Errance: Wandering and Straying in 20Th and 21St Century

Home , Marguerite Duras

ERRANCE: WANDERING AND STRAYING IN 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY

FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE

ALLISON H. FONG

B.A., UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, 1999

M.A., COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 2002

D.E.A., UNIVERSITÉ PARIS 7 / DENIS DIDEROT, 2003

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN THE DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2012

iii

VITA

Allison Fong was born July 14, 1977 in Pontiac, Michigan. She grew up in the nearby

town of Waterford and later attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she

received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1999 with a major in French and teaching

certification in secondary education. In 2001, after two years of teaching in Michigan,

she commenced a two-year stay in Paris, France during which time she earned a Master

of Arts degree in French Cultural Studies from Columbia University in 2002, and a

Diplôme d’Études Approfondies at the Université de Paris 7/Denis Diderot in 2003.

Upon her return from Paris, she began doctoral studies at Brown University in

Providence, Rhode Island, in the department of French Studies where she undertook an investigation of wandering and straying in twentieth and twenty-first century French and

Francophone literature. She was awarded her Ph.D. in May 2012. At Brown, Allison taught beginning and intermediate French language courses and spent a year teaching

English in Dijon, France at the Université de Bourgogne. She has also taught French language and culture courses at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It takes a constellation of communities to give life to a dissertation, and thus, to colleagues, friends and family with whom I have shared conversations, coffee, writing woes and successes, I offer my sincere and heartfelt gratitude. I thank my committee members for being open to the merits of an unconventional project such as this study of errance. My advisor, Sanda Golopentia, has provided unfailing support and encouragement, both academically and personally since this project’s inception as the topic of the second preliminary examination. Our meetings always left me with a renewed sense of purpose for myself and my work, even in, especially in, the darkest, most directionless, of hours. Her patient guidance kept me, ironically, en route to errance. I regret that my conversations with Thangam Ravindranathan were not more frequent, for they have greatly impacted my reflections on errance and the way in which

I give them voice in the dissertation. She has been generous with her time and rigorous intellect. Her comments on an early draft were invaluable, to say the least. Carina

Yervasi has been an inspiration since my days at the University of Michigan; her course on Paris and modernity led me to a capitale chance encounter with Surrealism and the everyday, and her continued support and intellectual offerings over the years has been greatly appreciated. I thank her for coming (back) to this project as a reader.

I am grateful to the Department of French Studies and the Graduate School at Brown for their support and scholarly excellence. I thank the professors with whom I have studied and worked for sharing their critical analyses and pedagogical talents. I have gained

much as a teacher from Annie Wiart and Stéphanie Ravillon whose rigor, creativity and dedication never cease to amaze me. To my fellow graduate students, both within the department and without, I extend my immeasurable gratitude for your constant words of encouragement, for minutes and hours of intellectual exchange, and for your shared passion for poetry and teaching. I am particularly appreciative of Sharon, Pauline, Josh,

Lole, Emilie, Meadow, Jen, Stéphanie, Theresa, and Tony whose friendship has made of

Brown and Providence a wonderful place of community. The kindness, friendship, and academic encouragement of those associated with Reid Hall in Paris have been instrumental in my initial and continued interrogation of the ever-elusive errance. My

extended family, stretching from coast to coast, and passing through Waterford and Ann

Arbor, has been not only a pillar of support but also a constant inspiration, showing me

time and again what it means to be successful and never doubting my own ability to

succeed. I dedicate this dissertation to my parents whose life experiences and personal

philosophies make of them (unwitting) errant subjects; I thank them infinitely for always

encouraging me to wander far and wide, to make mistakes, and to stray from convention.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction Steps Not Lost ………………………………………………………………………... 1

Chapter One Surrealist Errance and the Modern Wanderer …………………………………… 14

Part I: Dialectics of Aragon’s Arcade in Le Paysan de Paris ………………..……… 14

The Arcade: Passage ……………………………………………………….… 17

New Order in the City: Aragon’s Rhetorics of Displacement………………… 28

Siren Sighting: Wandering, Seeing, and Dreaming …………………………... 34

Part II: Footfalls of Possibility in Breton’s Nadja ……………………………………. 41

The Footstep: A Dialectics ……………………………………………………. 41

“Tramer les lieux”: Dialectic of Presence and Absence, Familiar and Unfamiliar ………………………………………………………….……………………… 48

“Mes pas me portent”: Literal and Allegorical Movement …………………… 55

“Ces pas sont tout”: Conceptual Unchaining ………………….……………… 60

Errance and the Outsider – the Case of the âme errante ……………………... 65

Chapter Two Loss and Incomprehension: Errancy in Marguerite Duras’s Le Vice-consul and Emily L. ……………………………………………………….… 72

Part I: The Errant Subject in Marguerite Duras’s Le Vice-consul ……………….…….. 74

I: Elle marche: Movement of the Mendiante ……………………………………..…74

Loss and the Body: Abandon and Expulsion …………………………………... 78

Displacement and Dispossession: Getting Lost in Body and Mind ……………. 87

II. The Colonial Situation and Metaphysical Errancy………………………………. 95

Le Vice-consul: Transgression and Liminality ………………………………… 96

vii Another Kind of Otherness: Anne-Marie Stretter …………………………….. 107

Part II: Duras’s Emily L. ……………………………………………………………... 115

A Sea Voyage: Dialectics and Uncertainty …………………………………… 118

Innocence and Punishment: Resonances of Un-rooted-ness ...... ……...……… 122

Ambiguity and Narrative Speculation ………………………………………... 127

Couple/Individual ; Immensité/Intime ………………………………………… 131

“Le Défaut de cette perfection, le voyage” …………………………………… 135

Lost at Sea …………………………………………………………………….. 142

Chapter Three The Errant “I” : Negotiating and Narrating the Self in Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué and La Vie heureuse ..…………………………. 149

Part I: The Body as Site of Errancy in Garçon manqué ……………………………... 152

Narrative and Symbolic Instability:“Ne pas choisir c’est être dans l’errance”… 152

“Le danger est en nous” ……………………………………………………...… 165

“Vérifier”: The Body in Default ……………………………………………….. 168

“Porter une faute”: Carrying/Wearing Personal and Collective Failure ……….. 172

Disguise and Adaptation: Performance as Errancy .…...……………...………. 176

Part II: Out of Place: Nina Bouraoui’s La Vie heureuse ……………………………… 183

“Pas à sa place”: On the Compositional Level ……………………………….. 183

Structure of Chapters: Passages Saint-Malo – Zürich ……………………….. 183

Lack of Conventional Dialogue ………………………………………………. 186

Lack of Place – Thematics ……………………………………………………. 195

“Je marche” …………………………………………………………………… 198

“Je ne trouve pas ma place”: Lack of heterosexual desire ……………………. 203

viii Circulation and Substitution ………………………………………………….. 209

Invention : Coming into Being Out of Place …………………………………. 211

Fitting in: “Refaire la légende” ……………………………………………….. 214

By Way of Conclusion: The Medium of Errance ………………………………….. 220

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………. 225

ix 1

INTRODUCTION:

STEPS NOT LOST

L’errant récuse l’édit universel, généralisant, qui résumait le monde en une évidence transparente, lui prétendant un sens et une finalité présupposés. Il plonge aux opacités de la part du monde à quoi il accède. Édouard Glissant, La Poétique de la Relation

Un philosophe … doit oublier son savoir, rompre avec toutes ses habitudes de recherches philosophiques s’il veut étudier les problèmes posés par l’imagination poétique.

En poésie, le non-savoir est une condition première

Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace

Thus digression … is loiterature’s stock-in-trade, the secret both of its art – a realization of the poetics of pleasure – and of its critical impact, as the enactment of an epistemology of the unsystematic. (…) Delay and indirection – the phenomena of mediacy – become at once sources of pleasure and devices of provocation in a larger universe that seems committed to directness, speed, and immediacy… Ross Chambers, Loiterature

Understood most commonly as the physical act of roving, wandering, or meandering, a certain aimless “going,” the French term errance necessarily denotes as well “error,” to make a mistake, to be at fault, to go astray. Readily associated with two divergent traditions, that of the questing knight and that of the wandering Jew, errance finds its earliest and perhaps most emblematic literary represention in the epic voyages of

Odysseus. The fact that errance in literature has most often been addressed via the figure of the vagabond or the voyager – ancient, medieval, and modern alike – reflects the degree to which physical movement has been its hallmark characteristic. But errant

subjects do more than traverse long distances, veering off course and encountering

obstacles along the way. S/he not only confronts the unknown, but enters deep into this

murky territory wherein subjectivity itself is unsettled. In errance, subjectivity is not a

given, nor are comprehension or systems of order. Errance is a destabilization that

displaces and disorients. To erre is to enter into (the space of) negotiation and to dwell there, in this threshold space of passage. But this dwelling is not immobilization, for errance is a continual movement, a displacement of body and borders. And yet, the

enactment and experience of errance cannot be limited to its sole physical expression,

though this is its primordial embodiment : errance can take the form of mental

divagations, ethical interrogation, political contestation, and poetical equivocation. At

every point, errance is a negotiation of the self in/and the world : body as boundary,

narrative as place and act of unsettling: passage.

This dissertation is an interrogation of thematic and narrative manifestations of

errance in select 20th- and 21st-century French-language texts. Much more than a simple “going wrong” or “stepping out of line,” errance, I contend, is a negotiation of non-knowledge whose risk and promise is the plumbing of the opaque. While often conceived of as a mythico-romantic displacement taking the form of the quest and effectuated in the time-space of the absolute, errance is, in fact, a movement anchored in the everyday and that anchors its subject in errance as lived experience. Through an analysis of the subjective agency of certain characters, some of whom are also narrators, and the destabilizing effects of the narrative voice – polyphonic, unknowing, speculative

– this study complicates the tradition of errance as embodied by a “type,” be it the adventurous knight, the condemned sinner, the detoured voyager.

In its etymology the substantive errance dates to the 12th century, signifying

voyage or chemin. In its verbal form, errer comes from the Latin errare, “to go” or “to

go seeking adventure,” hence the designation of the knights errant of the Middle Ages.

In Old French, this verb signified simply, “voyager.” Errance as physical displacement thus became the dominant significance of this word. But not just any kind of movement, specifically the unspecified movement of “aller çà et là.” Used interchangeably with terms such as déambuler, divaguer, flâner, vagabonder, flotter, the verb errer presents a deliberate slowness, directionless, that nonetheless indicates a sense of progression, non- linear as it may be. “Wandering,” then, is one apt English translation for the French errance. At the same time, the French errer, from the Latin errare, also denotes “to be in error.” Whether to “err” in one’s calculations or in one’s moral certitude, he who errs wanders out of the tacitly agreed upon bounds that structure our relation to the world, be it cognitive, ethical, esthetic, or other, consequently straying into territory unmapped, unfamiliar, incognito. The Trésor de la langue française lists within the entry of

“errance” an Old French signification of “incertitude, defiance”; from the classical Latin, errantia, we understand “action de s’égarer”. In its very signification, then, errance figures itself the necessarily double movement of going forth and going astray, progress in time and space always already undermined by a disruptive movement, a dislocation within that echoes without. This movement away from the self traces at the same time the route back, and yet, as André Breton and Michel de Certeau poetically and phenomenologically attest, to retrace one’s steps is not to experience mimetically. Given the impossibility of passing again on precisely the same route, the point of arrival can never coincide exactly with itself.

The interpretation of the 18th- and 19th-century figures of the promeneur and the

flâneur, as seen in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Baudelaire, for

example, represent literary “types,” defined by discursive borders, which dissolve at the moment that their defining characteristics of identity no longer render them individual

(ipse) but assimilate them to the masses (idem). The “subjectivity of the “man of the crowd,” anonymous and lost in a sea of people, is determined on the outside. Codes of civility and the “science” of physiognomy translate the extent to which these figures manifest an ontology separated from experience. Wandering into the 20th-century, the errant subject actively constructs his/her being through a necessarily futile negotiation of subjective agency. Part search, part dislocation and disorientation, errance is a

movement to and dwelling at the limit of loss of self. This dis-placement is imagined as a

negotiation of not-knowing for three principal reasons: firstly, as an epistemological

movement, this wandering and straying is necessarily a movement away from the

territory of the known into spatial and cognitive territory that has not yet been figured;

secondly, as movement into the Possible or into Nothingness, like the movement into

birth or death, errance cannot be communicated and thus not known by the collective;

and thirdly, to walk this threshold line of the limit requires a not-knowing of the gravity

of the movement, or at least a forgetting or willed ignorance, which are indeed kinds of

non-knowledge.

There exists virtually no body of criticism that takes errance as its object of study.

To this general rule, there is, to be sure, one major exception, the work of Édouard

Glissant, poet, theorist, scholar, novelist, whose theoretical Poétique de la Relation

proposes the errant as precisely the no-longer voyager-explorer-conquerer who “cherche

à connaître la totalité du monde et sait déjà qu’il ne l’accomplira jamais – et qu’en cela

réside la beauté menacée du monde” (33). Glissant’s “pensée de l’errance,” is a poetics

that speaks itself through the Relation, which is the ideal point of arrival of this the

movement of knowing, not discovering, on the scale of the entire Earth (39). If the

opacity and totality of this theory resonates with my instinctive interpretation of errance,

it is at the same time, this which distances my conceptualizations of errance from his.

For, while I draw from Glissant’s work, articulating errance as a negotiation of the not-

known that sends l’errant headlong into a non-traditional configuration of knowledge,

notably as relation with the other, I maintain that errance must be experienced on the

level of the body and the everyday.

It is thus that I cull much insight from criticism that engages with the broad,

interdisciplinary field of ‘everyday life studies.’ This distinctly 20th-century set of

preoccupations manifests as a multifaceted-inquiry encountering on the same terrain

feminist, sociological, semiotic, and poetic, and various other theoretical approaches.1 In

the pages that follow, I will evoke the important contours of the critical landscape

traversed in this study of errancy. But first I must make a brief detour to cite Ross

Chambers’s rich investigation into “loiterature,” which is the title of his book, that is to

say those texts that he deems to be “loiterly literature.” According to Chambers,

literature that goes nowhere and does nothing, loiters, as does an out-of-work fellow on the street corner, whose very idleness poses a threat to the social order that champions productivity, speed, and directness. In Chambers’s analysis are echoes of my interest in space and circulation and the way in which a text means through its movement, or, as

1 In The Everyday Life Reader, for example, are assembled texts by Betty Friedan, Georg Simmel, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin. Ed. Ben Highmore. London: Routledge, 2002.

6 with loiterature, through its pauses and gaps. Furthermore, in taking a cultural studies approach to the examination of literature, Chambers aligns poetics and politics, showing that “pleasure” and “critique” are not mutually exclusive and that acts of resistance, like dis-ordering, can be participate in an economy of (non-)knowledge at the same time that they serve as social criticism. In this study I aim to demonstrate, through close readings of the thematics of errancy and its narrative manifestations, that errance enacts in the world a productive straying, a critical wandering.

The texts under consideration and my readings of them are products of modernity, that is to say, that engage with problematics of ambiguity and ambivalence. Starting with an interrogation of two surrealist works dating to the 1920s by Louis Aragon and André

Breton, I then move into an analysis of two novels by Marguerite Duras and finish with an examination of two narratives by Nina Bouraoui. Although this disparate corpus of texts may seem a selection unable to communicate, these writings are very much in dialogue with one another, as I aim to show. As even a superficial appreciation of this choice reveals, it is evident that the authors concerned are all in some way actors of errancy themselves. Through the refusal of the reign of logic and the valorization of the imagination, the Surrealists subverted literary and aesthetic traditions and sought to break with the machine of bourgeois capitalism. Their double cry of “change life” and

“transform the world,” recuperated from the poet Arthur Rimbaud and the economist- philosopher Karl Marx, respectively, expresses the surrealist belief that poetry is not a place into which to escape but a way of intervention in life. Marguerite Duras is a writer who has been classed, by critics and contemporaries alike, among the members of the literary movements of the nouveau roman and the roman expérimental, and yet, she

maintains for herself a position as a writer unattached to any certain “group” or “school”.

Moreover, her activity, from the middle to the end of the 20th-century, in a variety of

creative domains – fiction, theater, film, journalism – reflects the generic ambiguity of

her writings themselves and speaks to the manifestly errant quality of her work. Like

that of Duras, the writing of Nina Bouraoui also resists generic classification – from the

novelistic to the biographic – and defies conventions of syntax and narration. Bouraoui’s

life experiences meld into the pages of her fiction as she navigates questions of bi- culturality and queer sexuality.

If the texts studied in this dissertation thus present themselves as a more coherent ensemble than may appear at first glance, the inner landscape of each pairing of texts

(and, certainly, each text on its own), remains nonetheless marked by distinct features, namely on the levels of thematics and narration. In view of this, my readings cross over varied theoretical and conceptual terrain. Sigmund Freud’s notion of the “uncanny” as that which is strange yet familiar shall be of recurrent consideration informing in particular my analysis of Aragon and Breton in the first chapter. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was of great interest to the Surrealists, notably in their experimentation with

“automatic writing” which can be said to translate to the “automatic” movement of wandering. The trope of “haunting” in Breton and Aragon also benefits from a Freudian consideration, yet with respect to the figure of the “uncanny,” I stray from the psychoanalytic interpretation of the “return of the repressed,” preferring instead to consider it as the figuration of the dialectical tension at work in the navigation of the modern city and in the negotiation of a modern subjectivity. This specific interpretation is read in concert with Michel de Certeau’s Freudian appreciation of the city in its

“inquiétante familiarité” (146). The “unheimlich” as “unhomely” makes its appearance

in my discussion of Duras and the way in which her female errant characters are

‘homeless’ many times over.

While Homi Bhabha expressly distinguishes “homeless” from “unhomely,” my

use of the term does coincide with his evocation of the displacement and disorientation

experienced by the “unhomed” individual. Bhabha’s complication of “the location of

culture” informs my reading of Nina Bouraoui’s double negotiation of her French and

Algerian heritage and her gender identity. Bhabha’s notion of the ‘beyond’ figures well

my conception of errance as a place of passage through invention as intervention in the

moment of the present. However, I have, in large part, chosen to leave aside the temporal

aspect of Bhabha’s argument as represented in the “time-lag.” For, if my argument does construct errance as a conceptually a-temporal movement, in practice, it cannot be located outside of time, for errance nonetheless does inscribe itself on the body and on the ground in the fleeting moment of the present, as effected through the footsteps of the wanderer. De Certeau’s “rhetoric of walking” allows for an (anachronistic) reading of the ways in which Breton and Aragon “plot” against the order of the city at the very same time that they are “plotting” an intimate urban geography of the coordinates of the self through the “plodding” steps that take them through the streets and the arcade.

The arcade, which finds its French enunciation as “le passage,” shall be the first place to give us pause in our analytical wanderings. And it shall be this edifice, erected by Aragon in a lyric prose that serves indeed as figure of conceptual mediation. We might liken it to a covered bridge: at once interior and exterior, joining both sides of the river and yet separate from them, suspended in the space above and below. I take my cue

9 from Walter Benjamin in reading the arcade as the embodiment of modernity in its ambiguity. This threshold space saw the meeting of innovation and tradition, public and private, commerce and leisure. Significantly, the dual sense of the term “passage,” as the action of moving across or through and the place in which this happens, translates the figure of errance. This movement is for me dialectical and yet non-synthetic ; it is a negotiation that is also a navigation : a moving between that is also a moving across, a moving forth. If I am at times tempted to read errance as a utopian experience-space of displacement cloaked solely in the finery of Possibility, as perhaps the Surrealists might wont, that would be to do a disservice to writers such as Duras under whose pen the errant subject endures the corporeal and mental ravages wrought by the self’s displacement. Without wanting to accord a value to different movements of errance, nor to configure them in a Hegelian dialectic amongst themselves, I contend that of the three subsets of texts studied in this dissertation, it is Nina Bouraoui’s that does take us into the fullest experience of errance, on the level of the narration and thematics, and by the sobriety of the risk run in the continual negotiation of the self : “Ne pas choisir c’est être dans l’errance” (Garçon manqué 33).

Each chapter is comprised of two parts that work in dialogue to think through certain aspects of errancy. Chapter 1 investigates the surrealist errance of Aragon’s Le

Paysan de Paris (1926) and André Breton’s Nadja (1928). In Chapter 2, I consider

Marguerite Duras’s thematic and narrative straying in Le Vice-consul (1966) and Emily L.

(1987). Chapter 3 is a reading of Nina Bouraoui’s works Garçon manqué (2000) and La

Vie heureuse (2002).

Chapter 1 explores errance and subjectivity as it relates to the city in Le Paysan de Paris and Nadja. The city as site of quest and dissolution through aimless wandering

– quest for the marvelous, dissolution of boundaries (of dream and reality, for example) – is one main idea orienting the Surrealists’ vision of the city. Key principles such as the primacy of imagination, the faulty division of reality and irreality, and the reversal of hierarchies, inform the poetics and politics of errancy offered in these texts. Aragon and

Breton diverge in their rhetorical means and aims such that their pairing articulates two of the most strident veins of Surrealism that endure to this day. One of the major lines of inquiry orienting the first chapter is a consideration of Michel de Certeau’s assertion

“marcher, c’est manquer de lieu,” and its implications for the surrealist practice of urban errance. Freud’s notion of the “uncanny” will inform my interrogation of the strange and

the familiar with respect to encounters with and negotiations of the everyday, modernity,

and the self.

The risk and promise at stake in the subject’s experience of the modern is most

fully represented in Aragon by the vertige, what I read as a 20th century surrealist

translation of Baudelaire’s ivresse. Aragon’s poetics as critique is not simply a negative

evaluation of these systems that orient an unquestioning understanding of the world, it is

also a productive interrogation of subjectivity and perception resulting in an

epistemology of not-knowing. André Breton’s Nadja proposes errant footsteps as a

metaphorical and literal straying that shall be our only path to freedom. While a general

appreciation of surrealist errance follows the model of the knight errant, Breton’s

straying encounters the edge of the known psychic territory incarnated in the character of

Nadja, “l’âme errante.” If this mad figure represents the “limit point” of surrealist

errancy, as Breton calls it, we must consider carefully the danger posed by losing oneself.

Marguerite Duras’s errance manifests as a primarily geographic displacement. In

Chapter Two, my analysis of Le Vice-consul and Emily L. proposes a configuration of errance as stemming from and engendering loss, a loss that originates in “error.” Loss of self translates a geographic disorientation such that wanderer and the world lose their distinguishing limits and the separation between self and other is blurred. Displacement

in unbounded space leads to the erosion of the physical being: wandering is the

phenomenological experience of the depth of space as a plunging into loss, notably the

loss of subjectivity. In Duras’s texts, a poetics and politics of errancy manifests as dislocation in step with loss. The errant characters and the texts themselves negotiate disorientation and non-knowledge as a paradoxical articulation of subjective agency.

These texts operate from an always already unsettled position. Duras is known for writing that refuses comprehension within the diegesis and extends out to the reader,

effecting on both levels an inevitable decomposition. I contend that narrative

manifestations of instability – multiple narrative voices, interweaving of inner-narratives, syntactic ambiguity and ambivalence – represent a narrative errance that works actively to inhibit fixed and complete understanding in Duras’s work.

The first part of Chapter 2 proposes in Le Vice-consul, a reading of the beggar

woman’s position of “placelessness” as “homelessness,” including a dis-placement from/by her own body. This figuration of errance unsettles the body and/as boundary.

Through this character, we will engage with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that the

“[lived body] is our general medium for having a world” (Casey 229) and that “l’être n’a

de sens que par son orientation” (Phénomenologie de la perception 290). The second part of Chapter 2 reads the multiple losses suffered by the title character of Emily L. as a translation of incomprehension as cause and effect of errance. Grieving the loss of a singular poem destroyed by her husband, fearful and ignorant in the face of his wife’s poetic genius, Emily L. is complicit in this annihilation of her writerly self by the other, choosing not to write again and to give herself over to a life of seafaring errance.

If in the move from surrealist errance to Durassian dis-place-ment questions of space radiate outward from the modern city into the immensity of the sea and the Asian continent, they also bring the wanderer into a more intimate, anguished negotiation of the self. The movement of/into not-knowing continues to traverse the bounds separating theme and narration: the character’s experience of errance is to a certain extent subject to the negotiation of the narrative voice. In Chapter 3, this interweaving of subjectivity and voice finds full form in the writings of Nina Bouraoui. Both Garçon manqué and La Vie heureuse dispense with traditional narrative form, privileging instead incorporation of the

“parole d’autrui” into the “parole persuasive interne,” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation, such that the errant narrative voice as performance of the negotiation of self and/as other is the very voie d’errance. Bouraoui’s refusal of enfermement within the bounds of narrative, generic, and syntactic convention translate her unfailing and forceful deferral of the naming of desire and the assigning of a stable sign that would identify the ipse, render it recognizable, thus fixing it through the familiarity of the idem. To remain always in a state of dialectic negotiation that functions through the narrative voice and the performance of gender errance, is Bouraoui’s “ruse” operating in the unheimlich –

heimlich tension. As is the case for Duras, the female body is here the location of an illusory original errancy, site of the double inscription of physical and ethical straying.

Walking as experienced and performed, to act and be acted upon at the same time,

the double movement of being in the world, offers an apt point of departure for my

investigation of errance. As corporeal manifestation of errance, walking is enacted as wandering. To rephrase the axiom, “All who wander are not lost,” I assert that all who wander do not erre. For there is wandering, and then there is erring, a displacement in

space that is also an intellectual or narrative straying: under the destabilizing rhythm of

one’s own footsteps, the 21st-century errant subject makes her way, un-knowing, in

negotiation.

CHAPTER ONE:

SURREALIST ERRANCE AND THE MODERN WANDERER

PART I:

DIALECTICS OF ARAGON’S ARCADE IN LE PAYSAN DE PARIS

Je ne veux plus me retenir des erreurs de mes doigts, des erreurs de mes yeux. Je sais maintenant qu’elles ne sont pas que des pièges grossiers, mais de curieux chemins vers un but que rien ne peut me révéler, qu’elles. A toute erreur des sens correspondent d’étranges fleurs de la raison.

Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris

In the opening section of Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, the reader is initiated into

the text by way of a critique of certainty and error and their correspondents: objectivity,

reason, sensation, and imagination. In this “Préface à une mythologie moderne,” Aragon plays the role of anti-philosopher, disputing the possibility of ever arriving at a set of certitudes upon which to build a secure set of theories, beliefs, notions: “L’objectivité de la certitude, voilà de quoi l’on querellait sans difficultés: la réalité de la certitude, personne n’y avait songé.” Adopting the tone and rhetorical methods of a logician,

Aragon points to the fact that philosophers and, accordingly, scientists, work from a negative model, constructing their argument as refutation of another’s postulate because said postulate is wrong. Taking particular issue with Descartes in the Préface (Kant and

Hegel are critiqued at later moments), Aragon decries the “fameuse doctrine cartésienne de l’évidence” as an illusion whose far-reaching destruction is still being felt into the early 20th century (10). Aragon sets up a false dichotomy between certitude and error

and, by extension, reality and error, in order to discredit this mode of thinking. Reason

and sensation are also pitted against one another as the only two means of analysis which

lead to knowledge, one of which must be more useful, leading to more precise and

correct results: “Cependant la connaissance qui vient de la raison peut-elle un instant

s’opposer à la connaissance sensible?” (13), asks Aragon before continuing on to assert that man has been taught to doubt his senses and to prefer logic as the superior form of understanding. But the writer refutes his own arguments with conviction by way of what almost seems a non sequitur: “Et pourtant, c’est toujours l’imagination seule qui agit.

Rien ne peut m’assurer de la réalité, rien ne peut m’assurer que je ne la fonde sur un délire d’interprétation, ni la rigueur d’une logique ni la force d’une sensation” (14).

If “error” is has long been considered a dirty word,2 one against which the

domains of philosophy and science define themselves, this is not at all the case for

Aragon. We would expect nothing less from one of the founders of the surrealist

movement. After all, in Le Manifeste du Surréalisme Breton writes, “Nous vivons encore

sous le règne de la logique…. Sous couleur de civilisation, sous prétexte de progrès, on

est parvenu à bannir de l’esprit tout ce qui se peut taxer à tort ou à raison de superstition,

de chimère; à proscrire tout mode de recherche de la vérité qui n’est pas conforme à

l’usage” (20-21). While Aragon, like Breton and his surrealist brethren, argues the merits

of that which has traditionally been despised, sometimes doing so in a gratuitous fashion,

his argument in favor of error is a subtle and complex enunciation of the surrendering of knowledge on the part of the subject. This occurs through a refutation and subsequent dismissal of the philosophic and scientific methods by which the world is assigned meaning. Assuming the role of “anti-philosopher” (though in quite a different manner

2 For a recent pop cultural study of the contemporary mania over (not) being in error, see Kathryn Schulz’s recent book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, New York: Ecco (HarperCollins), 2010.

than that of Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaïsm, who, in his negative practices aimed

at destroying the categories of Art and Poetry, was known as the Anti-Philosopher),

Aragon works rhetorically and poetically to bring the subject to an understanding of modern life as the experience of not-knowing.

In spite of these aims, Aragon lives not outside of reality; in fact, he grounds his narrative in the everyday experience of his present-day Paris, constructing the text in step with his wandering in the Passage de l’Opéra. The arcade, as a microcosm of the modern city, is a place of errancy. But it also functions to engender particular modes of straying which translate a certain relationship with knowledge. The confrontation with error functions as part of a discourse on the futility of controlled thought, which is at the same time praise for imagination. Knowledge should not be the domain of a few, nor should its function be dictatorial. In what follows, we shall see how Aragon’s text, in its style and content – verbal collage, playlets, fanciful descriptions of the arcade’s stores, inhabitants, and architecture, poetic meditations on the workings of contemporary culture

– works to unsettle the seat of knowledge and its absolute reign, including word play that

serves to confuse reasoning and the senses. Besides such commentary, whether

attestitory or illustrative, we find dialectical negotiation in Aragon working as a

prominent means of calling into question our understanding of the order of things.

Aragon’s dialectics thwarts the Hegelian model of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, preferring

instead not a tidy resolution but multiple ways of seeing that muddle categories and blur

distinctions.

If we qualify this place of questioning that yields no answers as uncanny and

liminal, we can better read the importance of the passage as a centerpiece of Aragon’s

text, as that which interested Walter Benjamin, and as the first figure in our study of errancy. From the confines of the arcade to the streets of Paris at large, we will trace the movements of our surrealist narrators through the constellation of their footsteps and their words.

The Arcade: Passage

The city is a site of possibility for the Surrealist wanderer, ever-ready to encounter

the unknown and unexpected. If the forest used to be the locus of the unknown,

representing the risk and promise of adventure for the knight errant and others who dared

enter, the city has become the new territory ripe for exploration. Both enchanted and

foreboding, the city as modern forest offers an opening onto the power and possibility of

chance encounters, reverie, and poetry. A micro-city, the Parisian arcade, le passage, holds an inherently dialectical potential. It comes as no surprise that Aragon chooses to set the first half of his récit in the Passage de l’Opéra. The eponymous first main section of Le Paysan de Paris, is at once material and metaphysical space explored by the

narrator-flâneur. The choice of setting is utterly fitting for the project Aragon proposes

to undertake in this text as stated in the title to his preface: to identify or create a “modern

mythology.” A distinctly urban space, the arcade embodies modernity, defined as it is by

transience and the “double postulate” Baudelaire’s of the modern as the coexistence of

different without the need for resolution.

Literally a covered passageway between streets, the arcade confuses interior and

exterior as the pedestrian travels inside the edifice, protected from the elements, yet

remains on a sort of street, outside the shops and cafés, whose interior décor and

18 animation are tucked away behind doors and windows. The confusion extends to the domains of public and private, leisure and business, luxurious and quotidian as hotels, boarding houses, and brothels are incorporated into these proto-shopping malls. This protected indoor space beckons the promeneur for a safe and leisurely stroll. As

Benjamin and others note, the 19th century pedestrian faced constant danger from the traffic of horse-drawn carriages and carts whizzing about. Besides traffic laws and signs, the streets lacked designated pedestrian walkways and were difficult to navigate, often muddy and in disrepair. These spaces, furthermore, as open streets transformed into covered galleries of commerce, consumption, and spectacle, represent much more than architectural and commercial innovation; their physical liminality is telling of an in- between quality or status associated with modernity. The arcades, with their vaulted glass ceilings and ironwork, represent new technologies and artistic mastery; aesthetics meets everyday use and capitalism speaks to the senses. In the 1939 version of his exposé “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century,” Benjamin reads the arcades as the “street- galleries” proposed by Charles Fourier and states that they are “the ideal backdrop for the flâneur” (The Arcades Project 17). Shop windows with commodities purposefully displayed represent a kind of scenery, one made to strike the flâneur’s fancy, to elicit flights of fancy.

Aragon’s text is a guide to the ways in which the arcade is the site par excellence for the encounter of “contraires mêlés” (Le Paysan de Paris 15). The dazzling effect of fabrics, fashion accessories and philately on display is juxtaposed with the strange and disquieting quality of certain objects and places such as the medical supply store whose shop windows offer an inordinate variety of hernia bandages, syringes, test tubes, and

belts, a “hétéroclite commerce,” “ce bazaar de bizarreries” (123-124). Indeed it is such juxtaposition of two terms which come together on their own, upon which centers much of Surrealist thought and activity. In André Breton’s words, “C’est du rapprochement en quelque sorte fortuit des deux termes qu’a jailli une lumière particulière, lumière de l’image, à laquelle nous nous montrons infiniment sensibles. (…) On peut même dire que les images apparaissent, dans cette course vertigineuse, comme les seuls guidons de l’esprit. L’esprit se convainc peu à peu de la réalité suprême de ces images” (Le

Manifeste du surréalisme 46). As a function of the ambiguity inherent in the structure and use of the arcades, the dialogue between disparate elements like light and dark, death and love, and the marvelous and the base, makes of this particular urban space a harbor of the in-between. In Aragon’s dialectics, elements are considered in their relationship, negotiating their value with respect to one another, never mutually exclusive or fully extricable one from the other. Like reason and sensation, the binaries of light and dark, truth and error, we are told, work in this same way, one term drawing meaning from and lending meaning to the other. Instead of accepting the paradigm of a dichotomous cleavage, Aragon puts the elements into communication: “La lumière ne se comprend que par l’ombre, et la vérité suppose l’erreur. Ce sont ces contraires mêlés qui peuplent notre vie, qui lui donnent la saveur et l’enivrement. Nous n’existons qu’en fonction de ce conflit, dans la zone où se heurtent le blanc et le noir. Et que m’importe le blanc ou le noir? Ils sont du domaine de la mort” (Le Paysan de Paris 15).

We will consider the arcade itself, and Aragon’s text by the same name, as said

“zone” of “contraires mêlés” where this mixing occurs in the form of juxtaposition and negotiation. The passage itself sets up this dialectics, announcing a multiplicity and

20 ambiguity in its very name. “Passage”: an alleyway, a corridor, a space designated for transit; also the time in which this movement occurs and the very movement itself performed. Aragon muses over the nomenclature and function of these structures that integrated themselves into the Parisian cityscape in the middle of the 19th century: “… ces sortes de galeries couvertes qui sont nombreuses à Paris aux alentours des grands boulevards et que l’on nomme d’une façon troublante des passages, comme si dans ces couloirs dérobés au jour, il n’était permis à personne de s’arrêter plus d’un instant” (21).

The transitory status of the arcade is established from the beginning of the text with

Aragon’s reflection on this space and its signification, in terms of the pragmatic and the symbolic. This transience speaks for itself, or rather speaks itself, its usage and its meaning, in its name. We could not read the passage as anything but an in-between space, a “practiced place” (in Michel de Certeau’s terms) of circulation – human traffic and material goods pass through the covered streets, move into and out of shops.

The passages are deemed by Benjamin to be examples of “phantasmagoria,” a term evoking a rapid and constant change and transformation of elements or images, such as those encountered in a dream state or hallucination. The intoxicating modernity of which Baudelaire speaks manifests itself in the arcades. Goods displayed in store windows have the effect of a disorienting parade of objects; clients become participant- spectators, amazed and intrigued by the merchandise before them as they wander in this dizzying dream site. In his essay “Dialectics at a Standstill” illuminating Benjamin’s thought in The Arcades Project, Rolf Tiedemann explains this term: “Phantasmagoria: a

Blendwerk, a deceptive image designed to dazzle, is already the commodity itself, in which the exchange value or value-form hides the use value” (The Arcades Project 938).

According to Tiedemann, Benjamin’s phantasmagoria was an interpretation of the commodity fetishism of Marx that deformed it in its move from an economic application to a broader cultural one.

In the phantasmagoric passage, what appears to be there, what is hidden, and what does or does not exist on a material level are muddled; the appearance of what is not really there puts notions of the real and the unreal into question, reconfiguring them with respect to presence and absence. Loosened from the fixity of the real, the appearance of a personage or object due to altered mental or physiological faculties or to certain optical effects creates presence in absence. There is much play between light and dark in “Le

Passage de l’Opéra” and in all of Le Paysan de Paris for that matter. In his initial description of the arcade, Aragon describes the light in terms of its strangeness, its sinister quality, as a “lumière moderne de l’insolite” and “lueur glauque, en quelque manière abyssale” (20-21). Some pages later Aragon returns to his characterization of the arcade as macabre, this “grand cercueil de verre” whose light changes from “la clarté de sépulcre à l’ombre de la volupté,” and reminds us that we are playing the “double jeu de l’amour et de la mort” (44). In her study of Le Paysan de Paris, Yvette Gindine considers the dialectic between light and dark as that which transfigures ordinary places.

Hats in a shop window can take on an animated air, simply “à la faveur d’un éclairage propice,” transforming into creatures playful or savage. In this way, the “pénombre protectrice” serves in particular to liberate “l’imagination de l’emprise du réel” (Gindine

33). The effects rendered by the play of light fall squarely into the domain of the surreal: what is seen and felt results, on the one hand, from fortuitous chance and, on the other, from a somewhat concentrated effort to free the imagination. Benjamin’s

22 phantasmagoria as it applies to the arcades then works through all the meanings of this term, from optical illusion created by play of light to ghostly visions or apparitions.

For Aragon, the dialectic between light and dark, as a metaphoric negotiation and as it manifests literally in the form of shadows cast and perception distorted, translates the liminal status of the arcade. The transient quality, however, is not merely a product of poor lighting but also of the arcade’s dilapidated state and disuse. Dating to 1822

(with most arcades being built between the 1820s and 1870s), the Passage de l’Opéra has already known a century of shop keepers and clients, passers-through, and loiterers by the time Aragon writes his text.3 Contributing to a much greater extent, however, to the arcade’s haunting and macabre quality is its particular transitory situation at the time of the text’s initial publication in 1924: the Passage de l’Opéra is slated for demolition. One might argue, as does Robin Walz, that it is only for this reason that Aragon chooses to write about the Passage de l’Opéra. Walz claims that through a preemptive, false nostalgia for a little-known and even less-cared-for site in Paris, Aragon exercises a certain “insolence” characteristic of the Surrealists (Walz 26). Benjamin, whose own work on the arcades was influence by Aragon’s rendering of the arcade, saw it as a space of the “outmoded,”4 a quality championed by the Surrealists as having the power to reverse hierarchical orderings. Its near-obscurity coupled with its imminent demise is that which, ironically, renders apparent the significance of the arcade. Aragon writes:

3 Which appeared in installments in the Revue Européenne between June and September 1924, before being published in its entirety by Gallimard in 1926 accompanied by the three other texts that compose Le Paysan de Paris in its present form. For a concise genesis of the text, see Simon Watson Taylor’s introduction to his English-language translation Paris Peasant, Boston: Exact Change, 1994.

4 Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill”; Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution; Natalya Lusty, “Surrealism’s Banging Door,” Textual Practice, 17(2), 2003, 335-356.

… ces aquariums humains déjà morts à leur vie primitive, et qui méritent pourtant d’être regardés comme les recéleurs de plusieurs mythes modernes, car c’est aujourd’hui seulement que la pioche les menace, qu’ils sont effectivement devenus les sanctuaires d’un culte de l’éphémère, qu’ils sont devenus le paysage fantomatique des plaisirs et des professions maudites, incompréhensibles hier et que demain ne connaîtra jamais. (21)

This textual moment merits our attention for numerous reasons, not least of all because it articulates the dialectical potential represented in the figure of the arcade. On a rhetorical level, Aragon mixes the language of the eternal and the ephemeral, primitive and modern, past and future, the sacred and the profane, hidden and visible. He effectuates a linguistic passage between these terms, moving in both directions: the arcade as a place of man is transformed into a place of myth; myths as enduring and universal elements structuring culture, yet certain ones nonetheless face extinction; the ephemeral, which we could read as the everyday, as the profane, has a religious quality to it here. The communication between terms and conceptual categories establishes them within a dialectical relationship. In a view of the dialectic inspired by Henri Lefebvre as the “movement of thought” wherein “every truth is partial and relative” (Shields 36) – an echo of Aragon’s “la lumière ne se comprend que par l’ombre et la vérité suppose l’erreur” – dialectical negotiation leads into the realm of ambiguity rather than resulting in Hegel’s synthesis of thesis and antithesis in the supreme idea of a higher order. In this way, the encounter of competing terms presupposes a dialectical negotiation as a means of overcoming the state of discordance between them. Each moment of negotiation is a rupture with the last, a renegotiation of the terms in the relationship. But there exists no visible exit within this schema of rupture as continuity. While the Hegelian possibility of transcending duality persists like a vanishing point on the horizon, Aragon does not need an exit. He exists in the tumult of his words and images, and it is here that he finds the

24 possibility for exit (which exists only as an ideal), through the unsettling of language and habitual manners of seeing (in Sheringham’s terms). The exit is internal, must be lived by the subject through his straying against reason and logic, straying into the poorly lit zones of muddled contraries, zones in which we risk encountering death.

This dialectic procedure employed by Aragon is often seen as a pervading aspect of Le Paysan de Paris, as much theme as function wherein Aragon negotiates sets of supposed binary oppositions or otherwise competing elements. The dualities abound and cannot be limited in scope, for this “double register,” as Gindine calls it, works at once on the levels of concept, sensation, and narration. The exploration of dualities is precisely that which permits the surreal to be apprehended at the moment that two domains merge.

Gindine writes: “[P]our arriver à cette position limite, il faut avoir exploré le double registre du blanc et du noir, constaté le réel et plongé dans l’imaginaire…. De cette obligation résulte l’alternance du rapport objectif et de l’envolée lyrique, de l’exposé descriptif et du jeu fantaisiste” (34-35). Aragon sets up the importance of this double register, this dialectic, from the very beginning, “Chaque jour se modifie le sentiment moderne de l’existence. Une mythologie se noue et se dénoue. C’est une science de la vie qui n’appartient qu’à ceux qui n’en ont point l’expérience. C’est une science vivante qui s’engendre et se fait suicide” (Le Paysan de Paris 15-16) ; as well, speaking of the regular female customers in the arcade cafés, “Tapisserie humaine et mobile, qui s’effiloche et se répare. (…) Dans tout ce qui est bas, il y a quelque chose de merveilleux qui me dispose au plaisir. Avec ces dames, il s’y mêle un certain goût du danger : … tout en elles, en même temps, me montre l’abîme et me donne le vertige…” (48-49). Terms

25 and movements, like people and ideas, ebb and flow, make their va-et-vient as a manner of construction in Aragon’s text and his subjective experience of modernity.

In its structure, the physical edifice of the arcade is an enclosed space that remains nonetheless open on either end, allowing for safe and pleasant passage between two streets. (The Passage de l’Opéra, furthermore, is constructed of two wings, the Galerie du Baromètre to the west and the Galerie du Thermomètre to the east, joined in the middle.) The passage is a dialectical structure, and like the ambiguity it engenders, it is an opening unto possibility and not a closed circuit. And yet, if we stay in the passage, in this moment, movement of dialectics, of wandering, if we do not stray from its confines, what becomes of the unused street opening at either end? And what becomes of the process of dialectical negotiation itself? We have continual negotiation between two sides, dialectics as movement across a bridge, wherein the traversing always yields a different experience. And yet, can we say that the process of continual dialectical exchange does indeed offer access to a sort of footbridge by which to exit the larger bridge? Can we stray from the bridge and remain in tact? Or perhaps straying as freefall would be a suitable outcome? Aragon does not need an exit; for, there can be no resolution within reality, reality itself being a term and concept in need of interrogation through just such negotiation. In this way, the arcade as not able to be understood in and for the past, and not known (or rather experienced, a category incorporating both knowledge and understanding and perhaps a more apt translation for the French connaître, or the Erfahrung privileged by Benjamin) by future generations, exists as an eternal present, a temporal location almost outside of time.

In the threshold zone as phantasmagoria we read this presence-as-absence of knowledge, this murky blankness as a terrain ready for the stories and images that the narrator is preparing to produce for his readers. The passage lends itself readily to this interpretation, in both its architectural form and its dialectic function. Evacuated of any and all previous content, the empty space of the Passage de l’Opéra – as material site and blank page – is now ready for the inscription of new myths performed dually by the wandering narrator and accompanying reader. Indeed, the present can only be made to last through the written word, its presence as both the in-between and absence. But

Aragon’s modern myth is also the anti-myth, breaking down the power and dominance held in the universal and the sacred by favoring fragmentation and human temporality over the eternal time of traditional religion or mythology.

It is clear to see why Benjamin is interested in Aragon’s arcade, for it illustrates the workings of Benjamin’s dialectic and his conception of historical materialism.

According to Tiedemann, this dialectic ran contrary to the Marxist version, aiming “to halt the flow of the movement [of developed social form], to grasp each becoming as being” (943). Benjamin’s dialectic is specifically configured as “dialectics at a standstill”

(to which Tiedemann’s analysis refers), in which time has stopped as in a utopia or dream image. While I read in dialectics a continual movement of negotiation instead of a standstill, I agree with Benjamin’s insistence on ambiguity as the manifest result of the process. His dialectical thinking involves “not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well” (Bejamin in Illuminations, as quoted by Tiedemann in “Dialectics at a

Standstill”). If we understand the arcade, as described earlier by Aragon – “paysage fantomatique,” “sanctuaire d’un culture de l’éphémère ” – to represent a zone of

27 liminality, Benjamin takes this one step further, or rather, diverges in his understanding, conceiving it not as an in-between (on a horizontal level) but rather as an inner zone or an all together separate entity existing outside:

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. (…) Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. (Benjamin quoted by Tiedemann in “Dialectics at a Standstill,” The Arcades Project 943)

We read Aragon’s “aujourd’hui” as Benjamin’s arrested thought, his dialectics at a standstill, ripe with the tension of ambiguity. Caught between the double absence or disruption of knowledge vis-à-vis the arcade – its incomprehension yesterday, its unknowability tomorrow – there is a fleeting presence to be understood in the interstice of today. The edifice gains importance, its existence given meaning wholly in the present because of the destruction slated to befall it: “aujourd’hui seulement que…,” proclaims

Aragon. Faced with imminent demise, the passage’s present stretches out like a temporal suspension bridge, where Benjamin would read time as stopped. This is our chance, our only chance, for we only have today to access the narratives of our time. Modern myths as stolen goods await their fate in the double warehouse of the passage as physical edifice and Aragon’s text. We are confronted with the rare opportunity to know that which typically is not within our realm of experience and consciousness. Aragon’s analogy underlines this offer as exciting and risky. Straying from the opening pages into the realm of non-logic, where shadows and the imagination can transform our experience of place, Aragon claims the right to error as that which we must allow ourselves to know.

