relatively free from the state, the codifying of formal belonging to the state was far less urgent than in contexts where citizenship and politics were mostly exercised through the state. “Institutions” is the key word here: while ideas did have a role, British legislators, for whom citizenship in any case was hardly a major interest, were probably more interested in producing norms coherent with existing institutions, rather than norms coherent with general political philosophies. I should also underline here that I consider these institutional differences to be autonomous from what has been described in the area of later minority policies, as the difference between a “multicultural” Britain and an “universalistic republican” France. Not only have these differences often been exaggerated, if one looks at the actual policies in the two countries,6 but countries far more “multicultural” than Britain (especially outside Western Europe) have and have had citizenship laws that are much more binary than the British ones. While it might appear that articulated definitions of belonging and multiculturalism go hand in hand,

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the particularity of British citizenship that I explore in this article is much more circumscribed and path-dependent, as I will show in the following paragraphs.

Codifying and convergence

15 The British Nationality Act of 1948 was the first to systematically deal with the juridical status of the population of the British Empire. As anticipated at the beginning of this article, the 1948 law is notable for defining six separate statuses: citizen of the UK and colonies (CUKC), citizen of independent Commonwealth country (CICC), British subject in Ireland, British subject without citizenship (BSWC), British protected person (BPP) and alien. The Act brought together lesser statuses used for colonial populations (BSWC, BPP) with statuses created as a response to the independence gained by parts of the Empire (Ireland and to a different degree, Canada). A survey of the citizenship legislation of European countries made in the important EUDO Citizenship database (www.eudo-citizenship.eu) does not show laws as complex as the British 1948 Act,7 nor are there comparably complex laws among those presented in the analysis of laws of African states of Manby (2010), except for the extreme and hardly comparable case of apartheid South Africa after 1970 (see Klaaren).

16 Randall Hansen clearly shows how the motivation for introducing the 1948 Act was the creation of a specific Canadian citizenship in 1946 (see also Paul 14-18). With one of the British dominions introducing a specific citizenship, the British Government tried to reconcile this innovation with the conservation of a juridically united Empire (which thus continued to influence the institutions of the metropole – cf Thompson). The United Kingdom was the only Empire to have had white majority dominions such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand; as such, the law can partially be explained by the complex structure of the British Empire and by a greater political will to keep links with at least part of its colonial subjects. Karatani, for example, claims that the whole “fuzziness” of British citizenship derives from a historically constant will to extend some kind of membership beyond Britain (or earlier, England) proper. Still, other explanations are to be found outside strictly colonial factors. No other major colonial power managed the end of its Empire as did Britain: France and Portugal both shed the populations of their colonies from allegiance once the colonial wars were lost, leaving preferential naturalization procedures in place for the colonial elites (white or otherwise) who wished to become full citizens of the metropolitan state. The Netherlands had given Dutch nationality to the population of its smaller Caribbean colonies, while limiting conferring the lesser status on the majority of the much larger population Indonesia. Despite this differentiation, most of the colonial population was pushed to renounce Dutch nationality on independence (see Van Oers et al.). As suggested up until now in this article, introducing such a complex law as the BNA of 1948 was more feasible in the United Kingdom than elsewhere, because of the nature of UK institutions. These phenomena are better explained by path dependency and/or institutional inertia than by the strength of ideas; in fact, the relationship of the British governments to the populations of its former colonies during decolonization has been described by several commentators as strongly ambiguous (see, among others, Freeman & Spencer; Solomos et al.; Miles & Phizacklea; Paul).

17 Hansen (op. cit.) observes how the 1948 Act seems out of place considering how the right of entry of colonial subjects began to be limited a few years after the Act, but he

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explains how this immigration channel became a central issue only in the 1950s. The 1962 and 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Acts signalled the closing of opportunities for entering Britain that had theoretically been available up to that point. Before the 1960s, there were limitations on free movement between different parts of the Empire, in particular on movement to the white majority dominions (see also Banerjee), while Britain itself was theoretically open to all subjects of the Crown. The Commonwealth Immigration Acts limited this freedom and did so in ways reminiscent of previous measures enacted in the white Dominions. The Commonwealth Immigration Acts have been described as implicitly racial in public discourse since the late 1960s, as the full right of entry was restricted to the descendants of people born in the United Kingdom, while limiting the right of entry for other colonial subjects. This implicitly meant leaving space for the “return” of white colonials, while limiting non-white immigration. The 1971 Immigration Act made the approach more explicit by the introduction of the “patrial” category, in reference to individuals descending from people born on UK territory. The Act also made British nationality even more complex and stratified, as the six categories of 1948 were transformed into what can be considered ten separate statuses, with CUKCs, CICCs, BSWCs and Irish citizens being divided between patrials and non-patrials.

18 1981 saw further restrictions being imparted on the right to entry of several categories, but also what can be considered the start of a convergence to the model “of French origin”. The 1981 British Nationality Act further limited the rights attached to certain statuses and made some of the statuses (British Overseas Citizens – who before were non-patrial CICCs, British subjects–former non-patrial BSWCs, and BPPs) non-passable to one’s offspring. While the main intention and meaning of the act was again to limit the possibilities for colonial subjects to enter the metropolitan territory, making part of the statuses destined to extinction meant a potential simplification of British nationality.

19 While British nationality still has not reached the citizen/non-citizen binary simplification, in a number of aspects it has become more similar to other European citizenship laws. Karatani underlines how the entire 1962 to 1981 period can be considered as having been characterized by the “nationalization” of British citizenship. This convergence with the binary model often happened by way of imitating the more restrictive measures of other European states, as with the 2002 and 2009 reforms that saw naturalization tests take a restrictive direction (see, among others, Kostakopoulou) that echoed the spread of naturalization tests across Europe since the late 1990s. More generally, some statuses have been hollowed out of content by the restriction of access to metropolitan territory, with some statuses having been made almost vestigial. There are still measures in Britain that are not so common in other states, such as the right of Commonwealth and Irish citizens to vote in national elections without having to obtain British citizenship. Nonetheless, British laws today are not as dissimilar from those of the rest of the world as they were some decades ago, even if this change occurred mostly by way of the introduction of restrictive measures.

“Everyday citizenship” implications

20 The arguments presented up to now have dealt with institutional tendencies that are retraceable through historical periods and at a high level of abstraction. Considering

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how Brubaker’s work on citizenship in France and Germany (1992) has often been taken as indicating different orientations of French and German societies as a whole,8 it is important to highlight here that legislation on, and everyday social conceptions of citizenship, have no strong deterministic link.

21 “Everyday citizenship” is an approach that uses qualitative methods to study the conceptions that common people have of citizenship (see Miller-Idriss 2006; Fox & Miller-Idriss). Other than being obviously variable from one person to the next, these conceptions are also fairly autonomous from those expressed in the laws of a given state. For example, while Germany and Italy are considered to have restrictive and “ethnic” citizenship laws, Miller-Idriss’s research with young people in Berlin (2006), as well as my own research with Italian factory workers in the Ferrara area (Sredanovic), show the predominance of, respectively, inclusive cultural conceptions, and inclusive economic conceptions of citizenship. Moreover, everyday conceptions seem to be less inertial and path-dependant than legislation: in the same Berlin research, Miller-Idriss (2009) shows significant changes in terms of ideas of nationality between the generation of teachers she interviewed and the generation of their students.

22 If the main result is the relative autonomy of laws and everyday visions, there is nevertheless a traceable result of the French-British divergences presented up until now. The Leicester research of Lister, Smith and colleagues (Lister et al.; Smith et al.) on the perceptions of citizenship by young people found a rather vague idea of citizenship, some of the interviewees having being unable to define it, or stating simply that “everybody is a citizen” (Lister et al. 237). On the other hand, a number of studies with young people in France (Venel; Ribert; Rio) and again, Miller-Idriss’ research with young people in Germany (2009), found ideas of citizenship that, without being completely free of misconceptions, nevertheless showed much greater clarity than the Leicester one. It could therefore be hypothesized that the shorter and less defined history of citizenship in Britain has led to a less diffuse social sedimentation of the concept. The different ideas about what makes someone a citizen according to the Leicester interviewees – for example the fact of being “respectable”, i.e., the idea of being employed and having a family – were also found among the interviewees of other research, the differences between the different studies being the level of clarity that the concept of citizenship in general assumes.

23 Obviously, the historical development of the concept is not the only possible determinant for its clarity among ordinary people. For example, among the Italian factory workers I interviewed (Sredanovic), many did not distinguish between citizenship as such and more limited statuses such as a permit of stay. Other factors, such as the salience of citizenship legislation within public political debate, or citizenship education, can be as influential as the historical development of the legislation.9 In this sense, the rising importance given to citizenship in education and in other British policies since the 1998 Crick Report (see Kiwan) is probably having an impact on the social salience of citizenship in Britain, which might become more visible in the next few years. Still, these policies remain characterized by an approach that puts forward social cohesion and neoliberal norms of citizen responsibility. These approaches to citizenship, citizenship education and citizenship policy are not uncommon in other countries, nor have they been absent in the past outside Britain. Nonetheless, rights and political participation in Britain have comparatively less institutional expression where they have been explicitly linked to citizenship. I do not

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wish to exaggerate the implications of these developments here; British society has not been less concerned with rights and participation than other societies and the most famous academic codification of citizenship-as-rights (Marshall) remains British. Still, the effects of historical and institutional definitions of citizenship in Britain are probably worth exploring.

Conclusions

24 In this paper, I have shown how citizenship in Britain in its external and formal dimensions has been set apart from most other states due to lesser systematicity, late codification and higher complexity. These original characteristics are linked to a large number of causes, including the general juridical (common law) system, political history (lack of popular revolutions), the different nature of British political rights (based on limitations imparted on state powers), colonial history, institutional equilibrium and path dependency.

25 It was also my intention to emphasize that, despite the multiplicity of factors involved, the impact of the nature of citizenship in Britain should not be exaggerated, as the differences in everyday perceptions between Britain and other contexts are mostly limited to the salience, rather than on the content, of citizenship. More generally, the effects which seem to depend more on “institutional” (i.e., historical forms of citizenship) than on “material” (e.g., the colonial situation) factors, are probably best explained in terms of path dependency and institutional inertia. To attribute it entirely to concepts such as universalism or liberalism would likely mean exaggerating the strength of ideas.

26 Studies, such as the present one, that compare general institutions across different countries and ample periods of time should always be conducted with caution. First, they need ample comparable data. In the case of citizenship legislation, this data exists especially for Europe (although the EUDO Citizenship project has started including data beyond Europe). Data covering other countries and offering more detail on the historical evolution of legislation, would allow a better understanding of the themes discussed here. Moreover, studies based on time periods that are large in scope, as well as on general themes, often tend to generalize their findings and to attribute them great explanatory and causal force, only to often be contradicted by studies more limited in themes, time and space.

27 Nevertheless, it is my hope that in this paper, I have shown the existence of limited phenomena, such as the British approach to citizenship at the end of the colonial Empire and the lesser social salience of the concept of citizenship among young people in Britain as aspects that can or need be explained (also) by institutional factors.

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NOTES

1. Citizenship and subjecthood are here considered as institutions – as patterns of norms that exist in relatively comparable forms across time and legal systems. This allows both to discuss the two without limiting oneself to the individual laws as they were promulgated, and to treat the French and British models of citizenship as heuristically different institutions. 2. Historically the distinction in France between nationalité and citoyenneté has been among the clearest distinctions between the juridical status that links an individual and a state (the external dimension of citizenship, nationalité) and the rights, especially political rights, linked to this status (the internal dimension of citizenship, citoyenneté). However, the two institutions are never easy to completely distinguish, and there is no vocabulary that clearly identifies the two dimensions across countries and time. In this article, the focus is on the external dimension of citizenship – that for which Britain is set apart – but I will nonetheless use both concepts of citizenship and nationality, reserving the second term for notions of citizenship less linked to (political) rights. 3. Holt is a good synthesis of both the positions that see the Magna Carta as the closest thing to a Constitution that exists in the United Kingdom, and the positions that see it as establishing merely feudal privileges similar to those existing elsewhere in Europe at the time. 4. Dummett & Nicol 1990, 59-63. I will not expand on the details of the different laws in this article, as excellent histories of the British citizenship legislation exist already – other than Dummett & Nicol, see Dummett 2006 and Sawyer & Wray 2012. I will rather focus on the aspects that set Britain apart from the most common ways in which the other states have regulated citizenship. 5. Colley links this development, and the extension of suffrage in 1832, to the military mobilization of a large part of the male population during the war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and the consequent need to recognize a larger part of the population as citizens. 6. But see the more articulated analysis of Favell. 7. Several states, such as Germany, Greece, or Hungary, do have something similar to a specific juridical status for “co-ethnic” non-nationals, but these are arguably used to facilitate naturalization or assure specific rights, rather than intended to be permanent membership statuses. 8. This has been criticized by the author himself: see Brubaker 1999. 9. The knowledge of citizenship of the students interviewed in Miller-Idriss 2009 is not so surprising considering that during the research of the author they were receiving classes on citizenship and citizenship laws.

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ABSTRACTS

In this article I offer an analysis of the history of citizenship in the UK by showing the low level of systematicity and the high complexity of this institution. By comparing it with the binary French case, I consider the two models of citizenship as two institutions with different goals, arguing that the diffusion of the French model has turned British citizenship into an insular case. I further show that the consequences of the different histories of citizenship can be found in everyday conceptions of citizenship in the UK and elsewhere, but that these consequences are limited to the salience and not to the content of the concept.

Dans cet article je propose une analyse de l’histoire de la citoyenneté au Royaume-Uni. En le comparant au cas français, de nature binaire, je propose une approche des deux modèles de citoyenneté en tant qu’institutions ayant différentes finalités, en soutenant que la diffusion du modèle français a rendu insulaire le modèle britannique de citoyenneté. Je montre également que l'on trouve les conséquences de ces histoires différentes dans les conceptions quotidiennes de la citoyenneté au Royaume-Uni et ailleurs, mais que ces conséquences sont limitées à l'importance relative du concept, et non à son sens-même.

INDEX

Mots-clés: citoyenneté, nationalité, législation, Royaume-Uni, France Keywords: citizenship, nationality, law, United Kingdom, France

AUTHOR

DJORDJE SREDANOVIC Postdoctoral fellow Group for research on Ethnic Relations, Migration & Equality/Migrations Asylum Multiculturalism/Université Libre de Bruxelles [email protected]

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Ariel's Corner

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Ariel's Corner

Emeline Jouve (dir.) Theater

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“The Power of Emotion : A Conversation with Katherine Brook and Shonni Enelow” Conversation with Katherine Brook and Shonni Enelow

Katherine Brook and Shonni Enelow

Biographies of the Artists

1 Katherine Brook is a director of new experimental plays and performance and makes original work collaboratively with her theatre company, Katherine Brook / Tele-Violet. Her work has been presented at various venues in New York City and beyond, including The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival, Incubator Arts Project, Prelude NYC, and more. Brook has also worked as a creative producer at The Foundry Theatre, The Builders Association, and New York City Players. MFA, Carnegie Mellon School of Drama.

2 Shonni Enelow is a writer and critic and assistant professor of English at Fordham University. Her book, Method Acting and Its Discontents : On American Psycho-drama (Northwestern University Press, 2015), was the winner of the 2015-2016 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Other recent publications include essays and articles on theater and media, American film acting, literature and performance documentation, and race in realist performance.

3 Brook and Enelow’s previous collaborations as director and dramaturge include a production of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer at Carnegie Mellon University and an adaptation of Richard Boleslavsky’s acting manual Acting : The First Six Lessons at NYU/Tisch’s Experimental Theatre Wing. They both received BFAs in Theater from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

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Discussion

4 Katherine Brook, director, and Shonni Enelow, writer and dramaturge, have collaborated for the past several years on a project called The Power of Emotion, a theatrical investigation of emotion in performance that takes its title from a 1983 film by Alexander Kluge and includes a new music score by composer Taylor Brook, performed live by the TAK Ensemble. They presented a work-in-progress version of the piece at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in the Incoming ! Series in 2015, and will present a final version at Abrons Art Center in October 2017, in a co- production with Mount Tremper Arts, called The Power of Emotion : The Apartment.

5 What follows has been compiled from several conversations between Brook and Enelow in July and August 2017, as they prepared for the rehearsal process for the Abrons Art Center production.

6 Shonni Enelow : Let’s start basic : what do we think is the relationship between acting and emotion ?

7 Katherine Brook : I think the theater is the play-place for dangerous and unusual emotional exploration. I feel that way about theater in general. But I think that theater often doesn’t take the opportunity to explore emotion as much as it could. And when it does, it usually just reinforces ideas about emotion that already exist.

8 SE : For me, this thinking came specifically out of my research on Method acting. What initially interested me about Method acting was the emotional memory exercise : the weird centerpiece of this acting style that was at once exotic and hegemonic — hegemonic in that a lot of its basic ideas are really ubiquitous in American acting, but exotic because the closer you look at them, the stranger they get. What I found interesting was that although the exercise is ostensibly about reproducing past emotions, real emotions, from the actor’s life, what seemed to me that it was actually doing was producing a new, theatrical emotion in the moment. So for me that was a crucial idea. Emotions — in acting, and maybe in general — are generated by a theatrical relationship, the relationship between an actor and an spectator.

9 KB : I’m also very interested in the way the audience receives emotion — and in the distaste I often have when I see emotion on stage. I’m fascinated by that feeling of “too much.” And I’m critical of the stripping away of emotion in a lot of contemporary theater that I think sanitizes it — and makes watching theater easier.

10 SE : The stripping away of emotion — that’s a real trend in experimental theater.

11 KB : I think there’s a visceral problem that a lot of people have when they deal with actors. I think actors can do things with emotion that are really ugly and disturbing and disgusting and offend our taste. And that’s really interesting to me.

12 SE : We wanted to go against the prevailing trend of low-affect acting. Which is — I think you’re right — a response to the disgust a lot of people in experimental theater feel about mainstream American acting and its ways of performing emotion.

13 KB : You and I both have that distaste as well, though. So the question became, how do we engage with emotion in acting in some kind of different way ? And that brings us to the Chashama workshop [a workshop in 2014]. We’d just finished working on Acting : The First Six Lessons at ETW [Experimental Theatre Wing]. Which taught me a lot about the history of Method acting and its pedagogy — how you got taught to do this thing.

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14 SE : That show was an adaptation of Richard Boleslavsky’s primer on acting, the first book on Stanislavskian acting to be published in the U.S.

15 KB : In the workshops we’d done in 2013, we’d used and demented some of those Method exercises to try to stimulate actors imaginative emotions.

16 SE : We had one exercise where we asked actors to come up emotional memories of watching theater. They had to remember an experience of watching theater that gave them some kind of powerful emotion as spectators.

17 KB : That was a way to access —

18 SE : The mimetic part —

19 KB : — of an actor’s emotional life. There was such variety. Alex Spieth [one of the actors] brought in the experience of watching what sounded like a terrible performance of Oedipus.

20 SE : I also remember someone brought in the experience of watching a production of Les Mis and being really moved by “Castle on a Cloud.” And then we had another actor in the group act out the memory. It was a way to estrange the idea of emotional memory. And also to literalize the idea that emotional memories are not some kind of return to an authentic truth but always, when they’re reproduced, theatrical. That’s an important idea that’s still a big part of the piece : the emotions happen in between people. And are generated by a relationship. Even when that relationship is with an imagined other.

21 KB : During the Chashama workshop, we used a different exercise we called “the color wheel.” We were wondering what kind of language could we use for these emotions that didn’t fit into the categories of emotion we already have in language. The colors were just stand-ins, a way of naming emotions that don’t have names. But because colors are evocative and expressive to most people, it worked.

22 SE : We had actors develop their own color wheels of emotion — the main criteria was that the emotions they were expressing through the colors couldn’t fit neatly into predetermined categories. And they could use gesture to access and articulate these emotions too.

23 KB : It gave the actors new palettes of emotion they could play with.

24 SE : And that you could play with as a director, instructing them to integrate them into scenes we were working on in various ways. This was also the workshop where I first brought in text. And by this time we were using the film [Alexander Kluge’s The Power of Emotion]. So we were already interested in using music, and opera specifically.

25 KB : Right. The Kluge film was so mysterious to me — and still is in some ways — because it’s at once emotionally opaque and rich with big, stormy emotions. And it’s clever and goofy too. One way it strikes this dissonance is by discussing opera and giving a sense of it happening in the background, but not using it as the expressive mode itself.

26 SE : The big idea in the film is that the opera was the power plant of the emotions in the nineteenth century, and cinema is the power plant of the emotions in the twentieth.

27 KB : I took the first part as an invitation to explore the possibilities of operatic acting as well as the manipulative possibilities of music in general. In that first workshop Taylor [Brook, the composer] brought in a selection of arias that were supposed to evoke particular emotions, and we experimented with how they affected actors and how they

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affected audience perception. It became clear that music would be a central part of this project, and Taylor wrote a score, inspired in part by opera, for the first public presentation of this piece at the Under the Radar Festival in 2015.

28 SE : In the Under the Radar version of the piece, we were working with big, operatic emotions, and I wanted to represent the idea of emotional contagion in the script. So I came up with a story about a cult leader who seduces an actress and gets her to burn down a building. It was supposed to be over-the-top and excessive, but also meta- theatrical — in the sense that we were trying to reflect on how emotion is produced by actors on the stage — and stylistically it ended up kind of like Genet’s The Maids. I think I was trying to match the intensity of Taylor’s music. That was fun, but it wasn’t the direction I wanted to take the script for this version that we’re doing at Abrons. With this iteration, The Apartment, I became more interested in the second part of Kluge’s idea : that cinema became the power plant of the emotions in the twentieth century. I don’t think that’s still true in the twenty-first — maybe it’s social media now ? But it got me more interested in thinking about realism, and juxtaposing different forms of emotional performance. Realist versus operatic. This is the juxtaposition in Kluge’s film. He intersperses scenes of opera and very abstract, expressionist montages with realist scenes that follow different cinematic genres, specifically crime genres.

29 KB : It was so spooky and serendipitous that I sat on the jury of an arson case last year. As soon as the case was over — I was on that jury for weeks — I called you to relay it all because the resonances with our artwork were so loud. And I guess you agreed...

30 SE : Yes, I ended up writing The Apartment around your experience, or my fantasy of your experience, as a juror. It had everything : the story was great, obviously, because it was about an intimate relationship that emotionally went haywire and became literally destructive — in the form of a fire, which was in our previous version of the piece. And it connected to opera : we were already using Wagner’s Ring Cycle as an intertext, which ends with Brunhilde lighting a fire and riding into it on a horse. And it was a way to think about spectatorship, because you were a spectator as a juror and it’s through your experience that we have access to the story — not directly, but through its retelling and reconstruction.

31 KB : And I was a participant in a way, too. I think that’s part of what is so fascinating about crime stories — one’s proximity to the crime, which as a juror feels very close, yet protected. I’ve thought about that experience a lot and it’s influenced the work in many ways.

32 SE : To get back to acting and emotion : part of what’s important to me is that we’re not interested in thinking about performance in general — we’re interested in acting. And the difference is that acting means playing character, in some way. Using pre-existing text that has some kind of other person in it. We weren’t going down the road of a lot of avant-garde theater — we weren’t thinking about —

33 KB : The essence of presence ?

34 SE : Right. I think this is why we kept using the word ‘acting.’

35 KB : The ongoing challenge for me is how to create performances with actors that are emotional and embodied, but not strictly bound to realism.

36 SE : But we in this project — and I think you in your work in general — are very interested in using the building blocks of realism, the elements of realist acting. We’re

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not using the building blocks of Butoh. We’re not using the building blocks of Meyerhold. We’re using American realism.

37 KB : Our own cultural tradition. I think that makes it a harder thing to enter into.

38 SE : Again, that’s why the word ‘acting’ is important. A lot of the theatrical rhetorics of the avant-garde don’t use the word acting, or not primarily. To me, today, the word ‘acting’ feels really connected to a realist tradition, which we’re trying to subvert but not completely leave by the wayside.

39 KB : We feel like we can’t ignore it.

40 SE : And we don’t want to ignore it.

41 KB : One of the things that I’m the most excited and scared by with this iteration, The Apartment, is the way it is exploring realism. I think that has the potential to fulfill the possibilities of the project as a whole but it’s a real challenge. I’m excited by the way we’re opposing the uber-theatrical operatic performance to the trial, to these intimate, less explicitly performed scenes. We’ve circled back to the Kluge film with this new version. I hope our show provokes that same emotional alienation and intrigue that I find so mysterious in the film.

42 SE : I do want people to be both seduced by the emotions they’re seeing the actors perform and also estranged from them and confused by them, in that Brechtian way. This is a piece about the ways that emotions rule our lives — the characters are very much guided by emotions in ways they themselves don’t understand or accept — but also about the ways we perceive and take in, or don’t take in, emotion as we watch theater. Without being too grandiose, I think this has a lot of relevance for what’s going on in the U.S. today. Method acting teachers and practitioners, at least in the twentieth century, generally thought that emotional expression meant authentic communication between people and would lead to truth — this is sort of a basic idea in realism in general. But the opposite seems to be true today. Emotional expression of the kind we’re seeing doesn’t lead to communication at all. And part of the reason seems to be that it’s generated by a theatrical feedback loop between a performer (Trump) and his spectators that’s self-reinforcing and enclosed. We haven’t been actively thinking about American politics as we work on this piece, but I do think we’re trying to break open and investigate those feedback loops, when they work and when they don’t.

ABSTRACTS

A conversation between director Katherine Brook and writer and dramaturge Shonni Enelow about their collaborative project, The Power of Emotion : The Apartment, premiering at Abrons Art Center (New York, NY) in October, 2017.

Echange entre la metteuse en scène Katherine Brook et l’auteur et dramaturge Shonni Enelow au sujet de leur collaboration autour de The Power of Emotion : The Apartment, présenté pour la première fois à l’Abrons Art Center (New York, NY) en octobre 2017.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: théâtre américain, théâtre expérimental, méthodes de jeu, réalisme, opéra, film, la Méthode, mémoire affective, Wagner, fiction de détection Subjects: Theater Keywords: American theater, experimental theater, acting methods, realism, opera, film, Method acting, emotional memory, Wagner, crime stories

AUTHORS

SHONNI ENELOW Assistant Professor of English Fordham University [email protected]

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Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare and Anatomy of a Suicide by Alice Birch Performance Review

William C. Boles

Factual information about the shows

1 Play : Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

2 Place : Globe Theatre (London)

3 Running time : May 18th, 2017-August 5th, 2017

4 Director : Emma Rice

5 Designer : Lez Brotherston

6 Composer : Ian Ross

7 Choreographer : Etta Murfitt

8 Lighting Designer : Malcolm Rippeth

9 Sound Designer : Simon Baker

10 Fight Directors : Rachel Bown-Williams & Ruth Cooper Brown of RC-Annie Ltd.

11 Cast : Marc Antolin, Carly Bawden, Nandi Bhebhe, Tony Jayawardena, Joshua Lacey, Pieter Lawman, Le Gateau Chocolat, Annette McLaughlin, Kandaka Moore, Katy Owen, John Pfumojena, Theo St. Claire, Anita-Joy Uwajeh

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Figure 1

John Pfumojena (Sebastian) and Anita-Joy Uwajeh (Viola) Credits : Hugo Glendinning

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Figure 2

La Gateau Chocolat (Feste), Joshua Lacey (Sailor) Credits : Hugo Glendinnig

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Figure 3

Katy Owen (Malvolio) Credits : Hugo Glendinning

12 Play : Anatomy of a Suicide by Alice Birch

13 Place : Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs (London)

14 Running time : June 3rd, 2017-July 8th, 2017

15 Director : Katie Mitchell

16 Set Designer : Alex Eales

17 Costume Designer : Sarah Blenkinsop

18 Lighting Designer : James Farncombe

19 Composer : Paul Clark

20 Sound Designer : Melanie Wilson

21 Cast : Gershwyn Eustache Jnr, Paul Hilton, Peter Hobday, Adelle Leonce, Sarah Malin, Jodie McNee, Hattie Morahan, Kate O’Flynn, Sophia Pettit, Vicki Szent-Kirallyi, Dickon Tyrrell

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Figure 4

Hattie Morahan (Carol), Kate O’Flynn (Anna), and Adelle Leonce (Bonnie) Credits : Stephen Cummiskey

Figure 5

Adelle Leonce (Bonnie) Credits : Stephen Cummiskey

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Figure 6

Hattie Morahan (Carol) and Peter Hobday (Dave) Credits : Stephen Cummiskey

Figure 7

Hattie Morahan (Carol), Kate O’Flynn (Anna), and Adelle Leonce (Bonnie) Credits : Stephen Cummiskey

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Review

22 Emma Rice’s last summer as the Artistic Director of the Globe Theatre was declared the Summer of Love. Playing in repertory during the early months of the summer, the Globe featured two takes on love with a contemporary version of Romeo and Juliet and Rice’s own re-invention of Twelfth Night, her swan song on the Globe stage as its Artistic Director. When it comes to Shakespeare’s comedies Twelfth Night has become a regular staple on London stages, seemingly popping up in various incarnations every two or three years. Even though I do not live in London, it always seems that during my trips to the city I always encounter “the”defining Twelfth Night production. In 2008 London was abuzz over the West End sell-out run for Michael Grandages’s star heavy production, which included Derek Jacobi (Malvolio), Indira Varma (Olivia), and Victoria Hamilton (Viola).And yet, the next year the Royal Shakespeare Company followed with its music heavy production, including a Feste that serenaded the audience during intermission, that found its way to the West End, with Richard Wilson as the put upon Malvolio. A few years later in 2012 Tim Carroll’s all male version sold out the Globe, the West End, and Broadway, featuring Mark Rylance’s heartfelt turn as Olivia and Stephen Fry’s pompous Malvolio. 2017 found two productions of Twelfth Night playing within months of each other. The National Theatre, focusing on the festive winter season inherent in the title, featured it on the Olivier Stage to overlap with the holidays, while a few months later Emma Rice’s production premiered in the late spring.

23 Over my forty plus years of attending the theatre, I have seen over twenty productions of Twelfth Night, and I still excitedly look forward to two scenes: the evening revels between Feste, Toby, Andrew, and Maria, which the peevish Malvolio interrupts, leading Toby to be avenged on him; and the discovery by Malvolio of the fake letter from Olivia professing her love for him. The scenes rebound with humor, music and song, and opportunities for a director to put his/her own stamp on the play. In contrast to those two ebullient scenes, I always cringe at the Sir Topas scene, where Malvolio has been imprisoned by Toby. It is relentlessly dark and cruel and runs counter to the spirit of the play, plus it brings the energy and momentum of the story to a complete standstill. Rice’s version, though, completely upended myusual expectations of the play by disrupting the usual narrative beats and providing a fresh theatrical presentation through her contemporary, hellzapoppin’ production. Her re-envisioning featured new lines and songs, the cutting of a great deal of Shakespearean text, and a playful, spirited cast that not only brought the production to life in an entirely new manner for those familiar with the play, but also introduced Shakespeare in a fresh, relatable way for a new generation. This latter point was clearly seen on the faces of the tweens who sat in front of me, relishing the electric production and peppering their parents with questions about the characters, the plot, and Shakespeare.

24 The first sign that this production would not be an ordinary Shakespearean production occurred during the play’s opening sequence, which featured music from an electric guitar led band, and opened on the Love Boat with dancing, white-bedecked passengers and crew members all being led by a sequined, wig wearing Feste in singing “We Are Family” until the boat wrecked, throwing everyone overboard. The first Shakespearean line of the play was finally uttered almost ten minutes into the performance. In staging such a lengthy pre-text sequence it would only make sense that Rice would make some cuts and changes to ensure that she did not end up with a three-hour long Twelfth Night.

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Many of the cuts that she instituted occurred in the three scenes I mentioned above. During the carousing scene in the play’s second act, much is made by Shakespeare of the musical nature of their revelry, including the presence of Feste who leads the inebriated night owls in a number of different songs. Rice, who limits the role of Feste greatly, instead used the scene to highlight the romantic relationship between Toby and Maria. Unlike some productions where Toby comes to love Maria over the course of the play, here they were already a couple. And it is worth noting that for the first-time in all the productions I have seen Maria is presented as being as equally prominent as Olivia and Viola to the story, creating a triumvirate of strong women.

25 Another example of Rice’s editing of Feste’s role occurred in the Sir Topas scene, which was abbreviated dramatically, as again Rice used the scene for narrative purposes, in this case showing Malvolio’s distress and his need for a pen and paper to write to Olivia, which is then read at the end of the play. Rather than the usual dark setting and ubiquitous staging of Malvolio emerging out of the stage floor, surrounded by bars, the stage stays bright and Malvolio instead sits on a bunk bed while talking with Sir Topas.The dark tone was removed, the scene was simplified, and the exuberance and energy of the production was not affected. Her decision to pare this problematic scene was a smart theatrical choice.

26 Usually the highlight of a Twelfth Night production is Malvolio’s discovery of Maria’s falsely penned note of Olivia’s fondness for her cross-gartered servant. Directors milk the scene for all the potential comedic possibilities of Malvolio’s engagement with the contents of the letter, the inventive ways to have Toby, Andrew, and Fabian hide, and the resulting angered reactions of Toby and the empty-headed musings of Andrew to Malvolio’s comments. Rice, though, disrupted the usual expectations for this scene, cutting great swaths from Malvolio’s speech about the letter (for example, the random inclusion of letters that Malvolio muses over was replaced by a big “M” on the outside of the note). The scene became streamlined and the comedy truncated. Because of this change, it no longer was a show stopper and the final scene before intermission. Instead, intermission came after the next scene which takes place between Olivia and Viola. And when one considers Rice’s theme for the summer Globe series, her choice made sense. After all, her focus was love. To end the first half of the play on the mean prank played on Malvolio and his own desire for vengeance on Olivia’s drunk kinsman devalued the nature of herthematic intentionality. There is no love present in that scene. Instead, Rice ended the first half of the play with the talk of love between Olivia and Viola, and even though they will not end up together at the play’s end, both will be coupled with their own partners in a rousing final dance and song, capping off an innovative and refreshing take on one of Shakespeare’s most produced comedies.

27 Emma Rice’s tenure at the Globe was brief as she rankled purists with her vision of the playing space and Shakespeare’s plays. Her production of Twelfth Night was an example of her vision of what Shakespeare can be and should be—a rousing, invigorating, re- imagined production that engages audiences and makes the Bard fresh to a new and upcoming theatrical audience. While she will be moving on from the Globe, there is no doubt that her directing and leadership will be appreciated elsewhere and more innovative Emma Rice productions will be appearing in London soon.

28 While Emma Rice’s concept relied on kinetic energy, movement and music, Katie Mitchell’s direction of Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide was on the opposite spectrum in terms of tone and subject matter. The play depicts the stories of three generations of

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women, Carol, mother to Anna, who is mother to Bonnie, and their struggles with depression and suicidal intentions. Birch’s play continues the long line of plays by women that theatrically depict the generational recycling that exists between mothers and daughters. Whereas in many plays the mother and daughter interact and battle with one another, Birch disrupts this usual narrative pattern by her the mother and grown-up daughter interact. Instead, Birch opts to stage each character at the same point in their lives, when they are in their 20s and 30s. In order to do so, Birch presents three different time periods at once, allowing us to see the parallels and repetitions between their lives. Not only are there visual overlaps between the three time periods, but the characters also occasionally share dialogue, reinforcing the generational connection between them.

29 While the three women are linked through language, the delicacy of each of their mental states, and a family home that all three reside in, their individual existences have their differences. Carol, weighed down by motherhood and the limited expectations for women in the 1970s, is surrounded by and exudes silence. She is often alone and pensive. (Hattie Morahan powerfully conveys Carol’s anguish through the crippling silence of just smoking a cigarette alone). When forced to engage in conversation with others, she is stilted and uncomfortable. In contrast her daughter Anna, who we first meet in a hospital after partying too much the night before, is a font of energy and constantly on the move, needing to find distractions from her dark thoughts. Hoping to find a bit more stability in her life, she moves back to her childhood home, where she lives with her husband and ends up giving birth to Bonnie. However, unlike her mother, who fights to suppress her suicidal feelings as long as she can for the sake of her daughter, Anna kills herself in the bathroom, while her infant daughter sleeps in the next room. (Unlike Carol’s death, which is not staged, Anna electrocutes herself in the bath, drawing a strong response of shock from the audience the night I saw it.) Set in the future, Bonnie is a medical professional, trying to find respect at work and deal with a lover who will not leave her alone. While quiet, like her grandmother, the psychological struggle with depression and suicidal tendencies does not appear as severe for her. After the death of her father, she moves back into her childhood home, where she confronts the demons of her mother and grandmother’s suicides. To stop, the tragedies from continuing further she opts to sterilize herself, halting the suffering with her generation.

30 The set has a deliberate institutional feel, contributing to the feeling of claustrophobia, oppression, and inescapability from the depression that plague all three women. However, once Carol and Anna have died, the stage is left to Bonnie, who has decided to reject the vicious cycle of her family, first, through her sterilization and, second, through the selling of the family home, to escape the memories of pain felt by her mother and grandmother. In the final scene the back wall rises to reveal a stark visual contrast to the rest of the play’s aesthetic. Bonnie now stands in a vast downstairs room of her family home, brightly lit by sunlight streaming through a window (a glaring comparison to the dimmed lighting for the other scenes). Coming down the staircase are a happy, little girl and her smiling mother (the new buyer, perhaps ?), admiring and relishing the space. Birch and Mitchell’s final vision here is open to multiple questions. Has Bonnie now successfully broken the curse of the depression suffered by her mother and grandmother ? However, is escaping such a debilitating disease so easily accomplished ?Does the presence of the mother and daughter in the last scene suggest the banishment of depression and suicide from the house—after all

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the room is filled with light banishing the darkness that had affected the three previous generations of women there ? Or is the presence of a mother and daughter a sign that the cycle will continue with a new family ? If the latter, is the play suggesting that there is no escape from such debilitating thoughts and action for women ? Part of what drives the uncertainty of these questions and the ending is that Birch never really explains why Carol and Anna experience the deep depression that they do and their desire to end their lives.While both Hattie Morahan and Kate O’Flynn enrich their sparse dialogue through their embodying of the physical and emotional suffering of their characters, the motivation is never adequately provided by Birch.

31 A comment on the playing space must be made. Having been a Royal Court theatre goer for almost thirty years, this might be the first production I have seen there where the stage proved to be too small for the production. Admittedly, Mitchell and Birch’s intent was to create an intimate setting, but the boxing in of the stage to one tightly controlled playing space (except for the final reveal) was problematic visually, as each character’s story was given a cramped amount of stage space. No doubt, one can argue that the cramped nature of the staging is effective in creating the atmospheric nature of the play (the idea that each woman is limited, boxed in by her own mental, familial, and societal struggles). However, from my perspective in an aisle seat in the back of the stalls, the visuals felt muddled and restricted.

32 Finally, it is worth noting that while it might have been the summer of love at the Globe in June and July of 2017, it is clear that this past summer was also the Summer of the Female Director, as these two works showed off the theatrical heft of Katie Mitchell and Emma Rice. Testifying to the power of their work, both productions played to sold out houses at two of London’s premiere theatres, the Globe and the Royal Court. In addition, Yael Farber’s rewriting of Salome, which she also directed, was on the Olivier stage throughout the summer. (Farber would go on to direct Knives in Hens at the Almeida later that summer.)The presence of these women shaping works and giving a new glimpse of classic stories testifies to the growing role of women in the British theatre.

ABSTRACTS

Theatre reviews, June/July 2017 Show : Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare—Globe Theatre (London), May 18th, 2017- August 5th, 2017 ; Anatomy of a Suicide by Alice Birch—Royal Court Theatre Jerwood Theatre Downstairs (London), June 3rd, 2017-July 8th, 2017.

Critique théâtrale, Juin/Juillet 2017 Spectacles : Twelfth Night de William Shakespeare—Globe Theatre (London), 18 mai, 2017- 5 août, 2017 ; Anatomy of a Suicide by Alice Birch—Royal Court Theatre Jerwood Theatre Downstairs (London), 3 juin, 2017- 8 juillet 2017.

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INDEX

Subjects: Theater Mots-clés: metteuses en scène, comédiennes, suicide, adaptations textuelles, moderniser Shakespeare, espace de jeu Keywords: female directors, female leads, suicide, textual changes, contemporizing Shakespeare, theatrical space

AUTHOR

WILLIAM C. BOLES Professor Rollins College, Florida (USA)

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Interview with Anna Weinstein, Series Editor of “PERFORM : Succeeding as a Creative Professional,” Routledge (2017) Interview with Anna Weinstein

Chris Qualls

Biographies

1 Anna Weinstein is the Series Editor for PERFORM. A writer and editor with over fifteen years of experience in educational publishing, she received her MFA in Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California at Riverside--Palm Desert and her BA in Communication Studies/Performance from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She teaches introductory and advanced screenwriting at Auburn University, and she is a frequent contributor to Film International, where she publishes interviews with award-winning female directors in her series "Diva Directors Around the Globe."

2 Chris Qualls is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Auburn University, where he teaches voiceover acting, acting for stage and screen, and introduction to theater. He received his MFA in Acting from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and his BA in Communication Studies/Film from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has worked as a voiceover actor for thirty years. His research and creative work focus on the integration of classical and nontraditional approaches to Shakespeare in performance, theater and media for social justice, and voice acting. He is a member of Actors’ Equity Association.

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Introduction

3 The PERFORM book series, published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis, is a series of books geared toward college students who are studying the arts. The series includes practical, real-world insights from working professionals in various creative fields, including film and theatre. The first three books, Writing for the Screen, Directing for the Screen, and Acting for the Stage, were published in February 2017.

4 I am the co-editor with Anna Weinstein on Acting for the Stage, and Anna is the editor of Writing for the Screen and Directing for the Screen. Anna is also the series editor for PERFORM. I interviewed Anna in her home office for this piece, which was easy enough to do since we happen to share a home. (Full disclosure : we’re married and have been sharing our lives for thirty years.)

[Figure 1]

Credits : by Routledge, Taylor & Francis

[Figure 2]

Credits : by Routledge, Taylor & Francis

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[Figure 3]

Credits : by Routledge, Taylor & Francis

Interview

Chris Qua lls : Let’s begin with a two-part question. First, what is the complete title for the PERFORM book series, and why ? And two, what was the impetus for the series ? Anna Weinstein : The subtitle is “Succeeding as a Creative Professional,” which is fitting because the intent of the series is to explore definitions of success in creative fields and what it means to perform creatively in a professional capacity and how this compares to performing as an amateur, or aspiring professional. As far as the impetus for the series, I think this is something I’ve been contemplating for years, this idea of success and performance anxiety and what it takes to make a living and a life as an artist. I grew up in an artistic family, and I wonder how long I’ve been quietly considering this concept of professionalism in the arts and who gets to decide whether one is a professional or a hobbyist. Where is that line ?

CQ : Have you discovered the answer ? Anna Weinstein : The answer is complex, but in short, the line doesn’t really exist—and it doesn’t exist because it’s different for everyone. In the end, we simply need to be comfortable calling our art art and ourselves professionals, regardless of where anyone else draws that line. For me, professionalism has to do with behavior and attitude more than anything else. I expect my students to behave as if they’re professionals. I expect them to do their best work, to be respectful and offer critical and thoughtful feedback. Of course I also want them to enjoy themselves and have fun with the process of writing a screenplay, but professionalism is important to me, as well.

CQ : Tell me about the true beginning of the series. You’ve said that you were inspired by your students ? Anna Weinstein : Yes, my very first class. I started teaching screenwriting in the fall of 2014, and I was absolutely thrilled to be teaching. I was so impressed with my students’ work and grateful that I was able to offer them guidance with their writing. But at the same time, I was troubled that I wasn’t able to support them in their endeavors to work in the industry. I could point them to internship opportunities and direct them to screenwriting competitions that were considered important, of

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course, but I wasn’t able to offer them real-world advice about making a living as a screenwriter. My own experiences were limited to writing on spec.

CQ : Writing on spec for a highly reputable producer and company. Anna Weinstein : True, but still, on spec. Now, I had my professors from graduate school and their real-world industry experiences to pass along as examples—and of course, I could share the stories and advice that I’d read about over the years. But I wanted to be able to offer my students more.

CQ : To clarify, you’re talking speciﬁcally about the business of screenwriting, not the craft ? Anna Weinstein : Right, yes. By the time I started teaching, I was confident that I could support my students with the craft of screenwriting. In fact, looking back on it, I think I was surprised by the end of my first semester to see just how successful I was as a teacher. I had never intended on teaching—that wasn’t my reasoning for going to graduate school—but I was encouraged to discover that I was able to help nurture my students’ voices. They made significant leaps over the course of that first semester, and I suppose it was inspiring to see that I could succeed in the area of craft and also a bit disappointing that I wasn’t able to teach them about the business with any firsthand knowledge. I wrote my initial email to my publisher that December over winter break.

CQ : This was an informal email that you wrote ? Anna Weinstein : As I recall, there was a form you could fill out online. It wasn’t anything terribly complicated. Name, email, and a space to write about your book idea.

CQ : How long was it before you heard back ? Anna Weinstein : Right away. I believe I wrote the email on the weekend, and I got a response from my editor that week. She called, and it became clear that she too thought this was a series with legs. I think the idea of teaching people how to make a living as an artist is really contrary to everything we’ve ever learned about making art. The point of art isn’t to make money—it’s to tap into our creative energy and allow it an opportunity to develop into something that is satisfying and cathartic and wholly unique to us. In some ways, it almost seems uncouth to discuss the concept of profiting from this creativity. And certainly, school is about building our skills and learning how to harness our talents ; it’s hardly the time to worry about making money. We’re still learning while we’re in school. That seems to be the prevailing thought, at least insofar as the arts are concerned. What a silly idea that we might make a living as a poet or as a writer or as an actor !

CQ : How long was it before you began working on the ﬁrst three books ? Anna Weinstein : I wrote the proposal for the series in the weeks that followed, in January, and then the review process took a few months. I began working on the first three books sometime that spring.

CQ : How would you describe your goal for the series ? Anna Weinstein : My goal was to share insights from a wide range of professionals working in theatre and film and television, to offer real-world stories and expertise about the different types of scenarios young actors, writers, and directors might encounter when they begin working. For instance, for Acting for the Stage, I know we both wanted to share stories from experts about what it’s like to work in the theatre,

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the different ways actors can make a living, the different ways actors can struggle, find support and strength, get beyond their nerves or performance anxiety, etc. We wanted to explore what that cycle of work looks like for an actor—the idea that you have to get started, and then go through that challenging stage of sticking with it before you find success, and then finding success, and then pushing ahead and moving beyond that plateau. And eventually, even daily, we begin that cycle again. All creatives do. We begin the cycle again and again and again.

CQ : I know what you mean, but could you clarify ? “Eventually, even daily” ? Anna Weinstein : I mean that this idea of “Starting Again” can mean starting again each day when we wake up and tackle whatever creative project we’re working on, or it can mean starting again after a significant failure, or it can mean starting again after a significant success. It can mean any number of things. For the creative person, we always find ourselves in the position of starting over. It’s something we’re accustomed to, because we’ve started over thousands of times. But sometimes—and I think this is what inspired me the most about this concept—sometimes starting again can seem so enormously difficult that we just don’t think we have it in us. We don’t want to start again. We don’t think we can pick ourselves up off the floor. We thought we’d gotten past all that, whatever that is. But of course, we’ll have the wind knocked out of us at some point, and I think that’s what that chapter is really speaking to— those readers who understand just how impossible it can seem sometimes to start again.

CQ : And the act of creating—the art itself, whatever the form—can be an important part of rebuilding your strength, right ? Anna Weinstein : Of course. I remember one of my professors saying once that stories are a safe place, and that really resonated with me. I do feel safe in those worlds I create. It’s a good escape, a good way to share, to lose myself. I heard someone say recently that if we don’t give ourselves a creative outlet, whether that’s making jewelry or singing or writing or acting, that creativity will come out in our lives, and likely not in a productive way. I really think that’s true.

CQ : What’s that quote we were talking about ? Anna Weinstein : “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Gustave Flaubert, the writer of Madame Bovary.

CQ : Save the drama for the work. Anna Weinstein : Exactly. Which is hard if you’re not working ! So that’s what that chapter is—and all of the chapters really, in different ways—a plea to students and readers to do the work. When it’s most difficult to do that work, that’s when it’s probably most important.

CQ : Let’s talk for a moment about the chapters in the series. You’ve referred to them, but could you explain ? Anna Weinstein : Right. Across the book series, there are five chapters in each book : “Getting Started”, “Sticking It Out”, “Finding Success”, “Getting Ahead”, and “Starting Again”. So whether it’s about writing or directing or acting or any other type of art form, this is a cycle that we can cycle through daily, weekly, annually, and over our lifetime. I loved exploring these stages and hearing other artists’ take on this. I left it up to the essayists to determine where their piece would be a good fit for the books. Would they most like to explore the concept of getting started ? Or finding

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success ? Which stage do they most connect with ? I’ll tell you that most of the contributors knew right away what they wanted to examine. For the artists that I interviewed, that was a bit different. Where I ended up placing the interviews really depended on the direction that the interviews took. You know this, with Acting for the Stage. We could have placed several of those interviews in different chapters, but there always seemed to be one that was the best fit.

CQ : Could you share some insights from the books that you have found most useful to you personally ? You’ve quoted some of the people you interviewed many times over the past few years. Their stories and advice have really stuck with you. Anna Weinstein : It’s really true. First, I should say that I interviewed people I’ve admired for years and years, so it was truly a delight and thrill to have the opportunity to speak with so many of these artists—directors like Michael Apted (Coal Miner’s Daughter) and Peter Segal (Tommy Boy), and writer-directors like Boaz Yakin (Remember the Titans) and Mary Harron (American Psycho), or writers like Barry Morrow (Rain Man). Of course, interviewing Ellen Burstyn was a particular thrill. She had such wisdom, such grace, really such an insightful and intelligent take on the work involved with acting, it was an honor to get her perspective. I keep coming back to several insights that she shared. One had to do with taking the punches, pulling yourself up again after a perceived failure, not getting cast in a part, etc. She said that she’d suffered quite a lot of adversity growing up, but those experiences made her more resilient. She said, It’s one of the advantages of having a difficult childhood—that you don’t sink. You do recover. You become a survivor. It’s like when they make steel stronger by pounding on it. So I’ve never been one to give up. It just doesn’t interest me I guess. If one thing doesn’t work, I try another. CQ : An amazing quote. Anna Weinstein : It really was pretty stunning. She also had a lot of insight about the perception of success. She was talking about how she tends to ruminate on her failures, so no matter whether other people consider her a success, she doesn’t feel like a success. She said, “…there are so many things I wish I had done, or wish I had done differently, or shouldn’t have done.”

