The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

Department of French

SELF AND REFUSE: WASTE ON THE HUMAN SCALE IN 21ST-CENTURY FRENCH

ÉCRITURE DE SOI

A Dissertation in

French

by

Laura Kmonicek Call

 2016 Laura Kmonicek Call

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2016 ii

The dissertation of Laura Kmonicek Call was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Vincent Bruyère Assistant Professor of French at Emory University Committee Co-Chair & Dissertation Co-Advisor Special Member

Jennifer Boittin Associate Professor of French, Francophone Studies and History Committee Co-Chair & Dissertation Co-Advisor

Jean-Claude Vuillemin Liberal Arts Research Professor, Professor of French

Monique Yaari Professor of French Studies

Richard Doyle Liberal Arts Research Professor, Professor of English

Kathryn Grossman Professor of French Head of the Department of French & Francophone Studies

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

ABSTRACT

In the 21st century, when wastes from fossil fuel emissions to mega-landfills have become a central focus of global cooperative initiatives, it stands to reason that authors, artists, and filmmakers have come to include waste materials in their self-representative works. In a self- writing style corresponding with Michel Foucault’s description of écriture de soi, Annie Ernaux,

Agnès Varda, and Jean Rolin glean cultural materials from various sources including books, libraries, real-life events, oral histories, and interactions with others in waste zones ranging from official landfills to liminal zones of material and human abandon. Incorporating the materials and stories of people they gather there into their self-understandings they problematize waste for readers and viewers. Making visible the invisible assumptions of waste and waste-dependent communities, they question why individuals and nations display some materials as self- representative when those that they disguise may constitute individual and national treasures equally worthy of display. Their subversive archives challenge traditional end-of-life limits for materials and individuals in a century in which scientists and engineers turn to waste for resources to create healthy and sustainable societies. Their personal archives provoke questions about France’s national display spaces. Their Self-Writing models new possibilities for waste that recognize that it may be repulsive and obscene, but it is also informative and powerful in constituting human self-understanding.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... vi

Preface ...... vii

Acknowledgements ...... xii

Introduction Environmental Questions of Waste Materials and Self-Reflection ...... 1

Scientific and Cultural Waste Narratives: ...... 3 An Ontological Question ...... 8 Theoretical Context ...... 37 Cultural Context ...... 45 Literary Context ...... 50

Chapter 1 Displaying waste: Self-preservation with the archive, the landfill, and self- writing in Les Années ...... 72

Ernaux’s oeuvre...... 75 Fragmentation in Les années ...... 81 Waste Materials in Les années ...... 88 Conclusions ...... 115

Chapter 2 Reflecting Waste: Spaces in Between in Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse and Les Plages d’Agnès ...... 117

Varda’s Oeuvre ...... 119 Self-Writing Collections and Correspondance ...... 123 Liminal Spaces ...... 127 Framing Liminality ...... 130 Creating with Fragments ...... 143 Voice and Self-Reflection ...... 150 Conclusions ...... 156

Chapter 3 Locating Waste: Waste and Collective Self-Understanding in Jean Rolin’s La Clôture and Un Chien mort après lui ...... 157

Rolin’s Oeuvre ...... 159 Collective Self-Writing ...... 162 Heterotopia ...... 165 Waste Spaces ...... 172 Waste-Dependent Populations ...... 184 Self-Reflection in Waste ...... 191 Conclusions ...... 197

Conclusions ...... 198

v Bibliography...... 216

vi LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 0-1. Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendöme, comtesse de Boulogne et d'Auvergne………………...4

Figure 0-2. Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendöme, comtesse de Boulogne et d'Auvergne, detail……..…..4

Figure 0-3. Narcissus……………………...……………………………………………………...34

Figure 0-4. Narcissus After Caravaggio……………………...…………………………………..34

Figure 2-1. Screenshot of Gleaner………………………...…………………………………….135

Figure 2-2. Screenshot of Varda………………………...………………………………………135

Figure 2-3. Screenshot of Varda’s hand……………………………………..………………….139

Figure 2-4. Screenshot of potatoes………………………………………………………………139

Figure 2-5. Screenshot of crushed metal……………………………………………...…………147

Figure 2-6. Screenshot of plastic sheet…………………………………………...…………..…148

vii PREFACE

When materials become fixed cultural metaphors, we stop questioning them. Waste is one of these deeply ingrained metaphors, but I began to wonder about this when reading my partner’s work on microbial waste remediation, a double taboo of using microbes to treat waste water. For engineers in his field, waste is a resource and their ultimate goal is to rehabilitate it.

With this unique perspective I could read my primary sources with a gleaner’s eye and see new possibilities for waste in literature. Waste may not have appeared vital to my original proposal, which targeted transitional zones in nutrient cycles. As I read my corpus, however, the modern- day miracle of transforming waste to resource emerged as a global challenge with local implications on everyone’s daily lives. Coming from a background in Environmental Sciences, which deal largely in toxic and non-toxic waste management and remediation, I was already predisposed to consider waste’s impacts. Finally, as a parent I became aware of waste production’s central importance in our autobiographies.

Adults may be repulsed by waste materials, but children’s daily stories revolve largely around their biological waste production. Their personal habits are sources of drama, celebration, power struggles, and myriad other quotidian narratives. At some point, our lives take on more diverse narrative patterns, but in the beginning it is all about waste production, and for good reason. First, societies value the productive capacities of their members and very small children are incapable of “producing” anything else. Second, regular biological waste production is also a sign of good health, and children’s parents are highly concerned by their health. This object of cultural disgust is equally a sign of life. Ambiguous and paradoxical, waste of all kinds requires years of cultural education to properly identify and handle. Even basic objects like an old sneaker in the road are difficult to classify—it may be waste in the West but a new shoe in another culture or even a work of art for a photographer.

viii In Les Mots et les choses, when Michel Foucault introduces Jorge Luis Borges’ Chinese dictionary’s classification of animals, he discusses this description’s enchanting impossibility.

Foucault describes the difficulty individuals with aphasia have in organizing materials on a table that seem to have an obvious classification to those around them. Science and philosophy attempt to make visible this invisible system, which varies over time and across cultures. If, for example, you are unfamiliar with the classification of trees, you may look at a forest and see a green mass of leaves. When you learn the types of trees, this mass becomes a legible surface on which you can distinguish different varieties that in turn indicate the kinds of soil, types of sunlight, amount of moisture, and species of animals present around the tree. Parents spend the first years of their children’s lives building the equivalent cultural classification systems for them. For a child, everything is the green mass and she must rely on those around her to break down the mass into a legible surface with underlying implications.

Waste objects are particularly difficult to identify from this mass, and children test the underlying system structure through touch and taste. In the 21st century, among the most common early classifications conveyed to children is “clean” or “dirty.” One hears parents say all the time, “don’t touch/eat that; it’s dirty.” Exasperated, they cannot comprehend why their children would pick up a bit of chewed gum from the floor of a public restroom and eat it. There is an entire structure that is violated by what may appear to the child to be a very simple act of ingesting a tasty treat. For the parent, there is a world of danger visible in this act, a lifetime of internalized order challenged. In previous times or other places, the repulsion this act generates may have been the equivalent of a child eating an unidentified berry or sharing food with a child from a different social class or race.

Ingesting improper items carries greater significance than touching not only due to the real physical danger involved but due to the implications of incorporating polluting materials into the body and self. Allowing unnatural or impure objects to enter the child’s body risks

ix contaminating the purity with which we associate children’s bodies and minds. A food item on the table is for eating, but on the floor it may be considered waste depending on whether the floor is publicly owned or private, or on whether or not an additional food source is available. For a child, the food on the table, on the floor, and in the trash is all the same food. Even more, that food may be indistinguishable from non-food items, such as small crunchy seashells, rubber bands, paper towels, or deer feces. Children must learn not only what materials are edible, but also where it is appropriate to find these materials. Without a system in place, children must be constantly observed or their environment secured in order to prevent injury or death from ingestion of harmful materials until the system has been verifiably confirmed.

Until then, the parent or community provides the support structure to prevent danger. The difference between clean and dirty or edible and trash is one of the most challenging things to teach because this qualification can depend on a whole matrix or network of variables that when considered in their entirety determine what falls into one category or the other, and this determination may vary from person to person even in the same culture. Even food on the table is not entirely safe, for example if a sick child sneezes or coughs on the food of a healthy child, unless this is the only food available or the sneeze is not observed by the parents. In any event, imagine a child trying to comprehend and internalize this logic, to properly “perform” waste in their communities. The same difficult considerations take place for adults confronted with materials that are difficult to categorize as clean or dirty, resource or waste. The only clear delineation appears to be their placement in a designated waste space, a culturally-designated space of material disambiguation. Outside that space, a material is dangerous, difficult to categorize, and part of the unidentifiable green mass.

These spaces, however, are not secure. In the 21st century, scientists have moved from waste containment and isolation to harvest. They are giving new life to materials that would have once been considered beyond salvation. Some authors and filmmakers in France are doing the

x same. Annie Ernaux, Agnès Varda, and Jean Rolin reposition waste in non-waste spaces. They introduce readers to alternate classification systems and force them to question their own as they redeem waste for self-expression. Through materials found on the sidewalk to human bodies, living and dead, the waste in their autobiographies pose difficult questions about French and global relations to waste and those associated with it. How does French culture regard and classify these materials in the 21st century? How has that regard and system changed in the years since climate change and natural resource scarcity have caused scientists and engineers to recategorize many large-scale, 20th-century waste materials as resources? Does this impact small- scale waste treatment in individual and collective self-representative spaces? How have French authors and filmmakers reappropriated waste to represent themselves in novel ways?

There is a reason, however, that waste is so deeply embedded in cultural metaphor—it is all around is, part of life, and an intimate reflection of health, productivity, and human being. It challenges feelings of superiority to other animals by reminding us of our own intimate connection to nature and the material world. As a reminder of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, waste to waste, only our humanity gives us the grace to turn waste to resource. Returning to a classical and intimate use of waste as a metaphor for human finitude, moral decrepitude, and emptiness, the famous French orator, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, called on rotting flesh to make a point in his

Easter Sermon sur la mort. As Bossuet opened Lazarus’s tomb to the 17th-century French aristocracy to show them the revolting remnants of human life in his time, these authors force

21st-century readers to see the waste that their living leaves behind. End-of-life materials, “fidèle miroir des choses humaines,” force reflection on our personal and collective material legacy.

Waste, like death, is not an abstraction, but a reality we all face whether in accepting responsibility for our excessive waste production or for coming to terms with our own material end in the human landfill of the cemetery. Landfills and literature alike reflect a culture’s values and systems of classification and are spaces to “contemple(r) le spectacle des choses mortelles.”

xi It makes sense to turn to literature about waste sites for insight into collective attitudes toward waste and their impact on individual behaviors toward waste materials and people often associated with them both through physical location and metaphorical language. And, while we explore an expanded role for waste materials in self-understanding and self-representation, we may come to find that our waste production and participation in the earth’s perpetual nutrient cycles grants us access to a greater life legacy than our actions and linguistic traces can guarantee.

That is, while Bossuet saw the material body as an impediment to eternal life, it is through our material bodies and supplements to our being amassing in waste spaces that the stories of our lives will perpetuate. If for Bossuet it was through the word of the Lord, through language, that humans would be resuscitated, granted eternal life, today that miracle is questioned. Rather it is our material bodies and supplements buried, returned to dust, and transformed into new life that we will resurrect in new cycles of matter. Words will not last as languages evolve and humans disappear, but our material legacy will remain entombed in the earth or repurposed in the matter of the cosmos. While Bossuet implored his audience to witness a tomb in its emptiness proving eternal life, I invite you to explore landfills and waste burial sites as spaces for self-reflection that in their fullness grant everlasting life:

Accourez donc, ô mortels, et voyez dans le tombeau de Lazare ce que c’est que

l’humanité: venez voir dans un même objet la fin de vos desseins et le commencement de

vos espérances; venez voir tout ensemble la dissolution et le renouvellement de votre

être; venez voir le triomphe de la vie dans la victoire de la mort: Veni et vide.

xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To a recent inquiry from a potential Penn State grad student, I responded that I would not be where I am without the intellectual and material support of the Department of French and

Francophone Studies. I would like to express my gratitude to the committee for reading through my various projects. I appreciate all your input, suggestions, and patience as I have gathered the materials for this project. In particular, thank you to Dr. Bruyère for his questions, comments, and insights that helped me focus my work. Thank you also to my two academic mentors, Jennifer

Boittin and Sandrine Siméon, for continually encouraging me to demand more for myself in my professional life. Thank you to Dr. Vuillemin for introducing me Michel Foucault work, which changed the way I view the world. Thank you to Dr. Yaari for teaching me to think about the role of space in our daily lives. Logistically, this dissertation would not have been possible without my husband’s persistent material, physical, and emotional support. I am also grateful to my in- laws for their time caring for our family through our many transitions in the last few years. Thank you to my mother for encouraging me to be independent and question everything and my father for showing me how to appreciate being alive and the people I love, and to both of you for your consistent support of my intellectual development. Finally, thank you to my Grandfather, John

Francis Thomas, who selflessly demonstrated the importance of challenging established cultural and medical practices that harm the people we love. Essentially, thank you for teaching me that the best practices are healthy and kind rather than normal.

Introduction

Environmental Questions of Waste Materials and Self-Reflection

J’analyse les figures et les processus obscurs pour deux raisons : les processus politiques et sociaux qui ont permis la mise en ordre des sociétés de l’Europe de l’Ouest ne sont pas très apparents, ont été oubliés ou sont devenus habituels. Ces processus font partie de notre paysage le plus familier et nous ne les voyons plus. Or, pour la plupart, ils ont, un jour scandalisé des gens. L’un de mes buts est de montrer aux gens que bon nombre des choses qui font partie de leur paysage familier—qu’ils considèrent comme universelles—sont le produit de certains changements historiques bien précis. Toutes mes analyses vont contre l’idée de nécessités universelles dans l’existence humaine. Elles soulignent le caractère arbitraire des institutions et nous montrent de quel espace de liberté nous disposons encore, quels sont les changements qui peuvent encore s’effectuer. --Michel Foucault

Since the material turn in cultural studies, stuff matters.1 Things and materials have profound meaning and influence in human lives and cultures. Beyond the pages of scholarly journals and scientific and political discourse a growing abundance of things threatens to snuff out human culture and life. Humans have a practical problem of too much stuff that it no longer wants or needs, in other words, waste. Everyone wants a solution from the public to politicians, scientists, and artists. So far, societies have explored a variety of technical solutions including

1 For more on the material turn and Thing Theory, see (Appadurai; Bennett; Brown; Daston; Freedgood; Miller; Trentmann; Alaimo; Bennett and Joyce; Iovino and Oppermann; Levinson; Morrison; Phillips and Sullivan; Sullivan; Breu)

2 recycling, biodegradable products, and resource harvest from waste sites. What if in addition to these needed solutions we explore an ontological solution?

Waste, despite its very real impacts on individuals’ social realities, is not a mere thing.

Gay Hawkins argues, rather, that “Waste … is an effect of classification and relations” (The

Ethics of Waste 2). In this sense, I argue, waste is a flexible category, a remnant of 19th- and

20th-centuries' industrial linear epistemologies, a myth reinforced by spatial practices. This myth, however, has ethical implications for people's social and material lives. The French and other

Western cultures disguise waste with special systems for its removal and containment in spaces similar to a type of space described by Michel Foucault as Heterotopia. In this type of

Heterotopia, French society also hides “other” groups that detract from the linear, production- focused thinking of the industrial age, such as the elderly, the insane, the unemployed, or the undocumented. On the contrary, in another type of Heterotopia, French society displays valuable cultural materials, such as books, arts, artifacts, and public documents.

The authors I study, Annie Ernaux, Agnès Varda, and Jean Rolin, take waste out of its hiding places and bring it into display space in way that forces the public to confront the spatial divisions (Heterotopia) that reinforce the categories of exclusion that industrial society created to make productivity and growth the highest values (i.e. if it is not useful, if you cannot make something from it or with it, then it needs to be excluded so it does not get in the way of production). Through display in literature and film, they reverse waste’s negativity, give value to the valueless, and debunk the myth of linear lives for everything from products to people, reflecting the evolving networked, collaborative, and cyclical ecological epistemologies of the

21st century. The above authors’ work focuses on groups of excluded people and objects that do not serve industrial economies and societies. In their self-writing, they question how society treats them and others like them as trash (excluded, silenced, hidden, buried) and, rather than continuing to use waste to represent filth, loss, and emptiness, reverse and embrace (or reappropriate) its

3 negative stereotypes to give value not only to waste but to themselves and others associated with waste. In this ethical act of giving value to the undervalued, they risk sacrificing their own careers by accepting the rejected in their work. And yet, this risk enriches their work and public waste perceptions as it reflects modern waste use as a potential resource for raw materials and creative ingenuity.

While waste’s role in literature has been studied in American and English literature, I propose to observe such influences in both the literary and spatial practices of a nation highly implicated in global discussions of waste management and environmental ethics—France.2

Specifically, I will examine the personal narratives of individuals who relate to waste literally or metaphorically in a hybrid study linking French cultural attitudes to waste and environmental elemental cycles with their literary manifestations in the non-fictional genre of écriture de soi.3

This will be the first study to point to an evolving metaphorical role for waste in self- representative French texts, and will thus further integrate Ecocriticism into mainstream French

Studies at a time when environmental challenges confront all nations.

Scientific and Cultural Waste Narratives:

Among all the questions Ecocritics raise, why is waste an important issue to address? Waste, I argue, is a physical shibboleth cultures use to determine humans from nature and distance some human groups from one another. The more one interacts with waste, the more one is tainted by it, the less human one seems, and the more disposable one seemingly becomes. And yet, being is a dirty business. We push waste away, but must keep producing it in order to survive. As much as

2 For more on waste in American and English literature see (S. Morrison; Buell; Schmidt; Bragard; Brantlinger and Higgins; Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste; Cahill, Hegarty, and Morin; S. S. Morrison; Phillips and Sullivan; van Wyck; Soper; Packard; “The Discard Studies Blog”; “Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage”; Yaeger; Hawkins, “Documentary Affect”; Allison; Strasser; Allen; Sullivan). 3 I attend to the theoretical possibilities of genre and non-fiction in later sections of the Introduction.

4 humans may try to deny their materiality, it cannot be avoided. One could argue that arts have been the preferred tool for this denial in that clothing, make-up, visual arts, and narrative, among others, disguise our bodies, blemishes, and finitude.4 For example, Egyptian funerary arts from bodily preservation and decoration to visual narratives of the afterlife and portraits on burial shrouds combatted the decomposition of human flesh. At times, however, these very arts also remind us that we will nonetheless continue to sweat, smell, produce all manner of filth, and degrade. In Figures 0-1 and 0-2 below, for example, a medieval French sculptor employed funerary arts not to preserve Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendöme’s corporeality but rather to prefigure her dematerialization in cycles of life.

Fig. 0-1. Jeanne de Bourbon- Fig. 0-2. Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendöme, Vendöme, comtesse de Boulogne comtesse de Boulogne et d'Auvergne, detail. et d'Auvergne. 1511. Stone. Musée 1511. Stone. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo- du Louvre, Paris. Photography by graphy by P. Philibert. P. Philibert.

4 See Timothy Luke’s argument later in the Introduction that the arts exacerbate the environmental crisis when used as tools to drive consumerism.

5

While its role in the arts may evolve, it continues to be that our very existence depends on the physical ability to create waste—to consume materials and expulse their inassimilable components from our bodies. While we generate this mess individually, unless we participate collectively in processes of its removal and containment, it accumulates around us and threatens our survival.

Sciences and cultures posit manifold and divergent waste narratives. In the physical sciences, the principle of mass conservation states that mass within a closed system cannot be created or destroyed, but rather reconstituted. As a result, matter within that system is never wasted and is continually repurposed. Waste in such systems is nothing but purposeless matter awaiting reformulation. As the planetary population grows and consumerism takes root in existing cultures, waste expands beyond the confines of human systems that contain it, and many researchers have sought methods to accelerate waste matter’s repurposing.5

From a cultural perspective, we try to distance ourselves from waste and material decomposition. We create narratives to talk our way out of our bodies, separating mind from matter. And yet, every biotic and abiotic entity decomposes over time to become what we call waste. While the time scale may vary among organic and inorganic materials, nothing escapes this certainty. Human cultures spend much of their time avoiding or actively fighting this process in landscapes, foods, and commodities as well as physical bodies. We have in fact created rituals and special spaces for disguising and preventing decomposition. We have esthetic and medical treatments for the signs of aging, funerals to mourn the dead, preservatives and refrigeration to combat rot, garbage collection and disposal regimens to remove and isolate waste, and treatment processes to manage excrement. We rely on science and engineering to do this in clinics, homes

5 These are not technically “closed” systems, and therefore, the principle no longer applies.

6 for the aging, funeral parlors, warehouses, landfills, and water treatment plants. We designate certain individuals to interact with decomposing materials: some with special training, others willing or obligated to operate within zones of social taboo. From this perspective, cultural discourses surrounding waste tend to be decidedly negative.

In a 2013 article that summarizes her 2015 book The Literature of Waste: Material

Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter, Susan Signe Morrison writes, “Various artists over the 20th century dealt with waste concepts in their work. They played on negative perceptions of waste, phobias, taboos, and prescriptive practices to create either arts external to themselves or self- reflexive arts that rendered their “inward spiritual being as ‘a waste’ or ‘wasted’ and meaningless” (466). Consider, for example, the many literary works in which waste causes or symbolizes societal division, alienation, and disgust. In French, authors and artists, including

Céline, Perec, Dubuffet, Duras, Baudelaire, Zola, Rabelais, Bossuet, and Beckett, have all employed waste materials and wasting bodies as symbols or vehicles for conveying negative thoughts or feelings to their audiences.6 Sander Gilman describes “the function of visual conventions as the primary means by which we perceive and transmit our understanding of the world about us” (204), especially in the arts in which, “the ideologically charged iconographic nature of the representation dominates” (204). Gilman explains that these representations synthesize uniform classes of individuals that become stereotypes that ascribe shared qualities to a class, and “the myth of difference from the rest of humanity, is thus, to an extent, composed of

6 Gilman goes on to explain that “These myths are often so powerful, and the associations of their conventions so overpowering, that they are able to move from class to class without substantial alteration. In linking otherwise marginally or totally unrelated classes of individuals, the use of these conventions reveals perceptual patterns which themselves illuminate the inherent ideology at work. While the discussion of the function of conventions has helped reveal the essential iconographic nature of all visual representation, it has mainly been limited to a specific sphere-aesthetics. And although the definition of the aesthetic has expanded greatly in the past decade to include everything from decoration to advertising, it continues to dominate discussions of visual conventions. Patterns of conventions are established within the world of art or between that world and parallel ones, such as the world of literature, but they go no farther. We maintain a special sanctity about the aesthetic object which we deny to the conventions of representation in other areas” (205).

7 fragments of the real world, perceived through the ideological bias of the observer” (204). Classes associated with waste either literally, as in gleaners, or metaphorically, as in the homeless, sexworkers, or the ageing, get caught in the exclusionary spatial practices related to the material with which they are identified.