The experience of modernity is one of disorienting duality – the old juxtaposed to the new, the coexistence of the transitory and the eternal, the profane and the sacred found where we least expect them. In making such a claim, Aragon transgresses the first principle of logic, that “to be” and “to not be” cannot both occur at once. He has left the philosopher’s cave and has wandered into the labyrinth of the poet’s cité.

New Order in the City: Aragon’s Rhetorics of Displacement

In the opening section of Le Paysan de Paris Aragon muses over the transitions that the society of 1925 is experiencing, setting up the city as the place of modernity.

Along with Baudelaire’s definition of modernity, that of the coexistence of different worlds within our own (needing no resolution), we shall add that the city in its modernity equates to a place in/of motion. One major movement at work is a shift in consciousness or a displacement of traditional values and practices through which the insolite, the everyday, and the poetic come to occupy non-hierarchical positions of privilege in the realm of the modern, urban individual. Similar to his seating of knowledge in the experience of the everyday and the modern in the present of the arcade and the modern myths it harbors, Aragon works rhetorically in the following passage to establish the new order which begins with a dismissal of the old ways. His prevailing proclamation is a grand one: proffering the public and open space of the city as the new domain of the sacred.

On n’adore plus aujourd’hui les dieux sur les hauteurs. Le temple de Salomon est passé dans les métaphores où il abrite des nids d’hirondelles et de blêmes lézards. L’esprit des cultes en se dispersant dans la poussière a déserté les lieux sacrés. Mais il est d’autres lieux qui fleurissent parmi les hommes, d’autres lieux où les hommes vaquent sans souci à leur vie mystérieuse, et qui peu à peu naissent à une religion profonde. La divinité ne les habite pas encore. Elle s’y forme, c’est une divinité nouvelle qui se précipite dans ces modernes Éphèses comme, au fond d’un verre, le métal déplacé par un acide ; c’est la vie qui fait apparaître ici cette

divinité poétique à côté de laquelle mille gens passeront sans rien voir…. (…) Là où se poursuit l’activité la plus équivoque des vivants, l’inanimé prend parfois un reflet de leurs plus secrets mobiles : nos cités sont ainsi peuplées de sphinx méconnus qui n’arrêtent pas le passant rêveur, s’il ne tourne vers eux sa distraction méditative, qui ne lui posent pas de questions mortelles. Mais s’il sait les deviner, ce sage, alors, que lui les interroge, ce sont encore ses propres abîmes que grâce à ces monstres sans figure il va de nouveau sonder. La lumière moderne de l’insolite, voilà désormais ce qui va le retenir. (19-20)

Transposing the old narratives, the grand narratives, onto a modern, urban setting, the

surrealist poet alters them in the process. Power is evacuated from the likes of Salomon’s

Temple and other holy sites; the city is instead imbued with this sanctity. In this passage an important paradigmatic displacement of knowledge and power takes place via the figure of the sphinx and a rhetorical movement from high to low. Here, it is man who questions and searches, plumbing his own life and the world around him: “[C]e sont encore ses propres abîmes que grâce à ces monstres sans figure il va de nouveau sonder.”

From the abstract, metaphysical realm of religion to a somewhat more concrete

materiality, Aragon declares a move towards a secular understanding of the sacred as the

sphinx which lives in our midst, this mythological monster hidden in plain sight. “Sans

figure,” these sphinxes are “méconnus,” unrecognizable to most passerbys. And yet, they

populate the city in the form of objects, perhaps even places or spectacles, as Aragon

alludes to later in his text. In the second half of the book, entitled Le Sentiment de la

nature aux Buttes-Chaumont, we read of the way in which the city of Paris affected

Aragon: “Certains lieux, plusieurs spectacles, j’éprouvais leur force contre moi bien

grande, sans découvrir le principe de cet enchantement. Il y avait des objets usuels qui, à

n’en pas douter, participaient pour moi du mystère, me plongeaient dans le mystère.

J’aimais cet enivrement dont j’avais la pratique et non pas la méthode” (140-141). While

Aragon at this point in the text is no longer referring explicitly to what he earlier terms

“sphinxes,” his experience of place, spectacle, and object as that which can enchant, mystify, and intoxicate testifies to the power that the city exerts on those who wander therein. Mystery and mysticism color the city streets, and alchemy is akin to “profound religion” in this new understanding of daily, lived experience.5 Everyday places in Paris are precisely the sites of ambiguous, mysterious or otherwise obscure activity accomplished by its inhabitants and seemingly by the city itself. We recall here our earlier discussion of phantasmagoria with respect to the arcade, where the new pace of commerce and the movement of people and objects is a manifestation of the fleeting temporality that defines it as a place of passage. The city is a site of motion, a tumult of activity and its effects, but these workings cannot be explained, neither in their “principe” nor in their “méthode.” Vocabulary pertaining to science and philosophy is impotent in its attempt to account for the forces of the unknown.

It is unclear where the sphinxes reside and in what form; unclear also is their function. Aragon’s rhetorical construction introducing them to the reader reflects this opacity: they appear as a consequence following from the fact that “[l]à où se poursuit l’activité la plus équivoque des vivants, l’inanimé prend parfois un reflet de leurs plus secrets mobiles.” The sphinxes, in the form of building or statue, populate the city in precisely these places of strange or questionable human behavior. In such “zones mal

éclairées de l’activité humaine,” as Aragon refers to them a few lines earlier (20), the sphinx, as the inanimate object to which Aragon refers, becomes a reflection of man and

5 Reading Benjamin’s “Louis Philippe, or the Interior” in “Paris Capital of the 19th Century” alongside Aragon proves interesting: “The private individual, who in the office has to deal with realities, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. (…) From this derive the phantasmagorias of the interior – which, for the private individual, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together remote locales and memories of the past” (Arcades 19).

the secret desires, motivations he harbors. Whether hidden from man’s own

consciousness or hidden from his fellow man, the sphinx, thus, as allegory for such

secrets, goes unnoticed or mistaken (willfully ignored, ignorantly neglected, or simply

misunderstood?); man’s inner existence remains inaccessible to itself. But it does not

take a potentially deadly confrontation with the sphinx in order to solve the riddle and

gain access to the figurative temple of self-knowledge, as one might expect. Firstly, the

sphinx of modernity no longer poses life-or-death (usually death) riddles; secondly, it is not each man who will encounter the sphinx, even if he is standing next to one. “Ce sage,” he who knows how to recognize the sphinx in his midst, will confront this monster

or guardian, will put questions to it, and, by doing so, will in fact be plumbing his own depths.

A subtle confirmation of Neitchze’s “God is dead,” Aragon’s intricate rhetorical movement translates a complex conceptual move, whereby the enlightened man recognizes himself in the world around him, plunges into the dark recesses of himself.

Gods are no longer worshiped on high, in divine places found in nature; they have instead moved to the city, this man-made, urban construction, where human beings have come to have an intimate connection with the inanimate.6 The sacred sites and objects have lost

their traditional significance and ordering power; the sphinx itself is transfigured as it is

transposed onto the modern city. While Aragon does not explicate here the stakes of this

questioning, of this searching in the dark, we can understand them as the gaining of an

uncommon insight about oneself in concert with a privileged but unrecognized

understanding of the world. If knowledge is traditionally represented as “the light,”

6 Aragon comes back to this idea in the second half of the text, while roaming the Buttes-Chaumont Park. A statue speaks of “une grande nostalgie … qui unit l’inanimé au plus subtil de la vie … le vent des plaisirs sublimes où l’idée enfin se libère et trouve en soi-même un aliment” (190).

whether a certain holy illumination or other mental clarity, then this new (non-) religion

prefers to see in obscurity, the gray areas, “ce pénombre,” as we have already seen. Light

and dark, in their dialectic, produce shadows, illusions, ambiguity. The double register is one of communication and negotiation but also one of instability; and on this unsure footing, we are prone to go astray. Aragon writes:

Toute la faune des imaginations, et leur végétation marine, comme par une chevelure d’ombre se perd et se perpétue dans les zones mal éclairées de l’activité humaine. C’est là qu’apparaissent les grands phares spirituels, voisins par la forme de signes moins purs. La porte du mystère, une défaillance humaine l’ouvre, et nous voilà dans les royaumes de l’ombre. Un faux pas, une syllabe achoppée révèlent la pensée de l’homme. (Le Paysan de Paris 20)

To find insight in the everyday objects, in our missteps, translates this as an example of what Benjamin terms “profane illumination,”7 whereby a revelation is procured from a

non-religious source. He sees this illumination as a privileged operation in Surrealism.

Our own unconscious as the unknown, as darkness, is one territory whose workings can

be illuminated and thus dis-covered via missteps.

Aragon makes a clear reference here to the lapsus linguae with respect to the

unconscious, where, according to psychoanalysis, to misspeak can reveal thoughts of

which we are not aware, or at least, which we had not intended to enunciate. Man’s

thought is revealed to him by accident, as though it were coming from another source.

Mixing in this image the faculties of walking, speaking, and thinking illustrates this

disjunction within the subject. One typically speaks of a pierre d’achoppement as a

stumbling block that one might trip over when walking, in a literal sense of the

expression. In Aragon’s image, the misplaced step is a syllable stumbled over. Linking

7 A concept developed in Benjamin’s “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” Many scholars have engaged with this concept, including Margaret Cohen in Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution.

33 this part of the passage with what follows, we see how errancy allows access to a previously hidden or neglected understanding. A “défaillance humaine,” a “faux pas, une syllabe achoppée”: there where it seems mistakes have been made is located revelation; but that which is revealed before us is shadowy, mysterious of form. In ambiguity we come face to face with that which is familiar though unknown to us. In reading this paradigm through Freud’s notion of the uncanny, the descent into our “propres abîmes” is to experience “nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (Freud “The Uncanny”

90). The depths of the self that man is going to sound “de nouveau” writes Aragon, are those which he knows but which have been buried, hidden, such that they have to be plumbed anew.

Given the formulation “ses propres abîmes que grâce à ces monstres sans figure il va de nouveau sonder” (my emphasis), we read this renewed questioning as positively connoted. From the point of view of Surrealism, this exploration of the unknown is indeed a worthwhile activity. And yet, how might Schelling’s definition of the uncanny fit in: “‘‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained hidden and secret and has become visible’” (Freud 78)? In this way, we might be inclined ask, What ought not be made visible? It seems, however, that this is not a question that we even need to consider, for, Aragon’s light is that of the modern and “insolite,” unusual and unsettling. The light that illuminates darkened corners of the mind and the city is always only a half-light; to see authentically can never be to see in full clarity because total illumination is illusion. The tumult of the modern is a key theme in Le Paysan de Paris, consistently evoked in terms such as vertige, ivresse, and insolite. Aragon takes pleasure

in this dizzying and frightening disorder, working, through poetry and philosophy, to

incite this up-ending of tradition and ushering in of the modern. So the questing knight

leaves the medieval forest and wanders into the modern city, a laboratory for his senses,

his intellect. He is now the wanderer of a certain “distraction meditative,” “ce sage.” In

the above passage, Aragon works on a discursive level to destabilize concepts and images

associated with the old order, and to move, almost imperceptibly, the reader and city-

dweller alike into the space, the experience of the modern.

Siren Sighting: Wandering, Seeing, and Dreaming

The disordering of hierarchies and thwarting of received ideas are effected throughout Aragon’s récit. As rhetorical devices transpose and transfer meaning, traditional concepts are reconfigured or displaced, causing epistemological and narrative instability. Instability is a condition necessary for dialectical negotiation to take place; it is also the result of this negotiation. The spaces of the arcade and the page are sites for dialectics and its performance. From a Lefebvrien point of view, we see how a moving between supposed oppositional states such as the real and the imaginary, waking and dream states, interior and exterior, truth and error, etc. represents an initial transgression of limits which allows for a blurring (and eventual dissolution?) of boundaries. Such an unsettling of established categories enables other errancies, including alternate ways of seeing.

Starting his wandering in the arcade, Aragon states that the mysteries of tomorrow are born out of the ruins of today. Having already established the arcade as housing the ephemeral and the ambiguous, and as being a new site of the sacred, Aragon transitions

into detective mode, looking to flush out the enigmas that have settled here, site of

modernity and/as ruin. He proposes that the reader wander alongside him and participate

in the scrutiny of the space. From the first steps taken in the arcade, the physical act of

walking or wandering is intrinsically linked to that of looking: “Que l’on se promène

dans ce passage de l’Opéra dont je parle, et qu’on l’examine » (22, my emphasis).

Perhaps an obvious and benign relationship, this double modality of wandering is the cornerstone of Aragon’s errance. While the examination of the arcade begins with a meticulous description of the geographic layout of the arcade, both the objective tone and content of Aragon’s report quickly give way to poetic digression and subjective interpretation, the narrator offering the reader second-hand anecdotes and personal memories of experiences in the arcade, among which we read a meditation on blondeur, witness an encounter with Don Juan at the shoe shiner’s and a monologue performed by

Imagination personified, and are told of images drifting down like snowflakes from the ceiling of a favorite Surrealist bar.

Aragon’s unplanned movement in the arcade, always open to detours and deviations, affords him a certain perspective and richness of encounters. A “wrong” turn can prove to be the only path that leads to new experiences and new understanding. For

Aragon, there is, of course, no wrong turn. In the Préface à une mythologie moderne, he explains his desire to stop actively guarding against error at every turn and in all forms, whether sensation or instinct, reason or intellect alike:

Je ne veux plus me retenir des erreurs de mes doigts, des erreurs de mes yeux. Je sais maintenant qu’elles ne sont pas que des pièges grossiers, mais de curieux chemins vers un but que rien ne peut me révéler, qu’elles. À toute erreur des sens correspondent d’étranges fleurs de la raison. Admirables jardins des croyances absurdes, des pressentiments, des obsessions et des délires. (15)

If, in wandering, we are prone to getting lost, to finding ourselves in a place where we are

not meant to be, to taking much longer than we had planned to arrive somewhere, Aragon

extols these conditions and this act of wandering as the possibility for error, for this is the

only means of revelation. We can read the “étranges fleurs de la raison” and the

“admirables jardins des croyances absurdes” as the realm of the imagination, of the

poetic, both of which are sure to be accessed when wandering.

As he wanders physically, Aragon enters into the realm of reverie, this the most

apt site of and for errancy. The metaphor of the laboratory to which Aragon likens both

the arcade and the park underscores the experimental-experiential quality of the city for

the surrealist poet-wanderer. These urban sites in particular are endowed with a

generative and creative capacity. The Buttes-Chaumont Park by night represents an

“éprouvette de la chimie humaine” (165), a “laboratoire qui à la faveur de la nuit repondît au plus désordonné de notre invention” (167). To liken dreaming to scientific experimentation is not an outrageous comparison in the least, especially as a Surrealist endeavor. Dreaming as an experience of the unconscious, a time and space where unconscious desires and thoughts bubble up to the surface and communicate with the conscious cannot be controlled. The “results” are unpredictable and scarcely repeatable.

Furthermore, in the dream-state, and specifically where reverie is concerned, there is a sort of “reaction” occurring within the individual, one whose effects can be felt upon waking.8

Early in the text, Aragon recounts one of his most incredible experiences in the

arcade where an encounter with a transfigured object explodes the bounds separating

8 Aragon’s references to the moment of waking, the difficulty and pain of waking: “Et comme l’homme qui s’arrache au sommeil, il me faut un effort douloureux pour m’arracher à cette coutume mentale, pour penser simplement, ainsi qu’il semble naturel, suivant ce que je vois et ce que je touche” (13).

37 reverie and physical reality. Attracted by a low, mysterious noise to the storefront of the cane merchant, he sees the window bathed in a greenish light as if underwater. The arcade has just closed at this hour and Aragon is making his way toward the exit. Trying at first to find a reasonable explanation for the strange glow and sounds of the sea which are growing louder and louder, echoing under the glass ceiling of the arcade, Aragon quickly realizes he cannot. For, how to explain away the inexplicable? It must be concluded that there is no “explication physique” to account for the “clarté surnaturelle” enchanting the shop window. The ocean has simply invaded the arcade: “Toute la mer dans le passage de l’Opéra. Les cannes se balanc[ent] doucement comme des varechs. Je ne rev[iens] pas encore de cet enchantement quand je m’aperç[ois] qu’une forme nageuse se gliss[e] entre les divers étages de la devanture. (…) [Je croirais] avoir affaire à une sirène au sens le plus conventionnel de ce mot…” (31). Starting with the real of the cane- shop window and then diving into the irreality of the underwater dream scene, Aragon floats back to the surface of reality when he suddenly recognizes the siren as a woman he once met along the Saar River in Germany, singing at night songs she had learned from her father. Rather troubled and captivated by this apparition, Aragon cries out “L’idéal!” which stops the scene cold. Like at the end of an old-time arcade game, the lights dim, sound fades, and movement stops: all objects return to their “aspect normal” at which point the arcade-keeper ambles by and sends the bewildered wanderer on his way.

Was it but a dream, a hallucination? A spell put on him or on the storefront? ponders the narrator all night long. As one might expect, upon Aragon’s return the next morning, the everyday appearance of the objects displayed in the window betrayed no unusual, underwater activity. Except, of course for the siren-shaped pipe that had been

broken, and what the narrator deems as indisputable evidence: “un peu de poussière

blanche tombée sur la silésienne d’un parapluie [qui] attest[e] l’existence passée d’une

tête et d’une chevelure” (33). Proclaiming a tiny bit of powder on the umbrella as

undeniable proof of a woman’s presence in the cane shop the night before – and as more telling than the broken pipe itself – Aragon puts the notion of “évidence” into question once again (in the Préface he states that Descartes’s “theory of evidence” was in fact illusory, and dangerous at that). Mixing the observational skills of a detective and the reasoning of a poet, Aragon’s conclusion is as humorous as it is eerie. Furthermore, the ambiguous reference made to “la silésienne” adds another layer to the dialectic between

real and unreal, material and ideal. For, silésienne is a kind of fabric used for linings,

made of wool and silk.9 It is also a person native to the Silesia region of Europe,

stretching across parts of modern-day Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, and

which, in 1871 was integrated into the German Empire; this same year, Germany

captured the territories of Alsace and Lorraine, not far from the Saar River. Thus, while

making reference to the banal and real everyday object of the umbrella, Aragon also

evokes a multi-layered joining of the real and the imaginary, “evidenced” in the presence

of the German woman swimming in the store window the night before. Of course,

Aragon’s anecdotes and the biographic information presented in the text are themselves

meant to be questioned at the same time as they are meant to stand as fact, evidence, and

truth.

From the spectacle of the dream-experience the night before to its verification and

consideration the next day, the real is inscribed as mutable and subject to interpretation.

This assertion of the uncertainty of “objective reality” is stated elsewhere in more

9 Oxford English Dictionary entry for “Silesia.”

straightforward terms: “L’objectivité de la certitude, voilà de quoi l’on querellait sans

difficultés: la réalité de la certitude, personne n’y avait songé” (10) ; and “…l’erreur qui,

seule, pourrait témoigner à celui qui l’aurait envisagée pour elle-même, de la fugitive réalité” (11). Such proclamations and personal experiences deny the superiority of

“objective reality” over dreams, imagination, and subjective experience, and manifest

Aragon’s overt refusal of received ideology and its rational underpinnings. As the real and the unreal interact, their dialectic destabilizes them as discrete categories. By the end of this encounter, the poetic-oneiric has exerted its power and cracked the shell separating the conscious and the unconscious, waking and dream states, rationality and delirium.

This crack is an opening of and unto possibility. The possible is only possible, so to speak, through the dialectic, this play of the “double register,” as Gindine calls it, where movement within and between registers of thought and experience gives rise to and arises from an instable subject position, poetically and politically. We might even read

Aragon’s folding together of the dream and the real as the alchemic operation to which he refers as the “métal déplacé par un acide.” Through experience as experiment, and vice versa, the Surrealists are able to reveal the unknown and the unimagined present in the everyday. This revelatory experience takes the form of wandering in the city, terrain of the unexpected, the marvelous. Meandering at a turtle’s pace10 about the city with neither a destination nor a utilitarian aim in mind allows the wanderer to step out of the realm of the ordinary and the collective while still participating fully in it (Mazlish 55).

The bourgeois ideals of productivity, directness, and rapidity have been side-stepped.

The subject is free to experience the city through new ways of seeing and thinking, which

10 As an indicator of the extremely slow pace that the flâneur was to take when walking through the arcades, Benjamin notes the purported fashion of taking a turtle for a walk. Also, Gérard de Nerval is said to have started this trend when he took a lobster for a stroll along the boulevards.

40 are directly related to his meandering movement. Ordinary objects and places solicit fantastical visions and poetic inquisitions under the gaze of the Surrealist mind’s eye.

The performance of such flights of fancy are a means of destabilizing the established order through dépaysement. Through such disorientation, one strays from conventions, from rational thought and action, entering unfamiliar or inhabitual, though welcome, territory. Each instance of Aragon’s scientific and journalistic reporting invariably gives way to absurd imaginings and virtuosic lyricism; the rational and empirical do not hold sway over imagination.

CHAPTER ONE

PART II:

FOOTFALLS OF POSSIBILITY IN BRETON’S NADJA

Favoring the liminal spaces of the Passage de l’Opéra and the park Les Buttes-

Chaumont in Le Paysan de Paris, Aragon shows the surrealist privileging of the transitory and the threshold space. Such spaces are the site of contradiction, instability, and ambiguity. Wandering in the arcade is an act that sets in motion mental and rhetorical processes aimed at the opening up of the real to the unreal. This multi-modal movement functions through what Sheringham terms the activities of “deconditioning” and “active prospecting” – to break free from the ways of seeing and knowing to which we are accustomed, as they offer a limited set of experiences, and to actively seek ways to access the unknown and the possible that exist within in our midst (Everyday Life 67-

68).

The Footstep: A Dialectics

As we have seen with Aragon, urban flânerie is a corporeal experience, one that connects the wanderer to his surroundings in a most immediate and concrete way. This immediacy and materiality are achieved through the actual, physical steps taken by the wanderer. The flâneur moves at street-level, in proximity of shops, spectacles, and the crowd; the pace of his movement is in accordance with his capacity for perception.

Moreover, neither pressed for time nor tied to a pre-determined route, the wanderer exhibits a certain availability, the body and mind open to the sensory and cognitive experience of encountering the city. The mind stands ready to be captivated and

distracted, and the body willing to diverge from its current path at any moment, whether

intrigued by a curious object spied at a distance or precipitated by instinct or whimsy of

origin unknown. Breton writes that the reader may well find him on the Boulevard

Bonne-Nouvelle, a street he frequents regularly, though without understanding what

impulse, force, or reason brings him there:

On peut, en attendant, être sûr de me rencontrer dans Paris, de ne pas passer plus de trois jours sans me voir aller et venir, vers la fin de l’après-midi, boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle entre l’imprimerie du Matin et le boulevard de Strasbourg. Je ne sais pas pourquoi c’est là, en effet, que mes pas me portent, que je me rends presque toujours sans but déterminé, sans rien de décidant que cette donnée obscure, à savoir que c’est là que se passera cela (?). (37-38)

In this brief passage Breton lays out the characteristics that constitute his brand of

pedestrianism: the primacy of the footstep in the act of wandering; the tension between

passivity and agency; the anticipation and arrival of unforeseen encounters, not just an

aimless meandering.

The footstep itself is important as the vehicle of corporeal displacement – one

moves from point A to point B via a series of steps taken with one’s feet. The flâneur

represents a certain type of walker, but one concerned less with the mechanics or the

structure of his movement through the street than with the aesthetic effect produced

through his stylized, slow pace. The flâneur as spectacle unto himself is also concerned

with the spectacle in which he is participating as he wanders the stage of the street. The

emphasis is on the product and not the process; the flâneur becomes object-spectacle, or

within the context of Benjamin’s reading of the arcades, commodity, part of the parade of

objects on display, objects for consumption. Thus, in the 19th century dandy we see no signs of walking as a daily or utilitarian activity. In fact, it is imperative that we as

43 spectators do not break down his art of strolling into its composite parts – the movement of the feet, the swinging of the arms, and an acknowledgment of the coordinated effort of the whole body to move forward; rather, he seems to glide effortlessly along, this singular individual who is also part of the streetscape.

Aragon comes close to this interpretation of the flâneur as he wanders through the

Passage de l’Opéra. We are scarcely aware of the narrator’s movements, noticing his displacements only when he announces his arrival in front of a new shop. Suffused with language play, imagery, digression, fanciful imaginings, Aragon’s narration seems to move vertically, accumulating its density in accordance with the superposition of images and qualifications. This effect makes sense given Aragon’s project. He restricts his exploration to an enclosed space rather than roaming about the city. The verticality would seem to echo the imperceptible movement of the flâneur who does not betray his tranquil and disinterested exterior. The wandering narrator moving through the arcade in

Le Paysan de Paris resembles the flâneur of Baudelaire and Benjamin more closely than does Breton’s. Although physical movement is not described as such, there is still much agency, much deliberate process in Aragon’s mental and rhetorical wandering: his thoughts have free rein as they translate into lucid dreams and the conjuring of profane spirits. In this way, we recognize passivity at play but one nonetheless in concert with the agency of the imagination at work. He plays the role of surrealist ethnographer or archeologist (“modern mythographer” as Sheringham calls him), encountering the present, uncovering the past, and considering the future all at once. While the roles are quite unalike, the flâneur, like the social scientist, plays at participant-observer.

Breton’s agency differs much from Aragon’s; the imagination as motor of wanderings is practically absent, at least from the first-person narrator’s actions. It is the

character of Nadja who will come to personify unrestrained movement of the psyche – as well as that of physical wanderings, so much so that Breton wonders if she does not indeed represent the “terme extrême de l’aspiration surréaliste … sa plus forte idée limite” (Nadja 87). But Breton’s corporeal movement is clearly and straightforwardly described, movements, which, like his writing, take on a horizontal expression, in contrast to the verticality of Aragon. This horizontal progression is translated in the performance of his feet: “mes pas me portent.” Énoncé and énonciation, the declaration

of “my feet carry me,” expresses not only horizontal displacement but also the passivity

of being carried along rather than engaging oneself and moving through one’s own effort.

Letting his feet lead him translates an automatism that can be read on the one hand as a

routinized, mechanical gesture, born out of habit, and on the other, as a spontaneous

gesture, born in the moment without forethought. The Surrealists would certainly lean

towards an understanding of wandering as unplanned and improvised, with the

unconscious directing the feet even as the wanderer is fully awake and lucid. When one

wanders the mind is not concentrating on the path taken; the feet are free then to move as

they will, whether guided by the unconscious or guided by sensory input of sights, sounds, and smells. The most well-known automatism among the Surrealists is of course l’écriture automatique that Breton defines in the Manifesto of Surrealism as “a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and

… akin to spoken thought” (22-23). Wandering indeed represents a corporeal correlate of this automatic movement of thought and pen.

While I contend that the moving feet carrying the rest of the body represent passivity on the part of the subject, “mes pas me portent” should be read as the tension that exists between passivity and agency, one of the dialectical configurations present the figure of le pas. In this particular instance, we read agency in the “je me rends” following, “c’est là, en effet, que mes pas me portent.” Breton restates his movement along the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle using the “I” this time as subject instead of object.

The “je me rends” effectively gives agency back over to the speaking subject. Curiously, however, the concrete sense of movement disappears when Breton takes control of his actions, for the method of displacement is not explicated; he is simply saying, “I go.”

The agency given over to Breton’s feet constitutes a certain passivity on his part, as wandering subject, and this passivity translates uncertainty. In spite of the narrator’s seeming agency, he is without motive of movement and without assurance regarding what is to come except knowing that something intentional, though as yet undecided, will happen on this part of the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle.

Through his passive agency, or agency of passivity, Breton actively leaves himself open to the unforeseen occurrences that the city has in store for him by moving about the city and taking up residence on the street, as it were. Both agency and passivity are needed here. Without such availability on the part of the subject, important signs and revelations would surely pass us by. Aragon explained that there are paths and encounters that can only be discovered by accident, by erring. For this we must actively make ourselves open to seeing, ready our eyes and minds for recognizing these signs; we

must let our feet choose to take these paths. Breton too writes that “il est permis de

concevoir la plus grande aventure de l’esprit comme un voyage de ce genre au paradis

des pièges” (Nadja 133). What we conventionally see as traps into which we should not fall are in fact the most fortuitous paths of discovery, holding, possibly, and most

certainly unbeknownst to us, the most desirable of outcomes. Immeasurable possibilities

present in the footstep. From one figure, one ordinary movement, innumerable

subsequent movements are possible, rendering the Surrealist narrator open to an

encounter with and encounters within the city.

The example of the tableau changeant presents a familiar and seemingly fixed

everyday object that becomes something other right in front of our eyes. Early in the text

of Nadja, Aragon notices one day how a certain hotel sign, “Maison Rouge,” reads

instead as “Police” when seen from the street at just the right angle. Breton explains that

this optical illusion alone would not be remarkable if the very same day, just a few hours

later, a woman (whom, coincidentally, the author had met by chance earlier on) had not

shown Breton a tableau changeant whose representation of a tiger changes into a vase or

an angel depending on whether the viewer moves to the left or to the right (67-68). The

connection between these two instances of optical illusion encountered by Breton

(through first-hand experience and through Aragon’s recounting of experience) is

considered at once necessary and beyond rational comprehension: “[L]eur rapprochement

était inévitable”; “[I]l me paraît tout particulièrement impossible d’établir de l’un à

l’autre une correlation rationnelle” (68). If Breton says that he mentions the mutating

sign seen by Argon only because of a second occurrence of unstable visual

representation, to which Breton himself was privy, I would argue that the mutating sign

itself is worth our consideration, for it represents everyday reality as an unstable field of

existence and experience.

Certain events and moments in reality have the potential to destabilize our

habitual modes of seeing and being, allowing access to surreality. It is the changing sign,

more than the tableau changeant that signals the power of transformation, revelation, or the occult as present in our everyday lives. The changing sign also points directly to the instability and arbitrariness of language. It is no coincidence that Surrealism came about in the period following the major discoveries of Ferdinand de Saussure and Sigmund

Freud. Language is a cultural construction that can be deconstructed, reconfigured; and the unconscious manifests itself in dreams, in slips of the tongue, and free

association.Admittedly, Aragon exploits this point more directly than Breton, suffusing

his text with word play within the narration and more overt visual linguistic maneuvers

challenging the perceived hermetic nature of systems of meaning and being – play with

“pessimisme” and “l’éphémère”; conversation of man with his faculties and

Imagination’s discourse, etc.) Surrealist wandering can be considered as both a means of

“deconditioning” and of “active prospecting” as we saw with respect to Le Paysan de

Paris. The surrealist errant subject is an agent of his experience, choosing to encounter

the city on foot, the only way to make himself fully available to engage in this

experience. Yet he is still passive, letting his body and mind wander with no imposed

direction. Wandering, then, is a site of intersection, a means of experience, during and

through which occurs an enactment of the dialectic between mind and body, passivity and

agency, presence and absence.

“Tramer les lieux” : Dialectic of the Presence and Absence, Familiar and Unfamiliar

With respect to wandering, the dialectic of presence and absence manifests itself

clearly as a performative gesture, necessarily ephemeral. Walking can be mapped and represented graphically, the itinerary plotted on paper before or after the fact, as orientation or documentation. But the act itself leaves no trace. The wanderer’s presence can only be marked by a conscious recounting of his movement – as is overtly the case in

both Le Paysan de Paris and Nadja – and by his interactions with the city. That is to say,

his encounters with other people, his action upon the space of the city – the shopkeeper

he greets, the pebbles he displaces along his path. “L’acte de marcher,” writes de

Certeau, “est au système urbain ce que l’énonciation (le speech act) est à la langue ou aux

énoncés proférés” (148).11 The walk can thus be defined as a “space of enunciation.”

Speaking itself as steps are taken, the walk represents a signifying practice (160-161)

with the walker announcing his presence with every footstep and, at the same time,

eclipsing into oblivion, no longer present in the space where he just was.

The dialectical relation between presence and absence can also be figured as

specter, the past haunting the present in spaces of collective or individual memory. In

monuments, museums, historical placards, the restaurant as site of a first date, traces of

yesteryear (are made to) persist in the spaces we wander today. Breton explores this

dialectic tension throughout his text, in particular during his wanderings with Nadja.

Many have written about the way in which this woman is for Breton a key to unlocking

11 Certeau continues here with a few clarifying precisions: “Au niveau le plus élémentaire, il a en effet une triple fonction ‘énonciative’: c’est un procès d’appropriation du système topographique par le piéton … ; c’est une réalisation spatiale du lieu … ; enfin il implique des relations entre des positions différenciées, c’est-à-dire des ‘contrats’ pragmatiques sous la forme de mouvements …. ” (148).

49 the past – the revolutionary past of the city of Paris and Breton’s own past.12 While the enigmatic bohemian figure of Nadja intrigues and enchants Breton, and although the eponymous character takes center stage in the book, Breton starts his work with the existential, “Qui suis-je?” that develops into the frightful consideration of himself as ghost, wondering if he might not believe himself to be living experiences that he in fact has already had:

La représentation que j’ai du “fantôme” avec ce qu’il offre de conventionnel aussi bien dans son aspect que dans son aveugle soumission à certaines contingences d’heure et de lieu, vaut avant tout, pour moi, comme image finie d’un tourment qui peut être eternel. Il se peut que ma vie ne soit qu’une image de ce genre, et que je sois condamné à revenir sur mes pas tout en croyant que j’explore, à essayer de connaître ce que je devrais fort bien reconnaître, à apprendre une faible partie de ce que j’ai oublié. (Nadja 9-10)

The footstep, as a figure of this dialectics, translates the liminality inherent to wandering, this time-space of the in-between, the ambiguous. By wandering, we may happen upon or enter into familiar scenes – places imbued with historic or personal resonances – vaguely or easily recognizable. At other times, the familiar turns away from us and that which we know intimately takes on strange hues. We read the figure of the ghost and the tension between the familiar and unfamiliar as a manifestation of Freud’s notion of the

“uncanny.” The question of presence and absence can also be posed with respect to

Nadja, who, always distracted and finally deemed mad, is present in body but not in mind. Or perhaps vice versa?

Of note are the numerous images fill the pages of Breton’s text, both photographs and drawings. The presence of photographs in the novel can be read as a means of bringing authentic everyday life in Paris into the text or grounding the extra-ordinary,

12 Which, for Natalya Lusty, in her article, “Surrealism’s banging door,” is particularly concerned with his work in psychiatrics while a medical student during the war, in Textual Practice, 17(2), 2003, 335-356.

personal experience in “objective” or “real” reality (Sheringham 75-76), that is to say,

bringing together the physical and metaphysical – putting the two into contact, or opening

the real to the touch of the marvelous. Another case can be made for the photographs as

harbingers of possibility, as argues Ian Walker. In City Gorged with Dreams, he

considers that the photos bear witness to the presence of future possibility, a “what could

happen here,” rather than the “what has happened here” of a marked and determined

historical presence (through absence) of a past event. It is once again a question of dialectics – between the past and the present, presence and absence, event or experience and its representation or reading, and also between public and private, fixity and mobility.

The public spaces captured and fixed on the page – first through the act of taking a photo

and then through the inclusion of the photo in Breton’s text – are imbued with a sense of

personal history or experience for having been the site of a particular episode in Breton’s

life and by extension in the lives of Nadja’s readers. Thus, even if, as Walker contends,

the photos in this text speak to the possible stories to come in these public Parisian

spaces, the photos cannot be fully separated from the episodes (locale, event, language) to

which they are associated in Breton’s text.

Set squarely in the context of Paris in the late 1920s, Nadja like Le Paysan de

Paris each offer a narrator moving through the city, creating the city through the means

of his feet and seemingly simultaneously through that of his pen, writing the city as he

wanders. Thus a succession of footsteps creates a personal space within the city, an

“espace vécu.” As Breton points out in his remarks about the Boulevard Bonne-

Nouvelle, the city is a space of habitudes; one might even say that living in the city and wandering in the city constitutes part of the urban errant’s habitus, in Pierre Bourdieu’s

use of the term. The narrator is a local inhabitant who strolls most afternoons along a

precise stretch of this boulevard. He is also a regular at various cafés, cinemas, and

theaters. He tells the reader of the location of these places, of specific films and

performances seen and who accompanied him. These are places which Breton knows

well, places he goes quite frequently, his haunts, if you will. Breton knows the décor in the Théâtre Moderne well enough to describe it to us: “…cette salle aux grandes glaces usées, décorées vers le bas de cygnes gris glissant dans des roseaux jaunes, … où durant le spectacle des rats furetaient, vous frôlant le pied, où l’on avait le choix, en arrivant, entre un fauteuil défoncé et un fauteuil renversable » (43-44)! First through walking in

the city, physically moving among places, and then by recounting his experiences,

describing his habits and “haunts,”13 Breton appropriates the city through these lived spaces.

De Certeau’s theory of everyday practices in which one approaches the city as

“l’espace vécu” also takes into account an “inquiétante familiarité de la ville” on the part

of the urban inhabitant (de Certeau 146). Part anthropological approach, part fascination

with the unknown waiting to be revealed, Surrealist wandering in a familiar place leads to

its “estrangement”14 or Freud’s unheimlich. The everyday becomes visible and palpable by first becoming unfamiliar. Back on the street, the hotel sign “Maison Rouge” belongs to the realms of the ordinary and the public; so used to seeing the sign (or signs like it), the passerby does not notice it or takes it for granted. Perhaps this is one of the sphinx hiding in our midst of which Argon spoke? The sign is visible and accessible to all, but

13 I borrow this formulation from Douglas Smith in his article, “The Arcade as Haunt and Habitat: Aragon, Benjamin, Céline,” Romance Studies 22 (1), March 2004, 17-26. 14 In The Everyday Life Reader Ben Highmore offers this term via Fredric Jameson on Bertolt Brecht’s method of defamiliarizing the everyday.

52 only a few will choose to truly see it, to see it, that is, in its unsettling otherness of

“Police.” The Surrealists do not want a simple intimate knowledge of the city. They want to know the other side of the story, the underside of the city; they want to provoke a rupture with the Grand Narrative as it has been told. As Michael Sheringham explains :

For Surrealism, the possible is contained in the actual; what might be is always already present within what is. The problem is to find a way of grasping it, and this involves both deconditioning: getting round the barriers that have grown up to impede access to our own lives; and active prospecting: the invention of strategies that will propitiate the revelation of what is virtual yet inaccessible. (67-68)

If we can be sure to see Breton on the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle every few days, if a walk in this area of the city is something of a predictable and habitual activity for the narrator, this in no way cancels out the element of surprise at work in the streets of Paris.

Indeed, Breton’s routine walk bears the mark of uncertainty from the outset, for he knows not why his footsteps never fail to lead him to one particular spot on the boulevard nor what he will encounter there. Just what will happen in a quite familiar place remains wholly unforeseeable. This dialectic tension, between the familiar and the strange, between what exists and what is possible, is an ambiguity that characterizes both the space of the city and the subject’s experience therein, and is a steadfast trait of the modern city, of modernity itself. Rather than foreclosing the unknown and the unintended as undesirable and unworthy of our attention, the surrealist errant subject must be open to unexpected encounters, must welcome their possibility and their actuality. Enacting a dialectic between an appropriation of the city, whereby the wanderer-narrator creates his own space – individual and subjective – within the realm of the real and the public, and a making-strange of the city via a posture of availability and

an appreciation for the imprévisible, the act of wandering is at once a conduit and a catalyst for errance. The familiar and the unfamiliar meet on a modern city street.

Experience and knowledge of the world (Benjamin’s Erfahrung) cannot be gained

through controlled situations, and any situation worth experiencing can only occur

spontaneously via an unsystematic15 and open engagement with the world. Breton expresses this idea directly and emphatically at the end of the opening section of Nadja

when he explains that he wants the chance meetings, coincidences, and revelations that

he has been reporting to the reader to testify to the fact that the most important

occurrences in life are of an unforeseen nature and are most certainly not to be attributed

to work or planning. He writes:

J’espère, en tout cas, que la présentation d’une série d’observations de cet ordre et de celle qui va suivre sera de nature à précipiter quelques hommes dans la rue, après leur avoir fait prendre conscience, sinon du néant, du moins de la grave insuffisance de tout calcul soi-disant rigoureux sur eux-mêmes, de toute action qui exige une application suivie, et qui a pu être préméditée. Autant en emporte le vent du moindre fait qui se produit, s’il est vraiment imprévu. (68)

The experience of the street, of the city is precisely that which gives meaning to life, for

everyday experiences of the unpredictable have greater value than well-calculated actions and their expected outcomes, precisely because of the inherent instability of the street as a category of experience. Such is the epistemology of errance. Wandering in the city works on various levels as a means of blurring boundaries and distinctions of space and symbolically upsetting the systems of power and authority seated and exerted therein.

First and foremost, the act of wandering represents a non-productive and non- linear movement which stands in contrast to the value of work, both ethical and economical. For Breton and the Surrealists, work oppresses the individual, and

15 Cf. Ross Chambers, Loiterature, p.10.

systematic planning stamps out l’imprévisible and its accompanying possibilities,

whether fortuitous or unfortunate. Furthermore, we can read Breton’s call to take to the street, to enter and occupy this open and public space, as a refusal of the value typically accorded to work and to rational, controlled behavior and thinking. With this appeal

Breton valorizes the experience of the everyday and dismisses the supposed universality

of the desire for material property and productivity. To wander thus is to put into

question received systems of values, ideas, meaning, and being. A non-directed

movement in the space of the city puts into question the use of the space both in its

designed purpose and in its everyday practice. There is a crack that opens up “reality” as

a result, leaving vulnerable its organizing and signifying principles and practices. The

city and the self who wanders therein are thus opened up to a different perception,

experience, and understanding that involve an exchange between traditionally distinct or

opposed realms such as the conscious and unconscious, the rational and the irrational, the

real and the unreal, the planned and the spontaneous, etc. Whether an outright

transgression of limits or a more strategic subversion or circumventing of boundaries,

surrealist wandering is a straying from conventional modes of action and thought. Such

wandering is tied to surrealist vision. Sheringham writes on seeing:

A moment of perception provokes a reaction that reveals a connection between life as something given (rather than earned), and individual subjectivity as something virtual rather than circumscribed. Insisting on the non-religious character of these experiences (the revelation involved here is non epiphanic) Breton places the emphasis on perception and representation. [S]urrealist visuality is seen in terms of techniques for liberating vision from its habitual enslavement. (69)

Surrealist errance as phenomenology manifests Certeau’s idea that everyday practices

help us to resist and subvert systems of domination.

“Mes pas me portent”: Literal and Allegorical Movement

Surrealist errance as a strategy of resistance and revolt via a dialectics of

destabilization takes shape in the footstep. One might ask whether reading as primordial

Breton’s use of the term “le pas” (or a variation thereof) does not overstate the significance of this lexical choice (or perhaps even contrive this significance). At the time of Nadja’s publication in 1924, the author had already published a collection of essays entitled Les Pas perdus. Leading us through the text then, Breton’s “footsteps” offer themselves as an in-road to a reading of errance in the form of metaphor, conceptualization, literal movement, and quotidian practice.

We have already seen the footstep at work back on the Boulevard Bonne-

Nouvelle. In using the formula “mes pas me portent,” Breton expresses the agency given over to his feet which constitutes a certain passivity on his part, as wandering subject.

This passivity and uncertainty are necessarily enmeshed because Breton is not in control, and there is no known rationale motivating this habitual movement on this street, except knowing that something specific and intentional, though as yet undecided, will happen in this spot. If I have already mentioned this part of the text in conjunction with the engagement of the wanderer with his surroundings, this sort of phenomenology practiced through wandering,16 I return to this passage to insist on the dialectical relationships embodied in the footstep as well as the dialectics effected through this figure.

The active feet carrying the passive subject bespeak the liminal state which

characterizes the wandering subject. The subject acts as an agent of ambiguity,

mediating the encounter of the everyday and the other-worldly, for instance through the

16 Cf. Sheringham, Everyday Life, p.78.

“double jeu de glaces” of dreams felt upon waking and thus experienced in reality, and the chance meeting in the street of Breton and Nadja, this “génie libre,” this “âme errante.” To open the conscious mind to the imperceptible and the unknown, to unconscious thoughts and desires, can only be accomplished through wandering. This movement connects the corporeal and the mental, the material and the metaphysical.

Wandering then, as conduit and catalyst for the surrealist dialectic finds its precipitate in the footstep. As de Certeau points out, footsteps are those which “trament les lieux”

(147) weaving a tapestry of lived spaces. Whether the footsteps of the wandering subject can be said to create the city itself from the fibers of lived experience or whether the experience of the city through lived spaces comes to stand for the lived experience of the errant subject, the city, self, and narrative created cannot be considered finished nor fixed. This is a primordial self-evidence to keep in mind: the footstep is literally pivotal, as the moment and space of possibility, precisely a mobile moment and space, in motion, ever moving and changing. For, a footfall, at every successive pace, begs the question of where to go – to turn left, right, to reverse direction or continue straight ahead; it allows for stepping out of line, deviating from a path, making a detour, stepping over boundaries, crossing borders, and moving beyond or transgressing limits. More than simply the omnipresent potential for movement, the footstep represents movement itself, an event certain to arrive, even if the when and where of this arrival remain undisclosed.

Each step translates an individual act or moment of errancy because there is always the possibility of taking a new path, of moving by a “fait imprévu” in a new direction.

If footsteps can be considered as discrete, individual movements or acts, perhaps linked to particular experiences, they are nevertheless part of a series of movements

always and everywhere connected, the always incomplete whole. As we know,

juxtaposition and connection figure importantly in Breton’s conception of Surrealism,

and he insists on this idea throughout Nadja. Words pronounced or images viewed in one

context often find resonance in another, often passing through another person to arrive

before Breton as an uncanny or revelatory experience, the episode of the changing sign

and tableau being one such instance. As conduit and catalyst of communication and

connection between seemingly unrelated events and distinct realms of understanding and

existence, the footstep serves as a framework for understanding surrealist wandering.