CQ : And Michael Apted said something similar ? Anna Weinstein : He was talking about the price of success. For readers who don’t know, Apted’s films have received dozen of nominations for Golden Globes, Oscars, and BAFTAs over the years. He also directed movies like Gorillas in the Mist and the renowned Up ! documentary series, which might be my favorite series of documentaries. It’s incredibly moving. But he said, I’ve always believed that you can’t have everything. If you’re going to work like I’ve worked, and travel like I’ve traveled, it’s very, very hard to sustain a personal life, which has been a great sorrow for me. But it’s what I did, what I chose, and there’s been a lot of damage caused by that. He went on to say that he really loves to work, though, and that he’s happiest when he’s working, that he wouldn’t really know what to do with his time if he weren’t working—that he doesn’t particularly have a lot of hobbies. It was fascinating to hear his take on the work.

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CQ : I know you were also moved by Boaz Yakin’s story. What did you ﬁnd compelling about his perspective ? Anna Weinstein : Boaz Yakin wrote and directed A Price Above Rubies, which is definitely one of the films from the 1990s that has stuck with me the most over the years—truly a stunning and moving film. He also directed Remember the Titans, and he wrote and directed Safe and wrote films like Now You See Me. But yes, hearing his perspective on the emotional toll the industry can take and how he navigates the business aspects of the industry, I guess I found it inspiring to hear that someone with his level of success can find it emotionally challenging to work in the industry, and yet still he persists. He talked about some of the emotional work he’s done in recent years to be better able to deal with the frustrating aspects of the industry.

And by the way, he also had some really intelligent insights into creativity and what happens when we stifle it. I was asking him about a monologue that he’d written for Renee Zellweger’s character in A Price Above Rubies—it was an amazing monologue, and I thought it was remarkable that he had the insight to write this when he was in his twenties. He was wise beyond his years. This is what he said in response : If I remember correctly, I think it had something to do with the idea that when you’re younger, this excitement or energy or creativity or passion—whatever you want to call it—it doesn’t have limitations on it. But as she got older, all these other factors came in to keep that thing from becoming something that she could externalize. And when you can’t externalize or act on the things that move you the most, they become painful—and you can become self-destructive or destructive… this passion for life and excitement and sexual energy and emotional energy and all that stuff that develops in you when you’re young, when it gets stifled, it starts to eat you up. CQ : Again, almost a plea to do the work of creating. Anna Weinstein : Exactly.

CQ : Any ﬁnal pieces advice or wisdom you’d like to share ? I immediately think about Richard Robichaux’s thoughts about moving toward what you want. Anna Weinstein : Robichaux has acted in many of Richard Linklater’s films. He was the Head of Acting at Penn State and is now a Professor at UC San Diego. Yes, he talks at length about not moving away from something or somewhere if you’re unhappy with it, but instead moving toward what you want or where you want to be. That difference in attitude is important, because you’re empowered if you’re actively pursuing the thing that you want. Don’t run away, run forward. If I could leave our readers with one powerful reminder, it would be something Barry Morrow said when I interviewed him. Barry Morrow wrote Rain Man, and he wrote that script after writing the film Bill, which is a story about his friend Bill Sackter, a mentally impaired gentleman twice his age who he befriended and became the legal guardian of. He said that what’s most important for any artist is to really live, to go out into the world and gather stories. If you want your stories to really sing—to stand apart as authentic and exceptional—you have to live an authentic life where you’re genuinely engaging and developing relationships with people. In other words, in order to create characters that ring true at the level of Raymond and Charlie Babbitt, you have to get to know people with some level of intimacy. I’m interpreting now, but I believe he was talking about vulnerability—being willing to open yourself up to another human being and accept their vulnerabilities and expose your own. It’s something a lot of the artists discuss in the books, including

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Ellen Burstyn. Whether we’re writers, directors, or actors, whether for stage or screen, ultimately we’re trying to find truth in our stories and characters. We’re looking to expose and examine in a fresh and authentic way some truth about the human experience. That’s our goal. And really living, really engaging in life, that’s the first step.

ABSTRACTS

Interview with Anna Weinstein, who is the Series Editor of the PERFORM book series, published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis

Entretien avec Anna Weinstein, éditrice de la collection “PERFORM book series” chez Routledge, Taylor & Francis

INDEX

Mots-clés: jeu, mise en scène, film, scénarisation, television, théâtre, Michael Apted, Ellen Burstyn, Boaz Yakin, Peter Segal, Mary Harron, Renee Zellweger, Richard Linklater, Barry Morrow, Richard Robichaux, Bill Sackter, Gustave Flaubert Subjects: Theater Keywords: acting, directing, film, screenwriting, television, theatre, Michael Apted, Ellen Burstyn, Boaz Yakin, Peter Segal, Mary Harron, Renee Zellweger, Richard Linklater, Barry Morrow, Richard Robichaux, Bill Sackter, Gustave Flaubert

AUTHOR

CHRIS QUALLS Auburn University [email protected]

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This is not America : Angels in America au Théâtre du Sorano, Toulouse, Novembre 2016 Entretien avec Aurélie Van Den Daele (Deug Doen Group)

Alice Clapie

Deug Doen Group: Website

1 https://www.deugdoengroup.org

Deug Doen Group: Angels in America

2 https://www.deugdoengroup.org/angels-in-america

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[Figure 1]

“This is not America” Angels in America, Deug Doen Group, dir. Aurélie Van Den Daele, création novembre 2015 à la Ferme de Bel Ebat, Guyancourt, tournée en France 2016-2017 Credits : Marjolaine Moulin, Deug Doen Group

[Figure 2]

Caption : “Let’s Dance” Angels in America, Deug Doen Group, dir. Aurélie Van Den Daele, création novembre 2015 à la Ferme de Bel Ebat, Guyancourt, tournée en France 2016-2017. Credits : Marjolaine Moulin, Deug Doen Group

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Présentation d’Aurélie Van Den Daele, du Deug Doen Group and d’Angels in American

3 Aurélie Van Den Daele est metteuse en scène pour le Deug Doen Group. Après une formation au Conservatoire régional de Clermont-Ferrand et au Magasin à Malakoff elle s’oriente vers la mise en scène et intègre le Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Arts Dramatiques de Paris. Avec le Deug Doen Group elle a monté des pièces qui explorent les « mécanismes de l’histoire contemporaine » par la mise en scène d’écriture dramatiques contemporaines ou d’écriture contemporaines qui revisitent des mythes (Métamorphoses, d’après Ovide et Ted Hughes, Angels in America, Tony Kushner). Il est important de mentionner que le Deug Doen Group fait preuve d’un lien très formellement établis entre théâtre et cinéma. L’interdisciplinarité semble centrale et vise à remettre en question le lieu de théâtre et la place du spectateur ainsi que leurs rôles dans la société. Les thématiques que le Deug Doen Group explore sont ancrées dans un questionnements général sur la place de l’humain à la fin du XXème et début du XXIème siècle dans le monde occidental : la maladie, l’individu face à la mort (Angels in America, Dans les veines ralenties), le tournant neo-conservateur et neo-capitaliste des années 80s dans le monde anglophone (Angels in America, Top Girls), le féminisme (Top Girls), l’humain et son alter-ego, les images humaines, les images bestiales (Métamorphoses). Ainsi, en dépit du contexte anglophone, la mise en scène de Angels in America du Deug Doen Group en France entre 2015 et 2017 témoigne de la nécessité de montrer les années 80 et la période du « greed is good » comme un point de départ pour remettre en perspective l’humain dans la période contemporaine. « This is not America », référence à la chanson éponyme de Bowie sur les 80s jouant sur une homophone partielle (This is not America / For this is not a miracle), et un des surtitrages utilisés dans cette mise en scène, encapsule à la fois l’idée que l’Amérique et ses mythes se transforment à l’approche du millenium mais aussi que ce que vous voyez, où que vous soyez, vous concerne aussi.

Entretien

Alice Clapie : Angels in America a été régulièrement montée aux Etats-Unis depuis sa création, ce qui a amené Tony Kushner à modiﬁer le texte jusqu’en 2013. A ma connaissance, elle a été assez peu montée en Europe à part au Royaume-Uni, tout simplement, qu’est-ce qui vous a amené́ à monter cette pièce ? Quelle version du texte avez-vous utilisé ? Avez-vous vu d’autres productions de la pièce ? Quelles ressources externes au texte avez-vous utilisé ? Aurélie Van Den Daele : Dans les années 2010, on peut toujours mourir du sida. On peut mourir de ne pas le dire. D’en avoir tellement honte ou d’être tellement clivée que l’on en crève. Je l’ai vécu. De plein fouet. Hasard ou non, c’est à ce moment là que j’ai choisi de monter ANGELS IN AMERICA, pièce que j’avais rencontré au conservatoire. Elle entrait dans mon parcours pour clore une série de travaux sur la place du malade dans la société contemporaine. Nous avons utilisé la version de L’avant scène de Gérard Wajeman et Jacqueline Lichtenstein. Mais elle était datée et ne prenait pas en compte les changements de l’édition de Tony Kushner de 2013. Donc nous avons travaillé avec une dramaturge de la traduction qui a fait des

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ajustements et des réactualisations. J’avais vu Angels in America monté par Krystof Warlikoski, et en vidéo la production de Ivo Von Hove. AC : La pièce s’intéresse de manière générale à une société et un monde en changement. Dans une préface à l’édition de 2013 Tony Kushner dit de sa pièce que “Angels n’est pas une pièce théologique malgré ses pressentiments apocalyptiques. [...] L’espoir, quand on ne le voit pas dans ce qui est certain, peut toujours être localisé dans ce qui est indéterminé́ et dans ce sens, Angels est une pièce pleine d’espoir.” Ce qui m'amène a faire un lien avec le dossier de votre spectacle: “La pièce offre le paysage historique d’un monde en marche : celui des années 80, fondement de notre histoire actuelle.” Pensez-vous que la pièce parle de son époque, comme une fenêtre sur l’Amérique de Reagan, et/ou, au contraire, a une résonance contemporaine? AVDD : La pièce parle de cette époque de manière assez visionnaire, alors même que Tony Kushner, quand il l’écrit était en plein dans l’oeil du cyclone. Mais elle résonne absolument avec nous, de manière universelle. Tony Kushner y questionne des fondamentaux de l’êtrehumain : son identité, sa vitalité, sa perdition, en ce sens la pièce est universelle. Elle questionne également l’humain face à la maladie : que faire quand la maladie s’immisce dans notre vie ? accompagner, détruire, dénier ? Tous ses questionnements sont encore des tabous de notre société moderne. Mais elle interroge aussi les reculs d’une société, les dérives, et les périodes d’obscurantisme que nous traversons.

AC : Tony Kushner est réputé pour son théâtre politique et ses influences Brechtienne et Marxiste, votre création se veut-elle politique ? Militante ? AVDD : Je crois que notre projet est politique, mais pas militant. En ce sens que nous n’éclairons pas une cause, nous ne faisons aucun prosélytisme les spectateurs ne font aucune découverte quand ils viennent voir la pièce. Mais en montant la piece,̀ il me semble que je réaffirme qu’aujourd’hui au théâtre la question gay est un tabou. Et que l’identité, la catégorisation sont ses enjeux de nos sociétés futures. AC : Quelle relation avec le public avez-vous voulu établir ? AVDD : Je pense le théâtre comme un lieu où le spectateur doit être actif. Kushner offre ça : une saga qui alterne les émotions, les genres... Je ne souhaite pas choquer mais interpeller et émouvoir. AC Dans le dossier du spectacle vous parlez de l’importance de recréer des non-lieux sur scène, pourquoi est-ce si important selon vous ? Avez-vous envisagé l’espace de théâtre comme un non-lieu en lui-même ? AVDD : Les nons-lieux entrent dans un projet plus global au sein du DEUG DOEN GROUP. Je suis convaincue de la force du théâtre, de son pouvoir de convoquer l’imaginaire. Mais je suis aussi fascinée par la puissance du cinéma, du montage et surtout des images. En créant des non lieux, je me permets ces allers retours : ces espaces sont des espaces de théâtre, des boites ludiques où l’acteur peut jouer, sans que l’on impose au spectateur une vision, et en même temps, je peux décaler le décorum pour créer de images.

4 AC : Le dramatis personae de la pièce Tony Kushner indique que certains acteurs devront jouer plusieurs personnages, quel effet cela a-t-il eu sur votre production ? dans la construction de chacun des personnages ?

5 AVDD : Nous avons respecté́ cela sauf pour le personnage d’Harper qui devait aussi jouer Martin. J’ai assez vite décidé de ne pas respecter cette indication seulement. Cela a bien sûr joué sur la production, car nous jouons alors avec l’image et la perception du

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spectateur. L’une de nos lignes était de faire confiance au spectateur pour qu’il accepte l’illusion théâtrale, la dénonciation de certains procedé ́s. Sur la construction de personnages comme celui de l’actrice qui joue Emily et L’ange, il y a des corrélations qui s’établissent, des glissements. J’aime les challenges, que les acteurs soient polymorphes et cette puissance de la transformation théâtrale est trés présente chez Tony Kushner. AC : Une question qui peut paraître anecdotique, mais c’est que qui me frappe le plus dans l’iconographie créée autour de cette pièce : pourquoi avez-vous choisi d’utiliser des néons sur scène ? Peut-être que je me trompe, mais il me semble que la majorité de la lumière que vous avez utilisée est de la lumière néon avec une répétition des couleurs verte, jaune, et bleue, ces lumières m’évoquent à la fois la maladie, la faiblesse et la ville la nuit, pourquoi cette gamme de couleurs ? AVDD : Je travaille avec un collectif technique, le collectif INVVO aux dispositifs scéniques. Il y a très souvent dans nos scénographies des néons. C’est une manière de se réinscrire dans un courant artistique, mais aussi de travailler avec des sources que l’oeil du spectateur peut identifier à ce qu’il peut voir dans un lieu public, contrairement à un projecteur de théâtre. Quand nous travaillons, je ne parle jamais au créateur-lumière de couleur. Il s’agit d’une harmonie de plateau. Le jaune-vert électrique est associé aux hallucinations dans notre spectacle : le créateur-lumière voulait utiliser des svobodas pour l’Ange mais c’est une lumière très divine, très apparition : il voulait décaler cela et créer quelque chose de plus POP; dans les recherches que nous avons mené autour du kitsch, nous avons beaucoup regardé Pierre et Gilles par exemple. Ce jaune vert électrique est également une référence à une réplique de la pièce d’Ethel Rosenberg : « l’étoile de la haine d’Ethel Rosenberg, qui brille chaque année d’une lumière vert électrique ». Le bleu est venu d’un rapport d’harmonie aux écritures sur les TVS. AC : En suite, dans vos choix musicaux, David Bowie semble avoir un rolê privilégié, je pense au titre “Let’s Dance” pour l’acte 1 de Millenium Approaches par exemple. Qu’est-ce que représente David Bowie pour vous dans ce contexte-là? AVDD : David Bowie est un immense artiste que j’affectionne depuis très longtemps, tant dans son travail que dans son engagement, son identité́ trouble. Il a énormément travaillé à la cause LGBT. Je souhaitais qu’il apparaisse dans la bande son. Et puis petit à petit il s’est imposé que ce seront ces titres qui nommeraient les épisodes de cette saga GAY.

AC Pourquoi avez-vous décidé de mettre l’ange dans une cage? Si je ne me trompe pas l’ange ne tombe pas dans votre production alors que la chute peut être perçut comme l’élément qui cristallise toute la pièce. L’enfermer dans la cage a-t-il été votre alternative? AVDD : Je ne souhaitais pas d’ailes pour l’ange dès le départ du projet. La scène de l’ange est un casse tetê pour tout metteur en scène ! La chute de l’ange me semblait difficile à réaliser et me faisait très peur...et puis se posait pour moi des questions que je n’arrivais pas à résoudre avec une chute : comment montrer les différents niveaux de réel qui existent dans cette scène avec un ange qui a fendu un plafond ? Comment la concrétude du corps de l’actrice allait permettre la mythologie de cette scène ? en l’éloignant en termes de plans, en la plaçant dans une sorte de paradis perdu, d’éden kitsch, j’ai trouvé une autre dimension à la scène qui m’intéressait plus. AC : Tony Kushner donne peu d’information sur la mise en scène de ces scènes fragmentées, votre choix d’implanter une cage en plexiglas (peut-être vous ne l’avez pas envisagé comme une cage? et peut-être qu’elle n’est pas du tout en plexiglas?) apporte

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vraiment une frontière entre les deux parties des split scenes, tandis qu’une séparation avec un jeu de lumière, par exemple, n’assumerait pas assez la fragmentation il me semble, comment avez-vous imaginé cette mise en espace? AVDD Le dispositif s’est décidé avec le collectif INVIVO et la nécessité d’une séparation s’est imposé à nous quand nous avons travaillé en résidence technique. C’est en plexiglas, mais nous avons toujours nommé cela boite/boite en plexiglas. Elle avait pour objectif de séparer les espaces, les séquences mais de permettre le continuum de la vie des personnages. Avec le créateur lumière, nous aimons les CUTS raides, nets, définitifs. Mais sur un plateau nu, cela peut être « cheap » : il nous faut accompagner nos désirs par des outils techniques. AC : Merci Aurélie Van Den Daele pour le temps que vous avez accordé à mes questions et pour ces éléments fascinants et enrichissants sur la mise en scène et l’interprétation de Angels in America.

RÉSUMÉS

Entretien avec Aurélie Van Den Daele, metteuse en scène du Deug Doen Group, qui a monté Angels in America (Tony Kushner, 1993) en France entre 2015 et 2017 Interview with Aurélie Van Den Daele, director of Deug Doen Group that presented Angels in America (Tony Kushner, 1993) in France (2015-2017).

INDEX

Mots-clés : théâtre américain, Angels in America, Deug Doen Group, années 80, épidémie du SIDA, New York City, Tony Kushner, David Bowie, théâtre politique, histoire contemporaine, mythes Thèmes : Theater Keywords : American theatre, Angels in America, Deug Doen Group, 80s, AIDS epidemic, New York City, Tony Kushner, David Bowie, political theatre, contemporary history, myths

AUTEUR

ALICE CLAPIE M2 Etudes du Monde Anglophone, CAS, UT2J, Toulouse [email protected]

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Poetry, Politics and Popcorn : Angels in America at the National Theatre Performance Review

Alice Clapie

[Figure 1]

Credits : National Theatre, London

Factual information about the shows

1 Play : Angels in America : A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992), Millenium Approaches (3h30) and Perestroika (4h30).

2 Venue : Lyttelton Theatre (890), Royal National Theatre, London, UK.

3 Opening : Lyttleton Theatre, Thursday May 4, 2017.

4 Author : Tony Kushner.

5 Director : Marianne Elliott.

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6 Cast : Susan Brown (Hannah Pitt), Andrew Garfield (Prior Walter), Denise Gough (Harper Pitt), Nathan Lane (Roy M Cohn), Amanda Lawrence (The Angel), James McArdle (Louis Ironson) , Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Belize), Russell Tovey (Joseph Pitt), Stuart Angell, Laura Caldow ; Claire Lambert, Becky Namgauds, Stan West, Lewis Wilkins (Angel Shadows).

7 Website : https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/angels-in-america

8 Trailer : https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v =DinEV8NqKR0

Review

9 The National Theatre’s 20171 revival of Tony Kushner’s multiple award-winning play Angels in America has all the characteristics of a box office hit. The production opened May 4, 2017 and ran until mid-August. Tickets soldout in the space of a few hours despite record high prices. Angels in America was commissioned in the late 1980s by the Eureka Theater Company, in San Francisco, at a time when the AIDS epidemic and the conservative turn of the 80s, prompted many artists to respond to the crisis. Kushner was one of them.

10 A very dense and complex text, Angels in America resists simple summarization. In “A Few Notes From the Playwright About Staging”Kushner insists that Millenium Approaches and Perestroika, partly because of their heterogeneous characters, are “two rather different plays, each with its own structure and character.”2Millenium Approaches is often compared to an explosion and Perestroika to its aftermath.3 Play-goers had the opportunity to see both plays in a day (with five intermissions) or to see them separately. But Kushner believes that “once engaged, audiences rediscover the rewards of patience and effort and the pleasures of an epic journey. An epic play should be a little fatiguing.”4 While Kushner claims the political and aesthetic influence of Brecht and Marx in his work, Angels in America is a double-edged epic play. Depending on the director’s choices, the performance of Angels can turn epic or just not ; 5 the epic potential of the play actually depends on the performance. The National Theatre’s revival of Angels in America brought together poetry, political drama, and entertainment: “Poetry, Politics and Popcorn.”6

11 The program drew the audience’s attention to the contemporaneity of the play by highlighting connections between the 1980s and today. It displayed photos symbolizing the Reagan-Thatcher era and had articles dedicated to immigration (“Great Voyages”), to the evolution of AIDS since the 80s, or to Roy Cohn, Ed Koch (mayor of NYC in the 80s)and Donald Trump (“The Serpent and the Big Apple”). While underlining the political implications of the play, the production targeted a mass audience. And it reached its goal. A comic tone based on cultural stereotypes and pop-culture dominated the production against the backdrop of a highly poetic performance of suffering, love and political indictment. The production was fatiguing as expected. But it ended with an electrifying standing ovation and I think we experienced the effort, the patience, the pleasure and the reward of an epic journey.

12 Despite being roughly seven hours long, the production was entertaining and poignant enough for the audience to be liable to burst into laughter at any time. Dark humor, camp humor, and parody helped mingle entertainment and politics or controversial subjects as the production enhanced the topical themes of racial, sexual, gender, and

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national identity. Characters dying of AIDS, or depressed characters, are actually the ones that would make the audience laugh or smile the most. Stereotypes, cross- dressing and references to popular culture too. Louis’s monologue about race and racism, playing on stereotypes of Britishness received thunderous applause for example. Louis : Well, no, but when the race thing gets taken care of—and I don’t mean to minimalize how major it is, I mean I know it is, this is a really incredibly racist country but it’s like,well, the British. I mean, all these blue-eyed pink people. […]

13 Alongside the comic tone, the production could be qualified as a machine-play as the use of special effects or even spectacular choreographies on the Italian stage of the Lyttelton Theatre were at the same time highly entertaining and very poetic. In the text, when he first encounters the Angel of America, Prior cries out “Very Steven Spielberg.” Prior’s reference to Steven Spielberg is first and foremost a reference to theatrical illusion as Spielberg is famously known for his escapist movies in the 70s and 80s using developing technologies in film making. In fact, the National Theatre followed Kushner’s idea that “it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly thrilling, fantastical, amazing.”7

14 This staging alternated between machines and gestus, an acting technique developed by Brecht that emphasizes the social status of characters through body language, gaze, attitude and intonations. From the opening of the play to the middle of Millenium Approaches, the set was made of three turning blocks that enabled split scenes to “work out psychologically coherent (hence playable)”.8 The three turning blocks would at the same time create separate spaces and unite the events occurring at the same time. But it also rendered the show more entertaining and dynamic as the audience would never be looking into the abyss of an empty stage. The change of set occurred with the lights on and the three turning blocks were replaced by an empty space that would be used mainly when fantastic elements were played out (ghosts, hallucination, dreams, angels etc.).

15 It is tempting to say that the staging alternated between realism and abstraction. Private spaces were enclosed spaces on stage and they required more props and detailed settings. Public spaces and imaginary places on the other hand, were mainly taking place on an empty stage with only one door standing for example, or the angel statue of the Bethesda fountain, or a purple-neon ladder leading to heaven, or a bench, symbolizing the type of space where the scene was taking place. The use of neon lights, rain, and snow added to the symbolist side of the staging that aimed at symbolizing public spaces while realizing private ones. However, the more the show was going on, the less the set was busy, and the more abstract the staging was.

16 The aesthetic choices enhanced alterity and alienation. The alternation between realistic, symbolistic and futuristic tableaux reflected the polymorphic universe of the play. This alternation resulted in the creation of reassuring and menacing atmospheres in between which characters and the audience were caught. The production seemed to associate mainstream West End/Broadway aesthetic with very-Steven-Spielberg futuristic elements. For example, the set for the “Council Room of the Hall of the Continental Principalities in Heaven,”at the end of Perestroika, could, oddly enough, remind the audience of the interior of a Tardis, the vessel of the extremely well-known (in Britain

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at least) Dr Who(s). Possibly even more striking were the post-urban motifs that highlighted the aftermath of an era.

17 The representation of the Angel of America was a unique combination of machinery and gestus. Carried by six “angel’s shadows”this Angel of America can be related to a seraph, a type of angel, described in the Bible as celestial beings with six wings.9 The poetic choreographic performance of this character derived from both the phantasmagoric and the organic as her motion was hybrid, made of machine and actors. The dancers carrying the Angel would manually activate the beating wings and synthetic sound would raise or modify her voice. By representing the Angel of America as a weak, wounded, and aggressive angel (which is not often the case), the performance also presented the connection of characters with religion as one that is dwindling. The actress’s performance was faithful to Kushner’s openly acknowledged reverence for Brecht. In addition to the Angel’s gestus and sets emphasizing alienation and alterity, the production used distanciation effect (Verfremdungseffekt). Acting was, to some extent, exaggerated so that identification could not be possible. It relied on stereotypes which were also a great part of the comic tone of the production.

18 The 2017 National Theatre production of Angels in America seems overall to popularize (in the sense that it made it more accessible) a play about the struggle of the gay community in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Yet, if its popular success is in part due to the mainstream aesthetic of the play, or a cast gathering actors who have recently been seen in blockbuster movies and popular TV-shows,10 or even an emphasis on popular culture and the comic tonality, its popularity in 2017 bears witness to the work’s universal message. The production met Kushner’s expectations of a balance between entertainment and serious art, and the play, of which the reading is an immediate necessity,11 has reached a mass audience this year. The staging of this revival of Angels in America was very promising and it sure kept its promises even if the “mainstreamness”of a National Theatre production was surprising. Let’s say that it has at least brought a mass audience to the theater to see a play about topical issues, and there was epic, there was magic, and there was poetry, politics and popcorn too.

NOTES

1. The National Theatre staged the play for the first time in the UK in 1992 and 1993. 2. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. [1992] Revised Edition with an Introduction by Tony Kushner. New York: Theater Company Press, 2013. 311. 3. ibid. 311-312.“Perhaps it can be said that Millenium is a play about security and certainty being blown apart, while Perestroika is about danger and possibility following the explosion. The events in Perestroika proceed from the wreckage made by the Angel’s traumatic entry at the end of Millenium. A membrane has broken; there is disarray and debris. All of which is to suggest that, especially when the two parts of

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Angels are produced in repertory, the differences should be visible and palpable onstage.” 4. ibid. 312. 5. Reinelt, Janelle. “Notes on Angels in America as American Epic Theater” in Bloom, H. (ed.). Tony Kushner.N.p.: Chelsea House Publisher, 2005. 6. “[As a graduate student at NYU, Tony Kushner] co-founded a theatre company called 3P Productions, using the three p’s in politics, poetry and popcorn” Nielsen, Ken. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Continuum, 2008, 10. 7. Kushner, op. cit. 313 8. Kushner, op. cit. 314 9. Carroll, Robert and Stephen Pricket (eds.). The Bible Authorized King James Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 10. Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, The Amazing Spiderman), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Misfits), James McArdle (Star Wars) 11. Laville, Pierre. “Jacob en lutte avec l’ange de l’Amérique.”Preface to Kushner, Tony. Angels in America. trans. Pierre Laville. 1992. Paris: L’avant scène théâtre, collection des quatre vents, 2007.9.

ABSTRACTS

Theater review of Angels in America by Tony Kushner directed by Marianne Elliott at the National Theatre of London, UK, May - August 2017.

Critique théâtrale d’Angels in America de Tony Kushner et mis-en-scène par Marianne Elliott au National Theatre (London, UK), mai - août 2017.

INDEX

Subjects: Theater Mots-clés: Tony Kushner, Angels in America, théâtre épique, théâtre politique, divertissement vs. art, West End vs. théâtre non-commercial Keywords: Tony Kushner, Angels in America, epic theater, political theater, entertainment v. art, West End v. “non-commercial”theater

AUTHOR

ALICE CLAPIE M2 Etudes du Monde Anglophone, CAS, UT2J, Toulouse [email protected]

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Ariel's Corner

David Roche (dir.) Film, TV, Video

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Vincent Jaunas

1 Les journées d'études "Stanley Kubrick : Nouveaux Horizons" ont eu lieu les 16 et 17 mai 2017. Elles ont été organisées par Jean-François Baillon et Vincent Jaunas, avec le soutien de l'Ecole Doctorale de l'université Bordeaux-Montaigne, ainsi que des laboratoires de recherche CLIMAS et CLARE, de la librairie Mollat et du cinéma Utopia.

2 Réunissant 16 chercheurs et spécialistes européens (France, Royaume-Uni, Allemagne, Italie, Serbie, Pologne), ces journées ont permis de mettre en avant le dynamisme des études sur ce grand réalisateur et de confronter la pluralité des approches actuelles. Les études esthétiques, si foisonnantes, ont côtoyé les mises en perspectives historiques et les recherches d'historiens du cinéma qui, depuis une décennie, exploitent le matériel des archives de Stanley Kubrick à la University of the Arts London pour interroger les processus de production et de réception de son œuvre.

3 La première journée a eu lieu à la station Ausone de la librairie Mollat, partenaire de l'événement. Sam Azulys, professeur à la succursale parisienne de l'Université de New York (New York University), cinéaste et auteur de Stanley Kubrick : une Odyssée Philosophique (Editions de la Transparence, 2007), assura brillamment la conférence d'ouverture. Sa communication, « Stanley Kubrick : Le Corps et l'Esprit, volonté de puissance et mètis dans l'œuvre du cinéaste », remet en cause la taxonomie de Gilles Deleuze, qui, dans L'image-Temps, classe Kubrick parmi les cinéastes du cerveau1, en opposition à des cinéastes du corps (Cassavetes, Godard). Azulys affirme l'importance du corps dans l'œuvre de Kubrick, corps certes maltraité et souvent réduit au silence par un cerveau logique, froid et implacable, et par sa création, la technique. Il avance même l'hypothèse que « dans l'œuvre du cinéaste, c'est plutôt le corps qui tient en échec le cerveau », Kubrick adoptant un point de vue « physiologique » lui permettant

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d'envisager ses personnages en tant que sujets mus par une volonté de puissance qui, si elle menace de sombrer dans une volonté de néant canalisée par un nihilisme technologique envahissant, demeure. Cette résilience du vivant, du corps et des affects, ne pousse cependant pas Sam Azulys à conclure que Kubrick est un penseur dualiste, célébrant le corps au détriment d'un cerveau malade et pourrissant. En s'inspirant du concept de mètis, l'auteur envisage chez Kubrick, et plus particulièrement dans 2001 : L'odyssée de l'Espace (1968) , Shining (1980) et Eyes Wide Shut (1999) , le possible dépassement de la volonté de néant qui émerge d'une intelligence plus fondamentalement humaine, une intelligence qui est du corps et des affects, de l'instinct et de la ruse, autant que de l'esprit.

4 La seconde intervention fut assurée par Loig Le Bihan, maître de conférences à l'Université Montpellier Paul Valéry et auteur du récent Shining au miroir (Rouge Profond, 2017). À la macro-analyse de Sam Azulys succède une micro-analyse de Loig Le Bihan. Avec « D'un zoom l'autre. Une interprétation indiciaire de Shining », l'auteur se penche en effet sur un fait apparemment anodin. Lors de la production de Shining, Kubrick filma une scène fidèle au roman de Stephen King avant de la couper au montage. Tandis que Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), auteur en mal d'inspiration, s'échine à essayer d'écrire dans la grande salle de réception du terrifiant Overlook Hotel, il fait la découverte d'un mystérieux album dans lequel sont collectionnées des centaines de coupures de presse relatant l'histoire ombrageuse de l'hôtel. C'est cet album qui doit donner l'inspiration à l'homme pour écrire sa grande œuvre, un récit sur la vie de l'Overlook. Or, en cours de production, Kubrick supprima cette scène et la remplaça par une seconde, dans laquelle Wendy (Shelley Duval) et Danny (Danny Lloyd) jouent à se perdre dans le terrifiant labyrinthe de l'hôtel, tandis que Jack en observe une maquette. L'inspiration littéraire de Jack ne sera finalement pas motivée dans le film de Kubrick, et donnera naissance à la fameuse répétition de « All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy ». Au-delà de l'anecdote savoureuse (l'album, composé avec soin par un assistant qui y colla des centaines d'articles de journaux, n'apparaîtra finalement que comme un accessoire anodin sur le bureau de Jack dans quelques très brèves scènes), Loig Le Bihan suggère que ce changement atteste d'un revirement esthétique majeur qui, au beau milieu du tournage de Shining, poussa Kubrick à s'émanciper de la cohérence narrative du récit de fantômes de King, pour développer un film polysémique, ouvert à une multiplicité d'interprétations. Le labyrinthe devient par là-même le symbole clé de l'œuvre telle qu'elle put finalement être visionnée, tandis que le spectateur est invité à devenir un herméneute-détective chargé de reconstruire un récit déstructuré.

5 La première partie de l'après-midi fut ensuite consacrée à quatre communications effectuées par des chercheurs francophones. Clément Puget, maître de conférences à l'université Bordeaux-Montaigne, ouvrit le bal avec pour thème « Paths of Glory, aux croisements de l'histoire ». Le chercheur repère dans le film de multiples allusions, aussi bien dans les éléments visuels que dans les dialogues, à des faits historiques avérés ayant marqués la première guerre mondiale. Puget observe la présence de références tant antérieures à l'année dans laquelle se situe l'action (1916) que postérieures et permet d'envisager Les Sentiers de la Gloire (1957) — et par extension tous les films de Kubrick –, comme ancré dans un contexte historique particulièrement précis et détaillé, tout en en offrant une vision condensée et synthétique qui le transcende.

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6 Antoine Prévost-Balga, doctorant en études filmiques à l'université Paris VII Diderot, offrit ensuite une communication intitulée « Quand la Machine dysfonctionne : étude croisée de trois personnages kubrickiens ». Cette étude propose d'analyser conjointement Dr Folamour, du film éponyme de 1964, Alex d'Orange Mécanique (1971), et Pyle de Full Metal Jacket (1987). Chaque personnage est pour l'auteur l'occasion d'étayer l'analogie, si reprise dans les études kubrickiennes, entre l'homme et la machine : machine néanmoins imparfaite et prompte à s'enrayer. En s'inspirant des écrits de Gilbert Simondon, Prévost-Balga propose de définir trois types de bugs qui menacent de faire effondrer le fonctionnement machinique des personnages. Alex est ainsi mis en péril par l'invasion d'un élément étranger, tandis que Pyle risque la surchauffe. Dr Folamour, quant à lui, souffre d'obsolescence car l'ombre du nazisme détermine encore son fonctionnement dans les États-Unis de la guerre froide. Les considérations de Simondon sur une philosophie de la technique permettent ainsi à l'auteur d'éclairer le fonctionnement de l'humain dans les films de Stanley Kubrick.

7 Emmanuel Plasseraud, maître de conférences à l'université Bordeaux-Montaigne, analysa le dernier film du cinéaste, Eyes Wide Shut, adapté d'une nouvelle d'Arthur Schnitzler. L'auteur établit une comparaison avec La Ronde (1950) de Max Ophüls, lui- même inspiré de nouvelles de Guy de Maupassant. Si la fascination de Kubrick pour le cinéaste franco-allemand est de notoriété publique, le parallèle que dresse Plasseraud permet de déceler des accointances esthétiques et philosophiques, puisque l'auteur y voit la mise en scène des « masques de la vanité ». Cela l'amène à envisager des différences entre l'esthétique d'Ophüls et de Kubrick : chez ce dernier, la vanité devient un trait fondamental de la nature humaine.

8 Avec "Kubrick, Film-concept et mondes fictionnels", Pierre Beylot, professeur spécialiste de narratologie du cinéma à l'université Bordeaux-Montaigne, revint, après Sam Azulys, sur la si complexe dénomination deleuzienne de "Monde-Cerveau". L'auteur propose le terme de "films-concepts" pour définir ces œuvres qui dépeignent une "construction intellectuelle" davantage qu'une "diégèse autonome". Pour ce faire, Beylot analyse dans un premier temps l'armature narrative des films du cinéaste (voix- over, cartons titres, etc.), qu'il considère comme autant d'instances qui fragilisent le récit. Cela le mène à analyser la mise en scène de l'espace chez Kubrick comme double, à la fois réalité concrète et abstraction révélatrice des états mentaux des personnages qui l'habite. D'où le motif paradoxal de l'œil chez Kubrick, tant symbole d'exploration mentale que de l'opacité du visible.

9 La seconde partie de l'après-midi fut marquée par la conférence d'un invité exceptionnel en la personne de Jan Harlan, beau-frère de Stanley Kubrick et producteur exécutif de tous les films de la seconde partie de sa carrière, d'Orange Mécanique à Eyes Wide Shut. M. Harlan vint présenter sa collaboration avec l'artiste. Il nous fit part de l'extraordinaire amour de Kubrick pour le cinéma, son admiration et son écoute pour ses contemporains. Si l'admiration de Kubrick pour certains de ses contemporains (Steven Spielberg, Krzysztof Kieslowski, David Lynch) est de notoriété publique, M. Harlan nous fit également part d'admirations moins souvent mises en avant (Ingmar Bergman), voire même étonnantes (Carlos Saura) tant l'esthétique de ces cinéastes semble aux antipodes. Intitulée « No Artist. No Art », la conférence de Harlan dressa ainsi le portrait d'un cinéaste aux goûts particulièrement variés, animé cependant par une conviction très forte de ce que doit être le cinéma : un médium d'expression audiovisuel où le montré doit supplanter le dit, et à travers lequel l'artiste doit vouer

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une confiance totale en la capacité des spectateurs à comprendre et goûter des œuvres exigeantes. Loin des médisances qui continuent d'altérer la perception publique de Kubrick, Harlan se fit le témoin d'un homme ouvert, à l'écoute et passionné.

10 Cette première journée se conclut par la projection de Barry Lyndon (1975) au cinéma Utopia, partenaire de l'événement, précédée d'une présentation de Jan Harlan et Sam Azulys.

11 La seconde et dernière journée du colloque eut lieu à la maison de la recherche de l'Université Bordeaux-Montaigne. Ce fut au tour des invités anglophones de présenter leur recherche, à commencer par Manca Perko, doctorante rédigeant une thèse sur Stanley Kubrick à l'université d'East Anglia (Norwich, Angleterre), dont la communication « We-origins (Kubrick's crew confessions) », proposa de réévaluer l'aspect collaboratif du travail du réalisateur, par-delà son image d'auteur démiurge exerçant une autorité sans partage sur ses productions. Grâce à une analyse empirique basée tant sur de multiples interviews que sur une exploitation des archives de l'Université des Arts de Londres, Manca Perko analyse les divers projets de Kubrick en termes de formations de groupes de collaboration (notamment, par exemple, la collaboration du cinéaste avec le producteur James B. Harris lors de la première partie de sa carrière).

12 La communication suivante, « Inside the Interpretative Maze of The Shining : the Search for Meaning in Crisis », fut présentée par Vincent Jaunas, doctorant à l'Université Bordeaux-Montaigne rédigeant également une thèse sur l'artiste. Sa présentation s'interroge quant à l’origine de la vague de surinterprétations entourant The Shining, exemplifiée notamment par l'étonnant documentaire Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2012). Vincent Jaunas argue que le film lui-même, œuvre ouverte dont l'esthétique encourage un travail herméneutique exigeant (comme le démontrait la veille Loig Le Bihan), fait état des dangers de la surinterprétation, qu''il considère la manifestation d'une « vision hermétique du monde » (Umberto Eco2), vision dans laquelle se confond également Jack Torrance. La source même de la peur créée par le film, suggère-t-il, tient à ce vertige du vide face auquel la surinterprétation et sa vision réconfortante (car englobante) du monde apporte un répit dont la mise en scène démontre néanmoins le caractère illusoire et délétère.

13 Après avoir été comparé à La Ronde d'Ophüls la veille, Eyes Wide Shut fut cette fois, de façon peut être plus surprenante mais non moins pertinente, comparé au Jardin des délices (entre 1494 et 1505) de Jérôme Bosch. Avec « Stanley Kubrick and Hieronymus Bosch : In the Garden of Earthly Delights », Dijana Metlic, assistant professor à l'académie des arts de l'université de Novi Sad (Serbie), et auteure de Stanley Kubrick : Between Painting and Film (Film Center Serbia, 2013, ), propose de considérer le dernier film de Kubrick comme une formation triptyque qui, à l'instar des trois panneaux de l'œuvre de Bosch, font d'Eyes Wide Shut une réflexion morale. Tandis que le jardin d'Eden du peintre flamand permet d'apprécier le monde idéal fantasmé par Bill (Tom Cruise) au début du film, le panneau central (l'humanité avant le déluge) permet à l'auteure de caractériser les fantasmes d'Alice (Nicole Kidman), la femme du héros, alors que le dernier panneau, l'enfer, offre une analogie pertinente avec l'expérience cauchemardesque du protagoniste. Malgré les voies si différentes empruntées par les deux auteurs, Dijana Metlic, à l'instar d'Emmanuel Plasseraud, propose de considérer l'œuvre de Kubrick comme une exploration de la vanité des hommes.

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14 À l'issue de ces trois conférences aux thèmes variés qui témoignent des différentes directions prises par la recherche kubrickienne, un panel de trois communications fut exclusivement réservé à 2001 : L'odyssée de l'Espace, qui célébrera ses 50 ans l'année prochaine. En accordance avec son sujet de thèse qu'il rédige à l'université de Francfort, Nils Daniel Peiler fit état de l'extraordinaire survivance des musiques du film dans la culture populaire. Avec « Thus Spoke Stanley ! The Afterlife of Kubrick's Musical Second Choice for 2001 : A Space Odyssey », l'auteur étudie les innombrables reprises et pastiches qui témoignent de l'impact du film dans l'imaginaire collectif ; Ainsi Parlait Zarathoustra (1883-1885) de Richard Strauss, par exemple, est devenu si indissociable d'une ode à l'évolution de l'humanité qu'une publicité de bières allemandes put s'en emparer à des fins commerciales. Pourtant, l'auteur nous rappelle que la bande son mythique du film faillit ne jamais voir le jour, et qu'une bande originale fut composée par Alex North, avant que Kubrick ne choisisse de conserver la bande son que nous connaissons.

15 C'est également l'héritage du film qu'explora Artur Piskorz, professeur à la Pedagogical University de Varsovie et auteur d'une thèse sur Stanley Kubrick. Avec « 2013 : A Space Odyssey, Parody and Pastiche as Homage », Piskorz analyse le court-métrage animé du cinéaste polonais Alexander Sroczynski, dont les nombreux emprunts à l'œuvre de Kubrick déconstruisent la structure de 2001, en la transposant dans l'univers quotidien et rural d'un bucheron polonais. En considérant la subtile distinction qui sépare le pastiche de la parodie, l'auteur explore la façon dont les formes audiovisuelles créées par Kubrick devinrent des sources d'inspiration pour d'autres artistes, qui jouèrent avec leur résonnance mythique pour les adapter à des contextes socio-culturels autres et ainsi créer une esthétique nouvelle. Comme l'évoque le titre de sa communication, Artur Piskorz suggère que malgré les fins humoristiques, voire provocatrices, des emprunts de Sroczynski, la relation du court-métrage à son « hypertexte » (Gérard Genette3) prend néanmoins la dimension d'un hommage à l'œuvre du cinéaste américain, et à sa capacité à créer des formes suffisamment ancrées dans le répertoire culturel commun pour pouvoir devenir le matériau de création des générations suivantes.

16 La dernière communication du panel, « Dear Arthur, what do you think ? The Kubrick- Clarke Collaboration on 2001 : A Space Odyssey and A.I in Their Letters from the Smithsonian and London Archives » fut présentée par Simone Odino, bibliothécaire et archiviste à Bologne et auteur d'un livre sur 2001 : L'odyssée de l'Espace, à paraître en 2018. À l'issue de recherches intensives aux archives Stanley Kubrick de l'université des arts de Londres, ainsi qu'aux archives Arthur C. Clarke, nouvellement ouvertes au musée Smithsonian dans l'état de Virginie, l'auteur offre une exploration inédite de l'exceptionnelle collaboration de l'écrivain et du cinéaste. Si leur travail sur 2001 est désormais entré dans la légende, la correspondance relevée par Odino permet d'en éclairer des aspects peu connus. Les deux hommes continuèrent de s'écrire pendant presque 30 ans, jusqu'à ce que Kubrick envisage de retravailler avec Clarke pour élaborer l'adaptation de Super Toys Last All Summer Long de Brian Aldiss. Le projet ne vit finalement jamais le jour, bien que Steven Spielberg réalisa A.I : Artificial Intelligence en 2001 en l'honneur au projet de Kubrick. Odino révèle l'extraordinaire stimulation intellectuelle dont témoignent ces échanges, ainsi que certains désaccords qui soulignent les divergences esthétiques et philosophiques des deux artistes, dont la relation fut néanmoins marquée par un inébranlable respect mutuel.

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17 Le dernier panel de ce colloque explora divers aspects de la réception et de l'héritage de l'œuvre du réalisateur. Filippo Ulivieri, professeur d'études filmiques à Rome et auteur de la biographie de l'assistant de Kubrick Emilio D'Alessandro (Stanley Kubrick and Me : Thirty Years at His Side, Arcade Publishing, 2016), intitula sa communication « From “Boy Genius” to “Barking Loon” : an Analysis of Stanley Kubrick's Persona in American and English Media ». Il y relate les diverses étapes de la construction du mythe autour de la personnalité de l'artiste dans les médias anglo-saxons. L'auteur postule que si Kubrick fut hanté, lors des dernières années de sa vie, par une réputation d'excentricité, voire de folie contre laquelle il essaya de lutter, le cinéaste participa néanmoins à la construction de sa propre aura des années 60 aux années 80, période pendant laquelle l'artiste devint l'emblème de l'auteur démiurge et perfectionniste, davantage « boy genius » que « barking loon ». Cette analyse invite ainsi à reconsidérer en profondeur le rapport de l'artiste à sa propre perception publique.

18 Matthew Melia, professeur d'études filmiques à l'université Kingston près de Londres, proposa une communication sur les liens qu'entretiennent l'œuvre de Kubrick et la télévision, intitulée « Kubrick TV : Kubrick at the Interface ». Alors que le grand projet sur Napoléon que Kubrick envisagea de réaliser pendant des décennies devrait être adapté en une minisérie HBO produite par Spielberg, l'auteur analyse diverses inspirations télévisuelles qui influencèrent le cinéaste, comme par exemple Days of Hope (BBC, 1975) de Ken Loach et son impact sur l'imagerie de Full Metal Jacket, tout en démontrant le rapport teinté de méfiance que Kubrick entretenait avec ce média. Matthew Melia poursuit cependant en démontrant le profond impact de l'esthétique kubrickienne sur la télévision contemporaine, notamment les séries HBO, suggérant même que c'est dans la série TV que l'héritage du réalisateur se fait le plus prégnant, notamment à travers le traitement de l'espace et de l'architecture.

19 Enfin, Rod Munday, professeur à l'université d'Aberystwyth (Pays de Galles) et modérateur du site internet visual-memory.co.uk dédié au cinéaste, proposa une communication intitulée « A Kubrick Cinematic Universe ». L'œuvre de Kubrick est envisagée au prisme du concept d'univers cinématique, initialement inventé par les communautés de fans désireuses de prolonger l'expérience d'un film en exploitant l'univers diégétique créé par le réalisateur, à travers la fan fiction notamment. Bien que ce concept soit le plus souvent utilisé pour traiter de franchises comme Star Wars (Georges Lucas, 1977-), Rod Munday propose de l'exploiter pour analyser la ferveur avec laquelle tant les fans que les universitaires se replongent dans les univers kubrickiens, les analysent et prolongent ainsi leur héritage. Ce concept mène l'auteur à considérer la persona du réalisateur comme un souverain hobbesien, une figure d'autorité liant un ensemble de fidèles dévoués à déployer les richesses des univers créés par l'artiste.

20 Ces considérations apportèrent une conclusion appropriée au colloque « Stanley Kubrick : Nouveaux Horizons » qui, pendant deux jours, fit état de la vitalité des études kubrickiennes, et de la passion unique que l'artiste continue à susciter, tant chez des chercheurs confirmés que chez une nouvelle génération de fervents admirateurs.

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NOTES

1. Deleuze, Gilles. L’image-temps. Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1985, p267. 2. Eco, Umberto, Les limites de l’interprétation. Paris: Grasset, 1992, p14. 3. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1992, p13.