With global conversations about waste in the environment at the forefront of international policy, now is a critical time to study waste’s metaphorical role in our individual lives. In the 21st century, while scientific cultures seek novel modes of waste management that treat waste as resource, forward-looking artists challenge cultural treatments of waste and growing waste- dependent populations. The authors’ and filmmaker’s works I study incorporate waste into self- understanding, viewing waste not as an object to reject but as a mirror for individual and collective self-reflection. The effect is not revulsion but identification as the authors transform waste into a resource for self-understanding and self-representation. In this manner, waste’s metaphorical role moves from rejection and otherness to acceptance and sameness. This, I argue, is a new paradigm for waste perception at a crucial moment in environmental history.

Ecocriticism, a theory that approaches literature with environmental questions in mind, informed my inquiry into waste practices and governs my approach to the subject. Within this field, my work focuses most clearly on the effects of a specific material, waste, that I see having agentic capacity in individual and collective human relations; this places my work more precisely within Material Ecocriticism. One main question in this field treats ethical implications of material practices, here namely waste production, storage, and burial’s impact on human beings.

As ethical leaders in global environmental initiatives, French culture produces not only legislation and accords addressing waste’s environmental and human impact but also literature probing personal waste experiences. The top-down waste-behavior legislation France has implemented, such as recycling regimes, must take root in individual practices that recategorize and revalue waste material. To be successful, it must create new meaning and symbolism associated with

8 waste materials and interactions with them that carry beyond basic organizational gestures into personal and public practices of self. Therefore, this dissertation looks to French self-writing, a space in which humans grapple with and enact self-understanding, to examine changing dynamics in practices of waste and self in a century and a nation focused on environmental change. Annie

Ernaux, Agnès Varda, and Jean Rolin make visible the ethical implications of hiding waste as they challenge cultural assumptions and practices that harm individuals and collectives in French society. As they gather nationally valuable cultural materials from display spaces, such as archives, museums, and libraries, and blend them with waste materials in their ethnological self- writing, they encourage readers and viewers to see what they may have seen as waste as a resource for individual and collective creativity and ethical action.

This introduction lays the contextual and theoretical groundwork for subsequent chapters, including the ontological, cultural, aesthetic, historical, literary, scientific, and theoretical background to the thesis that waste in contemporary literature is evolving.

An Ontological Question

What is waste?

Trash, rubbish, garbage, misuse, emissions, inefficiency, surplus, effluent, junk, leftovers, decay, expenditure, loss, ruin, excess … 7 While we may have a wide range of synonyms for waste, the word resists definition. Simply looking at this list one wonders, how can excess also be loss? expenditure result in leftovers? The word’s synonyms contradict themselves and challenge their

7 In French, the words and concepts I examined were les déchets, les dégats, la vieillesse, vieux, vieille, âgé, ancien, usé, d’occasion, les ordures, la poubelle, la pourriture, les sottises, la boue, l’éboueur, le détritus, un tas, une décharge, pourri, délabré, jeté, abandonné, les rebuts, décomposé, la decomposition, and décrépit.

9 own meaning. How can we study such a centerpiece of human existence if we do not know definitively what it is? Is it a worn sneaker? a broken bottle? a plastic grocery bag? Forty years ago, these were all definitively waste, but as donation centers and recycling have spread around the world, what was once waste must now be sorted, washed, separated, and stored in spaces separate from “true” waste, such as kitchen scraps—oh, but wait, many of those belong in the compost bin, so they are not waste either. Even once recycling and other materials that appear to be definitively waste are out on the street, someone may come along to harvest some of them for re-sale. In a history of household waste, Dany Dietmann explains that “il n’est pas nécessaire de remonter bien loin dans notre histoire pour retrouver les fermes du milieu du siècle dernier dans lesquelles la notion de déchet n’existait pas” (13). Classifying waste materials is largely a matter of individual and societal opinions and choices. Whole societies institute waste management regimes that individuals enact through daily practices of self. In short, waste materials exist outside human meaning systems just as material bodies exist outside gendered and racialized meaning systems; it is not until they are assigned meaning that they are incorporated into those systems where they can be taken up by disciplines who create “truths” and discourses about them and societies begin “performing” them according to prescribed behaviors.

Despite this, we know that waste has weight, power, and meaning in society. It signifies danger, taboo, interdiction, toxicity, exile, and much more. Véronique Bragard argues that “Waste becomes a powerful type of matter that mutates, modulates, transforms both humans and their habitat and needs to be studied in its relationality” (460). Indeed, in a world that Michel Foucault describes as a great network of relations (“Des Espaces Autres” 752), waste as it crisscrosses the globe in various human and non-human networks certainly connects humanity on many scales.

These scales presented perhaps the greatest challenge in describing the scope of my work.

For many readers, an ecocritical dissertation about waste should address the 21st-century challenges of carbon waste, air pollution, and nuclear waste. These large-scale systems as a

10 whole, however, are not the central focus of my work as they are not for the authors and filmmaker studied. Large time- and space-scale nuclear waste, carbon emissions, and industrial waste elude individual self-writing. How does one capture nuclear waste or the enormity of carbon dioxide emissions in one’s life? How does one hold industrial waste in one’s hands?

Impossible. Rather one can interact with household waste, bodily waste, and food waste in manifold ways; indeed, one is forced to do so to participate in society, which determines what waste is under what conditions. While I will briefly consider these broader questions in the conclusion, the texts I study relate more directly to more closely human-scale waste materials, including bodily wastes, encounters with food waste, and consumer products and their dialectical relationships with waste management systems. I do discuss a single process in larger biogeochemical cycles, decomposition, to demonstrate how taking a wider cyclical view of materials’ lifecycles can obviate their status as resource, but my main interest is the authors’ experimentation with waste’s generative capacities on individual scales that resonate with science and engineering’s shift toward harvesting resources from waste on a societal scale.

Every society constructs frameworks for managing waste, even if those frameworks are minimal, and these structures evolve over time. For example, some nations have little to no waste management in place and local populations determine how and where to dispose of materials according to local cultural knowledge. In other nations, by contrast, waste practices are more disciplined. Such societies incorporate waste management into law, as is the case in France.

While there are still cultural norms then associated with waste practices, the state helps determine what those practices are and how they will be enforced.

Individuals, however, must approach small-scale waste on their own. They may receive guidance from society and government, but each time they make a choice of what to discard and how to discard it, they are making a personal choice that will influence society’s perception of them and their own feelings about themselves. If they choose to accumulate waste in their homes,

11 they will put off a certain image to visitors of being dirty or dangerous. If they choose to hold on to clothing or household goods even after they are out-of-date, they will also be sending a particular message to those around them about their economic status or values. For example, they may be demonstrating a concern for the planet rather than the latest trends or they may be showing that they place greater value on other aspects of their life than their appearance.

Whereas, if they treat useful goods or foods as waste by removing them from their personal or living space, they are conveying another meaning about the value of those materials in their lives.

In any case, how an individual chooses to interact with waste materials sends a message to those around them.

Waste’s message-carrying capacity makes it apt for use in literary texts. Just as an individual in their daily life may choose what materials they want others to observe in their living spaces to convey an image of self, an autobiographer will do the same. Sometimes, as is the case for the authors studied here, an autobiographer may include waste in a self-description or event to send a particular message to the reader. While waste materials have frequently been hidden from the self-writing text or used to create negative images, I argue that those in this dissertation demonstrate how waste can be a sign of life and cycle through communities in beneficial ways, and decomposition can be creative.

Life cycle assessment and nutrient cycles describe material cycling in large systems from a point of synthesis to a point of decomposition. This linear narrative rendering of a cyclical and web-like material process provokes a comparison with the Western human life trajectory, in which decomposition is the last step of materiality. What if, as the texts indicate at times, human lives are not linear, but web-like as well? In Annie Ernaux’s Les Années, phases of her life cycle from a photo through lists of memories and an ultimate return to the family table. Agnès Varda’s

Les Plages d’Agnès equally cycles through phases of her life returning at each phase to the beach.

Rolin’s work cycles around and around through time and space as well, creating complex webs of

12 human and material relations. In the texts, it appears that human material participation in the environment from social to physical is a cycling of experience, a consumption, and regeneration.

My initial dissertation proposal sought to work through all cycle transformation zones to observe how matter functions in French literature. Upon examining the specific step of decomposition in the texts, I found waste material’s liminal status between one state and the next intriguing. This is where a vital role for space, as physical liminality is spatially defined, began to germ. As a resource, waste is both a literal resource for physical nourishment, artistic endeavor, or alternative income and a figurative resource for self-understanding and self-representation.

Others of waste’s attributes linked it to Ecocriticism’s search for intersections between nature and culture, including: waste’s liminal status between human creation and nature’s appropriation after its abandonment, waste’s burial and degradation in the earth like the human body, waste’s linguistic association with marginalized populations whom many cultures associate with nature and dirt (the homeless, sexworkers, children, the elderly), waste’s direct relationship to climate change through methane production during decomposition, and engineering’s 21st-century pivot to waste to replace primary resources. Given waste’s liminal and subjective status (waste varies by culture, depends on perspective, and adjusts to resource availability), I sought to clearly define waste before beginning my project. For this, I returned to biogeochemical cycles, a subfield of

Environmental Science.

While I wanted a picture of waste to emerge organically from the questions elicited by the texts, I realized that without imposing some limits on the targeted concept, the analysis could become muddled. In her article on interdisciplinary research, Mieke Bal advises that variations concept meaning should be assessed upon moving from one discipline to another (Bal). As I intended to work with scientific and artistic notions of waste, I had to explore how waste behaved in both areas. Complicating the matter in a dissertation about French literature written in English,

13 it is important to consider how some concepts vary not only within general disciplines but from one language/culture to another.

There was one scientific perspective on waste among many that coincided with my textual observations. Environmental Science is an interdisciplinary science that blends the fields of Ecology, Hydrology, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Atmospheric Science,

Geography, and Soil Science to study relationships within and among life systems and cycles.

Within Environmental Science is the study of biogeochemical cycles, including the somewhat familiar water and nitrogen cycles, as well as the well-known and sometimes controversial carbon cycle.8 A biogeochemical cycle is a pathway for elements to move through biotic and abiotic earth compartments to provide necessary life materials. In these cycles, microbes constantly compose, decompose, and recompose all matter, with no physical waste (only entropy or energy wasted via these processes). Materials that we might refer to as waste, from water bottles to bodies, are in fact resources that microbes use for their metabolic processes while simultaneously creating new matter for other purposes. Decomposition transforms “waste” into new materials and is “the process of breaking down organic material, such as dead plant or animal tissue, into smaller molecules that are available for use by the organisms of an ecosystem”

(“Decomposition”). From this perspective, decomposition is both negative and positive: it breaks something down but also builds something up. When allowed to function with no external interference, these cycles self-sustain because there is no waste that is not simultaneously a resource.9

8 Over the last few decades, nutrient cycles have moved to the forefront of environmental debate. This began with concerns about the carbon cycle’s role in climate change. Recently, attention has turned to the water and phosphorus cycles, as these are poised to become the rare nutrients of the twenty-first century.

9 I do not wish to ignore the real threat that some toxic waste may have. Even toxicity, however, is dependent upon concentration and location, a question of framing.

14 As parts of cycles, nutrients appear to move infinitely through time and space, bringing a beauty to decomposition processes, because through nutrient cycling what appears finite takes on infinite possibilities of reconstitution. There is no endpoint and so there is no waste. Of course, a material may appear to be in a waste state for some time before it becomes a resource, but perhaps not. For example, leaf litter in the forest (notice the word litter) appears to be tree waste at the end of the growing season, but as it falls it immediately protects the soil from erosion and insulates smaller vegetation against cold/frost and on the longer term (years, decades) returns nutrients to the soil beneath, feeds the microbes that fix nitrogen, aerates soils, etc. In this scenario, we can see “end-of-life” materials as guarantors or investments in future life and community well-being.

We can contrast this perspective with the cultural, social, or individual categorizations of waste in the human context. What is waste depends on what technologies and systems are available to manage byproducts, packaging, end-of-life products, biological productions

(toileting, etc.), inedible parts of foods, and whatever other materials we no longer need or want in our living space. For example, if there is no system set up to facilitate recycling, materials that could be recycled will become waste. What’s more, with bodily waste and some other types of waste, cultural attitudes toward those materials may impact their treatment and definition. That is, a material’s status as waste depends entirely on the social, cultural, and situational context in which it appears, and within those different contexts it serves as a vehicle for culturally- constructed meanings. What may be waste to one individual, culture, or society may not be waste to another, and the meaning that material carries will also vary. This perspective complements

Mary Douglas’s observation in 1966 that dirt, like so many other human categories, is a performance. In other words, dirt, what we call dirt, and in what contexts we call it dirt carries meaning, influences social perceptions, and individual behaviors. Individuals and societies understand these meanings and use dirt to communicate or interpret messages. What is dirt is the

15 result of human behaviors towards a material based on a complex network of material and human relationships.

The same is true of waste in society. We know what waste is based on the actions, attitudes, and behaviors of those around us. Based on these observations, we in turn perform the same actions, attitudes, and behaviors toward similar materials in similar contexts. When technological changes arise that change the attitudes or performance we should have when faced with certain materials, educational literature or advertising (i.e. social exchange of information) facilitates changes in social behaviors to coincide with new waste systems. For example, when toileting facilities move indoors, there are public campaigns to encourage the use of indoor plumbing because what is waste, what it means, and how humans treat it are culturally embedded.

In the 19th century, “although people in France were aware of British legislation, in effect since

1855, requiring all waste to be evacuated through the sewers, they regarded this practice as a terrible waste; it not only consumed vast quantities of water but also deprived farmers of valuable resource” (370). Even today, in India where MP and writer Shashi Tharoor says Indians “are a nation full of people who live in immaculate homes where we bathe twice a day, but think nothing of littering public spaces, spitting on walls, dumping garbage in the open and urinating and defecating in public, because those spaces are not ‘ours’” (Biswas). Or, when composting programs arrive on college campuses, signage and posters help students change their waste definitions to properly conserve and place compostable materials.

Scientists, from physicians to civil engineers, help societies and cultures shape their waste definitions and performances. The arts of narrative and design help communicate those changes to the public which may accept or resist such changes. Together, they co-construct and influence not only what waste is, but what meaning is communicated through waste practices.

Recent efforts in engineering and design have opened doors to new ways of interacting with and performing waste. For example, recent technologies that manage to produce useful energy and

16 other products from “waste” offer hope for sustainable solutions to resource depletion, such as the urine diversion toilet that collects phosphorus- and nitrogen-rich urine for agricultural applications. 10

Biogeochemical cycles, however, are just one scientific narrative—all systems do not treat waste as beneficial. Even biogeochemical cycles consider excessive production of any material or product as waste. For example, excess carbon dioxide in the carbon cycle that cannot be a resource for plants can become toxic waste. In such cases, over more-than-human time spans, systems and cycles adapt to recapture excess. From science to science and from system to system therein waste in various forms can be beneficial, harmful, or non-existent. Waste performance in each system takes place on varying time and space scales, and while these compounds decompose their liminal state can be dangerous, even toxic.

Large scales of material cycling that are invisible to the human eye and human life time informed my reading of waste in French écriture de soi. Such cycles are incompatible with human perception of time and space and could not contribute to knowledge generated in texts based on individual human experiences. That is, autobiography can only attend to the human scale of waste. On this scale, science can confirm the performativity of waste. Biogeochemical cycles help me contemplate waste’s possible associations with infinity rather than mortality, but cannot help me define and identify waste in literature. While influenced by various sciences, the definition of waste and the meaning it carries is cultural and is performed on an individual scale.

10 William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue that the global community finds itself in an environmental crisis because of faulty designs of modern technology. Along every stage of design, manufacture, and use of our current products, dwellings, and tools there are negative environmental impacts that work against the natural systems that have evolved sustainably on our planet over millions of years, as opposed to positive environmental impacts that work within, improve, enhance or support these same sustainable systems. If we were to change the way we design our products, cities, services, etc. we would not need to worry as much about conserving energy, consuming less, or decreasing population growth because we would be working with the planet instead of against it. The basis of their argument and an important chapter in their book is “Waste Equals Food.” A variety of technologies have made use of this idea since long before this book, such as anaerobic digesters on cattle farms, methane recapture from landfills, energy creation from wastewater, etc.

17 The lessons I learned about waste as a potential resource would continue to undergird my thinking, but I concluded that biogeochemical time and space scales would be not exactly beyond the scope but rather secondary to this dissertation. These definitions and descriptions extend well beyond the individual human, and while the primary texts I study have implications for other scales, smaller-scale wastes (microscopic industrial byproducts cycling through the earth’s compartments and animal/human bodies, etc.) and larger-scale wastes (masses of carbon emissions, industrial waste, etc.) are not their primary concern. As such, while I seek a dialogue between these scales I largely limit discussion of the non-human scale to conclusions.

On an individual scale, behind daily waste practices lie deeply embedded cultural practices of self. According to Gay Hawkins’s The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish, she argues that “Styles of waste disposal are also styles of self and …practices of subjectivity” that “impose ethical and aesthetic order” (The Ethics of Waste 4). Partitioning off undesired associations maintains an aesthetic order in the individual environments that reinforce our self- understandings and represent us to others. Mary Douglas explains that when using materials to represent ourselves, we “behave as if moving in patterned positions in relation to others, and as if choosing between possible patterns of relations” (123). If what we choose to discard also helps define who we are, then by exclusion we demonstrate what we include in our ideas of ourselves.

Each author in this dissertation challenged this notion in a different way by including waste materials in self-writing. They remind society that, even though typically hidden, the materials, acts, and individuals we exclude from ourselves still contribute to our self-understandings, whether we wish to acknowledge them or not.

On a collective scale, governments enact waste management regimes that have trickle- down impacts on individual waste performances. In France, for example, “la loi du 15 juillet 1975 précise qu’un déchet est tout résidu d’un processus de production, de transformation ou d’utilisation, toute substance, matériau ou produit ou plus généralement, tout bien meuble

18 abandonné ou que son détenteur destine à l’abandon” (Turlan 5). The French law, therefore, that defines waste, recognizes the role that individual perception and personal choice plays in determining what materials are and are not waste when it notes that its waste status derives from its possessor’s intention to abandon it. Changing technologies impact waste definitions, for example le code de l’environnement later made subcategories of waste, including les déchets ultimes (article L.541-1 c. env.), which are unsalvageable landfill-destined materials, and les déchets inertes (L.541-30-1 and R.541-65 to 75 c. env.), which are non-reactive abandoned materials that have little potential to impact groundwater, air quality, or environmental and human health. In France, the rudologue specializes in “la gestion des déchets industriels ou ménagers et de la prévention des pollutions de l’environnement” and “analyse la production des déchets et les nuisances qu’ils génèrent, pour proposer des solutions de traitement des déchets”

(Turlan 7). To do so, she refers to the MODECOM (Méthode de Caractérisations des ordure ménagères” which divides waste into multiple categories, including municipaux, ménagers, industriels, hospitaliers, nucléaires, activités de soins et toxiques, agricoles, and ultimes

(“déchets ne pouvant plus être traités dans les conditions techniques et économiques du moment”

(Turlan 7)). Corvellac and Hultman explain that governments and “waste management companies participate in a decisive manner in the design of the sociomateriality of waste,” which is “the way organisations and individuals engage with the materiality of waste in the course of their daily operations and everyday life” (139). They go on to explain that such practices evolve constantly not only as a result of changing technology, local budgets, and resource availability but also in response to public conceptualizations of waste. They explain that “the sociomateriality of waste is contingent on the social understanding that people have of the nature, origins and destiny of waste as material” (Corevellac and Hultman 139). In other words, collective waste practices both influence and are influenced by individual waste practices that dialogue both verbally via public comment and physically via levels of participation. For example, even if a society institutes a

19 recycling program, an individual may choose to not participate as an assertion of independence from government control or an anti-environmentalist act of protest. While waste management companies and scientific inquiry may help determine individual practices of waste, humanistic inquiry must also find a definition that works. Susan Signe Morrison writes that “Waste is produced within a teleological framework; something useful comes to lose its usefulness” (471).

This definition works for many items, but what about the above scenario in which something stops being useful but it can be recycled or in fact be useful for someone else? And, how about objects that we throw away not because they stop being useful, but because they are aesthetically unpleasing?

A better conceptualization that recognizes both the subjective and societal role in waste practices comes from Gay Hawkins. She writes that waste is a performance in which “waste matter is both defined and removed; a sense of order is established and a particular subject is made. Waste, then, isn't a fixed category of things; it is an effect of classification and relations”

(The Ethics of Waste 2). This definition helps us understand competing narratives of waste in different disciplinary discourses. As each discipline creates a different role for household and biological waste (resource for environmental engineers, threat for wildlife biologists, danger for epidemiologists, etc.), no waste “truth” can be established for a material without considering the complex matrix of variables that determine its status in a particular moment in time and space.

Each material presents a performative choice for an individual who must choose whether to categorize it as trash through an exclusionary performance in waste space or to keep it in living space. As in gender performance, there are normative behaviors associated with such choices.

The collective society helps individuals determine waste to categorize as waste based on best practices established by different disciplines of varying levels of power in societal discourse. For example, biological materials such as urine, feces, menstrual fluid, mucous, etc. are normatively performed as waste. A History of Private Life explains French culture’s discomfort with

20 biological waste provoking fear: “Fear of allowing the Other—the body—to express itself, and fear that an indiscretion might give away one’s most intimate secrets” (Perrot 491). Beyond this fear of public shame, keeping such materials in living space is outside “normal” behavior largely based on the weight of medical and epidemiological discourses in modern society.

Household garbage, by contrast, has more varied performative options depending on the particular subset of the population to which one belongs. For example, keeping compost scraps in one’s kitchen or yard can be normal in one subset of the population, but abnormal in another.

Based on the influence of environmentalist discourses in society, recycling has become the norm and in some places the law while only two decades ago it was a choice.

While I refer back to Foucault’s work in L’ordre du discours to elaborate Hawkins’ definition, she bases her work on Mary Douglas’s 1966 book Purity and Danger: an Analysis of

Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, an in-depth ethnological study of the meaning of dirt in cultures around the globe. Many scholars refer to this touchstone text to assert waste as a multifaceted category of culturally-defined materials that carry more weight than we realize.

Timothy Morton, for example, expanded on Douglas’ observations to argue that we perform

Nature by excluding pollution (The Ecological Thought 274).11 While I agree with Hawkins’ view that waste arises out of socially-mediated and –informed actions, she needs to place more emphasis on the moment of waste performance. For example, how do we perform waste? In general, we perform it in exclusionary acts. Who determines what waste is? Ultimately, the individual faced with the material must determine what waste is, even when s/he receives guidance from the collective and the various disciplines that work with waste, it is the individual interacting with a material who has the power to choose which disciplinary discourse has the most weight in deciding whether a material will be excluded or not. Those who perform waste in

11 This idea is intriguing when one considers that we also perform Nature by excluding humans. Are humans inherently pollution as well?

21 non-normative ways are often excluded as well by extension taking on the negative traits associated with the materials that surround them.

First, we perform waste in exclusionary actions. Waste appears among the most clearly excluded materials in our society. While certain populations experience exclusion, the methods are often hidden, unclear, or masked as beneficial to society (such as Foucault describes in his work on the insane and prisons). When it comes to trash, however, systems for its removal rank among the first tasks of a newly established community. Such systems attempt a high degree of order and simplicity for maximum efficiency. They also require public education to facilitate their functioning. Neglecting the behaviors that contribute to proper functioning of these systems violates social and legal codes, entering the realm of the forbidden. And yet, what is it that forces us to exclude waste from our intimate lives? Why must waste leave our homes, our yards, our cars?

