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PITY THE LAND THAT NEEDS A HERO Political Discursive Strategies of Identity (re)Production in Contemporary France Míde Ní Shúilleabháin, B.E., M.A. A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Law and Government Dublin City University Supervisor: Dr. Ken McDonagh September 2016 I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of Doctorate of Philosophy, is entirely my own work, that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original and does not to the best of my knowledge breach any law of copyright, and has not been taken from the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. Signed: Míde Ní Shúilleabháin ID No.:56211156 Date: _______ i TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter I Myth in Modernity A Historiographic Project 24 Chapter II The Hidden Presence of the Sacred The Museum as Political Power in Struggles over Identity 56 Chapter III Nation as Novel The Role of Narrative Genre in Political Strategies of Identity 86 Chapter IV An End to the Hero’s Journey The Narrative Strategy of the Hero in the Story of the Nation 126 Chapter V The Artistic Visibility of Time Ritual Practice in Political Strategies of Identity (re)Production 162 Conclusion 182 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my supervisor Ken McDonagh, for his calm, thoughtful and insightful guidance. For allowing me to find my own way but always ensuring that it was in the right direction To advisor Karen Devine, for introducing structure to the woefully unstructured and for encouraging me to believe in myself when I thought I couldn’t. To my PhD colleagues, past and present, for the solidarity, the sympathy, the distraction, the motivation. For the stories and the laughter, the lunch hours, nights out, coffee breaks. To my friends, for being there even when I wasn’t. To my parents, for all that and much more. Buíochas ó chroí libh ar fad iii ABSTRACT Since his election in 2012 French president François Hollande has indulged in a predilection for a discursive politics of memory, structuring an ever-increasing proportion of his public addresses around physical sites of historical and cultural memory, thus intensifying a trend set by his presidential predecessors in the later decades of the twentieth century. This thesis explores this pattern of political instrumentalisation of monumental sites, identifying and analysing the particular physical and representative power of monumental sites as employed in political discursive strategies of identity. In my examination of these political discursive strategies of identity (re)production, in which I draw extensively on techniques offered by literary and narrative theory, especially M.M Bakhtin’s chronotope and Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism, I show the discursive tactics of President Hollande’s memorial excess to be in a tradition that is both timeless and, as a result of accelerating social and communication realities, in crisis: that is, the Western tradition of experiencing collective identity not only as narrative but also, more specifically, as myth. Myth as understood in this analysis is the myth of Greek epics, of Celtic traditions, of Christian dominance. A myth that forms both individual and collective identity by offering to its adherents stabilising explanations and meaningful experiences of time and space. Such myth is understood as always and inevitably operating as a triad: myth as narrative, ritual and hero. Should one of these interdependent components prove wanting, the myth will fail. My thesis begins by establishing the collective identity of the modern nation-state in this mythical tradition, identifying, as it does so, the manner in which the political myth of nation-state has adapted the balance of its narrative-ritual-hero triad to changing conceptions and experiences of space and time as provoked by developments in technologies of communication and social interaction. The subsequent narrative analysis of contemporary French political identity discourses allows me to identify the manner in which cultural and monumental sites are being employed in political efforts to mobilise the powers of ritual and hero without which the national narrative cannot aspire to mythical dominance. By analysing a tradition of museum politics, from the Louvre of the French Revolution to the recently-inaugurated National Museum of Immigration History, I isolate the strategies employed by political leaders in their (re)definition of national identity. Furthermore, in exploring contemporary attempts to evoke the mythical triad in cultural sites, I can identify the failings of the national model of collective identity in the twenty-first century context by contrasting the notions of ritual and heroism called upon by French leaders today through sites such as such as the Pantheon and the figure of Jeanne d’Arc with emerging experiences of lived identity provoked by the new temporal and spatial realities of cyberspace and the contestations around tradition social identity and leadership provided by increasing female political and social leadership and by the presence of previously marginalised social groups in contemporary collective narratives. iv INTRODUCTION Knowing what it is to be Modern TROUBLED BY BEING AND BELONGING There is that moment between night and day when the fear descends. When one knows oneself to be alone and in that moment of terrible clarity knows too what it is to be mortal. Not to be here/Not to be anywhere/And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says: No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.1 But day returns and the fear subsides. The soundless dark in which we sensed with mind, body and soul that which we think must always have been there has fled as light filtered in. “Work has to be done/Postmen like doctors go from house to house”. This is our cure: the rhythm of the day beating forward and bringing us with it. And maybe tomorrow we will sleep through the night. In his dawn terrors, Philip Larkin knew that there was no comfort in in the assertion that a rational being cannot fear a thing it will not feel. Such a statement presumes too much. It fails to ask what is it to be rational. Or what is it to feel. Several years ago I came across an article describing our inability to experience ‘wetness’ and explaining that, scientifically, we cannot feel directly what it is to be ‘wet’ but rather experience a combination of temperature and pressure enhanced by ‘perceptual learning’ (i.e. that we expect rain to be wet upon our skin).2 To feel ‘wet’ is, therefore, to experience a “perceptual illusion” (Filingeri et al., 2014). I found it a troubling thought and struggle with it still. Even if I now know that the rain I feel 1 All poetic quotations in this section are taken from Philip Larkin’s Aubade (1977) 2 I first came across an article on the fact that we do not feel ‘wetness’ many years ago in a National Geographic magazine, the year and issue number of which I can’t recall. However, a more recent exposition on the phenomenon is provided by Filingeri et al. (2014) 1 on my face, that the water that flows through my fingers, is a combination of temperature, pressure and prejudiced expectation rather than a discrete sensation of ‘wet’ I’m not sure I see how it matters. Is this particular combination of factors not a sensation in its own right? Is this not, therefore, a definition of wetness rather than a repudiation? Is what I feel less real because of the knowledge that enables it to be thus analysed and explained? Or is it not rather that the phenomenon of ‘wetness’ is real because I feel it as such? I feel the rain like a liquid on my skin. To claim something is ‘real’ because we feel it to be so can, of course, be irresponsible and even dangerous. I write this introduction in a year when a U.S. presidential election campaign has placed ‘feeling’ above fact and thus provided licence for the spreading and injurious falsehood and ignorance. However, in this thesis I argue also that to promote the totality of a ‘real’ that is independent of belief is equally, if not similarly, mistaken. There are truths that become so through belief, sometimes because the veracity of these truth claims can neither be confirmed nor disproved, because our sensations cannot always be broken down so neatly by a scientific journal article that explains our experience to be an illusion. Other times truths come about because our belief causes us to enact them into reality. When we become products of our beliefs, to deny the truth of our faith is to undermine the facts of our existence. And there is beauty in faith – the beauty in knowing the sensation on my skin to be elemental, a product of sea and sky. And there is comfort in faith; not only the musical brocade, before it became moth-eaten and when it still convinced us we would never die, but also the faith that draws us together in a common project. The sense of sharing in a community, of being with others ever when we are alone.

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