INDEX

Thèmes : Film, TV, Video Keywords : Kubrick, cinema, film criticism, reception theory, interdisciplinarity, hermeneutics, philosophy and cinema, intertextuality, film history Mots-clés : Kubrick, cinéma, critique filmique, théorie de la réception, interdisciplinarité, herméneutique, philosophie et cinéma, intertextualité, histoire du cinéma

AUTEURS

VINCENT JAUNAS Doctorant Université Bordeaux Montaigne [email protected]

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Youri Borg et Damien Sarroméjean

1 Organisée par les laboratoires CAS et PLH, en association avec la Cinémathèque de Toulouse, cette journée d’étude consacrée à Frederick Wiseman se propose d’aborder l’œuvre dense d’un cinéaste américain majeur du genre documentaire, reconnu tant par la critique que par ses pairs, mais dont les films (Titicut Follies (1967), Primate (1974) et Public Housing (1997) pour citer les plus connus) sont paradoxalement peu vus. Auteur d’une filmographie exigeante et cohérente, Wiseman est le créateur d’un cinéma qui lui est propre (par son style, son montage, sa poétique), aux enjeux à la fois esthétiques et éthiques. S’il paraît difficile de synthétiser leur contenu, ses films semblent néanmoins obéir à une praxis rigoureuse, centrée sur les implications éthiques et politiques des « tout petits liens », autorisant une remise en ordre du monde, et permettant de mettre en crise les représentations stéréotypées.

2 Dans leur discours introductif, Zachary Baqué et Vincent Souladié remarquent que la majorité des ouvrages analytiques (Thomas W. Benson, Joshua Siegel ou Maurice Darmon par exemple) portant sur l’œuvre de Wiseman semble tendre vers une recherche d’unité et de regroupement. Les deux axes majeurs de cette journée d’étude, que sont les notions d’ordre et de résistance, peuvent dès lors apparaître comme un moyen d’initier une recherche de motifs, certes récurrents et communs à plusieurs films, mais offrant également la possibilité d’une singularisation. De plus, il semble important de souligner la synchronicité du cinéma de Wiseman avec l’analyse sociologique des institutions (opérée par exemple par Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault ou Jean Baudrillard1). Les travaux de Foucault, notamment, trouvent une résonance particulière dans les films de Wiseman (par exemple Juvenile Court en 1973) ; on peut penser à l’attention particulière que le réalisateur porte aux détails, détails qui selon Foucault concentrent l’intervention de l’institution sur l’individu. Wiseman élabore un

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dispositif du retrait – il n’est pas un idéologue –, mais la question de la distance critique du cinéaste à ses sujets reste prégnante, de même que son rapport à une éventuel militantisme. Il s’installe dans les interstices, se concentre sur les détails, pour finalement établir une définition par la négative de l’institution, de l’autorité, du système sur lequel il pose son regard.

3 Patricia Kruth, Maître de Conférence en civilisation américaine à l’université de Lille, débute la journée d’étude sur la confrontation de deux documentaires, explorant chacun l’univers d’un lycée étasunien. Vingt-six années séparent High School de High School 2, chacun s’inscrivant dans des moments clés de l’histoire américaine. 1968, année de production de High School, est une époque charnière : la guerre du Vietnam, la lutte pour les droits civiques des noirs américains, et l’assassinat de Martin Luther King. High School 2, tourné en 1994 à la Central Park East Secondary School, dans un quartier à population majoritairement hispanique et noire, montre quant à lui quelques enseignants accompagnant des élèves dans l’élaboration de tracts, non sans lien avec les émeutes raciales qui ont éclaté deux ans plus tôt, et l’affaire Rodney King qui cristallisait ces tensions. C’est donc sur un mode allusif que les contextes viennent respectivement hanter les deux œuvres : la mise en scène de Wiseman n’est pas marquée par un engagement politique radical. High School est un objet de fragmentation. Il existe une distance délibérée entre les enseignants et les élèves. Les premiers sont en position de force, placés parfois littéralement sur un piédestal. Les moments d’échanges font figure d’exception par rapport aux discours autoritaires. Une autorité qui est renforcée par un découpage net et sec de gestes tendus et incisifs. Le montage est par ailleurs rythmé à l’extrême : chaque situation, de la répétition d’orchestre à la séance de sport, semble solliciter une performance de la part des élèves. Si quelques critiques sont émises à l’égard de l’établissement – qualifié de clos sur lui-même et parfois de rétrograde – ces derniers ne sont que peu amenés à s’exprimer. Patricia Kruth notera d’ailleurs que l’individualité s’efface dans la majeure partie du film. High School 2 est, à première vue l’exact opposé du premier système. L’institution, dans ses locaux comme dans son approche moderne de l’éducation se démarque immédiatement. Le décor est accueillant, les enseignants bienveillants, les gestes emplis de sollicitude. La pédagogie semble d’ailleurs montrer ces preuves à plusieurs reprises, lorsque encouragé à s’exprimer, un élève dresse une comparaison entre la littérature de Shakespeare et les histoires modernes qui le fascinent. Cette opposition apparente sera cependant fortement nuancée par Patricia Kruth : ce sont les lieux avant tout autre chose qui intéressent Wiseman. Des lieux qui ne sont pas caractérisés par quelques événements significatifs, ni enfermés dans quelques idées simplistes. Des lieux qui se prêtent à des lectures, des écritures qui les font osciller. Si le sens des documentaires de Wiseman nous résiste parfois, c’est bien pour renouer avec la complexité du réel.

4 David Lipson, Maître de Conférence à l’Université de Strasbourg, propose pour la deuxième communication une étude comparative des films Canal Zone (1977) et In Jackson Heights (2015), étude centrée sur la notion de résistance culturelle, et précédée par une analyse des caractéristiques propres à chaque film. Tourné en 1976, alors que la présence américaine, tant civile que militaire, est importante au Panama, Canal Zone offre une vision binaire de la cohabitation entre Panaméens et Américains. Lipson remarque, en effet, que Wiseman articule le film autour de contrastes et de juxtapositions : contrastes linguistiques, sociaux ou ethniques, amplifiés par un phénomène d’opposition entre les deux communautés. Ces oppositions sont le produit

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de la juxtaposition d’éléments antagonistes, le rural et l’urbain, l’immobile et le mobile, l’acteur et le spectateur. Deux groupes distincts se dessinent alors et font preuve d’une herméticité traduisant une résistance culturelle à l’intégration réciproque. Inversement, In Jackson Heights décrit un monde multiple, dénué de manichéisme, mais où de nombreux contrastes subsistent : différences générationnelles, sociales, culturelles, religieuses. Ces différences sont l’occasion pour Wiseman de filmer, là encore, une résistance culturelle, mais qui est ici une résistance multicommunautaire à un ennemi commun. Contrairement à Canal Zone, In Jackson Heights se concentre sur les aspects positifs et constructifs de la coexistence de groupes sociaux hétérogènes. Lipson se focalise donc dans un troisième temps sur une comparaison directe entre les deux films, séparés par une quarantaine d’années. Si les séquences d’ouverture et de clôture sont clairement antinomiques (on pense ici au feu d’artifice de la fin de In Jackson Heights, et à l’ultime séquence de Canal Zone, située dans un cimetière), une approche centrée sur la dimension de lutte culturelle permet de relever une certain nombre de similitudes, notamment dans la constance avec laquelle Wiseman interroge le concept de vivre ensemble. Pour Lipson, Canal Zone est une représentation de communautés closes, prisonnières de la fin d’une époque, et tournées vers le passé, là où In Jackson Heights est bien plus prospectif, et représente un ensemble de communautés en contact, tirant précisément leur force de la cohabitation et de la différence

5 Mathias Kusnierz, Docteur en études cinématographiques à l’université Paris-Diderot, a choisi d’explorer la place du spectateur face aux œuvres de Wiseman, notamment High School (1968), Law and Order (1969) et Meat (1976). Cette expérience serait affectée avant tout par la complexité du montage. Il y aurait ainsi deux grands moments dans le montage « wisemanien ». Le premier constituerait une écriture blanche, lisse, qui restitue le réel plutôt qu’il ne l’inquiète. S’il existe une forme parfaite et complète de ce montage invisible, Walter Murch, monteur, scénariste et auteur d’un essai sur le montage In the Blink of an Eye (1992), l’a théorisée. Afin de s’aligner sur la perception naturelle humaine, les raccords devraient se confondre avec les battements de paupières, dans le but de sectionner les espaces et les situations à la manière du cerveau humain. Construits pareils à une pensée, les flots visuels du réel seraient plus à même de se livrer à chacun. Murch tire ses conclusions de son travail théorique sur la biologie humaine, qui affirme en outre que ces raccords naturels seraient également liés à des phénomènes linguistiques. Car si les premiers constituent une forme de ponctuation du réel, ils prendraient en réalité appui sur la ponctuation orale de la parole. C’est ainsi que l’être humain serait plus prompt à cligner des yeux sur une consonne fricative – un montage qui ne ferait donc qu’un avec l’expérience naturelle individuelle du monde. Le second moment serait un point de rupture, relativement rare dans les documentaires de Wiseman. Contrastes d’échelles et de durées de plans, emballement du découpage, usages de syncopes et de contretemps : en opposition avec l’idée du montage invisible issue de la narration classique, celui-ci viendrait scander le réel plutôt que de le rendre lisible. Ce serait alors une rythmique, qui proposerait des variations d’intensités et qui opérerait un phénomène inversé : rendre indéchiffrable un monde qui nous est familier. Le documentaire ne serait plus alors l’amplification d’une idée partagée, mais la découverte d’une nouvelle réalité, par extraction d’un objet de son monde de représentation. C’est encore la densité et la complexité du montage qui, au service de la création d’un espace-temps inédit, caractérise la mise en scène de Wiseman.

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6 Thanassis Vassiliou, Maître de Conférence en études cinématographiques à l’université de Poitiers, choisit le film Boxing Gym (2010) pour étudier les assemblages de plans opérés par Wiseman afin de mettre en exergue les limites du montage « wisemanien ». Film singulier dans la filmographie du réalisateur (par son format, sa durée, par le huis- clos qui s’y construit), Boxing Gym synthétise et concentre les aspects caractéristiques du montage selon Wiseman. Vassiliou s’appuie sur une formule du philosophe et universitaire François Niney et précise que, par son montage, Wiseman rend visible les ficelles faisant tenir le contexte social. Ainsi, la violence que l’institution ou l’autorité étatique font subir aux individus, et sur laquelle Wiseman se concentre traditionnellement, est ici remplacée par une violence implicite, ritualisée, cathartique et finalement canalisée. Cette canalisation de la violence est à la fois thématique et filmique. Thématique car le sujet du film est une salle de boxe (or la boxe est un sport permettant une codification de la violence), et filmique car le réalisateur utilise ses outils, et en premier lieu le montage, pour souligner le rythme, les gestes et respirations, permettant ainsi par la variation dans la répétition une représentation de la canalisation de l’agressivité. Vassiliou évoque ici Péléchian et le montage contrapuntique : les plans importants sont disjoints et séparés par un commentaire, afin d’augmenter leur signification (ce rôle de commentaire étant souvent joué, dans Boxing Gym, par les dialogues). Enfin, les personnages sociaux peuvent être caractérisés (Vassiliou distingue ainsi le chef, le sage et le paresseux) et deviennent alors des figures emblématiques. Le découpage selon les occurrences de ces trois figures crée un rythme supplémentaire qui est intensifié par l’intrusion de la violence à l’intérieur de la salle de boxe, lors des discussions autour de la tuerie de Virginia Tech. Ces discussions traduisent une contamination du lieu clos par la violence extérieure, et trouvent leur acmé lors d’un dialogue philosophique sur l’analogie et la compréhension du geste, qui permet d’évacuer cette violence. Vassiliou en conclut que Wiseman opère avec Boxing Gym la démonstration que l’individu ne peut être contrôlé par la violence, mais bien par des activités de symbolisation relevant des relations sociales.

7 Delphine Letort, Professeure en civilisation américaine à l’université du Maine, conclut cette journée d’étude sur la démarche documentaire « wisemanienne ». Il y a d’abord un code de conduite : approbation de toutes les personnes qui apparaissent à l’écran, pas d’interventionnisme et une certaine distance. Le cinéaste récolte des situations et pas des témoignages, il rend compte de la vie publique plutôt que de la sphère intime. Il filme l’institution comme un espace social dans lequel s’expriment des rapports de lois et de pouvoirs. Ce sont les rouages de la machine sociale qui sont mis à nu. Le mannequin de Model (1980) est une figure silencieuse, subordonnée aux standards de la consommation. De la bande son émanent quelques congratulations, témoignages de la satisfaction procurée par des poses rigides, artificielles et faussement parfaites : le modèle est victime et acteur de sa propre réification, dans un monde construit sur l’exclusion, lié à un eugénisme physique. Dans Welfare (1975), Wiseman s’attarde sur la chorégraphie des corps, qui attendent, s’impatientent. La hiérarchie entre les êtres humains est clairement définie par une division sociale de l’espace. Le spectateur est placé à coté du fonctionnaire, promu au rang de juge, prompt à statuer sur l’attribution d’une aide publique. Les rapports de force et de pouvoir sont clairement établis dans The Store (1983). La classe sociale est directement liée à une fonction, des habits – la classe aisée se parant de bijoux. Les employés ont assimilé les normes d’une entreprise qui cherche à discipliner les esprits et les corps. In Jackson Heights, enfin, donne la parole à l’individu, à la minorité, à la communauté, lesquels constituent une symphonie

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harmonique faite de différences et de dissonances. Mais le poids insidieux du pouvoir institutionnel se cache derrière les déliaisons et la séparation. Des groupes d’individus, acculés, sont poussés à céder leurs locaux aux grandes enseignes avides d’accords financiers et d’agrandissements massifs alimentant la manne financière. Le montage « wisemanien » dessine la complexité des rapports sociaux, souligne l’invisibilité du pouvoir et met ainsi l’accent sur la domination silencieuse et rationalisée de l’idéologie néo-libérale.

8 Austérité du style, longs plans-séquences, absence de voix-off, les films de Frederick Wiseman échappent à tout cadre de réception institutionnalisé et élaborent une poétique propre au cinéaste. Par une approche comparative, basée sur des analyses filmiques strictes, autant que par des recherches théoriques permettant de déconstruire la démarche de Wiseman, cette journée d’étude a proposé un ensemble de réflexions originales, apportant un éclairage novateur sur le travail du réalisateur. Organisée en association avec la Cinémathèque de Toulouse, cette rencontre scientifique fut également l’occasion d’une table ronde, qui a permis des échanges pertinents entre public et spécialistes. Enfin, la projection de Hospital (1970) a offert aux participants une occasion, rare, de pouvoir profiter d’une œuvre du cinéaste pour clôturer cette journée.

NOTES

1. Alan Cholochenko, « The border of our lives, Frederick Wiseman, Jean Baudrillard and the question of the documentary », International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2004.

INDEX

Keywords : Wiseman, cinema, documentary film, communities, authority, editing, film criticism, ethics, institutions, social Mots-clés : Wiseman, cinéma, documentaire, communautés, autorité, montage, critique filmique, éthique, institutions, social Thèmes : Film, TV, Video

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AUTEURS

YOURI BORG Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès Etudiant en Master [email protected]

DAMIEN SARROMÉJEAN Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès Etudiant en Master [email protected]

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Conference report: 23rd SERCIA Conference: “That's Entertainment!” Spectacle, Amusement, Audience and the Culture of Recreation in the Audiovisual Contexts of English- speaking countries Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy, September 7-9, 2017 / Conference organized by Michele Fadda and Sara Pesce

Fanny Beuré and Najoua Hanachi-Grégoire

1 SERCIA (Société d’Études et de Recherche sur le Cinéma Anglophone), a society founded in 1993 to gather researchers in the field of English-speaking cinema, held its 23rd conference in September 2017 at Università di Bologna, Italy. It was organized by Michele Fadda and Sara Pesce (Università di Bologna), in collaboration with Centro La Soffitta (Department of the Arts) and Cineteca di Bologna. The title of the conference was “That's Entertainment! Spectacle, Amusement, Audience and the Culture of Recreation in the Audiovisual Contexts of English-speaking countries”. The conference lasted three days and included 13 panels of 3-4 speakers, as well as two keynote speakers: Richard Dyer (University of St. Andrews) and Krin Gabbard (Columbia University).

2 Entertainment has for long been identified as the source of the pleasure taken from the consumption of media productions throughout the 20th century. However, it has frequently been undervalued by academic analysis. Sometimes the mere synonym of “popular culture,” it is often set against “art” in a context of opposition between high and low culture. Entertainment has seldom been questioned, a notable exception being

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Richard Dyer’s seminal 1977 essay. The 23rd SERCIA conference acknowledged the importance of understanding the entertainment dimension of cinema and television. It offered the possibility to rewrite a historiography of the audiovisual production of English-speaking countries from the point of view of entertainment, beyond the patterns imposed by the auteur theory and of value judgments. The conference aimed at opening up for discussion a broad range of topics, including the relations between popular entertainment and official culture, the role played by technology and the corporeal aspect of entertainment. Above all, it questioned, to a certain degree, the main modes of entertainment that dominated the last century and its ongoing development in the era of new media and the Internet.

3 Richard Dyer’s inaugural keynote aimed at highlighting the importance of the sense of space in entertainment, considered as an affective notion. Dyer opened his talk by reminding the audience of two pairs of opposite terms generally involved in any discussion about entertainment. First, “entertainment vs. art”—the former seeking to give pleasure and the latter being more concerned with formal achievement. Second, “representation and affect.” Dyer explained that no matter how abusive those oppositions were, they remained useful to study entertainment. Two case studies followed in which Dyer examined how the spectator’s engagement into the fictional world was linked to the way space was constructed combining high level of formal achievement and entertainment. The first sequence studied was the “Prehistoric Man” musical number from On the Town (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1949). Dyer explained how the idea of expansion was conveyed through the number, by camera movement, editing and choreography. Dyer stressed the feminist dimension of the number – (Miller being the leader of the group), but also that objectification was still involved through suggestive costumes and dance moves. Dyer also underlined the problematic nature of the racial stereotype: not only the dancers are performing with objects stolen by imperialism, but the possibility of expansion is coded as white. Dyer’s second case study was the opening scene from Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971). He analyzed how the music and cinematography builds up the black character, who is confidently occupying space, walking from Midtown to Harlem; the use of music coded as black signifies Black possession of the streets.

4 In the first panel, speakers examined how entertainment is reconfigured in today’s entertainment industry. Enrico Mendudi (Università degli Studi Roma 3) pointed out how entertainment should not be regarded as a mere genre of media production, but as a continuum of activities. Activities that are tied to spectatorship on the one hand (watching a movie or a TV show), and other participatory experience of the self (such as tourism, gaming, physical activity) on the other, fuel one another by exchanging themes, contents and social habits. Antonella Maschio and Piergiorgio Degli Esposti (Università di Bologna) examined how new TV entertainment environment challenges the relationship between texts and audiences; viewing practices having changed, series are now the source of a double level of entertainment: not only from the production itself, but also from a more connective form of entertainment on social media platforms. Gianluca Sergi’s (University of Nottingham) paper offered an insight into the principal ways in which Hollywood operates today as a complex nexus of people and organizations; he focused on the role of key institutions such as the Academy, professional organizations and leading production companies, unveiling how all of

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these groups define the terms of excellence for the next generations of filmmakers while determining what film is.

5 Nostalgia in films was the pivotal topic of discussions in the second panel. Louis Bayman (University of Southampton) focused on the passage of time in the film Pride (Matthew Warchus, 2014). The importance of time is considered as an aesthetic motif that brings together heritage and retro. Two modes, though distinct in nature, constantly overlap and create a shift in categories: the unexpected encounter between mineworkers on strike and London-based gay activists. On the other hand, Pride epitomizes the changes undertaken by the British cinema over the 20th century. Ilaria de Pascalus (Università degli Studi Roma Tre) covered the topic of nostalgia in Feud— Bette and Joan (FX, 2017) where artificially reconstructed shots of the 1960's are signs of nostalgic enjoyment of the past and of the popular narratives. Lorenzo Marmo (Università di Napoli ‘L'Orientale’) examined Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) around the idea of miniaturization, obsessive attention to detail, and emphasis in framing of images modeled on silent cinema; the fascination for toys, doll houses, miniature trains display the constructive mechanisms of the camera and the filmmaking process.

6 On the third panel, both Adriano D’Aloia (Università Uninettuno Roma) and David Lipson’s (Université Paris Sud) presentations focused on entertainment at stakes in non-fiction productions. D’Aloia showed how infomercial, usually dismissed as a trash genre, follows a strict structure, with recurring protagonists aimed at capturing and entertaining the viewer’s attention. Infomercials entertain because they blend technical and magical appeal. The spectators’ satisfaction comes from watching people doing (and thus, internally doing), but also from the magical dimension of an obviousness not explicable by nature. Lipson’s paper questioned the relevance of the notion of “infotainment” in today’s media landscape where the lines between hard and soft news are increasingly blurred; after exploring the history and inception of “infotainment” TV and documentary, he examined the development, the decline and the legacy of the terms. Through the example of Supernatural’s (TheWB / TheCW, 2005- ) fandom, Olimpia Calì (Università di Messina) discussed the emotional meaning that joining a fandom may have for a person; Cali introduced an approach to fandom studies that implies the analysis of cognitive response to fiction and fans fictional products.

7 In panel 4, spectatorship and entertainment were examined both in the space of the circus which is, by essence seen as a promise of entertainment, and in the cinema. Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès) presented the case of two silent clowns He Who Gets slapped (Victor Sjoström, 1924) and The Laughing Man (Paul Leni, 1928); entertainment is studied according to a dual structure, i.e. attraction and narration; the clowns trigger laughter among the public through the repetition of gags, and at the same time the dramatization of their persona reveal both their public and private lives. Pierre Floquet (INP, Université de Bordeaux) discussed movement in animated films by focusing on web clips, frames from Italian Toccafondo’s, American Plympton’s and British Greaves’ and Quinn's, films. Gilles Menegaldo (Université de Poiters) analyzed the different strategies of entertainment deployed by Woody Allen in his films. The latter playfully stages different means of media that arguably cancel the boundaries of genres; his history as a stand-up comedian, and his recognized admiration of directors like Federico Fellini and Jean Renoir offer the audience a multilayered reflection on the limit between fiction and reality. Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot

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(University of Burgundy) explored magic shows in Woody Allen’s Don’t Drink the Water (1966), Stardust Memories (1980), Magic in the Moonlight (2014), Oedipus Wrecks (1989), Shadows and Fog (1991) and The Curse of The Jade Scorpion (2001); she pointed out how the clumsiness of the magician figures always fail to trick the audience, a paradoxical pattern which questions the veracity of a magic show in Allen’s art of fiction.

8 Stars and stardom were studied in the fifth panel. Star persona was developed in Jean- Baptiste Chantoiseau's talk (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3) on A Star Is Born (1937, 1954, 1976). The successive remakes of the film gave way to a certain number of transformations, e.g., the 1954 version added a musical dimension, hysteria in the 1976 version created a form of violence in relation to idols, etc.; the myth of Pygmalion, being at the center of the three films, draws attention to the image of the three female figures by means of a double-mirroring effect which inherently echoes the changes in Hollywood star system. Xavier Daverat (Université de Bordeaux) dealt with Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995), which was originally a variation of All About Eve (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950) and A Star Is Born. The film offers both a violent critique of the concept of entertainment and a phenomenology of erotic dance, continuously showing women’s bodies and playing on porno conventions and the hyperrealism of Las Vegas; the film flirts with melodrama only for the merchandizing of the female bodies who ended up looking alike. In her analysis of Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1954), Zeenat Saleh (Université de Franche-Comté) reflected on stardom in Hollywood, as well as on the fabrication of a star for marketing purposes.

9 The second keynote speaker, Krin Gabbard (Colombia University) opened his talk on La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016) by qualifying it as profoundly engaged in the culture of cinephilia. The crucial influence of the film is Umbrellas of Cherbourg’s (Jacques Demy, 1964) use of bold colors and emotional charged ending where lovers are not united; and color coding his characters in the fashion of The Young Girls of Rochefort (Demy, 1967). Gabbard’s main thesis was that any fiction about jazz runs into complex racial issues. Keith, the one African American character in the film, is seen by Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as a musical “sellout” because of his inclination to stray away from the very roots of jazz. On the other hand, Keith tries to talk Sebastian out of jazz purism by pointing out that Sebastian’s adhesion to the purity of jazz is perilous and counter- productive as it goes against the “out of boundary” spirit of jazz itself. Nevertheless, the film’s ironical twist is that Sebastian, a white man, declares himself to be the savior of jazz, even though he admits that he does not want to reach out to young people. As the film ensued a backlash from its detractors who saw it as an affirmation of white- male dominated discourse, Désirée Garcia, Chazelle’s old colleague, explained that the latter could not get funding without (white) stars. In La La Land neither Sebastian nor Keith is a villain; rather, the film is a multicultural groundwork that refuses to pick sides and allows the audience to have it both ways.

10 In panel 6, engaging the viewer in the film spectacle by reinterpreting the very notion of limits and boundaries and their articulation into the cinematic space, was one of the highlights discussed by Hervé Mayer (Université Paris Nanterre) in Batman v.Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016) and Celestino Deleyto (Universidad de Zaragoza) in Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015) . At this point, a redefinition of spatiality as a cosmopolitan motif implies a reconfiguration of the discursive positioning, as well as the political dynamics of entertainment cinema. David Roche (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès) analyzed the metadiscourse on the transformation of politics into

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entertainment in Black Mirror 1.1 (Channel 4, 2011) and I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016); both the show and the film evince an awareness of their own limitations as works of fiction—a necessary condition for political fiction to be truly political, according to philosopher Jacques Rancière—one that looks back on a political activist’s entire œuvre, the other that frames the limitations of the episodes to come.

11 Panel 7 focused on contemporary American cinema. Julie Assouly (Université d‘Artois) analyzed how Wes Anderson’s passion for theatre surfaces in the narratives and aesthetics of many of his films, foregrounding entertainment while delivering moral or poetic messages; she discussed the elements of theatricality in Anderson’s cinema in the staging (notably through costume and scenery), as well as in film narrative. Anne- Marie Paquet-Deyris (Université Paris Nanterre) analyzed Danny Boyle’s thriller- drama-adventure film The Beach (2000) as a telling story of young people’s postmodern, fragmented experience of time and space; she explored how the beach represents unadulterated entertainment and an ideal stage for inventing and consuming entertainment content, before turning into a violent dystopia where the representation of meeting “natural” authenticity is challenged. Chloé Monasterolo (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès)’s paper was about Atom Egoyan’s Adoration (2008), in which a teenager engages in a performance, that quickly goes viral, for which he pretends to be the child from the 1986 Hindawi affair; Monasterolo focused on the place of spectacle and intermedial experimentation in the character’s quest for his identity, with particular attention to how the repeated motif of creating avatars is used as a means of self-exploring.

12 In Panel 8, Costanza Salvi (Università di Bologna) dealt with the ambiguity of voice by focusing on two case studies: the urban and jazz-inflected style of crooner Rudy Vallée and the rural cowboy stars Gene Autry and Tex Ritter, who brought a modern style to old-fashioned Midwestern and Southern regions. However, Silvia Vacirca (Sapienza University & Richmond University) explored the role of make-up in 1930s Hollywood, and in particular Max Factor who played at styling the face of the Hollywood female film stars, giving the illusion of sculptural concreteness and influencing contemporary beauty trends. Zachary Baqué (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès) evaluated how entertainment in the documentary Films of Merit (Lorentz, 1935) became a key strategy in the making of film propaganda; entertaining their audience has always been a central aim of documentary filmmakers.

13 Panel 9 focused on classic and contemporary Hollywood musicals. Dominique Sipière (Université Paris Nanterre) sought to determine the nature of the spectator’s satisfaction when watching a musical, especially the relationship between the outside world and the various diegetic systems offered by these fictions; focusing on a backstage corpus, he identified the different levels of diegesis possible, from curtain rise to dream ballet, and its effect on narrative suspension. Fatima Chinita (Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa) proposed to re-consider the cinematic entertainment in Baz Luhrmann’s postmodern musical film Moulin Rouge! (2001), notably through the Benjaminian concept of “aura.” She showed how the film defied the traditional conventions of the musical film while reinforcing to the extreme the hyperbolic entertainment value of spectacle. Fanny Beuré (Université Paris Diderot) presented the audience surveys conveyed by Hollywood studios on a sample of musicals in the 1940s and 1950s; through a study of the comments, Beuré detailed the ingredients praised by audience an entertainment film, such as comedy, energy and variety; she also

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underlined the thematic specificity of classic musical films—in which entertainment is tied to family and patriotic values—and proved that the audience’s ability to maintain a critical distance from the messages didn’t prevent them from thoroughly enjoying it. Finally, Yola Le Caïnec (Université de Rennes 2) studied how La La Land (2016) constructs a new science of entertainment that reflects the double economic and patrimonial logic of American cinema; she particularly questioned how the reproducibility of entertainment makes it possible to rationalize it, though at the risk of impoverishment.

14 During the tenth panel, the “incredibly Strange Culture” was studied by Alessandra Chiarini (Università di Bologna); a trend which was considered as a complex universe of meaning able to accompany many underground tendencies from the fifties to today, e.g., music bands like The Cramps have incorporated their parents subculture into a punk attitude. Lucio Spaziante (Università di Bologna) illustrated the role and function of cinema and television in spreading and contributing to defining and constructing the identities of historic pop celebrities, in particular, the Beatles. Penny Starfield (Université de Caen Normandie) discussed Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull History Lesson (1976); she proposed to examine the way film fictionalizes and transforms, by distortion, historical fact. Céline Murillo (Université Paris 13) explored Glen O'Brien's TV Party (2005), and No Wave films such as Underground USA (Eric Mitchell, 1980) and The Foreigners (Amos Poe, 1978). She tried to decipher the key component of entertainment for performers, spectatorships' involvement, and political contestation in a corpus of films and TV shows made in downtown New York in the late seventies and the eighties.

15 In Panel 11, Elizabeth Mullen (Université de Bretagne Occidentale) tackled the rise in zombie-based entertainment across the media spectrum (film, television, comics, video games, web series, fan-based media, or programs like The Walking Dead [AMC, 2010]) and the aesthetic elements as well as the cultural contexts in which they are framed. Isabelle Labrouillère (Ecole Supérieure d’Audio Visuel) pointed out the entropic universe in David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars (2014) where representation invades the scene through the multiplication of screens, mirrors and duplicates, bringing about the fall of idealized models.

16 Panel 12 focused on contemporary British cinema. Jean-François Baillon (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) studied Mike Leigh’s films High Hopes (1988) and Secrets and Lies (1996) to argue that Leigh’s critical discourse on class is wrongly accused of excessive theatricality; what is often mistaken for caricature is actually the result of a reflexivity process in which the upper classes make a spectacle of themselves in order to deny the emptiness and boredom of their own lives. Isabelle Le Corff (Université de Bretagne Occidentale) studied Chris Morris’ We Are Four Lions (2010) to show to what extent it belongs to an artistic movement deeply rooted in the British culture of nonsense; like Monty Python’s earlier film productions, it transgresses boundaries while negotiating the distance between fiction and fact, politics and spectacle.

17 Panel 13 focused on TV entertainment, both in the form of fiction and non-fiction. Gender studies infused Anaïs Le Fèvre-Berthelot (Université de Rennes 2) and Marianne Kac-Vergne (Université de Picardie Jules Verne)’s papers. Le Fèvre-Berthelot pointed out how the musical TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW, 2015-) echoes a renewed interest in musical forms on American TV, but also departs from the existing models by deconstructing the codes of musical theater and romantic comedy. She showed how

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this incorporates a critical and feminist twist, as the show constantly negotiates a response to mainstream gender representations, often exposing the contradictions faced by young women. In her presentation on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (Fox, 2008-2009), Kac-Vergne examined why the show turned away from Schwarzenegger’s performance of hypermasculinity to resort to female combatants whose female bodily performance—notably combat—are the main source of entertainment in the show, in the context of postfeminism and the rise of “girl power.” Finally, Anna Bisogno (Università degli Studi Roma 3) presented the Italian TV show Portobello (Rai 2, 1977-1983, 1987) and explained how this type of TV entertainment—as well as the introduction of color—has been a major break in the Italian Public Service Broadcaster.

18 The 23rd SERCIA conference embraced the complex subject of entertainment through a wide range of objects and methodologies. The investigation of the question of entertainment called for the need to examine, whenever possible, the key concept of spectatorship and the way film genres cater for a specific spectator type. Some corpuses appeared specifically rich entertainment-wise: for example, musicals, action films and series, as well as filmmakers such as Woody Allen and Wes Anderson who drew a lot of attention. However, the conference highlighted that entertainment was also to be found in a broad spectrum of works, from early silent films to contemporary TV news. It also helped to deepen our understanding of what entertainment is by underlining its economic, psychological and sociological dimensions. Entertainment remains, thus, more relevant than ever in our research studies of cinema and television productions.

INDEX

Keywords: entertainment, Cinema, series, TV, media, internet, film, musicals, jazz, action, star, fans, Hollywood, fiction, documentary, information, spectatorship, animation, culture Subjects: Film, TV, Video

AUTHORS

FANNY BEURÉ PhD in Film Studies Université Paris Diderot, CERILAC [email protected]

NAJOUA HANACHI-GRÉGOIRE Senior Lecturer IMT-Mines Albi, Laboratoire Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes (CAS), EA 801 [email protected]

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Ariel's Corner

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud and Philippe Birgy (dir.) Music, dance

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To the Lighthouse (1927): a choreographic re-elaboration

Jean-Rémi Lapaire and Hélène Duval

1 To the Lighthouse is rightfully considered to be Virginia Woolf’s most accomplished work of fiction. The present stage adaptation was initially conceived and performed at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France, under the choreographic guidance of Hélène Duval (Département danse, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada). During the Spring Semester of 2017, some forty graduate students from the English, General Linguistics and Performing Arts departments were involved in writing a “minimalist script” and collecting movement material for the choreography. The workshops were held at the Arts Centre (Maison des Arts, Domaine Universitaire, Pessac). Participants reflected in pairs before engaging in activities with the rest of the group. Diaries were kept, and a film was made that documents the dynamics of the creative process (in French).1

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Figure 1

Working on the script

Figure 2

Discussing options

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Figure 3

Selecting movement material

Figure 4

Reflecting on gesture form

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Figure 5

Experimenting with short gesture sequences

Figure 6

Giving choreographic instruction (Hélène Duval)

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Figure 7

Putting the choreographic pieces together Groups perform gestural characterizations of Mr Ramsay, Lilly Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay

2 Undergraduate students from the Fine Arts Department were invited to sketch the participants as they sat or engaged in movement exercises. One of them, Emma Kradaoui, produced a remarkable collection of drawings that students later printed into their diaries.

Figure 8

“A sketch of the present”: Emma Kradaoui at work

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Figure 9

Drawings by Emma Kradaoui

3 In May 2017, eleven students volunteered to prepare a “portable” version of the piece, to be performed at the TILLIT festival in Vercelli (Teatro in Lingua, Lingua in Teatro, dir. Pr. Marco Pustianaz, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italia). The group travelled to Italy as an amateur company (Choreographers of Speech) with funding from the academic council for innovation (Université Bordeaux Montaigne). Three drama students – Fabienne Paris, Cyril Teillier, and Louise Bernard – were among the performers. They agreed to adapt Hélène Duval’s choreographic work to the stage and did a remarkable job. The following pages explore the dynamics and aesthetics of their transposition, with special reference to the TILLIT script and performance on 31 May 2017.

Short public presentation2

4 Choreographers of speech are delighted to present a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927). Virginia Woolf was only 13 when her mother died. For many years, she was “obsessed” by the loss. Then, one day, in London, as she was walking across Tavistock Square, she felt the urge to write a piece of fiction inspired by her own childhood experience. This, she felt, was the only way she could trace her mother’s “invisible presence” in “the cathedral space” of remembrance, and be at peace with herself.3

5 To the Lighthouse was written by Woolf in just a few weeks. The general structure of the novel has been entirely preserved, with its three main divisions: “The Window”, “Time Passes”, “The Lighthouse.” But the plot had to be reduced to bare essentials4 and the original set of characters cut down to three protagonists: Mr Ramsay (a figure inspired by Virginia Woolf’s own father, Leslie Stephen), Mrs Ramsay (a fictional character

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reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s mother, Julia Prinsep), and the painter Lily Briscoe (a keen observer of the “patterns” of life, like Virginia Woolf herself). The young James and Cam Ramsay, as well as two older village women, also make fleeting appearances.

6 The performers are graduate students who are currently enrolled in two distinct masters degree programs5: 8 are English language majors (including a visiting American student from the University of California), 3 are drama specialists6 (who have co-directed this piece, initially choreographed by Hélène Duval from the University of Quebec in Montreal)7.

Adapted plot summary

7 In the first part (The Window), the Ramsays are shown spending their summer holidays on the Isle of Skye. Their house has a commanding view of the bay, with a lighthouse in the distance, beaming at night. The children would love to sail and deliver parcels to the lighthouse keeper. Mrs Ramsay is sensitive and supportive but, much to James’s annoyance, Mr Ramsay coldly predicts that the sea will be too rough for the excursion, and is proven right. The war breaks out (1914-18).

8 The house is “left” and “a profusion of darkness” insinuates itself into the “deserted” rooms (Part 2 - Time Passes). The reader incidentally learns that Mrs Ramsay and two of her children have died. Some ten years elapse before the Ramsays decide to come back (Part 3 – The Lighthouse). One of their former guests, Lily Briscoe, a painter, is with them. As she struggles to complete a painting that she had left unfinished, she “dips” her brush “into the past.” She realizes that Mrs Ramsay’s quiet but intense presence “brought everyone together.” “Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!” she cries out in despair “as if to abuse her for having gone.” Meanwhile, Mr Ramsay and his children finally make it to the Lighthouse. As Lily applies the final brushstroke to her canvas, her own mental journey comes to an end and she ceases to be tormented. A sense of peace and completeness is restored at last.

To the Lighthouse (1927): a minimalist script for a short stage performance8

9 The novel uses a “small canvas” (Sampson 1970: 877), which both facilitates and legitimises compression. Major syntactic adjustments nonetheless had to be made.

Figure 10

Breaking the waves: sea and lighthouse movements

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Prologue9

10 V. WOOLF: I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else…10 One day, as I was walking, I made up To the Lighthouse. Why then? I have no notion.

11 VOICE: The book was written very quickly. One thing burst into another, like bubbles blown out of a pipe.

12 VOICE: Ideas… voices… scenes… came from a world far away.11

I The Window

13 VOICE: La finestra.

14 VOICE : La fenêtre.

15 VOICE : Das Fenster.

16 JAMES: Mother, can we go to the Lighthouse?

17 CAM: We have parcels for the Lighthouse keeper and his son!

18 VOICE: Stockings.

19 VOICE: A pile of old magazines.

20 VOICE: Some tobacco.

21 JAMES & CAM: Please!12

22 …

23 MRS RAMSAY: Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow!13

24 MR RAMSAY: But it won’t be fine!14

25 …

26 VOICE: The same dreary waves breaking week after week.

27 VOICE: The windows covered with spray!

28 JAMES: The Lighthouse keeper and his crippled son!

29 CAM: They must be bored to death! Sitting all day with nothing to do!

30 VOICE: Shut up for a whole month!

31 VOICE: How would you like that?15

32 …

33 LILY: To be silent, to be alone.16

34 MRS RAMSAY: But what have I done with my life?17

35 ….

36 JAMES: Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow!18

37 MR RAMSAY: But it won’t be fine.19

38 CHORUS: No going to the Lighthouse, James!20

II Time passes

39 VOICE: Il tempo passa.

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40 VOICE: Le temps passe.

41 VOICE: La maison vide.

42 …

43 VOICE: One by one the lamps were all extinguished.21

44 VOICE: Darkness flooding in.

45 VOICE: Darkness in the drawing room.

46 VOICE: Darkness in the staircase.

47 VOICE: Darkness in the bedrooms.

48 VOICE: Darkness.22

49 …

50 VOICE: Nothing moved, nothing stirred.

51 VOICE: The house was left; the house was deserted.

52 VOICE: Only the lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment.23

53 …

54 MRS BAST (CLEANER 1): They never come.

55 MRS MCNAB (CLEANER 2): They never send.

56 MRS BAST (CLEANER 1): They never write.24

57 MRS MCNAB (CLEANER 2): The war!

58 VOICE: Der Krieg. C’est la guerre!

59 …

60 VOICE: Night.

61 VOICE: Night succeeds to night.

62 VOICE: The nights now are full of wind and destruction!25

63 VOICE: Mrs Ramsay died in London, last night!26

64 VOICE: But what after all is one night?27

III The Lighthouse

65 VOICE: Il faro…

66 VOICE: Le phare.

67 …

68 VOICE: The peace has come again.

69 VOICE: The house is full again.28

70 VOICE: Back after all these years!

71 VOICE: And Mrs Ramsay dead!29

72 VOICE: What does it mean then, what can it all mean?30

73 …

74 [First focus on Lily Briscoe] [Comments by the Mrs Ramsays]

75 VOICE: Lily never finished that picture.31

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76 VOICE: She will paint it now!

77 …

78 [First focus on Mr Ramsay] [Comments by the Lily Briscoes]

79 VOICE: Mr Ramsay!

80 VOICE: That man never gave!

81 VOICE: That man took!32

82 …

83 [First focus on Mrs Ramsay] [Comments by Mr Ramsays]

84 VOICE: Mrs Ramsay!

85 VOICE: She brought everyone together!33

86 VOICE: Giving, giving, she had died!34

87 …

88 [Second focus on Lilly Briscoe] [Comments by the Mrs Ramsays]

89 VOICE: Can’t paint. Can’t write!35

90 VOICE: Where to begin?36

91 VOICE: Life, stand still!37

92 …

93 [Second focus on Mr Ramsay] [Comments by the Lily Briscoes]

94 VOICE: Now he wants to go to the Lighthouse!

95 VOICE: He’s sitting in the middle of the boat, with the children.38

96 VOICE: The sails flap over their heads.39

97 [Second focus on Mrs Ramsay] [Comments by the Mr Ramsays]

98 VOICE: Mrs Ramsay on the beach. Do you remember?40

99 VOICE: Mrs Ramsay in all her beauty.41

100 VOICE: Mrs Ramsay resolved everything into simplicity.42

101 …

102 CHORUS: Mrs Ramsay has faded and gone.43 Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!44

103 …

104 MR RAMSAY: There’s the Lighthouse! We’re almost there!45

105 LILY: They have landed! It is done. It is finished!46

106 LILY: I’ve had my vision.47

An insight into the re-elaboration process

107 Just as Virginia Woolf’s starting point was “a walk around Tavistock Square,”48 so the students’ first assignment was to go out for a stroll in a public park or around the main campus site. Hélène Duval insisted on everyone opening themselves up to their immediate surroundings and collecting sensory material that might later be reused as “composition material,” with conscious attention paid to light, colour, sound, smell, texture, motion, temperature, as well as mood changes and fleeting impressions.

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During the walking and sensing exercises, participants were encouraged to revisit some past situation, some special “moment” that had “come unexpectedly to the surface,” some personal “discovery” about the world or about themselves that they wanted to “go back to, turn over and explore,” to use Virginia Woolf’s own terms and artistic method.49 Hélène Duval was particularly insistent on performers gaining an embodied awareness of the creative process underlying artistic composition. In her oral and written instructions, she stressed the importance of emulating Virginia Woolf’s perception- and memory-based stance, by physically re-enacting the “walks,” by navigating their inner and outer worlds, by allowing thoughts, feelings, recollections, “moments of being” or “non being”50 to emerge. Provisions were made for students who could not engage in the outdoors exercises.

108 The vast performance space at the University Arts Centre,51 where the workshops were held, symbolically stood for the “cathedral space”52 of personal memories. The students worked in pairs, then in small groups, to develop kinetic evocations of their sensations, building on Laban’s notions of “effort” and “shape” (Laban 1943). Virginia Woolf, it may be recalled, had an extraordinary capacity for registering and recalling intimate perceptions (Fusini 2006). As dynamic tableaux and short gesture phrases were composed, the pictorial element in Woolf’s narrative strategy (Lacourarie 2002), the “transparency” an “opacity” phenomena in her writings (Lanone 2013) were experienced and physically enacted.

109 Once this essential preparatory work was completed, students were instructed to develop a kinetic characterization53 of Lily Briscoe, Mr Ramsay or Mrs Ramsay. Simple movement sequences, evocative of the core personality and interactional features of the three characters, were designed and rehearsed in small groups. Thus, firm steps, angular shapes, brisk hand gestures, and sneering facial expressions were spontaneously produced by the participants to mark the tyranny and insensitive rationality of Mr Ramsay, leaving no room for the positive expression of his “stoicism” (Bradbrook 1978: 282-85). As expected, Lily Briscoe’s art and observational skills dominated in the various kinetic characterizations that were developed. Brush strokes provided a metonymic starting point to evoke Lily’s identity as a painter, but were later stylised, so that the somewhat naïve iconicity of the hand movements was ultimately overcome. Meanwhile, the quiet, unassuming, Mrs Ramsay was perceived as perpetually “giving,” walking in circles, floating meditatively about.

110 All the coordinated movements were performed in groups of 4 to 6: “the Lily Briscoes,” “the Mr Ramsays,” and “the Mrs Ramsays.” The gesture sequences were highlighted in the opening and closing moments of the performance, but occurred over and again throughout the piece, in the form of “a kinetic leitmotiv.” On occasion, interactional frames between the Mr Ramsays, the Lily Briscoes and the Mrs Ramsays were set up, with groups following each other, observing each other, or even mixing with each other.

111 The gesture sequences were originally performed in complete silence, so as to orchestrate a Woolfian “return” to bodily perceptions and motions (Smith-Di Biasio, 2010). The continuous flow of movement, on the stage, was resonant with the “stream of consciousness” technique used in the novel, “the unbroken flow of thought and awareness in the waking mind”, the mingling of “sense perceptions with conscious and half conscious thoughts, memories, feelings, and random associations” (Abrams 1970: 164-5).

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112 Verbal statements borrowed from the original inner monologues of Lily Briscoe and the Ramsays were later added for the TILLIT piece: while one group would silently engage in the kinetic characterisation of a protagonist (e.g. Mrs Ramsay), a second group would watch close by and a third group would make some terse comment (e.g. “Giving, giving she had died”; “Mrs Ramsay resolved everything into simplicity”). The focus would then shift to another protagonist. The changing “perspective” on characters and events, which is an essential feature of To Lighthouse (Scifoni 2007), thus received tangible expression on the stage (Figures 19-21).

113 Woolf’s short poetic interlude on the passage of time (Part 2 – Time Passes), which has often been the target of severe criticism, proved to be “successful in its context” (Sampson 1970: 876). Students and instructors found the war, the “darkness” and the empty house particularly inspiring, while Max Richter’s music gave a moving intensity to the scene. The score was initially composed for Wayne McGregor’s choreography (“Woolf Works” 2015) and released by Deutsche Grammophon in January 2017. In the TILLIT version, the performers stood in circles. Each embodied a silent piece of stone or furniture, gathering dust. Then came Mrs Bast and Mrs McNab, moaning and cleaning. The circular structures gradually started to corrode and dissolve, as silence, humidity and darkness invaded the empty house (Figure 12). Finally, the war broke out and brought about commotion and disarray (Figures 13-15).

114 Throughout the performance, the presence of the waves could be felt, endlessly lashing against the shore. At key moments, the entire group stood in a line and engaged in a collective swell: bobbing up and down, rising and falling with the tide, resisting then yielding to the pull of gravity, upstage and downstage. Some occasionally stopped and turned, to evoke the verticality and rotating beam of the Lighthouse (Figure 10). Until everything froze: Lily had had her vision.

Figure 11

Part 1 – “But what have I done with my life?”

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Figure 12

Part 2 – “Darkness. Nothing stirred, nothing moved.”

Figure 13

Part 2 – “The War!”

Figure 14

Part 2 – “Der Krieg!”

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Figure 15

Part 2 – “C’est la guerre!”

Figure 16

Part 2 – “But what after all is one night?”

Figure 17

Part 3 – “The peace has come again. The house is full again”

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Figure 18

Part 3 –Mr Ramsay / Lily Briscoe / Mrs Ramsay

Figure 19

Part 3 –“Lily never ﬁnished that picture.”

Figure 20

Part 3 – “That man never gave. That man took!”

Figure 21

Part 3 – “Mrs Ramsay resolved everything into simplicity.”

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Figure 22

Part 3 – “Mrs Ramsay has faded and gone”

Figure 23

Choreographers of Speech

115 Figure 24

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Final curtain

Abrams, Meyer Howard. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1971 Bradbrook, Frank. Virginia Woolf: the theory and practice of fiction. In The Pelican Guide to English Literature. Volume 7. The Modern Age. Third Edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978, 275-287. Fusini, Nadia. Possiedo la mia anima: il segreto di Virginia Woolf. Milano: Edizioni Mondadori, 2006. Ebook ISBN 9788852016530 Laban, Rudolph. Modern Educational Dance. 2nd edition revised by L. Ullmann. London : MacDonald and Evans. [1948], 1963. Lacourarie, Chantal. Virginia Woolf : l’écriture en tableau. Paris : l’Harmattan, 2002. Lanone, Catherine. Virginia Woolf ou l’opacité de la transparence, Études britanniques contemporaines, 44 | 2013 URL : http://ebc.revues.org/463 Richter, Max. Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works. Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves. Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg. Robert Ziegler conductor. Deutsche Grammophon Records, 2017. Sampson, George. The concise history of English Literature. Third Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1972] 1979. Scifoni, Alessandra. Gita al Faro di Virginia Woolf. Progetto Babele Rivista Letteraria, 2007. Consulté le 10.01.2017. URL: http://www.progettobabele.it/rubriche/showrac.php? ID=2403 Smith-Di Biasio, Anne-Marie. Virginia Woolf, la hantise de l'écriture. Indigo, 2010. Wayne McGregor. Woolf Works. Choreography, direction, and designs. Premiered at the Royal Opera House, London, 11 May 2015. URL: http://waynemcgregor.com/ productions/woolf-works/ Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Frogmore, St Albans: Triad / Panther Books, [1927] 1977. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. Triad / Grafton Books, [1978] 1986.