Certainly, there are practical concerns regarding shrinking waste space or environmental impacts of poor waste management. Some waste may cause disease or damage water supplies if not properly contained. Nonetheless, one of the clearest delineations of waste is its location. A material becomes waste instantaneously when it is placed in a waste space—a new toy becomes old the second it enters a garbage can. Aside from this action, the physical aspects of the waste do not change. Perfectly useful and safe materials once they enter waste space are permanently tainted by a label such as recycled, second-hand, or used.

Having entered an exclusionary waste space, materials and objects become difficult to reintegrate into society. Placing objects in waste space creates a certain taboo around them. That is, if a material or individual needs to be excluded for some reason, it will thereafter have a label assigned that marks it as “other” or “forbidden.” In many cases, the act of excluding and forbidding go hand-in-hand. While waste materials may be physically excluded and forbidden to physical contact, their physical status influences their status in discourse as well. That is, being

22 excluded physically from society gives their inclusion in social or literary discourse a heightened or more weighted impact. Foucault describes how this happens:

Dans une société comme la nôtre, on connaît, bien sûr, les procédures d’exclusion. La

plus évidente, la plus familière aussi, c’est l’interdit. On sait bien qu’on n’a pas le droit

de tout dire, qu’on ne peut pas parler de tout dans n’importe quelle circonstance, que

n’importe qui, enfin, ne peut pas parler de n’importe quoi. Tabou de l’objet, rituel de la

circonstance, droit privilégié ou exclusif du sujet qui parle : on a là le jeu de trois types

d’interdits qui se croisent, se renforcent ou se compensent, formant une grille complexe

qui ne cesse de se modifier. (L’ordre Du Discours 11)

While the rest of L’ordre du discours discusses discourse production in the search for “truth” over the course of history, the roles of the author and disciplines in discourse production, among other subjects, Foucault makes three important points here in regards to our study of the evolving

“truths” of waste in 21st-century literary discourse. First, waste is not spoken. This is certainly the case for biological waste in most circumstances. When waste is spoken it brings specific connotations of taboo, danger, and disorder. Second, there are certain circumstances in which waste is not physically allowed. When waste is present out of place in the arts it provokes strong responses from the audience. Finally, not everyone can talk about waste. Certainly, in certain mouths and company, waste talk is crude. Many authors either shy away from it to avoid association with such materials or include it in order to take advantage of its exclusionary associations. And yet, waste surrounds us and guarantees life. As such, in other discourses or disciplines, waste has other “truths,” which vary from threat to resource depending on the field of study.

When waste appears in interdisciplinary contexts, however, its association with the forbidden has ethical implications. For example, while environmental discourses may value recycling and re-use, individuals who do such work still suffer from the social stigmas with which

23 waste is associated in social discourse. Every extra object that is produced removes resources from future generations and produces carbon dioxide that will damage their chances for survival.

These actions’ ethical impact can be mitigated when we recover resources from the waste we produce or when we allow individuals to enter taboo zones of waste storage and treatment to recover recyclable materials. While there have long been trash pickers who haunt landfills and dumpsters, there have also been added legislation limiting access to these spaces. For some, this is to protect individuals from harm or disease. For others, this is a repressive means of controlling goods. Even when one can participate in such activities, it is often considered taboo to talk about it. Both the act of harvesting from the garbage and the talk of it are strictly forbidden except among the most intimate company. When we perform household and biological waste in any way we are asserting ourselves as subscribers to a particular disciplinary discourse. I once watched a friend from Eastern Europe eat the shell of a hard-boiled egg I had planned to discard. When I asked him about it, he said it would be wasteful not to eat it. I had determined it was waste because I had been taught to fear egg shells as potential carriers of salmonella. The weight of medical discourse in determining my performance of this material as waste was clearly higher than the weight of economic discourse in this instance. This example demonstrates fairly clearly how the individual pulled by the influence of various cultural domains of knowledge must ultimately determine what waste is.

And so, when authors and cineastes perform waste in ways outside the dominant modes of discourse in their disciplines, they make obvious the power we all have in choosing how we individually wish to classify the materials in our lives as those with positive value to stay in living space or those with negative value to be excluded. The authors discussed in this dissertation break waste taboos to allow other taboo-breakers to speak. They enter the dumping fields for leftover agricultural products, the discarding sites for household waste, and the resting sites for aging individuals to show us what happens to material bodies and minds after we exclude them. They

24 include materials we typically exclude in new and exciting ways, altering with their performance the dominant modes of discourse surrounding literary waste. In short, with alternative performances, they explore importing other “truths” about waste into literary discourse.

A Brief History of Waste in the West since the Enlightenment

Current attitudes toward waste, however, have evolved from earlier practices. Foucault writes when summarizing his own work on the subject and power that

la conceptualisation ne doit pas se fonder sur une théorie de l’objet : l’objet conceptualisé

n’est pas le seul critère de validité d’une conceptualisation. Il nous faut connaître les

conditions historiques qui motivent tel ou tel type de conceptualisation. Il nous faut avoir

une conscience historique de la situation dans laquelle nous vivons. (Dits et écrits 1954-

1988, tome 4 1980-1988 224)

Indeed, to properly regard current waste expressions, we must first understand its long-term associations with negative emotions of fear, disgust, uselessness, and abnormality. The authors I discuss help to dispel some of this fear by establishing familiarity with waste, aging, and other excluded materials and bodies, but to understand this change we must look backwards. This section, therefore, will present a brief history of waste and hygiene in Western society and

France.

As I approach waste with the sciences in mind, I will focus on Post-Enlightenment waste history, as this is when Science began to enter daily life as a structuring force behind cultural practice.12 In an essay entitled “La politique de la santé au XVIIIe siècle,” Michel Foucault

12 Certainly religion had and continues to structure cultural practices of waste, but Science took on a greater role in the post-Enlightenment period and certainly has the largest influence on waste practices today, but this could be another study altogether.

25 described the emergence of health and illness as problems requiring collective management by the state not only for the benefit of the populace but for the proper functioning of the society and the economy. In the process, he describes how state-encouraged hygiene at the individual/family level and the political, social, and economic status of doctors increased in the 18th century before rising to a height in the 19th century (Foucault, Dits et écrits 21–25).13 If hygiene indicates health and cleanliness, then spaces in which disease spreads easily, such as urban spaces, were equated with filth. Indeed, many cities in the 18th century lacked the infrastructure to manage waste materials of all kinds, leading to visible rot, decay, and putrefaction. It then became a goal in

European societies to improve such spaces (Foucault, Dits et écrits 22). Despite the remarkable improvements in health and safety that have taken place since that time, these programs’ legacy continues to impact our imaginations regarding the city and those who live it.14

At the same time, an epistemological shift was taking place in the view of nature given the increasing mechanization of industry. In his environmental history of France The Light-Green

Society Michael Bess describes a shift during the 18th century from a venerable relationship with a superior natural world toward a “tendency to regard the earth and its creatures as being simply forms of mechanistically structured matter, subject to empirically ascertainable causal laws, and available for humans to manipulate and put to use as they saw fit” (117).15 As only humans had agency, this shift in perception paved the way for technological and industrial “solutions” to waste problems of varying kinds, from gaspillage of resources to removing potentially dangerous

13 Foucault writes that “il se constitue également une emprise politico-médicale sur une population qu’on encadre de toute une série de prescriptions qui concernent non seulement la maladie, mais les formes générales de l’existence et du comportement (l’alimentation et la boisson, la sexualité et la fécondité, la manière de s’habiller, l’aménagement type de l’habitat) (23). This notion of government management of the populace that he calls “noso-politique” in this text relates closely to his conceptualization of “la biopolitique.” 14 Urban ecocriticism attends to the lasting legacy of city persecution in mainstream ecocritical discourse. See The Nature of Cities (Bennett and Teague) for a thorough elaboration of this line of thinking. 15 Changing our metaphorical thinking about the natural world and human systems could change the way we conceive of and solve problems (Lemenager and Foote)

26 materials from homes and businesses. In the 19th century efficiency methods, sanitation, and colonization were all considered ways of reducing or eliminating various kinds of waste

(underuse, overuse, unusable leftovers, excrement, etc.) that were negative components of both nature and culture. Efficiency movements limited waste in industrial and home practices, sanitation movements removed disease-causing waste to protect local populations, and colonization prevented resource waste when foreign populations were perceived to not be adequately using natural resources (T. Cooper 22).

Western populations increasingly turned to technology for hope in a better future. This aspiration led populations to support technological advancements and colonization on moral, as well as financial grounds. In his research on British attitudes toward waste, Timothy Cooper points out that waste prevention was an ethical obligation that improved Britain’s citizens’ lives, increased their numbers, and guaranteed less dependence on foreign trade (26). “Post-

Enlightenment renderings of waste therefore constituted it as neglected utility” (T. Cooper 28).

Politicians used this neglect to argue in favor of colonization which, as a means of resource accumulation, could be considered a war on waste in resource management (Neocleous 508).

That is, native populations were “wasting” natural gifts by not using them.

Ethical argumentation pushed on industrial development in the 19th and 20th centuries based on its ability to limit waste and raise living standards. “The prestige of chemistry, and the

‘economy of nature’ model that underpinned it, was crucial to the thought of those who believed that an over-productive waste nature could be captured and incorporated within the industrial process” (T. Cooper 35). Rot itself was long used as an argument for “humanity as the means of reconciling a wastefully over-productive nature with the existence of a purposive creator: humanity's purpose was to utilize nature's excesses for civilization before they rotted” (T. Cooper

37). Humans could therefore improve upon nature’s processes with waste as a primary example

27 of nature’s failures. Overproduction, for example in reproductive structures like fruits, invited human technological interference to prevent waste.16

By the mid-20th century industrial development in Europe, and specifically in France, accelerated. Bess writes that “rapid and sustained economic growth in the eyes of many French citizens, became not just a desirable goal but a matter of maintaining national independence; technology became not just a vehicle for enhancing the quality of life, but a pivotal factor in providing basic economic and military security” (20). This technological advance marched right into the homes of average French citizens through marketing to women whose place in the home became very valuable to a state interested in increasing its population (Bard, El-Amrani, and

Pavard 186–8). With greater focus on these “fées du logis” responsible for a family’s health and happiness, obsession with cleanliness guaranteed through technology and medicine took on greater importance in the average person’s life. Roland Barthes observes dirt and decay’s disappearance from French culture in his essay “Publicité de la profondeur.” He writes, “« La pourriture s’expulse (des dents, de la peau, du sang, de l’haleine) » : la France ressent une grande fringale de propreté” (Mythologies 85). In a thorough analysis of post-war changes in consumer culture in France, Kristen Ross summarizes and expands arguments that the French penchant for cleanliness arose from the desire to purge the nation of its Occupation and war participation. She also argues that the postwar society went “from literal hunger for food to a more general appetite for consumption per se” (72). Such an appetite, however, was also underlined by desire for the new and the clean that represented the future and allowed French citizens to turn away from a recent difficult past. Dirt and putrefaction, therefore, took on greater symbolism in daily life and

16 While this excess appeared wasteful, these attitudes, however, did not take into consideration the fact that “wasted” fruits are a future investment vital to soil health. The nutrients and energy contained in them encourages a diverse microbial community in the soil that improves nutrient uptake and health in plants. Neglecting this fact and “over-harvesting” led to low-microbial-diversity soils needing fossil-fuel-generated fertilizers that together create lower-nutrient fruits and vegetables, and yet negative attitudes toward “waste” and rot persist.

28 became increasingly taboo while paradoxically leading to increased waste in the form of disposable objects and trends toward less and less durable goods.

Economic growth is almost always coupled with increased waste production. Patrick

Brantlinger and Richard Higgins explain that “capitalism, it seems, is an economic system geared to the transformation of waste into ever-more waste; according to its spendthrift logic, instead of two separate islands, utopia and wasteland turn out to be the same place” (456). That is, to create the ever-modern, ever-clean utopia that capitalism promises, one must perpetually renew products and spaces, all the while producing waste destined to eventually overtake that utopic space in a limited planetary zone. This has played out in that since France’s economic boom, between 1960 and 2005 household waste generated per capita doubled (Janis-Mazarguil and Morlighem). Such a figure does not include industrial waste created in France and abroad for products manufactured and transported from elsewhere to end in France.

Such hidden environmental costs are reaching a planetary scale that prevents us from ignoring them. A series of Grenelle legislation since 2009 has set goals to decouple waste generation and GDP through better management and product design. While modest decreases have been seen, the best results have come from industry, not individuals, and it is unclear what role outsourcing has played in this reduction. This trend continues even now in France and other

Western cultures of disposable products. The 2009 report from INSEE (Institut national de la statistique et des études économoniques) on consumerism in France demonstrates continuous growth, although changes may have taken place thereafter as a result of the economic crisis

(Consales, Fesseau, and Passeron). Another 2012 report from ADEME (Agence de l’environnement et de la maîtrise de l’énergie) shows continuous, although slowing growth in

French refuse, based on collection weights. While nearly 70% gets recycled, incinerated, or composted, the rest goes to landfill management (Mathery). Marilyn Randall explains in

“Recycling Recycling, or plus ça change” in Other Voices that

29 Recycling, […], also carries with it the more unsettling suggestion of a practice governed

not by choice but by environmental necessity, a practice whose virtue derives from a

context of crisis in which the production of waste has become a primary, rather than a

secondary activity.

Certainly, this offers another perspective of changes in waste practice that highlights the 21st- century specificity of environmental crisis forcing ethical action. On a global scale, an article in

Nature reports that daily waste production will triple by 2100 (Hoornweg, Bhada-Tata, and

Kennedy). Therefore, beyond general concerns about having enough physical space to store our waste and systems to manage it, governments must consider waste’s secondary impacts that may reduce public services as waste management costs increase, decrease air quality with increased use of incinerators, and hasten global climate change through landfill methane production.

In Europe and France in particular, legislation that may lower waste collection numbers has been introduced to limit food waste. Generations raised on recycling may begin to make better choices as this practice spreads over the globe. Current and future generations may indeed be moving toward a greater re-use of materials as Jeremy Rifkin, best-selling economist, has described the rise of a sharing economy in which individuals share ideas and materials in open networks with open sources, from software to architectural templates. As sharing and re-use take on greater acceptance, the 20th-century desire for the new and untouched may fade. Indeed, as waste production’s ethical impacts become clearer with growing global visibility of waste and waste arts, a new ethics may be coming. Changes in technological cultures (such as the development of industrial ecology and a move toward waste as resource (McDonough and

Braungart) based on observations of nutrient cycling) may inform or encourage changes in waste organization, but the arts are the site of self-construction and long-term behavior changes. Indeed, scientific narratives require personal narratives to connect the public to environmental issues. The authors here explore alternative waste performances that treat it as a resource or inspiration rather

30 than a fearful unknown and examine relationships to “non-productive” materials and members of society.

A Brief History of Waste Arts

Ernaux, Varda, and Rolin are not the first to use waste to carry meaning in their work. Art has long incorporated waste, leftovers, or found pieces into its repertoire with various effects on the audience. Cultural representations and discourses tend to focus largely on the negative aspects of waste, especially when approaching waste processes of decay or degradation (which are visible processes of decomposition and recomposition). One could point, for example, to the natures mortes of the Baroque era in which overripe fruits or fleurs fânées were included to remind the viewer of his or her own mortality. Focus on this finitude, as Gay Hawkins points out in The

Ethics of Waste, makes individuals reluctant to interact with waste for recycling or to accept waste as a resource.

The 20th century, however, showed great interest in waste arts. A variety of arts from conceptual art to found poetry used waste to deny originality in cultures of mass production. That is, employing these homogenous products as raw materials questioned their social value. From

Kurt Schwitters’ architectural collages that included waste objects in the interwar period in

Germany to nouveau réalisme’s postwar explorations of scraps and leftovers in work by Daniel

Spoerri, Raimond Hains, and Arman,17 European artists have been re-using objects to reframe quotidian experience. This humanistic response to a new industrial reality used typical objects rather than classical materials (stone, glass, clay, etc.) as symbols of consumption in order to

17 Arman created “accumulations” of identical objects that gave a sense of their movement and purpose, as well as coupés, or objects cut in pieces and/or reshaped, that seem to question the difference between noble materials (stone, clay, etc.) and everyday materials. This accumulation and fragmenting of consumer objects also takes place in the literary works of the authors I study later. Arman may also be “processing” waste but not in an autobiographical way.

31 provoke the audience, perhaps even chastise it for its willingness to accept a cookie-cutter existence for the sake of convenience, cost, and trendiness.

Redeploying consumer products to create artistic products could be considered a kind of aesthetic efficiency (Schmidt 26). Art historian Nicolas Bourriaud argues that in postmodern art,

“it is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects” (7). These pre-existing artifacts came with masses of supporting information from 20th-century economies that relied on planned obsolescence and advertising to fuel continuous and changing demand for products which since the late 19th century had become tangled up with personal identity (Allen 198; Bozak 218; Perrot 500). Western cultures now produce waste as primary products, that is products intentionally designed to become waste either under the category of disposable objects or of a quality and style that will limit their function and desirability in the long-term (Deitering 196). Basing one’s work on such consumable disposables creates a rather disposable art as well since such works quickly become dated by the ever-shifting and evolving brands and models designed to pass more and more quickly through cultures of desire.

Waste’s place as central character as opposed to backdrop or prop has also grown in film.

From Chris Marker’s Junkopia to American films such as Dive! and Food, Inc., documentary films have examined waste for varying artistic or informative purposes. The 2006 Canadian documentary Manufactured Landscapes recorded the wastelands that Edward Burtynsky photographs to challenge viewers’ environmental ethics and aesthetic ideas. The 2010 celebrated film, Wasteland, included an artist’s interpretation of one of the world’s largest waste sites,

Jardim Gramacho landfill in Rio de Janeiro, and its impact on the self-understanding of those related to it. In it Lucy Walker documents the artistic transformation of trash into semi-self- portraits by Vik Muniz and “pickers,” or people who harvest recyclable materials at their own

32 risk. The film contrasts the importance of this socially downcast population in terms of their ecological impact on resource recovery from waste with their work’s negative impacts on their personal lives given cultural attitudes toward waste.

Waste in literature also frequently serves to underline the negative in scenes, characters, and societies. In 1998, Laurence Buell noted that toxicity, including waste, was “becoming an emergent literary focus” in Anglophone literature (665). Buell discusses certain authors’ work as drawing attention to a failure of environmental policy that seeks a return to nature without human-made materials and views any human-produced products as toxic to an imagined non- human utopian world. In other words, waste for some time, especially in Ecocriticism has been associated with danger, selfishness, and dystopian worlds, a sort of anti-nature proxy. A substance’s toxicity, however, is relative to every organism and dose- and location-dependent.

Véronique Bragard argues that literature may provide an alternative narrative to waste as only toxic. She writes that

While scholars of the ‘material turn’ mainly emphasize the dangerous and menacing

nature of waste’s concrete overwhelming presence in contemporary society, literature

with its faculty to portray discarded objects as ‘storied bodies’ (Phillips and Sullivan 447)

perhaps manages to rejoin what we perceive as refuse with the productive capacity

inherent in matter. (461)

That is, recognizing that waste has value as a potential resource takes away some of its former negative stigma. While waste systems as they currently function do threaten humanity in some contexts, there are increasingly means of harvesting beneficial materials from waste. In the productive economies of the 20th century, new, utopic materials were storied. In the 21st century with a backdrop of waning resources and global climate change, waste materials begin to be storied. As they are, they gain in value as objects of desire in the arts, in the home, in the body,

33 and eventually in commodity markets. Indeed, Ernaux, Varda, and Rolin highlight this productive capacity of waste material in their work.

In the 21st century, waste continues to play an important, but evolving role in various arts and cultures around the world. Many artists not only mimic real waste in their work, but reclaim garbage to create valuable artwork.18 Even architects and urban planners now monumentalize waste treatment facilities within cities, rather than banning them outside city centers (Poirier).19

That is, waste recovery can provide services to cities. They have also turned to using brownfield sites for new construction of all kinds—making a sort of landscape recycling or repurposing possible.

Some argue, however, that rather than encouraging low-waste living the arts contribute to greater waste production in Western culture. Timothy Luke writes that

in many respects it [art] is critical, because the arts have been one of the main engines

driving the wasteful ways of modern capitalism. Publicity as an art itself creates objects

of desire through story. Every year brings a new set of artistically mediated expectations

and aesthetically intensified consumer requirements-always predicated upon the waste of

more scarce resources, the overconsumption of energy, and the misuse of productive

talents. (72)

This has certainly been true, but Nathalie Blanc et al. at the CNRS, by contrast, consider the arts one of the main forces of change in support of environmental policy. They argue that one of the main priorities of future ecocritical art work should be to engage the public in a dialogue about

18 Artists, such as HA Schult (German), Huma Bhabha (Pakistani), Vik Muniz (Brazilian), among others, build on past movements of conceptual art and found art. Found art photography won the Venice Biennale in 2013. 19 The Amagerforbraending waste-to-energy plant designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, the BEI-Stockton scheme by Heatherwick Studio, and Ennead’s work on the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, are examples of a new brand of urban monument that incorporates a city’s waste management into the urban landscape in a positive way.

34 our ecological future. In other words, we should use arts to reflect current environmental knowledge to the people. Nonetheless, they foresee several challenges to this model: the role of the artist as “accompanier” to political practice, fighting the idea of nature as far from the human, and the classical role of environment in arts as supporting matrix rather than main character

(Blanc, Chartier, and Pughe 5).20 While the authors I study may write works that impact political conversations (Ernaux for ageing women, Varda for food, Rolin for the homeless), they can hardly be said to be creating art solely for political purpose.

Figure 0-3. Narcissus, Caravaggio. Figure 0-4. Narcissus After Caravaggio, Vik Muniz.

As concerns waste in specifically ecocritical arts, Patricia Yaeger observed that postmodern artists have been turning toward waste as a self-reflexive subject in place of nature.

Comparing Caravaggio’s Narcissus in which the youth stares at his reflection in a natural pool of

20 Kenneth White and his critical movement la géopoétique analyze texts in which the environment or place are the main protagonists. See White’s Le Plateau de l’albatros and Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World and Chauche’s Langue et monde: grammaire géopoétique du paysage contemporain.

35 water and Vik Muniz’s Narcissus After Caravaggio, a photo of waste materials arranged in the form of the painting from the film Wasteland, Yaeger argues that

an old opposition between nature and culture has been displaced in postmodern art by a

preoccupation with trash: the result of a weird and commodity-based intermingling. If

nature once represented the before (creating culture as child, product, or second nature)

and if detritus represented the after (that which was marginalized, repressed, or tossed

away), these representations have lost their appeal. We were born into a detritus-strewn

world, and the nature that buffets us is never culture’s opposition. (323)

Yaeger observes this change in how we approach trash in the Americas, and I extend to interpret waste in French self-representative texts and films. The aestheticization of trash, she argues is taking place for four reasons: trash objects are individuated in opposition to uniformly-produced and -available commodities, trash refuses Enlightenment dialectics of the similar, trash has moved in and out of the cycle of exchange, and trash’s epistemology is shifting toward an embrace of the toxic (335-8). Yaeger writes, “we find ourselves in a queer ecology where the distinction between organism and environment disappears” (324). In this liminal state, human, waste, and space get confused in networks of exchange that reflect both a material ecocritical understanding of material agency and a biogeochemical cyclicality of materials.

