Errance: Wandering and Straying in 20Th and 21St Century
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ERRANCE: WANDERING AND STRAYING IN 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE BY 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 © Copyright 2012 by Allison H. Fong 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. iv 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 v 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 2 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