Insofar as it is characterized by the availability of the subject and the unpredictability of

the city and the modern experience, errance is epitomized in le pas: a step towards, never

fully constituted, ever dynamic and in transit. And yet, dialectical, the foot touches the

ground, accomplishes with each step some small act of errance, a partial or momentary

arrival, just until the foot picks itself up and moves on. As a performance of errance, the

movement of steps serves to destabilize systems of order and the objective certainty

accorded to the real. As we have seen, the errant subject’s experience of the city is that

of a sort of a passive agency, or rather an agency of expectation/waiting and chance.

Such experiences can be characterized as baffling and disconcerting, and even disturbing

and can thus potentially disrupt one’s perceived reality. For the Surrealists, possibility

and the unexpected reign supreme in the streets of Paris precisely because the wanderer is

open to experiences of the new and the unknown.

At the heart of Breton’s text we find a diary-style chronicle of the author’s wanderings with Nadja. As the reader follows their movements across Paris, the reader is faced with a vision and experience of the city similar to that of Aragon’s, privy to an

insider’s view of the city, namely on the level of the everyday. That which is revealed

through this position at the same time becomes marvelous, strange, other due to the

intimate nature of the perspective; commonly overlooked, unknown, or taken for granted,

the ordinary becomes extra-ordinary. Complementing and perhaps surpassing the

“inquiétante familiarité” that comes from the detailed documentation of the various cafés and restaurants that serve as meeting points and attractions for himself and Nadja, Breton also takes us into the realm of the outright bizarre and unsettling, all the while staying grounded in the city of Paris. For example, in the episode of October 6, Nadja

mistakenly guides the couple to the Île-de-la-Cité instead of to the Île-Saint-Louis. They find themselves in an obscure and historic corner of the island, the Place Dauphine, which Breton calls “un des pires terrains vagues qui soient à Paris” (Nadja 93). Nadja believes that an underground passage coming from the Palais de Justice runs beneath their feet. She wonders what (violent) events have transpired in the past on this very spot, and what might happen in the future. She then frightens Breton by correctly predicting that a window nearby would turn from black to red (red curtains become visible in a previously dark room when an interior light is turned on) and by believing that she sees a whole crowd of people when there are only one or two couples in the vicinity. Afterwards, Nadja leads them to the former prison, the Conciergerie and states that she too has been in prison, centuries ago; she wonders who she was in the entourage of Marie-Antoinette and who Breton was as well. Through this episode, the Place

Dauphine becomes a multi-layered “espace d’énonciation”: it is an everyday urban space

with a specific historical resonance and also a mystical aura in Nadja’s evocation of a

past life. The idea of connection and revelation thus manifests itself in this space, remote

and empty though urban and centrally located: everyday yet uncommon.

In his text, Breton opens up the real to the unreal, the conscious to the

unconscious, the banal to the extraordinary. He proves that supposed binary oppositions

can and do co-exist and comingle, and that this can only be accomplished through

wandering, that is to say, enabled or accessed through the physical movement of the feet.

Emphasizing the primacy of the footstep, Breton narrates their movement the day that he

meets Nadja: “Nous voici au hasard de nos pas, rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière” (81); and

a few days later, “Au sortir du jardin [de Tuileries], nos pas nous conduisent rue Saint-

Honoré, à un bar, qui n’a pas baissé ses lumières” (103). Richard Howard’s English translations of these two quotes – “Now we are walking through the narrow Rue du

Faubourg-Poissonière, I think” (70) and “We leave the garden and lose no time getting to another bar, in the Rue Saint-Honoré, which is called Le Dauphin” (89) – do not maintain

the image of the footstep as a presiding motor in the couple’s wanderings. This

translation not only undermines the significance of the author’s consistent usage of the

term “les pas” in the original text but also weakens or even ignores the force and

coherency of this figure, particularly with respect to the image of the route of unchained

footsteps of which Breton speaks upon his first meeting with Nadja (which I will consider

more closely in the section that follows).

The joining together of specific places visited by Breton and Nadja, tells a story,

that of a lived experience of the city of Paris, and serves to articulate Breton’s specific

conceptualization of the city as a space most propitious for questing and questioning,

exploring and experiencing. Each step of the wanderer’s is an individual act, movement,

60 and moment in space but must be linked together to create a full dis-placement. Always figuring the possibility for deviating and detouring, seeing anew, wandering (le pas) exemplifies and induces the dépaysement so dear to the Surrealists. But such an

“estrangement” ironically also brings together experiences, temporalities (past and present), and states of being (real and imaginary).

“Ces pas sont tout” : Conceptual Unchaining and l’âme errante

Telling Breton about her habit of taking the metro in the evening (because she has nothing else to do), sitting among the working-class people who will tomorrow return to the same job and whose respite from work consists in dealing with the worries and difficulties they face at home, Nadja remarks, “Il y a de braves gens” (Nadja 78).

Reacting angrily to such an approbation of those who capitulate to the “asservissement” of work, Breton castigates these people who do not have in them the spirit of revolt and who are thus not able to take the steps, figurative and literal, necessary to be free. He states:

Je sais qu’à un four d’usine, ou devant une de ces machines inexorables qui imposent tout le jour, à quelques secondes d’intervalle, la répétition du même geste, ou partout ailleurs sous les ordres les moins acceptables, ou en cellule, ou devant un peloton d’exécution, on peut encore se sentir libre mais ce n’est pas le martyre qu’on subit qui crée cette liberté. Elle est, je le veux bien, un désenchaînement perpétuel : encore pour que ce désenchaînement soit possible, constamment possible, faut-il que les chaînes ne nous écrasent pas, comme elles font de beaucoup de ceux dont vous parlez. Mais elle est aussi, et peut-être humainement bien davantage, la plus longue mais la merveilleuse suite de pas qu’il est permis à l’homme de faire désenchaîné. Ces pas, les supposez-vous capables de les faire ? En ont-ils le temps ? En ont-ils le cœur ? (…) Pour moi, je l’avoue, ces pas sont tout. Où vont-ils, voilà la véritable question. Ils finiront bien par dessiner une route et sur cette route, qui sait si n’apparaîtra pas le moyen de désenchaîner ou d’aider à désenchaîner ceux qui n’ont pu suivre ? C’est seulement alors qu’il conviendra de s’attarder un peu, sans toutefois revenir en arrière. (78-80)

With this passage Breton makes clear the unmistakably dialectical character of the

footstep which serves here to join the realms of inner and outer, theory and practice,

material and symbolic through a somewhat paradoxical “perpetual unchaining.” The

ambiguity and duality of errance and its dialectics are illustrated in the idea of the

“unchaining” of footsteps. The making of a marvelous, long series of steps can only take

place once man breaks free from the constraints and obligations of work and society.

Paradoxically, although man may be unchained, he can only wander about by means of

steps which are necessarily linked together. It will be through the linking of these freed

footsteps that a road to liberation (“unchainedness”) will take shape. Man is finally free

to wander in mind and body because of this constant and continual unchaining; it is not,

however, an abstract idea to be accomplished only through intellectual or metaphysical

processes. For, while Breton may employ a priori the image of the footstep on a

metaphorical level, it remains nonetheless a concrete figure of movement on the most

basic, everyday level, which, as we have seen, Breton enacts on the Boulevard Bonne-

Nouvelle and in his wanderings with Nadja. The footstep figures in reality the constant

and continually renewed possibility of movement, as is manifest in Breton’s use of the

term “pas” to indicate the actual, physical gesture of wandering across the city.

In Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution,

Margaret Cohen explores the metaphor of unchaining in Nadja, which she links to a

critique of Marxist ideology and the subversion of the dominant order. She considers

Breton’s lexical choice of “désenchaînement” to be “chosen for social praxis,” as

“Breton plays on [the] word ‘chaîne’ – assembly line and chain – a dig at Marx who calls to the proletariat to rise up and cast off his chains: they cannot do so because they are

caught in this very enchaînement” (Cohen 107-108). The working class is by all

accounts chained to the dominant class and the dictates that the latter sets forth. While

Surrealism and Communism may each lay claim to ushering in revolution, theirs is not a

lieu commun as each group has not the same revolutionary aims. For the Surrealists, this

is first and foremost a revolution of the mind which concerns man’s whole being rather

than his material situation. Because of the way in which it routinizes and orders the

experience of daily life and prevents, in fact, man from experiencing life, work remains

undesirable and must not be naively valorized : “L’événement dont chacun est en droit

d’atttendre la révélation du sens de sa propre vie, cet événement que peut-être je n’ai pas encore trouvé mais sur la voie duquel je me cherche, n’est pas au prix du travail » (Nadja

69). Because we cannot escape everyday life and the realities of the necessity of work

and the machine of the social order, we must seek resistance and change through

personal, daily acts of revolution and moments of revelation. Moreover, it is not an

escape from reality that Breton and friends are seeking, nor a banishment of it, but rather

a way to transform the experience of the real. Thus, such efforts of revolt and subversion

effectuated on the level of the everyday, in the form of artistic and linguistic

détournement, dreaming, game-playing, and of course wandering, challenge and defy absolute authority and hegemonic values systems. Manifestly surrealist in nature, these are the sorts of tactics highlighted by Certeau as everyday manners of resistance (Cohen

111-112). Are acts of errance then part of the surrealist tactical assault – at the level of the everyday – on received ideas and the bourgeois status quo, or do they represent rather a far-reaching strategy aimed at general disruption and the subversion of power, or both?

At once a means of destabilization, disruption, and désenchaînement, wandering enacts a social criticism, privileging exploration and valorization of the banal and the typically disregarded and scorned17 including hidden-in-plain-sight urban spaces such as

the street, the popular theater house, and the flea-market. Not coincidentally, these

spaces are propitious for the workings of the imagination, chance, and surprise and thus

incite the “disruption of dominant conceptual structures” (108). In the flea-market, like

in the arcade, these surrealist forces manifest themselves in the chance encounter between

the wanderer and the disparate objects that he happens upon. Located outside of Paris,

the Saint-Ouen flea-market represents an alternative to the bourgeois capitalist system of

production and consumption. Instead of offering new goods, sterile and without a past,

the flea-market is a bazaar of used offerings rescued from oblivion.

As was the case in the arcade, the flea-market wander moves about a dream space

within the everyday where “objects [are] freed from the drudgery of being useful, hoping

that in this state they will give access to forces hidden from daily life” (109-110).

Because aesthetic and socio-economic hierarchy do not organize and dominate the

wanderer’s experience at the flea-market, the heteroclite gathering of objects serves to

“libera[te] vision from its habitual enslavement,” in Sheringham’s formulation. Objects

out of their ordinary context disrupt ordinary perception and thought. Useless and

broken, outdated and incomprehensible, Breton prefers these objects because of the very

challenge they pose to our modes of seeing, knowing, and understanding. He classifies

17 Both Aragon and Breton make explicit mention of appreciating that which others despise or look down upon [mépriser]. Breton: “[P]our moi, descendre vraiment dans les bas-fonds de l’esprit, là où il n’est plus question que la nuit tombe et se relève (c’est donc le jour?) c’est revenir rue Fontaine, au “Théâtre des Deux-Masques” (45). He continues on describing one play in particular that he likes, “Je ne tarderai pas davantage à dire l’admiration sans borne que j’ai éprouvée pour Les Détraquées, qui reste et restera longtemps la seule oeuvre dramatique … dont je veuille me souvenir” (46). The title of the one play that Breton cares to remember should not go unnoticed.

them as “ces objets qu’on ne trouve nulle part ailleurs, démodés, fragmentés,

inutilisables, presque incompréhensibles, pervers enfin au sens où je l’entends et où je

l’aime” (62). Literally and figuratively a marginal space, the flea-market represents instability; objects are repurposed, re-placed, their original uses or destinations perverted.

Moreover, transience and ambiguity are defining factors of this threshold space where neither vendors nor their wares constitute a fixed presence in space or time. Like

Aragon’s arcade, Breton’s flea-market represents a counter-narrative to the Grand

Narrative of one-way, continuous time, fixity, logic, and capitalism’s universality. The flea-market becomes a strategic site for destabilization and displacement within the everyday.

For Cohen, it is of the utmost importance that this liberation be on the order of

“perversion” and not “revolution.” Social change occurs in the everyday, in just such marginal and threshold places that serve to destabilize economic and ideological power structures. Cohen considers such destabilization to be more of an “overturning” than a

“revolution,” Breton’s “objets pervers” exercising a “conceptual désenchaînement” (109-

110). And yet, the term “revolution” is also a “turning over”: of discourse in discussion or ideas in reflection; an overthrowing of an established system. While Cohen points out that the Latin pervertere indeed means “to overturn,” the verb also and indicates a turning

the wrong way, a deviation or corruption. An extremely apt term to describe

Surrealism’s aims, and means of achieving these aims, it is no surprise that “perverse” is

also a term used by Aragon. Given its semantic connection to errance, as in to be

mistaken or wrong; to go astray morally, perversion equates to the dialectical movement

of errance in that it pushes back against accepted practice and thought, distorting this

version of reality to the point of unrecognizability and transforming thus ways of seeing

and experiencing.

Errance and the Outsider – the Case of the âme errante

While Breton, like Aragon, may at times give himself over to the magic of objects

and images acting on the real, his meanderings are of a different quality, didactic and

plodding rather than wildly free-flowing and imagistic. According to Sheringham,

A thoroughgoing philosophical idealism constantly threatens to unbalance Le Paysan de Paris, pitching it squarely into the realm of dream and unreality. (…) As Aragon’s example shows, the ‘merveilleux quotidien’ always risks being an essentially literary rather than an experiential category. What begins as exploration of lived experience ends up as a form of rhetorical intoxication… . (Everyday Life 77)

As we have seen in the first part of this chapter, Aragon’s dialectic of errance operates principally on a rhetorical level. While some may claim that such a “rhetorical intoxication,” indicative of the form and function of Surrealist poetics, operates exclusively in the realm of ideas and images rather than effecting palpable social

change,18 I would argue, however, that this “rhetorical intoxication” is indeed

representative of an “unchaining” that subtends surrealist errance. For, this unbridled

imagining is only put into motion via wandering in the arcade, in the city. The concrete

material world with which Aragon comes into contact serves to trigger the mental

processes of dreaming and imagining, poeticizing and writing. Exploration of the inner

world is thus accomplished when the mind and the senses roam freely, unhindered and

uninhibited by rules of logic, reason, and order. Through his rhetorical virtuosity Aragon

18 Lefebvre as cited in Shields: “Cette tentative poétique… privilégie le visual au delà du voir, se met rarement à l’écoute…. Métamorphose verbale… anaphorisation du rapport entre les ‘sujets’ (les gens) et les choses (le quotidien), les surréalistes donc surchargeaient le sens et ne changeaient rien” (27).

perverts narrative conventions, unhinging systems of meaning and aesthetics. He throws

off the chains of coherence and syntax which then enables a more general liberation from

all manners of dominant rule. In his unbounded poetical prose, Aragon cannot be reined

in.

For his part, Breton offers the figure of Nadja, who, through mental, physical, and

verbal errancies, incarnates errance at its extreme limits. Given the importance placed on

the footstep in Breton’s conception of wandering, it comes as no surprise that in response

to Breton’s question, “Qui êtes-vous?”, the protagonist Nadja declares, “Je suis l’âme

errante” (Nadja 82). The designation of “wandering soul”19 brings together the physical

and metaphysical realms, articulating the connection between the two and highlighting

the liminality and ambiguity of her existence and identity and that of the concepts and

acts of wandering and straying (errance) as well.

Indeed, the all-encompassing spontaneity and unpredictability according to which

Nadja lives manifests itself in her askance mental processes as much as in her physical

vagabondage. In proper surrealist fashion, Nadja moves about the city with no fixed

plan, deciding haphazardly where to eat dinner by simply pointing to the restaurants

surrounding her, wherever she happens to be: “ ‘Où? (le doigt tendu:) mais là, ou là (les

deux restaurants les plus proches), où je suis, voyons. C’est toujours ainsi’ ” (82).

Moreover, Nadja makes all decisions with such capriciousness and instantaneity. At

another moment, she engages Breton in a verbal game akin to those of surrealist psychic

19 Richard Howard translates “l’âme errante” as “the soul in limbo,” a formulation which I find does not do justice to the idea of errance nor to the character of Nadja and her utter capriciousness and constant movement. Of course, Howard’s translation highlights the semantic complexity of the term errance, and in this case, the adjective errante. “Limbo” does indeed render palpable the uncertainty of errance, the fact that it is a threshold state and by extension a dialectical space and time in which intersect the binaries separated by and communicating across this in-between state of space and time.

automatisms: “ Un jeu: Dis quelque chose. Ferme les yeux et dis quelque chose.

N’importe, un chiffre, un prénom” (87). After demonstrating how to move from one

spoken word, randomly chosen, to a series of questions and responses in order to develop

a fully-embellished imaginary scene, Nadja explains that she often talks to herself in this

manner when she is alone, inventing all sorts of stories. She concludes by stating that it

is “même entièrement de cette façon” that she lives.

Furthermore, having left her native Lille for Paris a few years prior, Nadja

represents the figure of the outsider, the inconnue, mysterious and foreign. Deemed at

times a sphinx, Mélusine, and an enigma, Nadja is for Breton a riddle, a puzzle, and for

this reason is attractive and intriguing, a source of energy and inspiration. For others, however, the outsider is dangerous, negatively incomprehensible. A sort of orphan arriving alone in Paris, Nadja tells her mother back home that she is staying in a foyer run by nuns, while in reality living on the streets, and in the company of male companions.

She does not fit into the typical social structure, representing doubly the marginal figure par excellence: that of the prostitute and that of the madwoman. Without a proper job or home, marginal figures and outsiders pose a threat to socio-economic order of things.

Prostitutes in particular exist outside the realm of order and control, breaking the moral and economic rules that govern Western, capitalist societies. Considering the situation from a Marxist viewpoint, Cohen reads the vagabonds and the vagrants of bohemia as

Lumpen proletariat, who as a patchwork social group incarnate the very breaking down of social order desired by the Surrealists. Furthermore, as is the case with Nadja, these figures often enact a “libidinal unchaining with socially disruptive effect” (Cohen 109).

This unchaining is subversion; through Nadja’s physical and metaphysical capacity for

and enactment of subversion, she bespeaks surrealist errance.

There is yet another form of wandering and straying exemplified by Nadja, the

primordial element constitutive of her “unchained” subjectivity,and which undoubtedly gives rise to all others: madness. This mental and ethical errance manifests as complete freedom, leaving Nadja to speak at length about herself (past lives, visions, fears) without censoring herself or submitting her discourse to the regulatory conventions of logic and coherence. However, Breton notes that her extreme errance also renders her inaccessible and difficult to deal with on various occasions. The couple has already gone their separate ways by the time he learns of her internment in a mental hospital: “On est venu, il y a quelques mois, m’apprendre que Nadja était folle” (Nadja 159). The language

Breton uses here to tell of Nadja’s situation reveals his belief that madness is an arbitrary label imposed from the outside, a constructed condition belonging to the establishment: he learns that she is mad. Madness is codified and quantified, stated as a fact to be learned and accepted when exposed by the authorities who govern reality and its principles of acceptable – and inacceptable – ways of thinking and being. Because those who are mentally ill have “abnormal” and unpredictable ways of thinking and acting, madness represents a threat to all social order, an aberration in need of correction.

Breton questions the assertion that madness is other, that madness is a state of mind or being distinct from the “normal” or the “real”: “Les lettres de Nadja, que je lisais de l’œil dont je lis toutes sortes de textes poétiques, ne pouvaient non plus présenter pour moi rien d’alarmant. (…) L’absence bien connue de frontière entre la non-folie et la folie

ne me dispose pas à accorder une valeur différente aux perceptions et aux idées qui sont

le fait de l’une ou de l’autre” (171). Breton places madness and non-madness on equal

footing with respect to how each should be understood and (not) judged. The fact that he

sees in Nadja characteristics of a sphinx or a muse neutralizes the negative perception of

madness and instead associates it with a certain knowledge and power including that of

artistic creation.

Some argue, however, that Breton’s view of madness as a means of breaking

down social barriers and challenging literary and artistic conventions is rivaled, if not

wholly undermined, by the condescension he directs at the non-bouregois, and in

particular, at those in insane asylums: “Rather than valuing the unchaining worked by

madness, Breton points here to the debilitating effect of madness on the relatively sane

person; the moral terms found in this passage smack of condescension, echoing, like

milieu, the attitude of bourgeois social reformers to social institutions they deplore”

(Cohen 117-118). For Cohen, this ambiguous stance towards Nadja and those like her

represents an impasse on the road to the type of ideological “unchaining” that Breton claims to desire. Cohen reads the narrative ambiguity of Nadja, including the strength and fragility of the “revolutionary ideal” embodied by the female title character, as aporia

(116).

If Breton’s attitude towards Nadja and their encounters is, in the end, fraught with ambivalence, this does not necessarily lead the reader to a narrative or epistemological dead-end, as least not insofar as errance is concerned. For, while it is true that Breton comments on Nadja’s erratic behaviors and mental operations as the extreme limit of

surrealist aspiration20, it is also true that Surrealism does not aim to express or embody an

errance pure. Staying grounded within the context of the urban everyday, surrealist

wandering – as physical and narrative gesture, mental or intellectual process – seeks not

to stray too far from an engagement with the real. Nadja, as sphinx and muse, object of

love and desire, represents a fortuitous encounter, the possibility to be found in the

everyday, that of surreality: a cracking open of reality to unreality, the conscious to the

unconscious, the known to the unknown. Effectuated in the space of the city of Paris, in

its streets, where random encounters are to be counted on, errance is the domain of both the privileged male writer – the surrealist flâneur firmly anchored in the society he criticizes – and the marginal female figure – the destitute, mad, wandering woman who, for Breton, is “la créature toujours inspirée et inspirante qui n’aimait qu’être dans la rue, pour elle seul champ d’expérience valuable, dans la rue, à portée d’interrogation de tout

être humain lancé sur une grande chimère…” (Nadja 134).

Madness or any form of existence that wanders so far in one direction so as not to

maintain communication between the two positions, the two realms, that is to say, which

is not characterized by dialectical movement, cannot be considered as errance. To

wander, to stray, is to come back to and move away from a point of reference; it is just

this movement and the different perspectives to be gained at varying distances that

constitute errance as both a critical and creative act. And it is this potential for criticism

and creativity, at once a movement away from and towards, that posits errance as always

being at once potential risk and promise, error and/as possibility. Bretonnian surrealist

errancy then, insofar as it is characterized by just such a disponibilité, is epitomized in le

20 Commenting specifically her declaration “c’est même entièrement de cette façon que je vis,” Breton writes in a footnote : « Ne touche-t-on pas là au terme extrême de l’aspiration surréaliste, à sa plus forte idée limite ? » (87).

71 pas traversing urban spaces and blurring boundaries, in the traceless dialectical movement it allows for and engenders, without fixed form and always figuring possibility.

CHAPTER TWO:

LOSS AND INCOMPREHENSION: ERRANCY IN MARGUERITE DURAS’S LE

VICE-CONSUL AND EMILY L.

Contrary to the Surrealists’ experience of fortuitous hasard and revelation as

inherent to and indicative of their urban wandering (fruitful and voluntary), the experience of errance in the works of Marguerite Duras is one of loss and suffering. In

the novels Le Vice-consul and Emily L. this pain can be linked to inculpation and an attempt at the expiation of a perceived transgression via loss of the self. This loss is located in and performed through the body as the characters traverse vast expanses of land and water over an extended period of time. From movement in an unbounded geography to the erosion of the physical being, these wanderings translate the phenomenological experience of immensity as loss, notably the painful loss of self. For

Normand Doiron, errance in its Antique origins necessarily involves suffering. The exemplary errant figure of Ulysses illustrates the torture of being in an “espace sans repère” (15). The beggar woman of Le Vice-consul wanders for ten years across Asia, starving and alone, deteriorating from human being to animal and eventually going mad.

By choosing to make long voyages at sea with her husband, returning every so often to the Isle of Wight, the eponymous Emily L. deprives the couple of a traditional home-life in order to preserve their relationship; the sea slowly overtakes the couple, and Emily L. in particular comes to be identified with a wandering in/toward the void.

Errance here is no longer a liberating nor voluntary endeavor, no longer a

pleasurable experience as it was for the Surrealists. The geography, spaces, and stakes

have changed; for even if Aragon and Breton aim to stray from the familiar into the realm

of the unknown, and even if they do accomplish this on a conceptual and poetic level,

their bodies remain located in the city. Not only is this space demarcated by a common,

known geography, it is also punctuated with names of streets, buildings, monuments that

belong to the personal geography of the narrators wandering in this space. They cannot

get lost in this space, for their deep knowledge of the city, experienced through lived

personal experience (Benjamin’s Erfahrung) and collective memory, cannot be

eschewed. The texts themselves attest as trace to the extent to which their geography is a

lived one; Aragon details the layout of the arcade, names shops and restaurants, and

inserts into his work signs and other written material observed in the arcade. Breton, too,

gives precise information about the itinerary of his meanderings in the city, and the photographs in his Nadja can be seen as documentation21 of the reality of the narrative

told. Michael Sheringham calls this work a “log book, the register of an experience”

(Everyday Life 81).22

Le Vice-consul and Emily L., unlike the surrealist texts, relate accounts of

wandering as abstraction and uncertainty. Rather than manifest a trace, these texts, like

much of Duras’s oeuvre, perform an “esthétique de l’anéantissement” (Gouttebroze 137).

The errant subject, already without place, finds further dissolution into the world when

21 See Ian Walker for a problematization of the role of the photograph in Breton’s text by considering the complex relationship between image and text, notably the impact of crediting – or not – the photographer and the significance of including street scene photos devoid of human subjects.

22 Critics agree that while the complete faithfulness of the reporting of events by Breton may be called into question, the character of Nadja is indeed based on a real encounter between the author and a woman in the streets of Paris. See Marguerite Bonnet’s comments on Nadja in the Pléiade edition of Breton’s Œuvres complètes for details on the encounter; Paris: Gallimard, 1988.

74 she comes to inhabit silence through the loss of her body, loss of faculties of speech and reason, and lack of poetic voice. Loss of self coincides with loss of geographic coordinates and bearings: the physical being and the physical world through which the self moves both lose their delineating features, and the distinction between self and world/other becomes blurred. In Le Vice-consul, the mendiante’s forced wandering is an automatism that leads not to an unchained liberation but to auto-destruction. In Emily L. the voyage at sea is a means of at once purging and maintaining love and the couple.

Loss and error cannot be dissociated from the couple’s life at sea. Given the “radical instability of their narrating agency” (Willis 12), Duras’s texts operate from an always already unsettled position that extends from the diegesis through to the characters an inevitable decomposition. We will see how a poetics and politics of errancy emerges in these texts in the form of dislocation in concert with loss – loss of bearings, boundaries, mental and physical capacities. The errant characters and the texts themselves negotiate disorientation and non-knowledge as a paradoxical articulation of subjective agency.

Part I: The Errant Subject in Marguerite Duras’s Le Vice-consul

“Elle marche”: Movement of the Mendiante

“Elle marche, écrit Peter Morgan,” states the very first line of Le Vice-consul (9).

This brief opening sentence succinctly offers the reader insight into the main stakes and thematics encountered in this novel: the physical displacement of the errant subject and the telling (written or orally) of his/her story by another. These movements are accomplished by different characters: on the one hand, the beggar woman and the

eponymous French Vice-consul of Lahore each perform and endure their own errancy,

while, on the other hand, Peter Morgan and Calcutta’s European functionaries tell their

tales. The interplay of physical errancy and its narration serves to structure the text; both

movements can be read as a form of wandering: open-ended, spontaneous, continually

(re)constructed and (re)negotiated acts and their elaborations, prolongations, and

transformations. The beggar woman and the Vice-consul are defined by their movement and relation to place, specifically their social, geographic, and familial non-belonging and resulting displacement. On a secondary level, we shall also consider the metaphysical errance of two other colonial figures, Anne-Marie Stretter and Charles Rossett.

The beggar woman, like the Surrealists, errs on foot, on a daily basis. The insistence on corporeal movement in Duras’s text, however, surpasses that of the

Surrealists. Her plight has the makings of a human interest story, riveting and tragic: disowned by her parents and chased from her home after becoming pregnant, the young

Laotian peasant girl’s only option is to leave and never return. Without any idea of where she is ultimately headed nor in which direction she should go, she sets out on what ends up to be, we are told, a ten-year’s-long trek across Asia, from rural Laos to the capital of British India. Living outside the social structures inscribed in the novel, the anonymous beggar woman, referred to as la jeune fille, elle, la mendiante, la folle, is identified with the most basic level of existence, that is to say the corporeal sensations and movements of walking, hungering, scavenging, sleeping. It is walking, mechanical and empty, effected to the rhythm of hunger, that dominates all other activities:

Comment ne pas revenir? Il faut se perdre. (...) Il faut être sans arrière-pensée, se disposer à ne plus reconnaître rien de ce qu’on connaît, diriger ses pas vers le point de l’horizon le plus hostile .... (...) Tête baissée, elle marche, elle marche. (...) ... le ciel et le pays se rejoignent en un fil droit, elle marche sans rien

atteindre. (...) Faim et marches s’incrustent dans la terre du Tonlé-Sap, prolifèrent en faims et marches plus loin. La marche semée a pris. En avant ne veut plus rien dire. (9-10)

Rather than standing out as a singular experience of hardship, wandering and

hungering make up the beggar woman’s everyday condition; they “s’incrustent” into the

pages of her story, rhetorically in the very language used, and physically through the

body of the errant subject experiencing and being transformed by a constant hunger, by

the baby inside her, by the miles and miles she walks in bare feet. Using repetition and

simple syntax Duras makes palpable the day-to-day conditions confronting the young

wanderer, insisting on the corporeal movement and rhythms of this displacement by

stating again and again, “elle marche,” “elle dort,” “la faim.” These terms and images, now modified in their formulation, now repeated identically, serve as theme and variation informing and orienting the beggar woman’s trek. In this way, we see the extreme circumstances that this woman experiences on a daily basis. The quotidian and routine aspect of this extraordinary experience of wandering is further reified given its expression through everyday language and simple sentences. More importantly, Duras’s expression translates a dialectics of continuity and rupture: the chained footsteps of the aimless wanderer. The mendiante does not operate within the bounds of socio-economic order;

she inhabits the margins of the system both metaphorically and literally – taking refuge in

quarries, traveling through fields, entering town centers only to scavenge for food.

Although she may not be linked into Breton’s conceptual chain of economic order – she is doubly excluded, in fact, as an indigenous subject and as an outcast from her mother’s

house – her “unchained” footsteps do not tread freely, for the beggar woman’s existence

is tied to basic needs on the level of the body.

To say “faim et marches s’incrustent dans la terre” is to metonymically implicate

the mendiante, through her body that hungers and walks, as embedding itself in the land.

This rhetorical and corporeal incrustation (symbolized later on an even deeper level by

the beggar woman’s foot, cut open and infected, and the multiple babies born en route

over the years) seems to indicate a kind of anchoring of the wanderer within the confines

of the expression of her daily condition. The automatism of walking, “[l]a marche semée

a pris,” that becomes her existence, serves paradoxically to unhinge the mendiante’s

grounding in reality. For, although she finds herself walking deeper and farther day after

day, the beggar woman, “elle marche sans rien atteindre” such that “[e]n avant ne veut plus rien dire.” The en déçà–au delà structuration expressed here leaves the wanderer in a time-space of nothingness, that is to say, with no point of reference, no sense of

progress, experiencing a sort of vertigo which coincides with the terms of the beggar

woman’s errance: to lose herself. Advancing through the story of her trek, over the course of the first third of the text, the spatio-temporal demarcation governing the mendiante’s reality dissolves. Diegetic time becomes unhinged as the narration wanes in certainty regarding the duration of her wandering: “Elle marche pendant six jours” (12) ;

“Une fois, il a dû y avoir deux mois qu’elle était partie, maintenant elle ne sait pas »

(14) ; “Combien de temps … devant, derrière elle?” (15) ; “il doit y avoir près d’un an

qu’elle a quitté Battambang” (59) ; “Un jour, il y a dix ans qu’elle marche, Calcutta. /

Elle reste » (69).

This diegetic instability manifests a movement of unhinging that teeters towards

oblivion with respect to both the beggar woman’s subjectivity and the text itself. This

destabilization operates through a movement of dépassement, from the known to the

unknown. This disorientation works paradoxically through the “faims et marches” in

which her daily life is rooted. In order to survive, she must move beyond the physical

bounds of the world she knows – that of her village, of the rivers and plains familiar to her – and the mental and emotional limits associated with that world. Not only does she leave the geographic territory that she knows as she advances further from familiar landscapes and towns, but she also moves out of the cognitive and emotional territory of the known, that of lived experience – knowledge of family, place, and self – bound up in

the body and memory.

The beggar woman’s trans-Asiatic errance as physical and metaphysical loss of

self occurs through a gradual movement of simultaneous erosion and progression,

wherein loss of self proves the sole route to enduring and perhaps eventually overcoming

the painful condition of errance. (As we will see, the characters of Anne-Marie Stretter,

the Ambassador’s wife, and the Vice-consul also follow this route of loss of self in an

attempt to nullify the errance they experience.) The mendiante suffers loss in three

principal ways: through the physical erosion of the body, through the deterioration of

mental and linguistic capacities, and through spatial and temporal disorientation, all of

which can be associated with the transformative processes of abandon and expulsion.

Loss and the Body: Abandon and Expulsion

If the Surrealists wrote the city, and wrote themselves into the city, through their

wanderings by foot and by pen, the beggar woman too inscribes herself in the land that/as

she wanders. And the experience of this trek is no less inscribed on her. While there

may be no itinerary mapped out, no permanent footprints left behind to signal her

passage, the doubly visceral combination of hunger and wandering cannot but leave its

mark on the wanderer. Through her body, “faim et marches” physically and

metaphorically dig themselves into the earth with each step taken and embed themselves

in the topography of Tonlé-Sap, leading to a proliferation of “faims et marches plus loin,”

leading all the way to India. The physical contact of her feet on the ground, moving step

by step, day by day, over thousands of kilometers in the course of ten years, creates a

direct relation, intimate and painful, between the mendiante and the regions traversed.

Little by little, her body is destroyed, worn down and eaten from the inside-out. We see this corrosive transformation of the body represented in the beggar woman’s pregnancy and her infected foot. This destruction translates the material side of the loss of self incurred in the mendiante’s errancy, which in turn leads to a loss of subjectivity,

transforming this young woman into an animal-like creature.

A constant hunger ravages the wanderer; she knows not when next she will find

food. Beckoned by lights, she waits on the outskirts of towns where she scavenges for

scraps at the market’s close at the end of the day, sneaking at times rice or fish, and, at

other times, stealing blatantly, chased out once again. The ever-present hunger of the

first year of the beggar woman’s errance is not fully her own, but rather is shared by the

unborn child inside her. She must compete with this child for survival, its hunger and its

growth inside her, eating her alive. Duras writes:

Elle vomit, s’efforce de vomir l’enfant, de se l’extirper, mais c’est de l’eau de mangue acide qui vient. [N]uit et jour l’enfant continue à la manger, elle écoute et entend le grignotement incessant dans le ventre qu’il décharne, il lui a mangé les cuisses, les bras, les joues – elle les cherche, il n’y a que des trous là où elles étaient dans le Tonlé-Sap –, la racine des cheveux, tout, il prend petit à petit la place qu’elle occupait, cependant que sa faim à elle il ne l’a pas mangée. (18)

This passage vividly illustrates corporeal transformation as loss: the beggar woman,

advancing in time and space, loses herself to the baby, loses her place in her own body.

This baby gnawing at her on the inside is elsewhere termed “un rat” (19, 23). The vermin

destroys her, asserting its presence over her lack; he causes the malnourished wanderer’s

hair fall out thereby scaring off the fisherman whose money in exchange for sex allows

her to procure food. The mendiante and her baby risk death for lack of food enough to sustain them both. She tries to expulse the baby, to vomit him out of her.

Sharon Willis sees in the figure of the mendiante – who appears in others of

Duras’s texts – the “maternal dyad, mother and daughter, exchanges and loss, perpetually repeating and differentiating itself” who “reproduces the etymological sense of the word

‘hysteria’ – wandering womb” (Willis 25-26). For Willis this doubleness, epitomized in the birth and death figuration, or the womb and the tomb, as she terms it, represents the project of writing for Duras, which concerns itself necessarily with the question of the feminine and the “unrepresentable.” For Madeleine Borgomano, the mendiante is the

“cellule génératrice” at the heart of a number of Duras’s later texts.23 Underscoring less

the psychoanalytical questions of drives and the mother–daughter pairing, Borgomano

conceptualizes the beggar woman’s story in terms of the “modalities of textual

generation” that it provides: a female character wanders aimlessly in unstable space and

23 The mendiante makes her first appearance in Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) in which Duras accords two pages to this woman’s story ; she appears again as a much more prominent character in the “India cycle” of Le Vice-consul, India Song, La Femme du Gange, and Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (written as a novel, a play (adapted by Duras to film) and two other films, respectively). Sharon Willis speaks of the “elusiveness of [Duras’s] texts” as being “replicated in the mobility of her own position,”that is to say as author, playwright, filmmaker (Willis 2). And of the obsessional repetition that amounts in the retelling of the same story, the reappearance of characters across texts (the beggar woman is not the only one who accomplishes this), Willis writes, “Indeed, the oeuvre itself, in its repetitions and displacements of a minimal repertoire of figures, has a syntax of articulation all its own, which calls into question the integrity of textual boundaries, separate narratives” (Willis 25).

engages in movements of abandon and replacement. Concentrating on these textual

elements, Borgomano asserts that the space of the mendiante in particular is one “propice

à l’égarement,” since it is “marécageux et indistinct, où la terre et l’eau se mêlent dans

une totale confusion” (486). The unstable temporal frame mentioned earlier corresponds

to the shifting ground of swamplands that the beggar woman navigates: such unsteady

terrain leads one astray, makes one get lost, as earth and water blend together and traces

of footsteps disappear as soon as they are made. Quoting Pascal, Borgomano deems

Durassian space to be “un milieu vague, toujours incertain et mouvant” (486).

In spite of the differences between Aragon and Breton’s experience of errance

and its “forme-sens”24 in Duras’s texts, errance figures for all three authors ambiguity

and dialectical movement. If we read errance as a paradoxical site, a threshold position,

where straying from is always coming back to, coming together and separating, where

these and other tensions are constantly negotiated, Duras’s pregnant beggar woman

represents an exemplary figure of 20th-century errancy. She translates dislocation and disorientation diegetically, spatially, and corporeally. With respect to the bounds of her story, they blend in Le Vice-consul with those constructed individually by Peter Morgan as narrator of the inner-story and with those discursive bounds constructed collectively and inconsistently by members of colonial society as they discuss the mendiante with fascination and disgust. As “cellule génératrice“ or not, she performs, through her intertextual wandering, diegetic indetermination that extends to genre crossings and blendings. Furthermore, the blending of biography and fiction presents another tension

24 I borrow this term from Borgomano speaking of Duras’s writing as in-formed by the story of the beggar woman : “L’histoire de la mendiante nous semble donc une “forme-sens” de l’écriture durassienne : tous ses éléments deviennent générateurs” (486). In her text, “La ‘mémoire de l’oubli’, une ‘forme sens’ de l’écriture de Marguerite Duras,” Borgomano specifies that she borrows this term from Henri Meschonnic in his Pour la poétique III.

navigated via the figure of the mendiante. The episode of the baby bought by a white

woman comes directly from Duras’s own childhood in Indochina – her mother having

come home from the market one day with a 6 month-old child who died soon after

(Borgomano 491).

Whether one reads the various tellings of the story of the mendiante as

representative of Duras’s penchant for repetition (to a point of obsession, some say), of

her representation of instability and lack, or even as the very movement of writing itself,

as Borgomano suggests, this intertextual migration signals for us above all the

“placelessness” of the beggar woman.25 Recalling Michel de Certeau’s fromulation,

“Marcher, c’est manquer de lieu. C’est le procès indéfini d’être absent et en quête d’un

propre” (155). As Erica L. Johnson states, this figure is “homeless in all senses of the

word,” that is to say, not only in the sense of lack of a dwelling place but also lack of a

land to which she can return (Johnson 169). The beggar woman, cast out of her maternal

home and village, has no place of her own, no place to call home, as they say. In his

article, “L’expression de l’espace dans le Vice-Consul de M. Duras,” Jean-Guy

Gouttebroze argues that one space does belong to the mendiante -- her pregnant female body: “le seul espace qui lui appartienne, l’espace materiel interne” (Gouttebroze 137).

Regarding the body in motion, the lived body, from the phenomenological perspective of

Edmund Husserl or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we agree with this assessment of the body as a place, the place of the self, and with Gouttebroze’s postulate that the mendiante’s body is the one space from which she will not be chased and can thus fully inhabit. With the

25 Which Erica L. Johnson would claim reflects Duras’s own lack of “home.” For Johnson, all Duras’s works after Un barrage contre le Pacifique are “routed, in one way or another, through Indochina, this place from which she is displaced” (165). For our part, we shall save the question of Duras as an errant figure herself for another study.

83 movement of her feet upon the land, the errant woman makes a place for herself in the space of each footstep.

And yet, this body in motion is not a unified being in spite of what Husserl might say, “[In walking] my organism constitutes itself: by means of its relation to itself as an animate organism it is also constituted as moveable…. The kinesthetic activities and the spatial movements stay in union by means of association” (Casey 224). In spite of his claim of the body as the mendiante’s rightful and sovereign space, Gouttebroze unwittingly illustrates the dis-union within the mendiante when he directly follows his assertion by quoting from Le Vice-consul the passage that we have cited above describing the baby’s destructive displacement within the young wanderer. The association of the body’s parts into a whole union is disrupted here. The baby’s incessant gnawing has left holes where the mendiante’s legs, arms, and cheeks used to be. He takes up the space that used to be hers, all the way down to the roots of her hair. Not only does Duras vividly illustrate this destruction of the beggar woman’s body by another entity that is, in fact, of the beggar woman, but Duras also makes explicit that the other inside is taking over the space supposed to belong outright to the mendiante: “il prend petit à petit la place qu’elle occupait.” She is no longer at home in her own body; an extreme “homeless-ness” characterizes this figure’s errance.

The poetics of annihilation (l’anéantissement) that informs Duras’s texts is a driving force of errance in as much as it is a movement towards nothingness, emptiness, silence. The not-knowing or, rather, un-knowing of the self which has given way to the other of the baby, this other who is still of the self, an “alien internal entity,” Willis offers via psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, or “difference within,” is symbolized in the splitting

of the subject as radical loss (Willis 29). Sex, lack of food, and childbirth (the beggar

woman will bear, and abandon, many children in the course of her wandering) contribute

to the sheer physical erosion of her body, compounded through the perpetual pounding of

her feet into the earth day after day. Loss of the body, as figured in the general corporeal

deterioration and specifically though the lack of place within her own body, is the first

stage in the evacuation of the mendiante’s subjectivity.

The baby is born near Oudang, we are told by Peter Morgan (a fact that comes

into question later, as the beggar woman loses her bearings, in time and space, and her

memory, accordingly). The wanderer cannot continue to carry this burden on her back;

she is told that the whites will take babies, and that she should go to the marketplace in a

colonial town. After two unsuccessful attempts, the jeune fille (as she is called in this

section) arrives at a third white outpost, in Vinh-Long. She sets down the baby on a cloth

and desperately tries to attract attention to the sickly child (possibly dead?) whom no one

wants: “Cette belle enfant est à qui le voudra … et pour rien.” No one approaches, for

her speech is unintelligible to those in this market, though the young woman does not

notice and continues trying to communicate her offer of the child. While we know that she is far enough from her village that no one speaks her language here, we also wonder if this is the first noted instance of the beggar woman’s slide into madness. The reader is unsure if she is unintelligible due to her dialect or if she is speaking jibberish; on this day, the beggar woman is unaware of the linguistic gap separating her from those around her,

“Elle ne s’aperçoit pas que déjà, par ici, personne ne comprend ce qu’elle raconte. Hier elle l’a remarqué, aujourd’hui non” (Le Vice-consul 54). This failed communication is symbolic of the mendiante’s estrangement from her home, from the known, and her

presence in a strange land where she is not understood and does not understand.26 This instance of the wanderer’s slide into muteness is a glimpse of things to come: the disorientation in time and space and loss of memory eventually equate to madness and a descent into an animal-like state. Moreover, this non-communication figures the discursive silence into which she is being written through the pen-voice of the other,

Peter Morgan.

The incomprehensible beggar woman who has brought a seemingly dead child to market,

represents a further aberration in both the animality of her appearance and the ignorance

of her state. She sits wondering why no one wants her child, her leg outstretched beside

the baby, the odor of her infected foot betraying the gravity of the wound: “Le pied est

blessé, une large estrafilade faite par une pierre coupante, nette, dans l’écorce, dedans des

vers remuent, elle ne sait pas qu’il pue” (54). Her ignorance and imposed silence

translate the move toward disposession that occurs over the course of her decade’s long

marche. For Borgomano, the beggar woman’s story pushes writing to its limits by

situating itself “hors des limites du dire” while also positing this errant figure as herself the “lieu de l’écrit,” translating as such the emptiness “vers lequel se précipite l’écriture, dans un élan vers sa propre perdition” (Borgomano 484). We see this loss of self occuring from the “alien internal entities” of the baby and the worms eating away at the mendiante, pushing her out of the only “home” which she has left, her body. Both must be expelled as an act of “unchaining,” in Breton’s use of the term.

26 Erica L. Johnson reads the mendiante’s placelessness as the referent for her voicelessness, both of which “forc[e] the issue of the geopolitics of identity” (Johnson 169). In Johnson’s view, Duras’s own “homelessness” is reflected in this figure, as rapatriée at the age of 17 to a “homeland” that is not part of her lived childhood experience and which cannot consequently be the land from which she speaks.

At the market, a white woman with a daughter in tow makes eye contact, giving a coin and continuing on her way. But the jeune fille is not asking for money here; for once, the jeune fille is not a mendiante nor a thief chased out of the market; she reverses the roles, is the pursuer here, baby and coin outstretched in offering. A lengthy “chase” ensues ending at the white woman’s residence where the young woman and her baby are allowed to enter the courtyard, the baby then taken inside the house. The wanderer waits outside to see if the woman will agree to keep the child, sleeping for a bit, considering where next to go, and finally noticing a bottle of disinfectant and a bandage left outside for her. The young woman cleans her foot as she has seen it done before: “La jeune fille presse son pied, la vermine sort, elle verse l’eau grise et panse le pied. Dans un poste sanitaire, il y a quelques mois, on lui a soigné ainsi le pied” (Le Vice-consul 65). Duras’s economy of words in this sentence coupled with the earlier mention of the infected foot, infested with worms, renders the image with disgusting clarity. The beggar woman waits in the courtyard caught in extreme fatigue and hesitant to leave before knowing the fate of her child. Finally, the white woman bathes the baby : “[E]lle voit bien que cette enfante est vivante quand même, la preuve en est qu’elle la baigne. Baignerait-elle une petite fille morte? Elle, sa mère, savait. Maintenant elle sait aussi, la dame. Deux personnes” (63). While it is not at this moment that the young mendiate-mother decides to leave, the bathing of the child signifies transference of the child’s belonging, from la jeune fille to la dame. “Deux personnes,” two women who know that the baby is alive, who have tacitly and expressly entered into the care of this child, with one woman’s duty ending and the other’s beginning. The jeune fille finally succeeds in separating herself

87 from her child, whom the white woman takes into her house and agrees to keep (after a doctor confirms the child’s health).