In addition, where Nature was once an “other space” that contained non-humans as

Others, granted the human privileged existence, and in which humans could ponder their own mortality and decay in Other beings, waste spaces have now taken on that role. Where do we turn then to see ourselves? Nature or waste? Marjorie Levinson explains that “lacking an irreducible and, as it were, self-perpetuating otherness in nature, structurally guaranteeing the ongoing recognition of the human, our transformative encounters with the physical environment cannot do the subject-making work they once did” (117). Nature itself has become a generic, commodified product available for consumption by tourists and enthusiasts who perceive it as a utopic space

36 that presents little danger. As an innocent, idealized concept, nature straddles to a lesser extent than previously the razor’s edge between beauty and terror that earlier centuries encountered there. Given arguments by material ecocritics such as Stacy Alaimo that the traces of human products, toxic and otherwise, permeate the earth, the atmosphere, and the flesh of all creatures, traditional notions of nature as separate from humans no longer hold up and a non-human nature appears to have a reduced capacity to threaten humanity. By contrast, we turn to nature as our ally and teacher to manage the human-made wastes that overwhelm human systems.

In the 21st century, humans now have more to fear from themselves and their terrifying capacity to alter nature’s planetary cycles that they rely on. We are now less likely to turn to a traditional nature to find our end, as one did in les natures mortes, than to find our origins (Nature

.as a quaint and innocent life-giving garden rather than a life-taking adversary) or a quiet respite from urban life. In this sense, enormous quantities of grant greater access to the highest heights of human creative capacities and the darkest depths of the human soul as we contemplate how our collective commodity creations may someday snuff us out. As temporary avatars of or supplements to our being, watching them amass and decay gives advanced access to our own material decomposition. As many consumer objects undergo no physical change between utopic consumer spaces and the landfill, waste’s shadow creeps into daily living spaces where commodities of desire are only temporarily non-waste. They will endure far longer beneath the earth than in our living rooms. And so, with each commodity we consume, we must consider the ethical implications of our personal waste practices on larger scales. In this sense, waste can become an infinite resource for self-reflection and a multifaceted tool for self-representation in self-writing.

37 Theoretical Context

Why Ecocriticism?

Although slow to come to France, Ecocriticism emerged in the 1990s out of a growing trend in the United States and England of looking at literature from an environmental perspective. Like other areas of cultural studies Ecocriticism as a mode of inquiry responds to a need of the time— increasing knowledge of and concern about human environmental fragility. It first focused on the reappraisal of Romanticism, a period when current Western conceptions of nature were formed, and it largely studied Nature Writing as a genre. As they began to question humanity’s relationship to nature through text, ecocritics found themselves needing to define their terms.

What is nature? What is culture? What is human? It has since broadened to address the question, in all its dimensions, of how cultures construct and are in turn constructed by the non-human world. This is when the field began expanding beyond Nature Writing into other genres and non-

Anglophone cultures (Heise). The previously-outlined methodological, anthropological, and aesthetic questions arising from the French texts I study define the stakes for 21st-century

Ecocriticism as they reach into new cultures, elucidate intersections between environmental and social challenges, and posit new meanings for long-standing modes of representation.

There have been other names for Ecocriticism as different strands developed within the general thread of studying literature from an environmental perspective, such as Environmental

Literary Studies and Green Cultural Studies, but the best known is Ecocriticism. Under this umbrella, one finds fields as diverse as Animal Studies, Urban Ecocriticism, Object-Oriented

Ontology, Posthumanism, Ecofeminism, Biological Discourse, Ecological Post-Colonial Theory,

Ecophenomenlogy, and Material Ecocriticism. The common ground is that the ideas/preconceptions that structure interactions between humans and the natural environment

38 must be understood and/or altered to promote sustainable practice. While its subject matter is mostly cultural, from literature to visual arts and music, Ecocriticism is very much an interdisciplinary enterprise. It engages with Environmental History, Philosophy, Sociology, and

Environmental Sciences. This use of Environmental Science in cultural studies is what makes the theory useful here. As ecocritics open dialogues between the sciences and the arts, competing as well as cooperative narratives of ecocritical topics often emerge, generating difficult debates among ecocritics.

Two key debates in Ecocriticism that have pushed the boundaries of inquiry and are germane to this project are the postmodern claims that nature does not exist and that human and nature are identical. While some blame postmodern ecocritics for what they see as the demise of nature in arguments about nature as a social construct (Kroeber), Paul Wapner argues that postmodern theory also presents the strongest argument in favor of nature’s protection in its commitment to “otherness.”21

Even the most radical postmodernist acknowledges the distinction between physical

existence and nonexistence. As mentioned, postmodernists assume that there is a physical

substratum to the phenomenal world, even if they argue about its different meanings.

This substratum is essential for allowing entities to speak or express themselves. That

which doesn’t exist, doesn’t speak. […] Everyone should be wary about those who claim

to speak on nature’s behalf (…). But we should not doubt the simple-minded notion that

prerequisite of expression is existence. (179)

21 The classic line is “if you think nature is a social construct, go outside when it’s raining.” Nonetheless, merely being a social construct does not exclude nature from being a noble construct worth preserving in its approximate form. Rather then arguing over the “reality” of nature, it may be best to just recognize that having access to this learned concept in its physical form, although its definition and meaning may vary across time and cultures, is good for our health and that of many other species and should ethically therefore be preserved.

39 Indeed, Wapner goes on to argue, while non-humans cannot speak for themselves directly, their

“otherness” should be respected by allowing them to continue to express themselves via existence. The ethic behind preserving “otherness” should not be one of quantity but of quality

(Wapner 180). “We value the ethic of “otherness” because we realize that our own conceptions of the world are partial” and we should “open space within which others can express their experience of living” (Wapner 181). While Wapner does not push the argument so far, we can apply this to animate as well as inanimate “others.” Cultures must make space for “otherness” and grant voices to non-human biotic organisms by supporting their continued existence. Such spaces may be collectively organized nature preserves or individually owned beehives, but in any case sites that recognize the cultural heritage present in land and water as well as museums and libraries should be encouraged.

Second, studying postmodern literature in the French context poses translational problems for ecocritics attempting to apply Anglo-Saxon theory to Francophone texts, specifically when it comes to assumptions about relationships to nature. In his essay “Is Nature

Necessary?” Dana Philips describes modernist contemplation and direct connection to nature present in works by Hemingway and others (206). This direct connection to nature, so common to modernist Anglophone writers, does not translate to continental and specifically French literature.

Instead, relationships with nature were socially mediated (as a result of a Catholic idea of mediation between the self and the absolute instead of a direct Protestant connection with God or an absolute nature). When discussing the difference between Arne Næss’s Deep Ecology and

Continental Ecology, Augustin Berque writes that

Cette question, c’est celle de la part sociale de l’humain, et de la part du social dans le

rapport humain à la nature. Avec Næss, nous sommes à fond dans l’option occidentale

moderne, et en particulier protestante, qui envisage une relation directe de l’individu à

l’absolu, qu’il s’agisse de Dieu ou de la nature. Dans la descendance de cette option

40 figure l’individualisme méthodologique, qui a fleuri particulièrement dans le monde

anglo-saxon, tandis que la pensée ‘continentale,’ par exemple chez Marx ou Durkheim, la

contestait radicalement en insistant au contraire sur la part sociale de l’être et du faire

humains. […] En somme, c’est à travers les autres que nous sommes en rapport avec la

nature. […] Pour moi, c’est là clairement une impasse : on ne réorientera jamais notre

rapport à la nature sans prendre à bras le corps le nœud de la question, qui est la structure

de l’être humain.

In other words, in Continental thinking, relations to nature involve other humans. This mediation underlies our examination of texts employing many “others,” human and not, to express the self.

22 As the authors in this dissertation frequently turn to “others” of all kinds, organic and inorganic, to understand themselves and their cultures, they rely on a similar philosophy of human beings as implicated in networks of material and human relations.

To these debates I will add Michel Foucault’s work on spatial and temporal relationships between and among humans. In “Des espaces autres,” Foucault describes the 20th century as a time in which these networks of relations spread out.

Nous sommes à l’époque du simultané, nous sommes à l'époque de la juxtaposition, à

l’époque du proche et du lointain, du côte à côte, du dispersé. Nous sommes à un moment

où le monde s'éprouve, je crois, moins comme une grande vie qui se développerait à

travers le temps que comme un réseau qui relie des points et qui entrecroise son

écheveau. (Foucault, Dits et Écrits : 1954-1988 752)

An ecological resemanticization of Foucault allows us to understand ecology as part of a long history of conceptualizations of space. Each node in a network plays a crucial role in holding the system together. Ecosystems revolve around a balance in relations between predators and prey,

22 In addition to Berque, other critics have indicated the importance of the social in mediating interactions with nature, specifically in the French context (Blanc et al., Gandon, Posthumus, Rivière).

41 abiotic resource availability, and many other characteristics. Every change in the system impacts the entire system. This attention to space and the wide networks that connect people and objects around the planet coincides with global cycles and networks of water, air, and earth that became central to international cooperation in the late 20th century. Postmodern ecocritic Timothy Morton refers to these massive systems of environmental self-regulation that are difficult to apprehend as hyperobjects (Hyperobjects). On the human scale, as well, our small social networks rely on individuals and must adjust to changes in human placement, but each individual is a node linked to various other nodes.

The 21st century, however, became increasingly concerned with not only the connectivity of these all-encompassing networks (placeless in the sense that their connections to every planetary corner from the depths of the oceans to the heights of the atmosphere, at once everywhere and nowhere) but also with the possibility that changes within them could alter human history. That is, if these hyperobjects stopped functioning to support human life, life itself may come to an end. As Foucault describes, this simultaneity and linking near and far creates an atmosphere in which every gesture, every choice, every purchase, every being can influence the local world of every other (Dits et Écrits : 1954-1988 752). This happens not only through these large natural planetary systems, but also through those manufactured by man, and human participation in such material systems on a personal level has become of central focus of ecocritical work in the subfield of Material Ecocriticism.23

23 From this material ecocritical perspective, readers may note my reference to “materials” where some may employ “objects;” I do so for several reasons. First, this avoids divides between organic and inorganic materials that a term like object might imply. Second, it prevents classical object/subject associations that endow only subjects with agency. Finally, scientists make a distinction between materials and objects, noting that materials are the “matter” aspect of things, as in raw materials that have physical properties with the capacity to interact with other materials in predictable ways; whereas objects have a human-intended “function” or “itemness” about them. I prefer the word “materials” even when those materials may be considered objects by science’s classical definition because my work focuses on materials’ relationships to individual and cultural self-understandings. Specifically, waste materials, as necessary to all life, interact with other materials, individuals, and spaces in ways that catalyze reactions, behaviors, emotions, and meanings both intentionally and unintentionally in humans.

42 Why Material Ecocriticm?

As this dissertation demonstrates the material underpinnings of social realities in relationships between individuals and various forms of waste, it falls into the category of Material

Ecocriticism. This Ecocriticism subfield considers “the agency and performativity of matter”

(Bragard 459) in human lives and the environment. Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things argues that political theory should recognize the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. She introduces the concept of “vital materiality,” a force running through and across all organic and inorganic matter, including the matter of human bodies. Rather than focusing on human agency alone in politics, she suggests that acknowledging matter’s ability to influence human life would lead to more responsible policy, especially as concerns the environment. Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, the Environment, and the Material Self introduces the idea of trans-corporeality or movement of matter across human bodies and nature.

Her work looks more specifically at the agency of materials in human bodies and the environment and the way they alter our sense of self, in many cases challenging distinctions between nature and human, toxic and non-toxic, wild and domestic, living and non-living, etc. Basing their work on research by Jane Bennett and Stacy Alaimo, among others, Serenella Iovino and Serpil

Oppermann explain that “ecological postmodernism sees both organic and inorganic matter endowed with (arguably purposeful) activity and with internal experiences—as it contests distinctions between the biological (animate) and chemical (inanimate)” (465). That is, it considers all matter, organic and inorganic, as endowed with internal agency and histories. It encompasses two kinds of agency: the kind that humans ascribe to it and its own agency separate from human intentionality.

43 The first agency recognizes that matter carries human meaning and creates links between people, cultures, continents, and times. Mary Douglas describes material agency in social structures.

Certainly people carry around with them a consciousness of social structure…There are

no items of clothing or of food or of other practical use which we do not seize upon as

theatrical props to dramatise the way we want to present our roles and the scene we are

playing in. Everything we do is significant, nothing is without its conscious symbolic

load. Moreover, nothing is lost on the audience. (123)

Douglas notes both the sender and receiver’s roles in mutually constructing meaning through materials. Individuals in different cultures may not comprehend the messages sent through materials, but some, including waste and dirt, carry information cross-culturally. Many meanings depend on human value assignments to specific materials having desirable or undesirable qualities. In large part, this dissertation considers how authors employ waste, an undesired material (i.e. low-value), to convey textual meaning as Douglas describes. That is, it considers how we employ materials to perform and represent us to others, and how material meaning reception influences our self-understandings.

Another focus of the dissertation, however, relates to the second kind of agency in matter; specifically, how the internal agency we recognize but do not intentionally inscribe in matter influences our treatment of that material and those associated with it. For example, awareness that some materials may transfer disease between individuals without human intention or that our bodies have internal lives that resist our desires by falling ill and aging changes our behavior. In other words, matter may carry human meaning as a reflection of our self-understanding, but it equally resists it with its own inherent properties or meanings, even as concerns the very matter of our own being. Materials have internal histories, meanings, and purposes that exceed human comprehension and symbolic meaning. In part, this capacity for an unknown history makes them

44 dangerous and encourages us to create methods for distinguishing between dangerous and non- dangerous materials, such as warning labels and designated waste spaces that I will describe later.

For material ecocritics, an appreciation for matter’s agency has arisen largely in synch with growing awareness in scientific inquiry on human fragility on a shrinking planet. Marjorie

Levinson’s article, “Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialisms: Modeling Praxis without Subjects and Objects,” presents this situation most clearly. Referring to the randomness of weather patterns, pandemics, and genetic mutations, Levinson writes that

These freakish natural behaviors suggest a mutation of agency and this puts our own

agency as well as our concepts of it at risk. The boundaries between the human and the

natural, the biological and physical, the organism and the machine, the mind and the

body, are now, at strategic points, breached. A degree of self-deconstruction, betraying

the interdependence or imbrication of the received categories, seems to have occurred at

the level of technology and scientific practice. (117)

Nonetheless, a breach in studies of large-scale phenomena takes time to translate to the individual scale. This breach may slowly trickle into cultural practice as well with movements to recognize other life forms’ inherent value, as in some vegan movements and efforts to re-value waste materials via dumpster diving and reclaimed arts. With individual performances on the human scale the authors I study explore, repurpose, and rename waste.

As regards human fragility, a further dimension of this dissertation considers the ethical impacts of excluding waste materials from living spaces. Hubert Zapf argues that movements to examine ecology and ethics in literature that he terms the ecological and ethical turns have several common traits.

(1) Both of them newly focus on the relationship between text and life that has been

reduced to only one pole in the pantextual and pansemiotic universe of postmodernism.

(2) Both of them deal not only with facts but with values, that is, with a critical attitude to

45 a given state of things and with the necessity to think beyond it and imagine possible

alternatives. (3) For both of them, the relationship between culture and nature and thus

between the natural sciences and the humanities seems to have special significance, even

if they approach this relationship from different angles. (4) Both of them share the

assumption of an interconnection between local and global issues and are, therefore,

transcultural and transnational in orientation. (847)

In this dissertation, these four common principles will also guide my approach to reading the texts as representatives of the material world that reflect French values relating to waste as well as alternatives proposed by authors, embody the natural affinity between the sciences and the humanities, and approach the global problem of waste spaces from a specifically local French perspective.

Cultural Context

Why France?

As a nation with rich artistic, environmental, and ethical histories, France presents a prime territory in which to examine how a society aesthetically and ethically confronts the social challenges of growing household and human waste. France invests a great deal in the arts and, thus, presents a unique and appropriate context for this dissertation as it leverages humanist inquiry to promotes judicious use of science, technology, and the arts to enhance human and environmental health.

On a local scale, French law seeks to protect human dignity against advances in science that may hinder more than help humanity. In 1983 the first bioethics law created the Comité consultif national d’éthique (CCNE), a 40-member committee including the president, ministers,

46 theologians, and ethicists that educate and foster debate, but do not give advice. The committee provides background on topics such as allowing transplant of human organs under special conditions to respect human dignity, forbidding the cloning of human embryos, creating ethical consultation teams in hospitals to help doctors and patients make ethical choices, permitting research on human embryos under limited conditions, and protecting the integrity of the human genome. These debates are subject to laws and regulations that are constantly under revision to keep up with changes in scientific research. The current president of this council is the poet- scientist, Jean-Claude Ameisen.

As for environmental protection, France has had a Ministre de l’environnement since

1971.24 The current Code de l’environnement, established in 2000, combines existing laws dating back to 1968 concerning resource extraction, use, and protection in urban and rural environments. The code contains a unique “precaution” provision that requires environmental protections when scientific certainty of environmental impact is not yet clearly established with the caveat of “an acceptable economic cost” to balance immediate human economic needs with long-term environmental and human health.25 The code places the natural landscape on par with the nation’s artistic and architectural patrimoine. In country that relies on nuclear technology for

24 Since 2012, the title is le Ministre de l’Écologie, du Développement durable et de l'Énergie. While one must question the ways in which the development aspect of this minister’s work may influence environmental decisions, it is encouraging to see that the sustainable development movement popular in cultural movements (La Ville Durable, Centre d’écologie fonctionnelle et évolutive du CNRS, sustainability movements in parks, changes in the Geography/History track in the lycée now being centered around Sustainable Development, etc.) has found its way into the higher reaches of policy making and societal education. 25 These movements were expressed on a political stage when in the 2007 presidential elections Nicolas Hulot introduced the Pacte écologique to be signed by presidential candidates. Along with the Grenelle de l’environnement, the Pacte’s importance demonstrates a regard for the non-human “bio” in bioethics. Economic crisis in 2008 may have caused a slowing down of interest in the Grenelle, but the February 2012 Avis du Conseil économique, social et environnemental calls for “une préservation des acquis du Grenelle et pour une relance du processus fondée sur une économie verte, respectueuse de l’environnement et revalorisant le travail, qui engagerait notre pays dans une dynamique économique positive. Dans une perspective de développement durable, il faut inventer un nouveau modèle de prospérité créateur d’emplois, qui préserve l’environnement et les ressources naturelles et réduise les inégalités sociales” (4). This demonstrates a balanced approach to the environment and society, as does the appointment of the current Ministre Ségolène Royal who would have taken the pledge as the socialist candidate in 2007.

47 80% of its energy, part of protecting that patrimoine is ethically managing their nuclear energy waste (Jolly and Reed). Nuclear energy in France is a choice for independence, trust in science and engineering, and lack of other options for locally sourced energy (Bess 95). Rather than simply exporting their nuclear waste, they have used their scientific prowess and their ethical commitment to seek out innovative, effective, and safe methods for its storage under the direction of the Agence nationale pour la gestion des déchets radioactifs (ANDRA). Such legislation demonstrates an interest in environmental ethics balanced with the necessities of the economy, another ethical concern of French society as it relates to human quality of life on an individual and collective scale.

On a global scale, France has been a leader of international diplomacy in environmental regulations driven often by the fight for social equality. For example, the French were leaders of the Rio +20 summit in 2012 and hosted the 2015 international summit on climate change, the

COP21. In much of the rhetoric related to environmental concerns, impacts on humanity are of high import, especially in calls for sustainable development, which is an endeavor to ensure continued human existence on this planet by preserving the natural world (that is, rather than preserving nature for nature’s sake, it should be preserved for continued human existence).26

As concerns modern agriculture and human and environmental health (agronomy, food systems engineering, supply chain management, etc.), which will become relevant in the Varda chapter, recent French law renovates an agricultural system that ignored the human impact of product and profit maximization. A shift in attitudes to waste has recently made its way to policy debates in France where new laws were enacted to prohibit discarding or damaging past-date foods for supermarkets over 400 square meters. This change was partially fostered by the life story of the representative who put forth this legislation. Having gone hungry as a young person,

26 See Kate Soper’s What is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human for differences between conservation and preservation movements.

48 Guillaume Garot was able to convey to citizens and politicians the human impact of France’s food waste. Le Monde describes the situation.

En France, ce sont entre 20 et 30 kg de nourriture qui sont jetés chaque année par

habitant, et 140 kg par personne sur l’ensemble de la chaîne alimentaire. L’Agence de

l’environnement et de la maîtrise de l’énergie (Ademe) estime à 159 euros par an et par

personne la valeur de l’alimentation ainsi perdue, soit entre 12 et 20 milliards d’euros

gaspillés au total. D’un point de vue tant éthique, qu’économique et écologique, « la

destruction des denrées comestibles n’est plus acceptable », martèle Guillaume Garot.

(Eeckhout)

As this law intends to change long-term waste behaviors, students will begin to learn more about food waste in school. All this is part of a bill meant to reduce energy waste, consumption, and production via nuclear energy. That is, beyond its obvious humanitarian goals, this legislation limits energy waste in a petroleum-based food system in which foods are fossil fuels in another form. With the final push from Garot’s personal story (autobiography), this bill arose in the wake of social movements such as those in Le Monde’s special issue on gleaning: Gars’pilleurs, Disco

Soupe, Zéro gâchis, and Re-Bon, all of whom benefited from Agnès Varda bringing the practice into national conversations with her 2000 film Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse. In the years since, according to Hadrien Riffaut, coauthor of the study Glaneurs dans les villes, gleaning “est devenu plus toléré, même pour ceux qui le pratiquent” (Roucaute). Rather than statistics, one could argue that personal stories drove home the ethical implications of waste practices. Story moved the nation to accept reforms that alter waste classification and individual behavior for the benefit not only of those in need but also the environment.

Beyond using story to communicate and enact legislation, France has a history of employing other arts to improve national conditions. François Mittérand’s Minister of Culture

Jack Lang believed that cultural production rivaled technology in its ability to combat tough

49 economic problems. French environmental historian Michael Bess noted of the Grands Projets that in times of trouble and uncertainty, the French turn not only to technological but artistic innovation to alleviate difficulty and suffering. Recognizing the intimate connections between the mind and the body, the material supports of human existence (technology) balance with the immaterial (knowledge, poetry, and philosophy) in national problem solving.

Aside from the nationally self-representative architecture of the Grands Projets, the arts, and specifically literature, receive great support from the government. As will become salient in discussions of individual and national memory, in France, a nation with a long literary history,

Priscilla Parkhurst Clark explains that the book means something more than in other nations. She argues that France’s specific literary culture arises from four main elements: centralization and government patronage of the arts dating back to the ancien régime, resilience in times of change with a focus on tradition and authority, institutional support for the book (via prizes and power of the author in the government sphere), and the culture of the book being linked to a specific part of the cultural whole (an elite practice in a democratic society). This elite culture, however, was meant to be shared. In the 1980s, Lang also introduced the fixed price for the book to permit:

l'égalité des citoyens devant le livre, qui sera vendu au même prix sur tout le territoire

national; le maintien d'un réseau décentralisé très dense de distribution, notamment dans

les zones défavorisées; le soutien au pluralisme dans la création et l'édition en particulier

pour les ouvrages difficiles. (Etienne and Husson)

This provision is continually under dispute, especially now with the digital book (Alféef), but continues to guarantee access. Changes in the material culture of the book have encouraged debate and conversation around Book Fairs. Questions of authors’ rights and the role of the author in modern society return again and again, but despite its apparent lag in popularity, the book remains a major force in French culture.