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NOTES

1. Transmettre, apprécier, créer. Hélène Duval à Bordeaux, 2017. Directed by Jean-Rémi Lapaire and produced by EA CLIMAS / WebTV Bordeaux Montaigne. 2. English version, adapted from the original Italian presentation, delivered on stage by Jean- Rémi Lapaire. 3. “(When the book was written) I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.” (Moments of Being, “A Sketch of the Past”, 1978 [1939-40]: 94). 4. 540 words now compress 69709 words of complex narrative; 12 minutes of coordinated physical action now express the extraordinarily rich and fragmented inner world of the dramatis personae. 5. Université Bordeaux Montaigne. M1 Etudes Anglophones. M1 Arts du Spectacle. 6. Performers : Louise Bernard, Jane Cussac, Paul-Franck Dencausse, Julie Faugère, Maeva Gonfond, Solène Hauquelin, Alexia Hervoix, Marion Lesca, Mara Palmieri, Fabienne Paris, Cyril Teillier (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, University of California). 7. Hélène Duval is a professor of dance pedagogy at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal), Canada. While visiting Université Bordeaux Montaigne, she choreographed To the Lighthouse to music composed by Max Richter and released in 2017 (Three Worlds : music from Woolf’s works). Over 30 students were involved in the project. 8. Teatro in Lingua, Lingua in Teatro (TILLIT 2017 - UPO), Teatro Civico, Vercelli, Piemonte, Italy, 31 May-1 June 2017. The final script was written by Jean-Rémi Lapaire, after “creative rewriting sessions” with the drama students. 9. The opening lines of the performance are based on “A sketch of the Past” (1939-40)– a 90 page “memoir” edited by Jane Schulkind and published in Moments of Being (1978). Childhood memories are prominent, one leading to another and revealing “moments of “being” or “non being” (81). In the process of “fixing one’s mind” on “colour-and-sound memories” (77), while grasping “some real thing behind appearances” (84), the “memoir writer” experiences both “difficulty” (75) and ecstasy: “Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we– I mean all human beings–are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art” (84). 10. “A Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being (1978: 84). 11. Adapted from “A Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being (1978: 94): “Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked. What blew the bubbles? Why then? I have no notion. But I wrote the book very quickly.” 12. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 1, Chapter 1, 10. “(…) if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed whatever she could find lying about, not only wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would like to be shut up for a whole month at a time (…) to see the same dreary waves

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breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp (…) How would you like that?” 13. Opening line, To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 1, Chapter 1, 9. 14. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 1, Chapter 1, 9. 15. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 1, Chapter 1, 10. 16. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 1, Chapter 11, 60. 17. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 1, Chapter 17, 78. 18. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 1, Chapter 3, 19. 19. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 1, Chapter 1, 9. 20. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 1, Chapter 2, 19. 21. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 2, Chapter 1, 117. 22. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 2, Chapter 2, 117: “So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms (…) Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase.” 23. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 2, Chapter 9, 128. 24. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 2, Chapter 9, 128: “It was beyond the strength of one woman, she said. They never sent. They never wrote. There were things up there rotting in the drawers - it was a shame to leave them so, she said. The place was gone to rack and ruin.” 25. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 2, Chapter 3, 119. 26. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 2, Chapter 3, 120: “[Mr Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]” 27. Opening line, To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 2, Chapter 3, 119. 28. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 2, Chapter 10, 133. “Then indeed peace had come. Messages of peace breathed from the sea to the shore (…) Lily Briscoe stirring in her sleep clutched at her blankets as a faller clutches at the turf on the edge of a cliff. Here eyes opened wide. Here she was again, she thought, sitting bolt upright in bed. Awake.” 29. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 1, 137. “For really, what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing – nothing that she could express at all.” 30. Opening line, To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 1, 137. 31. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 1, 139. 32. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 1, 140: “That man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave; that man took.” 33. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 3, 150: “(S)he brought together this and that and then this.” 34. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 1, 140. 35. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 3, 149. 36. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 3, 147. 37. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 3, 151. 38. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 4, 152. 39. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 4, 151. 40. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 3, 149:”And then, she reflected, there was that scene on the beach. One must remember that.” 41. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 7, 168. 42. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 3, 150. 43. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 5, 162.

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44. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 11, 186. 45. To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 12, 188. 46. Adapted from To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 13, 191-92: “‘He has landed,’ she said aloud. ‘It is finished.’ (…) It was done; it was finished.” 47. Closing line of To the Lighthouse ([1927] 1977), Part 3, Chapter 13, 192. 48. “A Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being (1978: 95). Virginia Woolf moved to 52 Tavistock Square in 1924 and lived there until 1939. 49. “A Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being (1978: 83). 50. “A Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being (1978: 81). 51. Maison des Arts, Domaine Universitaire, Pessac, France. 52. “A Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being (1978: 94). 53. Fr. « Trouver ce qui pourrait être la signature gestuelle du personnage. »

INDEX

Subjects: Dance Mots-clés: chorégraphie, croquis, réécriture creative, transposition, Woolf Keywords: choreography, sketching, creative rewriting, transposition, Woolf

AUTHORS

JEAN-RÉMI LAPAIRE EA CLIMAS / Université Bordeaux Montaigne [email protected]

HÉLÈNE DUVAL Professeur Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada [email protected]

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Présentation publique du livre de Manon Labry, Pussy Riot Grrrls (Éditions iXe, collection Racine, 2017). Librairie Floury, Toulouse, Jeudi 15 juin 2017

Philippe Birgy

1 Philippe Birgy Nous sommes ici pour parler avec Manon Labry de son livre qui vient d’être publié aux Éditions iXe, et dont le titre est Pussy riot grrrls : émeutières. C’est un titre qui combine deux mouvements, pussy riot et riot grrrl, suggérant qu’ils sont liés, et pas seulement consécutifs, avec d’une part beaucoup de bruit de guitares et, d’autre part, une action médiatique, aboutissant à une forme militante commune. Ces deux groupes d’émeutières se retrouvent dans la parole, l’écriture et la performance. Ayant précisé cela, je vais brièvement présenter l’auteur ainsi que son livre afin de pouvoir au plus vite engager un dialogue avec Manon Labry et susciter un échange avec son auditoire. Cette circulation de la parole est au cœur de l’ouvrage, et c’est la motivation première des femmes dont elle raconte l’histoire.

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2 Manon a réalisé une thèse sur le cas de la sous-culture punk américaine. Il y a donc un pan universitaire de son travail qui alimente ses écritures plus récentes. Elle a cependant perçu les limites de cet exercice universitaire en ce sens que l’activité de documentation et d’analyse des sources qu’une thèse suppose reste disciplinaire. Même si son travail se trouvait à cheval sur plusieurs disciplines, il s’agissait toujours de décrire les objets d’étude, ce qui les fixe, comme c’est également le cas dans la presse généraliste ou spécialisée, un tel souci du détail pouvant finir par embaumer l’objet qu’on se proposait d’évoquer. À force d’en décrire minutieusement tous les traits, on risque de le figer dans une figure statique. Or, ce qui intéressait Manon Labry dans le Riot Grrrl, c’était davantage son aspect fluide, ouvert, indéterminé et queer, sa dynamique et sa vigueur qui ne se laissaient pas facilement naturaliser ou fossiliser. Il faut ajouter à cette présentation sommaire que Manon Labry mène aussi des activités musicales, ce qui signifie qu’elle a un autre accès pratique à la question de la scène ; nous ne parlons pas ici seulement du simple fait d’être sur scène mais aussi de ce que signifie l’engagement dans une scène.

3 Quant au livre, Manon Labry dit qu’il y a une manière de traiter le Riot Grrrl comme un style musical, une sorte de phénomène datable et identifiable. Tant du côté de la presse généraliste que des magazines spécialisés, du mainstream que de l’underground, on en a limité la portée en le restreignant à une période et un type de public. Or Manon soutient plutôt l’idée d’une persistance du mouvement, avec des ramifications et des mutations imprévisibles. Elle inscrit les ladyfests dans cette efflorescence. Il ne s’agit pas d’une lignée directe, mais d’une expansion dans toutes les directions, du proche au lointain : il y a les pussy riot, il y a l’electroclash, il y a même une scène techno. La première question serait donc : comment perçois-tu le développement de cet ensemble sur le long terme ? Ce qui implique que tu répondes aussi à cette autre question qui peut paraitre simple au premier abord : qu’est-ce que le riot grrrl ? Une partie de

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l’auditoire pensera peut-être qu’il est inutile de revenir sur des définitions aussi élémentaires alors que, précisément, il y a peut-être eu trop de simplifications.

4 Manon Labry Pour que les choses soient plus claires en ce qui concerne les deux livres – parce que je suis obligée de mentionner qu’il y en a eu un premier sur le sujet –, ce moment de description où l’on a observé un phénomène, un moment d’apparition précis… J’ai dû en passer par là aussi. J’ai dû tomber moi-même dans le piège de la datation quand j’ai écrit Riot Grrrls : Chronique d'une révolution punk féministe. Mais je savais déjà qu’il y aurait un autre livre, et celui dont on parle aujourd’hui porte davantage sur la suite des événements et sur ces ramifications que tu as mentionnées. Il est plus académique.

5 Pour en revenir à l’origine, le riot grrrl est un mouvement qui est né aux Etats-Unis au tout début des années quatre-vingt-dix, on pourrait même dire à la toute fin des années quatre-vingt. C’est un mouvement culturel, politique, féministe, mené par de jeunes femmes qui ont voulu faire entendre leurs voix dans un milieu où il n’était pas très facile de se faire entendre. Si le punk au départ se voulait égalitaire, horizontal, s’il y a eu des femmes dès le début dans le punk, très vite pendant les années quatre-vingt tout se re-codifie et se re-hiérarchise et le punk devient essentiellement mâle. Et des femmes vivent, chacune dans leur coin, ce sentiment d’aliénation, à la fois dans ces scènes (punk) et dans la société de manière plus générale. Je n’ai pas dit où tout cela se passait : à Olympia, dans l’état du Washington, à une heure de Seattle, une zone qui à cette époque est très dynamique puisque ce sont les débuts du grunge ; et il y a aussi un vivier à Olympia car c’est une ville universitaire. Ces femmes finissent donc par s’identifier les unes les autres, grâce à des fanzines, tels que Jigsaw, qu’on pourrait qualifier de proto-girlzine. C’est le premier qui va permettre à ces femmes de correspondre, de voir qui a envie de faire des choses. Rapidement, elles vont collaborer, fonder d’autres fanzines, monter des groupes et, de fil en aiguille, elles vont aussi concentrer leurs activités sur un autre pôle, à Washington (sur la côte Est, à ne pas confondre avec l’État du Washington), autre site musical très vivant à cette époque-là.

6 Ce sont deux scènes qui ont un certain nombre d’affinités, qui sont très attachées au Do It Yourself, anticapitalistes, qui ne s’attachent pas à des critères commerciaux, qui font le choix de l’innovation et de l’engagement. Et il y aura beaucoup de déplacements entre ces deux villes de la part des protagonistes de ce premier courant. Elles vont donc se concentrer en même temps sur ces deux pôles. Elles commencent à monter un collectif Riot à Washington en 1991, à organiser des réunions hebdomadaires non mixtes, à créer de nouveaux fanzines. En quelques mois, cela va avoir un effet boule de neige, facilité par les média mainstream, même si par la suite les relations vont devenir un peu conflictuelles. C’est sans doute un peu bref, il s’agit juste de brosser un premier tableau, mais on va peut-être revenir sur les détails plus tard.

7 Philippe Birgy On peut évoquer les quelque soucis éditoriaux que tu as connus pour ce livre-ci. Après tout, c’est un problème assez commun que ces délais de publication. Pussy Riot Grrl : émeutières est resté en souffrance pendant un temps assez long, et il aurait normalement dû être publié avant Riot Grrrls : Chronique d'une révolution punk féministe. On y trouve deux tons très différents. Dans le livre publié aux éditions de la Découverte, sorti l’année dernière, tu adoptes la position d’une participante qui essaie de transmettre toute la vitalité, l’enthousiasme, l’exaltation, l’énergie qu’a pu conférer le mouvement à celles qui s’y sont engagées. Et pour ce faire tu te prêtes à un exercice qui

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consiste à raconter l’histoire en la fictionnalisant, en empruntant des anecdotes aux protagonistes du mouvement dont tu parles. L’ensemble de leur activité est un acte d’expression qui passe par une parole publique, par la diffusion de fanzines, et ces femmes-là font leur histoire ; elles n’hésitent pas à l’inventer, à exagérer le nombre de magazines existants, et finalement cette fiction donne envie à d’autres femmes de les rejoindre, de rentrer dans le circuit. Il y a donc tout l’héritage du punk, du DIY, que l’on traduit par « bricolage » mais qui a véritablement une autre implication : si quelque chose n’existe pas et que cela manque, il faut le faire soi-même. Et si c’est fait, alors cela rentre dans l’histoire ou la chronique. Cela devient un événement qui aura des conséquences.

8 Dans tes deux livres, on distingue un phénomène fréquent : d’une part il y a cette émergence d’une scène au même moment, à des endroits différents, sans qu’il y ait de rapport direct (une série de groupes qui définiraient une même orientation esthétique, par exemple), donc un effet d’efflorescence ou plutôt un effet champignon. Et puis cela part dans tous les sens, tu utilises le terme de marcotage, d’une plante qui donne naissance à une série de rejets. Il ne s’agit pas de branches qui partiraient d’un même tronc qui en serait l’origine unique et en déterminerait les qualités communes. On a là quelque chose qui ressemble davantage à ces rhizomes qui courent sous la terre et qui vont faire qu’une repousse sortira vingt mètres plus loin. Tu utilises aussi la métaphore de la contagion : tout cela se répand comme un virus.

9 Manon Labry L’une des idées qui est vraiment au cœur de la démarche des riot grrrls, c’est ce slogan « revolution girls style now », la révolution à la manière des filles maintenant. Je vous lis un extrait d’un de leurs manifestes : « nous jugeons que la fantasmagorie de la révolution permanente macho porte-flingue n’est qu’un mensonge irréalisable destiné à nous laisser rêver plutôt qu’à incarner notre rêve. Et donc nous cherchons la révolution dans nos propres vies, chaque jour, en imaginant et en créant des alternatives à la manière merdique chrétienne et capitaliste de faire les choses ».

10 Il y a donc cette idée que la révolution qu’elles proposent n’est pas du tout l’idée qu’on s’en fait normalement. C’est au contraire une succession et une addition de révolutions individuelles. Elles passent par la prise de parole, par la création, par le DIY et c’est encore plus révolutionnaire pour les femmes qu’on incite davantage à se taire. L’idée cruciale, c’est que ce n’est pas un courant qui va tenter de fixer ses contours, mais il va les flouter pour essayer de le rendre accessible et transformable. La question de la prise de parole est cruciale et elle va entraîner ce dont tu parlais. Le mouvement va être repris par des gens qui vont se reconnaitre comme ses héritiers et se le réapproprier dans d’autres contextes, sous d’autres formes qui se réinventent constamment comme les ladyfest, les girls rock camps, les pussy riot. Tout cela participe de l’idée de contagion lente, d’une révolution patiente, qui s’inscrit dans la durée et qui signifie que, par la création, la personne qui s’est investie a fait sa propre révolution.

11 Philippe Birgy Il y a un prix à payer pour cela, qui est qu’il faut accepter que cela disparaisse temporairement, que ces petits foyers restent sporadiques. Et dans ta conclusion tu parles d’Hakim Bey et de sa notion de Zones Temporaires d’Autonomie. Ces vingt minutes de présentations peuvent peut-être donner une première idée de ce que le texte de Manon Labry peut receler de réflexions stimulantes. Je pense qu’on s’était entendu sur l’idée de faire circuler la parole et que le moment est propice.

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12 Question du public On a vu le cas des États-Unis ; mais pour la France, qu’en est-t-il de ce mouvement ?

13 Manon Labry Pendant les premiers moments d’émergence de cette culture, la première moitié des années quatre-vingt-dix, le mouvement a concerné très majoritairement les États-Unis, le Canada, et un peu l’Angleterre. En France, il y a le problème des archives qui se pose. À ma connaissance, il n’y avait pas en France des collectifs aussi organisés qu’aux États- Unis. Ce n’est qu’avec internet que cette culture est devenue accessible, à la fin des années quatre-vingt-dix, à toute une population qui était totalement passée à côté, qui était trop jeune aussi pour avoir connu ses précédents. Mais c’est déjà la fin de ce premier moment d’émergence. En France, ce qui a très bien fonctionné, ce sont les ladyfests. En 2000, toujours à l’initiative des personnes qui avaient fait partie des premiers moments, a été organisé un festival ladyfest destiné à promouvoir une culture féministe DIY, un festival où il y avait à la fois des performances, des ateliers, des groupes de discussion. C’était donc un événement qui proposait des moments de distraction, mais aussi des moments sérieux d’élaboration d’une espèce de théorie de la pratique, de mise en commun des savoirs et des savoir-faire. Et tout cela a été créé avec l’idée que ça devait circuler. Les organisatrices ont clairement annoncé : vous qui êtes là, prenez l’idée et faites-en quelque chose dans vos communautés, dans les lieux ou vous résidez. Et c’est ce qui s’est passé. En France, il y en a eu une dizaine. Des collectifs informels qui partageaient cette culture riot grrrl se sont montés. Le concept a assez bien pris car deux ou trois cents ladyfests se sont tenus en une quinzaine d’années, entre 2000 et 2015, dans le monde entier.

14 Philippe Birgy Tu as mentionné la question de la documentation qui est très importante. Tu es spécialiste du riot grrl et je ne me risquerais pas sur ce terrain, mais je peux citer l’exemple du punk. Depuis un certain nombre d’années des démarches sont entreprises pour retrouver les traces des initiatives punk. C’est un autre aspect de l’histoire culturelle populaire : d’un côté on la fait, mais de l’autre il est important de la mémorialiser, sans quoi on aboutit à une sorte de chronique héroïque très centralisée où le punk serait l’initiative d’une poignée de jeunes gens à Londres en 1976. Or il y avait au même moment, sur la côte Ouest des États-Unis, des groupes qui adoptaient sensiblement la même approche dès 1975. On recense les groupes, en France, en Espagne et au Portugal, qui portaient le même projet, et cela change évidemment la perception d’ensemble que l’on a du mouvement. Il est donc capital de collationner toutes ces informations, de retrouver la trace des enregistrements autoproduits, des fanzines éphémères qui assuraient la liaison entre les membres de telle ou telle scène régionale ou locale.

15 Manon Labry C’est quelque chose qui m’avait beaucoup marqué au sujet des riot grrls. Il y avait finalement peu de matériaux disponibles au moment où j’ai commencé à travailler sur le sujet. Et au fur et à mesure que les publications sortaient sur ce sujet, je m’apercevais que ça se figeait. L’idée était donc de trouver des éléments qui n’avaient pas été mentionnés, de les raconter d’une autre manière, ou de proposer une approche très subjective, de dire : voilà ce que je pense, au-delà d’un strict récit des faits. C’était une manière de dire « voilà ce que moi j’en ai tiré », en contournant ces fixations. J’ai eu la chance que se crée le fonds d’archives de New York, à NYU, un fonds rassemblé par une

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archiviste qui avait elle-même participé aux premiers ladyfests, et à laquelle une vingtaine de personnes avaient donné l’ensemble de leurs archives. Cela inclut un petit flyer griffonné taché par le café, des objets anodins qui permettent d’écrire une histoire différente, et qui n’est pas figée.

16 Question du public Est-ce que les pussy riot ont changé quelque chose dans le mouvement ?

17 Manon Labry Les pussy riot sont un cas très particulier, une réinvention totale, le contexte n’est pas le même. Cela n’a pas la même portée politique, et ce n’est pas le même usage des médias non plus. Ce sont des gens qui se sont autant inspirés des riot grrls que de l’artivisme moscovite. Avant elles, il n’y a pas vraiment d’occurrence de liens avec les milieux de l’art contemporain. Quand elles ont été emprisonnées, un nombre énorme de collectifs se sont formés dans le monde entier, souvent sous le nom « free pussy riot », des gens ont organisé des manifestations, des soirées de soutien pour récolter des fonds et cela redonné un souffle à des activités militantes car comme tu le disais, il faut accepter qu’il y ait des baisses de régime, que parfois il n’y ait plus rien, comme c’est le cas en ce moment, par exemple. Les pussy riot ont redonné une certaine vigueur au mouvement pendant une année.

18 Question du public Est-ce qu’on a des données sur la diffusion du mouvement dans le reste du monde ?

19 Manon Labry Il y a eu des collectifs riot grrl en Malaisie et au Japon. Il y a aussi eu beaucoup de ladyfest en Amérique du Sud. C’est sans doute ce qui a le mieux marché car il y avait l’idée que plus cela se diffuserait, plus le mouvement serait enrichi par de nouvelles influences, de nouvelles musiques.

20 Ce qui a également bien marché, ce sont les girls rock camps, en Asie, en Amérique du Sud. Je n’ai plus les détails en tête mais vous les trouverez dans le livre. Cela se passe sensiblement à la même époque que les ladyfests. Tout part de Portland, où une femme a l’idée de monter des sortes de colonies de vacances inspirées des ladyfests pour des jeunes filles de sept à dix-sept ans, avec l’objectif de les initier à jouer en groupe. Qu’elles soient musiciennes ou pas, cela n’avait pas d’importance. Il s’agissait non seulement d’apprendre à jouer d’un instrument et d’apprendre à jouer en groupe, mais de s’initier à la composition. L’idée était de travailler une chanson et de la jouer au terme de la colonie de vacances. Et dans le même temps, il y avait aussi des ateliers d’auto-défense, de culture féministe, tous adaptés à l’âge des participantes. Et ces camps ont eu un succès phénoménal, il y en a eu une cinquantaine aux États-Unis, mais aussi en France, en Angleterre, en Suède, en Autriche, en Islande, au Brésil et au Japon.

21 Question du public À part l’état des lieux, est-ce qu’on peut identifier des acquis, des choses qui ont fait bouger les lignes socialement ?

22 Manon Labry Il est difficile de répondre, puisque c’est un mouvement qui oscille sans cesse entre l’individu et le collectif, les effets réels sont individuels, on peut très difficilement le quantifier. Ce que l’on peut remarquer, ce sont des changements de comportements dans les milieux underground, des attitudes qui étaient tolérées il y a encore quinze ans ne le sont plus du tout.

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INDEX

Mots-clés : culture populaire, ladyfests, punk, performance, queer Thèmes : Music Keywords : popular culture, ladyfests, punk, performance, queer

AUTEURS

PHILIPPE BIRGY Professor à l’UT2J [email protected]

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Music and thrill(er)s: an interview with American novelist Peter Farris

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

1 American novelist Peter Farris was in the south west of France at the end of September to attend two local literary festivals devoted to thrillers and noirs and promote his second, much-acclaimed, novel Ghost in the Fields, translated into French by Anatole Pons and published this year at Gallmeister’s (http://www.gallmeister.fr/auteurs/ fiche/60/peter-farris). As a former musician, still deeply involved in music, he kindly and enthusiastically accepted to answer a few questions about the part played by this life-long passion of his in his writing.

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud Before you started writing ﬁction you were involved in a rock band for some time. Could you tell us briefly about the band and its main influences ? Do you still play music ? Peter Farris I was vocalist (aka I screamed my head off) in a band from Connecticut called CABLE for about six years. I was actually a big fan of the band before I joined them, as CABLE had been recording and performing since the mid 90's. I recorded 3 full length records with the band (Never Trust A Gemini, Pigs Never Fly, The Failed Convict), and played dozens of shows over that span. We had a variety of influences, from Black Sabbath and Black Flag to Laughing Hyenas, Willie Nelson and Kyuss.

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud What made you turn to writing ? Could you tell us when and how that decision was made ? Peter Farris It was a natural progression. I began writing lyrics and poetry, eventually attempting short fiction. My father was a novelist and he has always been an inspiration to me. Seemed inevitable I would fall in love with fiction writing. To pinpoint a particular moment or two, I believe I wanted to write novels when I discovered Flannery O'Connor and Larry Brown...paired with my experience during a bank robbery while working as a teller back in 2003. Those two writers and that experience planted the seed for my first novel Last Call for the Living.

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Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud You used some lyrics from a previous song as an epigraph for your ﬁrst novel; considering your music, do you consider this particular novel as some kind of « spin-off » ? Peter Farris I think perhaps not a spin-off as much as two pieces of art that shared this kind of creative synergy. Our final record The Failed Convict was a concept album about a man who breaks out of Brushy Mountain State Prison in Tennessee. Given my first novel Last Call for the Living dealt with hardened criminals and prison gangs, it felt intuitive to link them by way of those epigraphs.

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud How much of your music, or of music in general, seems to you to be woven into your writing ? Peter Farris Definitely quite a bit. I listen to music every waking second of the day, and particularly while I'm writing. I listen to everything, too...from dark jazz group Bohren & Der Club of Gore, death metal, country music and film scores to Jason Molina and Nick Cave. In fact, each novel has a soundtrack...in my head anyway. There are even subtle (and not so subtle references) to some favorite artists sprinkled throughout Last Call for the Living and The Devil Himself.

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud Would you say that there is some kind of logical connection between rock music―or music in general―and thrillers ? Peter Farris Absolutely. But I wouldn't limit the connection to rock music. A good thriller or noir should paint pictures in the head of the reader, and inspire certain attitudes and moods...just like a good metal song or dark ambient track.

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud If you were to go back to music as a main occupation one day, do you think that your approach to music would change because of your experience as a writer ? Peter Farris Great question ! During my time in CABLE, we made music that we wanted to hear. I think a musician or novelist (or filmmaker or painter, etc) should create art for themselves first and foremost. Follow your instincts and enjoy the process without regards to money, fame, ego or ambition. If it comes from an honest place―no matter your creative outlet―I guarantee people will respond to it.

INDEX

Subjects: Music Keywords: music, noir, soundtrack, thriller Mots-clés: musique, roman noir, soundtrack, thriller

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AUTHORS

NATHALIE VINCENT-ARNAUD Professeur Université Toulouse2-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Ariel's Corner

Sophie Maruejouls (dir.) Photography

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Another Walker Evans Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, 26 April-14 August, 2017

Daniel Huber

1 Walker Evans has been in vogue in France recently, and it is yet “another Walker Evans”1 visitors could discover at the exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou between 26 April and 14 August, 2017. The Walker Evans exhibition, curated by Clément Chéroux, Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is Evans’ first major retrospective in France and signals an innovative departure in the appreciation of his œuvre.2 The photographs on view represented the very best of his career: the 300 original prints came from the greatest public and private collections from all around the world such as the two giants from New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), which conserves his archives, and the Museum of Modern Art (the MoMA), as well as the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles among others. This is a great feat in itself, but the exhibition showed much more than his photographs: the title Walker Evans was literally to be understood to stand for his work in its broadest context. As will be argued below, this exhibition follows on naturally from and extends the exhibition that was presented at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles between 6 July-20 September 20153. Walker Evans will be shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art between 23 September 2017 and 4 February 2018.

2 Evans is a key figure of the history of 20th century American photography, both for his work and his thinking on the medium of photography. Reactions to his thinking and to his work imbue photographic practice and theory about the role of photography to this day. His work can be characterized as a visual quest for the essence of the identity of vernacular American culture, this everyday culture that is utilitarian in its productions, popular in its origins and amateur, domestic, home-made, in its practice and technique of execution (Chéroux 2017b: 9). It is possibly this desire to visually capture the identity of a culture, of a people, of a nation in constant change, this ultimately universal artistic subject, that makes his work appeal to later periods, our own in particular. His early career witnessed the Great Depression and its disastrous social and economic consequences in the 1930s: this forged his sensibility to adopt what came to be known as his “documentary style”, which he later deployed in his work for Fortune and other

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magazines, a significant body of work that was lesser known until recently4, especially until David Campany’s monograph in 2014 on his magazine work and the Arles exhibition in 2015, essentially built around Campany’s research. Concerning the concept of the “documentary style”, Evans said the following in his 1971 interview with Leslie Katz (Katz 1971: 87): “You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.”5 According to Mora (2007: 10), it is this definition of the “documentary style” in art that became his greatest legacy, beyond his images themselves: the various interactions between subjectivity, objectivity, neutrality, realistic illusion; the photographic object and what it reflects of the world photographed; what the notion of the “photographic document” means. These are all reflections that have preoccupied photographers and theorists, in one way or another, for the past decades up to the present.

3 There were a number of important features in the scenography of the exhibition that will undoubtedly mark the future presentation of his œuvre.6 What was a truly new departure in the organization of the material was a marked emphasis not only on his artistic output but also on what influenced him: more than one hundred original documents and objects on view revealed that he was an avid collector, of picture postcards of wooden churches and small-town main streets (especially those produced by the Detroit Publishing Company at the turn of the 20th century), film and advertising posters, enamel shop-signs, pages from tool catalogues, press and police photographs, and other graphic objects and printed ephemera that had some connection with the America he witnessed. Indeed, a postcard size version of a contemporary film poster for Love Before Breakfast (1936, directed by Walter Lang and starring Carole Lombard) was pasted next to Evans’ photograph (Figure 1) showing this poster on a hoarding separating the street from a row of houses in “Houses and Billboards in Atlanta” (1936). Similarly, he photographed “Main Street, from across railroad tracks, Morgan City, Louisiana, 1935” from the same vantage point as he found on a postcard in his collection but which considerably antedates the photograph. Anecdotes also report (Chéroux 2017b: 12) that in his later life he would often make away with the enamelled shop-sign that he had just photographed. There were also a couple of his oil paintings on view, of houses and aspects of main streets that Evans painted in the late 1950s (Figure 2). This concept of juxtaposing his collection and his production made for very fruitful associations between these items in his collection and his photographs in the neighbouring exhibition space. Indeed, the two rooms dedicated to his private collection were spaced so that related photographs were hung in a nearby room. It was one of the strong curatorial messages that in a way his photography could be regarded as the extension of his private collection and vice versa. This observation is identical in essence to what Evans said (Katz 1971: 85) when asked if there was any connection between what he collects and what he captures on film: “A great deal. It’s almost the same thing.”

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Figure 1

Houses and Billboards in Atlanta, 1936 Gelatin silver print, 16,5 x 23,2 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo : © 2016. Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence

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Figure 2

Anna Maria, Florida, October 1958 Oil on ﬁbreboard, 40 × 50,2 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Walker Evans Archive, 1994, 1994.261.178 © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image of the MMA

4 Another original element was the presentation of the material around the themes he photographed rather than in a chronological order. As Chéroux in his introductory essay (Chéroux 2017b: 9) explains, the whole conception of the show is based on the idea that the work of Walker Evans broke with the logic of a photograph being a synchronic entity coherent in space and time in the sense that his career demonstrated that he used his photographs to support his message, independently of their place and time of taking, and that this is in itself a truly vernacular approach to photography. The conception of the exhibition thus breaks with a chronological presentation and is constructed around themes, blending time and space (Chéroux 2017b: 9). This principle is justified and significantly more fruitful for the appreciation of his œuvre, and one can easily agree, because it resolves a number of problems related to Evans’ career. For instance, he had a preference to draw on his earlier work for his later projects, and museal presentations habitually hesitate where to place the individual image, at the time of its taking or at another time, while in fact this problem did not even pose itself for Evans. Chéroux (ibid.) cites as an example the portraits he took on the underground in New York: they were taken between 1938 and 1941 but they were not published at the time and they took their final form in 1966 when they were presented at the MoMA and published in Many Are Called. To the curator, the question is whether to present this series as the continuation of his interest in the human face, begun in Alabama in the 1930s, or as a fine example among his more conceptual work for Fortune in the 1960s:

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whereas of course the material combines the two aspects. While the exhibition did follow a rough chronology in the order of introduction of the individual themes, within each topic one could find photographs taken at various points in his career. This organization emphasized the persistence of many topics throughout his career that would have more easily been lost to the visitor in a purely chronological presentation of the material, and made effective comparison possible. This was a new departure for the appreciation of Evans’ work because one of the consequences of this curatorial position was that there was no specific mention in the accompanying texts in the exhibition space of specific book publications, such as his first and thoroughly influential volume American Photographs, presented at the MoMA in 1938 and published in the same year. Instead, a generous selection of images from this specific body of work from the 1930s were to be found in the various themes. The specific topics covered in the exhibition included his trip to Paris in the late 1920s, roadside shacks and store fronts, window displays and signs, portraits of anonymous passers-by, that is “ordinary”, people, signs of urban decay, the place of photographs in the home and in society, and so forth. These were all essential aspects of what he saw as “Americanness”, or the “American vernacular”.

5 A further feature of the presentation of the material was the conscious and frequent inclusion of his work as they had appeared in magazines, notably in Fortune between 1945 and 1965 and in Architectural Forum between 1958-62, among others. This has thus incidentally confirmed the success of the concept of the Arles exhibition in 20157 and the publication of Walker Evans The Magazine Work by David Campany in 2014. In connection with the magazine work, it was also a welcome gesture that the material included some original portfolios that had not been shown in their entirety in the Walker Evans, Anonymous exhibition in Arles: their inclusion here made sure no visitor could have the impression of seeing an identical showing of these photo-essays. Also, there was at least one portfolio spread on view at the Centre Pompidou that was not presented in Arles: Primitive Churches. Out-of-the-way vignettes of US religious life (in Architectural Forum, December 1961). An additional novelty of the presentation was the inclusion of multimedia material such as excerpts from a 1975 interview with Annie Mae Burroughs, and an interactive free app that contained extra content in connection with some twenty photographs of his.

Vernacular America as subject

6 The exhibition began with his time spent in Paris in 1926-27.8 He had studied French literature at Williams College, one of the most prestigious private universities in Liberal Arts, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, between 1922-23. He then took a job at the New York Public Library in 1924 where he immersed himself in the latest publications of modernism (Campany 2014: 10). He came to this “incandescent centre” of the arts that was Paris, in April 1926 to study the language and French literature and civilisation: he took out a pension at 5 rue de la Santé and took courses at the Sorbonne and at the Collège de France and tried his hand at translating Baudelaire’s prose poems (“La chambre double” and “À une heure du matin”9) and an excerpt, published with the title “Mad”, from Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars10 and avidly read French authors. In his long interview with Leslie Katz in 1971 (Katz 1971: 84, also quoted in Campany 2014: 39, and footnote 102), he talked about this influence: “...Flaubert’s esthetic is absolutely mine.

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Flaubert’s method I think I incorporated almost unconsciously, but anyway used it in two ways: his realism and naturalism both, and his objectivity of treatment; the non- appearance of the author, the non-subjectivity. (…) But spiritually, however, it is Baudelaire who is the influence on me. (…) Baudelaire influenced me and everybody else too...”. A collection of Evans’ early self-portraits and other photographs were shown here together with very interesting, rarely seen, objects such as his typewritten homework for his “cours de civilisation” dated 17 November 1926.

7 His stay in Paris made him familiar not only with a whole manner of literary trends and figures but with photography too, especially the possibilities explored by European modernist photography. The photographs he started producing at this early period and after his return to New York in 1928 conform to the aesthetics of what would come to be known as the “classical” modernism of New Vision as practised by Rodchenko and theorized by Moholy-Nagy: photo-booth self-portraits (in 1929) in the manner of the Surrealists fond of automatism in art production, extreme close-ups, low and high angle shots, misframing, double exposures and superimpositions and an overall graphic effect that had nothing to do with pictorialism. Many of these early, modernist images were published as series or photo-reports in various magazines, such as Creative Art or Hound and Horn.

8 It was from 1931 onwards that he started to reveal his interest in the utilitarian and domestic nature of popular culture. What made him move away from modernism in its classical form and discover the vernacular was two crucial encounters in his life. In 1929 Berenice Abbott showed him the photographs Eugène Atget took throughout his life in Paris. The juxtaposition of Atget’s photograph of the “Marchand d’abat-jours” (“Lampshade merchant”, Paris, 1899-1900) and Evans’ “Organ Grinder Street Musician” (New York, ca. 1929) brought out the connection between the two. Then in 1931 Lincoln Kirstein invited Evans to accompany him and to photograph Victorian architecture in New England.

9 One of his fascinations with the vernacular was small retailers’ window displays and store fronts in general. He was interested in multiple aspects of these displays: the typography of the signs (Figure 3) and the painting of the store fronts themselves, how the owner marked the prices, how the mannequins looked, the care taken to arrange the products in the window, by form, by colour, by positioning, how merchandise spilt over onto the pavement–anything that evoked in him the poetics of these sights, the poetics of this essentially vernacular expression. As Chéroux (2017b: 11) formulates it, he was interested in how the utilitarian was transformed into the visible, in other words, how the utilitarian was made visible through use. Some of these photographs were published as photo-essays, for instance, The Pitch Direct (in Fortune, October 1958) or Collector’s Items (written by Malcolm Bradbury, for Mademoiselle, 1963). He took more pleasure in the graphic quality of these store fronts than in what they actually served, namely commerce. In his text to The Pitch Direct, on view in its original spreads (also Campany 2014, Plates), he wrote about his position and aesthetic quest: “The stay-at- home tourist (…) should approach the street fair without any reasonable intention, such as that of actually buying something. […] one can get a lot of pleasure and rich and sensual enjoyment out of contemplating great bins of slightly defective tap wrenches, coils upon coils of glinty wire, and parabolas of hemp line honest and fragrant.” He also noticed how the aspect of these window displays changed from one state to the next, and even from one neighbourhood to another.

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Figure 3

Truck and Sign, 1928-1930 Gelatin silver print, 16,5 x 22,2 cm Private collection, San Francisco © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo : © Fernando Maquieira, Cromotex

10 Store fronts were not only to be found in cities like New York, indeed, businesses were everywhere along the roads that helped build America: garages, snack bars, service stations, fruit and vegetable stands populated the roadside across the country. The main street attracted his attention throughout his career and he amassed a huge collection of postcards of main streets all across the United States. This pivotal centre of an American town, as opposed to a European one, organized around places of authority, featured in many of his photo-essays for Fortune magazine: the rhythm of the main street store fronts, the telegraph poles and the cars parked at an angle represented visual poetry for him (Figure 4). The roadside shacks and small shops represented an inexhaustible source of visual material to document and discover, and are in a very concrete sense the signals of what makes a consumer society, the American society first of all.

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Figure 4

Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1931 Gelatin silver print, 18,73 x 16,19 cm Private collection, San Francisco © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo : © Fernando Maquieira, Cromotex

11 Evans’ father was an advertising agent, which can partly explain his attraction, or at least his early exposure, to posters, hoardings, their vivid colours and slogans. Another connection is evident when one considers that he translated excerpts from the novel Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars, who had also been fascinated by the beauty of multi- coloured posters. He photographed many hoardings, exterior advertising boards from the early 1930s onwards and included many in his work for the Farm Security Administration, when working on the effects of the Great Depression in the American South and Midwest. His aesthetic of documentation is visible in his manner of photographing these flat objects: sometimes from a frontal perspective and always in their context, an environment which is of course typically highly incoherent with the contents of the advertisement. Another set of more specific graphic elements Evans photographed were shop signs, boards, and signs in general, which he also photographed in their context and often close-up and frontally. As features of the truly vernacular aesthetic of the American cityscape, these signs were typically of the small trader, hand-painted and rudimentary. They nourished his visual appetite for logos, pictograms, and spelling mistakes, the latter of which he hunted down using colour Polaroids from 1973 until his death.

12 Besides specifically graphic aspects of his vernacular America, Evans was also interested in the people who inhabited this vernacular America. He took many photographs of people of humble background, share-croppers, manual workers, vagrants, and beggars. As he wrote in the opening sentences of his photo-essay People

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and Places in Trouble (in Fortune, March 1961, see Campany 2014, Plates), exhibited as original spreads from the magazine: “They speak with their eyes. People out of work are not given to talking much about the one thing on their minds.” He took these portraits with his subjects perfectly conscious of his presence, indeed, they often participated in the construction of the image. In early 1937 the FSA sends him to Forrest City, Arkansas, to photograph the aftermath of the Mississippi River flood: and he photographed the racially segregated camps, the queues for food and the despair of those who had lost the little they had in a region that had already been hard hit by the dust storms and the drought of the preceding years. This would become his last assignment for the FSA. His approach to making portraits is perhaps most emblematically illustrated by his portraits of Allie Mae Burroughs, of which 4 negatives of 20x25cm survive (Figure 5). They were taken in Alabama in August 1936, when Evans shared the life and hardship of three share-cropper families, the Burroughs, Tengle and Fields families, for several weeks together with James Agee who was writing a report that would eventually become Let us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Perhaps the rarest “exhibit” in the show was an interview recorded with Allie Mae Burroughs in 1975, and which was played in loop in one of the rooms, dedicated to her portraits as part of the portraits of the three Alabama families.

Figure 5

Allie Mae Burroughs, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, Hale Country, Alabama, 1936 Gelatin silver print, 22,3 x 17,3 cm Private collection © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo : © Private collection

13 While Modernism in the United States is usually associated with the age of speed and skyscrapers, and the gleaming chrome of tools, Evans was attentive to the other side of

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progress, the underside of consumer society and mass production: unrestrained consumption brought ever-growing waste, and throughout his career he screened this development of American society. The result is a large body of work on urban decay from across his œuvre: houses in ruin, faded interiors, crumpled metal. His photo-essays The Wreckers (in Fortune, May 1951), Color Accidents (in Architectural Forum, January 1958), and The Auto Junkyard (in Fortune, April 1962), among his very best on the subject, together with a selection of his images from the late 1920s and early 1930s, such as “Tin Relic” or “Stamped Tin Relic” (Figure 6), illustrated the point. The photo-essay The Auto Junkyard (1962) featured various Ford models at junk scrap piles, “the nether side of the automobile industry”, left to abandon, while normally one could glimpse these cars either in the streets or in advertisements. “Scenes like these are rich in tragicomic suggestions of the fall of man from his high ride”, he wrote. By the 1960s, his early interest in showing the downside of progress had culminated in photographs of junkyards, rubbish in gutters and dustbins: the logical final stages of accelerated consumption.

Figure 6

Stamped Tin Relic, 1929 Gelatin silver print, 23,3 x 28 cm Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, purchase in 1996 © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo : © Centre Pompidou / Dist. RMN-GP

14 This section on the downside of progress also included his images that he took in Louisiana in 1935 of a “Louisiana Plantation House” and a “Room in a Louisiana Plantation House” when working for the FSA documenting the effect of the Great Depression. (One of these images was included in American Photographs in 1938.) This choice can be argued to be out of tune with the overall coherence of this section since the focus in these images is less on the decay of the plantation building itself and the state of abandon it suggests but rather on the anachronistic, so one would like to believe, survival of the architectural vestiges of an exploitative economic system,

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slavery and plantation economy, whose mentality was painfully illustrated in the 1937 Mississippi floods and for decades to come. Alpers (2017: 54) points out a different reason why these images are important: the empty room in this image, just like in others with furniture as in “Negro Barbershop Interior, Atlanta” or the numerous interiors in share-croppers’ homes, almost suggests human presence without actually showing the inhabitants. Maybe such a group of photographs would have justified a section of their own showing empty, “vernacular” interiors that suggest human presence by their absence.

The vernacular as method

15 Walker Evans not only photographed elements of vernacular America, but in order to photograph his topics, he adopted non-artistic, that is vernacular, photographic approaches to his artistic projects (Chéroux 2017b: 12). When he set out to photograph the shining aspect of the chrome tool (Figure 7), as for his photo-essay Beauties of the Common Tool (in Fortune, July 1955), or when preparing the images for the MoMA exhibition catalogue on African Negro Art (spring 1935), he made himself a catalogue photographer. When he wanted to capture anonymous people passing by in the street, as in “Two Women Beneath a Store Awning” (August 1947), or those taken in Bridgeport in 1941, or Labor Anonymous (Detroit, 1946) or the images of people walking past taken in Chicago (used in two photo-essays: Edward Steichen’s In and Out of Focus. Corner of State and Randolph Streets, Chicago, 1949, and Chicago. A camera exploration of the huge, energetic urban sprawl of the midlands, 1947), he took on the role of the street photographer. He followed an automatism that consisted in setting up his camera facing a fence or at a street corner and wait for anonymous Americans to walk into the frame. These series are not portraits and were never intended so. Indeed, Chéroux (2017b: 13) points out that this fascination for automatisms in making photographs no doubt owes much to Flaubert’s aesthetic and the disappearance of the author. When he photographed elements of architecture, be it in the American South or New England, he became an architectural or postcard photographer for the project. But again, he chose not to choose a point of view, he systematically photographed from a frontal perspective, realist and impersonal. When he took the photographs of the site in Sarasota, Florida, where the Ringling Brothers Circus stored their old parade wagons, he proceeded like a forensic photographer at a crime scene photographing them from various angles, frontal, in profile, three-quarter view, in detail, in context.

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Figure 7

Tin Snips by J. Wiss and Sons Co., $ 1.85, 1955 Gelatin silver print, 25,2 x 20,3 cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo : © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

16 This method is also evident in his photographs that have a meta-photographic character: he took his fellow-professionals for subjects when he photographed the display of a photo studio, a postcard display stand, family photographs on the wall, the street photographer and even a “Resort photographer at Work” (1941), Figure 8. Chéroux (2017b: 12) advances the position that in fact his style is not only “documentary” because he borrows from other visual registers as well such as that of snapshots, or picture postcards or advertising that have no real documenting function; it is Evans that uses them so. Therefore, he argues, it would be more appropriate to speak about “vernacular style” in his case.

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Figure 8

Resort Photographer at Work, 1941 Gelatin silver print, later print, 15,9 x 22,4 cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo : © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

17 Whenever he photographed his topics, he systematically did it as an applied, that is professional, photographer would: he adopted a serial approach, which he then applied to his artistic and non-utilitarian projects. This aspect is evident in that impersonality, that repetition and lack of emphasis in his images. His fascination with means of transport, the railway carriage and the car in particular, did not only result in many images of the graphic splendour of these objects and their infrastructure, but also using, the train especially, as the viewpoint to photograph from: taking images looking through the window of a carriage in movement was an efficient method of satisfying his visual hunger for vernacular sights: store fronts, various signs, abandoned buildings and factories along the right-of-way. A combination of using a means of transport, the New York underground in this case, as the background and his method of taking pictures of those who came in range of the camera without much preparation had been applied in what would become known as his Rapid Transit: Eight Photographs series (taken between 1938-1941, published in The Cambridge Review, spring 1956) and The Unposed Portrait (in Harper’s Bazaar, March 1962). All these aspects of his approach were at the opposite of what was expected in the practice of an artist-photographer, and he appropriated, as Chéroux (2017b: 12) puts it, the codes of vernacular photography well before the conceptual artists came to the fore in the 1960s.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alpers, Svetlana. “L’œil d’Evans”. In Walker Evans. Exhibition catalogue. Editions du Centre Pompidou: Paris, 2017, pp. 51-55.

Bertrand, Anne. “ʻI’m a writer too.’ Les textes de Walker Evans”. In Walker Evans. Exhibition catalogue. Editions du Centre Pompidou: Paris, 2017, pp. 39-44.

Campany, David (ed.). Walker Evans, The Magazine Work. Steidl: Göttingen, 2014.

Chéroux, Clément (ed.). Walker Evans. Exhibition catalogue. Editions du Centre Pompidou: Paris, 2017a.

---. “L’art de l’oxymore. Le style vernaculaire de Walker Evans”. In Walker Evans. Exhibition catalogue. Editions du Centre Pompidou: Paris, 2017b, pp. 9-14.

Evans, Walker. Le Secret de la photographie. Entretien avec Leslie Katz. Text established by Anne Bertrand (translation by Bernard Hœpffner). Editions du Centre Pompidou: Paris, 2017.

Katz, Leslie. “Interview with Walker Evans”. Art in America, March-April 1971, pp. 82-89.

Exhibition catalogue

Chéroux, Clément (ed.). Walker Evans. Editions du Centre Pompidou: Paris, 2017.

The catalogue comes with Foreword by Serge Lasvignes, Preface by Bernard Blistène and essays by Clément Chéroux, Jerry L Thompson, Jeff L Rosenheim, Julie Jones, David Campany, Anne Bertrand, Didier Ottinger, Svetlana Alpers, and a long quote (also pasted in the final room in the exhibition space) from Walker Evans, as well as a biography, a (generous) selected bibliography and the list of all the exhibits.

ISBN 978-2-84426-765-8

NOTES

1. In reference to the first heading in Campany (2014: 9). 2. The exhibition was also supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art. 3. For a review of the exhibition in Arles in 2015, see https://miranda.revues.org/8411. 4. Bertrand (2017: 41) reports that Lesley Baier curated an exhibition in 1979 called “Walker Evans at Fortune”, at the Wellesley College Museum (Wellesley, Massachusetts). There was virtually no academic interest in this body of work until the 2010s. 5. This revealing long interview was translated by Bernard Hœpffner for the first time into French and edited on the occasion of the exhibition, as Walker Evans. Le Secret de la photographie. Entretien avec Leslie Katz. The French edition was established by Anne Bertrand for the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, in 2017. The volume also includes a critical introduction by Anne Bertrand and a facsimile of the original article in English, making it a particularly precious bilingual edition of sorts. Indeed, citations in English in the present review come from this facsimile of the original and is henceforth referenced independently as Katz (1971). I would like to thank Emeline Jouve, of Champollion University, Albi, for offering me a copy as a birthday present in advance of my trip to the museum!

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6. I have essentially followed the English texts pasted on the walls in the exhibition space, but these texts derive extensively from the introductory essay in French by Chéroux (Chéroux 2017b). 7. Walker Evans, Anonymous, curated by David Campany, Jean-Paul Deridder and Sam Stourdzé, and presented at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, 6 July-20 September 2015, was first presented in France at the Pôle Image, Haute-Normandie, in Rouen between 13 March and 9 May 2015 and had been shown during the Krakow Photomonth, 15 May-15 June 2014 and at the FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen between 27 June and 11 November 2014 and has kept travelling subsequently. 8. See Bertrand (2017: 39) for a detailed description of what can be known about his time in France and what literary impacts he could pick up in Paris. 9. Mentioned in a footnote to the French translation of Evans’ 1971 interview (Evans 2017: 38, fn 11). 10. It was published in Alhambra, vol.1, no. 3 (1929), pp. 34-35, 46. The same issue published a first photograph of his, “New York in the making”.