In a similar movement, we saw the wanderer wash her wounded foot, cleaning out the worms living inside and feeding on her. Though it represents quite a different sort of expulsion, sending the maggots out is a symbolic echo of the jeune fille’s casting off of the baby as expiation, purgation. The act of washing is a symbolic rupture and movement in a new direction, a cleansing purification and expulsion from the body.

Herself expelled from her mother’s home because she became pregnant, the wanderer has now rid herself of the baby that embodies this originary faute. The baby has been cleaned and is ready for a new life. Cleaning her wound, the mendiante also rids herself of the vermin gnawing away at her foot, eating away at her body as the baby once did.

She finally leaves the white woman’s house, which is ironically situated in the Plaine des

Oiseaux. This is the very region that was her initial destination, where her father had said a cousin lived and to which she has now come without knowing it, led here only by the desire to give up her child in the marketplace. Unlike that of her child, the wanderer’s new start is the beginning of the end. Leaving “for good” this time, finally heading far from her natal village, the mendiante leaves behind physical traces of her passage. The body’s evacuation has begun and, through these bodily and genealogical expulsions, so too has the dangerous move into a fully “unchained” subjecthood, which coincides with the “néantisation de l’être” (Gouttebroze 137).

Displacement and Dispossession: Getting Lost in Body and Mind

From the opening pages’ “Comment ne pas revenir? Il faut se perdre… En avant ne veut plus rien dire,” Duras lets her reader know that loss is accomplished through the

88 dual means of the body and the mental. A mental unhinging is hinted at here and there, often as a future state, not yet arrived: “Ce n’est pas encore la folie. C’est la faim, cachée par la peur …” (Le Vice-consul 27). Loss of mental clarity happens slowly, in concert with, and as a consequence of deterioration of the body. The absence of food, for example, results in hallucinations: “Elle ramasse une poignée de poussière et la met dans sa bouche. Elle se réveille… elle ne se souvient pas avoir mis ça dans sa bouche, elle regarde le noir de la nuit, elle ne comprend pas, elle a presque été du riz chaud, la poussière” (22). With her steps still « chained » to the rhythm of hunger and the need to move as far from her family home as possible, the earth that she wanders and the search for food dictate her actions. The transformation is slow, imperceptible to the mendiante, incomprehensible to this young woman who in the market at Vinh-Long was unaware that no one understood her.

There is an intrinsic connection between loss of subjectivity and geographic disorientation – a getting or being lost, losing one’s directional bearings. Significantly, this link is understood in terms of going astray, of making a mistake or error. After giving up her baby to the white woman, the mendiante, mother now separated from her child, briefly considers returning home to see her own mother, the one who cast her out.

But the imperative of never returning has finally been accepted and has even turned into a desire: “Elle ne retrouvera jamais le chemin. Elle ne voudra plus le retrouver” (65). The beggar woman’s expulsion from the maternal home as dwelling space leads her to displace herself across Asia on foot. Over the course of this movement she is dis-placed from her own body, the womb taken over by the baby, the other within. With the birth of the baby and more importantly its abandon at the white outpost, the self-as-other is now

displaced in turn, cast out of the maternal-home of the body, a repetition of the very expulsion that the mendiante has suffered. The abandon of the baby allows her to reclaim

some agency, even as she is deteriorating, losing herself, mentally and physically.

Dialectical and paradoxical, this errance is both lack and excess, a displacement that is

disorientation and dispossession: “La faim … le soleil, le manque de parler, le

bourdonnement entêtant des insectes de la forêt, le calme des clairières, bien des choses

approfondissent la folie. Elle se trompe en tout, de plus en plus, jusqu’au moment où elle

ne se trompe plus jamais, brusquement jamais plus puisqu’elle ne cherche plus rien” (70).

The transition from making mistake after mistake, going in the wrong direction

time and again, to no longer going astray, no longer making errors, occurs as a result of

aborting an attempt at knowing, an attempt at finding. Once the act of searching has

ceased – an act that, given the quote on page 65, as well as numerous other references to seeing the mother again, can be called the desire to find the way back home –, the beggar woman finds herself on the “right path” in that she is no longer going the wrong way, “ne se trompe plus jamais.” And yet, it would seem that the moment that she eclipses her habit of being mistaken, of getting lost, is in fact the very moment of becoming completely lost, going completely astray, that is to say going mad. She no longer searches because she is longer operating within the bounds of the rational world, she has lost her reason and memory along with her language and physical being.

This loss of self through the means of a spatial, mental, and material loss/getting lost, or permanent straying, is not only gradual but must be learned and consciously accepted. For, while the mendiante is expelled from her home and abandoned by her mother, she does not know how to abandon in turn her family, her homeland, all that she

90 knows life and herself to be. Coming back to the opening passage if Le Vice-consul, the reader and the wanderer are informed of “how” not to return:

Comment ne pas revenir? Il faut se perdre. Je ne sais pas. Tu apprendras. Je voudrais une indication pour me perdre. Il faut être sans arrière-pensée, se disposer à ne plus reconnaître rien de ce qu’on connaît, diriger ses pas vers le point de l’horizon le plus hostile .... (...) Tête baisée, elle marche, elle marche. (…) La marche semée a pris. En avant ne veut plus rien dire. (9-10)

The semantic movement in this passage shows the shift within the mendiante from emplaced to displaced via a learned “deconditioning,” a term Michael Sheringham uses to describe surrealist vision as a process of seeing differently and involving a willing break with the known in favor of a movement toward the unknown. Coming back to the maternal home (revenir) even though she has been expelled happens instinctually, due to a familiarity, an intimate knowledge of this place where she used to belong. Thus, in order to not come back, she must get lost, or we could say, she must lose herself. This new state of being, however, has to be learned, for it is a new experience that involves the un-learning of prior knowledge, a process of de-familiarization or strange-making. For

Duras, as Borgomano and others have shown, the movement of the mendiante, like that of writing, is a movement towards nothingness. In the dialectic tension between knowing and not-knowing, and in the act of losing oneself, not coming back, advancing indefinitely – though this “advancement” is of course illusory – a canceling effect is achieved, sending the wanderer off into a suspended existence, outside of time. At the moment that she is cast out of the family home, in the imperative, “Il faut se perdre,” the errant subject has already achieved an initial level of loss, inscribed in the very first movement away from her mother, her maternal home. Interpreting Willis’s allegory a bit differently, we see here the womb of the beggar woman’s mother-home from which she is

doubly expulsed as a sentencing to live as a wandering-tomb, movement of self- abolishment.

While we read “La marche semée a pris. En avant ne veut plus rien dire” as a foreclosure of the condition to which the mendiante is fated as a result of “committing” the “error” of becoming pregnant, we also read this condition as not initially happened into but as that which must be learned. To not return through getting lost (a loss of self) is not easily accomplished for it runs counter to one’s intuition of desiring to know where one is located, where one is headed, and by which path one may reach the desired destination. Thus, on her father’s advice, the young woman sets out for the Plaine des

Oiseaux, where a relative lives. However, she does not ask for directions straight away, preferring instead to rely on topographic markers to orient herself with respect to the location of her village and the Plaine. Inevitably she gets lost; and eventually, she decides not to seek out her relatives for she hopes to figure out how to get as far from her village and family as possible:

Elle se dit que, lorsqu’elle la connaîtra [la direction de la plaine des Oiseaux], elle ira dans la direction contraire à celle-là. Elle cherche l’autre façon de se perdre: remonter vers le nord, dépasser son village, après, c’est le Siam, rester avant le Siam. Dans le Nord il n’y a plus de fleuve et j’échapperai à cette habitude que j’ai de suivre l’eau, je choisirai un endroit avant le Siam et je resterai là. Elle voit le Sud se diluer dans la mer, elle voit le Nord fixe. (12)

Here the mendiante is not yet lost. Still in a phase of searching, deliberating, she is looking for a means to lose herself and conceives of a plan to this end. The use of the future tense clearly shows that this is a plan for the future, to be enacted forthwith.

Furthermore, the use of the first person in this passage indicates that she still has her voice, her human qualities. Mapping out her itinerary equates to a moment of agency where the je erupts briefly into this passage before fading back to third person narration.

As Peter Morgan tells the beggar woman’s tale within the larger framework of the novel,

the narrative voice expresses the mendiante’s lack of agency, her objectification. Unlike

the Surrealists, the beggar woman does initially not chose to err, but is forced to do so.

And yet, as evidenced in this quote and elsewhere, we see that she does not exist in an

utter lack of subjective agency, for she does take charge of her movements within this

passage. The je breaks into the text precisely .in order to announce a rupture with her past, with the place of memories, experience, knowledge. In the future she will rupture with this habit that she has from childhood, “cette habitude … de suivre l’eau,” for, following the water is a way to not lose oneself, according to her father, as the river will

always lead back home.

The three verbs to be enacted in the future by the je – échapper, choisir, rester –

tell of her escape from her past, her choice of a new place to live, and her intent to stay

there. In the course of one sentence she fully actualizes herself and takes control of her

situation by shaping for herself her past, present, and future. However, the autonomous

je belongs to the future and not to the present of her own life. Paradoxically, the future je

as found or formed can only come into being if the present elle loses herself, this other

that is not I. A radical transformation must take place and is accomplished through the

perversion of the notion that North is a marker of geographic (or existential) orientation.

The mendiante, we are told, must head north as a way to lose herself. Duras plays here

with the expression “perdre le nord” which means to lose one’s bearings, to be lost in a

metaphorical way. Referring to the north in the context of cardinal directions while

making the North stand for the (imaginary) place where the mendiante will get out of

being herself, an escape symbolized in the lack of river in the north, Duras subverts

93 rhetorical and rational convention. This subversion is a discursive manifestation of

“l’autre façon de se perdre.” Furthermore, the path to loss of self must pass by, must bypass, dépasser – in both senses of the term – her native village. She must travel past her village, into the place of future agency represented in the unknown. This place symbolizes a rupture with the past, a difference that will make of the beggar woman someone lost to herself.

This transformation occurs, indeed, though slowly and paradoxically, does not result in a fully actualized errant subject. After a number of “faux departs,” turning in circles and unwittingly retracing her steps time and again, the beggar woman ruptures with her native town and believes she is on the right path: “On ne la retrouve plus jamais aux abords du pays natal. … elle s’éloigne, sans crainte. Sa route, elle est sure, est celle de l’abandon définitif de sa mère” (28). Of course, it will take until she cleans out her wound and gives her baby to the white woman for her to really leave her former life and to move “for sure” into the loss that will become her existence. After accomplishing this second part of her double act of abandon, “alors elle commence à avancer. Cette fois, oui, elle avance. // Elle est sortie par la haie d’hibiscus, elle en est sure, elle est partie”

(68).

While she may, by the end of the novel, live free from the law of the mother and father, the mendiante reamains chained by the hunger drive, having slowly transformed into a less-than-human creature, compared explicitly, at times, to an animal motivated to look for food. In the concluding pages, she arrives on the same island as the group of

European functionaries, friends of the Ambassador and his wife, who have come here to pass a tranquil weekend at a luxurious hotel away from the suffering of Calcutta. The

94 beggar woman makes the trip on foot, then makes her way onto a junk to cross to the island. Although she arrives twenty pages after the group, her slow pace is not due to having lost her way, for, “Les éléphants fous trouvent la route des bananeraies” (199). It seems at this point that she can no longer get lost, having already lost her self many times over – her human, female subjectivity dissolved, evacuated, shed, including in the numerous babies born and abandoned over the course of her ten years of wandering. In the colonial capital, she lives among the lepers, swimming in the Ganges River and sleeping under the mango trees, not appearing to suffer from any disease herself.

Her communication consists of unintelligible song and frightening laughter. In an episode on the island, the mendiante follows Charles Rosen, a newly- arrived member

British colonial elite, until, trapped, he stops and turns back toward her. She then laughs, looks him in the eye, pulls from her breast a freshly caught fish and bites its head off. In her animal-like condition, we are no longer told of what she thinks or feels. This absence of subjectivity is expressed on an interdiegetic level when Peter Morgan’s story of « la mendiante folle » becomes the topic of discussion. Once again we see the beggar woman only from a distance, through the eyes of the colonials. Of Peter Morgan’s project,

Michael Richards says, “Je crois qu’il veut dire … il voudrait ne lui donner d’existence que dans celui qui la regarderait vivre. Elle, elle ne ressent rien » (182). In his fictionalization of her trajectory, the mendiante is reduced to an object, shaped and formed by others; she is without a voice in the telling of her story.

While her geographic advancement is illusory in that she has no fixed destination towards which she is making progress, the beggar woman does advance in the loss of self, this imperative put to her on the opening page of Duras’s text. It is precisely the

95 experience of loss, through multiple and varied ways – of the mother, her family, her home; her baby, her body; her mental faculties – that has shaped the wandering Laotian peasant girl into the beggar woman that we find in Calcutta at the end of her errancy.

Proclaimed on the opening page of Le Vice-consul and enacted throughout the rest of the text, the imperatives, “Il faut se perdre,” and “Il faut être sans arrière pensée, se disposer

à ne plus reconnaître rien de ce qu’on connaît, » reflect the desire for non-knowledge, an escape from the familiar expressed in Duras’s figuration of errance. More importantly, the poetics of errance represented in the figure of the mendiante emerge via experiences of loss and the accompanying emptiness. If de Certeau’s formulation that “to walk is to lack a place, to be indefinitely in search of a proper” reflects the movement of the mendiante, a most extreme and spectacular “marche,” how to read Duras’s « En avant ne plus rien dire”? It would seem that de Certeau’s “Sens de la marche” has lost the north.

II. The Colonial Situation and Metaphysical Errancy

While we would not expect the experience of the colonialists in the novel to echo that of the mendiante, it is indeed the case that the eponymous Vice-consul of Lahore and

Anne-Marie Stretter, wife of the British Ambassador, also live as errant subjects.

Although the personal history and diegetic situation in Calcutta of each of the three characters are quite different, we can draw parallels between these figures who operate within a paradigm of silence. Like the beggar woman, the Vice-consul and Anne-Marie

Stretter exist as other, object of fascination for the colonial society in the novel. Their stories, too, are told as hearsay, part imagined fabrication, part (distorted) reporting.

These two characters grapple with the impossibility of telling, illustrating the

insufficiency of language as communicative act. 27 Silence and otherness are further

signaled through the non-verbal communication that arises from the body to be

exteriorized in the form of the Vice-consul’s scream and Anne-Marie Stretter’s tears as

we saw with the beggar woman’s song and laughter. We shall see how these two

colonial figures, via an errancy personal to each of them, move toward self-annihilation

but do not accomplish it within the novel as does the mendiante, with her loss so

complete that she moves past the limit point of errance into a fully “unchained”

subjecthood, which is to say subjectivity negated, evacuated.

Le Vice-consul: Transgression and Liminality

The reader literally reads in tandem the story of the pregnant indigenous wanderer

and that of the troubled French colonizer, since they share center stage in the first half of

the novel. Duras alternates between relating the two stories, linking them together and to

the present of the narrative, the present of Calcutta, time and space from whence Peter

Morgan is writing the story of the beggar woman. After reading twenty pages of her

story, the first twenty pages of the novel, we are told that Peter Morgan has stopped

writing. He leaves his apartment and sees right away his subject: “Elle est là, devant la

residence de l’ex-vice-consul de France à Lahore” (29). Duras joins the two stories at

this moment, creating a dialogue between them. In its juxtaposition of the two

characters, this quotidian image of daybreak in the colonial residential area establishes

27 Concerning The figure of the unspeakable so prevalent in Duras’s oeuvre see In Language and in Love Marguerite Duras: The Unspeakable: Essays for Marguerite Duras. Ed. Mechthild Cranston. Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1992; and, Lawrence R. Scherhr, « Disloquations : de la communication durassienne » in Marguerite Duras, la tentation du poétique. Ed. B.Alazet, C.Blot-Labarrère, and R. Harvey. Paris : Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002. We will return to the subject of telling and being told by others in the second part of this chapter in our analysis of Emily L. including a consideration of the ineffable.

from the outset the distance between them and the relation of each to space. It is early

morning, the vice-consul has not yet awoken; he is asleep, secure and comfortable inside

his villa. The beggar woman sleeps, too, outside the villa, in the shade of a bush,

surrounded by lepers.

Given his cultural belonging and socio-economic status, the French Vice-consul to Lahore, Jean-Marc de H., represents in many ways the antithesis of the beggar woman, namely as a white male belonging to the colonial order, the political and cultural ruling class. He does not and could not experience the utterly annihilating errance of the

Laotian beggar woman. The physical and geographical dimensions of the Vice-consul’s

errance translate this privilege, both in his past and in the present of Calcutta. As we learn from the examination of his dossier, Jean-Marc de H. attends at least three high

schools, one of which is a boarding school that he dislikes immensely, eventually getting

expelled and finishing his studies back in Paris. He becomes a civil servant and spends

three to four years unaccounted for, away from the capital. An apparent outsider eager to

leave metropolitan France for an appointment in India, the Vice-consul, Jean-Marc de H., remains a singular and solitary being in this foreign land. Like the mendiante, the Vice- consul’s is a social and ethical deviation rooted in absence and exclusion. Jean-Marc de

H. is an adult orphan, his father dying when he was a teenager and his mother passing recently. The lack of social relationships runs deeper than the absence of family contact, extending to and perhaps epitomized by the utter lack of amicable and collegial ties. He has no friends, is visibly excluded from social circles, and avoided systematically by his peers. Through his displacements and non-belonging this man represents an aberration, many times over. In this novel Duras insists on the Vice-consul’s marginal status, from

his generally solitary existence to his acutely felt exclusion within Calcutta’s colonial

society, which can be traced to the incidents committed in Lahore. Having committed an

unspoken and unspeakable act, “l’acte solitaire, obscur, abominable” (103), in Lahore –

which is alluded to as an act (or acts) of random violence, that of shooting at night into

the Shalimar Gardens where the lepers and other poor sleep – Jean-Marc de H. has been

transferred to Calcutta where he awaits the French ambassador’s decision about where he

will go next.

In the reader’s first encounter with the title character, we find the Vice-consul in

his residence one morning in Calcutta, reading a letter from his aunt in Paris who takes care of his house while he is gone; she is his only family member. The narrator tells us that Jean-Marc de H. is “[f]ils unique maintenant orphelin” whose house in Paris is

“fermée des années durant parce que son propriétaire est dans les consulats, cette fois-ci

aux Indes.” Through this letter from “la tante de l’absent,” the Vice-consul’s presence in

the present of the text manifests as absence from the outset (33-34). As another figure of

“placelessness,” the Vice-consul, like the beggar woman, finds himself separated permanently from the mother-home. Calcutta is his temporary “home;” he lodges in a villa “destinée à abriter les commis qui sont à Calcutta en instance d’affectation” (36).

The present of the text in colonial India lasts but a few days, representing the time of the in-between.

The dialectic tension between presence and absence plays out in the character of the Vice-consul whose marginality and liminality reflect his relation to self and others.

He is characterized as other, strange, in his physical appearance: the look of his eyes and his voice that haunt, that do not accord with his physiognomy, “On voit mal ses yeux,

sons visage n’est pas expressif. Il est un peu mort …” (100); “Est-ce cela une voix blanche? On ne sait pas s’il vous questionne ou s’il vous répond” (112). The sight of him alone is said to frighten his peers, to provoke an uneasy feeling. Speaking with Charles

Rossett, a functionary newly arrived in Calcutta, the Ambassador mentions an

acquaintance who « ne peut pas supporter la vue du vice-consul de Lahore… Ce n’est pas de la peur à proprement parler, c’est un malaise... On fuit, oui, je l’avoue… je fuis un peu » (45). Much further in the text, though still within the diegetic present of the larger narrative frame (in which the story of the mendiante is embedded), these two speak again of the Vice-consul: “L’ambassadeur a dit à Charles Rossett: Les gens s’écartent instinctivement… c’est un homme qui fait peur… mais quelle solitude, parlez-lui un

peu” (103).

Furthermore, the Vice-consul represents within the novel the threat of madness or

unreason.28 At times he is said to « délirer » in his discussions with the director of the

European social club, the person most resembling a friend to the Vice-consul. The

specter of madness looms throughout the novel, without being articulated as such. This is

figured early on in a discussion on the Vice-consul’s file : « -- La folie n’a pas été

retenue ? -- Non, la dépression nerveuse seulement. Bien qu’il ait recommencé souvent

on a dit : ses nerfs ont lâché » (40-41). Raynalle Udris reads the colonial society’s refusal

to attribute madness to this character as a « normalising enterprise » in order for the

community to protect itself against the threat that the Vice-consul would pose to them as

28 In her work, Welcome Unreason : A Study of ‘Madness’ in the Novels of Marguerite Duras, Raynalle Udris makes a distinction between these terms. Udris explains, « The term ‘unreason,’ if one follows the distinction made by Foucault, refers to the liberation of imaginary powers, inscribed in an atemporal dimension and marked by répétition…. The term ‘madness’ is more circumscribed and linked to a modern appréhension » (5). She also states, however, that in her analysis of the character of the Vice-consul, she vascillates between the use of both terms.

100

a mentally ill member of their flock. And yet, as we have mentioned, they do not

recognize him as one of theirs. We can consider the ambiguity surrounding the Vice-

consul as a manifestation of the poetics and politics of errance at work in Duras’s text.

As was the case with the beggar woman, the Vice-consul’s straying from social

conventions, posits him as a figure poised for « unchaining ». Accordingly, Udris sees the Vice-consul’s deviation from the norm as a positive « assertion of Unreason », « the man of rupture within the group » who thwarts the status quo of (colonial) Reason according to which the European community operates.

Sharon Willis also reads the figure of the Vice-consul, like that of the mendiante, through the lens of resistance. Through these characters is posed the question of limits in relation to language, specifically in terms of an un-naming or not-representing that Willis terms “de-nomination.” With respect to the beggar woman she writes:

[T]he word Battambang,” this the mendiante’s village, becomes the only word the mendiante utters intelligibly by the time of her arrival in Calcutta, “serves precisely to de-nominate, to abolish the possibility of nomination within the récit of the mendiante, and with it, the récit itself. De-nomination is related to problems of representation through a destabilization of limits, of borders determining subject and object. (Willis 100)

Willis contends that “the problem of de-nomination” is at fact at work in the whole of the

novel, conditioning its “textual progress.” For his part, she sees the Vice-consul as

“com[ing] into being under the sign of the word ‘impossible’” (100). This word indeed figures in the Vice-consul’s official file, and is used to describe him as “quelqu’un d’impossible” (Le Vice-consul 104) we learn from Charles Rossett in conversation with the Vice-consul, trying in vain to solicit information from his colleague about the act he commited in Lahore. A bit later in the text, still at the Ambassador’s reception, it is now

Anne-Marie Stetter who assimilates the Vice-consul with this word when she tries to ask:

101

-- Je ne sais pas dire… Il y a sur votre dossier le mot impossible. Est-ce le mot cette fois?

Il se tait. Elle demande encore: -- Je ne sais pas moi-même, je cherche avec vous. -- Peut-être y a-t-il un autre mot? -- Ce n’est plus la question. (128)

Her interlocutor does not respond straight away, and then, after she prods him, his

response constitutes an ambiguous non-response that equates to non-knowledge while at the same time offering a possibility of an alternate knowledge. “Je ne sais pas” represents an ambivalent position of the in-between: neither refusal nor acceptance, it is the third term that at once immobilizes the discursive exchange and leads towards its continuation. Anne-Marie Stretter must ask another question, as rupture with the previous line of questioning and renewal of it. In Willis’s reading of this scene, “An

exchange jammed by the question of the word’s sense abolishes itself in its own

impossibility, in the search for a missing word” (Willis 101). Through many detours in

her analysis, Willis reads Le Vice-consul across examples of failed communication, this

“textual impasse of discursive exchange,” (101) to read the titular character as “the

possibility of absolute disjunction” and as “the terrifying possibility of a lack of all lack,

the death of desire, the utter detachment from an originary scene” (109). If for Udris the

figure of the Vice-consul embodies the “refusal of normalisation” (Udris 113) with

respect to the social structure of the colonial enterprise inscribed in the novel, Willis’s

“de-nomination” works on a much more diffuse level of language and representation. I

consider the discursive movement as that which informs characters and operates their

(non-)relations.

102

In this way, I agree with Willis and others who read the impossibility of

communication in Duras as a central theme and structuring element that manifests in dialogues of confusion or omission, the use of fragmentary syntax, and ellipses.

Lawrence Scherhr relates the impossibility of telling to the impossibility of community in

Duras’s oeuvre, a veritable dislocation in and through language. He states, “[I]l se trouve

toujours chez Duras une dislocation de la communication, soit une « disloquation ». Tout

est mis en doute, au niveau de la compréhension et la réception par cette disloquation »

(Scherhr 233). The « dislo(qu)ation of communication » relates to the impossible telling

and comprehension of the incidents committed in Lahore, as we saw in the exchange

between the Vice-consul and Anne-Marie Stretter. The relative silence of the Vice- consul constitutes his errancy as one that cannot be spoken, cannot be explained or understood. On the topic of Lahore, he remains literally silent, not speaking of it to others. This silence is rendered all the more grave when others evoke the incident at

Lahore and the topic of the Vice-consul, in his past actions or frighteningly enigmatic presence. Be they named characters or the anonymous “on,” those around the Vice- consul speak for and of him, though always only giving opinion and judgment and thus inventing, instead of objectively reporting, his story. Only the Vice-consul knows what

happened in Lahore, and he refuses to disclose this information. This refusal itself

represents a double act of erring – the transgression committed by the Vice-consul in

Lahore is compounded by the transgressive lack of explanation. Included in his dossier is

a testimony written by Jean-Marc de H.: « Je ne demande ni de rester à Lahore ni d’en

partir. Je ne peux pas m’expliquer ni sur ce que j’ai fait à Lahore ni sur le pourquoi de ce

103

refus. (…) Simplement je me borne ici à constater l’impossibilité où je suis de rendre

compte de façon compréhensible de ce qui s’est passé à Lahore » (39).

If non-knowledge, as a learned manner of de-familiarization, allows the

mendiante to beyond the limits of her native region into unknown territory thus assuming

her subjecthood-in-errance, not-knowing creates an uncertainty that colors the story of

the Vice-consul, including his interactions with others and their considerations of him.

Furthermore, the present of the text is structured as a period of waiting, which coincides with absence and the impossibility of telling. Instead of a movement toward nothingness, as we saw with the beggar woman, it seems that the Vice-consul always already exists

in/as the void and bound up in destruction. The impossible telling of the incidents of

Lahore, in their unknown cause and explanation, mirrors an « absence of the originary

moment of suffering » (Chéenne 58). Holes in speech reflect holes in knowledge, which,

for Scherhr also reflect the illusion of community :

Les seuls actes de communication dialogiques sont ceux qui ne disent rien. (…) La communauté est fondée sur la tautologie, sur l’absence d’information. (…) À cette exception près que chaque personnage reste une monade solitaire ; ce sont des monades qui se côtoient par accident, et on prend cette simultanéité pour une logique, mais en fin de compte, ce n’en est pas une. (Scherhr 239-240)

That the incidents in Lahore cannot be spoken, that the source of suffering and

madness cannot be located nor traced would seem to indicate the senselessness of the

Vice-consul’s act. His violent sense-less act illustrates the non-sense of the colonial

enterprise of which he is an agent. As Udris points out, it is not the act of shooting

(killing) in the Shalimar Gardens of Lahore that constitute the Vice-consul’s

transgression as much as what this act symbolizes, namely the rupture with the supposed

Reason of colonialism governing Lahore. The rupture with the community of Calcutta, a

104 microcosmic event-image of his overall lived experience of marginality (by choice? by fate?), is dramatized by Duras’s use of the “on” to scrutinize the Vice-consul through observation and commentary. Examples abound throughout the novel but are particularly prevalent during the course of the Ambassador’s reception where the anonymous on renders the Vice-consul as object, refusing him subjectivity. We read:

On dit: -- Il s’ennuyait à Lahore, c’est peut-être ça. -- L’ennui, ici, c’est un sentiment d’abandon colossal, à la mesure de l’Inde elle-même, ce pays donne le ton.

Anne-Marie Stretter est libre. Le vice-consul de Lahore se dirige vers elle. On dirait qu’il hésite. Il fait quelques pas. Il s’arrête. Elle est seule. Ne le voit-elle pas venir? (116)

And also :

On dit: Non seulement elle danse avec le vice-consul de Lahore, mais elle va même lui parler. On dit: Le dernier venu à Calcutta ce n’est pas le vice-consul de Lahore, non, c’est ce grand jeune homme blond aux yeux clairs et tristes, Charles Rossett … qui ira se joindre aux autres dans la villa du delta. Regardez-le, on dirait qu’il craint quelque chose … non… il ne les regarde plus, ce n’est rien … . (121-122)

While very often speaking, the on also performs other actions, of a passive nature, waiting, watching, noticing, “On attend. Ils se taisent. // On attend. Ils se taisent encore.

On regarde moins” (121). The anonymity of on as dramatis personae creates an effect of omnipresence, rendering it precisely less like a character due to its diffuseness. Because the on appears multiple times on most every page in this section, and especially because it appears as a character – as opposed to its more conventional use indicating either an extremely distant and vague “one” or “they” or an intimate and inclusive “us” (for example, “D’après ce qu’on dit…” or “Il faut qu’on se parle”), neither of which would be considered as characters –, the presence of the on is felt even stronger, as though it were a

105

mob. The Vice-consul is dis-located from this community of on for whom he is the

object of a frightful and disdainful fascination.

Unlike the mendiante, however, the Vice-consul chooses to let the on fabricate his story. He willingly comes to the Ambassador’s reception, he chooses his silence and, to a large extent, his exclusion. While he is at times compared to an animal, notably when he screams from his balcony or as he walks through the gardens at night, he has not fully been voided of subjectivity. Jean-Marc de H. lives his errance as liminality and ambiguity. Allowed to penetrate the inner social world at times, including the reception to which the Ambassador’s wife has invited him with a hand-written invitation, he is nonetheless excluded and pushed to the margins of society, by the on and named characters that talk about him and by Anne-Marie Stretter herself who does not invite the

Vice-consul on a weekend trip to the islands the day after the reception. This inside- outside tension manifests on the level of the narration through the use of terms such as

“éviter” and “autre.” Duras’s restrained lexicon lends a certain weight to recurring words, which increases when a word is employed such that it takes on a different meaning.29 In three different sentences and passages, we see the term éviter used with

reference to the Vice-consul :

Il rencontre Charles Rossett qui debouche d’une allée, si près, que cette fois-ci il ne peut pas l’éviter.” (35)

Elle aurait pu, quand même, nous éviter cette présence gênante.” (97)

Il est comme s’il était fou de bonheur, par instants. On ne peut pas ce soir éviter sa compagnie ; est-ce pour cela ? (99)

29 See chapter 3 of this dissertation for more on this and other stylistic similarities shared by Duras and Bouraoui.

106

With these three uses of the term éviter, the Vice-consul is the grammatical, physical, and metaphysical object to be avoided. Jean-Marc de H. is represented as a person, a physical body in space; a presence, a metaphysical force; as something in between the two poles of physical and metaphysical: a construct of sociability, though only present as a

negative. It is because others fail to avoid him that the Vice-consul has a presence, an existence. He exists by default. Like the mendiante, the Vice-consul lacks agency; he can only be spoken about and his subjectivity constructed negatively. And like the indigenous beggar woman, this male colonizer is without a fixed belonging, which is manifested in his negative presence. While the Vice-consul does not emulate the mendiante’s continual (daily) physical displacement, he remains a perpetual outsider who does not integrate into any community. His exclusion in the present of Calcutta can, like the beggar woman’s, be traced to an originary act of errancy, even as the incidents in

Lahore remain, for the Vice-consul unnamed and represent the unspeakable, the void, as being the source of his story.

The nothingness of waiting as understood in the tension between presence and absence (a presence constituted in the Vice-consul’s absence), can be seen as the figuration of “loss” structuring the Vice-consul’s experience of errance. Waiting for the event that would take him from his life in France, in geographic and cultural distance or in spectacular existential vulnerability: « Il semblerait que Jean-Marc de H. ait attendu les

Indes pour se montrer à découvert » (40). In conversation with the director of the Cercle européen, with whom he talks most nights, the Vice-consul speaks of his youth in Paris, his expulsion from boarding school: « Pour tout vous dire, directeur, j’attends les Indes, je vous attends, je l’ignore encore. En attendant, à Neuilly, je suis maladroit. Je casse

107

des lampes » (88). One might ask whether India, in its geographic and conceptual

distance from Paris, in its extreme difference and difficulties, represents a means of

escape for the Vice-consul? Albeit an illusory escape, for in the colony, his status as

marginalized, as an outsider not only remains but is compounded. If he does not choose

to integrate into the community, if the Vice-consul is seen as “other”30 by his peers, does

the Vice-consul err because he is marginal or is he marginal because he errs? Is his non- belonging a self-constituted position or one imposed by the society around him? Duras offers no answers, save the answer of “both” and “neither.” The Vice-consul, seemingly indifferent to the world around him – the goings-on of Calcutta society, the aberration of the colonial enterprise (of which he is a part) –, in his silence and passivity, occupies a position of ambiguity and liminality. His physical errance, if we can call it that, like

Nina Bouraoui’s in Garçon manqué, is an non-material manifestation of the lived experience of being in-between and out of place. The Vice-consul’s geographic wanderings, particularly his transitory stay in Calcutta, translate a metaphysical aimlessness that cannot be escaped. The colonizer may err against the bounds of his or her role in the drama of the colonial situation, waiting in the wings, hiding backstage, moving into the audience even, but s/he cannot leave the colonial theater.

Another Kind of Otherness: Anne-Marie Stretter

If the Vice-consul is excluded by virtually all of Calcutta society, Anne-Marie

Stretter is the exception to this rule. Not only does she personally invite him to the

Ambassador’s reception, but when asked, she also accepts his invitation to dance

30 “Est-ce cela une voix blanche?” the Spanish Ambassador’s wife will ask after having talked and danced with the Vice-consul, “On ne sait pas s’il vous questionne ou s’il vous répond” (112). Also, “ – Vous avez vu, il va danser, il danse comme un autre, correctement” (106); “Jean-Marc de H. se tait. On pose des questions à lui, Charles Rossett, mais à cet autre, aucune” (107).

108

together. Although dialogic exchange between these two characters results in a failed

attempt at communication – Scherhr’s « disloquation » – the conversation and the dance

that they share, however brief, are significant. Their physical proximity and the intended

cordiality that Anne-Marie Stretter shows the Vice-consul offends Calcutta’s white

society. Already « gênés » by his mere presence at the reception, onlookers, in the form

of the generic and general “on,” question Anne-Marie Stretter’s sense of decency and tact

as she exchanges with this other: « Alors, toute l’Inde blanche les regarde. (…) On dit:

Regardez quelle audace. On dit: Non seulement elle danse avec le vice-consul de Lahore,

mais elle va même lui parler » (121). Here, like before, the « on » exerts its power of

observing and judging, intimating the extent to which Anne-Marie Stretter is the object of

society’s gaze and desire. While the Ambassador’s wife is not seen as an abject object

like the Vice-consul, other and liminal, she, like he, is still not a full participant in

Calcutta society. Called the « reine de Calcutta » she is at the heart of this community

and thus solicits the interest of those around her, from party guests to and the male

European functionaries who constitute in her court, it seems most of the city falls for her.

We know that for the Vice-consul, Anne-Marie Stretter is the impossible love object. It is because of her that the hopes to remain in the transitory position in Calcutta, awaiting assignment over the course of the next few months so that he may stay close to her. She shows something of an indulgence for the Vice-consul as well. While we may wonder whether pity or her duty as a humanitarian and diplomat’s wife have pushed her to take interest in this outcast, it is clear that Anne-Marie Stretter recognizes a similarity between herself and the man from Lahore. Though he is one among many colonials, he stands out as singular in this community, as an aberration, given his refusal of integration

109

via normative behavior. In the dance between the Vice-consul and the Amabassor’s wife,

an enigmatic exchange reveals, little by little, a common understanding between these

two figures. We can see in their eyes, “une expression commune, une même attention

peut-être” (127). Two outsiders who see all too clearly and feel acutely the colonial

enterprise as aberrant, the Ambassador’s wife and the Vice-consul bear together a silent

suffering born out of this lucidity. Among those in Calcutta society, they are alone in

bearing witness to what is deemed the “côté inévitable de Lahore” by the Vice-consul.

The verb used is “apercevoir”: “Il est très important que vous l’aperceviez, même un très

court instant,” says the Vice-consul. Anne-Marie Stretter responds after a moment:

« J’aperçois le côté inévitable de Lahore […]. Je l’apercevais déjà hier mais je ne le savais pas » (128). To catch a glimpse of, to recognize, to perceive, the inevitability of the situation in Lahore – whether this refers to the specific “unavoidability” of the Vice- consul’s act of violence or, rather, to the more general unavoidable destruction and suffering wrought by colonialism – is at once an initial imperative to ensure that Anne-

Marie Stretter and the Vice-consul do not themselves stray into the territory of oppression and destruction. Udris would argue, though, that, in fact, these two characters represent

Unreason, as a break with colonial society and as the possibility of escaping this order.

Between them they acknowledge that the system is inherently flawed but that this truth is hardly ever seen. In fact, it is hard to see from the inside; they must work hard to keep the insidious error of imperialism in-sight.

The intimate metaphysical connection between these two characters is suggested

in the narration, particularly in the pages where guests at the reception alternate

speculating on the lives and personal histories of Anne-Marie Stretter and the Vice-

110

consul. It is difficult at times to follow the narration, to know which character is the topic of discussion as different conversations between anonymous characters are mingled together. Duras is known for her diegetic polyphony – we have seen the intermingling of

voices and perspectives with the movement between the story of the beggar woman’s trek

across Asia and the present of colonial Calcutta – which, through the alternating focus on

Jean-Marc de H. and Anne-Marie Stretter creates a sort of dialogue between the two

characters. Furthermore, we can tell stories are interlaced because both characters

exemplify errance in their own right.

We can read the in-betweenness of Anne-Marie Stretter as a different kind of void

than that one occupied by the Vice-consul, but both are constructed around a

“placelessness” which translates the presence–absence dialectic and also implies a

movement towards an elsewhere that is really a nowhere. The discursive posturing,

movement between opposite terms, as a movement in language, leads to a kind of

cancellation of itself. In expressing to the newly arrived Charles Rossett the experience

of being in the colony, Anne-Marie Stretter states: “—Non, c’est … rien … ici, vous comprenez, ce n’est ni pénible ni agreeable de vivre. C’est autre chose, si vous voulez, contrairement à ce qu’on croit, ce n’est ni facile ni difficile, ce n’est rien” (109). The impossibility of communication pervades the whole of Duras’s text, even the orderly world of the Ambassadrice, where she is said to enjoy life “dans cette ville de cauchemar” (110).

Of Venetian and French heritage, la femme de Calcutta claims her belonging as more than an attachment to or an origin in one place. This spectral figure seems to belong to everywhere and nowhere at once, stating to Charles Rossett: [C]’est un peu

111 simple de croire que l’on vient de Venise seulement, on peut venir d’autres endroits qu’on a traversés en cours de route, il me semble” (111). This mention of « places traversed along the way » would seem to refer directly to the preceding page’s mention of

Anne-Marie Stretter’s early days in the colonies whose discursive telling takes the form of questions without answers, and casts a shadow of uncertainty over her personal history, « a dubious past » as Udris dubs it 136). What happened to Anne-Marie Stretter at the beginning of her stay in the colonies, the reader is asked ? The answer we get is but parit« Tentative de suicide? Ce séjour ensuite dans les montagnes du Népal est resté inexpliqué » (110). This past is both rupture and continutity, showing signs of

« chaining » and « unchaining » where the inability of language to speak another’s story represents at once a movement out of language, and a being stuck in it, « à la fois l’impossibilité du langage et le fait que c’est la seule possibilité de dire cette impossibilité » (Scherhr 244). This dialectic tension of rupture–continuity and presence– absence translates as well the impossibility of telling. This can be seen as the aporia

Willis mentioned with the Vice-consul and to the general ambivalence that structures

Duras’s texts.

Like the Vice-consul, Anne-Marie Stretter has an ambiguous attitude towards belonging, which is further complicated by, or perhaps reflective of, her way of living the colonial situation. On the one hand, she is ambivalent in her role, playing the part of the colonial socialite. Painfully aware of the famine and poverty surrounding her, she puts out each day behind the embassy food and water for the homeless and the lepers. At the same time, she maintains a glamorous appearance as the Ambassador’s wife, keeping proper company with white society and spending luxurious weekends on the islands at

112

the Prince of Wales hotel, as escape from the crowded, dirty, stiflingly hot city. Contrary

to the exterior ambivalence that she must don in the role of ambassadrice, a somber,

anguished being hides beneath the stage clothes. Like the Vice-consul who betrays his pain in frightening and incomprehensible howls, Anne-Marie Stretter cries silently sometimes. To answer the question that Charles Rossett dares not pose aloud, she answers in thought, “Je pleure sans raison que je pourrais vous dire, c’est comme une peine qui me traverse, il faut bien que quelqu’un pleure, c’est comme si c’était moi”

(198). Both a symbolic and emotional release, perhaps her only outlet to expel the pain felt on the inside, this act of crying for India allows the Ambassador’s wife to step across the rigid barriers that keep colonizer and colonized in their respective places, playing their respective, distinct, distanced roles. While she may

“Irreprochable” is a term used by the generic on to describe Anne-Marie Stretter as guests talk about her at the Ambassador’s reception. Signifying “perfect” or “beyond reproach” in her character, her goodness, “irreproachable” also seems to suggest in this context a sense of being “un-approachable,” “un-touchable,” for like the vice-consul, she exists outside the ordinary realm: she cannot be known fully by others, she remains obscure and illegible for those around her. At one point the narrator asks, “Que dissimule cette ombre qui accompagne la lumière dans laquelle apparaît toujours Anne-Marie

Stretter” (109)? This distance between herself and those in her social circle translates a refusal to fully acquiesce to the errors of the colonial ways. Anne-Marie Stretter’s errance, then, is a straying from the colonial imperative, the impossibility of the Other as human. For Udris, this straying is represented by a latent Unreason that comes alive after she comes into contact with him at the reception (Udris 142). The islands, in a somewhat

113

paradoxical fashion, For this critic, it is the transition from an active state to a passive

one, which takes place at the islands, that ushers in Anne-Marie Stretters “passage to

Unreason”

Her frequent trips to the islands represent superficial and unsuccessful attempts to get outside the oppressive system in Calcutta. The Prince of Wales Hotel, which plays host to the colonial group on their visits to the islands, is artifice, a colonial construction like the city: “L’île est grande, à l’autre extrémité il y a un village très bas, qui touche la mer. Entre ce village et l’hôtel un grand grillage s’élève et les sépare. Partout, au bord de la mer, dans la mer, d’autres grillages contre les requins” (177). Guests aof the hotel must be separated and secured from the danger posed by the indigenous villagers and sharks alike. Ironically, the guests who have come to escape the dreadfully hot and oppressive environment of Calcutta are, within the hotel grounds on the island, closed in by a fence for their own security. During a walk on his first visit to the island, Charles

Rossett finds himself trapped, “Il cherche à quitter le boulevard, prend des chemins de traverse, tombe sur le grillage élevé contre la mendicité, revient, cherche encore et trouve finalement une porte dans ce grillage, sort, s’aperçoit qu’il vient d’avoir eu peur, peur absurdement de ne pas pouvoir sortir de cette zone de l’île qui lui est assigné pour sa plus grande paix” (202).

In spite of the fact that getting away to the islands is a priviledged time and space of respite, we see Anne-Marie Stretter at her most vulnerable and perhaps her most distant and “irreproachable” while away. She is mostly silent in the circle of men, sleeping, pretending to sleep, wandering the beach alone. At the moments when she cries or almost cries, she is characterized as looking old and ugly. Like the Vice-consul,

114

l’ambassadrice finds herself to be playing an inescapable role, and both figures have recourse to violence as an attempt to find a way out of the situation. It will be, in Duras’s

India Song (a separate text written as a sort of adaptation of Le Vice-consul), the taking her own life by drowning that becomes her absolute and last act of errance.

115

CHAPTER TWO :

PART II :

DURAS’S EMILY L.

« On les regarde de nouveau. Ils sont tous les deux les yeux baissés dans un repos qui donne le vertige. Ils habitent le monde dans son voyage interminable, celui de la mer. C’est écrit sur leurs visages brûlés par le soleil réverbéré, le vent. » (41-42)

In Le Vice-consul loss is an intimate experience that can take a variety of forms: the erosion of the physical self; the degeneration of mental and linguistic faculties; the affective experience of loss as abandon, expulsion, exile. In Emily L., too, the author offers errance in the form of displacement far-and-wide stemming from and engendering loss, rather than discovery, as was the case with the Surrealists. Here again, the specificity of errance is related to the form and function of a displacement: long-term and long-distance travel on the ocean; a voyage made in this case by a couple rather than an individual; the way in which this voyage is ultimately inseparable from loss.

Engine trouble interrupts an elderly couple’s sea voyage home to England, necessitating an impromptu layover in the French port town of Quillebeuf-sur-Seine. In a bar, this couple, the Captain and the Lady, become the object of fascination for a French couple, both writers, who narrate this tale. The relationship between the Captain and his wife, the whole of their story – from their courtship, disapproving parents, life on the Isle of Wight, eventual marriage and life lived at sea, to the present of the bar – floats between pure fiction, as invented by the narrator and her companion,31 and credible

31 The characters of the unnamed narrator and her companion are commonly understood as fictionalized versions of Duras and her homosexual, younger companion, Yann Andréa. Critics see the characters as an amorous couple, some perceiving them in an impossible relationship because of the difference of sexual orientation as well as the difference of age, while others evade the question, thus tacitly considering the

116

“reporting” of the story, as gleaned from the snatches of conversation overheard among the English couple and the bar’s owner, with whom they have shared their various comings-and-goings over the years in this place of passage.