50 The same is true of the French film industry. This mainstay of French culture since its birth in France with the Lumières brothers also enjoys support from the Minister of Culture, hosts a variety of internationally recognized film festivals, is second largest exporter of films in the world (“Enquête Sur L’image Du Cinéma Français Dans Le Monde”), and the third largest market for films in Europe (“Fréquentation record des salles de cinéma françaises en 2011”).

Film in French culture encourages national cultural dialogues and influences social behaviors.

“Given its prestige, financial importance, and enormous cultural resonance in France, the cinema is well positioned to engage in a spatial politics, to be an art of space producing its own spaces and potentially redefining the spaces of France and French subjects” (Handyside 83). As such, the power of the book and film cannot be underestimated both in individual and national French identity (Williams). Within this cultural context of support for the environment and the arts, we will now turn more specifically to the current literary culture in France, a culture in which I include Agnès Varda given her own declaration of being a “cinema writer.”27

Literary Context

Contemporary Literature in France

The 21st century is witnessing an adaptation in literary expression. Whether a response to the changing context in which it arises or an internal process (most likely both), this transformation is happening slowly but steadily. David Ruffel describes this trend in contemporary French literature as one that takes place “en contexte” (62). This “contextual literature” is in “pratiques littéraires qui ont en commun de déborder le cadre du livre et le geste d’écriture, de démultiplier les possibilités d’intervention et de création des écrivains, possibilités parmi lesquelles le livre

27 See Chapter Two for Varda’s definition of cinécriture.

51 occupe toujours une place centrale mais désormais partagée, et de se faire in situ” (Ruffel 62).

While he observes that many of these literary practices that encourage a blending of art forms and public participation are not new, they are no longer isolated avant-garde practices but widespread and increasing.

While Ruffel refers to this movement as “contextual,” I call it “environmental.” I chose this term because I conceive literature as an organism bounded by an adaptable, but protectionary integument; two forces influence the organism’s evolution: genes and environment. The first works from within in the way encoded genetic information controls certain aspects of growth and development. In the 20th century, many authors and literary theorists experimented with literature from a genetic sense, as the Structuralists observed and charted the underlying organizational principles of literature and solidified the foundations of what literatures had in common from within. In the 20th century, one may have considered literature a machine or mechanism with replaceable parts, but in the 21st century, literature evolves as an organic entity that engages in processes of exchange across the integument that both protects it and allows it to respire, absorb energy, and exchange materials and information with its environment. Literature now changes more based on the second force that works from without and influences the way in which literature expresses its fixed traits. It grows by admitting (as in allowing to enter) external materials that alter its appearance and expression but still resemble, coexist with, and reproduce with previous and concurrent literary organisms.

This “environmental” literature, as I call it, includes two modes of exchange according to

Ruffel. The first blends the boundaries between other arts and literary expression as it mixes media and artistic languages inscribing itself in “le présent commun de l’art, caractérisé par l’impureté et l’hybridation des langages” (Ruffel 63). These literatures express themselves in public spaces in conjunction with other art forms “sur les scènes des théâtres, dans les centres

52 d’art, dans les bibliothèques ou dans la ville” (Ruffel 62). Varda’s cinécriture preceded this trend, but carries on in it. The second mode Ruffel qualifies as “social” or “relationnel.”

À la différence de la littérature exposée et performée, les pratiques « relationnelles » ne

consistent pas à investir les lieux de l’art mais le champ social. Il s’agit aussi moins

d’élargir le territoire de la littérature que d’interroger sa nature, d’expérimenter les liens

qu’elle tisse avec la société, les lecteurs, les réseaux et de repenser le statut du créateur et

la nature de l’œuvre littéraire à travers les relations établies durant son élaboration et sa

réception. (Ruffel 67)

From this perspective, contemporary literature in France responds to environmental conditions, such as digital platforms and social media that permit/encourage collaboration, by expressing its internal principles differently. In this second mode, the author exchanges information and co- creates the text with others as it “substitue les paradigmes de la relation et de l’intervention à ceux de l’exposition et de la représentation” (Ruffel 64). The author is no longer the singular genius writing from an internal place who displays work to be received, but is a collector who gathers, responds to, and engulfs stories, images, sounds, and voices of others.28 As in feedback loops in single-celled organisms, the author accumulates materials from others that induce an art. Ruffel explains that

La littérature contemporaine n’est pas concernée, comme c’était le cas dans les années

1960, par la problématique de sa définition mais par celle de son illimitation. La tentative

de repousser les limites de l’art littéraire, qui est le propre de toute littérature authentique,

n’est donc plus interne au langage, à son être propre, elle se fait désormais par les

relations externes aux autres arts et au monde. (63)

28 Engulfs in the sense of phagocytosis in which a single-celled organism engulfs a solid particle to create an internal vesicle.

53 In other words, in its reaching out to dialogue with other art forms, contemporary

“environmental” works experiment with new modes of inclusion and exchange.

Having written on the cusp of the 21st century, these authors do not only exemplify, but have pioneered the above “environmental” trends. To begin, contemporary literature blends multiple formats into a single creation. For example, Ernaux incorporates descriptions of photography and quotes from other literature in many of her texts as well as descriptions of paintings, advertisements, and film scenes. Kawakami describes the relationship between

Ernaux’s published journals and her autobiographies of the same period as photographic. “Se perdre shows what it would be like to live inside a photograph; Passion simple shows us what it is like to look at one, knowing that its subject has survived the experiences depicted therein”

(241). In fact, Philippe Lejeune described “the co-existence of her diaries and récits in the public sphere as a new genre of self-writing” (233) when he said “c’est presque comme une installation– qui dépasse la notion d’oeuvre fermée ou de texte” (Thumerel 255). As an installation is a display of accumulated materials, Ernaux’s history as a collector and displayer of self-constituting materials continues in Les Années. Les Années’s sections also depart from photographs and its lists include all manner of other artistic forms from paintings to films and publicities. Varda’s work as well, which she terms cinécriture blends multiple genres of film (set scenes with actors, documentary-style interviews with characters, imaginary theatrical sets), clips from previous films, works of art, photography, literature, and music all composed as in a text. Rolin not only references many artworks in his texts, but describes in great detail paintings to the point of hypotypose, which effectively imports visual arts into literary texts. Bergé describes at least one scene in Un Chien mort après lui as a “gros plan de film” (640) as it focuses the reader’s eye in a cinematic style.

54 Second, Ernaux, Varda, and Rolin write ethnographic texts that add non-fiction to self- descriptive materials in a way that expands their voices into broader cultural discourses. In their efforts to explore their local cultures and time, Ruffel explains that contemporary authors

De nombreux auteurs écrivent à partir d’entretiens, dans une réflexion qui est à la fois de

nature éthique et sociologique (comment ne pas trahir cette parole, quelle position doit

adopter l’enquêteur) et littéraire (comment composer la polyphonie des voix, comment

monter ensemble différents niveaux textuels, documentaires, mémoriels, fictionnels pour

former un récit). (69)

We will observe how authors accumulate materials, stories, and documentation in their texts. For example, Ernaux’s work has used personal family stories to record longitudinal changes in French culture for women and the working class since Une Femme written in 1989, but her more recent works have extended into wider circles. Writing about Ernaux’s 1995 Journal du dehors, her daily observations of herself and others riding on the R.E.R. around Paris, Sheringham describes her “attempt to register what has been observed as neutrally as possible, holding on to the way minor events seem to reveal things which help the writer to understand herself and her participation in a wider social order” (“Invisible Presences” 21), the dimension of the subject that is not inner but outer, “transpersonnel,” “the interaction between individual identity and its possible reflections or horizons in the surrounding world” (“Invisible Presences” 22). That is, her work is ethnological, not just personal. In a 1996 survey of Ernaux’s work, Annie Ernaux, ou, l’exil intérieur, Claire-Lise Tondeur wrote that Ernaux “conçoit la littérature en termes d’enquête ethnographique basée sur une expérience autobiographique” (12). These practices continue in

Ernaux’s Les Années whose back cover describes its ethnographic function. Varda also has a long history of ethnographic work from her 1976 film documenting the population of her street in

Paris, Daguerreotypes. In “The Eyes of Agnès Varda: portraiture, cinécriture and the filmic ethnographic eye,” Emma Jackson explains that “if Daguerreotypes is a form of ethnography,

55 The Beaches of Agnès is an autoethnography” (126) in which she tells her life story through and alongside others. Varda’s 1982 film Ulysses which reconstructs her eponymous photograph explored “discontinuities between personal memory and more communal and social forms of remembering” and evoked “ways in which her photograph might align itself with a certain experience of history, of history with its capital ‘H’” (Blatt 186). Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse would later document the historical evolution of gleaning in France in “the especially inquisitive way in which her work teases out the extraordinary from the everyday” (Blatt 186). Rolin’s work departs from fewer personal resources, but ethnologically examines subcultures in France and around the world. “Ses livres nourris de références littéraires doivent aussi une part de leur gai savoir aux sciences naturelles, humaines et animales, à l'ethnologie et à l'éthologie, à l'ornithologie ou à la zoogéographie” (Bergé 636). Such a diverse array of “matériau recueilli”

(Horvath 86) with which he works demonstrates the manner in which Rolin is a social observer and collector of history and story in his wanderings in spaces ranging from formal archives to city streets.

Finally, their ethnographic work requires them to gather materials from a variety of resources, both public and private, extraordinary and every day. Ernaux “part d’un matériau hétéroclite le plus proche possible du réel et fait naître un imaginaire ancré dans le quotidien”

(Tondeur 125). Varda is also known for “the especially inquisitive way in which her work teases out the extraordinary from the everyday” (Blatt 186). Rolin’s method is based on living and observing everyday life in an approach that is “attentive à la proximité et non plus à l’exotisme”

(Vulbeau 9). That is, as ethnographers they document the everyday, what is often thrown out of history. With the wide variety of materials, times, places, voices, and arts that these authors engulf in their works, at times they convey more about their cultures than themselves, making writing about the self challenging.

56 Autobiography in France

Given this “environmental” focus and plurality in form and content, how do authors create a coherent autobiography? The answer comes if we return to the organic single-celled organism metaphor, because while contemporary self-writing initially reaches out to these others it ultimately internalizes them and incorporates them into its being. Such an idea certainly challenges classical notions of autobiography, but autobiography is a fairly young and dynamic literary genre. Michael Sheringham presents its critical history in his introduction to French

Autobiography French Autobiography: devices and desires: Rousseau to Perec. The rise in autobiography began around the 18th century when self-disclosure became less morally unseemly

(Sheringham 98). Within a century, A History of Private Life tells us that writing about the self became very popular. “The nineteenth century is regarded as the golden age of the confessional”

(Perrot 549) in which many women kept diaries. Men who wrote about themselves in this way, however, were considered timid (Perrot 502). As most well-known authors were men, it stands to reason that public autobiography was still only beginning to gain ground. In the 20th century, many well-known authors began writing memoirs, such as Collette, Gide, Sartre, Camus, and

Beauvoir, but until authors like Annie Ernaux in the late-1980s, one still needed to have a fairly extraordinary public life in order to publish a publicly read memoir.29 In the 21st century, however, Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth observe that

autobiographical writing has recently become extremely popular, with well-known

writers and newer voices venturing to write self-referential texts in many media, styles

and formats. Memoir is currently one of the bestselling genres, from the autobiographical

29 Ernaux herself wrote her first two novels as fiction despite that they were based on very personal experiences.

57 narrative of famous and accomplished people to those of the unknown, the ordinary and

the marginalized. (1)

The genre’s democratization lead to a large number of internally-oriented autobiographies that were published in France during the twentieth century. Some critics proclaimed French literature in peril due to an unrelenting nihilism, not merely in content, but in critique (Todorov). This kind of nombrilisme, or internally-oriented subjectivity, will always be part of the genre, but so will divergent forms.

In the 1970s, Phillip Lejeune introduced these texts as a legitimate literary genre. Like many other genres, it has many subforms: autofiction, memoir, life-writing, and self-writing, to name a few. The traditional definition of autobiography comes from Lejeune who defined it as a

“récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” (Le Pacte

Autobiographique 14) in which “L’identité du narrateur et du personnage principal que suppose l’autobiographie se marque le plus souvent par l’emploi de la première personne. C’est ce que

Gérard Genette appelle la narration « autodiégétique » dans sa classification des « voix » du récit”

(Le Pacte Autobiographique 15). In Lejeune’s definition, authors create a pact, explicit or not, with readers to show themselves as they are in “toute la vérité de la nature de leur récit autobiographique” (Le Pacte Autobiographique 1). In this pact, the author looks backwards and tells of her life truthfully with only errors in memory working against this intention. In essence,

Lejeune’s definition deals with two difficult questions: truth in memory and narrative voice.

Literary autobiographers have long struggled with memory’s incoherence. Sheringham explains that “If memory holds the key to our personal homeland it is because of its contrapunctual genius, the capacity to gather disparate threads into an organic whole, to manifest the latent thematic designs which underlie our scattered lives” (French Autobiography: Devices and Desires: Rousseau to Perec 288). For early authors such as Rousseau, Wordsworth, and

58 Dilthey, “Memory, these writers tell us, gathers and redeems, preserves and reintegrates. If lives and identities have unity it is by virtue of an agency which works on our behalf: we may help or hinder, but essentially Mnemosyne has her own mysterious ways” (Sheringham, French

Autobiography: Devices and Desires: Rousseau to Perec 288). Later, however, in Baudelaire,

“memory is at the heart of both aesthetic creation and human reality,” but in some cases “memory does not bring reintegration but violent disruption” (French Autobiography: Devices and Desires:

Rousseau to Perec 292). By the time of Proust’s writing, Sheringham notes that “in displaying a power to disrupt and problematize identity, it suggests an alternative anatomy of memory”

(French Autobiography: Devices and Desires: Rousseau to Perec 292). That is, memory does not provide unity, but rather questions it.

Later in the 20th century, as poststructuralism questioned unity, truth, and self, authors continued to move toward more decomposed narrative voices and structures. While the earliest

French autobiographies by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, François-René de Chateaubriand, and George

Sand gave a holistic shape to their life events and followed a rather chronological narrative structure, Sheringham describes the more anti-narrative tendencies of late-20th-century autobiography in works by Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Leiris, and Georges Perec that experiment with poststructuralist notions of self that continue in autobiography today (99). French autobiographers have been testing other formats and voices since well before the genre’s critical birth (Stendhal’s drawings in Vie de Henry Brulard, for example). The precursors in many ways to “environmental trends” in contemporary autobiography are Perec with his lists of quotidian observations (Species of Spaces) and fragmented multi-genred autobiographies (W: ou le souvenir d’enfance) and Leiris who builds his work on “engagement with materials—words, distant memories, current preoccupations, the heteroclite relics and remnants of one’s passage through time” and whose autobiographical desire “is diagnosed as a desire to become other” (Sheringham

59 246). Indeed, recently “other” voices, especially those of women, have driven much of the innovation in autobiographical writing.

Just as Ruffel observed about contemporary literature in general, Natalie Edwards and

Christopher Hogarth’s This "self" which is not one: women's life writing in French describes experimental autobiographies that include fiction (Georges Perec and Serge Doubrovsky), collective voices and histories (Assia Djebar and Irène Némirovsky), and blended media (Sophie

Calle, Camille Laurens, Raymond Depardon, and Julia Doucet) (3). The women’s work they study employs narrative strategies “that multiply the voice of the autobiographer, thus resisting the singular ‘I’ upon which the genre has traditionally been based” (Edwards and Hogarth 1).

Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film, and Comic Art in French Autobiography explains how women’s autobiographies blend other arts with writing. In her examination of Annie

Ernaux’s L’Usage de la photo, Lisa Connell describes the “feminist use of visual narratives for navigating the gendered spaces of public and private and prohibitions on self- disclosure” in a way that dismantles “the sociocultural and political underpinnings of the public and private spheres through acts of testimony” (Connell 146). The three autobiographers I study (Varda is an author of cinécriture) participate in this spatial questioning of social practices while in the style

Ruffel describes in contemporary French literature.

The emergent and experimental rather than cohesive self-portraits of Ernaux, Varda, and

Rolin bind their work together and to recent trends. All collectors, they reach beyond internally- stored and –ordered memory to external documents, “eye-witness” reports from friends and family, reflections of the self in others, and co-constructed self-images that rely on other and reader participation. That is, they employ materials to stand in for the self, use third-person voice instead of je, tell others’ stories in place of their own, and recycle well-known arts to self- represent whether on individual or collective scale. This intense “environmental” focus decomposes, or separates into its constitutive elements, the literary self, no longer a cohesive,

60 narratable whole. As such, I will observe how the aesthetics of fragmentation, accumulation, palimpsest (itself a kind of accumulation of layers), and recycling pervade the structure and content of their work in a way that reflects a selfhood that is multiple, disparate, open, in progress, reacting, and changing, never identical to itself. These observations will bolster my argument that the selves created in these literary works identify with waste as a cycling material, never in a fixed, end-of-life state, but always on the cusp of recomposition into a new creation.

While many have studied Ernaux’s ageing, Varda’s garbage, and Rolin’s interactions with waste populations, none have focused on the regenerative capacity of waste in their work.30

Self-Writing

As the autobiographical work I study contains so many references to other cultural materials, such as films, photos, literature, painting, etc., and its narrators reach out to the reader to explain the works’ intentions, it recalls what Michel Foucault described as Self-Writing. Reading ancient writing about the self that he calls écriture de soi, he observed two components: personal notebooks, in which self-writers gathered information from a variety of sources including other people’s writing, overheard conversation, or advice, and writing in which the author conveyed knowledge and advice to another individual referencing those notebooks. First, let us examine the notebooks, or hupomnêmata, an “aide-mémoire,” “livre de vie, guide de conduite,” or “mémoire matérielle des choses lues, entendues, pensées pour servir à d’autres fins plus tard,” such as

“matière première pour les rédactions plus systématiques, pas destinés à se substituer à la mémoire mais à devenir un cadre pour des exercices (lire, relire, méditer, s’entretenir avec soi- même et avec d’autres)” (Foucault and Defert 418). These texts could be miniature ethnological

30 For Ernaux, see (Breu; Jordan; Connell; Charnley; Kawakami). For Varda, see (Cruickshank; Tryer; Calatayaud). For Rolin, see (Gibourg; Armstrong; Bergé; Horvath; Thibault).

61 archives of valuable cultural materials that the author found inspiring. Writing the self included writing into one’s world view the views of others, recycling, if you will, other self-understandings and self-representations.31

This gathering of knowledge in hupomnêmata, however, required an eventual synthesis in writing. This is the second step in the self-writing process called correspondances that created a logos bioèthikos in which the writer put his knowledge collection to action, an important step to subjectivation of discourse (Foucault and Defert 419). Further, this step was necessary to avoid

La stultitia, which

se définit par l’agitation de l’esprit, l’instabilité de l’attention, le changement des

opinions et des volontés, et par conséquent la fragilité devant tous les événements qui

peuvent se produire ; elle se caractérise aussi par le fait qu’elle tourne l’esprit vers

l’avenir, le rend curieux de nouveautés et l’empêche de se donner un point fixe dans la

possession d’une vérité acquise. L’écriture des hupomnêmata s’oppose à cet

éparpillement en fixant des éléments acquis et en constituant en quelque sorte « du

passé », vers lequel il est toujours possible de faire retour et retraite. (Foucault and Defert

420)

That is, this collection gives the author something to look back on in difficult times to return to a self based in a visible accumulation of knowledge. Authors and filmmakers in the

“environmental” vein do for collectives or nations what these letters did for the individual—they gather materials to reflect back at society what it creates, contains, values, and hides. This spiritual genealogy provides the individual collector or group with a reminder of the thoughts that

31 In some senses, one could consider this kind of inclusion of others’ writing in one’s own as a lack of originality. Susan Signe Morrison argue that “the metaphors of cultural recycling—in concepts such as intertextuality, bricolage, and appropriation—become theoretical ways of justifying and explaining literary detritus for a generation discovering that originality is virtually impossible” (S. S. Morrison 472). I would rather argue that this can lead to enhanced creation, such as the recent winner of the Prix Goncourt pour premier roman, Meursault, contre-enquête, which while not self-writing relied heavily on an earlier work to inspire a new creation.

62 have informed her, his, or their actions. The act of writing to another reader has a “double fonction” because “la lettre qu’on envoie agit, par le geste même de l’écriture, sur celui qui l’adresse, comme elle agit par la lecture et la relecture sur celui qui la reçoit” (Foucault and

Defert 423). This sharing of knowledge at once encourages the writer to assimilate her or his knowledge and put it into action through advice to others by pondering potential actions in certain circumstance while also expanding the others’ collections, offering them additional knowledge with which to act. “L’écriture qui aide le destinataire arme le scripteur – et éventuellement les tiers qui la lisent” (Foucault and Defert 424). As opposed to the works we will read, in classical self-writing, the destinataire writes back to the scripteur; nonetheless, the authors and filmmakers look to this gathered information for self-understanding and self-representation to themselves and others. In addition, Foucault explains that “Comme élément de l’entrainement de soi, l’écriture a,

[…], une fonction éthopoiétique : elle est un opérateur de la transformation de la vérité en êthos,”

(418), or set of principles. The authors I study transform their observations of cultural materials, stories, themselves, and others into an ethic as they write about their experiences in the communities around them. The collections that we will study make the author or nation present to the reader or viewer in the same space at waste. Gathering waste alongside other cultural materials without using that waste to denigrate those materials is novel work, as is my reading of it.

The second component of self-writing, la correspondance, “constitue aussi une certaine manière de se manifester à soi-même et aux autres” (Foucault and Defert 425) in the sense that one makes oneself present to another by one’s imprint on the page. This presence transferred into writing even in the absence of the physical body will be particularly important for the study of

Ernaux’s work in which she attempts to fight her future absence in death using the imprint on the page. Writing to another opens the individual to the regard of others. “La réciprocité que la correspondance établit n’est pas simplement celle du conseil et de l’aide ; elle est celle du regard

63 et de l’examen” (Foucault and Defert 426). The public plays the role of this regard in receiving the author’s correspondance and examining it for personal use, perhaps in constituting part of their own books of life or memory aids to help turn the words they have collected into actions and formulating new attitudes toward waste. This concept of manifesting oneself to others without physical presence will be important when examining how Ernaux tries to use writing to propel her memories into the future.

Foucault found that self-writing functioned not only as self-representation and self- understanding but also as self-regulation. Michel Foucault’s herméneutique du sujet, as described by Frédéric Gros, explains a shift in the subject from an “œuvre”, or work, in Antiquity to an

“objet de connaissance” in Western society after the arrival of Christianity. Gros writes,

En un mot, la philosophie antique, et la vérité de son discours, ne tiennent absolument pas

dans la réponse à la question « qui sommes-nous ? », en tant que nature ou essence

connaissables, mais à la question « que devons-nous faire de notre existence ? » comme

sujets agissants. (161)

Self-writing’s goal then was an active one with a processual self in mind as opposed to the totalizing return to origins one might find in many autobiographies that attempt to define the self as an object through self-constituting past narratives.32 Using self-writing, by contrast, one works toward a self in practice that matches the self one desires to be in writing.