INDEX

Subjects: Photography Mots-clés: Walker Evans (1903-1975), style vernaculaire, exposition rétrospective, Centre Georges Pompidou Keywords: Walker Evans (1903-1975), vernacular style, retrospective exhibition, Centre Georges Pompidou

AUTHORS

DANIEL HUBER Maître de conférences Université de Toulouse [email protected]

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Daniel Huber

1 The 48th (2017) edition of Les Rencontres de photographie dʼArles1 offered, amongst its varied and rich programme of some 40 exhibitions, retrospectives of two influential American photographers: Joel Meyerowitz: Early Works as the monographic highlight of the main programme of the Rencontres, and Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970-1983 as an associated programme commissioned and organized by the private LUMA Foundation. It is probably fair to say that the two artists are very different in their artistic ambition, in their motivation for showing their early work today and their choice of subject matter: therefore, their art will be treated on their own terms in separate sections, without much explicit comparison between the œuvres. Nevertheless, there is a coherence to treating them together here: both exhibitions presented a selection of work from the early career of the artists; more importantly, their early careers overlapped during the tumultuous history of the United States in the 1970s; and both cite Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank as major influences on their work and thinking about photography. Finally, they both fall within the limits of the period Mora (2007) calls “the age of the last photographic heroes”, that is the years between 1958 and 1981, representing the arrival and critical acceptance of colour in art photography in the case of Meyerowitz, and, in the case of Leibovitz, building precisely on the personal documentary style of some of these last photographic heroes to apply it to the cultural and political affairs of the 1970s to create the iconic images that were published in Rolling Stone magazine and that would come to define the visual legacy of the period. Therefore, it is relevant to give an overview of their work as presented in Arles, showing how they started off on different tracks and how they reacted to a partially shared world, that of 1970s America.

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2 The two decades these two exhibitions cover between them are of crucial importance for photography, both in the history of American photography in particular and in the general history of the medium. This importance needs some discussion here. Luc Sante (2017, no page numbers) in his essay in the catalogue that accompanies the Leibovitz exhibition points out that in the early 1970s photography as a medium occupied an ambiguous position in the culture. It was still not seen as an artistic medium in its own right: the majority of museums stored their photographs as part of their print collection. Also, newspapers of the time that positioned themselves as more “literate and respectable” were text-intensive and did not accord much importance and space to photographs beyond inexpensive illustrative material, precisely in order to distinguish themselves from image-intensive tabloids and Harperʼs Bazaar or Life that were promoters of fashion photography and photojournalism, respectively. Mora (2007) identifies this period as that of the “last photographic heroes”, that is of the American photographers of the 1960s and 1970s. He defends the position (Mora 2007: 9-11) that the period between Robert Frankʼs The Americans (1958) and the emergence of the postmodernist use of photography by Cindy Sherman in the early 1980s was a period where photographers – and the people that help them emerge, including curators, art critics and art directors, editors, gallery owners and art collectors – were seeking an independent photographic language because they believed in the unlimited capacity of their medium, and which they did push to its limits precisely in this period. This quest for freeing the photographic language of any pictorial contamination accelerated, through various experimentations with the medium, in the 1960s, and photography ultimately reached its independence by 1975 (as far as the United States is concerned, and later elsewhere). Sante (2017) also remarks that this coming of age was also reflected in the fact that some photographers had reached pop-cultural fame at this time. Mora (2007: 10) wrote, ten years ago, that it was only then that art historians had begun to take full measure of how this period impacted our contemporary use and perception of the photographic image because it was only in the middle of first decade of the 21st century that we had the necessary distance from the period.

3 Moraʼs position is proved right by current curatorial practice. The Bibliothèque nationale de France hosted the exhibition 70' Le choc de la photographie américaine [70s, The Shock of American Photography] between October 2008 and January 20092, curated by Anne Biroleau. The Rencontres dʼArles, now showcasing Meyerowitz, presented photography by Stephen Shore in 2015 and Garry Winogrand in 2016 (in echo with contemporary photographer Ethan Levitas), while Winogrand also received a major retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2015, Aaron Siskind was presented in Montpellier in 20153, Tod Papageorge at the Galerie du Château dʼEau in Toulouse in 2016. They are all major figures of the decades discussed by Mora. This period saw photographers grappling with the heritage left behind by Walker Evans (also presented in 2015 in Arles4 and at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2017). Evansʼs lasting legacy was in particular his notion of the “photographic document”, and contemporary reactions to it gave way to fertile discussions, and more importantly, exhibitions and book publications, around objectivity, subjectivity, neutrality and realistic illusion, which thus nourished a period of tensions and artistic creativity in the particularly rich cultural, economical and political context of the United States in the 1970s.

4 In Moraʼs view, after this period, the photographic exploration of the real gave way to the exploration of the real as photographed, that is, of the image itself. Annie Leibovitz

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fits in precisely at the end of this period in the sense that her early work, very frequently on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine at this period, reacted in a consciously personal way to the economical, cultural and political climate of the 1970s and she produced work that ultimately created the defining and definitive images of those events. Her work, going far beyond a function of illustrative material in a magazine, is a powerful tribute and documentation of the intellectual and musical, but also political, scene of the troubled decade that was the 1970s in the United States. Her early work can be appreciated, in Humery’s words, as her “formative experiences of the counterculture of the 1970s, the ecstasy of youthful abandon, and the urgency of personal and political upheaval”. Leibovitz has contributed to freeing the photographic image from its illustrative function in magazine work so it can occupy a place of its own, being the narrative itself. When Cindy Sherman in an interview about her photographs with Vicky Goldberg of the New York Times in October 1983 (cited by Mora 2007: 171) declared she was an artist, not a photographer, what she meant is that for her, photography had become a readily available instrument for other artistic purposes rather than a tool for producing art as the aim of the exercise. This was only possible after establishing photography as an artistic medium on its own terms, and both Meyerowitz and Leibovitz contributed to this development.

5 As far as the aesthetics of this period of American photography is concerned, Mora (2007: 167-171) dedicated a whole chapter to the debate around colour photography at the end of the 1970s and, more specifically, how colour in art photography eventually imposed itself. While Mora concentrated on this period from the perspective of art photography, one should not forget that colour photography was not invented in the late 1970s. After various attempts and inventions, Kodachrome had been on the market since 1936 for colour slides and was used by some photographers of the Farm Security Administration between 1940-1941 (Mora 2007: 190, fn. 102). That said, early colour work of influential photographers has only recently been accorded due attention, a case in point being Capaʼs colour photographs that were shown at the Jeu de Paume in Tours in 2016 (and elsewhere on a world tour). By the 1970s colour had of course long been used in advertising and fashion photography5, and, for precisely this reason it was considered as the realm of the kitsch and popular culture (Westerbeck 2001: 13).

6 Most significantly for the history of art photography, Walker Evans had experimented in 1972-1973 with (colour) Polaroids using the mythical SX 70 camera, commercialized in its original run between 1972 and 1977 (he was actually offered the camera and an unlimited supply of film by the Polaroid company). Mora (2007: 54-55, 56-57), not quite accidentally it seems, included two photographs by Garry Winogrand, in colour, taken in New York in around 1961, a good decade before Walkerʼs Polaroids, in a period where artistic expression was not yet considered acceptable in colour. Walker himself had, however, published photo-essays in colour as early as 1945 for magazines. The landmark Color Photography exhibition was on view at the MoMA in 1950 and another in 1951 entitled Abstraction in Photography. It was John Szarkowski, Director of the Department of Photography at the MoMA, who ultimately organized the first monographic exhibition of colour photography in May 1976, of William Egglestonʼs works, a young photographer from Mississippi in the American South who was virtually unknown to the public at the time (although he was friends with his contemporaries, including Meyerowitz). The question for prestigious museums such as the MoMA whether or not to collect and exhibit colour photography had become acute by the late 1970s and it revolved around the dilemma: is colour in photography valuable merely

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because of the technical prowess or is it because it is an emerging artistic language? Until 1970 colour photographs could not be safely conserved without the dyes turning with time, so museums were, legitimately, worried about the stability of their colour photography collections. Indeed, even Evans himself was divided about colour in photography when he wrote in 1969 (cited in Campany 2014: 60, and fn. 176): “It is a consoling thought that in about fifty years both color transparencies and paper prints in color – all the color photography done in this period – will very probably have faded away.” This changed when Kodak introduced the dye-transfer process in 1970, which resulted in prints of much greater colour stability: this was the technique Eggleston used for his prints. The 1976 MoMA exhibition acted as a “catalyst”, in Moraʼs formulation (2007: 169), and it freed photographers, as well as the institutions and the general public, of their mistrust with respect to colour in art photography. The visual history and iconography of the American still image has thus finally caught up with the film industry, which had long adopted colour.

Joel Meyerowitz: Early Works

7 The exhibition Joel Meyerowitz: Early Works was presented at the Salle Henri-Comte (3 July-27 August, 2017), as one of the exhibitions on the theme “The Experience of Territory” and it was one of the highlights of this edition of the Rencontres, the third under the direction of Sam Stourdzé.6 One of Meyerowitzʼs photos, “Sarah, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1981” (chromogenic print of 1983) was chosen by Le Point and POLKA magazine for their special edition cover (freely available at the exhibition venues).7 According to Sam Stourdzéʼs curatorial intention (pasted on the wall in the exhibition space), the show continued the sequence on street photography the Rencontres had begun last year (he did not make it clear in his statement but he likely had Garry Winogrand/Ethan Levitas of last year in mind). However, another line of associations, that of presenting retrospectives of major figures of the decisive periods of American photography, can also be clearly discerned by regular visitors to Arles: the Meyerowitz show of this year thus follows on from the Walker Evans and Stephen Shore exhibitions in 20158, the latter being another major American colourist whose work and influence also began in the 1970s, as well as the Sid Grossman exhibition in 2016 besides the Garry Winogrand exhibition just mentioned. One can hardly wait for the revelation of the programme for next year already!

8 Joel Meyerowitz, born in 1938 in New York City, has not had an exhibition at the Rencontres for 40 years, since the summer of 1977 (Petitbon 2017a: 149), and just like back then, the photographer came to Arles to present his work.9 There were 59 photos on view10, with one of them, “Longnook Beach 1977”, being enlarged to a wallpaper11 on the back wall of the exhibition space. They were all, and this was unique, original gelatin silver prints from the 1960s and 1970s, never previously shown in France, from the artistʼs private collection and from the Howard Greenberg Gallery.12 Some of them must have been projected as a slide show in the 1977 exhibition, when Arles, among the first photography venues to recognize the importance of colour photography at the time (only one year after the MoMA show of 1976), chose to present Meyerowitzʼs work along with those by William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Frank Horvat, and William Christenberry.

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9 Sam Stourdzé, interviewed by Sarah Petitbon (2017a: 149)13 for Polka magazine, reveals a number of unique features of the show. First of all, since printing in colour was very expensive at the time, “it is a privilege and a rarity to be able to present his original prints”. According to him, one of the hallmarks of Meyerowitzʼs photographs is his extraordinary ability “to move from the bustle of the city to compositions that sometimes are close to still lifes”, and the hanging of the material was indeed consistent with this curatorial position. Finally, the selection was meant to illustrate “the resolutely cinematographic dimension of his clichés, in their subject as well as in their colours, very Technicolor”, which underlines his conspicuous “influence on a certain number of film-makers, such as Wim Wenders”. This acknowledges the huge impact his work has had on establishing colour photography as a legitimate and respectable means of artistic expression. Street photography as subject matter and colour photography as aesthetics were thus the major curatorial messages of the Meyerowitz exhibition. But the exhibition was in fact even richer and broader in scope: there was a generous selection of 27 images in black and white out of the 59 prints on view, that is nearly half of the material, as well as a selection of 11 portraits taken with a large format camera at Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

10 The curatorial statement, presented in French and English, described Meyerowitz as a photographer who brilliantly captured the urban energy and excitement around him. In the black and white photography of his early career, his interest in the city and its motion is evident, he becomes part of the urban bustle. His gaze is alert, his complex compositions (playing against balance and frame) seem to be hanging by a thread, he excels in capturing unexpected details, whose chance and accident (literally and figuratively) then become testimony to the creative vitality and poetics of the city. During the 1960s, he moves towards colour which he invested with nobility and so raised himself into the ranks of a master colourist beside William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. He shattered the colour palette, translating sensation into dazzling chromatic contrast. He also moved with ease between the frenzy of cities and more contemplative compositions and his work is intricately involved in the formation of the visual imaginary of the United States as we know it today.

11 Campany (2014: 132) considers Meyerowitz among the photographers of the 1970s who tried to grasp the “monstrous incongruity” of the American nation, its ideological contradictions and sombre rituals. In Campanyʼs opinion even his most represented subject, leisure activities and free time, became the source of disturbing humour. This humorous aspect was evident in a number of images hung in Arles, as in “Nun and young boy” (Rochester, N.Y., 1965) or the row of people sitting and waiting apparently for nothing in a Catskills resort in “Kutshers” (Catskills, 1963). Humour and an acute sense of urban incongruity is never far away, as in “Polka Dot Wall, Wyoming, 1964”, a glimpse of urban creativity where dots painted on a wall give the wall a playful twist, but, and this is the source of incongruity, a man wearing a cowboy hat walks past, looking back straight at the camera with a suspicious serious look on his face.14 Meyerowitz reacted to a country that was overconfident in itself and its power of seduction, and Campany (ibid.) draws a parallel between the work by Meyerowitz and that of Robert Frank, both searching for forms and motifs that expressed this uneasiness. The parallel with Frank is all the more appropriate because Meyerowitz received The Americans in late 1963 as a gift from his former employer, Harry Gordon

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(Westerbeck 2001: 6), and it was decisive in his turn to black and white photography for some time to come.

12 In his interview with Brigitte Hernandez (Le Point, special edition, 2017: 4-5) Meyerowitz talked openly about his early career, and specifically about three aspects that became decisive in his career and that also bear on the exhibition in Arles: how he left the world of advertising for photography, how he became friends, among others, with Garry Winogrand early on in 1962, and how he was impressed by seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson at work. Having come from the world of advertising as well as wanting to become a painter explain in great part why he naturally took colour in photography for granted from the outset. It was therefore self-evident for Westerbeck (2001: 17, 19, 20-21) to include, as the opening images for his volume on Meyerowitz, three early photographs taken in New York in 1962-1963, in colour (not shown in Arles): one stolen through a shop-window of a young woman doing the hair of her boyfriend, another of a newsagent framed by the small window of her booth, and the third a snapshot taken at a parade. What is striking in these shots is that colours are evidently not an accidental component of the images, they determine the overall ambiance and colour harmony of the scenes, and thus the emotional impact of the image. It is also significant that in his own commentary on these three images, Meyerowitz did not even evoke colour as an innovative or pertinent aspect of the shots: what mattered to him was how these images had helped him overcome his innate timidity. In the interview (Hernandez 2017), Meyerowitz recalled how his chance encounter with Winogrand at a street corner and then taking the underground for the Bronx together made him turn to black and white photography, represented also in the exhibition in Arles. In Westerbeck (2001: 22), he evoked a different factor that made him opt for black and white at the time: the ability to enlarge and study his own prints in detail which was not possible with colour slides. Such slides were, he remembered in the interview with Hernandez (2017), what shocked Eggleston, visiting New York in 1968, because they were...in colour! Talking about his early career as a street photographer, he pointed out (Hernandez 2017) the physicality and choreography of taking photographs when he talked about how he was astonished seeing Cartier-Bresson at work in Manhattan and how he came to understand his aesthetics by seeing him work: photography in this sense is about choreography, about moving about the subject, it is dance.15 Westerbeck (2001: 3) described a similar impact that seeing Robert Frank at work had on Meyerowitz. Meyerowitz eventually decided for colour photography as his aesthetic preference in 1972, when he also adopted the large format camera because it made a better descriptive precision possible (Mora 2007: 182).

13 The exhibition space, the single room of the Salle Henri-Comte, was used efficiently to divide the material in a number of sections, without the separations made explicit. It made for a streamlined presentation of the prints. The chronologically earliest set of 15 images were in black and white and dated from the period until 1971. They showed scenes of the experience of the daily life of ordinary post-war Americans, and these images fit squarely with Westerbeckʼs appreciation (2001: 10) in that they reflect the classic street photography aesthetic of capturing little everyday moments and thus they constitute a spiritual commentary on human behaviour. Some showed people at their workplace, such as in a fast food restaurant (“Atlanta, Georgia, 1971”), or in the humorous shot “Movie Theater Booth, Times Square, New York, 1963” (Figure 1) showing an employee sitting in her ticket office with the hygiaphone masking off her head (see Westerbeck 2001: 24-25). Others showed people at the visual absurdity of

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their various leisure activities: a family in public places such as at the airport patiently waiting, in the exhibition space of the space centre (in Cape Canaveral, Florida?), at a circus or cinema. Yet others took an instant shot of an encounter between visually/ iconographically incompatible people as in “Nun and young boy” (Rochester, N.Y., 1965) or scenes such the woman sitting alone, seemingly lost in her thoughts and looking down, in a space capsule. In connection with an image in Westerbeck (2001: 30-31), not shown in Arles, Meyerowitz remarks that one could put people together within the frame who do not know each other because it is the frame that creates the meaning: it is clear that what Meyerowitz is after is not documenting reality as such but a quest for a different level of meaning. Of course, some of these images might look trivial today, especially for Western viewers, but at the time of their taking they visualized aspects of the increasingly solidified consumer society in its less glamorous moments such as downtime spent waiting during more and more frequent travels by air. But it is precisely the fact that these scenes are still so familiar and that they are perceived without the visual shock of the time that is most disquieting to a contemporary viewer: what was seen as incongruous at the time has ceased to be surprising today. His particular fascination for leisure activities and the topic of free time was honoured with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970 that allowed him to travel across the United States photographing this subject (Westerbeck 2001: 126).

Figure 1

Joel Meyerowitz, Movie Theater Booth, Times Square, New York City, 1963. Courtesy of the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery. COPYRIGHT : Rencontres Arles

14 The next set were 13 images, 7 black and white, 6 in colour, taken in New York City and which represented the bustle of the city in all its aspects, all of them well-known iconic Meyerowitz shots. These images were arranged in a way that three large colour prints provided the separation between two groups, of four and six images, respectively. The three large prints are particularly significant because they illustrate the change in his aesthetic quest during this period: contrary to his earlier black and white photos, they

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are more encompassing images that translate the tension, complexity and density of city life, as analyses Westerbeck (2001: 10). This is his first original contribution to the street photography tradition because colour becomes the single element that justifies the taking of the picture in the first place. The opening large colour print in this section was the well-known street scene at the crossroads/corner of Broadway and 46th street (New York, 1976): this is a brilliant case of testing the aesthetic possibilities of a flat image in colour where all the informative elements, in the foreground as well as in the background, require equal attention, where there is no central subject, no perceptible depth of field, and where the colour palette plays an important role in making the image. This is a brilliant counterexample to the dictum of Cartier-Bressonʼs decisive moment because in this image there is, deliberately, no decisive moment (Westerbeck 2001: 96), only graphic quality. The second dividing picture was the equally well-known image “Camel Coat Couple in Street Stream” (New York City, 1975), which was, in his words (Westerbeck 2001: 94-95), a lucky coincidence with the play between the two pairs of camel-coloured coats and a pair of shadows cast on the right pair: the result is a masterly study in colour aesthetics in photography (Figure 2). This artistic stance illustrates well what Mora (2007: 10) described as the quest of photographers to push the photographic medium to its aesthetic limits. It was the closing image of this group that became a personal favourite: “Young Dancer” (New York, 1978), which derives from his series Empire State (1978-1980) that AT&T commanded in 1978, specifically in large 20x25 cm format, and in colour (Westerbeck 2001: 127). What is appealing in this image is how colour and form were treated in it: the young female dancer in green dress is set against the red wall framing a shop- window (of a fast food restaurant?) and her upright posture is parallel to the shape of the Empire State Building, visible at the end of the street in the background, and to the façade of the building across the street to the right.

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Figure 2

Joel Meyerowitz: Camel Coat Couple in Street Steam, New York City, 1975. Courtesy of the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery. COPYRIGHT : Rencontres Arles

15 The first of the two groups of images between the large colour prints just discussed, showed urban encounters such as ferocious dogs barking at another dog held on leash by a demonstrator against the Vietnam War (taken in 1968) or a person disguised in a gorilla costume walking down the street in 1965, all in black and white. The other group, of six black and white and colour images hung together, showed scenes from New York, pedestrians in the street, at the metro entry, a glimpse of his way of doing street photography in colour. They illustrated how colour can be used to express similar representations as in black and white. This set of images also included clear references to the car culture of the American society: Meyerowitz took photographs of people in cars decorated with the American flag for a national holiday, or the aspect of a car wash. Campany reports (2014: 132) that Meyerowitz recognized that in a certain regard, the car itself was a camera, its windscreen providing the frame for the scene happening outside. His first personal exhibition, at the MoMA in 1968, was called My European Trip: Photographs from a Moving Car, and it presented work during his trip to Europe, which is a telling counterpart to Frankʼs trip across the United States for The Americans ten years earlier (Westerbeck 2001: 8).

16 On the back wall of the exhibition space, with the wallpaper enlargement of “Longnook Beach” (1977), were hung 6 images in colour. To the left were three photographs of “Provincetown, Cape Cod 1976”, vernacular architecture reminiscent of Walker Evans, big cars and fences, but that were in fact accessories of the beach culture of summer holidays rather than downtown vestiges of earlier architecture. To the right were shots of bungalows that show up strongly as foreshadowing the drama and tension of the colour treatment practised later by Todd Hito. This was the part of the exhibition that in appearance showed scenes without much human presence, but of course every thing, from the built environment to the cars, and the artificial lights, implies human

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presence – consumerist human presence in particular. The famous “Red Interior, Provincetown, 1977” was hung here: the large format image of a big car with its doors open and red light flowing from inside, setting the contrast with ambient green hues coming from the street-lights, reflected on the white walls of a row of bungalows (Mora 2007: 182-183). The apparent absence of human figures in these six images was efficiently counterbalanced by the wallpaper photograph that did show people at the beach, although, quite fittingly, faceless and impersonal because back to the camera.

17 On the right wall, at the angle next to the wallpaper wall, were hung 11 portraits, all in colour, and taken in the Cape Cod area (mainly in Provincetown, Ma., or nearby, for instance, at Ballston Beach near Truro, Ma.). They also helped to counterbalance the absence of human figures on the back wall. It is from this group of portraits that the image of “Sarah, 1981” is taken. All the portraits were in the context of the beach, either at the seaside or with a bungalow in the background. Perhaps even more importantly, these photos were taken with his newly acquired large format camera, a Deardorff 8x10in, that he used for the first time at Cape Cod during the summer of 1976: it was precisely the descriptive capacity of this camera that made him discover portrait photography.16 Next to this set of portraits was one huge image in colour, “Land” (Provincetown, 1976), that represented the fast food and car culture on the East Coast summer resort site, with considerable humour resulting from the two cars parked in a way that forms a wedge, pointing towards the sign “food” under the name of the restaurant, “Land”. This restaurant also figured in another image in the last group of photographs, but that image had a different emphasis: it focused more on the typography of the neon sign and the aspect of the building, as shown in curious lighting conditions. This last group of images, 4 in black and white, 8 in colour (plus “Longnook Beach” in its original print hung a bit further away from the rest of the images), showed a miscellany of photographs from different periods of Meyerowitzʼs career. Some represented elements of the beach culture on both coasts and travel abroad (such as the famous shot in Greece from his travels in Europe between 1966-1967), while some focused more on the typography and graphic quality of hoardings and advertisements, and still others did not seem to have an apparent link within the set. This last section was the only part which could have used more coherence but that did not distract from the quality of the prints themselves.

18 The display of the material was fluid and coherent overall, maybe less so in the final panel, and was consistent with the curatorial intention of offering a representative selection of Meyerowitz’s work and his interest in everyday scenes, the visual absurdity and humour of leisure activities at a resort or at the beach, chance encounter between people, and most importantly: his unique and innovative use of colour to aesthetically convey atmosphere and emotions, his own feelings first of all, but that resonate with the viewer. It was also efficient and aesthetically pleasing to have the back wall decorated with the wallpaper print of one of his pictures that balanced off the images hung on that wall. As is usual at the Rencontres, all captions and descriptions were bilingual in French and English. Unfortunately, however, there was no catalogue published to accompany the exhibition. A short dedicated catalogue would have been welcome since this specific selection has not been shown before and the curatorial procedure was consistent and convincing. For those who will have missed it in Arles, the exhibition will travel to the Jimei x Arles international photo festival (Xiamen, China) 24 November 2017-3 January 2018.

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Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years 1970-1983

19 It was as a guest programme associated with the Rencontres d’Arles that the LUMA Foundation presented its first “Living Archive Program” show with the exhibition Annie Leibovitz, The Early Years, 1970-1983. Archive Project #1 (27 May–24 September 2017) in the Grande Halle at the Parc des Ateliers.17 It was in 2013 that Maja Hoffmann launched “LUMA Arles”, after creating LUMA Foundation in 2004 based in Switzerland, to plan, develop and manage the Parc des Ateliers. This site is a sixteen-acre (10-hectare) industrial area formerly occupied by SNCF railway workshops originally built in the middle of the 19th century, just off the historic town centre of Arles, and where the traditional and original exhibition spaces of the Rencontres d’Arles used to be located. The “Living Archive Program”, under the direction of Matthieu Humery, aims at integrating photography, design, literature, film, dance, and other media into a series of exhibitions and cultural programmes.18 As their first archive project, they acquired, last winter, the archives of Annie Leibovitz (about 800019 negatives, original exhibition prints, contact sheets and contact prints, books and even her contemporary technical notes.20). The present exhibition is intended as the first of a series of projects dedicated to the study and reinterpretation of her living archives. If this ambitious exhibition is any indication, the LUMA Foundation is serious about its business in the domain of mounting contemporary photography exhibitions in Arles outside the Rencontres and now it has become clear that their ambition is that Arles is no longer associated exclusively with the Rencontres. It is in this perspective that the visit to the Rencontres of Françoise Nyssen, Minister of Culture and founder of the local publishing house Actes Sud, was of significance.21

20 Petitbon (2017b) provides valuable insight into the acquisition of Leibovitz’s archives in its wider context of current trends of living photographers to find ways to the posterity and the long-term conservation of their work. Just like Elliot Erwitt (b. 1928)22, Leibovitz had been thinking about the future of her negative and print archive, as far as its conservation is concerned, but more importantly, as for its diffusion in the future. Michel Poivert (cited by Petitbon 2017b), who had gained his experience in the domain studying the archives of Gilles Caron, thinks that this kind of attention to their own archives is a sign that photography has reached maturity. There are of course other archive solutions such as in magazines or agencies, as in the case of the Condé Nast archive23 (for Vogue magazine and others) or the Magnum archives, but these only conserve the material that had been produced for them by a photographer and do not encompass the whole œuvre of the artist. Some photographers, or their heirs, have chosen to establish a private foundation, such as the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson or the Helmut Newton Foundation; others leave their legacy to the state, like André Kertész or Willy Ronis, or for their descendants to manage, like Robert Doisneau; yet others have chosen to sell their archives.

21 Leibovitz, after selling her archives, chose to do the selection and reinterpretation herself, now knowing that her legacy is protected. It was likely an exceptional occasion for her to do this retrospective work since her dense career did not make it frequently possible for her to look back on her work, confessed Robert Pledge, her friend and patron of the Contact Press Images agency. It is nevertheless true that Leibovitz has published two volumes of retrospective material, one covering the years 1970-1990

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(mainly professional rather than personal photos) and the other, those spent with Susan Sontag between 1990-2005 (exclusively personal photos). The retrospective in Arles combined personal and professional material, although the two types were never mixed on the walls and the personal sections, present in all rooms, were consistently captioned while most of the professional material was not captioned.

22 The period the exhibition covers, 1970-1983, is not accidental: the archive material highlights her work from the period she spent at Rolling Stone magazine and when she was based in San Francisco, California (even though many of the images were not taken there and she was a regular to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York). This was a period of tremendous social, political and cultural changes in the history of the United States, of which California was at the centre and where politics and popular culture had merged, providing fertile ground for an unusually wide range of subjects and events to be covered. The 1970s was a period, in Sante’s words (2017, no page number), where “[l]arge personalities...were now to be found not only in movies and music, but in sports, comedy, fashion, politics, literature, and even journalism”. Covering the events in words was the duty of journalists writing for Rolling Stone such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thomson, who established what would come to be known as New Journalism, grounded in exhaustive reporting. She took portraits and photographs of all the musicians, artists and writers, and politicians or political activists who came to prominence at the time: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Paul and Linda McCartney, Louis Armstrong, Joan Baez, Patti Smith, Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana, Mick Jagger, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Jane Fonda, Roman Polanski, Wim Wenders, Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Ken Kesey, Hugh Hefner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Muhammad Ali, Henry Kissinger, Senator George McGovern, to cite a few.24 This period was crucial in her life as a photographer: as she recalls in her introduction to the catalogue (2017, no page numbers), “[r]oad trips were at the heart of my work in the early years at Rolling Stone. It was a continuation of my childhood. Seeing things through a car window was something I had been doing all my life.” One of the recurrent visual features of her images in virtually all the rooms of the exhibition was indeed the photographs that came to form her “Driving series”, portraits of all manner of people taken in cars, and which form the cover of the catalogue.

23 The hanging of the material required a less conventional attitude from the visitor: it was not immediately self-evident how to try to take in around 3000 images, mentally, conceptually and emotionally. It was an unconventional, slightly unusual, and overwhelming, way of presenting this body of work, but it was in line with the curatorial intention of providing dynamic and innovative displays for the “Living Archive Program”. The visitor was aided by the numerous text panels in each room, which summarized, in French and English, the main themes of the years displayed on the adjacent wall space. While the presentation did work for the present reviewer and very likely for countless others, it would be easy to understand that some visitors did not get to appreciate the individual image drowned in the wall of surrounding images (see Figure 3). In this respect, the presentation of the material did significantly differ from presenting photography at the Rencontres.

24 The title of the exhibition makes it clear, though, that the visitor is invited to appreciate an archive of the early career of an influential photographer. The arrangement was essentially a literal reference to “archive”, displayed on walls rather

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than on shelves. The exhibition did resemble Leibovitz’s actual studio that can be seen at various places in the film Annie Leibovitz. Life Through a Lens (2006/2009). Petitbon cites (2017b: 34) Matthieu Humery in confirmation of this first impression of the visitor: the exhibition space was indeed conceived as a close reproduction of her current New York studio, specifically. In terms of more general iconographic references, the arrangement of the material was reminiscent of collages. Quite pertinently, the opening image in the catalogue of the exhibition (2017, no page number) shows Leibovitz’s black and white photograph, captioned “Hunter S. Thompson’s kitchen, Woody Creek, Colorado ”, which had photographs, Polaroids, invitation cards, newspaper clippings and other documents pinned on a wooden panel revealing the juxtaposition of intimate, personal moments and past or future public appearances of the journalist. This photograph is very much in tune with the overall atmosphere of this archive material.

Figure 3

25 The explicit references to “archiving” was also evident in the particular display of the material: the walls had smaller or larger groupings of photos that appeared to follow a thematic organisation, in approximate chronological order, without the themes explicitly labelled. Sometimes a group of prints was placed on top of each other and all pinned onto another image or to the cork wall panel, as if they were a group of images still waiting to be sorted out, or rather, for only one of them to be selected. As a consequence, some images were placed so high one could not actually get to see and appreciate them, as in the case of the prints of Nina Simone. A selection of images was supplied with a red drawing pin with a number on it, like objects at an excavation site: the number referred to the caption (typically the name of the person), which were all gathered together somewhere else on the wall. Unfortunately for the visitor with less than general cultural knowledge of the period and the personalities that inhabited it, it

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was much more difficult to find a particular pin (and the image it marked) corresponding to a caption: some pins were placed so high that it could hardly be made out or simply they could not be found because the pins did not appear to follow any numerical or chronological order on the wall – either you could recognize Carlos Santana, Alice Cooper or Tina Turner in the early 1970s or you could be hard pressed to find them. However, it was an original idea of organizing the material that the cork panelled walls hosting the images were also supplied with fibre cords as if at an archaeological site, dividing the wall surface into smaller parcels (see Figure 4). Furthermore, all the panels were under protective Plexiglas that was a couple of centimetres removed from the surface of the images, reminiscent of protection for some exquisite piece of Gallo-Roman mosaic wall: this technique did help the images breathe under protection and contributed to the archaeological presentation of the material. Humery in his Foreword to the catalogue (2017, no page number) does indeed talk about this purposeful return to her early work “as an archaeology of the self, where the passage of time enables a productive re-reading of ego and epoch alike”.

Figure 4

26 A further association with the archaeological aspect of the exhibition is precisely the absence of labels naming the themes or topics and captions to the individual image, as if calling on the viewer: “Do you recognize these people?”, “Do you know what these events meant at the time (and now)”? Sometimes it is a well-known particular event such as Nixon’s resignation on 9 August 1974 or the 1975 American tour of The Rolling Stones; sometimes scenes from the protests of the late 1960s and the 1970s where emphasis is more on the atmosphere than on the particular day of protest; sometimes it is shots at interviews or backstage. What stands out today as a landmark moment in politics, in the cultural scene or the musical arts in particular was an episode in the flow of the days of a photographer at the time: this explains why, at the time of their

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taking, they all had their specific importance, their significance can only be appreciated in hindsight. This might be a good conceptual reason for not indicating the themes in the display because at the time they had not yet become a topic: the identification of the topics is the work of the posterity, the exhibition shows the archaeological site at a preliminary stage of excavation. (This is also a call on researchers to delve deeper into this wealth of archive material.) Indeed, this general absence of captions together with the presence of the occasional drawing pin was the reflection of the archiving and selection process. In conclusion, many elements of the Leibovitz show consistently played with references to archaeology and the method of archiving.

27 The display was chronologically arranged in eight rooms after an entry room with biographical and historical material to better contextualize her artistic output. The chronological organization was first of all visitor-friendly, but it is also consistent with her earlier practice of presenting her work, as in the book A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 (Leibovitz 2006). The first room of images, “1970-1971”, presented her photographs from the time when she became a painting major at the San Francisco Art Institute, the influential art school where she had enrolled in September 1967. There are two important aspects of her career that need to be discussed in connection with the material presented in this first room: her enrolment at the San Francisco Art Institute and her involvement with Rolling Stone magazine.

28 Leibovitz, born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, bought her first camera in Japan in the summer of 1968 when on visit to her father’s airbase in the Philippines. She took a night class in photography the next semester and an intensive workshop the following summer at the Art Institute and then changed her major from painting to photography and moved over to the legendary Photography Department of San Francisco Art Institute. Here, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank were the heroes of contemporary photographic practice and the aesthetic and stylistic aim was to produce personal reportage shot with a handheld, 35mm roll film camera in black and white. This was a transformative experience because here, as Sante in his essay in the catalogue summarizes (2017, no page number), Cartier-Bresson gave students a purpose, Frank an aesthetic. While Cartier-Bresson “roamed the world as a photojournalist, shooting uncannily composed, nearly sculptural pictures amid scenes of chaos”, Frank “conveyed the troubled atmosphere of the [American] nation in subjective, emotional pictures that employed glare, grain, and off-kilter framing” in The Americans (1958). Students were taught to compose in the camera rather than aiming at later cropping, and they were taught to develop film and make the prints on their own. As a result of this accelerated training, Leibovitz had already mastered discipline when she approached Robert Kingsbury of Rolling Stone with her images of the anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco.

29 Sante (2017, no page number) recalls the early history and importance of Rolling Stone magazine. It was established in 1967 in San Francisco, with Jann Wenner as editor, Robert Kingsbury as art director and Baron Wolman as chief photographer (until late 1970). Their first issue came out on 9 November 1967 and soon it became more and more established as the voice of the youth culture after the Summer of Love of 1967, and one of the rare major magazines not to emerge from New York City. It combined the aura of San Francisco as the dream of teenage runaways with a seriousness unmatched in other contemporary music papers: this combination helped it establish

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itself as a news magazine for the counterculture. Sante notes that at this early period of the magazine, “the use of photographs was often little more than utilitarian, cramming together small pictures at the top of the page that illustrated multiple stories in the columns below”. This observation is much in line with what Mora (2007) said was the general attitude towards photographs at the period. In the 14 May 1970 issue, Leibovitz had her first image published in Rolling Stone magazine, in its “Dope Pages”: a shot featuring Allen Ginsberg. On 11 June 1970 she had garnered her first cover together with further, unrelated images inside, including another shot of Ginsberg. Other assignments followed soon, while she was still a student. The centrepiece of each issue was the “Rolling Stone interview”, which had, however, lacked a sense of intimacy and a physical presence because it could not be conveyed by the merely illustrative images at the time. This changed when Leibovitz shot her session with Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, interviewed by Ben Fong-Torres, for her first cover feature of the November 1970 issue. By December 1970 she went to New York to photograph John Lennon (and Yoko Ono) interviewed by Wenner, her career-making assignment: her name was printed on the masthead of the magazine under “Photography” and in 1973 she became chief photographer for the magazine. Altogether, Leibovitz would produce 142 covers for Rolling Stone in the thirteen years she spent with them. A selection of these earliest covers and features was displayed in a thematic unit in the first room, together with the early images and her shots at Kibbutz Amir in Israel in the autumn of 1969.

30 The second and third rooms, “1971-1972” and “1972-1973”, showed her early stories for Rolling Stone, for instance on the Soledad Prison on the occasion of the return home of the political activist David Harris (who had refused to be inducted into the armed forces during the Vietnam War), the night launch of Apollo 17 on 7 December 1972 with Tom Wolfe reporting and half a million people watching, or her documentation of the tour of the Allman Brothers. When she covered the 1972 presidential campaign (where Nixon ran for a second term and won), with Hunter S Thompson reporting, she was among the very few women journalists to cover the events. Rolling Stone covering the presidential campaign (with an explicit endorsement for the Democrat candidate McGovern) and the music scene especially in San Francisco was the natural expression of how contemporary protest music (Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, among others) fuelled the cultural revolution which was as much about politics as about lifestyle and music. She also covered other music festivals such as the country music festival Dripping Springs Reunion in Texas in the spring of 1972 that eventually contributed to establishing Austin, Texas, as an alternative centre of progressive country music besides Nashville. The 1970s, which Wolfe would later label the “Me Decade”, was the decade of the proliferation of spiritual guides and gurus for tens of thousands in a quest to develop their human potential. One of her first colour photographs on view is a scene with people sitting or lying in a random scattering on the ground of what looks like a giant flat open-air public space with a desert-like background, apparently well ahead of time, waiting for Guru Maharaj Ji of the Divine Light Mission.

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Figure 5

President Richard Nixon’s resignation, Washington, D.C., August 8, 1974 © Annie Leibovitz. From Annie Leibovitz The early years: 1970 - 1983. Archive Project #1

31 The dominant theme in the room dedicated to “1974” was Nixon’s resignation. It is, of course, a subject in its own right. Leibovitz and Thompson were sent to cover the events of 9 August 1974 but Thompson did not turn in his report before the September issue went to press, so it was her photographs in their own force that appeared in the 12 September 1974 issue of Rolling Stone, to cover Nixon’s resignation, with her name on the cover. Her photo-report included the two probably most iconic images of Nixon’s resignation in the collective imagination: Nixon’s face captured on a TV screen while he announced his decision, and the image Leibovitz took when his helicopter had taken off and officers were rolling up the carpet fighting the wind from the propellers (Figure 5). This room also featured some early colour photographs, the portrait of Norman Mailer, Roman Polanski and Tennessee Williams, as well as black and white portraits or photographs of other artists and musicians such as Elton John and Jerry Garcia.

32 The wall section leading over the rooms 5 to 8 was entirely devoted to the two-month long Tour of Americas of the Rolling Stones in 1975 that Leibovitz covered in literally every aspect, shot on “hundreds of rolls of film” as the text on the wall in the exhibition space revealed. There were 417 images on view25, and they possibly form “the summa of her photojournalism” according to Sante (2017) where she has “ridden participatory journalism to its edge”. She bore witness, in an excellent series of photo- reportage photographs, to the extremes of such an adventure: from stage shots to backstage scenes as well as images of the idle time between and before concerts or that of fans waiting for their stars (Figure 6). It really is a mix of images bursting with energy on stage, funny moments backstage and off stage, but also moments of isolation and reclusion to a solitary, somewhat melancholic state of mind such as on the image

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showing Mick Jagger sitting alone at the foot of his bed on the floor in his hotel room watching some sports programme. She wrote: “A rock and roll tour is unnatural. You’re moving through time and space too fast. The experience is extreme. There is the bigness of the performances and then the isolation and loneliness that follow. The band was like a group of lost boys, but their music saved them.”

Figure 6

Rolling Stones fans, Cleveland, Ohio, 1975 © Annie Leibovitz. From Annie Leibovitz The early years: 1970 - 1983. Archive Project #1

33 Rooms 5 to 8 covered periods after the 1975 tour of the Rolling Stones until 1983. The room dedicated to “1975-1976” showed three groups of important images. Leibovitz prepared a photo-report in the summer of 1975 of Arnold Schwarzengger in Pretoria, South Africa, documenting his preparation for defending his title of world champion and his announcing his retirement from bodybuilding. The next year, 1976, was election year, which she documented for Rolling Stone. For visitors interested in the history of photography and photographers, it was a special delight to appreciate her portraits of living photographers, a report where she both interviewed and photographed Helmut and June Newton, Guy Bourdin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, Ansel Adams and Jacques Henri Lartigue on assignment to Rolling Stone in 1976. The years “1977-1978” saw the inauguration of Jimmy Carter and the rise of punk music, illustrated most forcefully by the superb portrait of Patti Smith with metal barrels in flames behind her and other shots on stage. 1977 was also the year when Rolling Stone opened its office in New York. Leibovitz thus got to know Bea Feitler, who had been co-art director of Harper’s Bazaar and Ms. in New York, and who redesigned Rolling Stone besides preparing their 10-year anniversary issue with a 50-

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page portfolio of Leibovitz’s photographs in 1977: she would become a huge influence on Leibovitz in the coming years.

34 It is in the period “1979-1980” that a major aesthetic leap is noticeable in Leibovitz’s career: she started using a medium format camera that produced square negatives and she definitely turned to colour for these photographs. This camera is particularly appropriate for pre-arranged, set-up portraits requiring careful lighting. This move accentuated and accelerated her development towards portrait and fashion photography, for which she has since become best known. She prepared a series for Life magazine of contemporary poets where she used a simple idea from their work to use as the theme in a visually appealing portrait. She prepared portraits in a similar manner of musicians, actors and other artists in colour. The iconic square photograph in colour showing John Lennon naked and curled up to Yoko Ono was taken a few hours before Lennon’s assassination on 8 December 1980 and thus took on an unfortunate and unexpected significance and ultimately became a visual eulogy when it was published in Rolling Stone on 22 January 1981, with no caption on the title page.

35 The exhibition concludes in 1983 in the room “The 1980s”, which was a turning point in her personal life and career. Bea Feitler had revamped Vanity Fair, published by Condé Nast and based in New York, and she invited her to take portraits for the prototype of the first issue: the new editor was convinced and she joined the staff there. She left Rolling Stone after thirteen years and moved back to the East Coast, to start working as a contributing photographer to Vanity Fair and later to Vogue. While this change meant leaving reportage as her method of working and a major medium of her artistic expression, this approach of incorporating narrative elements has never entirely disappeared from her portraits she would produce and she would become known for. The photographs of Hugh Hefner embracing a young woman before boarding his private jet with the Playboy logo on it or the portrait of Bianca Jagger with the propellers of a jet as the background are not simply brilliant images defining full glamour, but they convey the image of an oversized flamboyant lifestyle that was not (and still is not) available to most viewers of these images: incidentally, these images seem to be echoed regularly in the advertising campaigns for Michael Kors. Leibovitz has kept that rare ability to understand and capture a character and “to extend that understanding into the realm of the imagination”, as Sante (2017) puts it.

Concluding remarks

36 There are a number of events and aspects of American life in the 1970s both Meyerowitz and Leibovitz photographed, but in characteristically different approaches. These included anti-war demonstrations in 1968, on either coast, but where Meyerowitz experimented with taking pictures from a child’s perspective or taking instant shots of random people in the crowd and taking pleasure in the graphic quality of dogs barking at each other, Leibovitz was aiming at the orators such as Ginsberg and policemen with a smile on their face. References to car culture are abundant in both works. Both were aware that the car is a perfect framing device, it is the metaphor of the camera in a sense. Meyerowitz does not usually include parts of the car in his compositions when composing from within a moving car, and pushes colour to its extreme, for instance when composing around the colour of the car, or focuses on the graphic quality of the aspect of a carwash as an element of the urban environment.

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Leibovitz includes the car as her frame and context, and prepares her portraits of her subjects visibly driving a car, as in her “Driving series”. One type of events both Meyerowitz and Leibovitz photographed was the launching of a spacecraft, Apollo-11 on 16 July 1969, “the Moon launch”, for Meyerowitz, and three and a half years later Apollo-17 in the night of 7 December 1972 at Cape Kennedy, the last manned mission to the Moon, for Leibovitz. The way Meyerowitz treated this subject was as an event that represented a spectacle for the outsiders, a leisure activity for the masses, half a million of them, waiting for the launch in the dark of the night, perched on makeshift chairs placed on top of a car for a better visibility. For Leibovitz it was an assignment together with Tom Wolfe who reported on it for Rolling Stone and she took pictures of the launch itself and not of the crowd. Some points the two share are their transition simultaneously to colour photography and larger format cameras, in the-1970s, and the role photography played to help them overcome their timidity. While Meyerowitz was searching for ways to go beyond documenting reality and look for what these images mean in a wider context, Leibovitz was going for documenting and tracking reality in its utmost detail, from a personal rather than distant, “objective” perspective.

37 As a final remark, one can only hope that the coexistence of two events in Arles, the Rencontres d’Arles and the future programme offered by the LUMA Foundation, will make for better exhibitions for the public and the representation of the artists to enjoy, and for all the actors involved directly or indirectly in promoting photographic creativity and creating the market for this medium, joining their forces rather than fostering animosity and division.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arrivé, Mathilde. “Aaron Siskind, une autre réalité photographique”. In Miranda [Online], 12 | 2016, URL : http://miranda.revues.org/8383

Campany, David. Road Trips. Voyages photographiques à travers l’Amérique [original English title: The Open Road, Photography and the American Road Trip]. Paris: Editions Textuel, 2014.

Duponchelle, Valérie and Olivier Nuc. “Annie Leibovitz, les rock stars dans l’objectif à Arles”. Le Figaro, updated 12 June 2017. URL: http://www.lefigaro.fr/arts-expositions/ 2017/05/30/03015-20170530ARTFIG00007-annie-leibovitz-les-rock-stars-dans-l-objectif.php

Hernandez, Brigitte. Edition spéciale “Rencontres d’Arles 2017”. Le Point. Free copy. 2017 (no page numbers).

Daniel Huber. “Walker Evans and Stephen Shore at the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles 2015”. Miranda [Online], 12 | 2016a. URL : http://miranda.revues.org/8411

---. “Review of Images de star, Marilyn. La Dernière Séance, Bert Stern”. Miranda [Online], 12 | 2016b. URL: http://miranda.revues.org/8394

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Laurent, Jean-Marc. “Annie Leibovitz, légende vivante”. La République (édition du Centre), 11 June 2017. URL: http://www.larep.fr/arles/loisirs/art-litterature/2017/06/11/annie-leibovitz- legende-vivante_12439019.html

Annie Leibovitz, The Early Years, 1970-1983. Archive Project #1. LUMA Foundation. Köln: Taschen, 2017.

Leibovitz, Annie. La vie d’une photographe: 1990-2005 [A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005]. Paris: Editions de La Martinière, 2006.

Leibovitz, Barbara. Annie Leibovitz. Life Through a Lens. Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2006; mk2 (French subtitled version) 2009.

Manac’h, Bastien. “Arles. Duo au soleil”. POLKA magazine, 2017, issue 38, p. 142-144.

Mercier, Clémentine. “Annie Leibovitz archivée vive à Arles”. Libération, 17 March 2017. URL: http://next.liberation.fr/images/2017/03/17/annie-leibovitz-archivee-vive-a-arles_1556212

Mora, Gilles. La Photographie américaine de 1958 à 1981. The Last Photographic Heroes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2007.

Petitbon, Sarah. “Joel Meyerowitz Early Works à la Salle Henri-Comte dʼArles”. POLKA magazine, 2017a, issue 38, p. 149.

---. “Trésors à vendre [Treasures for sale]”. POLKA magazine, 2017b, issue 38, pp. 30-34.

Sante, Luc. Essay in Annie Leibovitz, The Early Years, 1970-1983. Archive Project #1. LUMA Foundation. Köln: Taschen, 2017.

Westerbeck, Colin. Joel Meyerowitz. Series 55. Paris: Phaidon. 2001.

Jean-Marc Laurent, available at http://www.larep.fr/arles/loisirs/art-litterature/2017/06/11/ annie-leibovitz-legende-vivante_12439019.html.

Catalogue reference

The Joel Meyerowitz exhibition did not have a catalogue.

Annie Leibovitz, The Early Years, 1970-1983. Archive Project #1. 2017. Exhibition catalogue. LUMA Foundation. Taschen, Köln.

978-3-8365-6904-0

28 €, paperback, no page numbers, English edition (French exists too), with all the photographs.

NOTES

1. https://www.rencontres-arles.com/ 2. The exhibition came with a catalogue, with essays by Anne Biroleau and Gilles Mora and an interview between Sylvie Aubenas and Jean-Claude Lemagny: Biroleau, Anne (ed.) Le choc de la photographie américaine. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2008. 3. For a review of this Siskind exhibition, see Arrivé (2016) at: https://miranda.revues.org/8383 4. See Huber (2016a) for a review at: https://miranda.revues.org/8411 5. See Huber (2016b) on Bert Sternʼs The Last Session: https://miranda.revues.org/8394 6. The exhibition had something of a precursor in late 2016 in “Taking My Time” at Polka Gallery in Paris: http://www.polkamagazine.com/taking-my-time-part-i-de-joel-meyerowitz/ 7. The other solo exhibitions under the heading The Experience of Territory included Michael Wolf: La vie dans les villes, Marie Bovo: Стансы/Stances, Dune Varela: Toujours le soleil, Kate Barry: The Habit of Being and Christophe Rihet: Road to Death, together with some group exhibitions.