Not strictly physical death, loss in Emily L. manifests itself metaphorically and materially, striking the title character and her husband in the form of their baby who dies at birth; consisting in the loss of a half-finished, singular poem which, unbeknownst to

Emily L., was destroyed by her husband, the years of waiting for the death of the parents who forbade their daughter and the Captain to marry, and the insufficiency of love. A kind of contamination of error accompanies the successive losses suffered by Emily L. such that she strays further and further into the realm of incomprehension. The poetics of errance in this text take the form of uncertainty or liminality,32 where not-knowing and non-understanding are the danger and promise represented by writing and erring. The constellation of error, loss, and voyage, as it forms in Emily L., is a typical sight in the

Durassian sky, where emptiness, silence, and dispossession figure prominently.33 The sense of negation coloring the text derives from the dialectical movements at work which

couple as heterosexual. This detail does not concern us in this dissertation. I refer to the French male as the narrator’s companion.

32 In an article on the critical reception of Emily L., Vicki Mistacco speaks of a “poetics of liminality … arising from the principle of internal difference” as understood in the context of Hélène Cixous’s concept of écriture feminine (79). The question of difference will figure peripherally into my analysis here. My consideration of liminality is a phenomenological one while also grounding itself in textual analysis. “Plus ça change … : The Crtical Reception of Emily L.,” The French Review, Vol 66, No 1, October 1992., pp.77-88.

33 See for example criticism on these tropes and their narrative workings in studies such as: Danielle Bajomée, Duras, ou, La douleur ; In Language and in Love Marguerite Duras: The Unspeakable: Essays for Marguerite Duras. Ed. Mechthild Cranston; Erica L. Johnson, Home, Maison, Casa :The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell'Oro; Marguerite Duras, la tentation du poétique. Ed. Bernard Alazet, Christiane Blot-Labarrère, Robert Harvey; Lisa F. Signori, The Feminization of Surrealism: The Road to Surreal Silence in Selected Works of Marguerite Duras; Eleanor Honig Skoller, The In-Between of Writing : Experience and Experiment in Drabble, Duras, and Arendt ; Sharon Willis, Marguerite Duras : Writing on the Body.

117

navigate ambivalence, on textual and thematic levels, resulting in narrative instability that

participates in an economy of not-knowing around which the text is organized.

Undertaken in a vast, seemingly limitless space, the voyage at sea is a phenomenological experience of immensity, which, according to the philosopher Gaston

Bachelard, in his La Poétique de l’espace, is at once an experience of the plein and the vide. If a traditional interpretation understands travel as the desire for discovery, as an active seeking, a purposeful movement toward a destination, voyage is also, and above all, a perilous endeavor, a venture into the unknown from which one might not return.

The voyage manifests the risk and promise of erring: to stray from the realm of the known into the unknown, to transgress the bounds of the familiar and enter willingly into an encounter with the strange is a liberating and empowering experience while at the same time fraught with anguish, not least of all because of the metaphysical danger represented by both the plein and the vide, which extends, in this case, not only to the ocean, but to love and language.

We can say that the immensity of the geographic expanse traversed by Duras’s characters is phenomenologically experienced as the in-between, a navigation of this

exemplary fullness and emptiness. In this way, the sea offers itself as an exceptional

space of dialectics and the voyage its expression. As a thematic element which serves to

structure the novel as a whole and the story of the English couple in particular, the

voyage at sea represents at once loss and retention, movement and suspension, suffering

endured as punishment, or as a way of forgetting and surviving, that is at the same time as the only path of existence. Such dialectical threads are pulled through the cloak of speculation, ambiguity, and ambivalence donning this text, particularly the English

118

couple’s motivation for living their lives at sea. The instability of the couple and the text

manifests, on the one hand, the déterritorialisation34 of the Captain and the Lady, and on

the other, the omnipresence of not-knowing (the presence of the one and the other

related). The tale of the English couple and that of the French narrators, as related through a fragmentary, collaborative construction, manifests a fundamental epistemological and narrative uncertainty in which we recognize errance.

A Sea Voyage: Dialectics and Uncertainty

The expansive space of the ocean and the movement in this space define the very existence of the old couple. It is as if they belong to the ocean, are people of the sea.

Duras asserts as much, calling the couple “voyageurs” and employing numerous formulations about the English couple as « inhabiting » this incessant voyage at sea including, « Ils sont les voyageurs des plus longues distances de la terre. Ils habitent le

monde dans son voyage le plus long » (67). This errance is inscribed in their daily life,

an inhabiting translated through their physical being, their bodies, in spite of themselves

as seen in the epigraph: “Ils habitent le monde dans son voyage interminable, celui de la

mer. C’est écrit sur leurs visages brûlés par le soleil réverbéré, le vent » (41-42).

Commenting on a similar instance of inscription of sea voyage on the body, Erica L.

Johnson writes of the adolescent girl in Duras’s L’Amant, that:

[T]hrough a description of her ravaged, aged face, the narrator identifies the moment of aging, and the loss of her youthful visage, specifically with the voyage from Asia to France: …. . The sea route from Asia to Europe leaves its mark on the narrator physically as well as psychologically, inscribing her subjectivity with the irreversible arc of repatriation and highlighting the geographical and historical fissure that pervades her narrative. (Johnson 143)

34 To use Deleuze and Guattari’s term.

119

Johnson’s study of the figure of “home” in three texts from Duras’s Indochina cycle can come to bear on our reading of Emily L. in the intimate association of the experience of voyage with that of subjectivity and narrative. Johnson considers the cultural construct of

“home” from various angles, focusing on its representations within the context of colonization, including what it means to be without a home and the ways in which

“dwelling [is] a physical, psychological, and political practice” (31). Furthermore, there are three moments of separation involving “home,” though not necessarily figuring prominently in the deigesis: the impose separation by Emily L.’s parents who oppose her relationship with the Captain, and thus give them the garage to live in; the Captain forces a separation between Emily L. and her poetic home when he destroys the poem; imposed by Emily L. who chooses to leave the life above the garage and to travel without a fixed home, but instead a place to visit and to remember.

The English couple is not shown to be strongly connected to their home on the

Isle of Wight, having left it so many years ago. Yet they do still come and go from this point of return. In the present voyage, Emily L. desperately wishes to “passer outre,” to get back to England at the end of this long trip. Over the years, she insists on keeping the house, and yet, it is just a place to stay for a bit, from time to time, no longer their home.

In this respect, they are “voyageurs,” not vagabonds or nomads; they are travelers out to experience the immensity of the world around them but who are anchored to a point of arrival and departure. The term voyage is most often used with specific reference made to navigation on the sea, highlighting the exploratory nature and grandeur of the act undertaken and the immense distance traversed in the course of such a displacement. In many instances Duras keeps her use of voyage squarely within this traditional lexical

120

field, associating it with immensity and grandeur, for example : « [C]es longs voyages sur

les bateaux … restaient pour ceux qui les avaient vécus les moments les plus

extraordinaires de la vie” (41) ; “‘Ils sont les voyageurs des plus longues distances de la

terre. Ils habitent le monde dans son voyage le plus long’” (67) ; and “On se demande si

l’irréalité de leur présence ne vient pas du vide qui accompagnait le voyage, du seul

défaut de cette perfection, le voyage” (95).

In their designation as “voyageurs” we read the experience of the vastness of the

ocean stretched out à perte de vue, this romantic representation associated with poets and

adventurous seafarers alike. However, with respect to notion of traveling (voyager) as it

is commonly understood, we find in Emily L. the absence of a goal or desired arrival.

There is no destination. Even when they undertake to sail to Africa or the Maldives,

travel for the Captain and Emily L. is a purposeless set of displacements, non-linear in

space and time, save perhaps the desire to lose themselves. Although Duras often

employs the terms voyage and voyageurs, she works to invest them with a meaning

specific to this text. Here, the voyage takes on metaphorical resonances; what is typically

understood as a defined and isolated displacement to and from a given point, reflects instead a more broad and powerful lived experience. The Captain and his wife pass their lives at sea; to call them voyageurs then does more than describe their leisure habits or

signal a extensive geographic and cultural knowledge accrued over the years. It is a

ontological, state. In the preceding sequence of quotes, the voyages are represented first as distinct episodes – “ces longs voyages” – then as a state of existence, the voyage

constant and continual – these “voyageurs des plus longues distances de la terre” who

live a daily existence that is extraordinary, as emphasized by the use of the superlative.

121

Bringing together the vast and the local and putting them into a dialogic relation,

Gaston Bachelard explains, using the example of Baudelaire, that “[c]ette immensité (…)

est une conquête de l’intimité. La grandeur progresse dans le monde à mesure que

l’intimité s’approfondit. (…) Pour Baudelaire, le destin poétique de l’homme est d’être le

miroir de l’immensité, ou plus exactement encore, l’immensité vient prendre conscience

d’elle-même en l’homme” (178). In the dialogue between the daily, lived experience of

Emily L. and her husband on the one hand, and the fantastic, grand ocean crossings on

the other, we read the dialectical relation between the intimate and the immense as it

happens for the individual. For the couple, however, this is less a “conquest” than a

being-conquered-by the immensité intime that threatens them in the form of immobility.

Like the urban wanderer, the sea-going English couple traverses space in an

almost passive manner. Theirs is an intransitive, continual movement, made neither

away from nor toward anything: they drift. While drifting (dérive36) and errance

necessarily imply movement in space and time, Duras’s interpretation of this movement

reveals rather a state of suspension evoking liminality and the void. The close

assimilation of Emily L. and her husband with the ocean and the voyage renders all the

more significant our reading of voyage as dialectical since the present of the narration

takes place during a period of suspension and non-voyage for the English couple. The

time not spent at sea remains a part of the voyage at large, this sedentary state defining

36 Guy Debord, of the radical socio-politico-artistic movement Situationniste International, (known in English as the Situationists), uses this term to refer to an important situationist practice of wandering. In “Theory of the dérive,” he writes: “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll” (22). Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City. Eds. Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996, pp. 22-27.

122 also the existence of the English couple. Stationary on land as though marooned, while on the sea, the couple is suspended in voyage.

As that which serves to thwart facile readings of the text and to render it instable, dialectics is related to the ambivalence and ambiguity that Duras is known to sow in her works. Although the term dialectics is not often employed by critics, it represents for us a constant negotiation and renegotiation of meanings, an elusiveness of coming-and- going. From this point of view, dialectical movement has the same effect as that of silence in Duras, that is to say, to “subvert any attempt to fix meaning” (Chéene 53).

Silence is an expanse of emptiness like that of the sea. While Lisa Signori sees the ocean in Duras as equivalent to the surrealist merveilleux, a realm from which come revelation and transcendence (95), I see it rather as an un-space, in-between and outside-of, a space of dis-location. Whether through the movement of sea voyaging as felt in isolated, physical displacements that become a phenomenological errance, or through an apparent absence of movement – continual voyage as suspension (akin to the en-deça) – we come to the thwarting of meaning as negotiation via the dialectic and via the figure of suspension or liminality.

Innocence and Punishment : Resonances of Un-rooted-ness

The dialectics of the voyage extend to the entire novel, setting the text on the instable and uncertain sea, in sea travel. As inhabitants of the voyage, the English couple embodies the dialectic drift. Although I take as central to my analysis the French couple’s characterization of the Captain and Emily L. as voyageurs and the French couple’s speculation on motives for sea-faring that occur over the course of sixty pages,

123

the ambiguity surrounding the English couple, is in fact established early in the text, with

the moment they are seen entering the bar, for they take on characteristics of immobility.

The dialectic between the défaut and perfection of the voyage that we see later and the

deferral of meaning that it sets up is rooted in the initial portrait of these out-of-place travelers.

The ambiguous appreciation of the couple as having an “unreal presence” is tied to the idea of the void as the unique fault or defect within the realm of the voyage. This inescapable, inherent error is part and parcel with the voyage and cannot be extracted from the experience. The “vide qui accompagn[e] le voyage”: it is an ever-present blemish that haunts even the imaginary. Can it be said that this imperfection is that of l’immensité, or perhaps l’intimité? The emptiness of the vast world encountered but not understood, or does not understand us? Or rather, the nothingness that haunts the self to the core? Imagined or based in the real, the narrator’s portrayal of these voyageurs is, as seen in the passage quoted below, not as epic adventurers, hero-types, but rather as vulnerable, older, ordinary folk, immobile and decaying in reality, in the present of the narrative. It is not insignificant, then, that the image of the errant couple entering the bar evokes helplessness and nothingness. For, as they enter bar they enter the story: at the very moment when their boat has broken down, they are forced to come in from the sea:

Ils étaient allés d’eux-mêmes du côté du bar réservé aux clients de passage. Les clients habituels étaient de l’autre côté, vers la salle. Ils étaient seuls. Perdus. Seuls dans l’été. Dans le désert. Perdus au milieu de la lumière que renvoyait le fleuve vers la place, les murs, les falaises de craie, la double porte du bar grande ouverte sur le dehors. Ils ne voyaient rien, personne. Ni cette lumière d’été. Ni ce fleuve. (17)

124

The blinding light of the summer coupled with the unfamiliarity of the setting translates a feeling of extreme solitude and an overwhelming helplessness which Duras likens to being lost in the desert. The emptiness of the desert is literal but also metaphorical, translating to a seeming willed blindness where nothing and no one are seen. Into this space of nothingness arrives the English couple. While evoking the figure of the desert wanderer, the couple also represents a figure stranded and idle, in a position of physical and geographic immobility. The desert, in this sense, is also the experience of suspension, of a threshold state and space. We can in fact readily equate wandering with suspension: to wander is to occupy an in-between time and space. As they enter the bar, lost and alone, during this pause in their maritime wanderings that is nonetheless part of the overall experience of le voyage, the couple can but look about them – the man looks at the woman, the woman looks at the ground – and wait. Their presence translates a state of liminality, this “irreality” as suspended reality. They await their fate in a bar in a foreign port town. As the passage continues, we see that the state of decline in which they find themselves equates to a slow fall, a prolonged state of transition more akin to suspension than to an actual state of change. Upon seeing the elderly couple at the Café de la Marine for the first time, the narrator describes them:

Perchés sur leurs tabourets sans presque bouger, la tête penchée en avant, ballante, ils étaient aussi un peu ridicules. On aurait dit des plantes, des choses comme ça, intermédiaires, des sortes de végétaux, des plantes humaines, à peine nées que déjà mourantes, à peine vivantes que déjà mortes. Oui, des choses innocentes et punies. Des arbres. Des arbres privés d’eau et de terre, punis. Condamnés à s’affaler comme des êtres humains, là, sous nos yeux. (17)

With this comparison, Duras establishes the dialectic structure in the novel through which a phenomenology and poetics of the in-between are negotiated. These creatures exist

125

somewhere between living and dying: hybrids, transitory beings of an intermediate

existence. The apparent paradox of the motionless voyageur represents the dialectic of

movement and stasis and is embodied in the in-between state of these “plant-people.”

Parallel structure and syntactic proximity strengthens the allegorical association of life and innocence, death and punishment. As though standing before a painting, or more aptly, a tableau vivant, the narrator performs a reading of the scene, wherein an unnamed transgression seems to be at the root of a condemnation that shall, presumably, find its sentence in death. The image of the punished but innocent also calls forth that of the beggar woman in Le Vice-consul, forced to err as punishment for the transgression of becoming pregnant. This allegory serves thus as a subtle and complex representation of errance: the terms “punis” and “condamnés” express a (perceived) fault, an error for which the subject must suffer. Further in the text, the semantic field referring to error broadens, including not only the realm of the moral but also those of the judicial and the rational with the use of such terms as: crime, criminel, victime, délivrance, solution, logique, infidelité, trahison, souffrance.

Although the explicit reason for taking to the sea, for living “privés de terre,” remains obscured even as the reader progresses deep into the novel, the language of moral judgment employed by Duras intimates that an initial act of straying prompted the choice for this life adrift. If the use of the term “privés” is ambiguous, indicating perhaps deprivation as natural or random occurrence or an expressly inflicted sanction, the use of the terms “punis” and “condamnés,” however, suggests that no matter the reason for the lack of earth and water, there exists a crime, sin, or other error for which the vegetal-

humans are being made to pay, a sort of original sin, though one that is not named.

126

Following from Michèle Druon’s positing of an “absence of the originary moment of

suffering” (Chéene 58) as a tenet of the Durassian oeuvre, Julia Lauer Chéene proposes

the “negative space of the unsaid” as the very terrain for sowing the seeds of creation

(65). A springing forth of writing from emptiness – especially vast open spaces like the

sea, the desert, and, metaphorically, silence – is, as Signori also points out, an articulation

of the possible as it exists in Duras’s universe of the negative. This original silence,

original void, equated with suffering and punishment is, from a feminist standpoint,

necessarily and only female (Udris 29). Even if the two English people are considered as one unit, a half-living entity suffering together punishment and condemnation, it is Emily

L. who has chosen this unmoored life for the Captain and herself.

Besides the moral implications drawn from the image of the couple as “privé de terre,” this designation has another resonance, particular to the couple’s geographical non-belonging. In their daily lives the couple is not settled in a community, not “rooted” in the land; they are not connected to a certain community of people or to a certain place.

On the one hand, the condition of being “privé de terre” translates objectively the couple’s lack of rootedness, telling the reader that this couple is without a homeland.

While this may not be the case in objective reality, this is indeed the case in practice, especially as, in the present of the novel, the English couple finds itself in France, déterritorialisé. The metaphor works well in that as trees, these roots are a physical appendage that needs to insert itself into the soil in order for the plant to take in life- sustaining nutrients and to stand upright and grow, thanks to this “terre.” Without being rooted to the soil, plants wither and decay for lack of nutrients; as well, an unrooted plant, or a plant with shallow roots, will blow away, at the mercy of the wind. Here the

127 correlation between living an itinerant life and suffering in one’s physical state of being is direct. The errance of the English couple is signaled both on the level of the ethical, fault or error, and the level the social, being without roots or ties. To live a non-rooted existence is deprivation and/or condemnation twice over. Furthermore, Duras connects the couple to the sea though the nautical connotation of the verb “affaler.” The couple is condemned to failure, to be pushed back or sunk like a ship in the face of a storm. The metaphor complicates itself with a religious reference which can be read as their predestination for being shipwrecked: the English couple is destined to fail “like human beings” because they cannot escape the sentence of the original sin, not even as liminal plant-beings living at sea. Akin to the dérive, this rootless life does not manifest, however, as one-way, eternal drift. It is instead inscribed in the dialectic of coming-and- going such that the English couple’s movement is an errance finding its figure as impossible arrival and eternal return, punishment and condemnation, in the absence of an original error.

Ambiguity and Narrative Speculation

Dialectical negotiation as a conceptual structure serves to keep open, like Breton’s porte battante, readings of the text by virtue of ambiguity. Ambiguity on a thematic or narrative level signals instability of meaning in the text. Composed of much dialogue, simple sentences, and recurrent lexical choices; cinematic or theatrical in its fragmented scenes/shots and sparse, concise descriptions: the text achieves a narrative fluidity that ironically engenders a readerly uncertainty, a sense of non-progression, or rather, non- direction with regards to the narrative destination. In typical Durassian fashion, absent

128

are signposts and rhetorical devices that structure for the plodding reader a traditional

novel. According to Dominique Noguez, a seeming breakdown on the narrative level is

actually a movement out into the realm of poetry:

Dans l’ordre romanesque, l’écriture est marquée par une raréfaction progressive de l’action, contestée jusque dans ses propres rituels et redites…, freinée jusqu’à l’immobilité… : une évolution qui nous laisse entendre que c’est à partir du moment où la chaîne des relations de cause à effet se trouve enfin rompue, à partir du moment où la machine narrative est mise hors service, qu’il peut enfin advenir quelque chose, que le sujet peut s’ouvrir à « l’aventure nouvelle », à des événements d’une autre nature – et dans une langue qui se dégrammaticalise et entre progressivement en poésie … . (Trajectoires 8)

The poetics of errance in Emily L. emerge from a narration that resists comprehension

via a departure from the familiar novelistic form. As Noguez points out, Duras’s texts

work paradoxically to create meaning through the process of breaking down. This break-

down, whose effect is immobility, occurs most notably through the form of the narration

(syntax, repetition) and representations of non-understanding on the part of the

characters, of which the Captain and Emily L. are the prime examples. The narrator and

her companion, in their difficulties of communication, are also examples, though

secondary, for the purposes of this dissertation. The way in which the text works to tell

two stories at once – the story of the Captain and Emily L. as an interior story, and the

story of the narrator and her companion that functions as the outer narrative scaffolding –

leads from an initial, stylistics of instability that begets greater and greater slippage via

the speculative nature of the narration (narrative voice) and the multiplication of

incomprehension and silence inside the récit. The “out-of-service” narrative machine is, for us, that by which functions the traditional novel, whose advancement of the plot in a linear progression leads to a moment of triumph or tragedy for the novel’s hero.

129

Part of what inhibits the traditional working of the text are the narrative “holes” of the non-dit between characters and within the greater narrative frame.37 Duras’s texts, from characters to dialogic exchange and the stylistic use of negations, force us to reconsider our relationship to knowing. The French narrator and her companion weave a tapestry from the fibers of their own imagination along with what little that they can piece together of the Captain and Emily L.’s conversations in English with each other and with the owner of the bar. Gradually, we enter into the inner frame of the English couple, stepping into their drama on the Isle of Wight – from a forbidden marriage and the first years of life at large on the sea to a return home, after the parents’ death; Emily’s writing of poetry and the death of her newborn; a single, singular poem of Emily L’s. which was found and destroyed by the Captain; Emily L.’s questioning of herself and whether or not she wrote the poem in reality or merely dreamt its creation; her encounter with the young caretaker of the couple’s property, her idea reader; the English couple’s definitive return to the sea, the caretaker not to be seen again, and Emily L.’s her decline into despondency – with the narrator coming back to the present of the bar periodically to hear further speculation about the English couple’s life, and to hear conversations between the French couple on their own relationship and lives. The incomplete and speculative nature of the narrative concerning the Captain and Emily L. illustrates one principal level of not-knowing.

At the beginning of the story, we do not know what kind of mistake or fault the couple may have committed, and suppositions surrounding this very question become the basis for the French couple’s interest in the English travelers:

37 This term is indeed used by critics as well as in the same vain, “gaps,” “aporias;” “absence” and “silence” are two of the broader terms to describe this stylistic and conceptual phenomenon of Durassian narration and writing.

130

Vous dites que quelque chose leur est arrivé. Une circonstance extérieure à leur histoire, peut-être un accident, une peur, tout à coup, qui les avait fait se demander quel était ce temps pendant lequel l’amour était supposé se vivre. Est-ce que ce n’était pas toujours un temps remis à plus tard. Un temps mutilé de l’espérance. (…)

Mais peut-être le Captain était-il là pour se cacher sur la mer ? Après un meurtre ? Et elle peut-être se cachait-elle d’une croyance, ou d’une peur qu’elle noyait dans le whisky chaque jour la nuit venue ?

Ce qu’on pressentait c’est qu’ils avaient dû vivre ensemble une certaine adversité et que c’était à travers elle qu’ils avaient dû se connaître jusqu’à se trouver un être commun et dans le bien et dans le mal, et dans le crime et dans l’innocence, cela jusqu’à l’extrême conséquence d’une mort commune qu’ils avaient toujours évitée peu importait pourquoi.

Ce que nous ne savions pas, c’était jusqu’où était allé l’événement d’un tel amour, quelle profondeur avait atteint le mensonge divin avant que soit perçue la différence de la première trahison par l’un ou l’autre des amants. (42-43)

The possibilities imagined are at first hesitantly proffered by the narrator and her companion by way of questions, observations, and intuition. In spite of the fact that the tale being told is conjecture, bolstered by the ambiguity of the narrative framework, the narrative voice affirms itself, and the story of the “something that happened” to the

Captain and Emily L. (and others) finds footing and takes hold as plot and intrigue. The game of extrapolation and imagination in which the French couple engages gradually becomes the focal point of both levels of narration. The vague hypotheses alluding to what has happened stabilize themselves somewhat such that the last citation includes a series of definite articles that refer to “the” accident/adversity/event that has occurred.

However, a lexical field of uncertainty belies any precision that the imaginings might attain. We have here another example of ambiguity of the text and in the couple’s story.

Besides conveying uncertainty and ambiguity, these musings over the accident or

131

otherwise unnamed incident that has befallen the English couple are expressed in a

vocabulary of error, broadly speaking – crime, betrayal, deception – which finds figure in

the “difference” that comes between the Captain and Emily L.

Couple / Individual; Immensité / Intime

The question of difference and incomprehension relates to love and loss in the

Durassian configuration of errance. This plays out in a particular way in Emily L. given

that the errant subject is in fact a couple and not an individual. Early on, the couple is

often represented as a single entity undergoing the same experience by virtue of the use

of the pronouns “ils” and “eux.” Similarly, the couple is referred to as “ces voyageurs”

and “ces gens du bar.” Both designations imply an identity (idem) shared between the two individuals. The dynamics shown through pronoun use structures the narrative relationship in terms of “we” and “them” (see the passage below) and reflects the distance between the French couple and the English couple. In the bar, the travelers acknowledge themselves to be out of place: “Ils étaient allés d’eux-mêmes du côté du bar réservé aux clients de passage. Les clients habituels étaient de l’autre côté, vers la salle »

(17). The physical distance keeps the narrator from clearly hearing all that the English couple says to each other or to the bar owner. From a distance, then, the gaze is used to glean information, to study the other couple. The narrator and her companion cannot help but see the couple; it is a compulsion that defies reason:

Eux, nous les avions vus au bar de la Maine comme nous avions vu les clients de la salle, … ils étaient déjà là quand nous étions entrés dans le café, il n’y avait pas de raison et puis brusquement nous avons dû les voir. Nous avions dû les regarder sans les voir et puis brusquement les voir. Pour ne plus jamais ensuite pouvoir faire autrement // D’abord l’un l’autre. Et puis ensemble. Fondus ensemble en une seule couleur, une seule forme. Un seul âge. (16)

132

Duras uses the term “fascination” a few pages later (19) to convey the inexplicable force

making the English couple the marvelous object of the others’ gaze and to translate the

inherent obscurity and unknow-ability of the English couple and their story. They are the

Other for the French couple. It seems that part of what intrigues so is they are not known as individuals at this early moment in the text.

A more intimate portrait of each person comes out as we progress through the novel. We see the dialectic of couple and individual played out in the passages above.

An unnamed event that befalls the couple, “un accident, une peur,” and it is this “certaine adversité” which the couple experiences together that binds them as “un être commun.”

At the same time, the husband and wife are portrayed as separate. In the second passage, the narrator asks about the Captain’s and Emily L.’s distinct motives for taking to the sea, addressing in separate sentences the quite different reasons each one might have. In the last passage, we see the couple designated as “l’un ou l’autre des amants,” a formulation in which not only does each party stand as a separate grammatical entity, but the insinuation of betrayal caused by a “difference” between the two people further signifies their separation. At this point in the text, however, all is still understood from the reader’s point of view as speculation. For the first half of the novel, then, we consider that they negotiate the poles of various dialectics as a couple but do not themselves operate as poles.

While Duras most often employs the appellation “voyageurs” to the travelers, she also calls them “passants de la mer” (44). Here, “passant,” transposed from the typical context of the city onto the unlikely context of the sea, reconfigures our notion of being at sea to include the dialectics of coming-and-going. The passant is traditionally seen as an

133

urban type, an everyday character encountered on the streets, out for a stroll, moving

between shops, not stopping for long in any one place. The naming of the English couple

as “clients de passage” and “passants de la mer” is another way in which their existence

is inscribed in the space that they traverse. The Captain and his wife live day-to-day on

the ocean, forsaking a traditional domestic union built on a geographically stable and fixed existence. Like the idler, the vagrant, those outside the traditional social order, the

English couple lives a life unfettered, as Breton would say, not chained to the duties of work and the demands of society. And yet, if this movement has become a part of their daily lives, it is rather an endeavor of immensity. Like the beggar woman’s years of wandering, the English couple’s sea faring takes them across great distances for months on end and with no end in sight. Duras builds this immensity of time and space into the story of the Captain and Emily L. who live a “voyage interminable,” “incalculable.”

Loss of geographic orientation in the face of vast terrain can engender or lead to

loss of self. If we do not know where we are situated at a given moment, we suffer from

not knowing which way to go in order to find our way, out of a forest, for example.

Bachelard takes this loss of direction and formulates it inversely, stating, “Bientôt, si l’on

ne sait où l’on va, on ne sait plus où l’on est” (Bachelard 170). Uncertainty, hesitation, or

lack of orientation – geographical or metaphorical – leads to disorientation in the present.

Sometimes this is an unintended consequence, other times this is the desired effect, as is

the case with Duras’s characters. The Asian beggar woman has first to abandon the idea

of a fixed destination before she can commence the process of losing herself. In Emily L.

as well, in order to lose oneself in the present, one must give oneself over to the

immensity of the world. Even if La Poétique de l’espace does not concern itself with

134 errance38 as such, Bachelard’s assertion – that being without a destination leads to a loss of coordinates of the self – is indeed an understanding of errance. And it makes sense that the intimate experience of loss is experienced in the context of the immense, these far-flung geographic wanderings wherein one is least likely to know one’s destination.

However, Bachelard is in fact speaking of an “immensité intérieure” which is the experience of an “immensité sur place” (my emphasis 169-170).

We read this notion with respect to Duras’s sea-farers who find themselves stranded in the bar. The narrator states, « Ça avait commencé comme ça, pour nous, ces gens du bar, par cette immobilité dans laquelle ils se tenaient » (Emily L. 21). This is the opening line to the description of the Captain and Emily L. as liminal, intermediary beings that appear as though lost in the desert. In showing them perched on their stools, silent and helpless, Duras conveys an interior immensity that is located in their non- movement. The “immense” and the “intimate”: perhaps it is here that errance finds its most appropriate phenomenological expression when Bachelard states: “Il semble alors que c’est par leur « immensité » que les deux espaces: l’espace de l’intimité et l’espace du monde deviennent consonnants. Quand s’approfondit la grande solitude de l’homme, les deux immensités se touchent, se confondent » (Bachelard 184). The junction represented by “la grande solitude de l’homme” wherein the immensity of the intimate and the immensity of the world come together, reveals that which is at stake in errance, that is to say the necessary and purposive interpellation of the intime, the self, within the condition of mobility in the world. The couple’s immobility in the bar seems, then, to represent only one dimension of this immensity, “intime” and “sur place”; the suspension

38 Bachelard does quote Philippe Diolet who associates errance with the desert: “ ‘Descendre dans l’eau ou errer au désert, c’est changer d’espace’ ” (Bachelard 187) and “… il faut vivre le désert ‘tel qu’il se reflète à l’intérieur de l’errant’ ” (185).

135

of the subject in movement, represented by the voyageurs on the sea, proves a more

productive conceptual figure through which to consider the interplay between loss, error,

and the voyage.

“Le Défaut de cette perfection, le voyage”

Consistent with the image of the Captain and Emily L. as liminal, listless beings,

numerous descriptions of the couple in the present of the bar speak of them as worn

down, nearing the end of life, such as: “Arrivés à la fin du dernier voyage, à la fin de la

vie. C’est clair, c’est éclatant. Là, dans cette humilité d’avant la mort” (31) ; « Le

Captain. Il est très ralenti par la passion qu’il a pour elle…. Il est ralenti aussi … par l’épaississement de son sang, le ralentissement de la coulée de son sang dans son corps à cause de l’alchool » (95) ; and « [E]lle, elle est déjà engagée ailleurs, un peu dans la mort, un peu dans le rire aussi et dans Dieu sait quoi encore. Alors elle n’a plus assez de forces pour d’elle-même choisir un homme » (97). As we have said, this decline, while nonetheless a progression in time, is experienced as a suspended existence reflected in the paradoxical immobility experienced while at sea. In light of the earlier quotation of the

“vide qui accompagn[e] le voyage … seul défaut de cette perfection, le voyage,” we return to immobility and suspension to briefly consider their resonances with respect to le vide and le défaut. The void can be understood as suspension and immobility felt in passing one’s days at sea, outside of the social order, displaced from the daily reality in which most others live. Moreover, the void as loss and nothingness structures the

English couple’s experience at sea. The vastness of the void is also a kind of plentitude, and we see the couple’s love evoked in these terms: “l’immensité de l’amour” (66) and

“le gigantesque labeur d’un grand amour” (42).

136

The use of dialectical constructions also conveys the experience of emptiness at the moment of arrest in dialectical tension where the two terms (do not) meet: “Arrivés là ce soir, comme … à la fin du voyage passé, au début de celui qui vient” (42); “… quelque chose était arrivé qui les avait décidés à passer le temps de l’amour dans le voyage sur la mer pour à la fois ne faire rien de cet amour et, cependant, le retenir” (73). While this last quote does not express the two poles of a binary opposition, « ne faire rien de cet amour » implies letting love go, letting it wither instead of cultivating it, or instead of, at the very least, holding on purposefully, « le retenir. » As well, the apposition of « à la fois » and « et, cependant » marks a dialectical tension between the two actions which cancel each other out in the couple’s errance, the non-action of passing the years at sea.

Although the couple passes its time together, unified in this state of wandering, there is nonetheless a fissure threatening to break apart this union, that of Emily L.’s errancy which cannot be localized. Branded as a “défaut,” a “différence,” vague and unnamed, translates itself in various forms, namely the writing of poetry, that leads to the couple’s nautical wandering.

Towards the end of the novel, as the French couple continues to construct the story of Emily L. and the Captain, the narrator imagines an intellectual loss that haunts

Emily L., while the narrator’s companion conceives of this instead as a sort of fault:

- La force qu’elle porte en elle, elle doit la ressentir comme une sorte d’intelligence perdue qui ne lui sert plus à rien. - Vous voulez dire, comme un terrible défaut aussi qu’elle aurait attrapé au- dehors de sa vie, elle ne savait pas quand, ni comment, ni de qui, ni de quoi… ? - Un défaut qui se serait logé là, au creux de son corps et que toute sa vie durant elle aurait fait taire pour rester là où elle voulait se tenir, ces régions pauvres de son amour pour le Captain. (121)

137

“Intelligence perdue” and “défaut” both signal a lack; the former, however, is a fullness

transformed into lack, the latter a preexisting or originary lack. The “défaut” that the

couple imagines as inhabiting Emily L. is out of the ordinary in that it comes from

without instead of within. Like a communicable disease caught from an unknown source,

this défaut takes hold inside Emily L.’s body. She must not let this “defect” show itself, must not allow it to exercise an influence over her so that she might stay where she is, with the Captain. This défaut could paradoxically be thought of as Emily L.’s family’s lineage; the Englishwoman holds a higher social position than her husband and looses her honor for having married beneath her station: “Le Captain n’avait jamais oublié cette différence de naissance qu’il voyait entre eux comme une différence massive, definitive.

Qu’elle ait fait un mariage qui ne l’avait pas honorée, il devait en avoir souffert pour elle et il devait croire en souffrir encore” (101).

The Captain blames this difference for all that he does not understand about his wife. A not uncommon theme, difference of class is deemed the source of discord and distance between the husband and wife and can never be surmounted. This reading makes sense in light of the reference to dishonor through marriage and, of course, given

Emily L.’s parents’ opposition to the marriage of their daughter and the man who was hired help on their estate. There is another reading, however, most often privileged by scholars of Duras, namely a feminist reading of difference. Vicki Mistacco, for example, sees the Captain’s incomprehension of his wife due to the “différence de naissance” as a paradigmatic representation of woman as Other, an essentializing of difference between

female and male (78). A reading of otherness without an emphasis on gender seems,

138

however, to be more useful for our reading of errance as an unsettling of agency,

knowledge, and place.

In using the term “différence,” Duras implies a departure from the Same – both

that of Emily L.’s sameness with the Captain in their couple and a more specific

departure from social codes that govern the mores and actions of the social body. The

fact that Emily L. was of more noble birth and still married the Captain makes him suffer

for her, for she has been “dishonored.” Like the portrait of the plant-beings who are

condemned and punished for being root-less, straying outside of the social codes causes dishonor and thus suffering. While we read “différence de naissance” as a difference of social status conferred as it relates to the family that one belongs to, is born into, it is as well a difference inscribed in the (f)act of being born. Something akin to the originary

“faute” haunting the plant-beings and the inexplicable imperfection haunting the sea voyage, the difference separating the Captain and Emily L. is there by default, causing suffering for the husband. He blames this difference for all that he does not understand

about his wife: “ses lectures, sa folie et aussi ses incongruitiés, ces poèmes

redoutables…” (101). Multiple errancies follow from this lack of understanding and

being understood.

In the early years of their relationship, Emily L. writes poetry. The Captain does

not understand these poems; he does not believe that she simply writes of her love for

him and of the despair that touches all life: “Ce qu’elle y mettait en réalité, le Captain

l’ignoré. Voilà dans quelle situation se trouvait le Captain face aux poèmes que sa

femme écrivait” (77). This state of incomprehension, like the general non-understanding

that he has of his wife, is also one of suffering, “une vraie damnation” endured by the

139

Captain. He sees his wife’s writing of poetry as betrayal, as though she were leading a

double life, one that is “clandestine, cachée, incompréhensible, honteuse, peut-être, plus

douloureuse encore pour le Captain que si elle lui avait été infidèle avec son corps” (78).

Worse than a betrayal of the flesh is this seeming betrayal of the mind or the soul that

gives itself to writing. This judgment seems extreme, quite irrational; for how could the

writing of poetry be compared to having an adulterous affair? Because it is

unquantifiable, intangible, seemingly irremediable (because inherent to Emily L.’s being), the incomprehension that the Captain experiences in the face of his wife’s poems appears to him as more painful than Emily L. wandering outside the bounds of their marriage into another’s arms. Adultery in these terms, while not desirable, is at least understandable conceptually. The writing of these poems and the Captain’s ignorance of them equates to another sort of “breakdown” of the kind mentioned by Dominique

Noguez. Rather than losing the thread of the narrative due to stylistic tics and purposeful ruptures, we encounter a thematic cleavage between the characters. The Captain and

Emily L. have a different relationship to writing and knowledge that cuts quite deep.

However, as “to cleave” means both to split apart and to adhere to, as we know, this couple remains in tact, though, giving themselves over to the slow state of loss in the voyage.

Before the death of their daughter, when Emily L. writes poems that cause the

Captain great pain, he goes to see her father. Happy to hear that his daughter is a poet, the father secretly has one of her poems published. Upon seeing her poem in a local review, Emily L. does not understand how this could have happened independent of her.

140

Her only explanation is that a poem, once written, has been born into this world and

could live and flourish and travel of its own accord:

Et puis, étrangement, elle n’avait plus cherché à savoir. Ainsi s’était-elle inclinée devant l’impondérable de la circonstance. L’immanence du poème, sa pénétration des âmes, était au fond aussi mystérieuse que celle-ci. Elle croyait que lorsque des poèmes étaient écrits dans un pays donné, très vite ils se répandaient ailleurs, propulsés par leur seule évidence, leur seule existence, au-delà des distances, … des interdits. (…) Qu’il n’y avait qu’un seul poème à atteindre à travers toutes les langues, toutes les civilisations. (81)

Unlike the Captain who cannot bear the weight of non-understanding, Emily L. has no need to be the possessor of knowledge. Authorial control has been taken from her by her husband and father, who, as males, symbolize the domain of the logos, mastery of language and knowledge. Her voice, with its potential to enter into communication with

the realm of logic and reason through writing, is thus taken from her. Emily L. cannot

make meaning from the inexplicable appearance of her poem in a review; she gives up

trying to participate in this symbolic order from which she is excluded. She is not

defeated, but rather, engages in a different type of understanding: an epistemology of the

unknown. Like the mendiante who suddenly stops trying to find her way to the Plaine

des Oiseaux (“tout d’un coup, elle ne cherche plus”), and who, in this way, finally begins

to advance in her own manner, through loss of self, Emily L.’s first abandonment through

poetry subverts the traditional channels of understanding and ordering of the world. In

not-needing-to-know, she unlinks herself from the “signifying chain,” a term I borrow

here from Lacan39 but use not in a linguistic sense. This is rather the chain tightly

tethering knowing and understanding to reason and logic. Although Breton’s chain is one

more expressly tying man to work in a capitalist economic schema, the possibility of

39 “Links by which a necklace firmly hooks onto a link of another necklace made of links,” Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud” (418).

141

breaking away from this chain through a straying of the mind and movement of the

subject still holds true. Through Emily L.’s unchaining of signifiers the poem finds itself

voyaging far and wide, being written by all.

Soon thereafter, Emily L. stops writing poetry for a period during which she loses

a baby at birth (stopping writing is said to have occurred prior to this death, though we

can infer a connection between the two). In the face of this unexpected and inexplicable loss, Emily L. can only express herself through incomprehensible cries, first, and then through tears. As we saw in Le Vice-consul, language fails to articulate the “immensité intime” of lived experience, and the chain of signifiers is once again broken. It is through the body, not language, that pain and the non-sense of the world can be expelled out into the world.

Duras’s writing of incomprehension often takes the form of the subject whom others do not comprehend (the beggar woman, the Vice-Consul, Anne-Marie Stretter) and a world that fails to be understood by the subject. Emily L.’s loss of speech faculties is concordant with the loss of mental faculties. Due to her non-participation in the world through language and reason during this period, Emily L. is unrecognizable to the

Captain. Although Duras does not explicitly state here that Emily L. has entered into a state of madness or unreason,40 there is no doubt that it has occurred as we are informed

of reason’s return some months later: “L’été était arrivé et la raison lui était revenue, elle l’avait retrouvée presque entière, un matin au réveil, et le Captain l’avait reconnue” (82).

While we would not read Emily L. as excluded from the world in this context, by being

40 Raynalle Udris makes a distinction between “unreason” and “madness” in Welcome Unreason : A Study of "Madness" in the Novels of Marguerite Duras. While I make no such distinction here, it is interesting to note Duras’s formulation of a “return of reason.”

142

“unrecognized” she is in fact left out of the social order of her community with the

Captain. Élise Noetinger comments on this phenomenon of incomprehension as both non-understanding and non-inclusion as it occurs in Duras’s La Douleur (1985), in which

Duras tells the story of waiting for the return of her husband held in a concentration camp during World War II. Noetinger states, “She is trapped in isolation since the hostile world no longer comprehends her, in both meanings of the verb…” (65).

This straying into the realm of non-language and unreason is an entrance to the realm of non-comprehension, we read here once again the correlation between error and loss. Not only is one in error at the moment of a loss of reason, but in not being understood or included, one also loses one’s place in the (rational) world. Emily L.’s loss of knowing and being known after the loss of her baby is only momentary; it is not a complete crossing of the threshold from beyond which one shall not return. Rather, it is an errance, in the sense of both a dialectical movement and a mistake which can be, and is, corrected. If reason is found “presque entière,” then there is a part that does not come back to Emily L. and thus remains missing. This anticipates another movement to come that will send Emily L. back into the edge of unreason where she will be confronted again with loss and error in the form of the poem destroyed by the Captain.

Loss at Sea

Ça devait être après la perte de ce poème qu’elle avait trouvé le voyage sur la mer, qu’elle avait décidé de perdre sa vie sur la mer, de ne rien faire d’autre des poèmes et de l’amour que de les perdre sur la mer (89).

From the mysteriously published poem to the death of her baby, Emily L. finds herself entering progressively into the domain of the incomprehensible, whose apogee

143 she attains with the writing and loss of a poem unlike any other she has ever written.

Having come back to writing some months after regaining her reason, Emily L. starts a new poem but does not finish it, and goes out for a walk. In her absence, the Captain finds it lying on a dresser before him, “étalé comme un crime” (82). Like with her other poetry, this piece seems to have been written expressly to injure the Captain by ignoring his presence (84). The vocabulary of violence and ignorance associated with the poem and its effects on the Captain include a “sentiment d’être poignardé par la vérité. De s’être trompé sur la personne, de vivre avec une inconnue.” At the same time that Emily

L.’s writing of poetry is a nefarious force working against him, it is conversely a worthless endeavor derided as both childish, “ces caprices de sa jeunesse,” and “ces saloperies” (83). As we saw earlier, the Captain cannot stand the “torture” (84) inflicted upon him through incomprehension – in the form of not understanding his wife’s poetry and in the form of exclusion from her world of poetry, exclusion from mention in the poem itself.

Distinct from her other writings, this poem, which we recognize as Emily

Dickinson’s “There’s a Certain Slant of Light,” speaks of rays of light that wound without leaving a trace except for that of an internal difference:

Qu’elles ne laissaient ni trace ni cicatrice visible, ni dans la chair de notre corps ni dans nos pensées. Qu’elles ne nous blessaient ni ne nous soulageaient. Que c’étaient autre chose. Que c’était ailleurs. Ailleurs et loin de là où on aurait pu croire. Que ces blessures n’annonçaient rien, ne confirmaient rien qui aurait pu faire l’objet d’un enseignement, d’une provocation au sein du règne de Dieu. Non, il s’agissait de la perception de la dernière différence: celle, interne, au centre des significations. (85)

In the use of parallel structures of opposing elements, “ne … ni,” Duras eschews the binary model and leaves a blank space for meaning to arise, “ailleurs.” Oscillating

144 between elements and then choosing an altogether different option: from the “ce” whose antecedent is not known, is absent, to the “autre chose” and “ailleurs” that lead away from the paths upon which one normally treads and expects to travel. Unexpectedly indeed, this “elsewhere” is in fact inside, the center. This internal difference is one that needs no resolution and that is, for this very reason, an opening unto new meanings rather than a discord to be reconciled through assimilation of the already-known. There is a blind straying here that is nonetheless an in-sight, “la perception de la dernière différence: celle, interne, au centre des significations.”

Because the Captain cannot accept this difference as “a reading of otherness that forgoes mastery and truth, in order to maintain without synthesis same and other”

(Mistacco 83), he burns the poem. With the destruction of this poem (“anéanti” (87) that articulates the irremediable difference “de naissance” that marks Emily L., a difference which cannot but be seen as “un défaut” in the eyes of the Captain, the poet’s voice has been silenced, her author-ity taken from her. Her straying into the domain of the masculine, the literary, seems perhaps to have been doomed to failure and silence from the start. For, even though her father sees in her poetic genius, he controls her poetic voice in the world, publishing her poems under her name but without her knowledge.

After the father’s death, the Captain keeps the publication secret, even as Emily L.’s poetry gains celebrity: the Captain and the estate caretaker, le jeune gardien, work hard to intercept all letters from her readers; and the couple sails to distant, remote locations to which the woman poet’s renown has not yet spread. Having erred through writing to the limit point of the realm of comprehension, Emily L.’s poetry, “les objets criminels

145

qu’étaient ses poésies” (126) leads to her silencing. She no longer writes, for, “[l]e seul

poème veritable est obligatoirement celui qui a disparu” (117).

Just as her first poem was published, inexplicably, without her intervention, the

last poem changes in state to the lost poem without Emily L.’s knowledge. Not only does

the half-written poem vanish in material form, but Emily L. has to doubt whether or not

the poem had ever existed, given its unaccountable disappearance. In the end, she thinks

she must have imagined or dreamed the poem, even though she can feel in her memory

the movement of the pen in her hand, across the page. She does not trust her own mind

nor her body; “folle” and “folie” are used to describe Emily L. by others, and of herself at

the time she wrote the poem, she says that the Captain would have been worried about it

had he read it, “à cause de [s]a tête encore malade” (88). The multiplication of loss that

we saw in Le Vice-consul is experienced in similar fashion by Emily L.: loss of authorial

control, loss of the poem itself, loss of poetic voice, loss of reason, all of which equates to

a loss of self.