In this sense, there are at least two selves in self-writing. The first is the material, biological organism not linked to the text and unobservable from a distance as anything other than an organism subject to outside, uncontrollable environmental influences. The second exists only in the controlled environment of the text and is constituted by choice of texts, histories, and cultural materials that inform the biological organism writing the text and others reading it. In

32 From Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Georges Sand and on. See Michael Sheringham’s previously mentioned book.

64 neither case is there a “true” version of the self. That is, rather than a unified being existing in both physical and textual space, the two engage in a discourse or dialectic in which both selves continually and processually construct one another. The only physical link between the two would be the trace of ink on the page or the pulse of electricity across a computer screen. The organism is only in rapport with the textual self in synchronous writing, because once this second self is written into being, it breaks its link with the organism to become fixed on the page while the organism continues to respond to environmental changes and influences. The written self will evolve separately from the first with reader interpretation, but both selves will continue to dialogue over time. As we study self-writing texts, it will be important to keep in mind that the written self is always a fictional representation of the material organism who created it, carrying the spiritual genealogy of the writer, but not the organism herself or himself.

Selfhood in the 21st Century

The notion of self underwent several revolutions in the 20th century. Sarah Cooper summarizes this history well when she writes, “Most notably, it was derided in favour of the collective

(Marxism); seen as an effect of broader systems, such as language or ideology (Structuralism;

Lacanian psychoanalysis); or decentred and dissolved (poststructuralism)” (“Looking Back,

Looking Onwards” 58–59). Indeed, post-structuralists writing autobiographies struggled in the latter half of the 20th century with the notion of self. How, for example, could one write a history of a dissolved being? As a precursor to the authors here, Roland Barthes sought multiple arts

(photography and writing), voices (je, tu, et il), and writing genres (novel, alphabet, and autobiography) to underline the non-identity of self and text in Roland Barthes par Roland

Barthes in 1975 (Kelly 125–6). In this way, Barthes was able to express that “the self is not something that pre-exists as a thing which language will later be used to represent; this would be

65 constative understanding of autobiography as a text which describes a pre-existing, non-linguistic entity. Rather, it is language which constructs the self in the performative sense: one is only by saying that one is” (Kelly 123). Kelly’s observation highlights the performativity of the textual or filmic self, which does not and cannot reconstitute the biological organism who creates it. While the text remains haunted by the analogical connection between a physical being that the photos and language represent, Barthes preceded Ernaux, Varda, and Rolin (as well as other contemporary authors) in similar textual practices that put distance between the biological organism and the self of the text in order to underline the fragmentary nature of self that was being deconstructed in the late 20th century.

Indeed, Barthes points to a major challenge to deconstructing the self when he makes the distinction between destruction and decomposition. To destroy something (for Barthes, la conscience bourgeoise), one must be exterior to it, but to decompose something one may remain inside it, while all the while taking it apart. “Pour détruire, en somme, il faut pouvoir sauter. Mais sauter où ? Dans quel langage ? Dans quel lieu de la bonne conscience et la mauvaise foi ? Tandis qu’en décomposant, j’accepte d’accompagner cette décomposition, de me décomposer moi- même, au fur et à mesure : je dérape, m’accroche et entraîne” (Roland Barthes par Roland

Barthes 68). In this sense, the pieces do not disappear completely but are rather fragmented and scattered. The concept of decomposition was the initial starting point for this dissertation. It was in observing the fragmented structures of the texts and identification with waste materials therein that I developed this study. This textual self that I find in the authors studied here is the only possibility for self in the 21st century. In their own way, each author gleans what is left of the self and places it in a coherent albeit fragmented form that in some ways fights its dispersal.

The idea of human beings as singular, self-sufficient organisms has also been muddled by recent studies in ecology and microbiology. As Marjorie Levinson argues, knowledge from the domains of science and technology are infiltrating cultural conceptions. Individuals cannot begin

66 to contemplate self-understanding without the physiological and material elements that support life. Maslow’s pyramid, for example, demonstrates the extent to which human creativity and self- actualization depend on the material world. These materials, not ancillary to our individual or collective self-understandings, are fundamental. The biology and chemistry of our bodies that influence our behaviors and personalities depend on material elements. When necessary elements are missing or in excess (toxic) their absence or surplus gives them an inherent agency in the body.

In the 21st century, we now acknowledge a series of connections between the bacteria in the human gut and brain chemistry that impact the immune system, metabolism, mood, and even personality. Human bodies are not individuals but collectives of microbes participating in various nutrient cycling processes (Madigan et al. 672). As much as Western society fears microbes, rarely remarking the difference between the good and the bad, the Earth and humans are largely composed of microbes, many of which are busy cycling nutrients through decomposition (Pollan

38). The internal ecological wilderness yet to be explored opens new paths for examining human self-representation and subjectivity. What we consider the individual subject may be an unrealistic expectation of wholeness, separateness, oneness, or a singular subjectivity. Individuals may now explore themselves as collectives of living beings, rather than as single-organism selves. I argue that this collective of organisms making the self finds a manifestation in the environmentally focused autobiographies I present here. That is, while there may be no cause and effect relationship between the two, it merits examining how autobiographies based in a collection of materials and stories from others are coming in to vogue synchronously with a scientific shift in what it means to be an “individual” body containing other bodies and perhaps other subjectivities that ecologically impact our psychology.33

33 See the following authors for just a few of the recent studies on these links: (Benezra, DeStefano, and Gordon; Foster and McVey Neufeld; Goyal et al.; Nading; The Hidden Half of Nature)

67 The gut, for example, the site of resource recovery in the human body is ascending to the level of the brain and heart in human health. Particles of food not only arrive from diverse geographical locations in modern society, but they may also remain in the gut for decades.

Similarly, the bacterial colonies that process food date from various eras and geographic locations. Some species may have been present since shortly after birth while others are picked up later in life.34 The effect that this space may have on the human personality makes it a legible microbial autobiography. The gut not only collects a sort of ecological autobiography (where your gut has traveled, what it has eaten, if it has been ill, who you have lived with, whether you have pets, etc.) but its ecological health influences your overall health, decision-making, and personality. These final two elements are central to autobiographical work.35 These discoveries in microbial ecology make it ever easier to argue for human decentering as a complement to ethical arguments for valuing other species and materials.36

The others that live within humans and influence their 21st-century notions of self work in conjunction with others from without (human, animal, and cultural materials) that modulate individual thought and behavior. Indeed, the authors studied here construct themselves not only through the perspectives of others observing them but also through the materials and

34 Scientists once believed that the amniotic environment and newborn guts were sterile (perhaps because the notion of good bacteria was foreign?), but are now discovering the importance of healthy microbes in the placenta (Aagaard et al.; Moskvitch; Kaiser) and breast milk (Lara-Villoslada et al.; Lewis et al.) for establishing healthy infant microbiomes as well as birth practices in these colonization processes (Dominguez-Bello et al.; Neu and Rushing). 35 While I will not have time to explore artists working with their own feces in this dissertation, I do hope to add a chapter for the book that concerns this kind of autobiographical work. 36 “Paul Sears in 1964 and later Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley in 1969 once called the discipline [ecology] ‘the subversive science.’ They proposed ecology as an integrative discipline, ‘a kind of vision across boundaries’ and a ‘resistance movement’—an alternative to being ‘man fanatic.’ In their perspective, the world needs to know what ecologists know and needs to take that knowledge seriously enough to transform the ways by which we provision ourselves with food, energy, materials, shelter, and livelihood” (Orr 13). The arts engage in cultural subversion as well. Researchers at the CNRS call for an ecocriticism through the arts; that is, using the arts to critique culture-environment relationships (Blanc et al.). This can be achieved through incorporating ecology into the arts, whether plastic or literary.

68 environments that have shaped their individual and our collective existence. Patrick Murphy writes, “The subject is more than human; the human is more than the subject of his or her own narrative; we are responsive, consciously, unconsciously, and autonomically—not only to other humans, but also to numerous others and anothers that require or request mutual recognition and interaction” (82). It is from this perspective of the self being constructed with and through the surrounding and internal materials of existence that self-writing can serve as a medium for seeking out shifts in waste perceptions in the 21st century. Even the space we inhabit acts on our being as homes or territories are extensions of the self that influence behavior within that space.

Neil Evernden (“Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy”) explains how small fish behave as though they were larger fish when confronted on their own territory, that territory becoming an extension of their physical body and self-understanding. Equivalent to greater strength, a familiarity with one’s space permits stronger behavior. In a certain sense, Evernden considers a person’s situation in the geographical sense and their familiarity with that location’s physical elements as influencing their actions. If we add this geographical sensitivity to the cultural sensitivity in self-writing’s collection of cultural knowledge, we can observe how physical and cultural materials impact self-construction and self-representation.

This major shift in our understanding of microbial processes, i.e. our recognition that these organisms represented in the cultural imagination by dangerous pathogens (think Pasteur) impact the defining features of our selves (the other is within us), alters human self- understanding. Some may prefer the word “identity” in this context. I, however, both here and throughout the dissertation, refrain from using this word, because, as Brubaker and Cooper argued convincingly in their article “Beyond Identity,” it “tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all

(because of its sheer ambiguity)” (1). I prefer to use the word “self-understanding,” which they describe as a kind of “‘situated subjectivity’: one’s sense of who one is, of one’s social location,

69 and (given the first two) how one is prepared to act” (17). My overall understanding of the concept of “selfhood,” however, tends toward “the unstable, multiple, fluctuating, and fragmented nature of the contemporary ‘self’” (Brubaker and Cooper 7). This self is relational, composite, and active rather than fixed. On a larger scale, I will also borrow the term “collective self- understanding” to mean “processual, interactive development of the kind of collective self- understanding, solidarity, or ‘groupness’ that can make collective action possible” (6). This will be contrasted on occasion with “other-categorization,” which Brubaker and Cooper describe as how individuals in a society or the state may categorize other individuals as having a certain sameness with a particular group, which may or may not be the way the individual views her- or himself (15). While it may be just as conflated as “identity” to have multiple-scaled meanings with a single term, I have chosen “self-understanding” because the term includes a gerund that indicates the active role that an individual or group plays in the comprehension, projection, and preservation of a perceived selfhood. One reason that I have chosen to look at self-writing as opposed to autobiography in general is self-writing’s greater incorporation of external cultural materials that represent the collective in self-representative writing.

…

In The Ethics of Waste, Gay Hawkins argues that ethical waste practice hinges on incorporating positive views of waste into behavior and self-performance. Shifts in individual perceptions, behaviors, and performances are the only way to impact larger cultural practices. My dissertation argues that Ernaux, Varda, and Rolin demonstrate a shift in attitudes toward waste, enabling their work to become an alternate space for “treating” waste as a resourceful mirror for self-reflection. They are ragpickers, gleaners, and collectors, not only of grand cultural materials from national archives, but of the everyday stuff of life. They recognize the profound in the simple everyday decisions we make about what has value and what does not. While environmental scientists study the broader impact of such decisions on the environment, global

70 health, etc., these collectors explore their influence in personal life as they document how valueless materials take on new value in new contexts, how what we disguise can create and reinforce profound connections between individuals across time and space, and how finding the value in the valueless can help individuals maintain a sense of self-worth when the world around them begins to see their value as diminished. This is important because in a time of increasing waste and human population growth, those forced to live with or from waste will grow. The arts may be the best means of altering the way individuals view waste in light of changing science and engineering, which in turn will impact how they treat waste in their own lives and those dependent upon it. This work engages not only with Waste Studies and Environmental Science but also Literature and Film Studies. Blending these fields in new readings of well-known authors will create a firm footing for further ecocritical approaches to French Studies.

My analysis will move through the texts beginning with the most individually-focused text to the most societally-focused text, that is from Ernaux’s ethnography of her generation to

Varda’s observations of France’s attitudes toward waste-dependent populations and the ageing as she herself claims membership in these groups, and finally, to Rolin’s observations of French and global attitudes toward waste-dependent communities and individuals, including himself. These authors incorporate waste into their self-representative texts in the kind of efficient resource use we find in sustainable nutrient cycles, cycles in which waste products on all levels are incorporated into the bodies of micro- and macro-organisms of all kinds as a means of sustenance. This is significant because at a moment of decreasing primary resources and increasing secondary effects of production, our civilization necessitates a shift in perspective, away from viewing underutilized natural resources as waste toward viewing discarded byproducts of commodity production, toxic and otherwise, or even end-of-life commodities as resources.

Furthermore, this shift is now an ethical obligation to future generations that must be addressed by our global community. It can be enacted, however, only on the individual scale in the way we

71 observe taking place within the self-writing studied here. The arts can play a vital role in promoting this shift, as we shall see.

72 Chapter 1

Displaying waste: Self-preservation with the archive, the landfill, and self- writing in Les Années

It is difficult not to arrive at the view that a spectre of waste hangs over modern western society, and its culture and history. The extent to which we seem to be willing to acknowledge this suggests that waste actually haunts our consciousness—and, specifically, consciousness as a kind of temporal awareness or sense of finitude. - John Scalan and John Clark, Aesthetic Fatigue

“Toutes les images disparaîtront. // la femme accroupie qui urinait en plein jour derrière un baraquement servant de café, en bordure des ruines, à Yvetot, après la guerre, se renculottait debout, jupe relevée, et s’en retournait au café” (11). A curious image with which to begin, the introductory passage in Annie Ernaux’s Les années depicts a universal human gesture (urination) and a ubiquitous cultural material (ruins). What can we make of these waste images in the opening to ethnographic self-writing? Emmanuel Lévinas describes bodily functions as humiliating in On Escape, explaining that “we feel the need to transcend the limits of finite being” and the “degrading types of servitude imposed on us by the blind mechanism of our bodies…” (53). The body may seem to impose limits on the mind (if they are not one and the same) while equally maintaining it through the waste production.37 This initial image reproduces the first waste process in which a human engages, urine production filters waste from the blood to keep the body balanced and healthy. Long before birth, a fetus begins consuming its own urine

37 See Introduction regarding the manner in which body and mind are not easily separated, especially as concerns personality and microbiome.

73 blended with amniotic fluid to practice digestion and urination. Flow of fluid through the kidneys and back out into the amniotic fluid is as vital to fetal health as flow of nutrients through the umbilical cord. After birth, the first defecation liberates the child from the mother’s bodily systems and marks the first step toward self-regulation on a biological level, one that will gradually fall under the child’s control. Later, bodily waste continues to impact psychological and social standing as the onset of menses liberates the daughter from the mother’s feminine sphere as she enters her own feminine power and also subjugates her to the social expectations of womanhood within her culture. Semen emission eventually does the same for boys as they take on the role of men. Such bodily mechanisms are prerequisites to the human expression, communication, and creation that enable the transcendence Lévinas desires. Further, Diego-

Alejandro Aguilar Beauregard writes that “la parole est biologique, car son existence reste conditionnelle à la durée d’épuisements des sécrétions corporelles” (164). Language itself, intangible but nonetheless a biological excretion, is the medium in which Ernaux records her material and bodily memories before they decompose in age and death. And yet, she recognizes that the words we emit to communicate and preserve memory can endure only slightly longer than our other biological excretions, because even words participate in cyclical processes of decomposition and regeneration.

The background ruins in the above passage also invites question as an autoethnography typically creates a durable rather than crumbling monument to a person’s group membership. In an examination of the slippage between the material and social ruins of colonialisms, Ann Laura

Stoler describes the complexities of ruination,

an ambiguous term; both an act of ruining, a condition of being ruined, and a cause of it.

Ruination is an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss.

These three senses may overlap in effect but they are not the same. Each has its own

temporality. Each identifies different durations and moments of exposure to a range of

74 violences and degradations that may be immediate or delayed, subcutaneous or visible,

prolonged or instant, diffuse or direct. (195)

While Stoler describes ruination in her analysis, this process and decomposition, a waste process on which this dissertation focuses in terms of text structure and thematic content, overlap in relation to time and agency. As in ruination, decomposition takes place over a variety of time scales and can result from a driving force or absent agentic maintenance. Stoler goes on to argue, however, that rather than viewing ruins as exclusively negative, “Instead we might turn to ruins as epicenters of renewed claims, as history in a spirited voice, as sites that animate new possibilities, bids for entitlement, and unexpected political projects” (198). That is, the remains of ruination and decomposition can actually become sites of creation and regeneration, as is the case for Ernaux’s narrator whose mental decomposition frightens and inspires her to give a voice to ageing women in her generation and usher in new materials to cultural memory.

In Les années, the narrator tells the life story of one woman within the larger contexts of her generation and nation. Ernaux builds a fragmentary memory from characteristically controversial materials that highlight the material underpinnings of social realities, such as material culture, bodily fluids, and everyday gestures, buttressed by reminders of her textual intentions.38 In contrast to Jennifer Willging’s article, “Annie Ernaux’s Shameful Narration,” that conveys Ernaux’s anxiety in guiding reader interpretation as a desire to control textual reception and Simon Kemp’s argument that “Ernaux’s insistence that her depiction of the self be understood by the reader in the manner intended by the writer suggests an anxiety on the author’s part about readers’ freedom to interpret as they see fit” (177), I will ultimately argue that given

Ernaux’s persistent emphasis on waste materials, her anxiety arises more directly from a

38 Lyn Thomas’s Annie Ernaux: an introduction to the writer and her audience describes in some detail the variety of controversies around Ernaux’s work in the popular and academic presses, many of which surround her open discussion of sexism, women’s sexuality, classism, and abortion.

75 recognition of memory’s and language’s fragile materiality. To do so, in contrast to other scholars’ work on gender and age in Ernaux’s oeuvre I will attend specifically to how the narrator relates these subjects to consumer goods, bodily waste, and her decomposing memory. 39 I will focus primarily on Les années, because this is where Ernaux’s narrator is ageing, identifying with waste, and finding creative inspiration in both, but also to a lesser extent on Une femme in which

Ernaux’s mother’s memories slowly decomposes in dementia. These texts will allow me to link waste materials, ageing, and language through a single metaphorical thematic in a way no one has before in her work. In doing so, it illuminates the manner in which Ernaux’s work underlines language’s materiality, elucidating the much-discussed question of anxiety in her work. This reinforces my underlying dissertation argument that waste no longer represents a steady-state finitude but a fluctuating and cycling repurposing of matter. Overall, this chapter clarifies underlying French perceptions of waste and moves French studies and material ecocriticism forward by introducing waste studies into new geographic and cultural territories that will further our understanding of how waste materials underlie social realities in multiple cultures and contexts.

Ernaux’s oeuvre

According to the Ernaux scholar, Lyn Thomas, “The case of Annie Ernaux is an interesting one, for perhaps more than any other contemporary French writer, she has managed to combine a sustained resistance to the latter’s [French critics’] attempts to define and devalue her writing with continuing and widespread popularity” (161). Loraine Day and Lyn Thomas, explain that

39 (Connell; Day, Thomas, and Ernaux; Delvaux; Jordan; MONTFORT; Tierney and Motte; “Everyday Adventures”; Sheringham; Willging)

76 Ernaux’s texts “have been received in complex and contradictory ways” (99) by critics, academics, and audiences in France and other countries. Specifically, Thomas explains

I have identified two dominant discourses in the journalistic reception of Ernaux’s work,

around which, a number of sub-categories or themes can be grouped. The first is the

attempt to disqualify Ernaux from the literary sphere, to argue that although her writing

may be moving, powerful or popular, it is not literature. The second dominant discourse

is the tendency to focus on the writer as a person, rather than on the texts themselves.

(147)

Among her criticisms are her texts’ brevity, dry style, content (as Thomas notes, “The auto/biographical genre, when it focuses on experience outside the male, middle-class mainstream of French literature, seems to become highly dubious, and Ernaux’s determination to base her writing on her own life can lead to a variety of charges, particularly in the more specialised, literary press” (150)), genre questions, her success, narcissism/personal experience in literature, impudeur, midinette nature (talking of the banal or everyday), and treatment of gender, class, and sexuality (Thomas 150-156). Most important, Day and Thomas explain that “These differences in reception in different cultural contexts seem to stem from her foregrounding of issues of gender, class and sexuality” (99). As concerns this study, class and sexuality have well- established metaphorical relationships with waste in cultural discourse (lower classes being associated with dirt and filth and overt female sexuality typically polluting female characters).40

Beyond this, Ernaux’s open discussion of bodily processes (literal waste production) contributes new matter to the collective memory of bodily existence that may make some readers ill-at-ease,

40 Sander Gilman describes the iconography of the female prostitute as polluting in his article, “White Bodies, Black Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” While described less as related to innate, genetic difference arising from race and class distinctions, such associations continue in modern arts and literatures. He explains that “Alain Corbin has shown how Parent-Duchatelet's use of the public health model reduces the prostitute to yet another source of pollution, similar to the sewers of Paris” (221). Gilman refers to Corbin’s Les filles de noce: misère sexuelle et prostitution, XIXe siècle.

77 especially as it relates to the female body. As was the case of 19th-century autobiographical works confessing acts of sin, “confession was supposed to be accompanied by contrition” (Perrot 550).

Without the usual deference or apologies that go with revealing such personal information, her texts may seem brash or defiant, when really they are simply expressing all facets of human experience.

In her article describing Ernaux’s written ageing process, Shirley Jordan argues that

Ernaux “has persistently attended to categories of people and experience that are peripheral, unvoiced, taboo or shameful. In so doing she has drawn attention to and countered their negative construction” (140). As an author whose work is widely read, Annie Ernaux has faced a variety of criticisms about her work, in particular its inclusion of forbidden materials as representative of the French population. In Telling Anxiety, an analysis of the language of anxiety in texts by four women writing in French (Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Hébert),

Jennifer Willging explains that Ernaux’s texts “have become more and more revelatory, or even, some critics have suggested, exhibitionist,” (22) revealing indecent information about the author.

Some of her earliest texts recounted her abortion. “C’est cet événement qu’Ernaux souhaite rappeler afin de le ramener à la mémoire, pour rompre le silence autour de l’avortement et l’inscrire dans l’histoire” (Delvaux 132). Ernaux’s work on bringing abortion, another unspeakable, disguised waste practice, into the light in a literary display paved the way for other bodily wastes to become areas of focus in her work.