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8. See Huber (2016a) for their review at: https://miranda.revues.org/8411 9. Meyerowitz was present at the Opening Night of the festival on 4 July 2017 at the Théâtre Antique and on 5 July, at the Collège Mistral, invited to a conversation, organized by Le Point and moderated by Brigitte Hernandez, in company of Adélie Ipanema, his galerist in Paris and founder of Polka magazine and gallery. 10. The framing was prepared by Circad, Paris. 11. It was printed by Processus, Paris. 12. The exhibition was made possible courtesy of the artist as well as the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City (http://www.howardgreenberg.com/), and Polka Gallery in Paris (http://www.polkagalerie.com/). Furthermore, the Fondation Louis Roederer was sponsor of the exhibition, their first sponsorship for the Rencontres. 13. A slightly different version of her report is available online at: https:// www.polkamagazine.com/avec-early-works-joel-meyerowitz-est-de-retour-a-arles/ 14. The image is included in the picture gallery accompanying the article http:// www.polkamagazine.com/taking-my-time-part-i-de-joel-meyerowitz/ 15. This choreographic aspect of street photography is the link between his early work and his later work with Paul Taylorʼs New York City Ballet that resulted in The Nutcracker in 1992. 16. See the article http://www.polkamagazine.com/taking-my-time-part-ii-de-joel-meyerowitz/ 17. Annie Leibovitz came to Arles to personally present her work and she spoke on 6 July 2017 at the Théâtre Antique in Arles, on the invitation of Sam Stourdzé, director of the Rencontres d’Arles. 18. The material about this programme reported in the present review can be found in the LUMA Arles Journal N°5 (Summer 2017), freely distributed at the venue, but also available at: http:// www.luma-arles.org/ 19. The figure is mentioned in the article by Jean-Marc Laurent, available at http:// www.larep.fr/arles/loisirs/art-litterature/2017/06/11/annie-leibovitz-legende- vivante_12439019.html. Matthieu Humery in his interview for Libération mentions “between 6,000 and 10,000”: http://next.liberation.fr/images/2017/03/17/annie-leibovitz-archivee-vive-a- arles_1556212 20. These specifics are evoked by Matthieu Humery in his interview with Clémentine Mercier for Libération: http://next.liberation.fr/images/2017/03/17/annie-leibovitz-archivee-vive-a- arles_1556212 21. See Manac'h (2017) on a clear presentation of the issues and tensions at stake. 22. Incidentally, Elliot Erwitt had two parallel exhibitions in Budapest, Hungary, one at the Mai Manó House, “Elliott Erwitt in Hungary”, June 15–September 10, 2017, (http://maimano.hu/en/ kiallitasok/elliott-erwitt-hungary/) on his work when in Hungary on assignment to Time magazine in 1964, and a retrospective at the Capa Centre, June 15–September 10, 2017, http:// capacenter.hu/en/kiallitasok/elliott-erwitt-retrospective/. 23. For a recent and well-informed volume on the Condé Nast archives, see Nathalie Herschdorfer (2012) Papier glacé. Un siècle de photographie de mode chez Condé Nast [Coming into Fashion. A Century of Photography at Condé Nast], published by Thames and Hudson. 24. An instructive selection of 20 images concentrating on figures of music history has been compiled and commented on by Valérie Duponchelle and Olivier Nuc (updated 12 June 2017) for Le Figaro: http://www.lefigaro.fr/arts-expositions/2017/05/30/03015-20170530ARTFIG00007- annie-leibovitz-les-rock-stars-dans-l-objectif.php 25. The figure appears in the article http://www.lefigaro.fr/arts-expositions/ 2017/05/30/03015-20170530ARTFIG00007-annie-leibovitz-les-rock-stars-dans-l-objectif.php

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INDEX

Keywords: American photography of the 1960s and 1970s, Joel Meyerowitz, street photography, Annie Leibovitz, pop culture, Les Rencontres de photographie dʼArles, LUMA Foundation Mots-clés: photographie américaine des années 1960 et 1970, Joel Meyerowitz, photographie de rue, Annie Leibovitz, pop culture, Les Rencontres de photographie dʼArles, LUMA Foundation Subjects: Photography

AUTHORS

DANIEL HUBER Maître de conférences Université de Toulouse [email protected]

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Ariel's Corner

Charlotte Ribeyrol (dir.) British painting

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Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ‘At Home in Antiquity’ Leighton House Museum, Londres, 7 juillet-29 octobre 2017

Bénédicte Coste

1 En guise de boutade, on pourrait dire que le peintre Lawrence Alma-Tadema se sent autant chez lui en imaginant l’Antiquité gréco-romaine qu’il se sent chez lui à Leighton House. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Peter Trippi, Ivo Blom ont organisé cette exposition avec l’aide de Daniel Robbins à Leighton House autour de la recréation de l’Antiquité par le peintre (1843-1912) naguère célèbre puis oublié et remis à l’honneur aux côtés des peintres esthétiques victoriens (Frederic Leighton, Albert Moore, James McNeill Whistler, etc).

2 Il est impossible d’évoquer cette exposition hors de ce véritable écrin qu’est la maison du peintre Frederic Leighton (1830-1896) à Holland Park. Construite en collaboration avec l’architecte George Aitchison entre 1865 et 1895, son jardin gazonné et ses briques rouges l’inscrivent dans l’architecture anglaise mais sa façade ressemble à celle d’un palazzo italien et elle est célèbre pour sa décoration intérieure orientalisante avec ses mosaïques et les magnifiques céramiques de William de Morgan, mêlant l’ancien et ce qui fut très contemporain pour les Victoriens. Luxueuse et paradoxalement sobre, Frederic Leighton l’a conçue autant comme lieu de travail que lieu de réception et de socialisation avec son salon et son atelier.

3 C’est donc à l’intérieur de ce lieu unique que chacune des pièces accueille des œuvres de la famille Alma-Tadema disposées de façon chronologique et thématique. Dans le salon, les premiers tableaux du maître : des portraits tirés de l’histoire de sa Hollande natale, de sa famille montrant un artiste déjà attentif aux détails et à la reconstitution historique sans délaisser l’inspiration religieuse. Dans la salle à manger apparaissent les toiles exécutées par le peintre à la suite de ses voyages in Italie, en 1863 lorsqu’il découvre Pompéi, et sa lune de miel où il découvre en particulier l’intérieur de l’église de Saint Clément à Rome qui aura une influence décisive sur son art. Impressionné par l’architecture romaine, le peintre devient passionné et ranime littéralement une Antiquité devenue objet d’investigation archéologique et de curiosité collective. Il lui donne couleurs et mouvement, s’inspire des restes et des ruines, des textes aussi pour

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offrir des scènes de la vie quotidienne dans l’Antiquité (L’entrée d’un théâtre romain, Lesbia pleurant un moineau) où l’art est très présent, redoublant la démarche du peintre (Un amateur d’art romain, 1868). L’artiste s’est entre-temps installé à Londres où il rencontre les sœurs Epps, elles mêmes artistes peintres, chez Ford Madox Brown. Il épousera Laura (1852-1909) et s’installe avec elle au nord de Regent’s Park, à Townshend House, autre maison-atelier, d’abord partiellement détruite par une explosion à Regent’s Canal en 1874, puis reconstruite avec la collaboration de George Aitchison.

4 Les œuvres figurant dans la très austère chambre de Leighton House sont de la main des deux époux et rendent hommage à l’artiste que fut Laura Epps Alma-Tadema. Les époux peignent leur portrait croisé, mais ce diptyque n’est pas le seul : le peintre peint également sa fille Anna, future artiste au tournant du siècle. Toujours dans la chambre, L’infirmière (1872) apparaît comme une œuvre ambiguë dont le spectateur ne sait à quelle époque la malade (Laura) est veillée par cette infirmière dont le visage nous est caché. Alma-Tadema va progressivement brouiller les frontières entre passé et présent, s’approprier l’Antiquité en la recréant, en abolissant l’Histoire à travers ses toiles.

5 Dans la Silk Room (le salon de réception de Leighton) figurent des œuvres des années 1870, décennie de reconnaissance du peintre par l’Angleterre. Il se voit octroyer la citoyenneté britannique en 1873, expose à la Royal Academy, institution qu’il rejoint d’abord comme membre associé en 1876, puis membre à part entière en 1879. L’improvisatrice est l’un des rares tableaux représentant une scène nocturne où Lawrence Alma-Tadema montre sa réussite en la matière. Comme les autres toiles, son sujet est antique, et les œuvres antiquisantes montrent l’intérêt, la passion et la minutie du peintre attaché aux détails et à la représentation d’un quotidien imaginé et d’autant mieux imaginé que certaines scènes sont reprises en variant les personnages ou les détails du paysage environnant mais non les poses. Sur les trois œuvres que sont Plaidoyer (1876), Une question (1877), Une sollicitation (1878), une jeune femme assise sur un banc de marbre écoute attentivement un autre personnage (féminin puis masculin), rappelant l’intérêt des peintres esthétiques pour la sensorialité. L’artiste s’attache à la représentation des artistes (La peinture de poterie, 1871) montrant une jeune femme estimer son travail, aux fêtes religieuses (La fête de Pomone, 1879) mais aussi à des sujets bibliques (La mort du premier-né, 1872), au quotidien : Un bain (1876), et le mélancolique Automne (1874). Profusion de couleurs servies par l’huile, mosaïques, fleurs exubérantes, délicats accessoires féminins, séduisants bijoux masculins, draperies et étoffes bigarrées. L’artiste fait naître une Antiquité vibrante, colorée et hiératique : peu de mouvements violents, mais nombre de scènes où les personnages contemplent, œuvrent, parlent. Cette Antiquité est autant un sentir qu’un faire.

6 Dans l’atelier de Frederic Leighton, ces œuvres voisinent avec des scènes familiales. L’artiste et les siens s’installent à Grove End Road dans le quartier de St John’s Wood en 1883 et il y fait construire une maison à son goût avec un atelier de marbre vert et un plafond en berceau recouvert d’aluminium destiné à donner la teinte argentée caractéristique de son œuvre. Lieu de sociabilité, de vie familiale où Laura Alma- Tadema possède son atelier, et où les amis sont invités à relever le défi de petits panneaux peints. Des 44 effectués au fil des ans et des rencontres, seuls 17 sont identifiés et exposés ici. Beaucoup ont des paysages pour thème qui font écho à quelques exemples de peinture paysagère de Lawrence Alma-Tadema : le jardin de Townshend House (1872) ou Un coin des jardins de la villa Borghèse (1876). Réussissant le pari d’exposer un grand nombre d’œuvres dans cet espace somme toute restreint qu’est

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une demeure, l’exposition rassemble également nombre d’objets ayant appartenu au peintre (chevalet, répliques d’objets anciens, meubles, et aquarelles représentant des décors de théâtre historiques), légués par Laurence Alma-Tadema, sa fille, elle-même artiste.

7 Dans une pièce plus récente de la demeure, les grands formats sont exposés dont les célèbres Roses d’Héliogabale (1888) montrant avec un réalisme coloré la pluie de roses s’abattant sur certains convives pour la jouissance de l’empereur. Soucieux de réalisme, Lawrence Alma-Tadema se faisait envoyer des roses de la Côte d’Azur durant la réalisation de cette étonnante toile où dominent tous les roses. L’autre toile de grand format, La découverte de Moïse par la fille de Pharaon (1904), possède une histoire résumant la réception de cette peinture dont il faut rappeler qu’elle a représenté l’extrême contemporain à une époque où il suscitait tout particulièrement l’intérêt des acheteurs. Comme nombre d’œuvres de l’artiste tombé en disgrâce avec le monde victorien durant une bonne partie du XXe siècle, elle a inspiré Cecil B. de Mille pour ses Dix commandements (1956) puis elle a été roulée, sans doute pour cause de non- conformité aux critères esthétiques du jour, avant d’être vendue pour le prix record de 36 millions de dollars environ. De nouveau magnifiquement encadrée, elle est exposée pour la première fois depuis son acquisition en 2010 et rappelle que l’univers de Lawrence Alma-Tadema a inspiré de nombreux réalisateurs de cinéma plus récents dont Ridley Scott.

8 Il y a comme un effet de mise en abyme dans cette exposition très exhaustive (130 œuvres), sise dans la maison d’un autre, elle-même expression paradigmatique du mouvement esthétique britannique, mais la mise en abyme n’est peut-être pas là où l’on pense : tant Frederic Leighton que Lawrence Alma-Tadema se sont passionnés pour l’Antiquité, principalement gréco-romaine, tous les deux ont fait construire des demeures où ils pouvaient vivre, c’est-à-dire, aimer, peindre et accueillir amis et acheteurs. Célèbres à leur époque, ils ont chacun représenté des scènes où derrière la reconstitution ne saurait masquer l’intérêt porté à l’activité mentale et sensuelle des personnages. Ils jouent de la musique ou se livrent à l’art, mais surtout, ils écoutent, contemplent, et sont en fait d’une étonnante inactivité, pied de nez à l’éthique victorienne du travail et de la production. Lawrence Alma-Tadema ne semble reconstituer que pour s’approprier cette Antiquité qu’il fait peu à peu équivaloir à la modernité. Dans un premier temps, les œuvres interpellent par leur exotisme spatio- temporel servi par un maniement exemplaire de la couleur sans s’en interdire aucune ; dans un second temps elles semblent étrangement proches par les scènes représentées à travers lesquelles le spectateur de l’époque victorienne, pouvait reconnaître son quotidien, suggérant un rapport ludique à la représentation picturale. In fine, elles se replient sur le mystère de leur objet, de leur projet, posant inlassablement la question de la reconstitution du passé. Chez Lawrence Alma-Tadema, cette dernière est solidaire d’une réflexion sur la représentation. Ses œuvres sont dépourvues d’anachronisme, parfaitement lisibles, abordables, séduisantes et dangereusement modernes, une caractéristique que le XXe siècle a largement détestée avant de se raviser. Nous lui en savons gré.

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INDEX

Mots-clés : exposition, esthétisme, peinture victorienne, antiquité, classical reception, hellénisme Keywords : exhibition, British Aestheticism, Victorian painting, Antiquity, classical reception, hellenism Thèmes : British painting

AUTEURS

BÉNÉDICTE COSTE Professeur d’études victoriennes Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté

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Isabelle Keller-Privat and Candice Lemaire (dir.) Recensions

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Marielle Macé, Styles. Critique de nos formes de vie

Jérémy Potier

REFERENCES

Macé, Marielle, Styles. Critique de nos formes de vie (Paris : Gallimard, 2016), 368 p, ISBN 978-2-07-019764-4

1 The notion of style has long been recognised as both a key point of interest and a major source of dispute among specialists of aesthetics. In a growing body of literature, many have discussed its elusive semantic contours, failing to reach any consensus. Marielle Macé’s pioneering essay both acknowledges and eschews the long-standing definitional debate, setting out instead to make sense of the very conflicts that surface whenever the notion of style is called forth. A mere look at the table of contents suffices to shed light on the methodological intent that initially stirred the project. Drawing on a significant array of critical discourses (Appadurai, Barthes, Bourdieu, Canguilhem, de Certeau, Foucault, Latour, Leroi-Gourhan, Lévi-Strauss, Mauss, Merleau-Ponty, Sahlins, Simmel, Uexhkül…) and on an international corpus of prose and verse (Agee, Balzac, Baudelaire, Michaux, Naipaul, Ponge, Valéry…), Macé proves to be less interested in the theory of style these authors might help her sustain than in exposing the variety of morphological conflicts implicit in different practices of style. Engaging the issue from an interdisciplinary perspective, the author opens up an uncharted critical field: she calls for an extensive understanding of style in view of turning a somehow slippery aesthetic notion into a working concept for the human and social sciences as a whole.

2 The book is divided into five sections. The opening chapter—“POUR UNE « STYLISTIQUE DE L’EXISTENCE »”—serves as an introduction whereby the author circumscribes the object, method and limits of her study. A specialist of French literature, Macé first insists that she intends to reach well beyond the boundaries of aesthetic considerations so as to extend the study of style to all those commonplace manners, habits, bodily movements and rhythms that are part and parcel of any form of lived experience. The author thus

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establishes a decisive contention, arguing that forms are not to be contemplated because they are grand or distinguished, but because life always presents itself as a site of morphological variations (“Le « style », en cela, ne s’oppose ni au banal, ni au commun, mais à l’indifférence” [20]). Yet, Macé maintains that literature is neither to be cast aside as a mere corpus of examples nor to serve as a methodological frame of reference: if the endeavour to consider forms (to describe them with justice, care, but also rage if need be) is defined as the collective task incumbent upon both social sciences and literature, the latter is praised as the invaluable medium whereby a genuine attention to the stylistic dimension in life can develop (“[La littérature] est une entrée en lutte contre toutes les façons, y compris savantes, d’être inattentif au « comment »” [50-51]). The author does not fail to account for her focus on the notion of style. Style is a polemical word. What is thought of as a stylistic form is neither neutral nor final. Identifying a style—a system of forms—suggests a double movement: it implies both paying and calling attention to forms that matter. In this respect, to recognise a style as such is necessarily a bias, a commitment of sorts, a source of dispute and, above all, of value. To speak of style (as opposed to another, epistemologically more stable concept) therefore brings into focus the fascinating gap that stands between the issue of forms and that of value. The following three chapters investigate three different morphological patterns, that is, three conflicting ways of looking at these forms that shape our existences, three “styles of style” (39; translation mine).

3 The second chapter—“MODALITÉS”—dwells on an extensive critical corpus including Jean-Christophe Bailly, Georges Canguilhem, Michel de Certeau, Bruno Latour, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Adolf Portmann and Jacob Von Uexhüll. From Mauss’s anthropology of style to de Certeau’s analysis of daily practices, Macé shows evidence of a common form of thought that cares to pay attention to modes of being rather than essences (“non pas une foule de choses, mais une foule de façons d’être une chose; non seulement une foule d’hommes, mais une foule de manières d’être homme” [57]). “Manners,” “ways of,” “modes” all suggest an understanding of life as a self-editing corpus of variations—a milieu more than an environment. The nuance is critical to a modal understanding of style, for to acknowledge the existence of this plurality of modes is to prove able to contemplate novel, unthought-of morphological directions. In this regard, the sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers studied throughout the chapter rise above mere phenomenological observations to gesture towards a conception of style as a mode of ethical positioning. Macé lays emphasis on the poetry of Francis Ponge, whose verse she reads as an endeavour to give voice to such a plurality of ways of being—of being a man, an animal, a plant or a tree, but also an inanimate object. The poet’s aesthetic and ethical effort is shown to lie in his resolve to “qualify”—to describe with care and justice—the forms that stir the surface of the sensible world, his task turning out to be exemplary of a duty towards attentiveness. The bias implicit in this first conception of style is unambiguously expressed: modal modes of thought refuse taxonomies and hierarchies, finding value instead in plurality itself. A modal conception of style, Macé concludes, cannot be estranged from an acute consciousness of the fragility of forms of life that can disappear for want of care.

4 To recognise style as a phenomenon of distinction calls for a radical shift in attention. Where modal thinking values observation over analysis, the logics discussed in the third chapter—“DISTINCTION”—favour comparisons, hierarchies and taxonomies. Although first and best theorised in Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work, distinctive

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understandings of style are shown to thread from the early-nineteenth-century novels of Honoré de Balzac to the sociology of Georg Simmel or Erving Goffman. These tend to interpret styles as unequivocal, binary systems of forms that make sense no longer in relation to one another but in opposition to one another. As to forms themselves, they become positioning forces on a social exchequer of dominating and dominated classes— forms, that is, of nothing but social violence. Bourdieu’s examination of style, in particular, turns it into an object to be suspected—indeed, to be accused and tracked down—due to its unambiguous siding with the dominating classes. Macé is particularly convincing in arguing that distinctive thoughts stand as another morphological bias, but one that tends to ignore or to disqualify (to accuse of deference or ingenuity) any other thought on the issue of forms. As could be expected, this chapter is by far the most critical in the whole essay. Right from the start, Macé makes it clear that she does not aim at debunking the concept of distinction as such, but rather at questioning its intellectual monopoly over humanities in general and social sciences in particular. What drives the critical stance here is a belief that intellectual monopolies do tend to confiscate any sort of reflection on an object. As it happens, the author analyses how similar understandings of style as a force of estrangement from the commonplace have developed in the advertising discourse. Because they turn style into a value in itself, both distinctive theories and the advertising discourse have become modes of confiscation of the stylistic debate. Dismissing a form of naïve search for “authenticity” as an alternative, Macé argues for more nuanced modes of attention (“Car ce n’est pas parce qu’il y a des gestes qu’il y a des postures ; ce n’est pas parce qu’il y a du sens qu’il y a des signaux ; et ce n’est pas parce qu’il y a de la valeur qu’il y a du classement” [167]). She turns here to the prose work of British writer V.S. Naipaul, which she praises as a dutiful exercise in this subtler grain of attention. For Macé, Naipaul endeavours not to identify, not to recognise an object too promptly. Rather, he allows for uncertainty and hesitancy into his prose. Literature accordingly surfaces as a precious ally, for it proves able to occupy with patience the discrepancy that stands between what is said of a worldly object and the complexity of the object considered.

5 The fourth chapter—“INDIVIDUATIONS”—swerves from a conception of style as a strictly defining feature to dwell on the philosophical category of individuation. Neither identifying nor comparative, style is to be understood, from an individuating perspective, as forms of singularity that exceed the biographic subject. Gestures, manners and rhythms are no longer to be thought of as signifiers of identity or as signs addressed on a social scene, but as temporary practices that can be appropriated and dis-appropriated, and, therefore, that question the very notion of a secure identity. Macé insists that implicit in this line of thought is the divorce from aesthetic practices such as dandyism, which tend both to superimpose forms and identity and to turn style into an absolute, grand value. In short, individuation is more concerned with a practice of the world and of the relationship between the self and the world, than with a practice of the self (“Le style ici ne désigne pas une œuvre originale, distinctive […], mais une « relationnalité » neuve, autrement dit une nouvelle façon d’entrer en rapport avec le monde et avec soi” [212]). Throughout the chapter, Macé points out evidence of individuating thoughts and practices in James Agee, Arjun Apadurai, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Marshal Sahlins and Paul Valéry. She also regularly analyses the work of French poet Henri Michaux. Unlike Ponge, who is interested in a variety of ways of being, Michaux contemplates singularities as forces of alteration. After breaking his right arm, he writes for instance of his “left style” as

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another, more clumsy, uneducated way of inhabiting his own body. Such a “crisis of style” is shown to be a genuine individuating experience, for it allows the poet to temporarily experience unfamiliar modes of being. Individuating thinking therefore defines forms as points of struggle for a subject, who is invited to appropriate a style while rejecting another. It follows that individuation is a fundamentally ethically- engaging stylistic bias.

6 The closing chapter—“D’AUTRES FORMES POUR NOS VIES”—offers a series of acute observations on the ethical dimension implicit in any reflection on style. The author broaches in particular the relationship between style and anger. Building on her previous developments, Macé argues that the urge to contemplate and to describe forms rarely is divorced from a form of rage, that is, an explicit or implicit call for others forms of life. Whilst standing firm against backward-looking postures, the author still praises Theodor Adorno, Pier Paolo Pasolini or the later Charles Baudelaire’s angered musings for their alertness to forms (“c’est à mes yeux une vertu que de savoir être blessé par les formes si c’est être acharné à les voir, à dire quels genres de vie elles installent et quels genres de vie elles détruisent” [301]). Insofar as rage defines a world of forms as being habitable or inhabitable, it always voices a form of ethical concern. Heading towards her concluding remarks, Macé phrases the overall critical intent implicitly carried out throughout her study: to denounce all forms of confiscation of the issue of style—“external” (learned, commercial), but also “internal” (this peculiar form of confiscation that is carelessness and disregard). She follows for instance Jean-Christophe Bailly in his questioning the concept of “non-place” (Marc Augé), which tends, in its critical sweep, to disqualify a great many forms of life (“Il n’y a pas de non-lieux, il n’y a pas de vies nues : il y a des lieux mal qualifiés, et des vies mal traitées, à regarder pour cela en face” [297]).

7 Marielle Macé’s finesse and insight command admiration. Inquiring into the fascinating gap that stands between the issues of forms and value, style and ethics, Styles opens up a whole new field of interest. The author is masterful in dissolving the boundaries that stand between social sciences and literature, and, despite the variety of critical thoughts considered, consistent and nuanced analyses are offered throughout. Hers is a careful, rare essay that rises well above its methodological ambitions to offer a major contribution to a renewed understanding of style. It also carries out a valuable re- examination of the significance of literature in the humanities, revealing that specialists of prose and verse can speak not only about, but also with literature.

INDEX

Keywords: style, stylistics, gestures, manners, rhythms, modality, distinction, individuation, literature, social sciences, philosophy Mots-clés: style, stylistique, gestes, manières, rythmes, modalité, distinction, individuation, littérature, sciences sociales, philosophie

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AUTHORS

JÉRÉMY POTIER Doctorant contractuel Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Armelle Sabatier, Shakespeare and Visual Culture–A Dictionary

Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard

REFERENCES

Sabatier, Armelle, Shakespeare and Visual Culture–A Dictionary, London. Oxford. New York. New Delhi. Sydney: Bloomsbury–Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017, 295 p., 5 b.& w. figs. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-6805-2.

1 The contents of this Dictionary include, in order of appearance, a list of Figures, Acknowledgements, the Series Editor’s Preface, the list of Abbreviations, a list of Headwords, an Introduction by Armelle Sabatier, A-Z, a Bibliography and an Index. Armelle Sabatier’s detailed introduction delineates the main fields of interest which have guided the selection of headwords among the lexical fields related to the semantic field of Visual Culture. The choice of these two words for the book title indicates that the word ‘Dictionary’ is only to be understood as a justification for the alphabetical order in which the main themes are examined.

2 The introduction falls into five subparts respectively entitled: the anti-visual prejudice, Elizabethan and Jacobean visual arts, visual eloquence, colours in Shakespeare, methods and purpose. We are first reminded of the cultural conventions ruling public opinion in an age of re-assessment of the value of images: these alternate between two distinct traditions, in the religious one, henceforth excluded on the grounds of the Henrician Reform, and in the secular one of ornament and memory, in which their use was continued. The particularly original field of what the author choses to call “visual eloquence” is then carefully delimitated by references to the ekphrastic tradition, the Italian debate of the paragone. Finally, the author reviews the different critical approaches or ‘methods’ which precede her own, and justifies her purpose by her entirely original use of what might appear as a neologism to some readers, “visual culture”, instead of the usual “visual arts”. She writes “the expression ‘visual culture’ chosen for the title of this book offers the possibility of exploring the Elizabethans’

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visual experience which is not limited solely to pictures and statues as was previously the case […] it also enables to take into account both material culture and the literary and rhetorical aspects of visual elements.” (Sabatier 13). Shakespeare’s own understanding of the relation between non-verbal–called ‘material’ by the author–, and verbal–i.e. linguistic–visual experience, underwent a change, from mimesis as imitation of nature to mimesis as art itself, a change that will be recalled when necessary in Sabatier’s dictionary.

3 Since the book is a dictionary, this review will not account for each of the 244 entries– i.e. words–found in Shakespeare’s works, but instead account for the five thematic entries so usefully indicated by the author in her introduction.

4 Anti-visual prejudice and censorship appear in the use of words dealing with visual perception such as the reference to optics in “look”, “view”, “vision”, “gaze”, “ocular”, but also references to the visual appearance of things, such as “tinct/tincture”, “varnish”, “gleam”, “glitter”, “gloss”, “glow”. Related to this rejection of visual experience as dangerous, are terms connoting religious iconoclasm: “saint”, “statue”, “idol”, “idolatry”, “mock”, “flatter”, “superstition”, “wanton” and of course “tongue- tied”, “silence”. Besides these literal references to censorship the Dictionary tells us of the polysemy of key words which also bear metaphorical connotations, among which their use to signify censorship. For example, “gild” which is a technical term signifying the practice of coating an object of art with a pigment containing actual gold, is also used metaphorically to signify deceit, and justify the condemnation of art as deceitful (Sabatier 97).

5 Elizabethan and Jacobean visual arts. The various fields of craftsmanship in which artists and craftsmen could prosper: “ornament”, “jewel”, “limn”, “miniature”, “portrait”, “portraiture”, are listed in this Dictionary. Thus “monument” is given several pages (Sabatier 147-151) as well as “statue” (Sabatier 225-230). Their large number testifies to a widespread valuation of visual ornament and pictures as an important part of Elizabethan culture. Yet the absence of sets on stage and the distant places both in space and time in Shakespeare’s drama rendered a large number of descriptions necessary in order to appeal to the audience’s visual imagination. A telling example of this cultural practice is the play within the play in King Lear (4.6.11-24), with the Dover Cliffs being depicted as present in front of blind Gloucester.

6 Visual eloquence. This concept enlarges upon what looks like an inventory in order to analyse the various cultural fields in which visual arts were practiced as part of a central subject of discussion, the ‘paragone’ or comparison and competition between literature and images, verbal and non-verbal modes of expressing abstract ideas such as beauty, morality, or their opposite, ugliness and immorality. Lexical units include “Monument”, “tomb”, “chimney-pieces”, but also “tapestries”, “weave”, “hangings”, or “arras”, “painted cloths”, “curtains”, and of course “ceremonies”. Related to these ‘eloquent’ ornaments is the abstract semantic field of “image”, in “pictures”, “figures”, “effigy”, “emblems”, “heraldry”. Visual culture appears significantly in words referring to visual manipulations of appearances such as “perspective”, “proportion”, as well as “captatio benevolentia” in a detailed study of the use of the word “look” (Sabatier 139-141). It also establishes effects of transposition, or even synaesthesia as for example when stones such as “alabaster”, “marble”, are compared to “ivory” and “lily”. The Dictionary has a great wealth of quotations from Shakespeare’s plays as well as his poems which testify to the notion of ‘visual eloquence’. But the concept of visual

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eloquence is even more clearly established in the use of words belonging to the semantic field of colour.

7 Colours in Shakespeare. This is by far the most elaborate and detailed lexical paradigm which is found in many entries of the Dictionary. The word ‘colour’ itself is discussed with its variety of meanings in an interesting manner, since it is sometimes used literally and often used metaphorically. We are first reminded that in Early Modern England–Sabatier prefers the term Renaissance England (Sabatier 54)–, the word was highly ambivalent: it was tinged with pejorative connotations. Indeed, metaphorically, the word “colour” could be used as a synonym for pretence or lies. On the other hand, “colour” was used as a system of signs, as in heraldry, or in Hilliard’s parallel between colours and precious stones. And there exists a number of works listing the encoded meanings as Sabatier reminds us (Sabatier 60). But “colour” does literally mean the diverse hues and tones that can be perceived by the human eye, whether by intra-or extra-mission. This is the meaning Sabatier manages to track down through Shakespeare’s use of the word “colour”, thus underscoring an important meaning of the word which is usually left unexplored (Sabatier 56). In Shakespeare’s plays, she notes how characters discuss shades of colours, as in Love’s Labor’s Lost (1.2.83), or compare colours, as in As You Like It (3.4.9-11). Colours are used to help audiences visualize the landscape or setting of a scene. In The Tempest, Gonzalo speaks of seeing green where Sebastian says he sees tawny. (Sabatier 109). The word “colour” also alludes to complexion and emotions, according to the Galenic theory of humours, while it refers to rhetoric and style in elocution by analogy with the complexion of the face. Sabatier quotes at length the comic use of colours in Love’s Labor’s Lost (1.2.73-85) in which green embodies the elusive nature of visual perception (Sabatier 109-110). This point is also relevant to the fashion of fools to wear a motley coat (Sabatier 152-3). The Dictionary also explores Shakespeare’s use of colours separately in great detail, and deserves to be read extensively on that subject.

8 Methods and purpose. Visual conceits in words such as “imitate”, “ape”, or “artificial”, “art”, also contribute to the mapping out of visual culture of the common public of Shakespeare’s plays, mostly more or less educated Londoners of course. They too convey the ambiguity of the relationship to visual experience in everyday life. An interesting aspect of the general subject of visual culture and experience is the particular field of perspective–i.e. the depth of a scene, the volume of an object–and visual perception. Visual perception indeed ultimately appears as the principle of selection which has guided the orientation of the Dictionary upon a specific field. Important pages are an opportunity for developments on aspects of visual culture, such as “eye,” “gaze,” “glance.” By focusing on the paradigm of visual perception, the Dictionary selects a phenomenological approach which is quite original in Shakespearean criticism. Shakespeare the writer appears in a new light as experimenting with the lived–i.e. ‘embodied’–visual experience of his characters in order to give them psychological density. It is more precisely through their visual perception which is described in their words and actions, that their psychological approach of reality is depicted. And of necessity, this perception is the actual source of the change of their intentions and its resulting dramatic action. Visual perception is truly used to dramatize their inner life, as many quotations selected by this Dictionary from both poems and plays unquestionably show. For example, it is through the dramatization of visual perception that we have access to passion, such as lust (in The Merchant of Venice Sabatier 133) and shame. This interpretation was suggested to me by

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reading the Dictionary as a book. It is an instance of the way in which this Dictionary can be read item after item instead of the usual practice of looking up a word independently from the whole Dictionary. I would also argue that visual experience as a form of empathy allows us to better understand Hamlet’s inner struggle between passion and reason by the visual perception which is brought to light during his encounter with the ghost. On the other hand, it is Hamlet’s own understanding of the effect of visual perception and drama which inspires him the idea of “The Mousetrap” in order to make visible to all the invisible murderer hidden in Claudius. The detailed discussion of “image” is relevant here (Sabatier 118-121). On the other hand, Sabatier also examines the use of a frequent stage prop, i.e. the torch, and visual perception as the revelation to the audience of Romeo’s otherwise ‘invisible’ inner life, as he turns from melancholy to passion, or Othello’s inner conflict (Sabatier 134-135). Hence the predominance of developments about words such as “light” (130-137), “look” (139-141) and of course “image” and “imagination” (118-124). The method of this Dictionary is therefore more than paradigmatic and linguistic, it also chooses a phenomenological approach to examine passages from Shakespeare’s works which dramatize visual perception per se.

9 For this reason, the Dictionary can also be read as an account of a theory of visual experience which appears in the recurrence of words which, not belonging to the Shakespearean vocabulary, are nevertheless keys to our understanding of the poems and plays in the light of Early Modern visual culture. For example, ekphrasis is used twenty times, as we read in the very useful Index, and much more actually. The term is defined early in the Dictionary (Sabatier 8) as “the rhetorical description of a work of art”, to quote Homer’s verbal description of Achilles shield. We are told this rhetorical exercise was taught in Tudor schools and widely practised in Early Modern England. It is the illustration of the paragone or debate between poetry and painting. By quoting the conceit in different entries of Shakespearean vocabulary, the Dictionary makes us aware of the role of imagination as a way of creating a “powerful illusion of presence” (Sabatier 8). Similarly, the specific visual experience caused by the “white speck” on the sitter’s eye in a portrait, which is an illusion of movement addressing the spectator’s gaze, is found several times in Shakespeare. However, it is necessarily an illusion experienced by a character describing a portrait within the diegesis, and has little to do with the ‘presence on stage’ of a character (Sabatier 152). Such devices produce an interface mediating between the world of non-verbal visual icons and the world of poetry, not only by their rhetorical nature, but by the reliance on the visual connection between subjects and objects. On the one hand, comparing the different quotes in the Dictionary, I would say that they dramatize the ambivalence and uncertainty of the relation between subject and object–as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.2.103-4) when Lysander’s perception has been upset by Puck’s juice and his words depict a portrait of Helena which is invisible (Sabatier 20), and, on the other hand, they show how dependent on visual experience the subject is–as in The Rape of Lucrece (1366-7, Sabatier 84) when Lucrece visualizes a painting of Priam’s Troy. Such is also the word “emblem”, which is actually used by Shakespeare, and which is found several times in the dictionary with a similar purpose. Emblems, widely accessible thanks to printing, allow visual experience to act both as perception in an actual image and as imagination, in a necessary representation of an abstract notion called ‘conceit’. For example, in Julius Caesar, the bleeding statue that Calphurnia sees in her prophetic dream as an ominous prediction of Caesar’s death (Julius Caesar 2.2.76-8) is interpreted

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by Decius as a symbol of renewal (Julius Caesar 2.2.84-88, Sabatier 228-9). Other terms re-appear with a similar function such as “Petrarchism”, or “paint”, “painting”, or “eye” and “sight” or “view”. The latter are part of the Shakespearean idiom but the Dictionary shows their different meanings in a fascinating manner, making these words take a different connotation depending on their context, which results in broadening our understanding of Elizabethan ‘visual culture’.

10 To conclude, I would say that this is indeed what Armelle Sabatier means by “visual eloquence” (Sabatier 7), i.e. a wide range of cultural connotations which can be used in the texts depending on the dramatic situation because of the individual spectator’s own private ‘visual’ expectations, as the use of commonplace books and emblem books amply documents. But it also appears from this Dictionary that Shakespeare’s dramatic use of visual culture is actually grounded on a deep crisis of visual perception of images per se owing to a widespread ‘anti-visual prejudice’, which transpires in comic puns as well as in monologues expressing inner debate on the true nature of visual experience. Among others, these are reasons for recommending the use of this clever Dictionary.

INDEX

Mots-clés: couleur, culture, ekphrasis, emblème, héraldique, image, imagination, miniature, monument, paragone, perception, portrait, œil, optique, art visuel Keywords: colour, culture, ekphrasis, emblem, eye, heraldry, image, imagination, miniature, monument, paragone, perception, portrait, optics, visual art

AUTHORS

RAPHAËLLE COSTA DE BEAUREGARD Professeur Emérite Université de Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Hélène Machinal, Gilles Ménégaldo, Jean-Pierre Naugrette, Sherlock Holmes, un nouveau limier pour le XXIe siècle.

Sylvie Crinquand

RÉFÉRENCE

Machinal, Hélène, Gilles Ménégaldo, Jean-Pierre Naugrette, Sherlock Holmes, un nouveau limier pour le XXIe siècle (Rennes : PUR, 201, 325 p, ISBN : 978- 2-7535-5144-2

1 Cet ouvrage passionnant regroupe des communications issues du colloque de Cerisy consacré à Sherlock Holmes et plus précisément au devenir du personnage au XXIè siècle. Il s’articule en cinq volets suivis d’une annexe, d’une bibliographie générale, fort utile, et d’un index, et propose un voyage à travers plusieurs époques, plusieurs pays et plusieurs média, en gardant à l’esprit, telle une boussole, le personnage d’origine créé par Conan Doyle, et cet alliage de singularité et de plasticité qui lui permet de survivre aujourd’hui sous des formes très diverses. La diversité des supports analysés dans ce volume montre en effet combien le détective anglais est toujours populaire aujourd’hui, dans tous les sens du terme.

2 Hélène Machinal introduit le volume en revenant aux sources : celles qui ont conduit Doyle à créer son célèbre détective, mais aussi deux textes de Doyle, A Study in Scarlet et The Sign of Four, qu’elle considère comme fondateurs de l’œuvre à venir. Elle rappelle que la porosité entre réalité et fiction, qui conduit en partie à la création du mythe, et à l’illusion de faire face à un personnage réel demeurant bien 221B Baker Street, est instaurée dès les premiers textes par Doyle, qui inclut Dupin et Lecoq comme des personnages réels dans A Study in Scarlet. Cette introduction analyse ensuite l’évolution du personnage, depuis les premiers épisodes publiés dans le Strand Magazine, qui ancrent le récit dans une dynamique sérielle anticipant ainsi les actuelles séries

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télévisées, jusqu’aux plus récentes adaptations sous forme de bande dessinée ou de littérature jeunesse.

3 Un article liminaire de Jean-Pierre Naugrette fait suite à cette introduction générale, et se concentre sur la dimension matérielle des livres de Doyle, en s’appuyant sur le souvenir olfactif des livres de Poche par lesquels l’auteur de l’article fit connaissance avec Holmes, pour aborder le rapport entretenu par le détective avec la matérialité des documents qui lui sont confiés. Il analyse ensuite le passage du matériel au signe, aux codes que déchiffre Holmes avec son aisance coutumière, et souligne ainsi le rôle que joue l’intertextualité dans un texte-palimpseste, qui ancre le personnage dans un contexte fictionnel. Le grain de papier annoncé dans le titre de l’article est ainsi lu à un double niveau ; d’abord comme signature, double elle aussi, celle de l’émetteur du message par le choix matériel du support de son message, mais aussi celle de la trace laissée par l’intertexte. Mais l’article suggère également une autre vision du grain de papier, liée au code, et dépeint un Holmes « hacker avant la lettre » (p. 36), capable des décryptages les plus audacieux, dont le terrain de jeu n’est pas tant le palimpseste que la toile, ce qui place ce détective lecteur scripteur au cœur des problématiques du XXIè siècle.

4 Ces fondations solides ayant été posées, la première partie de l’ouvrage se consacre aux origines du mythe et au Holmes du Canon, avec tout d’abord une analyse de l’influence de Wilkie Collins sur le personnage de Holmes. Mariaconcetta Costantini se place dans le cadre de l’histoire littéraire pour rappeler la critique de Graham Greene selon laquelle The Sign of Four doit son intrigue à celle de The Moonstone, et analyse en détail les parallèles entre Holmes et le sergent Cuff, mis en scène dans le roman de Collins, ainsi que les points sur lesquels Doyle s’éloigne de son prédécesseur. Elle en conclut que Collins propose une écriture plus audacieuse, plus avant-gardiste que son successeur. Ce recadrage historique cède à la place à une perspective narratologique, et Nathalie Jaëck défend l’idée selon laquelle les intrigues holmésiennes créent une addiction, à cause de laquelle la fin ne suffit jamais, parce que la fin est toujours conçue comme avant-dernier épisode. Son analyse se fonde sur une étude rapprochée des dernières pages des nouvelles, où elle montre que celles-ci se partagent entre un sentiment d’anticipation (de la nouvelle suivante) et de frustration (devant des révélations incomplètes). Enfin la première partie se conclut par une analyse plus thématique, avec l’article de Dominique Meyer-Bolzinger consacré à la présence de l’imaginaire de l’autopsie dans le texte. Elle souligne pour commencer le fait que les autopsies semblent absentes des textes de Doyle, le mot lui-même n’étant jamais utilisé, pour ensuite montrer comment l’autopsie devient métaphorique, puisqu’il s’agit « de découper le monde, les corps, les textes, pour les transformer en récits. » (p. 87)

5 La seconde partie de l’ouvrage est consacrée à une première série de variations, textuelles, et se compose de deux articles complémentaires. Christian Chelebourg prend pour objet d’étude la littérature jeunesse, et plus particulièrement les romans de Nancy Springer publiés au tout début du XXIè siècle, où la mise en scène de la sœur du détective, Enola Holmes, permet à ses jeunes lectrices de repérer « les indices de la domination masculine », et répond ainsi à la vision sexiste de Doyle. Lauric Guillaud s’intéresse pour sa part aux pastiches de Holmes, et plus précisément à un détective américain, Solar Pons, créé par August Derlech en 1928, pour réfléchir à la manière dont le pastiche peut se révéler original pour offrir une nouvelle forme de création littéraire. Il analyse le difficile équilibre entre imitation et subversion du modèle,

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« entre fidélité et volonté d’autonomie » (p. 128) pour conclure que Derlech a au moins réussi à faire entrer son détective dans la culture populaire, puisqu’un site web lui est consacré.

6 La troisième partie de l’ouvrage, intitulée « Variations sérielles », et consacrée aux séries télévisées, s’ouvre sur un article d’Hélène Machinal qui traite de la série anglaise Sherlock. Elle propose une analyse fine et rapprochée de la série dans ses liens aux nouvelles d’origine, pour montrer comment cette adaptation utilise l’original tout en proposant un changement de paradigme, faisant ainsi entrer le texte holmésien dans le XXIè siècle. La même série télévisée est ensuite revisitée par Camille Fort, qui met l’accent sur la représentation de Londres mise à l’écran, toujours en conservant les écrits de Doyle en point de référence ; elle commence par réfléchir à ce qu’elle nomme la « fonction-Londres » (p. 160) en clin d’œil à Foucault pour terminer avec Michel de Certeau et la distinction entre le lieu et l’espace. Enfin Maud Desmet élargit le corpus aux séries télévisées les plus récentes, pour montrer comment l’influence de Holmes est perceptible dans les fictions les plus contemporaines sous les traits d’un « personnage archétypal d’enquêteur » dont elle analyse les caractéristiques à la lumière du corpus holmésien.

7 Le quatrième volet se tourne vers les adaptations cinématographiques, avec un premier article dans lequel Olivier Cotte s’intéresse à la figure de Watson et recense les modes de représentation de l’ami du détective, en allant du « Watson occulté » aux « variations Watson », et pour terminer non sans humour avec le « Watson (enfin) plus intelligent que Holmes ». Laura Marcus poursuit l’analyse avec des références au domaine germanique, en mettant l’accent sur un film autrichien comique, The Man who was Sherlock Holmes, qu’elle introduit par une réflexion sur ce qui, chez Holmes, semble appeler l’imitation et la parodie. Gilles Menegaldo se tourne vers la rencontre entre Holmes et Jack the Ripper, mise en scène dans plusieurs films, dont trois sont plus précisément convoqués dans son étude qui démontre comment la plasticité de ces deux figures mythiques facilite leur rencontre. Enfin Julien Guieu analyse lui aussi une rencontre, qui peut sembler plus improbable à première vue, entre Holmes et Don Juan dans le film Broken Flowers de Jim Jarmusch, pour en conclure que « s’il y a des Don Juan, il n’y a qu’un seul Sherlock » (p. 250).

8 La dernière partie de l’ouvrage, intitulée « Variations transmédiatiques », conclut en proposant deux cas spécifiques de transmédialité, le théâtre et la bande dessinée. Caroline Renouard s’intéresse aux mises en scène du personnage en France, à partir de l’adaptation française de la pièce de William Gillette, et montre que ces adaptations sont partagées entre fidélité à l’original et trouvailles novatrices. Et Jean-Paul Meyer poursuit l’analyse sur la bande dessinée, en mettant l’accent sur deux séries, Holmes et Les Quatre de Baker Street, pour montrer en quoi la spécificité du genre permet une adaptation renouvelée et originale. Enfin, en annexe, Antoine Faivre propose une filmographie commentée des films muets avec Holmes.

9 L’ouvrage propose ainsi un tour d’horizon très complet des tribulations de Holmes à l’époque contemporaine, tour d’horizon qui se double d’analyses stimulantes, qui conduisent à réévaluer la figure du détective, par le mouvement constant de va-et- vient entre l’original et les adaptations.

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INDEX

Mots-clés : Doyle, Holmes, roman policier, détective, cinéma, réécriture, adaptation Keywords : Doyle, Holmes, detective fiction, detective, cinema, rewriting, adaptation

AUTEURS

SYLVIE CRINQUAND Professeure des Universités Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, [email protected]

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Silvia Pellicer-Ortin, Eva Figes' Writings. A Journey through Trauma

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

REFERENCES

Pellicer-Ortin, Silvia, Eva Figes' Writings. A Journey through Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 282 p, ISBN (10):1-4438-8062-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8062-6

1 Writing a monograph on such a confidential author as Eva Figes – whose name has long been hardly known – is certainly an exciting yet daunting task. Since Eva Figes passed away in London in late August 2012 (somewhat unnoticedly, as could be expected, in the academic world), and even before that, writing about her work has appeared to her devotees not only as a necessary tribute to a fine author but also as an attempt to shore substantial fragments against what may otherwise turn into ruins: her story, that of a traumatic experience which, as a matter of fact, tells us a lot about History, and particularly about one of the most dramatic episodes of the twentieth century, the Second World War and the Holocaust, and how people like her have had to wade through memories and remains to achieve some kind of self-identification. It is, therefore, Silvia Pellicer Ortin's major contention that what Eva Figes has left to us in terms of both literary and critical heritage can have a tremendous impact on one's conception not only of the power of words and literature, but also of how closely one may connect the experience of literature and the experience of living. History and literature, the world and the self are seen to merge in this multi-faceted work which can “tell contemporary readers and critics many things about human nature and the capacity to cope with individual and collective pain” (247).

2 The metaphor of the journey obviously reduplicates the strikingly echoing pattern of both Eva Figes' early novel Winter Journey (1967) and her ultimate 2008 memoir Journey to Nowhere (an echo which would, in itself, deserve a whole study as a process that seems to some extent to close upon itself while suggesting later investigations into

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what this nowhere may stand for). Along with the journey through Eva Figes' face suggested by the cubist-like front-cover illustration1, this metaphor is aptly used for the title of the book which is indeed an all-encompassing exploration – another central image2–of the quest carried out by the author through the various experimental, testimonial, fictional and non fictional dimensions of her writings. As a distinguished specialist, fully aware of the subterranean logic of the work, Silvia Pellicer Ortin takes great care not to leave aside any single aspect of a substantial production which frames more than four decades; in doing so, she emphasizes how this multiplicity, ranging from experimental novels to sociological writings and autobiographical accounts, actually amounts to one single coherent whole which has its roots in an initial trauma, an essential divide.