Does loss beget loss, or does error beget error? It would seem that the two

function in a generative exchange. Each instance of loss could also be considered an

instance of errancy, a straying outside imposed order. Interestingly enough, the Captain’s

act of suppression is expressed in terms of a crime as well, in spite of the fact that it is not

known with certainty by those speculating about it: “… que le criminel qui avait

assassiné Emily L., c’était le Captain” (124-125); “… la thèse du crime du Captain.”

Error and incomprehension multiplies here, extending the lexicon of criminality from

Emily L. to her husband. This semantic connection works to keep the couple as one through a sort of con-fusion. The two hypotheses explaining the disappearance of the

146

poem, “celle-là du geste du Captain ou celle de la folie d’Emily L.,” put criminal

destruction or assassination on the same plane with madness, that is to say that they are

both transgressions of the bounds of the logically and ethically comprehensible and

acceptable (125). The commonality of the individuals here, however, does not lead us

very far. For, the Captain does not experience a loss of self as does his wife.

A common theme in Duras, notably among her female characters, that which

some critics term “dispossession”– whether through unreason or another symbolic

silencing such as the destruction of the one, true poem of Emily L.’s 41 – is what we

understand as errance whereby incomprehension and loss, in concert with various forms of error (“straying,” “mistake,” “fault,” “defect,” “crime,” etc.), lead to a non-coincidence

of the self and the world. While I agree with Raylene Ramsay, who, in comparing

Duras’s Emily L. and Nathalie Sarraute’s Tu ne t’aimes pas, asserts that self-abnegation is at work, I do not find this loss of self to be “mystical” nor a sacrifice of “her poetry to the love she shares with the captain, a love that can include even his lack of understanding and jealousy of her work” (800). I do not read the abandonment of poetry and a ‘rooted’ existence as a choice consciously made for the good of the English couple’s relationship.

Circumstances imposed from without carry Emily L. into successive losses and a widening experience of not-knowing/not-being-known. What she does choose to do is to stop seeking participation in the realm of the rational.

To exist outside this realm, outside the community of readers of her poems,

outside the bounds of acceptance by her parents, and beyond the “limite de

[l’]intelligence terrestre [du Captain]” (126), Emily L. finds herself existing in a perpetual

41 Raylene Ramsay, for example, speaks of “the dispossessed Emily L. (the woman poet assassinated)” (“The Unself-loving Woman” 793.)

147

state of loss, the liminal state of the voyage at sea: “Ça devait être après la perte de ce

poème qu’elle avait trouvé le voyage sur la mer, qu’elle avait décidé de perdre sa vie sur

la mer, de ne rien faire d’autre des poèmes et de l’amour que de les perdre sur la mer »

(89). The phenomenological experience of the outside and in-between as lived by Emily

L. and the Captain on the sea – outside the smybolic orders of the social and the logical;

in-between the geographic and temporal orders of departure and arrival – is an expression

of Bachelard’s immensité intime. It is also a function of the dialectics of the text whereby

Duras offers comprehension as necessarily partial and instable and thus meaning as continuously negotiated.

This voyage at sea becomes an alternate means of orientation, that of disorientation, both for the reader – and the narrators – and for the English couple. Emily L.

is said to have « found » sea travel as a way to lose her identities of writer and wife, to

lose herself in time and space, this « pure passage of time ». The semantic paradox of

finding out how to lose something, in this case oneself, reads as a counter-intuitive

« logic » by which Emily L. (and the text) is operating. A vocabulary of logic or reason

is used by the narrator’s companion to further charcterize this life of travel : « la solution

du voayge sur la mer » (54) and later, « [l]a logique aveugle du voyage autour de la terre,

c’est elle qui l’a découverte » ; also, « il leur restait seulement à résoudre le problème de

la mort » (130). Problem, solution, logic, discovery: these terms signal a sort of ordering

by which Emily L. and the Captain live their lives. And yet, this is Emily L.’s « blind »

or rather obscure logic that guides the couple. Contrary to a method – scientific or philosophical – applied to the process of thought and action in order to lead one’s movements toward the desired outcome of an anticipated end,

148

errance works à son insu, or à l’insu of the errant subject. It is a state or condition

happened into and not entered into with aims and expectations preconceived. In this way

we understand the abnegation of knowledge as inherent in errancy. Through silence,

dialectics, immobility, and loss Emily L. thwarts received ideas and traditional ways of

knowing. Understanding is dis-placed to the space of internal difference, where self and other might possibly coexist. The loss of the poem, however, and its unfinished state before its destruction – the middle part not having been written – symbolizes a dislocation of “where the meanings are.” The obscure “logic” informing the English couple’s decision to wander at sea seems not wholly unlike that which guides Aragon and

Breton as they move about the city: a movement that pushes against and crosses out of the limits defining the subject’s place in the world. If we are still apt to read Bachelard’s formulation of the immensité intime as an ideal expression of the phenomenology of errance, we must now acknowledge the grave risks that are run if, “[q]uand s’approfondit la grande solitude de l’homme, les deux immensités se touchent, se confondent”: when the subject encounters the world in her solitude of silence or loss of reason, the result just might be incomprehension or displacement that takes the self out of the self and out of the world.

149

CHAPTER THREE

THE ERRANT “I”: NEGOTIATING AND NARRATING THE SELF IN NINA

BOURAOUI’S GARÇON MANQUÉ AND LA VIE HEUREUSE

From the passive urban wandering of the Surrealists, to the auto-destructive errings of Duras’s characters, we have seen how movement across space and time as a dis-locating of the self within the physical world engenders a productive experience of getting lost or losing oneself. The movement between presence and absence enacted through the wanderer’s steps is one fraught with risk since at every moment s/he treads on the very limit of disappearance. Aragon’s arcade and its inhabitants had already been erased from the city at the time that Le Paysan de Paris was published. Breton, like

Aragon, chronicles his urban meanderings as a means of trace, and yet, his encounters with Nadja fade from view toward the end of the book; the âme errante has strayed so far into the margins that she no longer has a place in Breton’s life nor on the page. Duras’s wandering women, like the destitute and bohemian Nadja, are figures of loss manifest in part in form of silence. Notably, la mendiante and Emily L. experience extreme loss by way of the body and the mind. Significantly, for Duras, this poetics of loss lays the very ground upon which narrative is built. The displacement of self, the movement into the void, into the realm of negation of self, is the only movement possible. Through the dislocation of self – and world, self and self – an alternate epistemology emerges, that of un-knowing. Following this thread of the displacement of self as precisely that which allows for, or rather, necessitates, a reconfiguring of the coordinates of the self and a

150 plotting anew of the coordinates of self-and-world, we come to kind of (paradoxical) dénouement through which a consideration of two of Nina Bouraoui’s recent works,

Garçon manqué (2000) and La Vie heureuse (2002) shall serve to tie up our meditation on errance.

In the autobiographical Garçon manqué, the young narrator continually questions who she is in her own mind and in the eyes of others, who she is allowed or supposed to be, and who she wants to be. This questioning takes the form of an ongoing pair of dialogues among the four poles within and against which she negotiates her identity:

French, Algerian, female, male. Of French and Algerian origins, the young Nina explores before the reader the fear, anguish, pleasure, and ambivalence inherent to the negotiation of the self. The shift in setting from Algeria to France (where Nina and her sister spend the summer with their maternal grandparents) partway through the book is representative of the narrator’s delocalized identity. Her questions are reconfigured and posed anew from this other position of geography, culture, language. Like national identity, gender identity in its performance and its stakes is repositioned with respect to the socio-historical context in which she finds herself. For, gender is as politically and historically marked as geography.

Bouraoui’s work La Vie heureuse focuses on the difficulties of self-negotiation during adolescence, particularly with respect to sexual identity. In the dual setting of

Zurich, Switzerland and Saint-Malo, France, Marie, the narrator, confronts issues of desire, loss and absence, in particular the violence and secrecy surrounding her love for another girl and the prospect of her Aunt Carol’s death as she battles cancer. Indeed, as a novel (bearing the designation “roman” beneath the title, as Garçon manqué does not),

151 this text develops the narrator’s world as more densely populated by giving a presence and voice (through the narrator) to family members, close friends, and classmates who function as ever-shifting points de repère in Marie’s negotiation of the self. The complexity of issues at stake in this negotiation is intensified to an almost vertiginous state by the novel’s structure of alternate settings, moving back and forth between Zurich and Saint-Malo with each succeeding chapter.

Bouraoui’s style of narration – a poetic staccato of short sentences, fragments that flow rhythmically aided by repetition – coupled with the complexity of the dialectics and themes explored in both texts creates an unstable je, mutable and ever in the process of its elaboration. This process is somewhat akin to that of Duras’s in that Nina and Marie face a loss of self seemingly at every turn. But the body and the voice for Bouraoui, instead of serving as the site of loss as was the case for Duras, become instruments of presence.

This is not to say that the body and the voice are not problematic in Bouraoui’s texts, quite the contrary. Expressing a politics of refusal and a poetics of instability, Garçon manqué and La Vie heureuse offer the body and the (narrative) voice as agents of negotiation. The movement of negotiation, figured as dialectics, displacement, disorientation, and disarticulation on the thematic and formative levels, articulates a multiform errancy at work in Bouraoui’s texts. This movement operates principally through questioning and refusal – a refusal to choose, to be named. The instability engendered by errance is due precisely to the unsettling of places, through a crossing of boundaries. The boundaries of places – geographic, linguistic, symbolic – that become unsettled no longer function to keep in or out, to separate, to designate. Such is

152

Bouraoui’s transgression, a straying from recognizable categories of gender, sexuality,

and nationality that results in both a blurring of categories and a move beyond them.

Part I : The Body as Site of Errancy in Garçon manqué

Narrative and Symbolic Instability : « Ne pas choisir c’est être dans l’errance »

While Bouraoui does not narrate movement as a concrete, physical displacement

such as Surrealist flânerie or the beggar woman’s overland trekking, the body is no less

present in Garçon manqué. In fact, the body is a focal point of Bouraoui’s, integral to

our reading of the author’s particular staging of errance. But the body, in so far as it is a

part of one’s version of reality, cannot be separated from language, for it is constituted

through the medium of language. As the linguist Émile Benveniste explains, “Language

re-produces reality. This is to be understood in the most literal way: reality is produced anew by means of language. The speaker recreates the event and his experience of the event by his discourse” (Benveniste 22). It is in this sense that errancy in Bouraoui functions in much the same way as Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “beyond” as he posits it in The Location of Culture (1994). Considering questions of borders, space, temporality,

and subjectivity from the perspective of contemporary society, this complex present that

is somehow also its own ghostly shadow (postmodern, postcolonial, postfeminist),

Bhabha writes: “Being in the ‘beyond’, then, is to inhabit an intervening space…. But to

dwell ‘in the beyond’ is also … to be part of a revisionary time, to return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity…. In that sense, then, the intervening space

‘beyond,’ becomes a space of intervention in the here and now.” He goes on to say, “To

153

engage with such invention, and intervention … requires a sense of the new that

resonates with the hybrid chicano aesthetic” that is described as “a sensibility attuned to

mixtures and confluence … a delight in texture and senuous surfaces … self-conscious

manipulation of materials or iconography” (Bhabha 7).

Bouraoui the writer and Nina the adolescent, female, narrator “intervene” in the present in the space of the body/(of) the text. “Hybrid,” “mixtures,” and “confluence” reflect the complexity of Nina’s identity and its material manifestation in her body. A coming together of cultures and bloodlines French and Algerian – and on a different plane, of genders and sexualities – that is neither a full absorption of one entity by the other nor a seamless unity. For, if union there is, its existence rests precariously on the very fault of the fusion, at the point where exist both and neither, in Bhabha’s terms, the

“interstice.” This is exactly where Nina positions herself, “Je suis tout. Je ne suis rien”

(Garçon manqué 20). Nina’s straying from conventional categories of identification is not only a response to the imperative put forth by identity politics but also a straying from the confines of logic through language that govern traditional modes of understanding, for how can one purport to be “all” and “nothing” at once?

By her very existence and in her discourse, Nina refuses the limits assigned through politics and language, trying to break free of these bounds that restrict like a weight, one such burden being the “faute” that she carries – that of war, of her parents’ marriage, and of her own birth: “Longtemps je crois porter une faute” (32). Besides the material traces of the geopolitics and historicity of the French-Algerian War that Nina

wears, the body is transgressive in its performance of gender and culture through dress and speech. Performance as a constant calling into question of her identity – as

154

understood by the narrator herself and as conceived and projected by others – translates a

principal figuration of errance in Bouraoui’s texts, that of hesitating, negotiating, of not choosing. The experience of errance as deferral, with respect to both its transgressive and dialectic functions, is also located in the body, this physical and originary source of competing identities, “De mère française. De père algérien. Je sais les odeurs, les sons, les couleurs. C’est une richesse. C’est une pauvreté. Ne pas choisir c’est être dans l’errance. Mon visage algérien. Ma voix française. J’ai l’ombre de ma lumière. Je suis l’une contre l’autre. J’ai deux éléments agressifs” (33). Like Duras’s beggar woman whose body harbors the transgression that initiates her decade’s long wandering, Nina’s body is doubly marked by errance, as both cause and effect, and doubly inscribes in this errance the act of not choosing.

In order to elucidate the problematic of errance specific to Nina Bouraoui, we

needn’t look any further than the title, Garçon manqué. The signifier “garçon” indicates

a set of physical traits and social habits characterizing the category of person signified.

To talk about a boy means to exclude the other category, to not be talking about a girl.

The term also refers to age, a younger person, a child or adolescent, as opposed to a man.

Yet, the single term “garçon” does not tell the whole story. Rather, it is coupled with

“manqué” and is thereby defined in relation to this other term: manquer, rater, to miss, to not attain. An examination of this term and its polyphonic resonances in Bouraoui’s text point to a double reading of manquer as failure and absence. Thus Nina, as the title character, is an almost boy, a failed boy.42 She incarnates an unsuccessful attempt at

42 The French “garçon manqué” translates as the English “tomboy,” a denomination used to refer to a girl whose appearance and behavior are like that of a boy (within the Western paradigm of hetero-normative sexuality and gender regulating the masculine and feminine economies). It is interesting to note that in

155 being a boy. Or rather, is she the missed boy, the missing boy in her family, in the male- dominated Algerian society?

Through her masculine attributes – lean build, short hair – and interests – climbing on the cliffs, playing soccer –, Nina sees herself as a male, an equal to her friend

Amine. She wants to wander freely in the streets after school instead of being driven home straight away, shut up first inside the car and then the house. But Nina’s attempts to remake herself as a boy and to integrate male society, Algeria’s public sphere, will always fall short, as the title indicates, because Nina is irrevocably a girl: “J’existe trop.

Je suis une femme. Je reste à l’extérieur de la forêt” (40). Algeria, a “forêt d’hommes”

(37), does not admit entrance to this other, female, whose ex-clusion is due to her difference. Being female is a marked condition that stands out against the unmarked male condition; she is a girl, a non-boy, a “failed boy.” A man on the street of Algiers is like a tree in a forest: anonymous, invisible, universal and thus absent. A woman, however, disturbs the scene in her difference. She does not belong; she is an exception, unlike the others by her very existence, too present. Although Nina performs masculinity via her “tomboy” comportment and is recognized as a boy by her father – “Il m’élève comme un garçon. Sa fierté. (…) Il transmet la force. Il forge mon corps. (…) Il détourne ma fragilité. Il m’appelle Brio” (24) – the fact remains that she is not biologically male, and as such, the masculine self is absent. And yet, at the same time that she is lacking, is not male, Nina exists “too much.”

Her female presence, we could say, brille par l’absence of ‘true’ masculinity.

Thus, in order to enter the forest, Nina must pass through an alternate route, must sneak

translation we lose the very question of absence or failure that is posed in the original French title, a question that informs and even structures Bouraoui’s narration.

156

in using a ruse wherein she appears as male. But such masculine appearance – the short

hair, her boyish strut, athletic body, and aggressivity – can only exist as construction

added to the already-in-existence, female Nina. We can read her masculinity in terms of

Jacques Derrida’s supplement, where Nina’s subjective agency can only be accomplished

with the addition of masculinity. But, as Derrida warns, “the supplement supplements. It

adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void” (Of Grammatology 145). It seems that there is no way out of this absence, this “failing to occur” as male. For, it is doubly oppressive, translating not mere empirical fact but also conveying judgment in the negative significations of the terms failure and lack. According to her French grandmother, the young Bouraoui is a failure both as a boy and as a girl, “Nina, un garçon manqué. Nina, une fille ratée” (107).

The question of inherent failure here translates the way in which the narrator necessarily always already errs via her body, errs in the sense of committing what one would consider to be an error. There are two principal margins for error – that which is related to nationality (and including culture, language, geography) and that which is related to sex or gender. Depending on the context, each margin is enlarged to include others, its destabilizing effects and its ambiguity thus compounded such that nationality and gender come to mean different things in different locations, both for the narrator and for those around her. In spite of the materiality of her body, Nina’s subject identity proves not only unstable but negated, in so far as it is related to others’ notions of belonging, authenticity, and acceptability.

The cities of Algiers and Rennes each in turn serve as the backdrop for the text’s two sections. This in no way translates, however, to a separation or isolation of the

157

spaces. On the contrary, the dialogue taking place within the narrator represents an

exchange between the two cities, cultures, and languages of her family. Born of a French

mother and an Algerian father, Nina struggles to make a place for herself somewhere

between the two. She must carve out her own place because she cannot rely on others to

readily accept her; the words and gestures of those she meets will always tell her she does

not belong, no matter which side of the sea she is on. Bouraoui writes:

Les Algériens ne me voient pas. Les Français ne comprennent pas. Je construis un mur contre les autres. Les autres. Leurs lèvres. Leurs yeux qui cherchent sur mon corps une trace de ma mère, un signe de mon père. « Elle a le sourire de Maryvonne. Elle a les gestes de Rachid. » Être séparée toujours de l’un et de l’autre. Porter une identité de fracture. Se penser en deux parties. À qui je ressemble le plus? Qui a gagné sur moi? Sur ma voix? Sur mon visage? Sur mon corps qui avance? La France ou l’Algérie? (…) Qui je suis? (…) Moi, je suis terriblement libre et entravée. / « Tu n’es pas française. » « Tu n’es pas algérienne. » / Je suis tout. Je ne suis rien. Ma peau. Mes yeux. Ma voix. Mon corps s’enferme par deux fois. (19-20)

Clearly, the self is constantly in question, not only in the large, abstract, socio-political terms of nationality and ethnicity but also in the physical and intimate terms of the body and genealogy. The narrator, like every child, is a physical manifestation of her parents, bearing the “traces” of her mother and father through the various parts of her body, as well as her voice and gestures. In this instance, in the post-colonial context of Algeria and France in the 1970s, to resemble her mother or father signifies much more than the biological link between parent and child; it is rather to assign the narrator, by corporeal parts, identification with one country or the other. As she delimits her body parts we see literally the “identité de fracture” of which she speaks.

In the passage above, the combination of dual and grouped elements (voice, face, body) represents the negotiation that is occurring as more than a mere battle between

158

opposing forces. It is certainly true that the crux of Nina’s identity lies principally

between the poles of “Algerian” and “French” and “boy” and “girl”: “Je ne sais plus qui

je suis au jardin de Maurepas. Une fille? Un garçon? (…) Qui? La Française?

L’Algérienne? L’Algéro-Française? De quel côté de la barrière? » (141); and « Tous les matins je vérifie mon identité. J’ai quatre problèmes. Française? Algérienne? Fille?

Garçon?” (163). If the question of identity comes to be couched in these terms as oppositions present within the narrator, it is most often put to her by others who seek to classify and categorize as a means of dealing with that which is unfamiliar, which resists classification, “ce qui échappe,” as Bouraoui says at one point. For the narrator, this negotiation is a process more nuanced and complex than simply regarding herself as one or the other. Conscious of her social designation as an “enfant mixte” (19) or “métis,” the narrator is “entre les deux pays,” like the sea separating the countries of her parents’ birth, “entre deux identités” (26). It is this “entre” that is significant, indicating at once a coming together of two entities and their simultaneous separation via a middle ground.

The “entre” signifies ambiguity, hesitation. It is a sort of non-place that Nina occupies, not one or the other, but both and neither.

We have seen with Duras, and will further explore in our analysis of Bourauoi’s

La Vie heureuse, how the experience of placelessness is constitutive of errancy. As is dialectic tension. A back-and-forth negotiation of subject positions keeps the errant subject always in motion, unfixed, at a distance from others, constantly moving between presence and absence. For Homi Bhabha, to translate the experience of being-without- place in art or literature is to seek recognition of the self in/by the other such that one is identified, identifiable. He writes, “To live in the unhomely world, to find its

159

ambivalencies and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering and

splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social

solidarity: ‘I am looking for the join … I want to join … I want to join’” (18). Though

Bhabha suggests in this last phrase a desire for self to meet other in “social solidarity” as he calls it, we also hear the cry for a self who wants to meet its own self, to join its two

(or more) pieces together. For Nina, the question of self-joining is indeed mired in ambivalence and ambiguity. At times endured as psychic violence, this “identité de fracture” is nonetheless born out of Nina’s constant questioning of her belonging as she probes the space of her own desires and fears and those of the collective conscious and unconscious.

In the earlier passage the narrator poses the question, “Qui je suis?”, which we initially translate as, “Who am I?” but which also can read as, “Whom do I follow?”

Significantly, we recall that André Breton opens Nadja with this very interrogative, “Qui suis-je?”. Both Bouraoui and Breton offer unconventional autobiographical narratives of a search for self, and a search that, for both authors, must be navigated through the other.

Breton writes: “Qui suis-je? … en effet pourquoi tout ne reviendrait-il pas à savoir qui je

‘hante’?” (Nadja 9). While this surrealist ‘following’ involves a more vague set of others among whom he moves (friends, acquaintances, lovers, strangers), we know Bouraoui to be speaking of her parents, and, playing on an English idiom, potentially asking in whose footsteps she will metaphorically follow, her mother’s or her father’s? France’s or

Algeria’s? Moreover, in the transitive verb suivre is implied a physical movement of going along after someone, which we read as choosing to moving one’s physical self and one’s allegiances to one side of the sea or the other. Necessarily, to follow one parent

160

(one country) is to leave the other. Bouraoui writes, “Être française, c’est être sans mon

père, sans sa force, sans ses yeux, sans sa main qui conduit. Être algérienne, c’est être

sans ma mere, sans son visage, sans sa voix, sans ses mains qui protègent” (20). The

question of “Who am I?” then is inextricably tied up in the question, “Whom do I

follow?” We can say the same for Breton, who, through following Nadja, “appropria[tes]

her journeys into liminal states” (Cocker 16). There are no lost steps for Breton, thus the

steps that take him into Nadja’s path and across the city with her are necessarily steps

through which the je qui suis comes into being. For Nina, the “I” exists a priori as an incorporation of the other, the two others of her mother and father. If Breton’s following is an act of errance leading nowhere (in particular), Nina’s following would instead be a movement along a delineated path. In contrast to Breton, Nina’s errancy is accomplished precisely through not following. This decision to not choose one parent/place over the other leaves Nina paradoxically free from the shadow of the other and yet unable to move on her own, “Moi, je suis terriblement libre et entravée.” Her errance, like Breton’s leads nowhere.43

In this statement, like in the four very short sentences of being and not being that

follow it, Bouraoui represents the complexities and intricacies of the negotiation of

identity on the level of syntax: through the use of questions, the conjunction “et”,

negation, and affirmation. The use of et connecting two adjectives characterizing Nina

stands in juxtaposition to the two-sentence structure that follows directly afterward and

conveys separation. This “identité de fracture,” the act of “se penser en deux parties,” is

represented in the statements, “ ‘Tu n’es pas française.’ ‘Tu n’es pas algérienne,’ ” and “

43 Later on this same page, Nina states, “Je cours, immobile,” an oxymoron, which, as Ann-Sofie Persson points out, is an extreme figuration of the binary structures seen elsewhere (18).

161

Je suis tout. Je ne suis rien.” Each set of declarations is parallel in structure, short, and

violent, punctuated with a full-stop to mark the separation and distinction between the

characterizing terms. On the one hand, we have the use of et working to bring together the disparate parts, to fuse the fractured halves. On the other hand, we have evidence of this cleavage, which seems impossible to reconcile.

Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the subject pronouns tu and je express another layer of negotiation through which the situation must be considered: not only must the narrator decide for herself whom she will follow / who she is, but she must also contend with the world view of others as it is imposed on her from the outside (and as it is insidiously at work on the inside, having become a sort of hegemonic discourse that leads to interior discord and self-questioning). The unnamed speaker addressing Nina here reminds us of the anonymous on in Le Vice-consul, this omnipresent force working to negate the Vice-consul’s presence. While the address is direct, we see in the repetition of

“ ‘Tu n’es pas…’ ” negation twice over, denying Nina recognition of the two nationalities constitutive of her identity. We can consider here the speaking other as the border guard

(literal or metaphorical), who, in spite of the official documentation that proves Nina’s belonging to both countries, deems her not French, not Algerian. It is the mixing of the two that make her unrecognizable, unacceptable: “J’ai deux passeports. Je n’ai qu’un seul visage apparent. / Les Algériens ne me voient pas. Les Français ne comprennent pas” (19).

Bouraoui evokes a multifaceted, non-recognition in which the social, the political, the symbolic and the linguistic conspire to keep Nina out of the realm of agency on all

(national) fronts. It is precisely the question of recognition by the Other that grants or

162

denies existence. In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Judith Butler shows how this coming-into-existence arise in language:

Thus, to be addressed is not merely to be recognized for what one already is, but to have the very term conferred by which the recognition of existence becomes possible. One comes to “exist” by virtue of this fundamental dependency on the address of the Other. One “exists” not only by virtue of being recognized, but, in a prior sense, by being recognizable. The terms that facilitate recognition are themselves conventional, the effects and instruments of a social ritual that decide, often through exclusion and violence, the linguistic conditions of survivable subjects. // If language can sustain the body, it can also threaten its existence. Thus, the question of the specific ways that language threatens violence seems bound up with the primary dependency that any speaking being has by virtue of the interpellative or constitutive address of the Other. (5-6)

While for the Other, Nina does not exist – refused recognition through the faculties of vision and reason, before being outrightly denied being (through the negative syntactical structures with être), she is nonetheless addressed in speech. As the object of the Other’s address, Nina does not “exist,” however, she does not reside immobile in the position of objectification. Moving out of the subject position of the tu constituted in negation, the narrator moves into the je, asserting herself in two affirmative statements: “Je suis tout.

Je ne suis rien.” Echoing the syntax of the prior negations, Nina nonetheless changes the terms for formulation of identity, not staying within the bounds of nationality but jumping out into the realms of the absolute. And yet, by the very contradiction expressed between “tout” and “rien,” she negates the notion of absoluteness.

Moving back and forth from term to term: her mother, her father; her voice, face, body; France, Algeria; terribly free, terribly restricted; not French, not Algerian; all, nothing, Bouraoui establishes her dialectic. A sort of dialectic perverted or détournée, for this back-and-forth movement of interrogation and consideration occurs not between two fixed terms but ones that are ever-changing. We can consider these negotiations in terms

163

of Jacques Derrida’s différance, a constant and continual deferral of ultimate meaning,

which thus allows a panoply of significations to exist simultaneously and a mutation of

signification to occur from one moment to the next and from one place to another. This

mobility is rooted in the va-et-vient of negotiating culture and gender as both belonging and transgression, as a coming-into and a moving-away-from. We read this movement in

Bouraoui as a contemporary expression, on the levels of the metaphysical and the discursive, of the physical action of the “aller çà et là” of errance.

Rather than capitulate to the demands of dominant discourse by claiming one nationality over the other, Nina opts instead to escape the imposed order of classification:

“Ne pas être algérienne. Ne pas être française. C’est une force contre les autres.

Je suis indéfinie. C’est une guerre contre le monde. Je deviens inclassable. (…) Ne pas choisir c’est être dans l’errance” (33). This is not a move made simply, as we have seen thus far in this chapter and as such critics have shown in their studies of Garçon manqué.

44 Through a multiple means of thwarting fixed categories of identity, including the

outright refusal to definitively name herself, the narrator harnesses the “power of the

postcolonial translation of modernity,” which “rests in its performative, deformative

structure…” (Bhabha 241). By not choosing, she enacts subjective agency via subversion

of the symbolic. In refusing to choose one set of terms over another, the narrator does

indeed make a choice, that of continuing to negotiate her identity and to remain in flux,

constantly moving back and forth between the two places of origin, as it were, and the

large semantic and symbolic structures attached to each. Competing terms often in close

44 I am thinking in particular of Trudy Agar-Mendousse, Martine Fernandes, Anne-Sofie Persson, and Ching Selao. Fernandes and Selao focus on the subversion of the problematic of telling. Persson too considers the autobiographic function/form and its result as “manqué” at the hand of Bouraoui. Agar- Mendousse’s study is the most exhaustive in its examination of the numerous ways in which the narrator “propose différentes solutions à l’angoisse qu’éprouve Nina face à son identité ethnique indécidable” (208).

164

proximity to one another across the text have the effect of cancelling each other out. In refusing to affirm herself definitely in her ethnicity or her gender, Nina effectively strays from the system of the binary, entering instead an “interstitial passage between fixed identifications,” that, writes Bhabha, “opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (4).

In the figure of the passage we have the action of passing, which Nina enacts

three times over: a movement between poles of culture and gender; an attempt at

assimilation, such that she pass as Algerian or pass for a boy; the passing up or passing

by (by-passing?) the double imperative put before her by language: to choose the term and check the box that best describes her: French, Algerian, Boy, Girl, Multi-Racial,

Tomboy, Other? Nina chooses all and none of the above. She breaks the rules governing social order wherein one must be identified and identifiable according to pre-established codes. Passing becomes a mode of survival, and not choosing becomes one of the main tactics used to combat the pull of the divided self, to overcome the classifications and designations imposed by others. Bouraoui plays with language, using it to her liking, to fit her needs, situating herself within opposing terms, as a part of both, while also identifying with neither term, situating herself outside the equation.

The double negation of national identity – to not be Algerian or French – as a negation or refusal of her female condition and the associated gender role: not an

Algerian woman, not a French woman. Not only is she part French, but being female puts her in the double bind of being an outsider twice over. To be male in Algeria is to be on the side of power, to have a full presence and yet to be invisible, to not stand out on the street as does a girl or woman. In this country of men, Nina becomes Ahmed and

165

Brio.45 Of her mother and father she writes: “Je prends des deux. Je perds des deux.

Chaque partie se fond à l’autre puis s’en détache. Elles s’embrassent et se disputent.

C’est une guerre. C’est une union. C’est un rejet. C’est une séduction. Je ne choisis

pas” (20). She is double and divided: “Ici [en Algérie] l’identité se fait. Elle est double

et brisée” (29). She is one and many: “Je passe de Yasmina à Nina. De Nina à Ahmed.

D’Ahmed à Brio. C’est un assassinat. C’est un infanticide. C’est un suicide. Je ne sais

pas qui je suis. Une et multiple. Menteuse et vraie. Forte et fragile. Fille et garçon”

(60). Passing here is a violent movement of discontinuity between herself and her

parents and more gravely between Nina and herself, or rather her selves. She performs

her own birth and death as she passes between names. And we see her both as exterior

and interior to the self in the assassination of the other and the suicide, death to the self.

The metaphorical killing of the self is experienced as a non-recognition or a not-knowing of the self, « je ne sais pas qui je suis ». But we also read this once again as the undecidability of whom to follow. It is impossible to read the precise interplay of the signifiers here, between knowing – being – following – death, and this is precisely what

Bouraoui aims to show : passage, because it is open, equates to possibility. But possibility as promise is also always possibility as danger.

“Le danger est en nous” Taking the form of a textual and intellectual movement, errance as dialectic, as a negotiation of terms that designate the narrator’s belonging or exclusion on the basis of

45 However, we cannot speak of this gender errancy solely as a desire for assimilation and security. Throughout the book, the narrator expressly calls into question her gender identification alongside her national or ethnic identity. While it must be noted that gender performance as a boy is not actively portrayed while Nina is in France, this happens for numerous reasons, among which is her place in her grandparents’ world, the (imposed) need to be “presentable” and “civilized.” This in no way negates Nina’s identification with Ahmed and Brio.

166

ethnic (national, cultural) and gender identity is manifest in the very fact that Nina’s

identity is in question. This questioning comes about because of her skin tone, her

speech, her name – these outward markers that indicate an inherent errancy built into her

very being, a difference marking her as being astray, or if you will, a stray as in a stray

dog (as we will see with the annual medical visit once she is in France for the summer):

“Je ne suis pas assez typée. ‘Tu n’es pas une Arabe comme les autres.’ Je suis trop

typée. ‘Tu n’es pas française’ ” (33); her (female) body cannot blend into the (masculine)

cityscape of Algiers, as we have seen, “J’existe trop. Je suis une femme” (40). In her

material being, Nina stands out as evidence of an ethnic intermingling, this inescapable

otherness that equates to aberration and thus poses a potential threat. This métissage

represents more of an inherent danger than does a cliff from which a climber could fall,

or the sea in which a swimmer could drown. Of herself and her friend Amine, as they climb expertly among the sea-side cliffs in Algeria, the narrator states:

Nous escaladons des jours entiers les falaises du Rocher plat. Agrippés à la pierre. Contre le vertige. Contre le danger. Avec la vie. Sa force. Avec la folie de notre enfance. Le danger est en nous. Ce n’est pas la falaise. Ce n’est pas la mer profonde. Ce n’est pas le soleil. Ce n’est pas la hauteur. Le danger est en nous. Il est sous la peau. Il est sur le visage. Il est dans le renoncement. Il est dans le manque d’un pays. Il vient de la séparation. De mère française. De père algérien. Deux orphelins contre la falaise. (35)

While it is evident that topography and climate pose a potential threat to the

unassuming tourist or the inexperienced climber or swimmer – for we can see that the

cliffs are high and steep, we know that the sea is deep, its currents and waves stronger

than us – these are not the “real” dangers. According to Nina, the danger resides within

Nina and Amine. And yet, as with so much of Bouraoui’s writing (like that of Duras’s),

the exact signification of this seemingly straightforward statement eludes us. We do not

167

know what constitutes this danger nor against whom it is threatened. And while we read

clearly that the danger is “in” the “us” of Nina and Amine, we do not know whether this

has been declared by Nina or if she is indirectly repeating (mocking?) the discourse of

others. The latter would seem a likely possibility given that this passage takes place in

the open space of the cliffs against the sea where these children could be watched,

noticed by others as not belonging as “natural” in this Algerian landscape. Nina and

Amine are enfants mixtes whose bodies give presence to the violence and oppression of

the colonial past, whether as haunting reminder or as danger in the present, since an ease

of life and political stability did not follow from Algeria’s independence from France.46

Whether in times of war or peace, as Martine Fernandes states (through Elaine Scarry),

the human body is a political one, “dans la mesure où il représente la nation” (Fernandes

69). The statement of the existence of danger becomes further complicated, or

multiplied, as it is schematized within the public, the private, and the mental.

The difficulty in reading this statement lies in part in the question of where the

emphasis is placed in the sentence – upon en or nous? At first glance, it is the nous that

stands in contrast to the cliffs, the sea, and sun, and as such, we understand that the

danger lies not in these natural formations but rather: “Le danger est en nous. Ce n’est

pas la falaise. Ce n’est pas la mer profonde…” (my emphasis). It would seem then that it

is the nous that imports semantically. Yet, upon closer inspection, the en in turn takes on

much significance, as Bouraoui repeats the phrase “Le danger est en nous,” and follows it

directly by locating the danger in different places: “Il est sous la peau. Il est sur le

visage. Il est dans le renoncement. Il est dans le manque d’un pays” (my emphasis).

46 For Ching Selao, the French-Algerian War and the Algerian civil war are at the heart of Garçon manqué, motivating the project and proposing writing as an (urgent) act of telling.

168

The en here refers to both the “in” of inside and the “in” of incarnation, to both the composite parts and the whole. Moving from the biological components of the body to the emotional and intellectual interior, this passage concludes with an ambiguous image

“Deux orphelins contre la falaise” as the ultimate location of the danger. Mother and father represent two distinct countries, both of which have rejected or otherwise abandoned Nina and Amine. Without one clearly recognized nationality, these orphans stand out en relief in this landscape scene, not integrated into the land of their childhood

(though Nina was born in France and lived there until the age of 2), they stand against it.

It is not without significance that Duras’s beggar woman and the Vice-consul, as figures of the outsider, are also orphans, without a mother-home.47 Outside the

primordial social structure of the family, the orphan, like all marginal figures, is a mis-fit,

and thus poses a threat to the community, the one to which he or she does not belong.

Unlike the extreme alienation from within experienced by the mendiante, a forceful and

violent displacement of the self is experienced by Nina on the discursive level.

“Vérifier”: The Body in Default

The narrator’s body indeed poses a threat, as a mis-fit for the culture and society

in which it finds itself, whether in Algeria or in France. In the second part of Garçon

manqué, we cross the ocean to the city of Rennes, where Nina and her older sister Jami

(Djamila) pass the summer with their maternal grandparents. After meeting their

grandfather at the train station and riding back to the house in his grand American car,

47 Bouraoui would seem to fit among the writers studied by Erica L. Johnson, female writers without a “home” except the one they make in/through their writing, terragraphica (27). With respect to Duras and her marginal characters, Johnson speaks of “the dangers of displacement and interstitiality” (119).

169

after being welcomed by their grandmother, wandering the grounds, and finding again the

little family dog, there is another ritual to undertake at the beginning of the summer in

France: the medical exam. Bouraoui writes:

Demain j’irai chez le médecin pour vérifier ma vie algérienne. Juste par précaution. Sang, ouïe, os, réflexes. Passer en revue le corps. Traquer. Déceler. Les signes de carence. Oui, monsieur, on mange à notre faim. Des légumes, de la viande, des laitages. Analyses. Radios. Stéthoscope. Voir si tout va bien. Après ce pays, cette terre, cette Afrique du Nord. S’approprier nos corps. Les fouiller. La médecine française sur nous. Cette pénétration. Du crâne aux orteils. (…) Demain, on m’examine. Mais moi je vais très bien. (110-11)

A routine medical exam represents an attempt to preemptively identify problems that one might be facing but of which one is unaware due to their internal and thus unknowable status. Although the term “danger” is not expressly used in this passage, the above citation echoes that of Amine and Nina on the cliffs, for here again the body represents a site of straying, which poses a potential – unknown – threat. The narrator’s young body must be examined for signs of “carence,” that is to say “deficiency” or “failing,” simply because she lives in Algeria. The potential lack that always already haunts Nina’s body must be rooted out and expelled through this ritual.48 While Nina’s grandmother simply

worries about her granddaughters’ health, the medical examination represents nonetheless

a forced submission of her “vie algérienne” to verification by a form of French authority.

Now that she has arrived in France for the summer, her body is suspect; like the

48 While we cannot equate this episode summarily with the obsession with cleanliness that, according to Kristin Ross, overtook France after World War II as the country sought to erase the traces of German occupation, there is an eerie similarity between the acts. Moreover, Ross puts the rise of the modern household in its exigency of cleanliness and its new use of electric appliances in dialogue with the use of homemade torture devices in the “dirty war” in Algeria where electric shock devices were used precisely because they were “cleaner,” that is to say, left little trace on the victim. See Chapter 2, “Hygiene and Modernization,” in Ross’s Fast Cars, Clean Bodies : Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.

170 verification of passports to check that one’s official identity is in order, the body too must be “controlled” upon entry.

The private becomes public, the private is political. If, in Algeria, Nina does not fit in seamlessly to the national tableau, positioned contre la falaise, she exists in France as an outsider; through control of the Algerian human body, the well-being of the body of the French nation can be assured. For Nina, the medical exam is both a questioning of her identity, her everyday existence in Algeria, “pour vérifier ma vie algérienne,” and an exposure of it, and represents another way in which the self is dislocated. To examine, to verify means to question the “correctness” of something, to scrutinize, so as to uncover hidden or ignored meaning, to lay bare secrets, details, to find out in which ways one is deficient. The medical exam epitomizes the constant scrutiny that the sisters endure during their summer in France: “Ici je suis sous surveillance. Mon dos, mes yeux, mes dents. Deux étrangères. À vérifier. Intérieur. Extérieur. Où passe soudain l’enfance ?

C’est la mort déjà qui est là. La mort à trouver sur ces peaux brunes et encore brûlantes »

(117).

Whether in the collective imaginary equating Algeria simply with poverty and illness or in the terrifying reality of armed conflict, massacres, and torture of the French-

Algerian War, the Algerian (métis) body becomes equated with death. This being, perhaps the very danger seated in Nina and Amine. No matter which side of the sea the narrator is on, separation, exclusion, and rejection resonate in her experiences and resulting narrative. Bouraoui weaves together at this point in the text recurrent references to death, the medical exam, and la faute, all of which intersect in the body. Death, for the narrator, equates to loss and abandonment, to the « sensation du rejet » (121). The

171 corporeal « verification, » like any other examination, indicates the possibility for failure, for rejection of the self, this divided, double, fractured self. In one passage Bouraoui puts death in dialogue with difference and connects the physical and the metaphysical/mental:

L’idée de la mort s’insinue avec la sensation du rejet. (…) L’idée de la mort vient avec l’idée d’être toujours différente. De ne pas être à sa place. De ne pas marcher droit. D’être à côté. Hors contexte. Dans son seul sujet. Sur soi. De ne pas appartenir, enfin, à l’unité du monde. Mon visage. Mon corps à vérifier. Mon accent. Très léger mais reconnaissable. Surtout sur les « t ». Ma façon de marcher steve-mcqueen. Une scoliose, docteur ? Non, L’Affaire Thomas Crown. (121-122)

Every affirmation is at the same time a negation: her accent affirms her Algerianness and negates her Frenchness; her strut à la Steve McQueen betrays her health and/as femininity. Furthermore, the textual glide from Nina’s faint yet undeniable accent to her masculine way of walking adeptly links the four poles – or “problems” (163) – of her identity that she constantly and continually (re)negotiates. Both gender and ethnic identification and performance are always in play. Internal negotiation and outward performance are two manners of constructing the self through errancy, there where she is not.

Significantly, here, as in the preceding passage regarding the medical visit, Nina has not lost agency even as she occupies the position of object under examination (as

(postcolonial) subject). In the first passage she asserts her agency in moving from object to subject: “Demain on m’examine. Mais moi je vais très bien,” effectively sliding out of the grasp of the other as she changes grammatical pronouns. Moreover, she undermines the logic of the need for the medical visit, since, as she asserts, she is not sick or hurt but feels just fine. In the second passage, Nina once again operates a détournement of the discourse in order to subvert the schema of order represented in acts of control and

172

verification, which here are also tied to notions of health and sickness. The narrator’s

strange way of walking concerns her grandmother. The reader is told that this strut is in

imitation of the film actor Steve McQueen, but for the grandmother this appears as a

medical condition, possibly a spinal deformity, “Une scoliose, docteur?” Nina usurps the

parole and answers in place of the medical authority, denying science and government its

power through regulation and knowledge. By stepping in to speak in place of the doctor,

Nina changes the whole course of the discourse, locating it outside of the realm of

rational understanding in which the doctor and the grandmother participate. Considering

this exchange with respect to both Butler and Bhabha, we see the subversion performed

here as a movement toward the ‘beyond’ enacted through introduction of “another locus

of inscription and intervention, another hybrid, ‘inappropriate’ enunciative site . . . for the

signification of postcolonial agency” (Bhabha 242). And in Butler’s terms, “Speaking

and exposing the alterity within the norm (the alterity without which the norm would not

‘know itself’) exposes the failure of the norm to effect the universal reach for which it

stands, exposes what we might underscore as the promising ambivalence of the norm”

(Excitable Speech 91).

“Porter une faute” : Carrying/Wearing Personal and Collective Failure

From the potential “carence” of the narrator’s body, to being out of place, “hors

contexte,” we see in Bouraoui’s text a poetics and politics of straying. Although this

aberrant movement can threaten the existence of the self, it is at the same time

constitutive of this existence. We shall consider now another term, faute, and its

resonance within our reading of Garçon manqué. The polysemy of faute, like manqué,

refers to absence and failure. As an act of erring, to commit a faute can refer to a benign

173

sort of error (une faute d’orthographe) or to a more grievous offense, namely that of sin.

Both senses of the word correspond to the condition of the narrator in Garçon manqué; I

shall read this term with respect to two distinct moments in the text where the narrator

meditates on the “faute” of being Nina Bouraoui. In the first instance, which comes in an early section, the very section in which the narrator declares herself “indéfinie” and

“inclassable,” the faute is related to an internal questioning which stems from a question

of family history in the context of the Algerian War: “Longtemps je crois porter une

faute. Je viens de la guerre. Je viens d’un mariage contesté. Je porte la souffrance de ma famille algérienne. Je porte le refus de ma famille française. Je porte ces transmissions- là. La violence ne me quitte plus. Elle m’habite. Elle vient de moi” (32). The narrator is always conscious of her ethnic and national origin, since questions of belonging and exclusion are inescapable for the minority subject. In her physiognomy Nina incarnates the troubling union of a French woman and an Algerian man. Within the context of the war, such interrogations carry greater urgency and emotional weight.

As before, the question of the body is a central one. For here we have the narrator considering herself as somehow faulty, representing a failure or even the transgression of sin because she is a product of this contested union. While it is not solely a question of

“faute,” the other issues on the table are no less grave: rejection, violence, suffering, sentiments all held or carried by Nina and thus linked to one another in the use of the verb porter. As with most of Bouraoui’s key lexical choices, porter can be understood in two different ways: to carry and to wear. These two definitions are significant because they work on the level of the inner and the outer, that is to say, to carry within onself, in one’s conscience as intellect or sentiment, and to wear as exterior signifying practice. It

174 would seem to make the most sense to interpret the verb porter as “to carry” in the sense of “to bear” a duty that has been imposed from the outside or “transmitted” as Bouraoui writes. Laws of genealogy and descendance dictate that one bears the traces of one’s forefathers, that one carries on the traditions, carries forth the lineage, the family name.

As well, we carry within us and we carry forward our family history, triumphs, dramas, secrets. This burden Nina bears in different forms for the paternal and maternal sides of her family.

In her article, “Porter l’Algérie: Garçon manqué de Nina Bouraoui,” Ching Selao examines the ways in which through the act of writing Bouraoui “se porte témoin,” which she translates as the English “bear witness” since the text is a means of literally carrying

Nina’s uncle lost in the war, this the “true” witness to the atrocities of which Bouraoui writes from a distance (Selao 79). Selao also points out that the verb porter is also found in the text in the formulations “porter un nom” and “porter une identité de fracture” which Selao ties to the act of “porter le deuil,” which does not figure verbatim in the text.