In her latest text, “It is in its focus on ageing, then, that Les années maintains both

Ernaux’s habitual intimacy and her tactic of bringing to literature states of vulnerability, or

‘unspeakable’ matters” (Jordan 141). Shirley Jordan explains that prior to this work Ernaux has only addressed women’s ageing through her mother in Je suis pas sortie de ma nuit and Une femme (141). As we will also see in the next chapter on Varda’s recent films, Jordan argues that

“In any number of ways, old women ‘disappear’” (139). They disappear not only while they are

78 still active in society, but also when their memories fade or they enter exclusive spaces for the ageing, such as retirement homes. Jordan goes on to acknowledge that “In spite of the emergence of an ageing population in Western societies, a development which should sharpen our interest in old age, new critical and creative approaches to women’s ageing are slow in arriving” (139). As she has tackled any number of difficult issues in the past, Ernaux confronts the challenges of ageing and memory in Les années. Une femme, which records her mother’s death and details of her life as well as Ernaux’s mourning, is full of forward-thinking references to Ernaux herself one day arriving in the retirement home. “J’ai pensé aussi qu’un jour, dans les années 2000, je serais l’une de ses femmes qui attendent le dîner en pliant et dépliant leur serviette” (Une femme, 103-

104). Ernaux’s fear may arise from the circumstances of her mother’s last years and death in this space. A History of Private Life explains that in the 20th century, “Where death had once been a part of life, now it came to be seen as a form of decay” (Prost and Vincent 333). Touch heals and death in the modern era is not typically contagious, but society still limits physical contact with the old, sick, and dying. As such, in the 1930s death moved to hospitals where “People today die in hospitals, where the staff behaves as if the person were going to live, administering treatment whose primary purpose is to conceal the imminence of death” (Prost and Vincent 261). These may be valuable spaces for protecting fragile communities but many hide human materiality and prevent the physical connections with familiar people needed in times of crisis. Foucault describes them as Heterotopia created for individuals that deviate from social expectations of activity and who are in crisis because French culture treats age as a kind of crisis. He explains that “Les maisons de retraite, qui sont en quelque sorte à la limite de l’hétérotopie de crise et de l’hétérotopie de déviation, puisque, après tout, la vieillesse, c’est une crise, mais également une déviation, puisque, dans notre société où le loisir est la règle, l’oisiveté forme une sorte de déviation” (757). This is not just deviation from society but also from self in the mind. Removed materially lifelong surroundings, the elderly can become unmoored in such spaces.

79 The 2000s have arrived and Ernaux’s response appears to be a fear of disintegration of the mind, the body, her language, and her desire (“Contamination Anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s

Twenty-First-Century Texts”). The narrator’s age gives her a new authority, but while

This new authority might be thought to lend a positive gloss to the experience that comes

with age, an experience that is clearly demonstrated – perhaps even tacitly celebrated– by

Les années. Other facets of ageing are less welcome. Ernaux records a painful sense of

exclusion from the community of younger women, women of forty-five or fifty, with

whom she still identifies yet who cannot identify with her. (Jordan 141)

Thus, the narrator finds herself in a difficult position. While she may do what she can to feel young, society still excludes her. It is only to those in her generation that she can say ‘nous’ and be understood. Thus Shirley Jordan argues that “While the work maps a trajectory with whose staple elements many women over sixty will identify, its overriding expression of ageing is rooted in loss and decline” (148). As a reaction to such loss, in Mal d’archives, Jacques Derrida argues that one may wish to accumulate materials. Indeed, we will see how Ernaux gleans and compiles memories, in a sense saving them from the trash heap of history with an overall effect of creativity. That is, while she may feel loss with age, that sentiment inspires novel work. Adding the ageing process to the list of taboo topics, perhaps it is Ernaux’s frankness and unwillingness to participate in negative constructions of perfectly normal processes and realities of existence that creates controversy. Some of this negative reception certainly stems from Ernaux’s foregrounding or display of controversial or hidden topics.

As Foucault describes in his introduction to L’Ordre du discours, societies have specific rules of what can be said, when, and where. “Tabou de l’objet, rituel de la circonstance, droit privilégié ou exclusif du sujet qui parle : on a là le jeu de trois types d’interdits qui se croisent, se renforcent ou se compensent, formant une grille complexe qui ne cesse de se modifier” (L’ordre

Du Discours 11). Ernaux’s text moves the grid of the forbidden to record what gets left out of the

80 archive and hidden in the landfill. Ernaux demonstrates throughout the text the role materials play in defining the self. We all construct our identities through processes of inclusion and exclusion, a performance that takes place both spatially and temporally. Appropriately timed and placed objects, individuals, and language shape how we understand and represent ourselves in the world.

Societies function well when everyone follows the guidelines of time and place, and on an everyday basis these accepted practices are practically unnoticed, such that when materials and utterances do arise out of time or out of place, they are jarring, disturbing, and exciting. Artists and authors have long included the excluded to question and make visible society’s invisible practices. In addition, just as self-writing serves the purpose of (re)forming a self that one wishes to be through accumulation and contemplation of knowledge, display spaces for such memory can help construct a collective/national identity, not simply record it. As Natalie Edwards notes in her introduction to a Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature volume, the process of archival selection, however, is not just “incomplete and subjective” but “patriarchal and discriminatory”

(3). Until the late 20th century this had been particularly true when it came to memorializing everyday life and the lives of women and minorities who found minimal representation in national displays. One goal of Ernaux’s text, according to the narrator, is “en retrouvant la mémoire de la collective dans une mémoire individuelle, rendre la dimension vécue de l’Histoire”

(251). In this sense, Ernaux’s text presents an additional facet of a generation’s collective memory. As Ernaux’s texts include topics and materials often thrown out of display spaces that preserve collective memory, such as bodily materials and practices, there has been some controversy over the place of Ernaux’s work in France. To a large extent, this is due to their contents’ having typically belonged in disguise spaces.

To further understand why waste materials have a particularly complex relationship with the forbidden we can turn to Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern. In this book, he describes the desire to purify as a typically modern strategy in which waste has no generative

81 capacities, only destructive ones. As such, our culture can use waste, dirt, and decay as placeholders for anxieties about the end of clearly defined boundaries. Waste as ever-present and ambiguous (is it a healthy part of life/resource for survival or a growth medium for deadly pathogens/toxic behemoth stifling out humanity?) requires specific linguistic and physical controls that limit not only its partitioning in space but in language contexts. The object itself, the circumstance in which it is discussed, and the right of the speaker to utter its name create controversy when “out of place,” for example in a display space such as a nationally recognized book.

The memories that we do not care to transfer tend to remain excluded and contained in inaccessible spaces. The recesses of the mind are perhaps the most secretive spaces for seclusion.

This is where we store what we want to hide about ourselves and our culture, the physical traces of this hidden culture are disguised or excluded in spaces that limit access and discourage memory. Western cultures, French as much as any other, have used the arts of medicine to avoid or delay materiality, disease, age, and death and created spaces to disguise them. Given the tendency to do so, human materiality and decomposition must have represented a threat to human culture in the past. Associating them with waste metaphorically and hiding them in exclusive spaces, such as Heterotopia, express a culture’s desire to distance itself from such natural processes and materials. Ernaux, however, brings these materials into display space.

Fragmentation in Les années

As I discussed in the Introduction, the self-writing under examination in this chapter shares three traits with the contemporary French literature in this dissertation; it is ethnographic, multi-media, and structurally fragmented. Their ethnographic rather than singular focus grants access to larger cultural relations to waste; their multimediality links them to archives, museums, and other

82 display spaces; and their structural fragmentation echoes with waste, often a partial and heterogeneous conglomerate of materials with a singular commonality—place in waste space.

This section of the chapter will describe how Les années displays these characteristics and, thus, relates to the other texts in the dissertation.

First, Ernaux’s work is ethnographic. Annie Ernaux is well-known for her subjective storytelling, but this text goes beyond the singular experience. Shirley Jordan explains that “the intimate and the subjective through which Ernaux habitually explores social phenomena” (141) have become her familiar to readers. After the introductory list of memories discussed above, each unnumbered book section in Les années begins with the narrator’s brief description of a photo of elle, the otherwise unnamed person’s life and times she recounts. From this photo, the narrator constructs first an image of the woman and her family and then expands out to include historical events, consumer products, arts (music, film, literature, advertisement, etc.), and cultural celebrations. While the narrator transforms them from memory into text, these disjointed lists contribute to the multimedia nature of the text in which the reader sees an individual, one among many in her generation, evolve in her individual time and place while being influenced by larger societal changes.41

As in the other texts in this dissertation, the narrator’s ethnographic project requires her to glean and weave multimedia materials and events into the text’s structure. No other scholars have written about the narrator’s identification with gleaners. Near the end of a list of memories in Les années, the narrator writes, “l’abbé Trublet compilait, compilait, compilait” (16).

Described by Voltaire in the 18th century as the “chiffonnier de la littérature” during a dispute,

Trublet never lived down the moniker that marked him as a collector of literary waste. In the 19th century, these collectors and sorters inspired arts by many, including the painter Jean François

41 This text won le prix Marguerite-Duras, le prix François-Mauriac, and le prix de la langue française.

83 Raffaëlli and the poet Baudelaire. By the mid-20th century this profession had practically disappeared in France.42 While only a small reference, this short phrase complements the narrator’s stated goal of preserving lived history and collective memory, “en retrouvant la mémoire de la collective dans une mémoire individuelle, rendre la dimension vécue de l’Histoire”

(251). Rather than writing “je suis l’abbé Trublet,” the list merely includes this reference among various uninspiring images that are not part of collective memory. While brief, it indicates

Ernaux’s awareness of her role in picking up and preserving what others have thrown out of history, perhaps even to the extent of becoming a gatherer herself, given the amount of repetitive and intertextual material in her autobiographical oeuvre as a whole.43 Among this same list in Les

Années is “l’explorateur mit le contenu de ses fouilles dans des caisses” (17). Another kind of collector, the explorer may be a more socially acceptable gleaner whose historical debris will end in archives or museums (display) even if they originated in former waste spaces (disguise), such as cemeteries (an ancient Greek burial ground, for example). Who is the narrator then? A ragpicker? A treasure-hunter? Whomever she may be, she gathers remnants of history and gives them continued value in the context of her life story, at the same time contributing to her text’s fragmentary and multimedia nature.

Second, this gleaned material appears at times within a narrative matrix and at others in fragmentary lists. Les Années is not the first text Ernaux has broken up. Akane Kawakami explains of Ernaux’s published diaries that “On the level of discourse rather than syntax, the prioritization of notation over narrative results in the inclusion of lists” (235). These lists include a variety of collected materials from the past like those in self-writing notebooks discussed in the

42 This work continues informally in developed countries and in many undeveloped countries around the world playing an important role in recycling and informal economies. In the United States, in states that offer refunds for returned bottles and cans, the night before trash pick-up modern chiffonniers collect this kind of waste as well as scrap metals for resale. 43 Ernaux retells many stories from her life in different ways over her oeuvre. (Jellenik)

84 Introduction. These are accumulations of seemingly unrelated material except in their location in elle’s memory, similar to unrelated materials in a landfill in which only their shared location unites them. In addition to simple lists of consumer products, literary references, films, and songs,

“Another narrative mode frequently employed by Ernaux in her diary is the brief description, which she refers to as ‘scènes’” (Kawakami 236). These are not quite stories, but rather contexts that offer glimpses of daily life. Such scènes also dominate Les années and are separated by blank spaces in the text. Michael Sheringham examined the role of blank spaces in Stendhal’s autobiography, explaining that, “In Stendhal we are dealing with memories, not Memory, fragments of a past, not the Past. He emphasizes the gaps and blanks which are often as palpable as actual memories” (295). In much the same way, Ernaux employs gaps and fragments in a way that emphasizes the fragility and subjectivity of memories.

Finally, in addition to gaps in the prose, there is space in the voice as well. In her interview with Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Ernaux explains that while her first novels Les armoires vides from 1974 and Ce qu’ils disent du rien from 1977 had fictional characters, she thereafter turned to first-person narrations in which the je in the text and the name on the cover refer to the same biological organism, agreeing then with Lejeune’s Pacte autobiographique (L’écriture comme un couteau 21). Over time, however, her work took on layers of fragmentation, as Lyn

Thomas explains.

We do not find in her writing the characteristics associated with autobiography in its most

classic form: the exemplary life, the momentous turning points, the cohesive sense of

self, and the conclusion written with the benefit of hindsight. The identity described is

more tentative, its textual presentation more fragments than is the case for more

conventional exponents of the genre, such as Beauvoir. (29)

85 Ernaux stylistically fragments Les années more than her previous texts by importing quotes from films, other authors, references to paintings, and photography, using lists and scènes in place of longer prose, and altering the text’s voice.

The narrator’s “tentative” identity to which Thomas refers above makes a major split with the author in Les années in which Ernaux blatantly erases je from her self-writing. In addition to the obvious temporal distance of autobiographers from past events in their lives

Sheringham also describes a spatial distance between autobiographers and written memories.

“Whatever the degrees of identification, there is always a gap here between the autobiographer and his memories” (297). Ernaux creates a similar gap using elle in place of je and lists and blank spaces to imply space between memories; whether time or space, there is separation between events. At least three referents relate to the text: the biological organism called Annie Ernaux, the narrator whose voice tells the story, and elle about whom the story is written. The typical place of je is remarkably taken over by elle. Writers use pronouns to describe the position, or space, from which an action arises. Je indicates that the action comes from the space occupied by the speaker and that there is no one else in that space. Simon Kemp argues that the author does this due to

“contamination anxiety” from the narrating persona. Textual evidence indicates, however, that the narrating voice recognizes a distance between her current self and the selves of her past, but a je is present in nous. She writes of her selves of the past that “Il lui semble que ce sont ses mois qui continuent d’exister là” (104). When Ernaux writes from outside the space of the protagonist elle, she not only creates distance between elle as she is and the self that she was (or one of the elles that she was given that each one is different), but escapes or hides behind that former self. She spatially excludes elle from her present position or space. When writing nous, however, frequently in reference to the feelings of people in her generation, she reclaims a shared territory with elle who is also part of that generation, but occupies a different space within it. If Ernaux were completely outside the narrating voice, then ‘they’ would have been an appropriate space

86 from which to write. As this is the case, then the narrator is recognizing multiple elles in the text as making up a group to which the narrating voice belongs. In that sense, while Ernaux does not employ je, this space along with the spaces of the elles recreates the sensation that there are many selves existing simultaneously in other places with the unstated je, and that the writing voice, especially if it is the voice of the biological organism on the cover, will continue to evolve while the elle of the text will remain fixed. With this, elle is more of a retrospective creation than a representation of an existing external being, and this actional approach to self-recreation lies at the heart of self-writing as described in the Introduction.

Having begun publishing such fragmented texts in the 1990s, Ernaux was certainly at the forefront of contemporary French literature’s movement. More than stylistic, however, given her revelations regarding her role as a gleaner and the scrappy manner in which she collects memories in this text, I argue that this text more than others demonstrates a treatment of memory itself as waste because Ernaux gathers up life’s remnants to prevent their eventual decomposing and archives them to keep them from the silent landfill of history lost behind the foreheads of her ancestors.

The archive, as it plays a role in both self-understanding and self-representation, is a hallmark of our era, as both Marc Augé and Michel Foucault have observed. In Non-lieux Marc

Augé describes the current era as what he terms “la surmodernité” consisting of three excesses: time, space, and the individual (37). While the number of individuals on the planet has grown, time and space have technically remained fairly constant (expansion of the universe aside), but

Augé refers to the amount of access to and information we have about these three categories. This excess access is partially granted through archives that contain materials representative of time, space, and the individual. Foucault, in particular, notes the special relationship that the archive has with time and space as it removes materials from temporal progression and accumulates them

87 in a single space among other representatives of various time periods. He explains, “Il y a…les hétérotopies du temps qui s’accumule à l’infini” (759), and that

L’idée de tout accumulé, l’idée de constituer une sorte d’archive générale, la volonté

d’enfermer dans un lieu tous les temps, toutes les époques, toutes les formes, tous les

goûts, l’idée de constituer un lieu de tous les temps qui soit lui-même hors du temps, et

inaccessible à sa morsure, le projet d’organiser ainsi une sorte d’accumulation perpétuelle

et indéfinie du temps dans un lieu qui ne bougerait pas, eh bien, tout cela appartient à

notre modernité. (759)

Such archives fill Ernaux’s pages. Critics, as has been noted from the Introduction to the content chapters, have called all three authors both archivists and ethnologists. The desire to collect time in a manner of speaking outside of normal time indicates that there must be feelings of lost time based on Derrida’s assertion in Mal d’archive: Une impression freudienne that accumulation is rooted in loss. Lack of access to time may be at the heart of a growing movement to document both the self and the nation in the 21st century. That is, having as much access as we do to stories about time, about the long history of the world, and predictions about its eventual end in solar death, we realize how little of that time we will experience and seek to preserve it. Ernaux fights the idea that her memory may consume itself, forget her while she is still in her body. Time marches forward, past time is replaced, and those of us experiencing time along with it. As we shall see, the analogy is further enhanced by the emphasis on disposable memories and materials in the following sections.

88 Waste Materials in Les années

Everyday Waste

At stake for Ernaux’s narrator is her personal trajectory through time and space as well as her generation’s unique experience of French history. There is a sense that the narrator, feeling distant from her earlier selves would like to preserve them for others to remember. Beyond the typical hope for self-preservation, however, the text also fights to preserve these individuals as representatives of the other elles of her generation. Repeating the idea that our memory is outside of us and working with the understanding that the choice of what is retained in collective memory may be, as Natalie Edwards wrote above, “patriarchal and discriminatory” the text fights to include the excluded. It works against Les années’s epigraph by José Ortega y Gasset in Ernaux’s text, “Nous n’avons que notre histoire et elle n’est pas à nous” as the narrator uses the text as “un instrument de lutte” (252) against forgetting what has previously been “junk” memories on the collective scale. Gay Hawkins argues in The Ethics of Waste that “what we want to get rid of tells us who we are” (2). That is, women’s history, long excluded from archives before the cultural turn, was a decomposed history, in ruins until scholars saw in it inspiration. To fight against these patriarchal archives, this text combines materials “worthy” of inclusion, such as literary quotes and artworks from museums, with those previously excluded. Ultimately, others will possess our memory, if it is possessed at all, but in collecting these materials in book, Ernaux bridges small ethical choices to the large.

Pour Ernaux, quelque chose s’ouvre avec l’événement et son écriture, quelque chose

comme une compréhension du monde et une ouverture à la souffrance d’autrui, un geste

éthique qui l’amène à concevoir une même collectivité, et à associer, sans pour autant les

89 confondre, l’avortement et la déportation nazie, le féminin et “l’humain”, l’intime et le

collectif, le petit événement et le grand. (Delvaux 133)

With this history of employing small-scale events to convey experiences of larger scale, Ernaux’s writing fits into larger collections of national literature. These events as cross-over points continue in Les années, where intimate moments become representative of the entire collective, including women, so that their memory can continue in collective history.

With Ernaux’s text purposefully “passing on” the lived experience of history (251), it enhances collective memory with representations of women’s work—gleaning, cleaning, consuming, nourishing, celebrating. As we shall see, with a focus on women’s lives, everyday materials and gestures, and popular culture, Ernaux’s self-writing gathers materials typically sorted out of collective display spaces and places them in the book space for long-term preservation (not only in the library but on a celebrated list of prize-winning texts) and instigates debate about what belongs in collective memory display spaces. After all, any number of texts may contain these materials as sidelines, but Les années grants them new attention and meaning.

The landfill-ready materials that stand in for elle in the text, such as consumer products and bodily fluids generate controversy but including these materials both enhances and interrogates the self-representational qualities of the book. We may ask, however, if in including everyday, universal materials, is the uniqueness of the memory one is trying to maintain and preserve diminished or improved?

Aside from controversy regarding Ernaux’s discussion of female sexuality and age,

Tierney and Motte note that there has also been criticism regarding her emphasis on gestures of daily life in suburban environments rather than extraordinary existence.44 “Ernaux observes everyday life mediated by the body with permeability of the self a driving factor in public life”

44 Several historians worked toward making daily life a part of French history in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Michelle Perrot, Philippe Ariès, George Duby.

90 (Tierney and Motte 113). Ernaux, as well (and many other women authors), have written stories of the ordinary, of the everyday, of the basic gestures of daily living. This material has often fallen by the wayside, been a matter of detail rather than a central matter of focus for self-writing and collective memory. Nonetheless it is in the daily gestures of everyday life that we participate materially in the universe and leave our lasting marks or traces on the earth in the materials we leave behind. These gestures, acts, and individuals associated with those acts (women, children, trashpickers, latrine cleaners) biodegrade in history; that is, they endure only over the lifetime of the individual gesturer. With the loss of the individual performing the gesture, these acts biodegrade and disappear from the material performance of life. These gestures may even degrade over the course of an individual’s lifetime as the procedures of daily life evolve with changing technology, as it did most rapidly over the 20th century. These ordinary acts of living, such as how to open a can, are typically excluded from archives due to their very abundance in daily repetition (their quantity decreases their perceived quality), Ernaux, however, records them in elle’s life in Les années and her mother’s in Une femme.

Before she was the archivist of her generation, Ernaux preserved her mother’s. Une femme told the ordinary life story of a woman whose memory would have been lost has she not had meaning for one person who chose to preserve her memory. “C’est elle, et ses paroles, ses mains, ses gestes, sa manière de rire et de marcher, qui unissaient la femme que je suis à l’enfant que j’ai été” (Une femme 106). These repeated small gestures tie us ritually day after day to past lives, selves, and experiences. Claire-Lise Tondeur argues that in Une femme, “La narratrice se fait archiviste de la mémoire de la mère, de sa langue et de son « savoir-faire ». Avec minutie, elle met au jour les coutumes, les goûts, le vocabulaire, les valeurs du milieu maternel” (13).

These made up her individuality. Not only materials but cultural acts and human bodies place us in networks, despite that most of them are destined to end in waste spaces, such as the landfill and cemetery, nonetheless leaving traces across human and material networks.

91 Object Autoethnography

Natalie Edwards writes that “In recent years, autobiography, fiction, drama, and visual arts have moved progressively towards objects as a means of representing the self and one’s relationship to others” (1). In many senses, Ernaux writes what Susan M. Pearce calls an “object autobiography” created “by selecting and arranging personal memorial material” (32). A self-declared ethnographer, Ernaux rather uniquely discusses changes in consumer culture and its impacts on daily life during times of individual and collective abundance and subsequent waste. Lyn Thomas explains that Ernaux’s work has long focused on the material and that “In her representations of gender and class, Ernaux is particularly concerned to demonstrate the material basis of inequality” (55) and that “this emphasis on the material basis of oppression seems in many ways to be at the root of Ernaux’s espousal of a realist mode of writing… In this way, emotional states and nuances are invoked through the depiction of aspects of the material world, rather than by direct description” (57). While Thomas was describing Ernaux’s earlier works, in Les années,

Ernaux’s narrator focusses equally on her generation’s material legacy in a collection of objects that at once represent and mediate their experience of the world.

The text describes the evolution of waste-generating consumer culture in the 20th century and its impact on self-understanding. Postmodern philosophy considers how individuals and societies use materials to represent themselves to others. Dana Philips, in his essay “Is Nature

Necessary?,” writes that in postmodern American sport “representation has supplanted presence”

(206) of nature. Commodity fetishism that signified nature and implied experience overtook modernist contemplation and direct connection to nature present in works by Hemingway and others. In the Introduction, I described how Mary Douglas studied how humans use materials to communicate with others in mutually recognizable ways and materials have always played an important role in self-understanding and self-representation from crowns to uniforms. They at

92 once mark an individual as playing a certain role in society and with the weight of symbol hide any inability to do so. Humans require these abiotic materials as much as biotic ones to live fully in the world, both physically and emotionally, and Ernaux’s text demonstrates the extent to which these materials influence self-understanding on both individual and collective scales.

In Les années, the narrator employs materials to mediate relationships in elle’s life. For example, the narrator notes the role materials can play in maintaining connections between the parent and child and assuaging existential guilt. “Elle paie à tous ce week-end au bord de la mer par désir de continuer à être encore la donatrice du bonheur matériel de ses enfants, de compenser leur éventuelle douleur de vivre dont elle se sent responsable en les ayant mis au monde” (210).