3 As is detailed in Chapter 2, “Eva Figes' world”, little Eva Figes (who was Eva Unger at that time) had to run away from Germany with her German-Jewish family at the outbreak of the Second World War and arrived in England – where she lived until her death – at the age of seven. Unlike lots of German-Jewish children who were part of the Kinderstransport to England where they found foster families–an episode recalled by such writers as poet Lotte Kramer–( Kindertransport, Before and After: Elegy and Celebration. Sixty Poems 1980-2007 [Brighton: University of Sussex, Centre for German- Jewish Studies, 2007]; New and Collected Poems [Ware: Rockingham Press, 2011]), Eva was lucky enough to leave Germany with her parents and brother but had to leave behind her grandparents who were soon to disappear in concentration camps. She also had, of course, to leave behind her mother tongue, as she keeps recalling in her autobiographical works: “Rule one: never speak German” (Little Eden. A Child at War [New York: Persea, 1978]). Eva Figes was to discover the truth about her grandparents' fate much later, at the age of thirteen, when her mother, unable to speak about the past herself, sent her to the cinema in London to find out about the horror of the Holocaust. Hence Eva Figes' enduring feeling that everything about her had been building up into a “conspiracy of silence”, a phrase that she used in one of her late interviews (Ruth Gorb, “Fairy Tales Grimm and beautiful” [Camden New Journal, 20th March 2004

4 All that, of course, sets the stage for a particularly intricate relationship with language, since Eva Figes as a young girl is seen to have indeed lost her tongue twice (Tales of Innocence and Experience: An Exploration [London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2003] 122-123): first of all by being uprooted from Germany and having to fit into a new social and linguistic environment; second, by suddenly having to see through the smooth surface of the British social and linguistic reality she was living in and being taken back into a past she didn't know about because of her mother's obstinate silence which turned “‘not knowing' into an art form” (Tales of Innocence and Experience: An Exploration 87). This redoubled linguistic and existential disruption is, of course, at the origin of a fragmented self, but it also paves the way for a paradoxical attitude towards writing, acutely brought to light in the late autobiographical works: on the one hand, writing means getting to grips with language in order to fight away silence, oblivion and suffering, while on the other hand, being rooted in what Eva Figes calls “the horror” (Tales of Innocence and Experience: An Exploration 122, 126, 173, 177) or “the dark pit” (Tales of Innocence and Experience: An Exploration 124), writing may be “tempted by silence” (George Steiner,. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the

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Inhuman [New York: Atheneum, 1967] 7) in the face of unspeakable truths as a reduplication of the fear-stricken and guilt-ridden mother.

5 Getting to grips with this dual perspective, Silvia Pellicer Ortin puts together the pieces of Eva Figes' writings just as Figes herself, in the first place, kept working through a series of fictional masks or doubles that she had to resort to as the primary stage of what can now be seen as “writing cure” or “scriptotherapy”. This careful study is carried out along the lines of trauma studies–for which Silvia Pellicer Ortin provides a comprehensive and detailed framework before embarking on her analysis of the texts–, while the question of the literary material and influences is tackled from the complementary angles of the Modernist heritage and the ensueing experimental vein. Not experimental for experimentation’s sake, but because a lot of the qualities inherited from Modernism, such as fragmentation and emphasis laid on various guises of stream of consciousness, were the ultimate outlet for anything genuine Eva Figes was able to come up with when she started her literary career. This was sometimes achieved in such a way as to excavate the very sound material of language, as one of her fictional characters does at the very beginning of her 1967 novel Winter Journey, a novel which is highly emblematic of this experimental phase and which is, significantly, one of her fictional works that have not–yet–been translated into French (nor into any language). As suggested by Silvia Pellicer Ortin, this difficulty to come to terms, even linguistically, with such writings echoes the “acting out of the trauma that is represented throughout the narration” (105), an attempt to return to the primary experience of language as a way of deciphering the world around and what the self, what identity, or at least identification is about. Writing is here equated with a whole territory of investigation to open up; it comes as no surprise, therefore, that Eva Figes should have quite often turned into a translator herself–a fact aptly enhanced by Silvia Pellicer Ortin(59)–, deeply concerned as she was with the specificities of each idiom and its ability to conjure up the strange or the familiar.

6 Just as the author's linguistic exile and sense of alienation are betrayed by her late memoirs, the fictional works throw further light on the tedious process of self- identification: most of the characters are seen to have lost touch with the world outside and, first of all, with the anchoring, referential values of language. Passages from such early novels as Winter Journey or Konek Landing offer indeed striking examples of the character's desperate search for reliable landmarks, conveyed by a variety of streams of consciousness, fragmented or elliptic structures and blurred references. All these narrative devices are carefully explored by Silvia Pellicer Ortin, with an emphasis on symbolic patterns and intertextual echoes (to Virginia Woolf, Coleridge and, most significantly, T.S. Eliot). Even though the narrative itself is of a far less cryptic nature, a similar portrayal of disintegration is at work in the later novel Nelly's Version where the name of the main location, the Black Swan Hotel–hinting, of course, at a split personality–, but also the thresholds and the doorways that the whole novel is teeming with clearly indicate the character's confusion and sense of breaking apart. All that, of course, testifies to to the author's need to get into shape an enduring sense of void and to articulate “the identity conflict suffered by all women in patriarchal societies” (95).

7 In her last memoir, Journey to Nowhere, a challenging work which, as Silvia Pellicer Ortin underlines, “offers new alternatives to traditional autobiographical genres” (225), Eva Figes' political commitment went as far as taking a definite stand on Israel, as if to round off her survey of human alienation. All this does turn Eva Figes' works into a

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unified whole, consistent with the sense of the realities she had lived through (as an exile from the very start) and by (as an acute witness and observer of the suffering and changes she was confronted with all along). With its richly-documented and highly sensitive approach, including such treasurable first-hand material as an interview that she made with Eva Figes in 2009, Silvia Pellicer Ortin's book marks an important stage in the field of trauma studies while paying a fine tribute to an author who should be given prominence in the light of the various tensions, fears and mishaps of our century.

NOTES

1. Eva Figes' Portrait (2012), by Carlos Blanco Artero (https://http://www.carlosblancoartero.com/ blank-c786). 2. See the title of her 2003 memoir, Tales of Innocence and Experience. An Exploration.

INDEX

Keywords: experimental writing, Holocaust, identity, Modernism, scriptotherapy, testimony, trauma Mots-clés: écriture expérimentale, Holocauste, identité, Modernisme, scriptothérapie, témoignage, trauma

AUTHORS

NATHALIE VINCENT-ARNAUD Professeur Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail [email protected]

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Françoise Clary, Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River

Christine Dualé

RÉFÉRENCE

Françoise Clary, Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River, Collection Les Clefs concours Anglais- Littérature dirigée par Elisabeth Soubrenie (Paris : Atlande, 2017), 284 p, ISBN : 978-2-35030-384-0

1 Cet ouvrage présente une analyse très riche de Crossing the River, l’œuvre maîtresse de Caryl Phillips qui explore et reconfigure, à travers le récit choral d’une fratrie (deux frères, Nash et Travis et une sœur, Martha), l’histoire de la diaspora noire, les relations Blanc/Noir, dominant/dominé, inclusion/exclusion et « introduit une réflexion sur la transmission de la mémoire » (100). Caryl Phillips est connu et reconnu pour être un auteur de l’Atlantique Noir car ses fictions tissent les multiples expériences de la diaspora noire et explorent toutes ses facettes. L’ouvrage de Françoise Clary met ainsi en regard influences et apports historiques, culturels et littéraires afin d’exprimer une identité noire diasporique hybride et de souligner une écriture du trauma et du non- dit. Le présent ouvrage est divisé en trois grands axes (repères ; analyses thématiques et synthèse) qui permettront aux étudiants comme à tous ceux intéressés par la littérature postcoloniale et l’identité noire diasporique de réfléchir au concept d’hybridité qu’il soit identitaire, littéraire ou culturel. L’ouvrage va bien au-delà d’une simple analyse littéraire puisque chaque partie (la « synthèse » plus particulièrement) ouvre de multiples pistes de réflexion historique, esthétique et élargit l’analyse à l’imaginaire des poètes de l’espace Caraïbe. En annexes, Françoise Clary présente une chronologie biographique assortie de la réception des œuvres de Caryl Phillips.

2 Les références littéraires, historiques, culturelles ou encore idéologiques et philosophiques abondent dans l’œuvre de Phillips exactement comme la présente étude qui analyse très finement le roman de Caryl Phillips. Cet ouvrage s’avérera donc un outil précieux pour les étudiants et/ou candidats à l’agrégation externe. L’entrée dans

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la littérature afro-caribéenne et dans Crossing the River se fait par une introduction (« Repères ») extrêmement riche et détaillée qui met en regard ce que Françoise Clary nomme « le jeu des convergences » et signale la puissante dynamique de créolisation à travers les différents degrés d’hybridation culturelle. Les Noirs américains et les Afro- Caribéens du Royaume-Uni, notamment, forment une communauté autour d’une histoire commune faite de multiples déplacements depuis les rives africaines jusqu’aux colonies anglo-américaines et celles des caraïbes puis dans les colonies elles-mêmes. Parler de diaspora noire renvoie ainsi à de nombreux changements (géographiques, démographiques, politiques, épistémologiques et culturels) dans le monde colonial et postcolonial qui ont participé et participent toujours de la construction identitaire culturelle noire diasporique. Dans The Black Atlantic (1993) Paul Gilroy utilise les termes « créolisation », « métissage » ou encore « hybridité » pour traduire le syncrétisme culturel et identitaire et souligner les mutations à l’œuvre et le processus de (dis)continuité dans la création culturelle et identitaire noires. Homi Bhabha dans The Location of Culture (1994) voit davantage là ce qu’il nomme la « culture de survie », témoignage de collisions, d’échanges culturels et portée par des êtres qui évoluent entre tradition et formes culturelles hybrides. En plaçant son roman dans une perspective résolument postcoloniale, Caryl Phillips invite le lecteur à ne pas envisager une fixité identitaire dans le processus d’hybridité et montre comment les concepts polysémiques de « culture » et d’« identité » noires diasporiques se construisent l’un par rapport à l’autre et renvoient aux notions connexes de « diaspora », de « déterritorialisation », ou encore de « créolisation ».

3 En définissant le contexte géopolitique dès le début de l’ouvrage, Françoise Clary nous fait comprendre comment l’impérialisme économique de l’Europe et le capitalisme industriel façonnèrent l’identité diasporique africaine tout en imposant une prise de conscience identitaire chez ces êtres déterritorialisés dont l’esclavage nia la mémoire culturelle. La dynamique de créolisation et le cheminement d’êtres de la marge vers la création d’une culture commune, hybride et métissée, sont mis au premier plan. Cette étude permet de prendre toute la mesure de l’espace transatlantique dans la formation de la culture et de l’identité noires diasporiques et de relever les schémas de « mises en relation des cultures, africaine, antillaise, indienne, britannique, américaine » (95) des romans de Phillips. Ces mises en relation renvoient aux « rencontres entre sujets différents mais pas indifférents » évoquées par Edouard Glissant dans Introduction à une poétique du divers (1996). Les influences (culturelles et littéraires) présentes dans Crossing the River montrent, par conséquent, le caractère polymorphe et la fluidité de l’identité culturelle noire qui s’inscrit dans un continuum à la fois individuel et collectif. Elles permettent aussi de présenter toute la richesse de l’écriture elliptique caribéenne, « écriture de l’émotion et du non-dit » (107). Ainsi, Phillips reconfigure l’histoire de la diaspora noire grâce à des histoires fragmentées et asynchrones. La « petite histoire », c’est-à-dire les tranches de vie de ses héros, est l’occasion pour Phillips de réécrire l’Histoire et d’offrir un regard personnel : « réécrire l’histoire depuis la marge » (147) permet à Phillips d’articuler un contre-discours, de remettre en cause les normes établies et de proposer « la formulation postcoloniale d’une littérature moderniste » (148).

4 Crossing the River, tout comme de nombreux ouvrages appartenant à la littérature afro- caribéenne, présente une synthèse d’apports très divers et attache une importance toute particulière à la fragmentation des êtres mais aussi à leur dislocation ; dislocation que le langage ne peut retranscrire. W.E.B. Du Bois fut l’un des premiers intellectuels

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noirs américains à évoquer, dans The Souls of Black Folk (1903) ainsi que dans Dusk of Dawn (1940), la dislocation géographique et culturelle ainsi que la mémoire de l’esclavage pour expliquer la tension entre les origines et les voies à emprunter. Phillips fait prendre conscience des traumatismes de la diaspora noire et interroge sur cette identité diasporique à travers trois thématiques (« l’humanité du Noir », « la figure féminine », « la religion et la culture »). Il use d’« une narration segmentée à visée allégorique » (111) où la « désaliénation du sujet diasporique va de pair avec un processus de démythification du discours dominant » (111).

5 La structure d’analyse proposée par les éditions Atlande fait écho au style même de l’auteur étudié ici. D’ailleurs, comment ne pas établir un rapprochement avec l’analyse d’une extrême précision de Françoise Clary qui s’approprie l’écriture de Phillips en fusionnant contextes historique, culturel, littéraire, philosophique et idéologique afin de comprendre et d’interroger l’identité diasporique noire. Françoise Clary explique d’abord le contexte géopolitique puis historique de la fiction de Phillips, avant d’amener le lecteur vers les contextes culturel et littéraire et de terminer par une réflexion sur les dimensions esthétiques et politiques du discours culturel afro- caribéen. Comme Caryl Phillips l’expose dans son écriture et comme Françoise Clary s’attache à le montrer, la culture et la littérature noires américaines et afro- caribéennes mettent en jeu d’autres perceptions et différentes strates, au sens deleuzien, qui font sens. Ainsi, la lecture de Crossing the River peut se faire par n’importe quelle section du roman car la narration ne répond pas à un agencement préétabli ; elle s’apparente, en définitive, aux Mille « plateaux » définis par Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari. Tous ces plateaux soulignent une multiplicité d’approches, d’influences, d’interprétations.

6 Le concept de « marge », présent dans l’écriture du roman et caractéristique de la littérature mineure et de la « minoration », permet d’articuler la résistance noire au système hégémonique et de subvertir la norme établie. En prenant ses distances du canon littéraire euro-américain, Caryl Phillips affiche sa volonté « de rompre toute relation de subalternité vis-à-vis de la culture eurocentrique » (188). Par cette réorganisation des codes narratifs, Phillips aboutit à « une esthétique de liberté » (189). La mémoire et l’oubli sont aussi mis en relation à travers une mosaïque d’espaces de mémoire qui souligne, par ailleurs, la proximité de l’auteur avec les romanciers africains et le lien étroit entre texte et intertexte. Caryl Phillips s’appuie sur un espace- temps intermédiaire où l’action, qui est éclatée entre différents espaces, renvoie à un « mouvement vers l’ailleurs » (112). Par conséquent, les concepts d’intersectionnalité de Kimberle Crenshaw, de la marge et du mineur, ou encore du rhizome deleuzien, forment autant de repères théoriques, philosophiques et idéologiques qui aident à comprendre l’écriture polyphonique de Phillips. Ces concepts et cette écriture témoignent de l’identité « rhizomatique » noire et permettent finalement de décloisonner l’analyse en ne la cantonnant pas uniquement aux théories postcoloniales dans lesquelles elle s’inscrit. Le « rhizome » deleuzien ou ce que Françoise Clary nomme la « pluralité en mouvement constant » (184) permet à Phillips d’articuler la différence culturelle et de montrer comment la culture noire diasporique est faite de parcours, d’influences et de réseaux divers qui finissent tous par se télescoper et se nourrir les uns les autres. En articulant hybridation et récits de mémoire collective et individuelle, marge et histoire, déconstruction identitaire et renversement des normes, on retiendra toutes les influences à l’œuvre dans la représentation « du traumatisme de la diaspora noire et de sa relation à l’Afrique » (110). L’Afrique, qui est mise à distance et rejetée en

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tant que référent identitaire par l’un des personnages du roman (Nash), est bien présente à travers la dimension philosophique conférée à l’écriture du non-dit mais aussi à travers la réinterprétation intertextuelle du conte africain qui permet une mise à distance du monde occidental. « Le schéma en ellipse de Crossing the River confirme la correspondance avec la thématique du roman postcolonial africain : savoir affronter les drames et les échecs du passé pour s’ouvrir à l’avenir. […] Assumer un passé de souffrance, de dislocation et de mort est source de vie » (151). Françoise Clary s’attache à montrer les diverses influences à l’œuvre à travers l’histoire de la diaspora noire et dans l’écriture de Caryl Phillips en soulignant l’intertextualité littéraire, culturelle, historique et philosophique qui jalonne toute la lecture de Crossing the River. Si « la mémoire collective se construit sur une base d’échange dans Crossing the River » (16), le présent ouvrage montre, quant à lui, à quel point l’écriture de Phillips est riche d’échanges et d’emprunts à la fois à la littérature africaine, afro-américaine et afro- caribéenne. « L’idée de déplacement aide à comprendre l’éventail des perspectives offertes par l’œuvre de Phillips nourrie des thématiques majeures de la littérature caribéenne ainsi que la fiction afro-américaine » (91).

7 L’intertextualité de Crossing the River permet à Françoise Clary de tisser des liens et d’établir des ponts entre histoire, littérature, mémoire, construction identitaire, écriture de l’émotion et du non-dit. Ce faisant, elle souligne autour de l’œuvre de Caryl Phillips une « conscience communautaire qui se transmet de personne à personne, d’espace en espace, de groupe en groupe […] qui caractérise l’écriture diasporique de l’exil et du traumatisme, qu’il soit collectif ou individuel » (21-22). En naviguant ainsi entre les domaines et en décloisonnant les frontières disciplinaires, Françoise Clary fait aisément circuler les savoirs. On soulignera enfin l’apport remarquable de ce travail extrêmement fouillé dans le cadre des études postcoloniales et l’histoire du Commonwealth en France. Cette étude laisse une trace durable en clarifiant les rapports entre l’écriture, le discours culturel et le discours identitaire et ouvre des pistes de réflexion sur l’identité noire diasporique, la valeur symbolique de l’Afrique, la transmission et la mémoire, la déterritorialisation, la fragmentation des êtres et l’influence de la littérature africaine, afro-américaine et afro-caribéenne dans la littérature postcoloniale de l’Atlantique noir.

INDEX

Mots-clés : culture, créolisation, déterritorialisation, diaspora noire, espace transatlantique, hybridation culturelle, identité(s) noire(s), littérature mineure, marge, rhizome Keywords : culture, cultural hybridity, creolization, deterritorialization, black diaspora, transatlantic space, black identities, minor literature, margin, rhizome

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AUTEURS

CHRISTINE DUALÉ Maître de conférences HDR Université Toulouse Capitole [email protected]

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Agnès Derail and Cécile Roudeau (eds.), James Fenimore Cooper ou la frontière mélancolique : The Last of the Mohicans et The Leatherstocking Tales

Wendy Harding

REFERENCES

Agnès Derail and Cécile Roudeau (eds.), James Fenimore Cooper ou la frontière mélancolique : The Last of the Mohicans et The Leatherstocking Tales, Paris : Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2016, 154p, ISBN-978-2-7288-3596-6

1 If there were any doubts concerning the importance of James Fenimore Cooper’s contribution to American letters, this slim volume of essays edited by Agnès Derail and Cécile Roudeau puts them to rest. Though Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels were immediately popular at the time of publication, later criticism raised questions about their literary value. In particular Mark Twain’s pointed critique, "James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences" (1895), lampooned such features as the author’s unwieldy sentences and unrealistic turns of plot. In spite of those unfashionable traits, since their publication the Leatherstocking novels have been read by generations of readers, and The Last of the Mohicans has been translated into many languages and media. This collection of essays explores some of the ways in which Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels succeed in forging a distinctly American mythology in their coupling of history and romance. The Leatherstocking series maps the expansion of the new nation, presenting what the collection names the melancholy frontier, "la frontière mélancolique" referred to in its title.

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2 The introduction by Agnès Derail and Cécile Roudeau is an essay in its own right. The editors present the work of the other contributors only very briefly in the last paragraph of their preface. Their contribution introduces Cooper rather than the other critics, summarizing how his work forges an enduring myth for American culture. In particular, their essay emphasizes how The Last of the Mohicans mourns the effects of imperialist violence on the land and its indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, as the authors point out, the novel’s melancholy cast is also a posture ; the narrative returns to the nation’s past so as better to move America forward into the future. Cooper imagines a multi-racial ideal in coupling Uncas and Cora, but their unrealized union, only suggested at their funeral, leaves the way open for the Anglo-American pairing of Alice and Duncan Heywood. The narrator speaks from the time of that couple’s future, drawing attention at key moments to a double time frame in which the past of the narrative contrasts with the post-Revolutionary present of the novel’s writing.

3 Cooper’s concerns with history, trauma, and American culture are addressed in different ways in the essays that follow. Although the collection brings together the work of a number of contributors, each with a distinctive approach, it is nicely focused on the idea of melancholy. The volume is slim, which keeps it at an affordable price for students. The contributions are of high quality, coming from some of the most respected French scholars of nineteenth century American literature as well as some of the most promising younger ones. Rather than entering into debate with the critical corpus, the authors have privileged engaging with the Leatherstocking novels themselves and their cultural and literary intertexts, including other works by Cooper.

4 Ronan Ludot-Vlasak’s essay, "Les spectres shakespeariens de The Last of the Mohicans", takes as a point of departure Cooper’s evident reverence for Shakespearean drama. Other critics have noted and quantified Cooper’s numerous references to the English dramatist ; Ludot-Vlasak’s contribution to this scholarly tradition resides in his detailed analysis of the varied ways in which The Last of the Mohicans engages with the hypotext. First, like Shakespeare, Cooper highlights the theatricality of the action and underscores the ways in which identity is a game of masks. Scripted codes of behavior produce a spectacle that serves to hide the underlying barbarity of imperial warfare. Parallels with Shakespearean tragedy bring out the absurdity of war and the evil of participants.

5 Pauline Pilote looks at another important intertext in her essay, "‘This picturesque land of ours’. La mise en valeur du paysage national dans les romans écossais de Walter Scott et dans The Last of The Mohicans de James Fenimore Cooper". She shows how Cooper manages to create a national literature that both resonates with and departs from Scott’s own project of mapping his native land. The American author does this by transforming the conventions of the Romantic novel for the national territory. In The Last of The Mohicans, the wilderness both recalls and contrasts with Scott’s Scottish landscapes. This essay shows that the American setting is more grandiose, more terrifying, and less a simple background than an actor in the plot. Moreover, Cooper’s wilderness is not devoid of history, for within a very short time the traces of past battles furnish it with gothic ruins.

6 Further exploring the landscape of the The Last of the Mohicans from the unusual perspective of the depiction of water, Emilia Le Seven points out the continuity between Cooper’s maritime novels and this fictional rendering of events and scenes from 1757. The quotation included in the essay’s title, "water leaves no trail", is a point

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of departure for an exploration of the ways in which, on the contrary, the aquatic element does indeed leave traces that are readable by the novel’s expert trackers. In discerning the signs left in water—the marks of passage and of violence—Cooper’s trio of foresters demonstrate their expertise in reading the book of nature. The narrative’s treatment of water invites readers to look beyond appearance and to pay attention to the ways in which historical events make their mark on the apparently virgin surface of the American landscape.

7 Julian Nègre’s contribution to this volume focuses on the novel that deals with Leatherstocking’s final years. In The Prairie the main protagonist of the series follows the course of American empire by migrating westward, beyond the settlements. Nègre contrasts the way in which Cooper gives historical relief to the New York landscape of The Last of the Mohicans with the restraint he exercises in his depiction of the western prairie. This study of the novel shows Cooper’s debt to Stephen Long’s map of the region that the cartographer labeled "the Great Desert". Indeed, Cooper’s plains are quasi-empty. Like Long’s map, the novel represents the prairie as a smooth, nomadic space, inhospitable to settlement. Insofar as the novel takes on the work of mapping, it does so by using abstract geometric points of orientation, following the logic of the grid or of nautical cartography. Appropriately, the prairie is the site of Natty Bumppo’s tomb, since its settlement is bound to bring on the end of the nomadic way of life. The Prairie fits into the model of the melancholy frontier because it resists the progressive vision of history and imbues the westward movement of Euro-American settlers with a sense of regret for their exploitative relation with the environment.

8 In "L’après-Cooper : logique de l’après-coup dans The Last of the Mohicans", Marc Amfreville considers the applicability of the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit, or the "après-coup" in French, usually translated as "afterwardsness" or "deferred action" in English. The essay begins with a reflection on the concept itself, one that Amfreville claims to have been anticipated by Cooper before Freud articulated it as a psychoanalytical phenomenon. Its pertinence to the novel derives from several features, including the way in which the deaths at the end repeat the trauma of the historical massacre at the center of the novel. Colonization leads to fratricide among and between Europeans and Native Americans. The text plays with time in staging the uncanny scene in which the father mourns his heir, witnessing the end of his line. In Amfreville’s very subtle inquiry into the similarities between history and fiction, the melancholy (personal and national) that is the focus of this collection takes on its full significance.

9 Like Marc Amfreville, Mark Niemeyer takes up the question of the resonance between America’s fictions and its history. His contribution looks at the recurring trope of the Vanishing Indian. The essay considers how The Last of the Mohicans takes its place in a continuum of artistic and literary representations of the demise of indigenous Americans. The romanticizing of Indians as a dying race only became possible once the threat they posed to settlement had been distanced. It is at that point that the national work of mourning could begin for a way of life that imperial expansion had worked to destroy. Still, as Niemeyer points out, Cooper’s text leaves open the possibility of future resurgence, hence the choice of the word "allochronic" in his title, to refer to a time different from the present.

10 The final contributions to the volume by Pierre-Yves Pétillon take the form of inter- related notations rather than a developed essay. "Nathanaël avant et après ; ou de

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prolepse en anamnèse", ranges across all five novels of the Leatherstocking saga to give a biography of the protagonist. Different sections of this contribution deal with the various aspects of the hero’s characterization, from the multiple names by which he is known, to his ethical code, religion or attitude to race. There follows in a section entitled "Annexe : arrière-plan" a recapitulation of some of the novels’ historical underpinnings as well as a discussion of Cooper’s own relation to the history covered in the Leatherstocking series.

11 Students and scholars of American literature will find much to recommend in this volume. It contains an excellent bibliography that includes all of Cooper’s writings, as well as selected texts by his contemporaries. Besides a listing of literary studies on Cooper, his sources, and more generally on literary genres, there is a quite extensive list of works on history, American Indians, representations of the American territory. One can only regret that the collection is really available only to French speakers, since just one of the essays is written in English.

INDEX

Keywords: Native Americans, cartography, frontier, history, imperialism, Indians, Leatherstocking, melancholy, trauma Mots-clés: Amérindiens, Bas-de-Cuir, cartographie, frontière, histoire, impérialisme, mélancolie, traumatisme

AUTHORS

WENDY HARDING Professeur des Universités Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès [email protected]

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Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans.

Françoise Coste

REFERENCES

Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans, Nathalie Dessens, University Press of Florida, 2015, 273 pages, ISBN number: 978-0-8130-6020-0.

1 Nathalie Dessens achieves quite a feat in Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans, a book which is equal parts a detective story and history book. The book’s starting point is quite fascinating, both from a scientific and personal points of view: a set of 158 letters, totalling almost 1200 pages, sent by Jean Boze to Jean-François Henri de Miquel, Baron de Sainte-Gême (or Henri de Ste-Gême, as he was known in the Americas) between 1818 and 1839, and forgotten for almost two centuries in the archives of The Historic New Orleans Collection. Nathalie Dessens decided to work on this correspondence when an American colleague joked to her about the tiny French town where Saint-Gême was born, Saint Gaudens—which happens to be Dessens’s hometown.

2 The book reflects the material that gave it life: just like Boze, a “privileged informant” (150), wanders through the streets of New Orleans, Dessens wanders through his letters and uses his impressions and descriptions to give us a chronicle of the booming city in its first American years. The first chapter details the minute detective work Dessens had to undertake in order to understand the context in which the letters were written and to reconstruct the life of her two protagonists. This alone sent the author on an international odyssey through French, American, and Cuban archives that retraces the complex transatlantic lives of both Boze and Ste-Gême: Boze was born near Marseilles in 1753, worked in the merchant marine and made a life for himself in Saint-Domingue, where he settled in 1784, before reinventing himself as a Caribbean corsair (one who worked for the Netherlands); as for Ste-Gême, he was born in an aristocratic French family near Toulouse in 1767 and he devoted his life to the French army, a military

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career that explains his posting to Saint-Domingue. In 1803, Boze and Ste-Gême fled revolutionary Saint-Domingue (soon to be Haiti) and found refuge in Santiago de Cuba, where they met and stayed for a few years. The year 1809 saw them sail once again, this time to New Orleans, the city that had become part of the United States after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Boze would spend the rest of life in New Orleans, whereas Ste- Gême finally went back to France in 1818, after making a fortune, particularly thanks to a sugar plantation he had acquired though his wife’s family. Boze was one of his associates, as he seemed to have helped Ste-Gême manage his Louisianan business, especially after his departure which had made him a rather typical transatlantic absentee owner. The correspondence at the heart of the book allowed the two friends to remain connected across the ocean and to exchange on the many financial assets Ste-Gême had left behind, like his dozens of slaves, who are a recurring topic in the letters. These many “epic” episodes and this long friendship help show how “the Atlantic was a space of crossroads, a complex network of commercial movements, of departures and returns, of transatlantic families and correspondence” (2).

3 The scientific potential of the letters is undeniable, as this “breathtaking Atlantic narrative” (19) provides an extensive description of New Orleans in its first American years, a period of “intense political competition between the French-speaking community and the new American rulers” (27) that is too often neglected by historians. Thanks to Boze’s letters, Nathalie Dessens demonstrates how this transition period was marked by “a complex dialectic of continuity and change” (3). Each chapter of the book stresses one facet of New Orleans and shows how the city was slowly, but irrevocably, integrated by the United States, while proudly retaining a strong Atlantic and Caribbean dimension.

4 During the twenty years covered by the correspondence, the small French colony of New Orleans became the third largest city, and the first exportation port, in the United States, which came with extensive growing pains. Thus, Boze chronicles the urban transformation of New Orleans, where conditions of life were often horrendous, especially because of violent and extreme weather, the constant spectre of yellow fever and cholera epidemics which took regular tolls on the local population, and the extremely high rate of violent crime that went together with the arrival of tens of thousands of immigrants and sailors from all over the Atlantic world—a topic which seems to have exerted a peculiar fascination on Boze, whose letters “tee[m] with stories of people beaten to death, shot, stabbed, and killed in every imaginable way” (52). But local authorities persistently endeavoured to improve urban life, and one feels Boze’s pride in the efforts put in sanitation, public lighting, transportation or cultural institutions (like theatres) which made New Orleans a glaring urban and commercial exception in the South and “the only modern city in the West” (86).

5 The growth and prosperity of the city was closely linked to the geopolitical upheaval triggered by the Louisiana Purchase. Boze’s letters cannot be understood without taking into account the fact that the city in which he and Ste-Gême had arrived in 1809 was now part of the United States. The correspondence consequently depicts “the beginning of the decline of the French cultural domination over the city, but also the first moments of the creation of a new culture, an era of both Americanization and Creolization” (28). The letters allow Nathalie Dessens to study the complex power dynamics between the many demographic groups composing the city, like the large community of free people of color, or the Creoles who had to adapt to the

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Americanization of their city. Given his personal position, Boze also regularly insists on the economic competition between the French-speaking and American communities. Hence a double movement at play in Boze’s letters: on the one hand, the city retained extremely strong connections with its French roots, if only through the personal bonds between French citizens who had stayed in Louisiana like him, and those who had gone home, like Ste-Gême, or the continual arrival of thousands of immigrants from all over France, even after the Purchase. The letters show how interested Boze had remained in his home country, in particular through the countless mentions of political events in France and in Europe (the Greek War of Independence, the conquest of Algeria, the reign of King Louis Philippe or the Three Glorious Days of July 1830). However, even if such concerns may indicate a certain degree of nostalgia for the homeland, Boze’s letters also betray an almost unconscious Americanization at work, particularly through the expression of strongly liberal and anti-monarchical values. The letters thus reveal “a man of in-betweenness”, a man of “dual belongingness” (149).

6 Boze’s letters are an extraordinary find, as they are a testament to the many changing faces of the city in the 1820s and 1830s. This archival discovery is made even better by the impressive mastery of the history of New Orleans by Nathalie Dessens, who regularly indicates how Boze’s descriptions fit in the existing historiography of the city. This leads her to groundbreaking research on some forgotten topics, like dueling, in particular in all its racial dimensions (chapter 2). She also knows how to give the reader a window into a man’s private life, as she manages to recreate Bose’s moods and very human emotions, as in the pages devoted to his love for gossip (in chapters 3 and 5 for instance). But the personal and the anecdotal never take over scientific concerns and, in the last chapter, Nathalie Dessens returns to the key question of Creolization as she finds in the letters “the progressive hybridization of various cultures” (189), including the Gallic and Anglo-American ones. People from the two communities spoke together (in English, a language which increasingly appears in Boze’s letters though the years), traded together, went to the same entertainment venues, lived in the same neighborhoods, celebrated together (particularly the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans), and even sometimes married one another. Based on Boze’s testimony, Dessens disagrees with previous generations of historians who liked to insist on how French speakers “resist[ed] an imposed American way.” According to her, “the idea of a forced Americanization needs to be qualified” (211); instead, “New Orleans residents chose the best of coexisting systems” (199), as the period described in Boze’s letters “show[s] a clear progression toward the elaboration of a new cultural continuum, borrowing from both dominant cultures, in which the two main groups often met halfway, building, in the process, a new, original culture” (211)—a thesis more than convincingly demonstrated in this chronicle of early American New Orleans.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: Nouvelle-Orléans, correspondance, monde transatlantique, urbanisation, Créolisation Keywords: New Orleans, correspondence, transatlantic world, urbanization, Creolization

AUTHORS

FRANÇOISE COSTE MCF - HDR Université de Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Catel & Bocquet, Joséphine Baker

Christine Dualé

RÉFÉRENCE

Catel & Bocquet, Joséphine Baker. Paris, Casterman, collection écritures, 2016. 564 p. ISBN : 978-2-203-08840-5

1 L’ouvrage « bio-graphique » de Catel Muller est d’une belle originalité car elle adapte en bandes dessinées (sur une demande de Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker) la vie de Joséphine Baker à partir d’un scénario de José-Louis Bocquet. Catel Muller s’est distinguée pour son talent de dessinatrice et ses bandes dessinées autour de figures féminines emblématiques telles Kiki de Montparnasse (2007) et Olympe de Gouges (2012). Aidée une nouvelle fois de son compagnon, José-Louis Bocquet, ce très bel ouvrage entraîne le lecteur dans la vie romanesque et mouvementée de Joséphine Baker et montre une facette peu connue d’elle : la femme engagée et militante. À travers des dessins sobres et élégants noirs et blancs, Catel fait découvrir la vie de cette femme au destin hors du commun sur 564 pages. Après le « roman graphique » de la vie de Joséphine Baker (6-460), l’auteure présente une chronologie illustrée (463-479) suivie des notices biographiques accompagnées des portraits des proches et personnalités principales ou secondaires qui ont jalonné la vie de l’artiste (481-561) ; puis un texte (« La tribu arc-en-ciel », 562-564) écrit par Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker, le sixième des enfants de la « tribu » de Joséphine ; ainsi qu’une bibliographie. Ces différentes parties ajoutent à la richesse de l’ouvrage. Les dessins de Catel, servis par un scénario précis et documenté, font le lien entre biographie, monde des cabarets et histoire du début du vingtième siècle, tout en étant au service d’une vie flamboyante menée par une femme d’exception. La présentation chronologique de la vie de Joséphine Baker met en lumière les temps forts de son existence et de sa carrière sans oublier ses combats de femme engagée.

2 L’ouvrage commence en 1906, année de naissance de Joséphine Baker et est séquencé autour de son enfance difficile, puis ses débuts d’artiste, qui nous amènent de Broadway à Paris dans les années 1920. Catel fait aussi revivre les missions de

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renseignements effectuées par Joséphine pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale et souligne son engagement contre le racisme et la ségrégation. Les premières pages posent le contexte social et familial sur fond de ségrégation et de violences raciales. Elevée dans ses jeunes années par sa grand-mère et sa tante Cherokee, elle nouera une relation particulière avec ces femmes qui lui apprennent la liberté et la résistance féminine. De sa grand-mère, Joséphine Baker dit : « elle me berce de chansons splendides qui parlent de la liberté qui viendra, un jour » (482). Le lecteur saisit bien aussi la personnalité de Joséphine, débordante d’énergie, et toujours prête à amuser ses camarades et son entourage mais qui s’est faite toute seule. Après une « introduction » qui met les difficultés des Noirs et surtout la solitude de Joséphine et des femmes noires en perspective, l’auteure amène le lecteur dans les grandes villes du Sud des Etats-Unis avec la tournée de la Compagnie Dixie Steppers où Joséphine fait ses premiers pas en tant que costumière avant de monter sur scène. Auprès des membres de la troupe, elle comprend l’importance de la musique comme moyen de survie « car en cette terre infernale pour les pauvres culs noirs, la musique est le seul viatique » (100).

3 Au même moment à New York, la revue Shuffle Along est le premier spectacle noir présenté à Broadway. Florence Mills (1895-1927), artiste noire surnommée « The Queen of Happiness », assure le succès de la revue avec sa prestation. Joséphine Baker rejoint la troupe à seize ans. Shuffle Along marque les débuts du mouvement de la Renaissance de Harlemet inaugure la période qui suit, marquée par de nombreuses créations par des artistes noirs. Cette comédie musicale, créée par Eubie Blake et Noble Sissle en 1921, est le premier spectacle noir à pouvoir se produire dans des salles réservées aux Blancs et à offrir la possibilité aux spectateurs noirs d’accéder aux fauteuils d’orchestre. En se produisant à Broadway, Shuffle Along ouvre la voie aux artistes et metteurs en scène noirs tout en légitimant leurs comédies musicales. Si ce spectacle rompt avec les tabous raciaux, la comédie musicale reprend les vieux stéréotypes des vaudevilles et minstrels très appréciés au début du siècle par le public blanc. La musique jazz, nouvel idiome musical qui se développe au même moment, et les jeunes chanteuses sont une grande nouveauté qui attire le public et en fait l’un des spectacles les plus populaires de l’époque. Les vaudevilles noirs, qui supplantent peu à peu ceux joués par les Blancs, perpétuent certes les clichés dont les Noirs cherchent à se libérer mais leur ouvrent en même temps la voie de la comédie musicale et accompagnent la Renaissance de Harlem. Alors que les journaux et les magasines littéraires noirs diffusent les idées nouvelles des intellectuels noirs, ces spectacles attirent l’attention sur d’autres formes esthétiques noires, directement héritées de l’esclavage. Joséphine Baker fait un triomphe. Le public l’adore car elle incarne le pendant féminin de Sambo, le brave Noir servile et toujours joyeux, stéréotype issu de l’esclavage. Eubie Blake raconte : « elle faisait toutes sortes de blagues avec ses jambes, se trompant, perdant le pas, le rattrapant, jouant aux billes avec ses yeux. Elle dansait toujours en mesure, simplement elle ne faisait pas la même chose que les autres. Les gens hurlaient de rire. Ils ne se rendaient pas compte qu’elle jouait la comédie » (486).

4 À Paris, Joséphine fascine davantage. En manque d’affection et d’une image paternelle, elle est à la recherche d’une figure masculine pour partager un projet de vie. De nombreux hommes traverseront sa vie. Elle épouse Willie Wells à l’âge de treize ans ; puis Willie Baker alors qu’elle n’a pas encore seize ans. Eubie Blake tombe aussi sous son charme, puis Paul Colin, Georges Simenon (alors apprenti romancier), Pepito Abatino, Le Corbusier, Jo Lion, Jo Bouillon. On lui prête aussi des relations homosexuelles, ce qui est suggéré par Catel, et « une liaison avec Colette […]. Ni

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Joséphine, ni Colette ne s’étant confiées sur le sujet, cette assertion apparaît pour la première fois dans une biographie publiée aux Etats-Unis en 1993 […] » (515). Catel explique d’ailleurs que « l’histoire semble trop fantasmée pour être intégrée dans le présent ouvrage » (515).

5 C’est une femme, Caroline Dudley, qui donne sa chance à Joséphine en 1925 et lui propose de faire partie de son spectacle à Paris : « Je vous ai admirée sur scène, vous étiez comme un point d’exclamation au bout de la ligne de danseuses ! […] Je monte la production d’un spectacle à Paris dont la compagnie sera entièrement composée d’artistes noirs…noirs américains ! Et j’ai besoin de vous » (138). En acceptant sa proposition, la vie de Joséphine bascule et Paris lui apporte la notoriété. Elle est saluée par les artistes (Picasso, Van Dongen, Cocteau). Elle devient « la Vénus noire qui hanta Baudelaire » (170) et s'impose comme la première star noire à l'échelle mondiale. Libre et émancipée elle incarne la modernité et trouve sa voie à l’étranger comme « Bricktop », une autre artiste Noire américaine qui se produit déjà dans les cabarets parisiens. Bricktop est la première à initier les parisiens au charleston et assistera ensuite à la folie suscitée par Joséphine. De douze ans son aînée, elle devient l’amie intime et la confidente de Joséphine.

6 Dans les années vingt, la référence à l’Afrique dans la décoration et la mode, en passant par le textile, l’habillement et les accessoires, est omniprésente ; mais une Afrique revisitée par l’Occident, ce que Catel montre parfaitement dans ses planches et dans les dialogues des personnages. Les magazines de mode de l’époque : La Gazette du bon ton, Vogue, Jardin des modes, Art, goût, beauté, popularisent « l’art nègre » dans la mode et la décoration. À la fin des années vingt, ce style est tellement apprécié qu’il est produit à grande échelle. Avec La Revue nègre (1925), les parisiens ont tous la sensation de côtoyer d’authentiques Africains et de découvrir avec eux la véritable culture africaine. Le numéro de danse de Joséphine avec sa célèbre ceinture de bananes et ses contorsions illustrent les aspects primitifs, naïfs et sauvages recherchés par le public blanc parisien. À cette époque, les Noirs désireux de se faire une place dans le monde du spectacle et de se faire accepter par la société blanche en gagnant en popularité n’hésitent pas à donner ce qui est attendu d’eux et à accentuer les stéréotypes véhiculés par les Blancs, mais ils jouent de cela. Joséphine Baker, elle, arrive à transcender et à sublimer les stéréotypes. Rendue célèbre par le personnage de Fatou dans La Revue nègre, Joséphine Baker sait utiliser les stéréotypes pour plaire à son public mais sait aussi s’approprier les codes des Blancs. Toutefois, avec sa popularité grandissante, les rôles s’inversent car Joséphine a lancé une mode et les parisiennes cherchent à lui ressembler. Elles utilisent la gomina que Joséphine commercialise (la Bakerfix) pour donner de la brillance à leurs cheveux et les lisser à sa manière : « Si en tant qu’agent, Pépito n’hésite pas à louer l’image de Joséphine pour les automobiles Delage, les cigarettes Piast ou les tricots Réard, sa plus belle opération – et aussi la plus rentable – reste celle du Bakerfix, une brillantine dont les pots, décorés par Paul Colin, se vendent à des milliers d’exemplaires, rapportant des royalties considérables au couple pendant des années » (509). Cet écart entre réalité et stéréotypes est caractéristique de l’époque. Ces contradictions sont capturées par un autre artiste américain installé à Paris, Man Ray. En 1926 dans son travail intitulé Noire et blanche, Man Ray propose une série de portraits où il met en scène un masque africain et le visage de Kiki de Montparnasse. La contradiction chromatique, qui évoque la différence physique, symbolise le racisme et le désir d’être autre de la femme blanche, au point de vouloir devenir noire. La légende affirme que le premier portrait promotionnel de Joséphine, où elle apparaît sur le toit

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du Théâtre des Champs Elysées avec la tour Eiffel derrière elle, serait de Man Ray. « Elle est en réalité d’Henri Manuel […]. Le portrait de Joséphine par Man Ray ne semble avoir laissé aucune trace » (501). Une hypothèse serait que Man Ray aurait détruit ses clichés de Joséphine pour ne pas s’attirer les foudres de Kiki de Montparnasse, sa muse et compagne.

7 Lorsque la guerre éclate, cette française d’adoption se dévoue sans hésiter pour la France, ce que l’on sait moins d’elle et qui est très bien rendu dans l’ouvrage. Joséphine prend de nombreux risques en recueillant des renseignements appréciés en haut lieu. Elle déclare : « c’est la France qui m’a faite telle que je suis » (297). Elle avouera à Vincent Scotto qui lui a écrit ses deux chansons emblématiques, J’ai deux amours et La Petite Tonkinoise : « la France m’a tout donné, à mon tour je dois tout donner à la France » (526). Une rencontre avec le général de Gaulle a lieu en 1943 à l’opéra d’Alger. En 1946, elle reçoit la Médaille de la Résistance avec rosette puis la Légion d’honneur et la Croix de guerre avec palme pour faits de résistance en 1961. Après la guerre elle décide de vouer sa vie à la lutte contre la ségrégation et le racisme et s’engage dans la lutte des droits civiques aux Etats-Unis. Elle participe à la Marche sur Washington en 1963 où la militante s’adresse à la foule ; Martin Luther King lui rendra hommage dans une lettre quelques mois plus tard. En Dordogne, le Château des Milandes est devenu son refuge et le lieu où elle concrétise son projet de fraternité humaine et universelle avec Jo Bouillon. Son souhait qui est de « rendre tous les enfants du monde heureux » (257) commence par l’adoption en 1954 d’Akio et de « Jeannot » à Tokyo et se poursuit jusqu’en 1964 avec l’adoption de Stellina, son douzième enfant. Ses enfants adoptifs sont « le symbole de la paix à venir et [forment] la tribu arc-en-ciel » (375). La princesse Grâce de Monaco confiera à Jo Bouillon après la mort de Joséphine : « nous pensions la même chose : que la cellule familiale est la base d’une société et que c’est pour elle qu’il faut soigner la société, quand celle-ci est malade » (547). Très en avance sur son temps, elle crée en parallèle un projet touristique pharaonique et coûteux avec Jo Bouillon dans son domaine des Milandes. Dans les années 1950 elle décide de se consacrer exclusivement aux Milandes. Ruinée, elle est sauvée une première fois par Brigitte Bardot. À sa séparation avec Jo Bouillon en 1960, Joséphine part sans cesse en tournée afin de conserver les Milandes dont elle est finalement expulsée en mars 1969. Puis elle s’installe avec sa famille à Roquebrune, sous la protection de la princesse Grâce et repart en tournée sans se ménager jusqu’en 1974, date à laquelle la princesse lui propose d’être la vedette d’une revue à Monaco. Aidée de Jean-Claude Brialy, « la dernière bonne fée de la vie de Joséphine Baker » (560), dont elle a croisé la route quelques années auparavant, elle remonte sur la scène parisienne de Bobino en mars 1975. Elle fait un triomphe et chantera jusqu’à son dernier souffle, le douze avril 1975.

8 On retiendra de cet ouvrage le portrait d’une icône dont les idéaux et les choix de vie firent d’elle une personnalité d’une extrême modernité qui se réalisa dans l’exil. Dans l’ouvrage Joséphine (1976) Jo Bouillon dit d’elle : « Joséphine star, Joséphine héroïne, Joséphine militante, Joséphine mère, j’ai connu toutes les Joséphine, un faisceau de vies en une seule » (543). Ce sont bien toutes ces Joséphine que Catel et Bocquet font renaître et découvrir (ou redécouvrir) dans cet excellent ouvrage servi par de très belles illustrations depuis la couverture jusqu’à la dernière page. Joséphine Baker fut toujours sujet de son propre destin et son point de vue fut celui de l’émancipation et non de la domination. En ce sens, en avance sur son temps, elle illustre déjà très tôt la

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pensée féministe de la troisième vague et notamment celle de bell hooks pour qui le féminisme doit permettre de lutter contre l’oppression et la domination.

9 Tant a été écrit et dit sur Joséphine Baker, qu’il était difficile de poser un regard neuf sur elle. C’était sans compter sur cet ouvrage très réussi et suggéré par Jean- Claude Bouillon-Baker à Catel Muller en 2013, « persuadé que sa mère aurait aimé être dessinée par sa plume » (551). Par ses planches de bandes dessinées, l’élégance de la présentation et les nombreux détails qui l’enrichissent, cette superbe « bio-graphique » raconte aussi l’éclosion des Noirs américains dans les spectacles à Broadway et les années folles à Paris et offre un autre regard, moderne, sur la vie romanesque et tourbillonnante de Joséphine Baker.

INDEX

Keywords : Josephine Baker, Black Venus, black art, Broadway, cabarets, Harlem Renaissance, jazz, minstrel, musicals, Paris, ragtime, rainbow tribe, La Revue Nègre, roaring twenties, Sambo, Shuffle Along Mots-clés : Années folles, « art nègre », Joséphine Baker, Broadway, cabarets, jazz, minstrel, Paris, ragtime, La Revue Nègre, Renaissance de Harlem, revues, Sambo, Shuffle Along, Tribu arc- en-ciel, Vénus noire

AUTEURS

CHRISTINE DUALÉ MCF – HDR Université Toulouse Capitole [email protected]

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Christine Savinel, Gertrude Stein : Autobiographies intempestives

Monica Latham

REFERENCES

Savinel, Christine, Gertrude Stein : Autobiographies intempestives (Paris : Editions Rue D’Ulm/Presses de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, 2017), 246 p, ISBN : 9 782728 805662

1 Gertrude Stein: Autobiographies intempestives offers exemplary scholarship on Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical oeuvre. Chistine Savinel scrutinises the multiple facets of a cubist-like self-portrait painted by the prominent American author, an iconic figure at the heart of a vibrant artistic environment at the beginning of the twentieth century in Paris. Stein’s “autobiographical enterprise” (15) amounts to a literary revolution, similar to her friend Picasso’s geometrical representation of the author in his 1906 “Portrait of Gertrude Stein”. The subject’s mask-like face suggests the artist’s inability to reveal her truth and access her interiority. Likewise, despite the multiplication of autobiographical poses in her oeuvre, Stein remains an elusive subject who both displays and dissimulates herself. Savinel leads us through Stein’s autobiographical workshop and demonstrates that out of the multiplicity of fragmentary, partial, direct or oblique glimpses we are shown, the modernist author’s “inopportune” autobiographical forms compose a consistent personal, national, literary, and aesthetic identity.