This semantic connection shows the mourning that Nina bears for the self and for the deceased uncle and the whole of the country of Algeria. Selao links Nina’s passing between nationalities and genders with the deferral inherent in bearing witness:

“L’écriture testimoniale repose effectivement sur un décalage identitaire et contextuel puisque le moment de témoigner ne coïncide jamais avec l’événement vécu: du témoin oculaire au témoin littéraire, une forme de rupture a forcément eu lieu, car le témoignage est toujours différé, reporté, jamais produit à l’instant même” (83). The rupture in time and space between the event and its telling is the time-space of deferral, the in-between as passage. In carrying familial and historical sufferings, violence, Nina exists as this

175

passage between the past and the present. She also bears the physical traces of her family

lineage, indicated in the sense of porter as “to wear” on the outside. For, to look French

is to remind her Algerian family of their country’s colonial past and the recent violent

war for independence. At the same time, to look Algerian is to belong to her father’s

family, to those who have suffered under French colonial rule and wartime torture, to be

(considered) an immigrant when in France. Furthermore, the métisse narrator, in her dark

skin, hair, and eyes, wears externally the features of the enemy, the impossible,

undesirable son-in-law.

This passage, which starts “Longtemps je crois porter une faute,” is separated

from the preceding section by an asterisk yet carries forward nevertheless the pain

expressed a few pages earlier; Bouraoui connects these passages through the resonance of the verb porter: “ Ici [en Algérie] je porte la blessure de ma famille algérienne” (30) and

“Je suis dans la guerre d’Algérie. Je porte le conflit. Je porte la disparition de l’aîné de la famille, sa référence » (31). The emphasis, then, in the formulation « porter une faute » on page 32 falls on the act of carrying/wearing familial and historic legacies instead of on the notion of faute itself. While Bourauoi’s focus earlier seemed to be on the porter side of the formulation, the question of faute returns to view in the second part of the book, during the narrator’s summer visit to her maternal grandparents’ in Rennes.

Just a few pages after the meditation on death and reference to the routine yet troubling medical exam, the narrator’s thoughts wander (back) to the faute :

Mais de quelle faute parle-t-on? Quelle responsabilité d’avoir ce visage-là avec ces yeux-là ? De porter ce nom-là ? J’ai pris rendez-vous pour Mlles Djamila et Yasmina Bouraoui – quinze heures. Quelle faute ? D’obliger à épeler. À articuler. À ouvrir grande la bouche. À porter sa voix. À se faire entendre de tous? Lettre par lettre. B-o-u-r-a-o-u-i. (…) Quelle faute, alors? D’être la fille des amoureux de 1960. De rendre ce temps éternel. Par ma seule présence. Par

176

mon seul regard. Par ma seule voix. Par ma seule identité. De remuer le couteau dans la plaie. D’insister sur cette mauvaise période. C’était la guerre. (123-124)

With this questioning coming mid-paragraph and without any mention of faute in the preceding pages, we have to assume that the narrator is making a link to her earlier statement, “Longtemps je crois porter une faute.” Through this interrogation, Nina puts into question the Other’s questioning of her, effectively rendering unstable the conception of faute and undermining its application to Nina. Fernandes reads this as a releasing of the self from this sense of faute by dismissing the line of questioning as absurd, stating,

« Elle se défait ainsi du sentiment de faute qui parcourt le roman en en montrant

l’absurdité… » (69). Certainly, one cannot make Nina responsible for (cannot accuse her

as responsible for) her physical features, her Arabic last name, the fact of being born.

However, given the complexity of the levels of discourse through which I read faute, I

am less inclined than Fernandes to read here an undoing of the haunting, accusatory,

painful sense of faute that Nina bears as a child. Like Fernandes, I do see the possibility for escape from the over-determination – felt as imprisonment – of the self by the Other

as located in the body, even if this body is constituted in language, a language shared

with the Other, and even if the body is also site of the dislocation of self. In fact,

precisely because of this possibility.

Disguise and Adaptation: Performance as Errancy

Nina’s struggle to negotiate her identity, to truly invent herself and claim her

place in this world is in large part carried out through performance, by various means and

to different ends, on the order of imitation, adaptation, and dissimulation. I use the term

performance here in the sense of Judith Butler’s notion of the “performative,” which

177

“suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning.” Like the speech act, the

performative constitutes the performer as present in the world through his/her action upon the world which happens via the body, which, for Butler is “not a ‘being,’ but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality” (Gender

Trouble 177). While Butler speaks of the performative with respect to “doing” gender, I see it as applicable to ethnicity as well in that “doing” cultural belonging involves a conscious, stylized manipulation of comportment, speech, and dress such that one is recognized as conforming to the norms associated with “being” French or Algerian, for example. Because negotiation the self – identity of the individual or ipse – involves to a

certain extent the need to see oneself as the same as others – identifying with others or

idem – Nina makes various attempts to assimilate in order to gain a sense of belonging

and security in both countries. This in no way negates her desire to not choose, for,

performance also enacts hesitation and deferral.

Mastering the Arabic language, for example, is one path to legitimating her

existence as Algerian. However, while her body may be a marker of (as it is marked by)

her Algerian heritage, the language, writes Bouraoui, “ne prend pas sur moi. Elle [la langue] me rejette. Elle me sépare des autres. Elle rompt l’origine” (11-12). When in

France, the situation is reversed, and the narrator tries to lose all traces of her accent,

which ironically consists of those Arabic sounds that she does not quite have. (We hear

the voice of the Other echoed throughout the text: “Tu n’es pas française.” “Tu n’es pas

algérienne”.)

178

Performance as outward signifying expression includes and is often founded on the “stylization of the body” (Gender Trouble 179), that is to say, clothing, hair, gestures, etc., as the principle element of fitting in or “passing” as one who belongs in a given place, in a given society. For whether or not we speak to or interact with others, we are seen by them and either recognized and accepted, or denounced as s/he who does not belong. Leaving Algeria to spend the summer in France, Nina wears the outfit that such a voyage calls for: a feminine matching pants and shirt ensemble by a French designer and a pair of closed-toed shoes (“de vraies chaussures”). She is dressed to leave her “real life”, dressed to “faire oublier” her daily life in Algeria, her family and the history there.

As we have seen, Nina is not seen as fully Algerian nor French in either country; being made to dress like a typical French girl is a tactic to make her fit in during her summer in

Rennes and Saint-Malo, to disguise her accent, her gestures, the physical features of her body, tanned and masculine, that would give her away as Algerian and gender- ambiguous. As a child Nina does not have a choice in deciding what to wear for this trip nor during her sojourn in France; she must be “presentable” to her grandmother and others as a “real girl” instead of being seen as a tomboy. The narrator dubs this travel outfit her “déguisement,” her “peau française” (Garçon manqué 92-93).

Bouraoui’s choice of language in this scene illustrates Butler’s assertion that gender is a cultural construction, one elaborated via “the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions” (Gender

Trouble 178). The designation of her feminine and French clothes as disguise, an exterior layer that can be put on, taken off, changed as needed or as desired, translates a self hidden or covered by these clothes, a self that participates in the “punitively

179 regulated cultural fictions alternately embodied and deflected under duress” (178). At the moment of her voyage to France, Nina embodies this dual fiction of Frenchness and femininity; through her writing, Bouraoui discounts the “credibility” of this fiction.

Moreover, this scene emphasizes the extent to which national and gender identity are bound together in the narrator’s negotiation of the self.

Whether imagined or real, the reception of the self by others serves to influence or even dictate our actions and way of thinking. As Butler showed us, we are “brought into existence,” so to speak, through the address of the Other. On the question of this primordial recognition, the psychiatrist and theorist Frantz Fanon writes in his seminal

Peau noire, masques blancs, “L’homme n’est humain que dans la mesure où il veut s’imposer à un autre homme, afin de se faire reonnaître par lui. Tant qu’il n’est pas effectivement reconnu par l’autre, c’est cet autre qui demeure le thème de son action”

(175-176). The narrator of Garçon manqué finds herself performing for the Other during her summer visit to Rennes. Nina enumerates a list of what accompanies the departure:

“Faire oublier mon nom. Bouraoui. (…) Étouffer Ahmed et Brio. Dissimuler. Ma grand- mère aime les vraies filles. Oublier que mon corps est fait pour la lumière, le sable et les vents de sel. S’excuser, voilà la raison de ce départ. De ces grandes vacances forcées”

(92). If Nina feels compelled to be a “real girl” for her grandmother, then that must mean that she is otherwise a “fake girl,” a term which is in fact used earlier in the book in an episode where she is mistaken for a boy (36). “Cette fausse fille,” “ce travesti”: these terms signify the crossing of boundaries, straying from the (supposed) truth or correctness of one’s identity. Indeed, as Butler writes in Gender Trouble, “If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on

180

the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only

produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity” (174).

Verbs such as “étouffer,” “effacer,” “dissimuler,” “cacher,” “imiter,” and

“mentir” occur with great frequency throughout Garçon manqué and manifest the compulsion (or desire?) the narrator feels to abide by certain rules in the public realm.

The narrator speaks of the “mensonge” in which she resides, this lie, these many different lies told in the form of silence, pretending, and self-effacement. This constant performance, varying continually according to the situation, becomes a habit, “une habitude.” As something done repeatedly so as to become familiar and commonplace to the subject, these acts and ways of thinking that would seem to run counter to who Nina

“is” or wants to be, become, to a certain extent, constitutive elements of her identity.

Such performances are context dependent; the fluid use of the same verbs shows the arbitrariness of our ideas of what is “correct,” “real,” or “true”. The fact that the narrator’s dissimulation or imitation are used to move in both directions and that they apply to all four crucial poles – French, Algerian, male, female – underscores the

argument that the self is a continuous elaboration created out of the incessant process of

negotiation. This fluid identity is an errant one because it enacts a kind of wandering

without a fixed (or known) destination, a straying from the prescribed path or course of

action, and always in the threshold space where one risks being perceived as errant.

Such errancy can also be considered as a strategy for survival. Upon arrival in

France, the narrator describes the transformation that accompanies the change in territory:

“Je suis à Rennes. Je suis toujours à fond dans le lieu que je traverse. Je suis dans cet instant, là. Cette permanence. Cette vérité. Ainsi, j’efface vite tout ce qui précède” (99).

181

Later in the text she will call this her “faculté d’adaptation” (162, 171). However, the narrator does not and cannot internally erase all that came before, her life in Algeria; indeed, much of the second section, “Rennes,” is spent interrogating her identity as

Algerian, by recalling family stories and history, including the atrocities of the Algerian

War. The increased relevance of relating historical and personal stories, and the increased intensity with which these are told, is a direct result of the narrator’s presence on French soil. The physical distance separating her from life in Algeria translates into a need to tell. At the same time, it is in being far from Algeria that she cannot escape her

Algerianness, “trop typée.” Her Algerian identity is affirmed, negatively, only when she makes the voyage across the sea: Nina is not-French, “pas assez typée.” Adaptation or assimilation is a challenge put to her by the French. Through disguise and silence Nina plays this game, and yet she does not, cannot escape those elements of her identity inscribed on her body and through her lived experience. Furthermore, as we know, her refusal to resolutely determine herself as French or Algerian, boy or girl, shows how she does not follow the rules of the game that she has entered into.

Integration, as an act of shaping the self into the immediate present of a certain place and time, is a dialectical negotiation, a back and forth, give and take movement between Nina’s two cultural identities. Certain words, stories, gestures must be muffled, concealed, held back. Assimilating into life in France means (publicly) forgetting for the present moment, life in Algeria; to this end, the narrator lets go of her friend Amine, replacing him in Rennes with a French girl, Marion. In this way, the narrator enacts

“plusieurs vies à la fois,” “une multitude de petites trahisons” (162). And yet, this

“faculté d’adaptation,” as Bouraoui calls it, is also Nina’s “parfaite négation” (171). That

182

is to say, by assimilating into the cultural landscape of her present, she exists for others

(idem) through the very inexistence of the self (ipse).49 The disorienting movement of

continual negotiation of the self is the very movement of the creation of identity. In

Fanon’s words, “Dans le monde où je m'achemine, je me crée interminablement » (Fanon

196). The bringing of the self into the world occurs necessarily through movement, a moving along of the body, coming into contact with others, and thus creating the self through each step, in each new experience. Via a politics of refusal working on the order of discourse and performance, the narrator of Garçon manqué unsettles the boundaries of symbolic places whose contours demarcate what is included and excluded in such realms as that of the feminine, the masculine, Algerian and French citizenry. Refusal to participate in the traditional order of the symbolic is a movement that calls this order into question. The destabilization of boundaries opens them up to a crossing-over, a passing-

through. These movements, moments, and places of passage become new “enunciative

sites,” to use Bhabha’s term, for the self-creation of the “je” qui ne suis pas.

49 On the possibility of this negative existence, see Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, notably the chapter “L’expérience vécue du Noir.”

183

CHAPTER THREE :

PART II :

OUT OF PLACE : NINA BOURAOUI’S LA VIE HEUREUSE

“Pas à sa place” on the Compositional Level

The figuration of being out of place in La Vie heureuse is triple – as non-existence of place; as exhaustion of place (a “running out” of place, there are no places left); and being in the wrong place, not where one is supposed to be. An analysis of the various ways in which the narrator is out-of-place will show us how the text performs its own errancy via an alternate reading of the pas: “pas de place pour moi,” “je ne trouve pas ma place.” We will see the way in which the structure of the text, in its curious chapter organization and its untraditional dialogical mechanisms, performs dis-place-ment which in turn translates the experience of Marie’s errancy. Finally, we shall see how this experience performs social critique and creative production, this, the defining conception of errance that this study seeks to elicit.

Structure of Chapters : Passages Saint-Malo – Zürich

The dialectical negotiation proposed in La Vie heureuse navigates the spheres of home and school, childhood and adolescence, and heterosexual and homosexual desire.

Each localized within its own geography, that of Saint-Malo and that of Zürich, these spheres maintain distinction by way of the text’s organization: a structure of alternating chapters set within the bounds of each location (extending out to the city of Rennes and the region of Brittany as part of Saint-Malo; and including neighboring towns and

184

mountainous regions around Zürich in its story) so that the narrator takes the reader back

and forth from her school year in Switzerland to the following summer spent in France.

Narrated principally in the present (with logical and poignant movements of reminiscence

and backstory) each geography represents its own narrative thread and appears distinct

from the other, its own separate story. For the first twenty-five pages we have the

impression of having walked in on a private conversation, filled with names and events

whose place in the story we do not initially comprehend. The narrator does not assume

the function of tour guide here: no overt attempt is made to clue the reader in, and so,

disoriented by the inhabitual structure of the text, the reader struggles to make sense of

the disordered chronology of the text, the relationships between characters, and the

intrigue that seems to accompany each geographic designation. The reader wonders if in

fact the chapters are meant to be read out of order as a way to give order to the text, that

is to say, to read every other chapter so as to stay within the temporal and spatial bounds

of Zürich first and then Saint-Malo in order to piece together the narrative in a more comprehensible manner. But the back-and-forth rhythm is an integral part of the way in which the novel functions, particularly with respect to movements of displacement and the ensuing destabilization.

This delocalization and its effects of disorientation translate to an incomprehension of the situation as the reader enters the novel. The narrator seems an itinerant, wandering across the pages and over land between Saint-Malo and Zürich, operating a much different va-et-vient than the narrator of Garçon manqué. Curiously, the comings-and-goings here are not felt as such since the narration progresses chronologically starting in Zürich during the school year and moving to Saint-Malo for

185

the summer. The present as privileged temporal framework in two spaces in a seemingly

simultaneous manner lends itself to cinematic narration50 where the movement between

chapters could be understood as “jump cuts.” The jarring effect explicated in this term is

indeed one type of destabilization of which I speak. Thrust into a “new” context every

few pages, the reader, like the film viewer, initially has trouble getting her/his bearings.

Affected continuously by a sensorial jolt, the reader has barely had time to gain an

understanding of the issues at hand before being moved to the next chapter and its

accompanying micro-context. Little by little, we get the lay of the land, so to speak,

including becoming familiar with the characters, the relationships between them and the

narrator, and the ongoing issues at stake. This initial disorientation can be read as a

structural manifestation of the narrator’s sentiment, “pas de place” (112), “je ne trouve

pas ma place” (122), “je ne sais plus où je suis” (286), sentiments which serves also as

thematic refrain. The narrative disorder suggests the painful movements of desperately

searching for one’s place.

While we might think that the constant movement from city to city with each

succeeding chapter would ascribe to the narrator a double or perhaps divided self, which

we saw in Garçon manqué, the cities find themselves in continual communication, linked

through the narrator and the narration. Thus, instead of a sharp segregation of these two

parts of Marie’s life, we see how each place, its set of circumstances and characters, is in

dialogue with the other. Considering more figuratively de Certeau’s quote that footsteps

“trament les lieux,” we understand the structure of Bouraoui’s narrative and the

50 The cinematic quality of Bouraoui’s writing evokes that of Marguerite Duras. While Bouraoui has not written for screen or stage, her writing is also difficult to classify according to genre. La Vie heureuse, for example, although designated as a novel, breaks with conventional dialogue and can be read as biographical in nature.

186

movement therein in terms of a textual “weaving together” of places and times. Two

stories seem to be told in parallel, but, as the reader learns, the different places and people

mentioned and encountered all fit into the “trame” of this year lived by the narrator, this

year wherein the narrator recognized, battled with, and reveled in burgeoning sexual

desire and feelings of love and the year that saw the death of her aunt Carol and sadness,

emptiness, and strength within the family unit. Thus, although we begin our trek as

reader on extremely unsure footing, moving blindly alongside the narrator as she cuts

from one setting, one set of characters to the next, we come to find that while the plot

seems site-specific it in fact weaves itself across the whole of the novel, different threads

and patterns making visible, if not always comprehensible, various connections and

ritornellos. One strand is pulled from Zurïch, one from Saint-Malo; the two cross over

and under each other, retaining their own form and trajectory and yet in communication,

working together to form the whole.

If the ambivalence of a divided subject position – which is, in fact, a plural

position rather than a dyad – is intensely palpable in Garçon manqué as the negotiation of self continuously cycles therein – girl-boy-Algerian-French –, the errancy of La Vie heureuse, manifest in the constant alternation of chapters, achieves for itself an effect of utter destabilization. For, the rigorous narrative structure of constant alternating geographies that transition from one chapter to the next performs so aptly the being-out- of-place experienced by the narrator.

Lack of Conventional Dialogue The dialogics of La Vie heureuse implicate and engage to a much greater extent than in Garçon manqué the people surrounding the narrator. We have moved into the

187 realm of the novel: family members, close friends and acquaintances are named, their characters developed, their presence felt throughout the text. However, while the numerous characters and plot serve to create a full fictional world, La Vie heureuse, in its absence of traditional dialogue still does not conform to the expectations held for the novel. There are but a handful of instances where the typical dialogic markers of dashes or quotation marks are used, such that the characters do not speak directly to each other nor to the reader. Marie retains almost exclusive control of the parole, serving as a sort of filter or screen through which pass the words of others. Like the organizational framework of alternating chapters, the lack of conventional dialogue enables fluid movement of and within the text; this in turn embodies instability, at work on both the formative and the thematic levels.

On the one hand, the destabilization arises from the fluidity of the narrative voice, that is to say, its errancy. A constant movement engenders con-fusion: both a blurring and a blending of speakers – voice, thought, intention, action. Because the narrative voice speaks for others, it appropriates their speech as her own through this process – putting questions to others, interpreting or anticipating their actions or words, responding in their place. The dialogues of others are redefined according to the narrator’s own needs and desires. Through a shifting of voice and perspective occurs a small glissement into the realm of the other that occurs fully on one’s own terms. For example, in the following citations we see how a question asked by or to the other has multiple significations when spoken through the voice of the narrator:

Marge a disparu et je retrouve Audrey. Audrey veut me protéger. Audrey me trouve secrète. Audrey ne comprend pas. Pourqoui quitter Zürich? Et ce garçon Gil? (95)

188

Julien fouille la cabine, il reste quelques affaires, une paire de bottes, un pull blanc. Faut-il les prendre? Les rapporter aux villas? Non, Carol reviendra. Ils partiront pour l’Angleterre. Julien en est sûr. (103)

Like with other forms of indirect discourse, the reader here cannot always be sure whether or not Marie is anticipating the questions of others, reporting their questions, or is asking the questions of herself or of an interlocutor. In Esthétique et théorie du roman

Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us that on the order of the everyday, so much of what we say comes from the other. In literature, it is less a question of representation of the other – in his words and ideology – than of the process of transmission (Bakhtin 159). In Bouraoui, as in other instances, the context orients our readings; most often the narrator in La Vie heureuse is in conversation with another. Yet, as these exchanges find their expression through the first-person narrator, the resonances are multiple and we also hear Marie asking herself “Pourquoi quitter Zürich? Et ce garçon Gil?” as though she, too, is searching for an answer to these questions. Because the narrative voice of La Vie heureuse does not give full autonomy to the speaking other, always filtering the discourse of others through her own voice, the narrator casts a shadow of doubt on affirmative statements, transforming them into questions: “Carol reviendra. Ils partiront pour l’Angleterre. Julien en est sûr.” Through the narrative voice, Marie does to others what they do to her: she censures them, and in this way she participates in reciprocal rejection.

As is the case in any narrative text, the narrator acts as a sort of ventriloquist, relaying the words, thoughts, and intentions of others inside the narrative framework to the reader on the outside.

Whether we consider Bouraoui’s text a common example of the dominance of the narrative voice or a kind of extreme ouï-dire narration, the result is narrative instability.

189

Without the clearly demarcated attribution of speech granted through traditional dialogic

structure, it becomes difficult to distinguish between speakers because all communication

passes through the narrator’s mill, putting into question the reporting of events, thoughts,

and intentions. This unconventional literary form enables the narrative voice to sow ambiguity across the text. Trudy Agar-Mendousse notes that “[l’]abondance d’ambiguïté de l’écriture de Bouraoui introduit de l’incertitude dans ses textes et met en jeu la prétendue nature univoque de la langue. De même, la métaphore déstabilise le langage du texte » (247). Considering in particular the text Le Jour du séisme, Agar-Mendousse writes of the « violence linguistique » of Bouraoui’s writing, such that « par

l’agrammaticalité, l’asyntaxie et les autres armes linguistiques déployées par Bouraoui, la

signification des textes est perpétuellement différée et interrompue (253). While

fragmentation and non-adherence to syntax is somewhat less striking in La Vie heureuse,

this text strays from the conventions of writing according to which the fictional world of

an individual author is read as a set of stable referents by all. In La Vie heureuse, this

instability stems from its seemingly monologically covert dialogue.

In Garçon manqué, the absence of dialogue distinctly marked and recognized as such indicates a process of internal questioning in the form of Nina’s encounter with and resistance to dominant society and its hegemonic discourses. The calling into question of

categories and orders of classification are no longer the main issue at stake in La Vie

heureuse where the questioning becomes more pointed and personal. Rather, Bouraoui moves toward a much more complex and nuanced interrogation of the self via the idea of the multi-voiced narrator who takes in the voice of the other as a means of self-

negotiation. In the following passage, the narrating Marie relates her disappointment and

190 inquietude, moving from declarative and hypothetical statements to one-sided inquiry, and finally into dialogue with Diane. Bouraoui writes:

Diane n’a pas appelé pour le jour de l’an. Elle avait promis. C’est la faute de Sorg. Elle a eu peur peut-être. La cabine téléphonique ne marchait pas. Sorg surveillait la chambre. Je la retrouve au lycée. Elle est très belle, bronzée. (…) Diane est sublime et elle le sait. Diane au cou d’Astrid. Diane dans les bras d’Olivier. (…) Diane joue. Mon corps s’éloigne. Mes rires avec Céline. Diane appelle. Je ne réponds pas. Je ne regarde pas. J’ai les dés. Elle sait. Elle est sublime et elle sait. Elle est sexe, cette fille. (…) Diane méprise les garçons. Les garçons ou les gens qui l’aiment ? Les garçons ou les coeurs faibles? (…) Comment Diane peut-elle dire qu’elle n’aime pas avec les garçons ? Quel corps pour comparer ? Seule, une autre, mon corps un jour ? // Non, je ne t’ai pas appelée. Sorg a lu mon agenda. J’ai tout noté, la maison, le champagne, les trois nuits, ton visage après la fête que je n’arrivais pas à oublier. Je n’ai pas écrit ton prénom. Sorg pense que j’ai rencontré un garçon. C’est très drôle, Marie. Sorg ne pense jamais au reste. C’est quoi le reste, Diane? Tes mains à ma taille ou cette marque rouge sur ta peau? Les lèvres de Sorg ou tes yeux tristes quand je ris avec Céline ? Le reste ? Ton corps qui s’allonge près du mien. Le temps que tu prends. Mon téléphone qui ne sonne pas. Ma nuit sur la terrasse, dans le froid. (…) Le reste? (97-98).

Indeed, there are three important types of narrative movement going on in this passage: speculation, interrogation, and interlocution, all of which contribute to and reflect the instability of the text. In the beginning of this passage we see how supposed statements of fact are undermined when the speaking voice is unknown. In reading,

“C’est la faute de Sorg,” for example, the reader is unsure if this assignment of blame comes from Diane or Marie, and it is unclear whether we are to hear in this statement a reporting of fact, an interpretation of events, informed speculation, or deluded reasoning.

While all narration can be said to be ‘unrealiable’ and necessarily polysemous, the dialogic structure in Bouraoui’s text creates even greater ambiguity surrounding the inner world of the narrative, specifically the way in which events, thought and emotion, are related between characters. We can read this in terms of what Bakhtin calls “un amalgame chimique” between the words of another, the context of its enunciaton and its

191

reception. He states: “[L]orsqu’on étudie les différentes formes de transmission du

discours d’autrui, on ne peut séparer le procédé d’élaboration de ce discours du procédé

de son encadrement contextual (dialogique): les deux procédés sont indissolublement

liés” (Bakhtin 159). We read Diane’s acts and intentions through the prism of Marie’s

perspective as she guesses, wonders, explains away the other’s silence. The ambiguity

introduced here reflects less the blurring of the categories of fact and fiction than it

translates an underlying uncertainty coloring the whole of Marie’s world and the overall

instability of Bouraoui’s narration.

Moving from individual and internal speculation about the situation into

interrogation of the other: “Diane méprise les garçons. Les garçons ou les gens qui

l’aiment? Les garçons ou les cœurs faibles?” represents a movement towards dialogue,

between Marie and herself and Marie and Diane. Although Marie speaks of Diane in the

third-person and asks questions in this same manner, these are questions nonetheless

directed at Diane, putting her motives and intentions into question, rather than accepting

blindly what she offers as a representation of herself in discourse and act. The indirect

interrogation of Diane mid-passage sets up the more fully performed exchange that

follows. By the end of the passage, glissements into the other can be seen in instances

where the “je” and “tu” of the speaking subject become interchangeable, however briefly.

“Non, je ne t’ai pas appelée,” “Je n’ai pas écrit ton prénom » ; « Tes mains à ma

taille…», « … tes yeux tristes quand je ris avec Céline » (my emphasis): at first Diane is the speaking “I” and Marie the object other, then the roles are reversed. In their déictique

function, je and tu will always represent the point of view of the speaker; we are all in

turn both “I” and “you.” Benveniste insists on the fact that the use of “I/you” is a

192

“constant and necessary reference to the instance of discourse” (218), and that the

“indicators I and you cannot exist as potentialities; they exist only insofar as they are

actualized in the instance of discourse, in which, by each of their own instances, they

mark the process of appropriation by the speaker” (220).

And yet, the “instance of discourse” is obscured in this passage (as is the general

case in this text). We can read the passage as a kind of verbal collage mingling reported

statements, imagined questions and responses, posed in the course of a typical dialogue

or perhaps composed over an indeterminate period of time, the unspecified subsequent

moments when the narrator replays the night of the missed phone call, reflects on the

subsequent explanation given by Diane, and enters into dialogue with Diane in this

regard. The fragments of Diane’s comments to Marie are met by Marie’s belated, imaginary rebuttal. The muddled, displaced temporal bounds of the instance of discourse allow for a coming together of the characters through a conversation that does not actually take place. The proximity of the speakers, established through a direct address of each other towards the end of the passage with, “C’est très drôle, Marie. Sorg ne pense jamais au reste. C’est quoi le reste, Diane?” operates a double movement of incorporation and separation, seen in the very structure of these three sentences. Because of the absence of dialogic separation clearly delineating the speakers, and because there is no “I” or “you” uttered here, the speaking voice is both the one who addresses the other as “Marie” and as “Diane.” At the same time that we can hear a single speaking voice playing both parts (or even speaking all three sentences, including the transitional second one), we can also hear each sentence uttered by a different person, presumably Diane and

193

Marie, though it is also possible to hear a polyphonic round of two (or three) exterior

voices speaking in each one’s stead.

According to Benveniste, it is precisely through dialogue that subjectivity is established. The self comes into being through an act of linguistic exchange where the speaking, “interior” I addresses the “exterior” you. In Problems in General Linguistics

Benveniste states:

Consciousness of self is only possible if it is experienced by contrast. I use I only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you in the address of the one who in his turn designates himself as I. Here we see a principle whose consequences are to spread out in all directions. Language is possible only because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to himself as I in his discourse. Because of this, I posits another person, the one who, being, as he is, completely exterior to “me,” becomes my echo to whom I say you and who says you to me. This polarity of persons … offers a type of opposition [which]… does not mean either equality or symmetry: “ego” always has a position of transcendence with regard to you. Nevertheless, neither of the terms can be conceived of without the other; they are complementary according to an “interior/exterior” opposition, and, at the same time, they are reversible. (…) And so the old antinomies of “I” and “the other,” of the individual and society, fall. (…) It is in a dialectic reality that will incorporate the two terms and define them by mutual relationship that the linguistic basis of subjectivity is discovered. (224-225)

The non-fixity of I and you in the instance of discourse offers a mutability and mobility of the self by its very condition in language. The speaking self not only refutes definition but also necessitates a relation with the other for its own understanding to make sense. In the dialogic exchange between Marie and Diane, occurring within and transmitted by the narrative voice, the two subjects are blended, the boundaries of the self blurred such that both voices, both characters are incorporated into one polyphonic narrative voice. We saw this play between subject pronouns effect diegetic instability in both Le Vice-consul and Emily L. This movement was reflective of the multiple narrative frames existing in

194 each of Duras’s texts. More significantly, the movement of the voice and characters between the levels of narration indicated the porosity of these boundaries, and the ever- present risk of loss of self. In Bouraoui, the instable subject positions start out as such, their displacement inversely reflecting a move towards finding the self, though a movement nonetheless fraught with risk and violence.

Besides errance of the narrative voice, the above passage shows the contact and circulation among the characters in this text: circulation of bodies – Diane moving from her boyfriend Sorg in their hotel room in Zurïch into physical closeness with high school classmates Astrid and Olivier, and finally to moments of intimacy with Marie, whom she sees secretly. As we will see shortly, circulation also represents the substitution of one body for another. Presence becomes absence through these exchanges, and the norms of relationships (friendship, love, physical intimacy) are put into question and configured differently. Through the multiplication of characters and the punctual alternating of chapters (Saint-Malo – Zurich), this text manifests to an even greater degree of complexity and intensity the dialectic of double and divided, in-between and outside, multiple and negated that resonates throughout Nina Bouraoui’s narration. The narrator intensely experiences the pull of the other, the dangerous power that others have over us

– whether beautifully intoxicating or cruelly maddening, and everything in between –, and yet finds herself immobile at times, escapist at others, unable or unwilling to be fully subsumed by the other. For as important and life-giving as Diane and Marge are for

Marie, she nevertheless – or necessarily – loses both of them in the end. Indeed, Marie’s negotiation of the self is both wholly dependent on others and independent of them. The narrative voice becomes thick with the phrasing and habits of the other, the other’s worry,

195

ignorance, and desire. The other comes to be through Marie’s telling of the story, and in

this way, Marie comes to be through the other, yet remains always herself, different, in

search of her place.

Lack of Place – Thematics

The movement between geographic locations in each consecutive chapter, then, creates initial confusion and disorientation for the reader. However, the effect of this movement remains one of fluidity in the form of constant displacement. We recognize this as the same sense of narrative fluidity experienced through the constantly circulating narrative voice. Furthermore, the prevailing use of the present tense effects the same blending and thus blurring of temporalities and spaces as that which occurs with the shift in location and with the polyphonic yet dominant narrative voice. The errancy of these formative elements – in their transgression of literary conventions and the disorderly effects they produce – enacts the dis-place-ment at work in this text. Marie as narrator-

character is fluid, in movement, in transit, not rooted in a single place, without a fixed

and defined sense of self. Echoing Nina in Garçon manqué, Marie states, “Moi, je ne

suis pas dans la définition non plus” (89)

This idea of not being defined or fixed in one’s identity makes sense for Marie.

This dis-orientation, dis-order, or un-rootedness comes in part from the fact that the

narrator has just moved to Zürich and will begin the year at a new school; she will settle

into a new group of classmates and friends, and new environs. It is not just Marie whose

life has been upended with this most recent move; her sister too will enter a new school

in Switzerland, will have to adjust to anew, including being apart from her boyfriend in

196

Paris, where the family had been living. The whole family unit is represented as

fractured: the two daughters make these moves with their mother while their father is

away, always traveling for work. His absence, which punctuates the novel with direct

mention at various moments, is felt more so as a looming loss spanning the length of the

novel and projected into the foreseeable future. At the novel’s close, with her father still

away, Marie and her mother pack up and move the family once again, this time back to

France, near the Swiss border. In this way, being “out of place” is felt as an exhaustion51

of resources (geographic space, time, energy) since the possibility of arrival in or

attainment of “place” has once again been deferred.

In the first chapter, we find ourselves in the present of an unspecified time during

the post-Zürich summer; of the impending move to Ferney, Marie states: “Nous quittons

Zürich, c’est sûr. C’est mieux ainsi écrit ma mère, ‘C’était difficile sans ton père, moi je

ne pouvais plus’ » (15). On the following page she thinks back to the previous year’s

uprooting, the sudden move from Paris to Zürich, how that move was supposed to be the

last:

Je me souviens de mon arrivée à Zürich. J’étais furieuse de quitter Paris. Là encore, il valait mieux partir. (…) Ma mère attendait sur le quai, sans mon père. Je n’ai pas tout de suite compris. On a fait vite, le parking, la nouvelle voiture, … l’appartement, les cartons ouverts, ma chambre, mes affaires de Paris, la terrasse, la vue. Mon père, médecin, était déjà reparti. Je l’admirais. Il traversait le monde. Il aidait, il soignait. Tout devait s’arrêter à Zürich. Son poste serait fixe. On formerait une vraie famille. J’étais déçue. (16)

The insecurity of the family unit, both in its dispersion of family members and its constantly delocalized dwelling place, represents one main manifestation of destabilization taking place within the text. Once again, the thematic and the structural

51 I thank Thangam Ravindranathan for bringing this particular semantic reading to my attention.

197

work in tandem to translate this un-settling movement from start to finish. The first pages of the novel present a sort of double beginning as the parallel chapters take us almost simultaneously into the start of the school year and into the start of summer vacation. Both the family and the self are in transition at these two initiatory moments: coming back to Saint-Malo in June is the beginning of the last summer that Aunt Carol is alive. Furthermore, the typical vacation months spent with family and friends are anything but routine during this last summer: Marie is in Saint-Malo with her grandparents and cousins; Aunt Carol is at the hospital in Rennes being looked after by her husband, sister, and niece (Marie’s mother and sister). The same disorder that plagues the nuclear family has now befallen the larger family, and the parallelism between the two plotlines extends from structure to theme. The drama of Aunt Carol’s agonizing death unfolds in the time and space of the family, that of the summer in Saint-

Malo.

The uncertainty and disorder with which the novel commences carries itself forth such that we find a double ending at the novel’s conclusion. In the last chapters the narration moves from the summer’s definitive close, as Marie boards a train leaving

Rennes and headed to Ferney, to the final day of the school year in Zürich where, surrounded by classmates, Marie feels the separation. The definitive separation from her high school friends is prefigured in the departure from Rennes; we feel the reverberation that will follow, even before she has left Zürich: “Je me sens seule. Je ne reviendrai plus au lycée de Gockhausen. (…) Céline dit que j’ai un air triste. J’attends Diane comme je l’attendais la nuit du 31 décembre. (…) J’ai envie de rentrer” (283). At the close of the novel, the narrator arrives in her new “home” of Ferney, France, her mother waiting for

198

her at the train station. Bouraoui draws obvious parallels here, echoing the scene of

arrival in Zürich just one year prior. The movement of the narrator, between three cities

in three chapters, bears out the placelessness experienced by Marie. The dis-ordered and

dis-located movement from Saint-Malo to Zürich to Ferney (August – June – September)

further manifests the way in which narrative progression as progression in/of knowledge

can be interrupted and unsettled. The way in which the novel ends, with Marie in neither

Saint-Malo nor Zürich but in a different, alternate space, as was the case at the conclusion

of Garçon manqué, shall be considered in the dissertation’s conclusion. For now I will

extend the consideration of movement, dis-order, and lack on the thematic level to a consideration of the narrator as walker.

“Je marche”

“Je marche,” states the adolescent narrator. Through the forests around Zürich, in

Flutern, Uster; on the beaches and seawalls of Saint-Malo; in urban streets and parks,

along deserted country roads: the act of walking follows through the chapters as one of

the few constants in the narrator’s life. Across the prevailing movements of discord and

brief moments of harmony – from the spatial dis-placement of the move to Zürich and the

loss of Aunt Carol, to the capriciousness of both the temptress Diane’s affection and the

loyalty of Marie’s best friend Marge – the narrator holds fast to the ritornello of walking,

stating often, “je marche.” This movement anchors her to the present of her

surroundings, grounding her among the upheaval. In chapters 22 and 23 we read

respectively, “Il fait moins quinze degrés à Zürich et je n’ai plus froid. Je marche dans la

neige avec Céline,” and “Il pleut au Pont. La mer est grise, le sable trempé. Je marche

sur la digue” (54-55). The parallelism that begins these consecutive chapters is striking:

199

first a description of weather conditions and then a description of place – silent, snow-

covered city streets in Zürich, the cliffs and beaches of Saint-Malo, with the landscape

and seaside buildings still bespeaking the destruction wrought by the Second World War.

While the structure of these two chapters (and the structure of the whole novel) puts the

two places, these two sets of narration into dialogue with one another – achieved all the

more effectively in this instance since these two chapters appear on facing pages – it is

the action of the narrator, her “je marche,” that fully aligns them and brings them into

communication. Curiously absent in Garçon manqué, the act of physical wandering on

the part of the main character/narrator is, in La Vie heureuse, a signifying practice.

Returning to Michel de Certeau’s assertion that “marcher, c’est manquer de lieu.

C’est le procès indéfini d’être absent et en quête d’un propre” (L’invention du quotidien

155), we can consider Marie’s walks in both sets of chapters – set against the backdrop of

Zürich during the school year, and Saint-Malo during the summer months of vacation –

as symptomatic of this dis-placement. Walking is, as de Certeau explains, a “pedestrian

speech act”52 (“enunciation piétionnière” (148)) that announces and performs out-of-

place-ness. It is clear that the mobility of the family unit, the instability of its

membership, and the non-fixity of its dwelling-space represents – or engenders – this lack

of place “of one’s own,” Certeau’s propre. Marie’s walking thus is another manifestation

of this absence that is also errance. The body in motion, moving through space and in

time, enacts a dialectic of presence and absence, a continual dis-placement where the

place in which I am right now becomes, almost instantaneously, the place in which I just

was. Displacement as search, an absence-as-presence occurring on the level of the

52 I take this formulation directly from the English translation of de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, page 97.

200

everyday, as a means of navigating desire, confusion, of negotiating relationships,

interior and exterior realities, is performed on one level by this “je marche” which will

reappropriate an out-of-place-ness as a place of one’s own. For, the propre, considered as place, a locatable point in space, is illusory and can in fact only exist as passage. One must be out-of-place, between places, on-the-way (as both figurative and literal “way” or chemin) in order to ever have the possibility of arrival. Conceptually speaking, we read

Bouraoui in La Vie heureuse as in Garçon manqué in resonance with Fanon, “Dans le monde où je m’achemine, je me crée interminablement.”

On a narrative level, Bouraoui, much like Duras, employs repetition, often in the form of anaphor and enumeration, as narrative organization, spatialization that plots together (“trame les lieux”) places of the text, even if this occurs through fragmentation and even if we remain largely unaware of the unifying work of this repetition. The reader might notice, for example, that the narrator is often walking, and yet, this activity is so un-remarkable, so very quotidian that the many statements of “je marche” offered throughout the text do not make an impression on the reader. While this identification is indirect and somewhat superficial, to walk, however, is not an empty gesture, particularly with respect to narrative function. It is precisely the fact that the narrator is so often walking and that these walks are not described as being extraordinary, that leads us to associate Marie with walking. The experience of the body moving through spaces and

(among) people is the way in which the narrator comes to constitute herself. Marie narrates her actions in the present, giving a straightforward account of what she is doing as she is doing it, “je marche.” Narrating this movement in the present highlights the immediacy of the act and tunes the reader and narrator alike into the physical and

201

metaphysical condition of the body. In this same direct manner, she communicates her

thoughts and desires, her interactions with others, as well as the actions, thoughts, and

words of those around her.53

As was the case for the Surrealists and Duras, walking, in as much as it is a

principal activity of a novel’s characters, comes to constitute an important element of

their personalities, and their ways of walking – manner, motivation, space – portray in

each text a different ethics and poetics of errancy. Surrealist wandering as exploration

opens up the walker to the world and vice-versa. Displacement in the city positions

Aragon and Breton in proximity to the merveilleux quotidien, which it is always possible

to encounter if one steps out onto the street. For Duras’s Emily L. and the beggar woman

wandering (at sea and on land) is lived as auto-punishment that leads to annihilation of the self. As a movement towards non-knowledge, the errant subject’s dislocation is also dispossession. If Marie’s walking effects her non-belonging through a “pedestrian speech act,” it also operates, as de Certeau asserts, her search for place. It is an everyday practice, and it is precisely the everyday in which she lacks a place. There is no stable exterior signifier in which she sees herself: Diane, Marge, Aunt Carol all fail her, the presence of each dissolving into absence. We read: « Diane m’a trahie. J’ai perdu

Marge. Carol est partie. J’aimerais revenir en arrière » (219) ; and « Diane m’a trahie.

Marge a disparu derrière les rochers. Je ne veux pas voir Carol en cendres » (248).

These moves of presence-become-absence reflect Marie’s lack of a proper which she articulates almost obsessively in the phrase, “Je veux rentrer.” Although this énoncé is for the most part context specific (for example, spoken when Marie is at a classmate’s

53 For example: “Diane ne me regarde pas. Elle écrit un mot, ‘Samedi chez moi.’ Je ne réponds pas. Je pense au lac sous la glace. Je pense à un autre mode, secret et profond. Je pense à une autre ville. Je regarde la forêt derrière la fenêtre. Je pense à la course et au désir » (73).

202

party in Zürich and at a nightclub in Saint-Malo), is also speaks of a desire to change positions in a conceptual or phenomenological way, to desire simply to go where one is

not currently located. Especially given the fact that “home,” as implied object (place) of

the verb rentrer, is a non-entity in this text – there are very few scenes that take place in

the “home” whether in Saint-Malo or Zürich, and the very dual structure of the text posits

at least two possibilities for places representing “home” – we read “je veux rentrer” as a

sort of nostalgia, a longing for a place that no longer is or perhaps never was. The

constant expression of this desire for a (return? to the) proper is heard as echo in the

narrator’s “je marche.”

The narrator’s movement within the framework of the récit is another incarnation

of the movement that the reader experiences via the novel’s structure. The two

movements produce different effects, however. While the jumps from chapter to chapter

result in disorientation of time and space, the action of walking grounds the narrator (and

the reader along with her), in the present and the places that she traverses. A sort of

refrain punctuates the narrator’s walks in and around Zürich: “il neige” and “j’ai froid” or

“je n’ai plus froid” echo throughout the text:

Il fait moins quinze degrés à Zürich et je n’ai plus froid. Je marche dans la neige avec Céline. On descend de Kirchen Fluntern à pied. (…) La ville est silencieuse sous les montagnes massives. Les tramways ne circulent plus. Tout s’est arrêté. Tout couve sous la neige. Quelque chose va arriver. Quelque chose à l’intérieur de moi. C’est une vision. C’est un avertissement. Je crois changer. Ça brise sous ma peau. Ça se défait. Ça se révèle. Je fais du feu dans la cheminée de ciment. Je creuse avec une pelle la neige qui monte contre les baies. Je n’attends plus les lettres de Marge. Je ne téléphone plus. Je m’amuse dans la ville assiégée. (54)

The weather, both the cold winter of Zürich and the hot summer of Saint-Malo, is somewhat oppressive, surrounding the narrator in silence, emptiness, and absence. The

203

mention of the weather serves not as literal description but rather as an expression of the

narrator’s environment. The actions of and interactions with family and friends can be

experienced as viscerally as the rain, the cold or the heat. For example, we read the

formula “il neige dans ma tête”54 at moments when Marie is upset or confused, evoking

the relationship between sensation and reason within the subject. The walking narrator

further represents the porous bounds that separate exterior and interior, her wanderings,

as corporeal enunciation, the experience of self in/and the world.

“Je ne trouve pas ma place” : Lack of heterosexual desire

Summertime in Saint-Malo is especially rife with sexual desire: meeting friends

of friends, making the rounds at the nightclubs. Marie often goes out with her best friend

Marge, feminine and audacious, and object of cousin Julien’s unreciprocated desire.

Experimentation and excess are hallmarks of summer nights spent drinking, dancing,

hitchhiking, and making out with strangers. This year, danger and excitement offer

themselves to the teens in the form of “la maison de Luc” – an erotic weekend event of

unidentified sexual encounters where one is blindfolded and sent into a room to meet an

unknown other. Marge lives for this excitement, but Marie does not, refusing to partake

in these exchanges just as this summer she no longer interested in groping on the dance

floor and hitching rides home with strangers. Eventually the two friends separate over

54 For example, « Moi je n’attends rien. Je n’ai pas de projets. On dit que le ciel devient blanc avant la neige. Il doit neiger dans ma tête alors » (19) ; « Diane verse de l’huile solaire dans l’eau, pour l’odeur de l’été et la peau douce. Il neige encore. La nuit tombe au-dehors. Il y a du soleil dans ma tête » (161) ; « Diane me dit que ce sera plus facile pour aller à Genève et voir Sorg, le beau Sorg. Il lui manque. (…) Elle ne veut pas lui faire de mal. Elle va l’appeler. Ça s’arrangera. Et moi, est-ce que ma tête va s’arranger, est-ce qu’il va s’arrêter de neiger, est-ce que je passerai en première, est-ce que … [mon père] m’aimera toujours quand il apprendra pour Diane ? » (168-169) ; « Tu es difficile Marie. Je pensais te faire plaisir. (…) Merci Diane, tu oublies. (…) J’ai envie de la gifler. Je me retiens. (…) C’était ma surprise, Marie. Tu me déçois. Il neige dans ma tête. James revient. Il invite Diane à danser. Elle le suit. Je reste seule » (244).

204

their differences. Marie and Marge, childhood friends, grow apart for various reasons during this summer after Zürich, the summer of Aunt Carol’s death, not least of all because of the secret Marie harbors, her intense and unrequited love for Diane. In her attraction to another girl, or rather, her non-attraction to boys, the narrator does not fit into the world as Marge sees it: “Marge me dit bizarre avec les garçons. Ça ne va jamais, comme un vêtement qui tombe mal. (…) Je me regarde faire, mes mains, ma langue….

Je m’entends. Je joue. Marge a raison. Je suis bizarre et en retrait. Il manque toujours

quelque chose avec un garçon. (…) Ce n’est jamais normal avec un garçon. Il ne se

passe rien, ni à l’intérieur d’eux ni à l’intérieur de moi-même” (38).

Because of her lack of heterosexual desire, Marie is labeled as « bizarre » by her

friend and sees herself in this way too. The narrator, along with Marge, works here to

uphold the “punitively regulated cultural fiction,” to quote Judith Butler (Gender Trouble

178), of what it supposedly means to be female in France in the 1980s. The semantics of

this passage are telling. On the level of mainstream society, non-adherence to the

standards of heterosexual adolescent behavior and physiological impulses warrants the

judgment of « bizarre » and « not normal » to be assigned to the offender, decided from

without and from within. At the same time, that which is « bizarre » is equated with lack,

something that would, being present, render the subject whole or “normal,” is considered

as missing (« il manque toujours quelque chose »; “il ne se passe rien”). As Derrida

shows with the supplément, to be lacking is to go against both Nature and Reason.

Marie, in her lack of heterosexual desire, then, is an aberration, unlike the other

adolescents she knows.

205

As a manner of finding her place, Marie must first come to recognize herself. In

her performance of heterosexuality, Marie’s experience is that of another, she “plays” at

being straight, watches and hears herself. The “real” Marie is absent from this encounter.

Moving from a position of lack-within-the-self, the narrator eventually displaces this lack onto the exterior world, acknowledging that the source of the lack is indeed cultural fiction. Reflecting on her relation to others and self as mediated by discourse and the imaginary, Marie explains that while she once sought her place, in her own mind and in the mind of others, by attempting to overwrite the supposed lack wherein she is denied a place in society’s narrative (cultural fiction), she now recognizes that fiction as such:

Je me croyais amoureuse. Je n’aimais pas Antoine, il m’occupait l’esprit. Je l’inventais. Il devenait mon homme, le père de mes enfants. (…) J’ai attendu Antoine sur le quai. Il n’est jamais venu. (…) Je n’étais pas triste. Je ne voulais plus mentir. Antoine n’existait que dans ma tête. J’avais construit une histoire pour me protéger du vide. Je n’aimais aucun garçon. Je ne tombais pas amoureuse. Je me persuadais. (…) J’attendais mon Hubble. Il n’existait pas. Il ne viendrait jamais. Je n’étais pas comme les autres filles. Il fallait bien l’accepter. (146-47)

It is not merely child’s play to invent, to dream, to lie (to oneself and others) about our desires, or lackthereof. For, the initial, minor punishment of being ostracized or momentarily cast out of the collective, which Marie endures in the form of name-calling, is seen here in the much more menacing and potentially painful “vide” that shall be experienced as an alternative to participating in the telling and living of the “normal” social narrative. To not have a place, to walk on the edge of the abyss of the unknown –

frightening and unknowable alternative to the recognizable and socially acceptable world

of heterosexuality – is what Marie allows herself to experience. She must pass into the unfamiliar space and must undertake to make sense, against Nature and Reason some would say, of her desire for Diane.

206

Back in Zürich, Céline, like Marge, does not understand Marie’s non-participation

in the “club”55 of heteronormative adolescence. Of this incomprehension we read:

“Céline est surprise par mon comportement, ce penchant. Rien ne penche en moi, tout se

dresse, tout se tient. (…) Ça passera, dit Céline. Et ça ne va pas avec mon corps. Je ne

suis pas androgyne, dit-elle. Je ne fais pas garçon manqué. J’ai du succès. Elle ne

comprend pas. On veut toujours trouver une raison à l’amour des filles » (130). It does not make sense, is not natural, that a feminine adolescent girl would not be sexually attracted to boys. Participation in the club is assumed and membership granted by default when one conforms, purposefully or unwittingly, to the prescribed regulations, in this case, the “dress code” regulating appearance as a heterosexual female. Positioning herself outside the realm of heterosexuality and the normative schemas of seeing and understanding that it governs, Marie represents an enigma, incomprehensible to her friends. If she looked like a tomboy – read: lesbian – it would perhaps be conceivable that Marie is attracted to other females. However, as she “ne fai[t] pas garçon manqué,” the narrator is refused by Celine (and society at large) the possibility of same-sex desire.

Once again, the non-familiar, the unrecognizable is incomprehensible; it is rejected because it does not fit in to the already existing mental schema, and more often than not is also rejected as menacing.

The incomprehension and condemnation that surrounds Marie’s attraction to

Diane begets secrecy and ineffability. Bouraoui puts the taboo story of Carol’s death in

dialogue with the unspeakable story of Diane: « Cacher. Faire semblant pour Liz. Sa

voix qui n’attend pas ma voix. (…) Il ne faut pas dire pour Zürich. Il ne faut pas dire

55 Judith Halberstam, in her work Female Masculininty, insightfully evokes Carson McCuller’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) in her discussion of tomboyism and the ways in which society forces “nonmembers into memberships they cannot fulfill” (8).

207 pour Marie, son histoire avec Diane. Ça passera, tu sais. Ça passe, ces choses. Ça ne compte pas. Ça n’existe pas. C’est la peur qui fait ça. La peur, ça met la tête à l’envers » (58). Non-normative sexual desire (identity) is put in dialogue with – if not exactly equated to – the ultimate threat to our being, death. Both are painful and shameful subjects that must be avoided, covered, silenced. In both instances, this silence must be actively maintained. To hide the news of Carol’s cancer, her deteriorating condition, from her young daughter Liz, to pretend that nothing is wrong, that nothing of note is happening, parallels the theatrics of ignorance and denial that must be performed with regards to Marie’s relationship with Diane. Once again, a speech act is operated: to decree that “ça ne compte pas” or “ça n’existe pas” and to expressly keep from speaking of this relationship does in fact nullify its existence, as long as all persons are complicit in this negation.

Speak not of lesbian desire, hear not of it, see it not: the refusal to acknowledge

Marie’s desire is an act of censorship, which, for Judith Butler, is a formative act, not just the privation of speech as we tend to consider it. In Excitable Speech, she writes:

I propose that censorship seeks to produce subjects according to explicit and implicit norms, and that the production of the subject has everything to do with the regulation of speech. The subject’s production takes place not only through the regulation of that subject’s speech, but through the regulation of the social domain of speakable discourse. (...) To move outside of the domain of speakability is to risk one’s status as a subject. (133)

Even if her external appearance allows her to pass as a “vraie fille,” Marie, like Nina, does not fit in. In her desire for Diane and non-adherence to the heterosexual norm, she has strayed from the domain of the speakable. Thus, in spite of her typically feminine appearance, it is Marie, and not the short-haired, motorcycle-riding Céline who remains

208

different, outside the order, alone in her own world. Marie cannot speak of her feelings

for Diane, nor could she wander down the street hand-in-hand with a girl. The censorship at work in the social domain forbids this. As Butler asserts, the narrator as social subject is thus formed in part through the silence, hiding, lying, and fear that she must perform and endure. Bouraoui writes:

Ah! tu es avec Olivier depuis quinze jours, tant mieux, bravo, c’est beau l’amour, une fille, un garçon, s’embrasser dans la rue, au bord du lac, sur le quai de la gare, profites-en Céline, c’est magnifique d’être libre, de ne pas avoir peur, de ne pas mentir. Moi c’est la guerre. J’invente, j’ai de l’imagination. Cacher, ne pas se plaindre. Je ne pourrai jamais dire qu’une fille me brise le cœur. Je ne suis pas comme toi, Céline. Je ne trouve pas ma place. (122)

In this state of censorship Marie is not free in her actions or her speech; she is formed as a negative subject here. In order to articulate her desire and potentially (re)constitute herself as a full subject, she must move out of Butler’s domain of speakabililty, that is to say, out of the regulated domain of social acceptability. Crossing into the non- heterosexual, non-normative realm of sexuality is seen as a transgressive act that “risk[s] one’s status as a subject.” And yet, ironically, it is not seen at all. For, dis-placed,

Marie’s homosexual desire is not recognized nor is it recognizable. Someone who is out of place, who has erred from her “proper” place, finds herself in the margins and thus less visible, and often completely invisible, because her strangeness (“bizarre”) is not comprehensible to others. This would account for the fact that no one suspects Marie and

Diane to be an amorous couple, even when they spend much time together: “Je prends la

place de Sorg. Personne ne se doute. Personne ne veut voir. C’est impossible d’aimer

une fille. Ça n’existe pas” (115); and also, “Diane arrive, en retard. Gil la voit, sur le

quai. Elle salue à peine. Je lui en veux. Gil a compris? Non, ça n’existe pas pour lui.

Diane est dans ma classe. Les filles sont très proches à l’adolescence” (138, my

209 emphasis). Unlike Céline, Marie exists unaffirmed in her subjectivity, at times, negated, even. Indeterminacy and instability are the conditions inherent to the narrator’s passage of adolescence: “Je ne trouve pas ma place.”

Circulation and Substitution

As we have seen in Garçon manqué, strategies of errance such as improvisation, adaptation, and performance can be employed as a means of negotiating one’s identity.

The narrator of La Vie heureuse errs as well, veering into the realm of the other whose words and intentions are passed through the narrator and incorporated into the dialogue- less narration. If, as we have seen via Bakhtin (and Beneveniste), the narration (as discourse) is a site of intermingling and movement among and between voices, these voices ultimately rest within the narrator, are distilled into one narrative voice in lieu of individual expression through traditional dialogue. This hermetics allows the narrator to ruminate, question, and search for her own voice on her own terms while still in dialogue with the other. Bakhtin states: “[L]a parole persuasive intérieure, au cours de son assimilation positive, s’entrelace étroitement avec ‘notre parole à nous,’” which is footnoted with “Car ‘notre parole à nous’ s’élabore petit à petit, et lentement, à partir des paroles reconnues et assimilées d’autrui, et au début, leurs frontières sont presque imperceptibles” (164).

This (semi-)seclusion of the narrative voice, then, would seem to foster the desire for circulation in the physical realm, movement of bodies among each other. Moreover, circulation and the substitution that accompanies it are errant movements, for they operate through pretense, mendacity, disguise and adaptation. Circulation signifies first

210 and foremost a moving between or passing around of one body among various others, whether as agent or object. The circulating body as agent evokes a disposition of searching, of actively seeking something, whereas this same body as object becomes necessarily passive, carried along by circumstances, the desires and actions of others.

Both the active search and the passive “se laisser faire” (or the “je me regarde faire”) approach to relationships (amical, amorous, or sexual) are representative of errance in La

Vie heureuse. The interchangeability and purposeful substitution of romantic and sexual partners manifests an unfulfilled desire or an otherwise general dissatisfaction that keeps the body in motion, waiting for the arrival of something, of someone: “Je suis heureuse de revenir au lycée. On m’attend? Qui? Personne. C’est moi qui attends. Comme j’attendais enfant une fille qui me ressemblât. Elle n’est jamais venue. J’ai fini par l’inventer” (57).

Whether because or in spite of the lack (of Diane) or out-of-placeness that haunts

Marie throughout the novel, she eventually allows herself to date Gil. This will act as an illusory manner of inclusion, a conscious entering into and exercising of her membership in the “club” of heterosexual, adolescence. At the same time, dating Gil also represents one of various efforts made to forget Diane, to erase all traces of this siren from Marie’s life. Being close to Gil also serves the opposite purpose, however, that of keeping Diane present in her life and even of virtually attaining her. Gil is the current target of Diane’s game of desire, mostly because the innocent and boyish Gil is instead interested in Marie.

Not heeding Diane’s interdiction – “Ne touche pas à Gil … tu sais bien qu’il est pour moi” (217) – Marie will get what she needs out of the situation : « Je vais embrasser Gil.

Je n’en ai pas envie. Je vais chercher Diane dans son corps et le pénétrer » (218), and

211

then, “J’embrasse Gil … Gil glisse sa main sous mon sweat, je me laisse faire…. [Il]

touche ma peau comme un trésor, fragile, ce sont les mains de Diane, c’est sa voix, Ne

touche pas à Gil, il est pour moi. Je ne me venge pas. Je retrouve Diane. J’embrasse celui qu’elle désire. J’embrasse celui qui l’excitait” (224). This is but one example of substitution and circulation that occurs throughout the novel. Characters constantly move among each other, become close with and separate from each other: family members, friends, lovers move through the text and through each others’ lives. A fluidity similar to that of the narrative voice seeming never to stop moving and to encounter and incorporate56 incessantly the other such that at times Gil is Diane; Marie takes the place of Diane’s on-again-off-again boyfriend Sorg; Marie’s sister replaces Diane as Sorg’s romantic interest; little cousin Liz is the carefree child on the beach that used to be Marie.

To what end this substitution of bodies, circulation of desires? On the one hand,

this movement is that of the search, a theme ever-present in La Vie heureuse. Whether it

is Marie, “le corps qui cherche,” or her cousin Julien seeking “le visage qui se

rapprochera le plus du rêve,” “le corps qui consolera” (36), being out-of-place propels one to search out the moment and space of fitting in, the safe space, one’s own, paradoxically to be sought via the other. Like the narrative voice that can be said to incorporate the other, searching bodies (characters) must pass through each other as a means of constituting the self, identification in errance.

Invention : Coming into Being Out of Place

The one she seeks, the one for whom Marie waits does not come: the girl “like

her” whose arrival she awaited as a child; Antoine, who was supposed to meet Marie at

56 Or, we could say “cannibalize,” evoking the title character of Maryse Condé’s La Femme cannibale. In a public lecture, Condé explained how the character of the “cannibal woman” figuratively devours those around her in order to learn about herself, to discover who she is. (Holy Cross College, 23 Jan 2009.)

212

the train station one day and whom she has imagined as a husband; her father, always

traveling, who is not there for the move from Paris to Zürich, from Zürich to Ferney;

Aunt Carol who does not recover from cancer, who never returns for another family

summer in Saint-Malo; Diane who does not call on New Year’s Eve.

Waiting is the time-space of suspension, the opposite of circulation. Waiting is a

blank space, silence, the void, a parenthetical moment, or rather an ellipsis signifying that

which is unknown, which may yet come to pass. The time-space of waiting, l’attente, is

emptiness, nothingness of suspension, and at the same time it is the fullest possibility, the

anticipation and expectation of an event, a response. We saw in Emily L., waiting as an

experience of nothingness and of slow (auto-)destruction (in the space of a few days, the

couple seems to grow old while waiting in the bar for their boat to be repaired; their

seafaring errancy was but an activity to pass the time as they awaited (or perhaps sought)

death); the Vice-consul waits in a moment of nothingness, deferring as best he can in

quiet desperation his departure from Calcutta. For the Surrealists, on the contrary, the

wait represents possibility, and wandering can be considered a physical incarnation of the

active and open waiting-state. For Bouraoui too, waiting is an experience full of positive

potential, even if at times it culminates in disappointment. To wait, to hope: the

emptiness of waiting offers possibility as that which will come to fill the space. Because

the existing domain of the speakable does not recognize Marie as a desiring subject,

Bouraoui offers her narrator the space of waiting and the space of imagination as the

place where dreams might come true: “Diane, ce fantasme-là… Je ne souffre pas trop.

J’attends. J’espère » (118) ; and « C’est sublime d’attendre. C’est sublime d’espérer »

(121).

213

To imagine, to fantasize, to invent for ourselves a different world, this is one way to combat the emptiness of the waiting-state by taking ownership of it and filling it with that which we desire, the world according to our own terms, to arrive at the propre that has been sought through the course of constant displacement. In Garçon manqué, Nina used strategies of performance – improvisation and adaptation of attitude, comportment, and physical appearance –to take ownership of the narrative of her identity, of the creation of the self. She spoke of writing as a way in which she could combat prejudices and transgress social and cultural prescriptions. Curiously, Marie is not la fille qui écrit, as was Nina, and as are many of Bouraoui’s protagonists. But the fact that she is not a writer does not mean, however, that she abstains from creative processes; her creation is on the order of the fictional and the real via the mental and the discursive. Occurring on the one hand in the fantasy realm of popular culture (songs, television, and films) of the early 1980s, and on the other in the realm of the (hetero-normative) dominant discourse influencing and organizing everyday life (thoughts, dreams, action, inaction). In both cases, it is a matter of inventing a place for oneself.

Even if the narrator sees the waiting-state as full of potential, as a largely positive activity (“C’est sublime d’attendre. C’est sublime d’espérer”), she cannot endure the wait for Diane or for any of the others who do not arrive. Instead she searches, circulates, substitutes, looking for the other who will not leave her empty. More actively, and more effectively, she invents – creating personages, scenarios, dialogues, whole futures in her head. We have seen the specific term “inventer” used to describe the imaginary love- object, future husband Antoine; to describe the imaginary friend that Marie invented as a child when a girl like her failed to enter her life.

214

Fitting in : “Refaire la légende”

The realm of popular culture is dominated by images of beautiful people, mythical romance, and harmony, functions as an ideal place into which the solitary youth, seule et différente, without a place in the real world can retreat. References to film, television, and music abound. Martine Fernandes suggests this as an illustration of the way in which the body, in its sensory faculties, participates in the definition of the categories of masculine and feminine (71). I see the presence of pop culture, however, as an avenue of escape. Not in the sense of escapism as avoidance, but as a place whose boundaries and rules of governance do not exist as such; it is the reconfiguration of place such that Marie can find herself there. From the movie Flashdance, with Irene Cara’s hit song extolling the possibility to take a dream, a passion and “make it happen” (an overtly significant choice of film and song) to the television soap Dynasty, whose main female character Marie finds much more attractive than the leading man, the narrator expresses a desire to enter into another realm where the rules of heterosexuality do not dictate what is perceived as acceptable discourse and action.

Unlike her, Céline, who can speak of and show off her relationship with Olivier in public without the least worry of scorn or rejection, Marie cannot talk openly about her desire for Diane, cannot be seen in front of others as having an amorous relationship with another female. The fantasy world of popular culture is Marie’s dream world, the safe space, removed from reality where she can assume desires and play out scenarios that are impossible in the everyday world. Like the young female welder in Flashdance with secret aspirations of becoming a dancer, Marie too leads a double life, keeping hidden, for most of the novel, her relationship with Diane, her wish to love out loud. Without a

215 place among her friends, at school, in her family even, Marie spends her time at the movies, watching television, walking and imagining by herself. The narrator tells us:

Je marche dans la forêt du Dolder. Je pense à Linda Evans de Dynastie. Ma sœur préfère Jeff. Pourquoi ? Je pense que c’est compliqué d’aimer une fille. Il faut du courage, de la force, de la patience. Je pense que beaucoup d’entre nous ici, au lycée, ont refusé à cause de cela. Je pense que beaucoup de filles dans le monde ont voulu mourir à cause de cela. C’est irrésistible d’aimer une fille. C’est le corps qui s’évanouit. Ça entre dans la tête et ça bat, comme les cymbales du carnaval de Zürich. C’est quitter la foule et le cortège. C’est très dur de ne pas trouver sa place, en classe, en famille. C’est très dur d’aimer un mauvais feuilleton comme Dynastie. Ce serait encore plus dur d’embrasser, en rêve, Blake Carrington au lieu de sa femme, Krystle. Ce serait une grande faute de goût. (102)

Because she does not fit in with her friends and family, Marie seeks an alternate space where her preferences are recognized. Ironically, she must step away from the company of others, must “quitt[e] la foule et le cortège,” in order to have a place where she belongs. She must leave the safety and anonymity of the crowd, must take the difficult step out of the pre-existing order of the procession instead of following along. We hear an echo of Breton here, when he calls for man to free himself from the shackles of bourgeois capitalism by stepping away out from work and into the street. In order to step freely, Marie, however, must leave the realm of the real and move into the realm of imagination and popular fantasy.

While quite different in scope and significance, Marie’s movements into the imaginary are similar to the experience of Fikria, the young, female narrator of

Bouraoui’s acclaimed La Voyeuse interdite (1991, awarded the Prix Inter) who is sequestered in her home until her marriage. In her study, The Space of the Screen in

Contemporary French and Francophone Fiction, Donna Wilkerson-Barker proposes a reading of the window as a movie or television screen that offers spectators “the

216 experience of the ‘world’ at a safe distance.” Furthermore, the control and restrictions

“placed on her body … interfere with her creativity and prohibit her from finding a place in the world which she herself could define.” The substitution of the screen as a replacement for reality is a denial of the objective and the subjective, according to John

Berger (Wilkerson-Barker 128). Although these two texts by Bouraoui engage with much different issues of identity and power, and do so through very different narrative means, the consideration of reshaping reality through both denial and creation applies effectively to La Vie heureuse. In moving into the realm of the fictive, one can manipulate the configurations of desire, comportment, appearance such that one fits into the story being told. Already so far removed from the concerns and rules of the everyday so as to offer idyllic harbor, the fantasy world portrayed in popular culture offers a welcome destination for Marie.

And yet, she does not let herself escape fully into the arms of Linda Evans or

Jennifer Beals, the actrice from Flashdance. She remains for the most part in the real world, grounded as she is, performing as needed: keeping secrets and silence, telling lies to herself and others, inventing imaginary friends and lovers. An act of creation, invention is, as we read it through Homi Bhabha, an opening unto the new, an emergence of the self as presence through the disruption of boundaries. It is an intervention that alters the world. For Marie, finding her place is rooted in making her place in the world.

As we have seen, this place-making (“tramer les lieux”) occurs on the level of the imaginary – an individual act of day-dreaming and hoping common to us all. But there exists a second level of place-making that is rather a re-making : to rewrite the grand narrative according to which a girl is taught and learns to seek her ‘prince charming’ – or

217

rather to wait for him to come find (rescue) her. So what happens when a girl in adolescence realizes she is “not like the others”? There is no bedtime story told in which a young girl with same-sex desires recognizes herself in the character of the heroine.

How to even fathom the possibility of a same-sex relationship when all that one hears on

the subject are insults and condemnations? Explaining to the reader (and to herself?) just

what her relationship with Diane does and does not look like, Marie says:

[P]as ces histoires mièvres d’internat de filles. Comment dit-on déjà ? Attouchements ? Moi je ne suis pas comme cela. Moi je ne suis pas une lycéenne sans expérience. Moi je ne suis pas fleur bleue, Claudine à l’école, la prof et l’élève, etc. Moi je ne suis pas dans la définition non plus. Que disent-ils déjà ? Hommasse, se prendre pour un mec ? Manquer un truc? Se rêver avec un pénis? Camionneuse? Comment disent-ils encore? Une maladie? Une perversion? Une tare? Diane et moi, c’est Woman in Love de Barbara Streisand. (88-89)

This passage offers numerous derogatory expressions for lesbians and lesbianism and shows how the lesbian relationship is represented as rooted in naiveté, experimentation, or boredom. Furthermore, and importantly, we see that these expressions are promulgated by the “on” and the “ils,” the anonymous “they” whose fear and half-truths get passed along to the point of becoming embedded in a society’s common discourse on a subject. As Bakhtin states, “La parole autoritaire exige de nous d’être reconnue et assimiliée, elle s’impose à nous, indépendamment de son degré de persuasion intérieure à notre égard …. La parole autoritaire … est organiquement liée au passé hiérarchique.

C’est en quelque sorte, la parole des pères. Elle est déjà reconnue dans le passé” (161)!

If the “they” represent an authority, the narrator does not bow in submission before them.

Marie’s tone here calls into question the legitimacy of the “parole autoritaire,” undermining the “on” and the “ils” as representations of truth and reason, not least of all because as expressing a masculine, heterosexual point of view, they are exterior to Marie

218

and Diane’s experience. The question marks serve also to put into question and to

ultimately negate the validity of “ce qu’on dit.” And the final sentence serves to rectify

the errant conception that “they” have of female love. With her assertion, “Diane et moi,

c’est Woman in Love de Barbara Streisand,” Marie rejects the labels of sickness and

perversion that have qualified lesbianism by declaring her feelings as being just those of

Streisand’s hit song, familiar to all, lauded, wished for by all. Popular culture once again

becomes the vehicle through which the narrator can tell her story, can fit into the story

told by others.

Stepping outside of tradition, straying from the cultural norms (fiction) that offer the story of Prince Charming and his Lovely Maiden is where Marie must go to find happiness, to find her reality. But she does not just find it, she must build it, make it, create it herself, for herself. She must remake the stories, myths, notions of what is right, wrong, acceptable and not in the realm of romantic relations. For, Marie’s desire is discordant with the dominant discourse.

At two different moments, the narrator states that she will “refaire la légende”:

Comment cela a pu arriver, Diane ? Et cette chanson d’Elton John, how wonderful life is, when you’re in the world. C’est horrible que tu existes Diane. Je dois tout refaire à l’envers, l’enfance, ce qu’on m’avait dit, l’homme de mes rêves, le prince et la princesse, la légende. Moi, je n’aurai pas peur de faire l’amour avec toi. Ce sera plus qu’avec un garçon. Il ne manquera rien, là. Ce sera la vie, la Vie heureuse. (61)

Je la suis dans la forêt. Je recommence la légende, le prince et la princesse. … Je n’ai plus froid. Diane a appelé. (…) Diane ne remplace pas ma mère. Ce n’est pas ça l’histoire des filles. C’est autre chose. … Ça ne remplace rien. … On ne se retrouve pas en elle. On ne comble pas et on ne manque pas. C’est plus que cela. Ça n’a pas d’histoire. C’est sans passé. C’est d’une grande virginité. Il n’y a aucun malheur à aimer une fille. Ça donne beaucoup de force. Ça rend intelligent, à force de mentir. Ce n’est plus une fille alors. C’est un sujet qui surgit. (69-70)

219

The future tense is used to envision a parallel universe, different from the one that Marie had envisioned, had heard about as a child. That universe is only accessible, only exists if Marie takes it upon herself to bring it into existence by a purposeful and systematic remaking of the traditional, hetero-normative narrative of falling in love and getting married. In her characterization of this mythic narrative, Bouraoui uses a semantic field steeped in terminology belonging to fairy tales that is nonetheless the very set of terms we use to speak of our romantic encounters and aspirations. Framing the field with “ce qu’on m’avait dit” and “la légende” articulates clearly the fact that this conception of relationships is a cultural construct transmitted from generation to generation, but of course also shared between members of the same age group. This type of telling is like recounting legends, these distortions of purported factual events that come to exist somewhere between the realm of the real and the fictive. In the proposed act of remaking the legend to include herself, Marie strays from the order of tradition and the past, which having been passed down to her, now becomes the place of her intervention in the future, the place in which the subject surges forth.

220

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: THE MEDIUM OF ERRANCE

« L’ERRANCE. – C’est cela même qui nous permet de nous fixer. De quitter ces leçons de choses que nous sommes si enclins à semoncer, d’abdiquer ce ton de sentence où nous compassons nos doutes, – moi tout le premier ! – et de dériver enfin. Dériver à quoi ? À la fixité du mouvement du Tout-monde. (…) La pensée de l’errance débloque l’imaginaire, elle nous projette hors de cette grotte en prison où nous étions enfermés, qui est la cale ou la caye de la soi-disant unicité. (…) Quel est ce voyage, qui serre sa fin en lui-même ? Qui bute dans une fin ! L’être ni l’errance n’ont de terme – et le changement est leur permanence, ho ! – Ils continuent toujours. »

Édouard Glissant, Tout-monde

« L’espace ouvert par l’appel et l’attente n’est pas celui d’une énigme qu’on pourrait peu à peu éclaircir et résoudre, mais celui d’un mystère que l’écriture a pour tâche d’approfondir, et non de réduire. La quête poétique ne se propose pas de rendre connaissable l’inconnu, mais au contraire de révéler dans le connu la part de l’inconnaissable. »

L’horizon et l’avenir sont rebelles à la planification.... Leur indétermination n’est pas pour le poète un obstacle à surmonter, mais un lieu de vacance et d’accueil où les mots sont rendus à leur disponibilité…. Cette marge d’indétermination qui fait que l’avenir est toujours à venir … est la dimension même de la création existentielle et poétique, «l’horizon fabuleux » qui n’invite le sujet à imaginer son histoire et à réécrire la « fable du monde. »

Michel Collot, La Poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon

The above quotes from Édouard Glissant and Michel Collot frame well the unsettling movement of errance as effected through both the wanderer and the text. It is a movement of the mind that has freed itself from the constraints of codified manners of thinking. We saw this particular manner of wandering and straying in the texts of Aragon and Breton, where the thoughts of the ambling narrator move with a like sinuosity and an

221

even more rapid pace than his feet or his pen. Bouraoui too enacts an errancy of thought,

working through interrogation, refusal, and deferral to “contrevenir à la racine,” in

Glissant’s terms, that is to say, to reject the structure of rootedness as not only an order of

social relations but also as an organization of thought that limits the movement of the self

toward the other in the world. If I agree emphatically with Glissant’s assertion that the

being and (in) errance have no end – both as spatial and temporal point of arrival –, I

read in this passage, and in particular his use of the verb “dériver,” a sense of movement

that does not engage as negotiation. Although I posit errance as a va-et-vient, it is not a back-and-forth that stays fixed to two stable terms. By wandering the path of negotiation

– of presence and absence, Algeria and France, yesterday and tomorrow, the subject not only keeps the dialogue open by the constant movement but also leaves open the possibility of straying right out of the conversation.

In moving from the binary, however, what happens to the wanderer? Where does s/he go from here? One possibility proposes itself (or is proposed by the wanderer) in the figure of the ‘third space’ as an alternate to the terms of the binary. This other space exists in various conceptual images, that of the in-between, outside, neither, ‘beyond,’ the interstice, and for Bhabha, the space of enunciation (37). The question of the binary and the possibility of the third space begs the question not just of form but also of function: what happens in this space? Is it the site of synthesis? Shall it be considered a ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of the binary, a solution supposed as necessary or desirable in the face of painful and constant negotiation? Nina Bouraoui, in both her texts, offers a straying into the third space, although it is not the final resting point of either narrator. I shall take a minute to consider in Garçon manqué the section titled “Tivoli.” Coming after the

222

sections titled “Alger” and “Rennes,” the narrator passes, for a few pages, out of the

Algerian–French constellation and into the new space of Italy. In Tivoli park in Rome, the narrator finally is, herself: liberated at once from her own internal negotiation and from the inquiries and labels imposed on her by others, who in France and Algeria, never stop questioning her belonging, never stop excluding her. In Rome she becomes another, fully-othered, Other, for the Italians in the square and for herself. The young Nina

narrating explains that it is here, in this other space, the she comes to know desire. In

moving into the realm of a space not wholly foreign yet distinct from the two places that

comprise her cognitive and affective landscape, Nina experiences a new knowledge.

Reading Bouraoui through Bhabha’s conception of the third space as one of

enunciation, we can indeed read this declaration of the self as whole or other, constituted

in desire. In his demand for recognition, Fanon sets personal desire as the element to be

seen and acknowledged by the other: “Je demande qu’on me considère à partir de mon

Désir. Je ne suis pas seulement ici-maintenant, enfermé dans la choséité. Je suis pour

ailleurs et pour autre chose » (177). Are we all Other(ed) in our desire? Other to

ourselves because we now recognize a movement within that projects out, toward the exterior Other? With respect to the question of enunciation, is being recognized, addressed by the Other our enunciation, or must we speak ourselves? The latter would seem the only way to constitute the self. To this end, I ask what relationship errance has wtih writing?

If much consideration in this study has been devoted to an examination of what I have called ‘narrative errance’– the movement of the voice within the récit; the intertextual crossings of voices, characters, and genres; the way in which the negotiation

223

of terms on the level of the text enacts a movement that touches the thematic realm (the

characters, the setting, the action) – I have not addressed with any regularity the question

of writing as it pertains to act and movement. Errance as a negotiation of non-knowledge,

as an enactment of unsettling having an effect of instability: these manifestations of

errance could be expressed as the movement and resonance of writing. Indeed, like the

physical body that wanders through space, writing is a movement that crosses boundaries,

connects times and places, and that leaves its mark on the one who moves, whether its

feet on pavement or hand across the page. Moreover, both writing and walking, like

speaking, do something; it is a two-way street of acting in the world and being acted

upon. For de Certeau, there is a “rhétorique de la marche,” that brings walking and

speaking to a certain equivalency. Movement, or rather, motion, displacement, is a necessary component in any type of production – material, mental, and scriptural alike.

De Certeau states that, “Les jeux de pas sont façonnages d’espaces. Ils trament les lieux”

(147). To walk, to speak, to create, to experience the immensity of the city, indeed the world, on the level of the intimate, through the most everyday of acts, by placing one foot in front of the other.

These actions occur in the time-space of the in-between. When we are doing

something we are necessarily in process, in transit, taking our words and our bodies from

here to there, between the point of departure and the moment of arrival, constructing the

world at the same time that we experience it. The double movement represented in the

notion of passage reminds us that at each point we are in negotiation through our minds

and our bodies. “The body is our general medium for having a world,” asserts Merleau-

Ponty: the writer like the walker experiences and/as s/he enunciates. The trace is left, but

224

its reading (meaning) not fixed. There is a passing through, from, over, into that must

occur between the reader and writer across the text. Writing and telling as mediated and

mediating acts call to mind the image of Michel de Montaigne’s remarks to the reader at

the beginning of his Essais. He proposes to bare all, to confess, honestly and sincerely,

his thoughts and thus to show himself essentially naked to the reader. But this is an

impossible project, not only because of questions of sincerity and artifice that could never

be fully un-covered, but because there is a screen across which the image-thoughts are

passed. The confessional screen across which pass words and which throw shadows; the

confessional screen is a boundary, but a porous one. The time-space of errance itself

represents such a boundary, a site of crossing.

Working on the level of the body and the parole, errance is a mediation of self

and other, self as other. It is not insignificant that the small amount of theorization of

errance that has been done exists largely as figurations of the poetic, as we have seen with Glissant and Collot. S’égarer, écarter, poursuivre sans fin, these are a few of the ways in which the poem, the poet, and the parole err for Collot. This getting lost,

moving apart, and pursuing interminably work in concert with the revelation of the not-

known or unrecognized/unrecognizable that exists within the domains of the known: “La

quête poétique ne se propose pas de rendre connaissable l’inconnu, mais au contraire de

révéler dans le connu la part de l’inconnaissable.” The poet and scholar alike must stray

into the shadowy regions of the world, must plumb the depths of the unknown

geographies of the self on her quest for new understandings.

225

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agar-Mendousse, Trudy. Violence et créativité de l’écriture algérienne au féminin.

Paris : L’Harmattan, 2006.

Alazet, Bernard, Christiane Blot-Labarrère, Robert Harvey, eds. Marguerite Duras, la

tentation du poétique. Paris : Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002.

Aragon, Louis. Le Paysan de Paris. Paris : Gallimard, 1953.

______. Paris Peasant. Trans. and introduction Simon Watson Taylor. Boston:

Exact Change, 1994.

______. Traité du style. Paris : Gallimard, 1928.

______. Le Mouvement perpétuel. Paris : Gallimard, 1924.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin

McLaughlin. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass, 2002.

______. Selected Writings, Volume 2 : 1927-1934. Ed. Michael W. Jennings

et al. Trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. Cambridge, Mass : Belknap Press, 1999.

______. Écrits français. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.

Bachelard, Gaston. La Poétique de l’espace. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France,

1964.

Bahktin, Mikhail. Esthétique et théorie du roman. Trad. Daria Olivier. Paris :

Gallimard, 1978.

Barthes, Roland. Le plaisir du texte. Paris : Seuil, 1973.

______. The rustle of language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York : Hill and

226

Wang, 1986.

Bates, David W. Enlightenment Aberations: Error and Revolution in France.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Baudelaire, Charles. « Peintre de la vie moderne, » Critique d’art. Paris : Éditions du

Chêne, 1945.

Béhar, Henri. Le Surréalisme. Paris : Librairie Générale Française, 1992.

Beneveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek.

Coral Gables, FL : University of Miami Press, 1971.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York : Routledge, 1994.

Blanchot, Maurice. L’espace littéraire. Paris : Gallimard, 1973.

Borgomano, Madeleine. “L’Histoire de la mendiante indienne.” Poétique 48 (1981) :

479-494.

Bouguerra, Mohamed Ridha. Histoire de la littérature du Maghreb : littérature

francophone. Collab. Sabiha Bouguerra. Paris : Ellipses, 2010.

Bouraoui, Nina. Garçon manqué. Paris : Gallimard, Éditions Stock, 2000.

______. La Vie heureuse. Paris : Éditions Stock, 2002.

Breton, André. L’Amour fou. Paris : Gallimard, 1964.

______. « Manifeste du surréalisme » dans Manifestes du surréalisme, édition

complète. Paris : Éditions Pauvert, 1979.

______. Manifestoes of Surealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann

Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1972.

______. Nadja. Paris : Gallimard, [1928], 1963.

______. Nadja. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

227

______. Œuvres complètes. [Vol. 1, 2.] Ed. Marguerite Bonnet. Paris: Gallimard,

1988, 1992.

______. “Surrealism and Painting,” Surrealism and Painting. Trans. Simon

Watson Taylor. London: Macdonald, 1972.

Bruno, Thibault. « Errance et initiation dans la ville post-moderne; De La Guerre (1970)

à Poisson d’or (1997) de J.M.G. Le Clézio. » Nottingham French Studies 39.1

(Spring 2000): 96-109.

Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge,

1997.

______. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York :

Routledge, 1990.

Casey, Edward. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley : University of

California Press, 1997.

Cavallaro, Dani and Alexandra Warwick. Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and

Body. New York: Berg, 1998.

Caws, Mary Ann. André Breton. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

______. Ed. Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2001.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley :

University of California Press, 1984.

______. L’Invention du quotidien. v.1 Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

Chambers, Ross. Loiterature. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

______. Room for Maneuvre : Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative.

228

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline. Le Surréalisme. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France,

1984.

Cléder, Jean. Ed. Marguerite Duras: Trajectoires d’une écriture. Paris : Éditions Le

bord de l’eau, 2006.

Cocker, Emma. “Desiring to be Led Astray,” Papers of Surrealism, Issue 6, Autumn

2007. http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal6/index.htm

Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist

Revolution. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1993.

Collot, Michel. La Poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon. Paris : Presses

Universitaires de France, 1989.

Cranston, Mechthild, ed. In language and in Love: Marguerite Duras : the Unspeakable:

Essays for Marguerite Duras. Potomac, MD : Scripta Humanistica, 1992.

Dash, J. Michael. “Engagement, Exile and Errance : Some Trends in Haitian Poetry

1946-1986.” Callaloo 15.3 Haitian Literature and Culture, Part 2, (Summer

1992): 747-760.

______. “The Madman at the Crossroads : Delirium and Dislocation in

Caribbean Literature.” Profession (2002) : 37–43.

Debord, Guy. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” and “Theory of the

dérive,” in Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City. Eds.

Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de

Barcelona, 1996.

Deleuze, Gilles et Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Paris : Éditions de Minuit, 1980.

229

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore :

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Doiron, Normand. Errance et Méthode: Interpréter le déplacement d’Ulysse à Socrate.

Québec : Presses de l’Université Laval, 2011.

Druon, Michèle. « Le Miroir à deux faces : ambiguïtés de la figure du double dans

Détuire, dit-elle de Marguerite Duras. » Stanford French Review 9 (1985) : 223-

239.

Duras, Marguerite. Emily L. Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1987.

______. Le Marin de Gibraltar. Paris : Gallimard, 1952.

______. Practicalities : Marguerite Duras speaks to Jérôme Beaujour. Trans.

Barbara Bray New York : Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.

______. Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein. Paris : Gallimard, 1964.

______. Le Vice-consul. Paris : Gallimard, 1966.

Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952.

Fernandes, Martine. “Confessions d’une enfant du siècle: Nina Bouraoui ou la ‘batarde’

dans Garçon manqué et La Vie heureuse.” L’Esprit créateur 45.1 (Spring 2005) :

67-78.

Firchow, Peter Edgerly. “Nadja and Le Paysan de Paris: Two Surrealist ‘Novels.’”

Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 6.3 (Autumn 1965): 293-307.

Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.

Fourton, Maud. Marguerite Duras, une poétique de “l’en allé”. Dijon: Éditions

Universitaires de Dijon, 2008.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny,” Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Ed. David

230

Sandner. Westport, CT : Praeger, 2004.

Gasarian, Gérard “Ecriture de l’errance / Errance de l’écriture chez Bonnefoy.” L’Esprit

Créateur 36.3 (Fall 1996): 41-51.

Gascoyne, David. A Short Survey of Surrealism. London: Enitharmon Press, 2000.

Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1972.

Gindine, Yvette. « Structures du Paysan de Paris » in Les critiques de notre temps et

Aragon. Paris : Garnier Frères, 1976.

Glissant, Édouard. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

Godo, Emmanuel. Une histoire de la conversation. Paris : Presses Universitaires de

France, 2003.

Gouttebroze, Jean-Guy. « L’Expression de l’espace dans Le Vice-consul de M. Duras. »

Création de l'espace et narration littéraire : colloque international Nice-Séville,

6-7 mars 1997. Ed. Gérard Lavergne. Nice: Association des Publications de la

Faculté des Lettres de Nice, 1997.

Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

Harrington, Katharine. “Writing Between Borders: Nomadism and its Implications for

Contemporary French and Francophone Literature,” Contemporary French and

Francophone Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, April 2006, pp. 117-125.

Highmore, Ben, ed. The Everyday Life Reader. London: Routledge, 2002.

Hubert, Renée Riese. “The Coherence of Breton’s Nadja”, Contemporary Literature,

Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1969), pp. 241-252.

Johnson, Erica L. Home, Maison, Casa : The Politics of Location in Works by Jean

Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell'Oro. Cranbury, NJ: Associated

231

University Presses, 2003.

Kristeva, Julia. “Approaching Abjection,” Continental Aesthetics Reader. Ed. Clive

Cazeaux. Florence, KY: Routledge, 2000.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,”

Écrits: the First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, New York:

W.W. Norton & Co, Inc., 2006

Lefebvre, Henri. La Production de l’espace. Paris : Editions Anthropos, 1986.

Levinas, Emmanuel. On Escape. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2003.

Lusty, Natalya. “Surrealism’s banging door,” Textual Practice, 17(2), 2003, 335-356.

Malt, Johanna. Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2004.

Mazlish, Bruce. “The flâneur: from spectator to representation,” in Le Flâneur. Ed.

Keith Tester. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénomenologie de la perception. Paris : Gallimard, 1945.

Mistacco, Vicki. “Plus ça change … : The Crtical Reception of Emily L.” The French

Review 66.1 (October 1992): 77-88.

Mudimbe-Boyi, Elisabeth. “The Poetics of Exile and Errancy in Le Baobab fou by Ken

Bugul and Ti Jean L’Horizon by Simone Schwarz-Bart”. Yale French Studies

83.2 Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms (1993): 196-

212.

Narjoux, Cécile. Aragon: Le Paysan de Paris. Paris: Ellipses, 2002.

Noetinger, Élise. “At the Sharp End of Waiting: A Study of La Douleur by Marguerite

232

Duras.” L’Esprit Créateur XL.2 (Summer 2000) : 61-74.

Norindr, Panivong. “‘Errances’ and Memories in Marguerite Duras’s Colonial Cites”.

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 5.3 (1993) : 52-80.

Orlando, Valérie. « To Be Singularly Nomadic or a Territorialized National : At the

Crossroads of Francophone Women’s Writing of the Maghreb. » Meridians :

feminism, race, transnationalism 6.2 (2006) : 33-53.

Persson, Ann-Sofie. « Pluralité et fragmentation dans Garçon manqué de Nina

Bouraoui, » This « Self » Which is Not One : Women’s Life Writing in French.

Eds. Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK :

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.

Poe, Edgar Allen. « The Man of the Crowd », The Portable Poe. Ed. Philip Vand Doren

Stern. New York: Viking Press, 1973, (pp. 107-118).

Poiana, Peter. « Figures of Scandal in the Later Narratives of Marguerite Duras, »

Romantic Review. 93 (3). May 2002, pp. 323-40.

Ramsay, Raylene. “The Unself-loving Woman in Nathalie Sarraute’s Tu ne t’aimes pas,”

The French Review, Vol 67, No 5, April 1994. pp.793-802.

Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French

Culture. Cambridge, MA. : MIT Press, 1995.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. Paris : Librairie Générale

Française, 2001.

Scherhr, Lawrence. « Disloquations : de la communication durassienne, » Marguerite

Duras, la tentation du poétique. Paris : Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002.

Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. New York:

233

Ecco/HarperCollins, 2010.

Selao, Ching. « Porter l’Algérie : Garçon manqué de Nina Bouraoui. » L’Esprit

Créateur 45.3 (Fall 2005) : 74-84.

Sheringham, Michael. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the

Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

______. Ed. Parisian Fields. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1996.

Shields, Rob. Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics. New York : Routledge,

1999.

Signori, Lisa F. The Feminization of Surrealism: The Road to Surreal Silence in Selected

Works of Marguerite Duras. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2001.

Sng, Zachary. The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

University Press, 2010.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Smith, Douglas. “The Arcade as Haunt and Habitat: Aragon, Benjamin, Céline.”

Romance Studies 22 (1) (March 2004), 17-26.

Tester, Keith, ed. Le Flâneur. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Udris, Raynalle. Welcome Unreason: A Study of ‘Madness’ in the Novels of Marguerite

Duras. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi: 1993.

Vinaver, Eugène. A la recherché d’une poétique médiévale. Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1970.

Walker, Ian. City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in

Interwar Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Walz, Robin. Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century

Paris. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2000.

234

Wilkerson-Barker, Donna. The Space of the Screen in Contemporary French and

Francophone Fiction. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2003.

Williams, James S. The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later

Works of Marguerite Duras. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Willis, Sharon. Marguerite Duras : Writing on the Body. Chicago: University of Illinois

Press, 1987.

Winston, Jane Bradley. Postcolonial Duras : Cultural Memory in Postwar France. New

York : Palgrave, 2001.