2 The monograph consists of an introduction, six substantial chapters and a conclusion. In her introduction, Savinel outlines the wide scope of her book that sets out to examine some of Stein’s writings in which the autobiographical propensity appears, be it openly declared or thinly veiled. Savinel maps out and temporally delimits her corpus out of Stein’s vast and varied oeuvre to focus especially on four major works revolving around questions of autobiography: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Four in America (1934), The Geographical History of America (1936), and Everybody’s Autobiography (1937). The first and last autobiographical landmarks–more accessible

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and popular–of this creative spectrum temporarily enclose more elitist and experimental works, but Savinel evinces that they all have in common Stein’s creative strategy of hiding the self behind other subjects. Stein’s personal letters as well as other additional writings are taken into account in order to highlight her “interior landscape” (15): essays (Lectures in America [1935]; Narration [1935]), a play (Four Saints in Three Acts [1927]), and her only detective novel (Blood on the Dining Room Floor [1933]). The autobiographical dimension crosses and brings together all these eclectic texts in which the author’s personal reflexions resurface in indirect, unexpected ways. Savinel thoroughly investigates the nature of the Steinian autobiography, its displacements, detours, and contours, as well as its “inopportune” ramifications into other genres. The felicitous subtitle of the monograph, “Autobiographies intempestives”, reflects Stein’s unique autobiographical project: a disconcerting, incongruous and devious literary enterprise to stage and represent herself.

3 The first chapter of this monograph, “Faux témoignages”, aims at exposing the “falseness” of Stein’s autobiographical testimonies. Savinel mainly focuses on the literary ventriloquism at the heart of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, that is to say Stein’s hiding under her partner’s identity in order to write a third-person autobiography and use it as a tribune from which she imparts her vision on art and creation. Savinel examines the immediate reception of this autobiography, especially the controversies triggered by Stein’s opinions about artists from her entourage. Some of them question the truthfulness of their representations as well as Stein’s inaccurate recording of historical truth, and voice their discontent in Témoignage contre Gertude Stein. By closely analysing Stein’s stance and statements on writing her life, Savinel points out essential questions about the impossibility of being oneself when writing an autobiography and the limits of true and complete self-disclosure; hence, for Stein, the necessary devious literary game of borrowing another voice and identity to indirectly unveil herself and speak her truth.

4 While the previous chapter deals with other people’s reactions to Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Chapter 2, “La place du mort”, starts with Stein’s own reaction to its reception and her writer’s block (her dying and drying inspiration) about which she paradoxically abundantly writes in her second declared yet oblique autobiography, Everybody’s Autobiography. After the successful reception of the first autobiography, Stein’s written flow is paralysed, and Savinel contends that this amounts to an identity crisis for a writer who is defined by the flow of written words she has written, is writing and will write. For this, Savinel offers a detailed close reading of Stein’s text, with an attentive eye on its materiality and movement, its breathing spaces, language, “grammar of crisis” (67), punctuation, syntax, and structure that participate in the expression of the author’s strenuous effort to write.

5 Savinel demonstrates that Stein retrospectively casts doubts on the truthfulness of her first autobiography and reveals its fictitious nature by drawing analogies with Robinson Crusoe: “nothing is entirely real in autobiography and nothing is entirely fictitious in Robinson Crusoe” (70). Savinel underlines the lack of factual information for an autobiography, for its author is more interested in the evolution of her development and “apprenticeship as a genius” (81), and in questions of fluctuating memory, by definition inaccurate and untrustworthy. Autobiography is thus seen as fiction about oneself. Savinel further discusses the penetrating metacreative discourse to be found in Blood on the Dining Room Floor, a curious detective novel that draws on real events, and

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concludes that the author’s inability to lead the investigation is ironically going to finally de-block and unleash her creative flow, her literary and linguistic experimentation. In this chapter, Savinel dwells on various examples in which Stein replaces, alienates, metaphorically “kills” people in her entourage (her brother Leo, friends, and collaborators) and performs identity substitutions and creative thefts in order to stage her own self and liberate her literary production.

6 In chapter 3, “Le général”, Savinel’s starting point for her analysis of Stein’s multiple autobiographical stances is Everybody’s Autobiography. She minutely examines Stein’s penchant for generalisations and indeterminacy, as well as the idiosyncratic Steinian grammar, which is intrinsically linked to the author’s mode of thinking and writing. She further offers an analysis of Stein’s own reflexions on her name, her identity stemming from family genealogy and filiation. Within such identity considerations, Savinel inserts an astute analysis of Four in America, a “biographical fantasy” (124), and an appropriate case to study for its original autobiographical dimensions. Stein fictionalises the lives of four American figures and imagines four “improbable” destinies for them, thus changing the course of their real lives and playing with their identities, as well as historical and biographical reality. Savinel contends that Four in America actually constitutes facets of Stein’s self-portrait, as the four fictional portraits reflect her own American identity and offer “biographical, aesthetic and critical analogies” (121) with her own personal life. The autobiographical subtext thus underlies the ensemble of this fanciful literary production.

7 Chapter 4, “L’Amérique: géographie du hors-temps”, focuses on Stein’s Geographical History of America, another formal variation on the genre of autobiography in which Stein meditates about a-temporal interiority and personal identity shaped by origin and history. Savinel offers a thorough study of the relationships Stein establishes between biography and autobiography, personal and collective, interiority and exteriority, human mind and human nature, and explains that the Steinian autobiography exhibits tendencies towards temporal generalities, abstraction and geographical and historical de-contextualisation. Savinel also makes references to Narration, which gathers Stein’s four conferences given in Chicago in 1935, in which questions about writing history are essential. Savinel argues that for Stein writing autobiography and history is similar insofar as they both consist in interiorising external events. This leads Stein to reconsider her American interiority and the nature of her “Americanness” (162), and ponder how much it is accounted for by human nature in general.

8 The interdependence between geography and identity is also a topic discussed in chapter 5, “Folie de la reconnaissance”. Savinel follows Stein’s geographical displacement and points out her disorientation during her American tour in 1935. The author’s position as a public celebrity prompts musings about her American identity, about the adverbial motifs of “here”, “there”, “where”, about her insularity as a prerequisite to her creativity, as well as about her “recognition” and “non- recognition”. Savinel asserts that Stein’s non-recognition of her American territory has an impact on her writing, as confusion and malaise are reflected in her discourse and her use of a tortuous grammar and syntax. On the other hand, Stein’s recognition as a “genius” and a creator of valuable, original works makes her reflect on the attributes of masterpieces which go beyond the author’s identity and time; obliterating the self is thus paramount in the act of creation. Hence, being recognised by the public interferes

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with creativity. Savinel pores over such sharp observations and comments on the author’s growing popularity in America, and shows how Stein is her own spectator and astute evaluator of her image and oeuvre.

9 According to Savinel, meditation is the essence of the Steinian autobiography, since all her autobiographical texts display reflexions about people, things, events, places, creation, language, literature and writing. In the last chapter of her monograph, “La méditation infinie”, Savinel analyses the relationship between Stein’s meandering, slow flow of thought and her use of an idiosyncratic punctuation to create meaning and rhythm. She offers the reader fine studies of the anatomy of the Steinian sentence, dissecting and interpreting its fluidity and sound effects. The Steinian autobiography is thus a recording of the author’s meditations and reflexions on her own processes of thinking and creating; it does not display the materiality, exteriority and intimacy of the body, but scrutinises the mental interiority and the dynamics of her thoughts.

10 In each chapter of this intense monograph, Savinel investigates a plurality of aspects related to the specific themes announced in her titles that revolve around the central question of identity. We see how the icon of Gertrude Stein is built by Gertrude Stein herself, although we are never given a simple, straight-forward self-portrait. As an expert art and literary critic, Savinel guides us into Stein’s intricate autobiographical poses and accounts and points out features that the modernist author skilfully dissimulates behind a variety of masks, filters, oblique representations, veiled truths, ventriloquism and convoluted discourses. Savinel has a comprehensive view of her subject, but also pauses on the Steinian text and magnifies it to offer us minute, illuminating close-reading analyses. As such, this book constitutes a valuable contribution to Gertude Stein studies in France and will appeal to an academic audience interested in Stein and avant-garde art and literature at the beginning of the twentieth century.

INDEX

Mots-clés: autobiographie, identité, biographie, histoire, géographie, expérimentation littéraire, expérimentation linguistique, avant-garde, cubisme, témoignage, vérité, méditations, intériorité, signature steinienne Keywords: autobiography, identity, biography, history, geography, literary experimentation, linguistic experimentation, avant-garde, cubism, testimony, truth, meditations, interiority, Steinian signature

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AUTHORS

MONICA LATHAM Professeur Université de Lorraine [email protected]

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Noelia Hernando Real, Voces Contra la Mediocridad : la Vanguardia Teatral de los Provincetown Players, 1915-1922

Rovie Herrera Medalle

REFERENCES

Real Hernando, Noelia, Voces Contra la Mediocridad : la Vanguardia Teatral de los Provincetown Players, 1915-1922, Valencia : Publicacions de la Universitat de Valencia, 2014, 366 p, ISBN : 978-84-370-9565-3

1 The Provincetown Players are known as the community that transformed the theatrical landscape in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Tired of and disappointed with commercial theater and the monopoly of Broadway, the Provincetown Players became a refreshing force that staged ninety-three plays by forty-seven American playwrights between 1915 and 1922. Noelia Hernando Real presents in Voces Contra la Mediocridad : la Vanguardia Teatral de los Provincetown Players, 1915-1922—Voices against Mediocrity : The Provincetown Players’ Avant-Garde Theater, 1915-1922—the first comprehensive study in Spanish of the Provincetown Players’ history and eight selected plays by various of their playwrights.

2 Voces Contra la Mediocridad is divided into two sections ; the first section includes nine chapters that explain in detail the beginning of this little theater community, its rise and success, but also its failures and fall, and the second section contains plays by George Cram Cook, Louise Bryant, Pendleton King, James Oppenheim, Bosworth Croker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Susan Glaspell. Interestingly, the first section serves as a compilation of previous key works about the Provincetown Players published in English, such as those of Brenda Murphy’s The Provincetown and the Culture of Modernity (2005), Cheryl Black’s The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922 (2002), or Robert Károly Sarlós’s Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players : Theatre in Ferment (1982). As Hernando Real explains in the Prologue, besides revisiting these works, she also uses different original

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sources, such as biographies and autobiographies of the playwrights, academic publications, and an extensive archive of original documents related to the Provincetown Players, including manifestos, circulars, leaflets, reviews, and letters.

3 The first chapter “Hacia un nuevo teatro norteamericano” (“Towards a New American Theater”) introduces the different factors that were key to the creation of the Provincetown Players. Hernando Real explores how the new European tendencies had no impact in American theater which—largely due to the power of the Syndicate— favored commercial theater. Hernando Real observes how the Theatrical Syndicate favored the Star System and produced musicals, melodramas, and plays that were realistic in style between 1900 and 1915. Many of the future Provincetown Players— such as Kenneth Macgowan, Robert Edmond Jones, Susan Glaspell, or Jig Cook—were very disappointed with those Broadway productions, which did not reflect the intellectual and bohemian life of Greenwich Village. Hernando Real explores interesting sociopolitical and artistic movements of the time, such as The Armory Show, The Patterson Strike and its Pageant, and the influence of the journal The Masses.

4 The second chapter, “El sueño de una noche de verano : Provincetown, 1915” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream : Provincetown, 1915”) gives an account of the Provincetown Players’ first performance in Provincetown, at the very tip of Cape Cod, on 15th of July at the Hapgoods’ vacation house. They staged two plays, Constancy, by Neith Boyce, and Suppressed Desires, written by both Glaspell and Cook. The latter had previously been rejected by the Washington Square Players. After this first experiment and its success, the Provincetown Players decided to move to their second location : the Wharf Theater, where Jig Cook already envisioned what he named “his beloved community.” The work done by the Players this summer led to their second season in Provincetown. In the third chapter, “El sueño se consolida : la segunda temporada en Provincetown, verano de 1916” (“The dream consolidates : the second season in Provincetown, Summer 1916”) Hernando Real narrates the ventures of the Provincetown Players during the five bills that they produced. It is remarkable that she includes a translation of the original text of their constitution, where the members established themselves as a private club and set their goals for this association. This chapter also collects the different hypotheses about how Eugene O’Neill joined the Provincetown Players that summer of 1916. Jig Cook was part of the directive board as the President and he addressed the members of the club at the beginning of every season writing a circular ; most of these circulars have been translated and compiled in each of the chapters by Hernando Real, something no previous history of the Provincetown Players written in English had done before.

5 The fourth chapter is devoted to the Provincetown Players’ first season in New York. In “Los Provincetown Players en Nueva York : la primera temporada, 1916-1917” (“The Provincetown Players in New York : the first season, 1916-1917”), Hernando Real makes a chronicle of the plays produced ; it should be noted that she pays attention not only to the plots but also to some other essential aspects for the production such as the mise en scène of the plays and the difficulties that the Players overcame in terms of space and budget. This season, set in the theater of 139 MacDougal Street, is marked by the prominent figures of Glaspell and O’Neill who put on stage some daring and experimental plays, such as The People and Before Breakfast. The fifth chapter, “Sin miedo a fracasar : la segunda temporada, 1917-1918” (“With no fear of failure : second season, 1917-1918”), includes the updated list of the members during this season and

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the circular where Cook states : “We promise to let this theatre die rather than let it become another voice of mediocrity” that gives the title to this book. Hernando Real makes interesting observations about the so-called “Other Players” and their contribution to radical avant-garde theater with plays such as Alfred Kreymborg’s Manikin and Minikin and Jack’s House, which was the first cubist play produced in New York, or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Two Slantterns and a King, as well as a contribution of O’Neill to this season with the family tragedy The Rope.

6 The sixth chapter, “El nuevo teatro en el 133 de la calle MacDougal : la tercera temporada, 1918-1919” (“The new theater in 133 MacDougal Street : the third season, 1918-1919”), is characterized by this new space of the Provincetown Players, who were in need of a bigger theater, and which entitled new possibilities. This season is marked by a climatic decision ; they decided to send invitations to the critics which, as Hernando Real points out, some scholars have seen as the first sign of the Players’ future decline. The seventh chapter, “La temporada de la juventud : la cuarta temporada, 1919-1920” (“The youth season : the fourth season, 1919-1920”), gives room to the youngest playwrights of the Players, led by James Light, who were in charge of the bills with very innovative plays, such as Djuna Barnes’s An Irish Triangle or Kreymborg’s Vote the New Moon.

7 The eighth chapter, “Y Nueva York tuvo su cúpula : la quinta temporada, 1920-1921” (“And New York had its dome : the fifth season, 1920-1921”), featured two of the most relevant plays produced by the players : O’Neill’s expressionistic piece The Emperor Jones and Glaspell’s politically controversial play Inheritors, and could be considered one of the most successful seasons. One of the main achievements of this season, now from a technical point of view, is the fact that Cook gave the first cyclorama to a theater in New York. The final chapter of this section, “El fin de nuestra amada comunidad : sexta temporada, 1921-1922” (“The end of our beloved community : the sixth season, 1921-1922”), explores the last season and the internal fights between two opposite groups, one led by Light and the other by Cook. Nevertheless, the dramatists did their work and produced extraordinary plays, such as Glaspell’s The Verge and O’Neill The Hairy Ape.

8 The second section of the book includes an introduction and translation into Spanish of one representative play from each season : Cook’s Change your Style (Cambia de estilo) ; Bryant’s The Game (La partida) ; King’s Cocaine (Cocaína) ; Oppenheim’s Night (Noche) ; Crocker’s El Cochecito de Bebé) ; St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da capo ; Glaspell’s Inheritors (Herederos) and The Verge (Al límite), which, as Hernando Real points out, deal with contemporary themes such as war, art, the American dream, identity or the harsh realities of life. I would, however, recommend reading the plays before the introductions as the latter are very detailed and sometimes tend to disclose some of the surprising elements in the plays. It must also be noted that none of these plays had been translated into Spanish before and that the selection constitutes an excellent journey into the formal and thematic experimentations of the Players.

9 Voces contra la mediocridad is an essential work for those who research on the Provincetown Players’ history, as well as for those who are curious about the US little theaters in the early 20th century. As a journey into modern theater this volume presents a fascinating and thorough examination of the Players. Hernando Real provides an extensive research that was not available in Spanish and will contribute to bring the Provincetown Players closer to new spheres, and hopefully to new stages.

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INDEX

Keywords: early 20th century American drama, experimental theater, little theaters, Provincetown Players Mots-clés: théâtre américain du début du 20è, théâtre expérimental, petits théâtres, les Provincetown Players

AUTHORS

ROVIE HERRERA MEDALLE Substitute Professor Universidad de Málaga (UMA) [email protected]

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Marie-Laure Ryan. Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu. Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative : Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet.

Wendy Harding

REFERENCES

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu. Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative : Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Columbus, OH : Ohio State University Press, 2016. 254p, cloth ISBN : 978-0-8142-1299-8, paper ISBN : 978-0-8142-5263-5.

1 In the wake of Gerard Genette’s Figures I-III, (1967-70) and Paul Ricoeur’s Temps et Récit (1983-85), narratologists have been very much concerned with questions of time. The aim of Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative : Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet is to reorient the discipline by studying the ways in which “space can intersect with narrative” (1). To pursue this project, Marie-Laure Ryan, a literary specialist, has joined forces with two geographers, Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu in an endeavor that attempts to be truly interdisciplinary. The authors explain that while they took individual responsibility for developing different chapters, they worked as a team from the outset, exchanging ideas and sharing methodologies. The result is an innovative and wide-ranging study that begins with discussions of well-known literary texts such as Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s “Eveline” from Dubliners before moving on to other forms such as videogames, heritage sites and museums that also connect narrative to space.

2 The project the three writers have taken on has its potential pitfalls, not the least of which has to do with finding modes of address that can engage readers whose training is weighted on the side of either literature or geography. The writers have had to judge

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how much discussion of either narratological or geographical concepts would be necessary to allow them to bridge disciplinary divides without giving either too much or too little emphasis to ongoing debates in the different fields. On the whole, the writers succeed in this endeavor. They provide definitions of the concepts they employ that are succinct enough not to irritate specialists and clear enough not to baffle outsiders. Moreover, their brief summaries of scholarly debates coupled with their well-chosen bibliographical references offer directions for readers interested in pursuing the topics further.

3 In focusing on space, the book takes on a concept that has proved increasingly difficult to pin down. Regrettably, the attempt at defining it is rather brief. The authors quickly list some of the major theories of space and place—those of Yi-Fu Tuan, Deleuze and Guattari, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebvre—but they do not discuss their differences or similarities, or the extent to which their own definitions overlap with their predecessors. In fact the distinctions the authors make between space and place, elaborated on page 7 of the book, have much in common with the foundational division between the abstract and the particular made by Newton and Locke in the seventeenth century, although the authors modify and complexify this modern bifurcation by fertilizing it with the ideas of the phenomenologists. Thus, the authors take space to denote “location, position, arrangement, distance, direction, orientation, and movement,” while they take place “to refer to the way environments and settings have been shaped and molded by human action and habitation, the qualities that make spaces unique” (7). However, the difficulty of making such distinctions emerges from outset in the book’s first case study of space in Joyce’s “Eveline.” The eponymous character’s movement in space, her outward orientation, is hard to separate from the particularity of her insertion in both time and place. Our understanding of the short story certainly gains from the close attention to location and orientation, but it also illustrates the porosity of the categories of space and place.

4 With its roots in structuralism, narratology tries to establish distinct categories based on clear oppositions. While they look for such distinctions, the authors are aware of the danger of applying categories too rigidly. From the first chapter (authored by Ryan) we find the caveat that a narrative model should not be used “like a cookie cutter,” but instead should be taken as “a flexible analytical instrument whose application to a given text depends on interpretative decisions and yields variable results” (37). Indeed, this could be both a description of the authors’ analytical procedures and a vade mecum for readers.

5 As its title suggests, Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative deals both with space in narratives and narratives in space ; this double focus marks the book’s originality. For example, the authors treat the narrative potential of maps from many angles, discussing ways of mapping characters’ movements in narrative, the genesis of narrative in real or imaginary maps, readers’ cognitive maps of narrative space, maps that narrate the unfolding of historical events in space, and maps that guide visitors through museums. The book looks at narrative not only in its conventional literary sense, but also in its applicability to the street names, signs, plaques and inscriptions that city dwellers encounter every day without necessarily giving much thought to the stories they encapsulate. The study of these wide-ranging topics is enhanced by the many illustrations that make this book a pleasure to study and make the paper version

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a much better choice than the Kindle text, whose visuals are impossible to examine in detail.

6 The broad scope of these authors’ inquiry will certainly stimulate further interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars of literature and geography. Appropriately, the final chapter sketches out possible directions for future research.

INDEX

Keywords: cartography, geography, literature, maps, narratology, place, space, time Mots-clés: cartes, cartographie, espace, géographie, lieu, littérature, narratologie, temps

AUTHORS

WENDY HARDING Professeur Université de Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance

Jean-Daniel Collomb

REFERENCES

Worster, Donald, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance, New York, Oxford University Press, 2016, $ 27.95, 265 p., ISBN 978-0-19-984495-1.

1 With Shrinking the Earth, Donald Worster makes yet another remarkable addition to an already long list of major books on US environmental history. The book is sure to be an engaging and instructive read for both environmental historians and readers not yet familiar with this branch of history. It is divided into three parts, each composed of three chapters and a concluding section titled ‘Field Trip’.

2 In the prologue Worster lays out the main thesis of the book, which he calls the theory of the green light‒a hint at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In the novel Gatsby observes a green light on the horizon of the Long Island Sound and interprets it at first as a manifestation of America’s unlimited natural potential, or “nature’s green light of infinite promise” (4). By the end of the novel, however, he realizes that the green light is nothing but a chimera and is forced to come to terms with the natural limits of the New World. Worster uses Gatsby’s tale of illusion and disappointment as a parable of American history from the early days of European settlement to the present time. According to this theory, the stupendous natural abundance that Europeans stumbled on when they discovered America around 1500 AD was instrumental in kickstarting the modern age and, even more importantly, gave European settlers the false impression that there was no limit to what they could extract and expect from the natural world. As time went on, they found out that they would have to come to terms with the world’s inescapable physical and biological limits. The goal of Worster’s book is to put US history to the test of this theory.

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3 Part I centers on the age of illusions brought about by the European discovery of American plenty. In Chapter 1, Worster emphasizes the deeply transformational impact of the discovery of the New World‒the “Second Earth”‒ on the mindset of Europeans. Suddenly Europeans had access to what seemed to them like a world of unlimited abundance and opportunities. Worster concludes his chapter by an impressive summary of the radical demographic, economic, and environmental transformation of North America over the last five centuries. In the process he empathizes with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century settlers, thus staying clear of anachronistic self- righteousness, one of the pitfalls of environmental history.

4 In chapter 2 Worster tries to shed light on the origins of Western ascendancy over the last five centuries. He approaches such transformational events as the scientific and industrial revolutions from the perspective of environmental history. Though by no means the only factor, the discovery of the Second Earth, Worster argues, was instrumental in stimulating empirical research and later supplied European industrialists with the overabundant resources they desperately needed. This leads Worster to fault his fellow historians for overemphasizing the influence of institutions and political ideologies to account for historical change while downplaying and sometimes ignoring the impact of natural forces. Although chapter 2 is a useful reminder of the relevance of environmental history, it may also lead the reader to overemphasize the importance of environmental factors: discovering vast amounts of natural resources is one thing but having the cultural, intellectual, and behavioral resources to make the most of them is another.

5 Chapter 3 strikes the first jarring note in the rise of American abundance by introducing some dissenting, albeit marginal, voices of restraint. It opens on a discussion of the way in which Adam Smith responded to the plentiful natural resources of the New World. Worster underscores the tension at the heart of The Wealth of Nations in which Smith conceives of the Second Earth as an unbelievable opportunity to fuel and expand economic growth while also acknowledging that, the world being finite, economic expansion would inevitably have to be replaced by “a comfortable stationary state” (46). Worster also points out the importance of physical limits in the thinking of such luminaries as David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, and demonstrates that as early as the 18th century some of the founding figures of modern economics were having second thoughts about the idea of unlimited growth. The reader familiar with Worster’s Nature’s Economy will recognize his wonderful knack for synthesizing complex ideas in a concise fashion without oversimplifying them.

6 Part I ends with a section in which Worster takes the island of Nantucket as an illustration of the book’s main thesis. He calls Nantucket’s history “a complicated parable of heroic achievement mixed with brutality and failure” (58), and recounts the tremendous expectations spawned by the whaling business in the 19th century as well as its tremendous and heartrending environmental costs.

7 In part II, Worster chronicles the gradual and difficult emergence of environmental awareness in the United States and the slow recognition of nature’s limits. Chapter 4, which deals with the early stage of US conservation, contains a profile of US writer and diplomat George Perkins Marsh, whose Man and Nature is rightly singled out as the foundational text of US conservation. Though instructive, this chapter is less original than the previous ones. It makes no notable additions to previous accounts of early conservationist efforts in the US given by Worster and other scholars.

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8 Worster then moves on to the tremendous impact of the industrial revolution on American life, principally from the angle of energy production and consumption. This odyssey of energy production is environmental history at its best. Worster likens the environmental effects of the new industrial order to “a new Ice Age” (98) while also probing into the social impact of the quest for energy on the hill farmers of southern Appalachia and on Andrew Carnegie’s workers in Pittsburgh.

9 Chapter 6 provides a fascinating insight into the ambivalent record of Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first conservationist president. TR comes across as a man aware of the threat of resource scarcity but also steadfastly committed to unlimited economic expansion. His ambivalence sets the stage for a detailed analysis of federal conservation. The historical developments contained in the chapter have already been examined at length in such classics as Samuel Hays’s Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency. Nevertheless the chapter is well worth reading because the author delivers a sophisticated analysis of the ambivalent thrust behind federal conservation, the goals of which have been both to protect the natural world and enhance economic development. Worster makes the case that the Promethean roots of federal conservation have very often turned it into an instrument to ensure the continuation of unlimited economic growth by other means.

10 The field trip that concludes part II is set in California’s Imperial Valley. Worster chronicles the epic efforts by the federal government to supply the Southwest with water. Readers already familiar with Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert and Wortser’s Rivers of Empire will learn nothing new. Finally Worster reflects on the potentially devastating repercussions of climate change and anticipates the return of the Colorado desert. One is struck by the wistful tone adopted by the historian, who seems comfortable with a deeply personal and heartfelt approach to the writing of environmental history.

11 The book’s final part is evocatively titled “Planets of Limits”. In chapter 7 Worster tackles the postwar boom and the advent of what historian Liz Cohen has dubbed the consumers’ republic. This chapter is a reminder of the ambivalence of the postwar years as a rapidly expanding middle class made the most of a seemingly endless economic boom while critics of unlimited expansion like Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich managed to carve out unexpectedly large audiences for themselves.

12 Chapter 8 focuses exclusively on the Club of Rome’s 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth. It chronicles the somewhat irrational reception of the book when it was published. Particular attention is given to the knee-jerk reaction of many economists willing to preserve the dogma of unlimited growth on which their thinking was predicated. The chapter sounds like a defense of the Club of Rome against its many contemporary critics who often use it as a way to dismiss the warnings of environmentalists as unfounded apocalyptic rhetoric. Worster mentions the Green Revolution only in passing and gives this major historical development less than its due, especially in a discussion of the Club of Rome’s legacy. Interestingly, he faults the authors of The Limits to Growth for not even contemplating the possibility that humans might be able to adjust in the face of growing limits, which leads them to promote an “irrationally gloomy worldview” (178). Although Worster’s point seems well taken, he is himself very short on details about the human capacity for adaptation, which makes his objection sound more like an act of faith than a convincing argument.

13 In Chapter 9, Worster contends that the ideological defeat of the Club of Rome may only be partial and temporary. He argues, quite persuasively, that environmental

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consciousness is now part and parcel of the American psyche, making unlimited growth a contentious issue in a way it never was before. The chapter then oscillates between guarded optimism and deep pessimism as the author discusses the alarming warnings of geophysicists. Judging from the gigantic scale of the environmental challenges facing humankind in the 21st century and beyond, Worster’s eventual plea for an earth ethic almost rings hollow.

14 In the book’s final field trip, Worster tells the story of Canada’s tar sand oil exploitation from early experiments at the beginning of the 20th century to today’s highly controversial industry. The book’s brief epilogue is well worth reading if only because it contains the reflections of the greatest US environmental historian on humankind’s future and the Anthropocene. Worster envisions the emergence of new social hierarchies as a consequence of the recognition of the limits of the earth. The very last paragraph of the book is a passionate plea in favor of environmental history. For the readers not yet familiar with it, Shrinking the Earth will be an inspiring starting point.

INDEX

Mots-clés: climat, croissance économique, écologie, environnement, environnementalisme, histoire environnementale, limites, révolution industrielle Keywords: climate, ecology, economic growth, environment, environmental history, environmentalism, industrial revolution, limits

AUTHORS

JEAN-DANIEL COLLOMB Maître de conférences Université Jean Moulin (Lyon 3) [email protected]

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Frédéric Leriche, Les États-Unis : Géographie d'une grande puissance

Anne Stefani

RÉFÉRENCE

Leriche, Frédéric, dir., Les États-Unis : Géographie d'une grande puissance, Paris, Armand Colin, coll. U, 2016, 29 euros, 320 pages, ISBN 978-2-200-28847-1.

1 Cet ouvrage collectif, qui vient enrichir la collection U des éditions Armand Colin, dresse un état des lieux très complet des États-Unis et de leurs relations avec le monde au début du 21e siècle. Le coordinateur du volume, Frédéric Leriche, auteur de l'introduction et de la conclusion, a réuni quatorze contributeurs spécialistes des États- Unis, dont onze géographes et trois civilisationnistes. Près de trente ans après la publication de trois ouvrages ayant longtemps servi de référence sur le sujet, ce nouvel opus fournit des connaissances et une réflexion renouvelées sur les États-Unis d'aujourd'hui.

2 Comme l'annonce le titre sans équivoque, l'approche retenue est principalement géographique, mais l'étude se nourrit également d'autres disciplines, telles que l'histoire, l'économie, la sociologie et la civilisation. Ce choix scientifique présente de multiples intérêts, dont deux s'imposent à la lecture. Le premier est que l'articulation des perspectives donne de la profondeur de champ à l'analyse, notamment en inscrivant celle-ci dans une temporalité qu'il serait difficile de ne pas prendre en compte, tant la construction du territoire étatsunien se confond avec le processus historique de construction et d'expansion de la nation (10). Le second intérêt d'une telle approche est que le territoire des États-Unis, parce que celui-ci a conditionné l'histoire du pays et de sa population, a façonné la société, la culture et l'identité étatsuniennes. Il est donc tout-à-fait pertinent et intéressant de choisir la géographie comme point d'entrée dans l'analyse des États-Unis afin d'explorer les liens entre territoire, histoire, population et société dans toute leur complexité.

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3 L'objectif premier de l'ouvrage est de dresser un bilan du pays après la fin d'une période hégémonique ayant marqué l'apogée de la puissance étatsunienne au tournant du 21e siècle — entre 1991 et la Grande Récession de 2007-2009. Après une introduction présentant l'approche adoptée, les choix thématiques, et la thèse principale de l'ouvrage, les différents chapitres déclinent les problématiques sélectionnées en s'attachant aux forces et aux faiblesses des États-Unis dans un monde devenu multipolaire. Le principal fil directeur de la réflexion est la notion contestée de déclin, que de nombreux observateurs appliquent souvent de manière trop hâtive à la situation actuelle des États-Unis, tant dans le domaine économique que dans celui des relations diplomatiques et militaires. Les auteurs s'appliquent au fil des chapitres à relativiser cette notion, démontrant que, si les États-Unis ne sont plus aujourd'hui l'hyperpuissance hégémonique qu'ils ont été entre 1991 et 2007, ils n'en demeurent pas moins une grande puissance, si ce n'est qu'ils ne sont plus désormais le seul pays à se prévaloir d'un tel statut.

4 Le volume, ne prétendant pas à l'exhaustivité, est structuré en six parties de trois chapitres couvrant une sélection de thématiques clés. Sont étudiés les enjeux majeurs de la puissance étatsunienne dans le monde depuis la Grande Récession de 2007-2009, chaque chapitre plaçant la situation contemporaine en perspective dans l'histoire du pays.

5 La première partie s'attache au territoire. Le premier chapitre, consacré aux ressources, met en lumière les tensions, voire les contradictions liées à l'exploitation, la gestion, et la valorisation de ressources naturelles à la fois abondantes et vulnérables. Le deuxième se concentre sur une région spécifique, l'Ouest, sur le statut particulier de celle-ci dans l'histoire du pays, et sur son rôle dans la construction de l'identité nationale étatsunienne. Le troisième retrace l'histoire du mouvement écologiste en analysant l'évolution du regard porté sur la nature, appréhendée tantôt comme une menace, tantôt comme une ressource, tantôt comme un patrimoine à préserver.

6 La deuxième partie a pour objet la population. Le chapitre 4 permet de comprendre les dynamiques démographiques contemporaines grâce à un historique du peuplement du territoire, à partir de trois facteurs ayant joué des rôles clés dans l'évolution de la population : la colonisation européenne, le développement de l'esclavage, et l'immigration. Le chapitre 5, sur la population active et le marché du travail, fait ressortir les contradictions de l'économie étatsunienne en opposant un dynamisme indéniable à la persistance du chômage et, surtout, à la précarisation du travail. Le chapitre 6 clôt la deuxième partie par un tableau complexe des inégalités sociales et de leur inscription spatiale contemporaine. Ce chapitre confirme le paradoxe de la puissance étatsunienne, les États-Unis étant l'un des pays les plus riches du monde mais l'une des sociétés les plus inégalitaires. Après un rappel des causes historiques des inégalités — notamment la ségrégation raciale — le chapitre analyse le renouvellement de celles-ci après la Grande Récession de la fin des années 2000 — les causes étant à chercher dans le démantèlement de l'État-providence et dans la dérégulation de l'économie depuis les années Reagan.

7 La troisième partie se concentre sur les espaces productifs. Le septième chapitre, consacré à l'agriculture, démontre la puissance indéniable d'un système productif performant et protégé par une politique publique interventionniste, ce système — bien qu'aujourd'hui contesté et concurrencé à l'échelon mondial — faisant preuve de capacités constantes de renouvellement. Le chapitre 8 étudie le déclin et le renouveau

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de l'industrie automobile, retraçant une phase d'expansion, puis de recomposition après le développement de la concurrence asiatique, pour finir par la Grande Récession du 21e siècle et la résurrection du secteur après une opération de sauvetage fédéral historique. Le neuvième chapitre présente la « nouvelle économie » étatsunienne, étudiant la transition du fordisme au post-fordisme à partir de 1990, transition caractérisée par le déclin de l'industrie et le développement des services cognitifs- culturels.

8 Dans la quatrième partie, les auteurs se penchent sur les limites et les frontières du pays. Le chapitre 10 analyse l'originalité du découpage de l'espace américain (parcellaire orthogonal divisé en townships), due aux conditions historiques de peuplement et d'organisation d'un territoire considéré comme vacant par les premiers colons européens. L'objet du onzième chapitre est la frontière Mexique / États-Unis. Ce chapitre, articulé autour de la notion d'asymétrie frontalière, montre comment l'asymétrie socio-économique entre les deux pays a fait de la frontière un espace de contrôle social depuis les attentats de 2001 aux États-Unis. Le douzième chapitre dresse un tableau contemporain des ports en expliquant la transformation de ces derniers depuis 1950, pour finir par l'étude du cas atypique de San Francisco.

9 La cinquième partie porte sur la question urbaine, la ville étant posée comme le creuset du modèle étatsunien. Le chapitre 13, sur les réseaux et hiérarchies urbaines, présente la structuration et l'évolution de l'armature urbaine nationale, fondée sur une double catégorisation de l'espace en « zones urbaines » et « zones métropolitaines », devenues les principaux acteurs économiques sur un territoire désormais polycentré. Le chapitre 14 propose une mise en perspective historique de la théorie de la ville et de ses modèles, de l'École de Chicago à celle de Los Angeles, pour discuter des enjeux contemporains de la planification urbaine, l'idéologie expansionniste ayant cédé la place à celle de la croissance intelligente et raisonnée (227). Le quinzième chapitre, consacré à la ségrégation, étudie les mouvements de balancier entre déségrégation et re-ségrégation au cours de l'histoire récente, afin d'expliquer l'évolution de la société étatsunienne, où un ordre binaire (opposant Blancs et Noirs) a cédé la place à un ordre multi-ethnique beaucoup plus complexe.

10 Enfin, la sixième partie conclut le volume sur les rapports actuels entre les États-Unis et le reste du monde. Le chapitre 16 examine l'évolution de la politique étrangère menée par les différents présidents depuis Bill Clinton, du multilatéralisme de Clinton au minilatéralisme de Barack Obama en passant par l'unilatéralisme de George W. Bush. Le chapitre 17 s'interroge sur la place des États-Unis dans l'économie mondiale après le phénomène d'internationalisation ayant donné naissance à un monde multipolaire. Le tout dernier chapitre revient sur la notion de déclin, problématique centrale de l'ouvrage, à partir d'une discussion de divers termes clés faisant débat — déclin, empire, hégémonie, suprématie, leadership.

11 Au terme de la lecture, cet ouvrage s'avère constituer un bilan solide et bien informé de la puissance étatsunienne, tout à la fois riche en données factuelles, nuancé, argumenté et cohérent. Il présente une belle unité thématique tout en rendant compte de la grande diversité de son objet d'étude, grâce à un croisement disciplinaire réussi entre la géographie et d'autres sciences humaines et sociales. Chaque auteur apporte ainsi sa contribution spécifique dans son domaine d'expertise tout en suivant le fil dialectique de l'opposition entre puissance et déclin. Ce volume collectif peut donc être sans nul

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doute considéré comme une référence pour toutes les personnes désireuses de comprendre les États-Unis et leur place dans le monde contemporain.

INDEX

Keywords : United States, geography, power, territory, resources, West, national parks, environmental movement, population, slavery, colonization, immigration, job market, green economy, inequalities, poverty, agriculture, automobile industry, Great Recession, new economy, Frontier, township, Mexico, ports, San Francisco, town, urban, metropolitan, urban theory, Chicago School, Los Angeles School, segregation, desegregation, resegregation, foreign policy, multilateralism, unilateralism, minilateralism, internationalization, transnational firms, China, decay, hegemony Mots-clés : États-Unis, géographie, puissance, territoire, ressources, Ouest, parcs naturels, mouvement écologiste, population, esclavage, colonisation, immigration, marché du travail, économie verte, inégalités, pauvreté, agriculture, industrie automobile, Grande Récession, nouvelle économie, Frontière, township, Mexique, ports, San Francisco, ville, urbain, métropolitain, théorie de la ville, Ecole de Chicago, Ecole de Los Angeles, ségrégation, déségrégation, re-ségrégation, politique étrangère, multilatéralisme, unilatéralisme, minilatéralisme, internationalisation, firmes transnationales, Chine, déclin, hégémonie

AUTEURS

ANNE STEFANI Professeur Université de Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Roy McFarlane, Beginning With Your Last Breath

Eric Doumerc

REFERENCES

McFarlane, Roy, Beginning With Your Last Breath (Rugby: Nine Arches Press, 2016). 83 pages. ISBNIsabelle2017-09-19T15:07:00Isabelle: 9781911027089

1 Roy McFarlane was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage and has lived in the Black Country, an industrial area to the north of Birmingham, most of his life. He is a former community worker and after working in many anti-racism projects in the 1990s, began to write and perform poetry around 2000 under the tutelage of the late Roi Kwabena, a Trinidadian poet and cultural activist who was then based in Birmingham. Roy's reputation as a poet and performer quickly grew and in 2009, he was appointed Starbucks Poet in Residence. In 2010-2011 he was Birmingham Poet Laureate.

2 In 2011 Roy McFarlane co-edited an anthology of poems by locally based artists, Celebrate Wha'? - Ten Black British Poets from the Midlands (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2011) and in 2012, he was featured in a major anthology of black and Asian poetry edited by Jackie Kay, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson: Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2012). His debut collection, Beginning With Your Last Breath, was published by Nine Arches Press in September 2016.

3 This first collection is divided into four sections which follow the poet's journey and his life as a black man who grew up in Britain. The catalyst for the writing of these poems was the passing of the poet's mother in November 2014. The first section begins with the poet's adoption by his new mother and charts the painful process of getting to know his biological mother and coming to terms with his status as an adopted child. The second section is about growing up black in England in the 1970s and 1980s and tackles the issues of racism, integration and identity. The third section charts the poet's development as a man and deals with love, relationships and jazz. The final

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section completes the circle with the passing of the poet's mother being a major theme and taking us back to the beginning.

4 Roy McFarlane's collection could be seen as an example of what Black British poetry is today, but it also transcends these expectations and shades into confessional poetry.

5 The second section of this collection contains the poems which best fit the "Black British" label. For instance, the poems entitled "That place just off the M6" and "The black corner of Wolverhampton" subtly address the issue of Black Britishness or growing up black in England. In "That place just off the M6", the poet uses humour and wordplay to refer to the wave of immigration from the Caribbean which started in the late 1940s and saw the arrival of thousands of West Indians in the Black County, an industrial area to the north of Birmingham: Queen Victoria called it the Black Country. Black Country! Black people! Where else would they go? (21)

6 Then we learn that it is no wonder that so many West Indians settled down in the Black Country, also known as the land of the "yam, yam" on account of their dialect, as "Black people nyam [Jamaican Creole for "to eat"] yam, sweet potatoes and tings" (21).

7 A haunting presence in this collection is Bevan, a childhood friend of the poet, who appears in several poems like "After all is said and done" and "Saturday Soup". Bevan may have been the poet's alter ego, a "rude boy" who sometimes resorted to violence. In "After all is said and done", Bevan gets beaten up by a gang of skinheads and that incident changes his life forever: "he still believed, but stopped calling on Jesus" (35). Poems like "Saturday Soup" and "The Tebbitt Test (Patriotism) address the issue of racism squarely. The piece entitled "The Tebbitt Test (Patriotism)" refers to Norman Tebbitt's notorious "litmus test of Britishness" (33). In 1989 the Conservative MP Norman Tebbitt said that most people did not want to live in a multicultural society and that the latter had been imposed upon them and in 1990 he said that to be British you had to support the England team at cricket matches. This quickly became known as the "cricket test".

8 One of the most moving poems about the poet's childhood memories is probably "Patterson's House", a piece in which the poet fondly reminisces about "the old man of the neighbourhood" whose house was always open and where the local youths could eat Jamaican food, drink some Guinness and listen to the old man's stories about this time in Cuba or in the RAF during the Second World War.

9 The poems in the first, second and last sections transcend the boundaries of Black British poetry and take the reader into the realm of confessional poetry. The first poem in the collection, "Papers", movingly recalls the day when the poet first heard from his adoptive mother that he had been adopted, and "Fragments of a mother and son story" relates the poet's journey to Canada to meet his biological mother. Both poems work towards crescendos that enact the poet's emotional experience.

10 A number of poems could only be described as sensuous love poems and chart the poet's development as a lover while others explore his love of jazz ("A Love Supreme") or his religious upbringing ("Baptism"). Indeed, the poet's father was a Pentecostal minister and expected his son to follow in his footsteps. This adoptive father appears in several poems like "In Memory of Boxing" and "I Found my Father's Love Letters". The poem entitled "In Memory of Boxing" is a tribute to his father's resilience and endurance, from his days as a farmer working "under the bruising heat of a Caribbean

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sun" (25) to his life as factory worker "labouring in the ring of the steel industry/ caught up in the cold of the British Isles (25). All these reminiscences are held together by the metaphor of boxing, from the famous "Rumble in the Jungle" of 1974 to the Frank Bruno v. Mike Tyson match of 1989.

11 A number of poems are also characterized by a strong sense of place, like "Tipton" for instance in which the poet voices his attachment to this small industrial town in the Black Country where he presently resides: Tipton, this tongue-tipping double syllable of a word, this Bermuda triangle between Brum and Wolves. This lost city quintessentially Black Country, God's belly button of the universe has got me (59)

12 In this "lost" city Roy Mc Farlane has found his voice as a poet and has begun a new journey. For this, the reader can only be grateful.

INDEX

Keywords: Caribbean poetry, Black British poetry Mots-clés: poésie des Caraïbes, poésie anglo-antillaise

AUTHORS

ERIC DOUMERC Maître de Conférences Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Kokumo Noxid, Dub Truth

Eric Doumerc

REFERENCES

Noxid, Kokumo. Dub Truth. Stourbridge: APS Publications, 2016. 127 pages, ISBN : 978-1536979947

1 Gerald Dixon, aka Kokumo, was born in Jamaica. He has lived in Birmingham for many years and is well-known as a dub poet, workshop facilitator and storyteller. For a few years he ran a "griottology" workshop at the Drum, the local arts centre in Aston which closed down recently, where he compered several events like the tribute to Louise Bennett in September 2006.

2 Kokumo visits Jamaica regularly and has worked with the noted dub poet Yasus Afari, releasing a CD single with him entitled "Set it Off". In 2006 Kokumo released a CD entitled Writing's on the Wall, recorded in Birmingham with local musicians. In 2017 his debut collection of poems, Dub Truth, was published by APS Publications, a small publishing house based in Stourbridge, in the West Midlands.

3 The title of the collection is an allusion to Kokumo Noxid's vision of dub poetry. In a recent email communication, he gave me his own definition of dub poetry:" The true essence of dub poetry is to inform and to invoke conscious responses to cultural and social norms. It must be the voice of the downtrodden". This definition is quite in keeping with the revolutionary thrust of dub poetry as it emerged in the 1970s with poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka and of course Oku Onuora.

4 Kokumo Noxid's Dub Truth can be seen as an example of traditional dub poetry or griot poetry.

5 There are several definitions of the word "griot": the strict definition which can be found in any dictionary and refers to the West African context , and a looser, more flexible definition found in books and articles dealing with the oral tradition in a more general sense. Strictly speaking, a griot is a travelling, itinerant musician and poet/ storyteller from West Africa or Senegambia. The Collins English Dictionary gives the

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following definition of the word "griot":" A member of a caste responsible for maintaining an oral record of tribal history in the form of music, poetry, and storytelling"(from the Free Online Dictionary). In The Rap Attack, David Toop quotes an excerpt from Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions In the Blues (1970) by Paul Oliver in which the art of the griot is summed up: "though he has to know many traditional songs without error, he must also have the ability to extemporize on current events, chance incidents and the passing scene. His wit can be devastating and his knowledge of local history formidable"(Toop 32).

6 A quick internet search will reveal that the word "griot" is today commonly used to refer to a variety of performance poets and poets or spoken word artists. For instance an article published in the Jamaican newspaper The Daily Gleaner article in November 2006 refers to the performance poet Seretse Small as a "griot with a guitar" (The Gleaner, 26 November 2006).

7 Kokumo Noxid's Dub Truth can be seen as a form of griot poetry inasmuch as the poet voices the concerns of his community and acts as its spokesman. What makes Noxid's collection unusual is that the poet widens the remit of traditional dub poetry to reach out to the African-American community, which leads to the birth of a transnational dub poetry.

8 The themes developed in Dub Truth are well in keeping with the traditional ethos of dub poetry and are often social and political. So we find poems dealing with the negative stereotyping Jamaicans are often burdened with abroad ("A One Jamaikan Dis"), life in Jamaica's working-class areas ("Dis Yah Pressha"), Pan-Africanism ("Garvey's Vision"), the limitations of independence ("In-Dependence Dance") and the persistence of mental slavery ("Enslaved"). The influence of traditional dub poetry is also visible in the intertextuality with reggae culture which characterizes this collection. Indeed the poem entitled "Natty Boo York" is reminiscent of Black Uhuru's "Chill Out", "Dis Yah Pressah" bears the influence of Sugar Minott's "Hard Time Pressure" and "De System" echoes Mutabaruka's poem of the same name.

9 The Jamaican oral tradition features heavily in this collection, as can be seen in the poem entitled "Maskittah" which is a modern reworking of an old Jamaican traditional song ("Mosquito One, Mosquito Two, Mosquito jump inna hot callaloo!"). Kokumo Noxid's version incorporates references to Chikungunya and the Zika outbreak before accusing the "big pharmaceutical compiniz" (Dub Truth 41) of making the most of this new market.

10 That said, Kokumo Noxid's poetry transcends the borders of traditional dub poetry to embrace African-American culture. The poem entitled "No Knock, In Cyber Space" updates in an ironic way Gil Scott-Heron's "No Knock", a poem that decried the tactics used by American policemen trying to search some premises without announcing their presence. Noxid's poem adapts this iconic piece to the digital age: No Knock, if you think I'm scared Come knockin' if you're brave But triple lock your computer and smart phone Because soon someone May be hack-hackin' And the next no-knocker Ha, ha, ha! Is for you (Dub Truth 13)

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11 Likewise, in "I Didn't Want to Call It Baltimore", the poet mentions the New York African-American poet Ngoma Hill as well as Randy Newman's "Baltimore" to insist on the theme of racial discrimination in America. The poem entitled "Killin' America" refers to the sad case of Sandra Bland, an African-American woman who died in custody after being arrested for a traffic offence but also ropes in the Flint, Michigan water contamination affair: How long have you been killin' America How many blood-soaked boots Returned to doorsteps I see killing is your intention We will never forget Sandra Bland You even poisoned water in Flint, Michigan (Dub Truth 58)

12 The poet thus sees himself as a kind of alternative newscaster or journalist whose role is to draw the public's attention to some serious issues. Kokumo Noxid's debut collection is thus a modern reinvention of dub/griot poetry, but within a global context which encompasses the African-American and even the American dimension. This transnational scope is what could make Kokumo Noxid's poetry different from other dub poetry collections. It is a type of poetry which has its place and which is much needed today.

INDEX

Keywords: dub poetry, griot, reggae Mots-clés: dub poetry, griot, reggae

AUTHORS

ERIC DOUMERC Maître de Conférences Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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