This shared time and food recreates the lost physical connection between parent and child that was established through earlier shared materials, from a shared body to shared food and shelter.

No longer nourishing them with the physical body or space, these experiences and materials offer an alternate nourishment, feelings of safety, comfort, protection, etc. They also compensate for eventual unhappiness—the eventual pain of living, suffering, and dying.

By contrast, materials binding relationships can also serve to sever them. When elle divorces her husband the narrator explains that the act was not complete until their possessions were divided. The point of no return was when “on dressait la liste des objets accumulés en quinze ans” (144). Splitting these materials effectively split the individuals tied to them. “Comme la liste des choses à acheter, des casseroles aux draps de lit, avait établi autrefois l’union dans la durée, celle des choses à se partager matérialisait maintenant la rupture” (145). In addition to the ritual marriage festival that symbolized their union, a sheet envelopes the couple’s story and provides the symbolic background and support to daily life. When language and law transfers it from “ours” to “hers” its material properties do not change, but its material presence signifies something new. This demonstrates the manner in which, for Ernaux, materials have an excess of

93 meaning beyond their function. How else can a symbolic break in a bond be “materialized” but through materials?

Ernaux makes explicit the links between consumer materials and women’s efforts to preserve their identities while ageing. She writes that the latest products were always “un supplément d’être” (207), created with the intention of standing in for a quality lacking in the individual. “Rien du corps humain, de ses fonctions, n’échappait à la prévoyance des industriels”

(228). That is, industry began addressing bodily changes in ways previously unspoken. Rapid changes in products and their constant renewal highlighted the body’s inability to perform indefinitely and generated a need for supplements. While in earlier times, facing age was heroic,

A History of Private Life explains that “Resignation to growing old is no longer considered a virtue, resignation to disease even less so” (Prost and Vincent 95). Thus, fighting the signs of decomposition, a natural human process, drove a whole sector of consumer products. On moving on to the latest product later in her life, the narrator explains that skipping the latest technology for body and household, “c’était accepter de vieillir. Au fur et à mesure que l’usure se marquait sur la peau, qu’elle affectait insensiblement le corps, le monde nous abreuvait de choses neuves.

Notre usure et la marche du monde allaient en sens inverse” (230). While her body remained in natural cycles, the world kept rejuvenating with new materials to replace the old. As these materials raced on, the slower process of generational reproduction brought a replacement for elle as well in the form of a granddaughter.

The narrator describes how keeping herself surrounded by new materials prevents her from feeling the passage of time. Disposing of used or slightly outdated objects and excluding aged individuals, such as her mother, in hidden spaces gives the impression of living in “un pur présent” (211). The need to live in the present, however, was a modern means of holding on to one’s identity. “One is supposed to look young, and the personality is so bound up with the body that it has almost become necessary to remain young in order to retain one’s identity” (Prost and

94 Vincent 95). Shirley Jordan describes “Ernaux’s rising sense of vulnerability” and “responses to the hegemonic reach of the new technologies which race ahead even as she ages, defying her to keep pace” (145). This object culture that encouraged products to stand in for not only experience but for other lacking qualities gave individuals unrealistic expectations of their body’s limits and performance. Rather than maintaining her identity, she becomes splintered by changing materials as observed in the successive portraits of elle that contain few material links. With each new photo, the described woman’s material surroundings change radically, and in these pictures and environments, to elle, “Il lui semble que ce sont ses mois qui continuent d’exister là” (104). With each change in material supports, elle’s lifestyle and story change. The rapid turnover in the material supports of the self must contribute to the distance that the narrator documents between the various selves having inhabited the same body that appear in the photos. The disposable products and materials that created elle’s various environments and senses of self-understanding will remain many centuries in the landfill years after elle herself has gone. Many will outlast even her textual form preserved in the library book. As the narrator provides little story to such supplements, but rather lists them, accumulated one on another as in the landfill, for some readers their abundance paradoxically impoverishes the text.

Ernaux’s postmodern employ of materials as mediators does not necessarily enhance the text because object meaning, in particular consumer-product meaning, evolves rapidly over time and varies widely in space. This is now more true than ever as consumer products have become increasingly disposable and intended for short-term use, decreasing their long-term cultural durability. Short-term use gives short-term value and meaning to many consumer products. As noted in the Introduction, many consumer products are intended to have short-term appeal so that new ones may be purchased to replace them. In this sense, even new objects are produced with the landfill as their destination to the extent that goods production is essentially direct waste production. Where the text relies on disposable goods to describe elle, readers from outside her

95 generation have no point of entry to relate and those goods become empty and excessive signifiers. For those in her generation, however, the text becomes an exhibit of the material supports that defined their loves and would have been lost to history. For them, the text provides history, story, and identity to lost materials, be they items or bodies. For them, the text is the counter-landfill, the space in which the terrifying excess signification of materials in human life find a more secure place in human systems of memory. As we shall see later, however, that security may be an illusion.

Ritual Waste

In addition to the symbolically rich and ever-changing material supports of her generation,

Ernaux’s narrator highlights the daily gestures of life and repeated rituals of French culture.

Festivals, frequently women’s work, employ materials to symbolize family, community, and cultural connections. These ephemeral display events focus on abundance, cyclical repetitions in which the same materials come out, comfort, and support transmission of the festival space in which family memory thrives. One communal experience that conveys memory from one generation to the next appears to be the gathering activity around the table. A kind of waste- generating consumption, this activity is relatively unchanged and repeats and builds upon the gestures of previous performances. As an adult, the narrator looks back and writes that in “la réalité immatérielle du repas de fête […] quelque chose de l’enfance se rejouait ici. Une scène ancienne et dorée, avec des gens assis aux figures brouillées, dans une rumeur indistincte de voix” (242).

Festival is a space/time that connects elle to her selves. Generally, a scene of abundance, the festival is abundant not only in its contents but in its iterance. This may be the only space in which elle can find rather than lose time through repeating ritual gesture. During such events,

96 Foucault explains “on abolit le temps, mais c’est tout aussi bien le temps qui se retrouve, c’est toute l’histoire de l’humanité qui remonte jusqu’à sa source” (760). Rather than artificially assembling documents to create monuments to existence, these completely synchronous and ephemeral spaces are the only ones that grant an authentic experience outside of time, layering time upon time in a palimpsestual timescape that includes the remnants of the past as well as the present. Ernaux’s text returns to the holiday table at the end of each self-portrait, observing how it acclimates but ultimately stays the same. Unlike the consumer products that constantly change over time as supplements to elle’s being, these holiday meals serve as touchstone for herself and those who have shaped her life. It is waste space that appears to grant the narrator great comfort in its continuity through repetition and is the only space/time that the multiple selves she draws can all access.

Many cultural festivals celebrate community health and abundance at times of harvest while they generate a great deal of excess (tossed tomatoes, stomped grapes, etc.), a synchronous display of both memory and present. While the festival provides continuity to time in collective human culture, do not other ritual gestures repeated time and again grant access to all time on the individual scale? Ritual individual waste production that purges bodily excess similarly grants access to all time but on a personal scale. Including images of bodily waste production (such as the urination and defecation in the text mentioned above) that the narrator fears will be lost may be similarly reassuring in their ability to abolish time while containing it all in a single gesture.

Rather than shying away from these life-giving and disgusting gesture, Ernaux records them, challenging the reader to see the links between food and feces, abundance and waste, reproduction and sterility.

Returning to Ernaux’s use of bodily waste in the opening image, what does it mean that an image of urination will be the first to disappear? It may be that these quotidian gestures performed on an individual level are often the first lost in history because they are rarely recorded

97 in display space despite their necessity to human health. In this text that purports to give the lived dimension to history, such an activity is indeed a living gesture that has a place in literature at least as far back as Rabelais and the Moyen Âge. Other unusual memories follow the above cited image and complement traditional histories that record larger events and recognized cultural productions. This includes a man with no arms due to a toxic nausea medication prescribed to his mother during gestation, a woman with Alzheimer’s disease roaming the halls of a retirement home, a scene of excrement mixing with toilet paper in the babbling creek waters below an outdoor toilet, and the dead ancestors that return to her family table during holiday conversations.

Among these memories mix publicités, films, dreams, jokes, and song lyrics familiar largely to individuals from elle’s generation. The text thus intermingles and recycles both waste and non- waste in a single cultural product, the book.

Another kind of ritual bodily waste, menstrual fluid, has a role in regulating women’s time and self-understanding in Les années. In this particular text, Ernaux’s frank portraiture of bodily fluids contests their typical negative construction. For Ernaux, feminine waste is double as it liberates her and confines her. As she displays it, she asks readers to acknowledge this material’s role in social realities. The onset of menses in many cultures initiates young women into new responsibilities and a new notion of time. The narrator explains that young scholars

“vivaient dans deux temps différents, celui de tout le monde, des exposés à faire, des vacances, et celui, capricieux, menaçant, toujours susceptible de s’arrêter, le temps mortel de leur sang” (85).

This “human” or “mortal” time contrasts with their schoolwork, also a ritualistic, repeating calendar, but whose focus is more cerebral than material. “Blood time,” as the narrator calls it, forces women to be attentive to their body’s materiality even while their minds may be consumed by larger ontological and epistemological questions.

At the same time, this waste subjugates them. In Ernaux’s Les années, we observe how women’s relationships to the earth both in youth and in age relegate them to roles of managing

98 waste materials. In their sociological study of French attitudes toward waste, Lhuilier and Cochin note that “Les rôles sociaux dévolus à la femme lui octroient une place centrale dans l’entretien de l’espace domestique et des corps” (65). They go on to say, “Ranger, trier, jeter… la confrontent jour après jour à la poubelle. Le déchet est d’abord celui qu’on traite au quotidien dans une dialectique de propreté-saleté, ordre-désordre” (65). They relate this role to the fact that women’s bodies produce a kind of waste in childbearing years that marks them, limits their social possibilities, and determines their role in society.

Les déchets féminins sont synonymes de souillures : ils sont signes d’une nature toujours

persistante, irréductible et inconvenante. […] Ainsi le sang menstruel comme le placenta

constituent des menaces, des dangers qui appellent rites de purification et relégation. Les

menstrues sont des sous-produits d’un cycle de vie qui s’abîme dans la mort : ce sang qui

s’écoule est un enfant manqué. Signe d’une perte toujours renouvelée, ce sang doit être

maintenu caché, secret. Il symbolise l’impureté d’une nature toute-puissante puisque

source de vie et de mort. Il est l’envers de la fécondité féminine et, à ce titre, frappé

d’exclusion. (67)

That is, as the inverse of productivity and a sign of ruination or decomposition, this waste needed to be disguised, and at times those who produced it. Elle displays a waste material that has long been visibly hidden, but at the same time the sole basis for structuring her material reality.

Aside from the ways in which this material marginalized elle as a woman seeking a career and relegated her to managing family materials in the 1960s, Ernaux publicly shares her experience of this waste that marked her as linked to the earth. After gaining control over women’s secondary time with the pill, the narrator attests that “On sentait bien qu’avec la pilule la vie serait bouleversée, tellement libre de son corps que c’en était effrayant. Aussi libre qu’un homme” (95). The body itself was now controllable and “blood time” more predictable and certain, but would still be burdened with the societal role of managing human materiality, from

99 the chosen material production of human bodies to their material maintenance (purchasing, cleaning, and disposing of goods). Elle’s continued link to bodily material despite being liberated from her reproductive duties prevents feelings of self-satisfaction and fulfillment. The narrator explains, “Elle a l’impression d’avoir dévié de ses buts antérieurs, de n’être plus que dans une progression matérielle” (103). It is unclear if the narrator refers to the body’s material progression toward the grave or the material progression of acquired products for the maintenance of her family’s bodies or social status. In either case, her continued responsibility for managing her family’s consumption and expulsion of materials weighs on her.

Early in life, this waste brings women a certain power, one that treats their bodies as ornaments and cultural display spaces for ornaments such as jewels and clothes, but later in life, as both Ernaux and Varda note, the disappearance of this waste/resource from their bodies causes them to disappear as active participants in society. Jordan argues that “In any number of ways, old women ‘disappear’” (139), which may take place as a result of their lost productivity. Their waste was a resource in which society embedded fetuses. Without this resource, old women become invisible in so many ways and eventual find themselves in disguise spaces, such as retirement homes. Ernaux’s narrator, however, refuses to disappear.

While she may have been able to live more comfortably in both man’s time and her new

“blood time,” the impact of this bodily waste on her self-understanding would not diminish. The narrator later details the physical changes in her menstrual fluid as she passes through menopause and the end of her reproductive capacity in society. As Ernaux explains in L’écriture comme un couteau regarding the controversy surrounding her work, women’s postmenopausal sexuality remains largely censored.45 In Les années, the narrator does not hesitate to describe the love affairs she had with younger men who gave her the impression of agelessness during sex, not

45 The Catholic church has long had concerns about unreproductive sexual activity, and while much of French society may have a more liberal attitude toward sexual activity, it is important to note this history.

100 unlike the abiotic “supplement[s] d’être” (207) she purchased at the market. Women as decorative supplements to men appear in cultural memory in images throughout time, but Ernaux’s narrator reverses the standard by describing young men as helping elle remain young like so many of the other products she purchases and disposes throughout the text.

As with the other disposable materials in the text, one may wonder why Ernaux includes so much personal and historical detritus in a text intended, by the narrator’s admission, to give a living dimension to history and a physical form to her future absence. If the narrator wishes this monument to endure, why include so much material that would generally be slated for the dustbin of history? Patricia Yaeger’s Editor’s Column in PMLA “The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; Or, Rubbish Ecology” describes the way trash has grown in cultural significance. She writes, “Postmodern detritus has unexpectedly taken on the sublimity that was once associated with nature” (327). That is, nature is now limited, something we must conserve and preserve, while waste is limitless, constantly growing and pouring over the borders of the spaces we create to hide it. Indeed, carrying the conceptual infinity we once associated with nature. Waste’s reliable abundance and constancy, as far as human bodily waste is concerned, scattered among enduring historical moments and fleeting consumer products offer another means of fighting the reality that elle will “disparaître dans la masse anonyme d’une lointaine génération” (19). The impetus to gather all these disparate materials into a single self-representative memorial text, I argue, arises from the narrator’s wariness toward the durability of memory and language (its transmission vehicle).

101 Language Memory Loss

Writing allows society to guard a record of the past and carry it into the future.46 Whether personal or societal, memorial collections and writing turn time into space. Sheringham explains that “in saving experience from the ravages of time, and in overcoming the discontinuity of past and present, memory turns anterior into interior, and converts time into (inner) space” (French

Autobiography: Devices and Desires: Rousseau to Perec 289). The individual or the collective, in this sense, gathers time within, but in order to pass on this experience of time, it must externalize it. Societies, thus, collect and display memorial materials in display spaces that inform and represent the nation to itself and to others. In some cases, these display spaces are archives, museums, and libraries, but in others, they are festivals, commemorations, and monuments. As individual memory is nebulous and untenable, however, it can be difficult to display. One solution for decomposing (i.e., coming apart) individual memory has been writing. In some cases, this writing only serves the individual who writes, but in other cases it helps families care for loved ones with memory loss and still in others, when the writing is published and shared, the writing can aid a society in understanding itself and its history collectively based on the life of an individual member. These spaces and activities, as well as the written form of memory in the book, are indeed instituted and sustained by society. French society’s support for all three cannot be disputed as Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire project clearly demonstrates.

As simple as this may sound, the process remains complex. First, where are these memories? One could argue that memories are located in objects, places, or sensations of meaning for both the individual and the collective. Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson argue that

46 While this exploration is based in one particular text, writing’s role in memory retention and creation will hold for the rest of the dissertation.

102 memory, apparently so immaterial, personal, and elusive, is always implicated in

materiality, whether it be the materiality of sound, stone, text, garment… or the

materiality of our very bodies…. Memory is evoked by the senses—and encoded in

objects or events with particular meaning for the narrator. (27)

For example, upon entering a particular room one’s mind may be flooded with past memories even ones of which one had little awareness. Nonetheless, this is an individual experience in which the room catalyzes a reaction rather than contains it. As we observed in her lists of generationally legible product references, one material can provoke a variety of memories in different individuals, and as such while the material may call up a memory, it does not physically contain it.

Where is memory for Ernaux? Physiologically, memory resides in a tangible space in the brain, but is an extremely complex physiological concept dispersed over various brain regions and dependent on many external factors for proper functioning (diet, health, stress, injury, etc.).

Thus, notwithstanding the ability of certain spaces and materials to bring about memories, the memories themselves require the physiological support of the body. Ernaux’s narrator, however, indicates that memory is not contained in us and indeed not containable at all; like the weather it is unreliable, ephemeral, and immaterial. The narrator explains, “notre mémoire est hors de nous, dans un souffle pluvieux du temps” (17). That is, even if memory is in the body while an individual is alive, on the long term, that memory is in others. This is a double-edged sword in the sense that an individual has little control over future memory, but the individual does have the opportunity to displace memories onto others, as noted in the above-mentioned epigraphs. Ernaux attempts to condense this nebulous material in her book.

Ernaux’s text “saves” time from itself, as the narrator explains in the final line of the text that she wishes to “Sauver quelque chose du temps où l’on ne sera plus jamais” (254). This phrasing could be read rather ambiguously as either “saving something from the time where we

103 will never be again” in the sense that the things from the past are being saved because we will never be able to go back to them or “saving something from time when we will no longer be here anymore” in the sense that this text will protect these things from time itself when the people of her generation will no longer be there to safeguard it. In both cases, the text should provide a relatively safe space in which the narrator and her generation will continue to be represented without having to worry about time eating up their memory.

Accessing these memories, however, can be dangerous to self-understanding. While in these moments, “les yeux dans le vague” (Les années 23), as Ernaux describes it, memory breaks away from current time. The mind here returns to the past while the body stays in the present.

Sheringham describes this state in Baudelaire’s ‘Le Flacon’ when he writes

memory’s terrain is an uncanny intermediacy between the living and the dead. To

succumb to its pull is to be dragged away from our moorings in the present. Memory

breaks up the habitual routines of self-awareness and, rather than fostering unity,

threatens everyday self-consistency. The unassimilable past lodges in the present like a

foreign body, while the familiar past is disrupted by the invasion of a forgotten

dimension. (French Autobiography 293)

The memory’s ability to intrude on self-understanding could threaten the author who becomes vulnerable while entering deeply enough into the past to describe it in detail. Memory can become stored excess that like waste intrudes on ordered systems and disturbs them when it arises out of context. And yet, memory can also be a resource for self-understanding and creation, as we see in much of Ernaux’s oeuvre based on her memory. Memory can create a variety of illusions that enhance or diminish lived experience or compensate for changes in situation or loss of objects, individuals, abilities, etc. This can be explained by Sheringham’s reading of Stendhal.

“Stendhal’s impulse is to externalize his memories (as in his diagrams), to inscribe, trace, and

104 ‘materialize’ them. Remembering remains a present activity: we are always with this memory or that, never securely in the space of Memory” (297).

The question remains, can one save these memories? Self-writing, which gathers materials and thoughts in the space of book, can be memory’s durable form for individuals or groups. Memory translated into language is contained in a specific material space (within the pages of the book), and, at least in France in terms of the book, is designated in the institution of society.47 As memory plays a role in self-understanding, writing memories creates a self that gives material form to an unlocatable concept. Ernaux’s narrator explains of writing this book that “C’est maintenant qu’elle doit mettre en forme par l’écriture son absence future” (249). To replace their material body container that will biodegrade and disperse, her memories once written take the material form of the text.48 The narrator calms her anxiety about her future absence by saving her memories on paper, as was common in the 19th century when “The purpose of the private diary was to exorcise the very same anxiety about death that keeping such a diary engendered. By detecting the ways in which one’s substance was wasted, the diary became an element in a strategy of thrift” (Perrot 499). That is, self-writing blocked the wasting of memory by containing it. According to A History of Private Life, “A memoir, at once an antidote to amnesia and an instrument of commemoration, thus took shape” (499). Indeed, for Ernaux, a fear of personal memory loss that she observed in her mother in Une femme encourages her to fight through writing, as she expresses a desire to preserve more than her own life but also her generation’s.

Les années does have the two principal characteristics of self-writing outlined in the

Introduction: it conveys its purpose to the reader and it compiles found materials in lists that

47 The important role of literature, the book, and authors in French culture cannot be disputed. Please see the Introduction for more on French book culture. 48 For more about biodegradation and language see Jacques Derrida, “Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments.”

105 inform self-understanding. The narrator also lists supplementary materials that one might find in self-writing’s hupomnêmata, such as brief personal narratives, scenes from films, jokes, short stories, literary references, and consumer products from her time that inform her self- understanding, not only hers, but her entire generation’s as well covering the individual and collective scales in one text. As the narrator states that she wishes to give a form to herself that will endure after her body’s material absence, these lists and short narratives must be not only representative of but vital to the narrator’s self-understanding. While the hupomnêmata would have helped the ancients work towards becoming the self that they wished to be through contemplation and conversation about these found materials, Ernaux’s text becomes a secondary self for her to contemplate in her memory’s future absence or for others in her body’s absence.

In Les années, the narrator describes memory’s capacity to amalgamate a variety of images and sensations from throughout time and space as she focuses its unimaginable sudden decomposition despite its seeming infinitude. Of memories, she writes

Elles s’évanouiront toutes d’un seul coup comme l’ont fait les millions d’images qui

étaient derrière les fronts des grands-parents morts il y a un demi-siècle, des parents

morts eux aussi. Des images où l’on figurait en gamine au milieu d’autres êtres déjà

disparus avant qu’on soit né, de même que dans notre mémoire sont présents nos enfants

petits aux côtés de nos parents et de nos camarades d’école. Et l’on sera un jour dans le

souvenir de nos enfants au milieu de petits-enfants et de gens qui ne sont pas encore nés.

Comme le désir sexuel, la mémoire ne s’arrête jamais. Elle apparie les morts aux vivants,

les êtres réels aux imaginaires, le rêve à l’histoire.15

Similar to but even beyond the capacity of language to juxtapose heteroclite materials in ways impossible in reality, memory gathers and combines incompatible times, places, images, and sensations for which there may be no linguistic referent.

106 Ernaux’s representation of these unpredictable combinations likens memory to sexual reproduction. In this process, chromosomal crossover allows exchange of genetic information and organism diversification, similar to memory’s infinite capacity at recombination and creation of novel information. The text indicates that memory serves to perpetuate the self in one’s own mind and in others’, just as sexual desire plays a function in propagating one’s genes in other bodies.

Ernaux describes not only an active role for literature, but its ability to propagate over space and time in the minds of others. “Car, pour moi, la littérature qui compte, c’est celle qui a une action.

Cette action peut être brève dans la durée, elle peut s’étendre sur un long temps, mais cette action qui se passe sur des inconnus, des anonymes est importante” (“Entretien” 13). Storytelling can create a desire to read, engulf, and spread others’ memories.

While Ernaux’s text may employ materials to represent individuals, for many in the 21st century, memories constitute the basis for self-understanding, assuming that we can point to a self to be understood. When asked who we are, we may answer with a noun, an adjective, or a story, but all are based in a personal history called up from memory. When the mind wastes either in disease or death, who are we without these memories? Ernaux’s text expresses some anxiety about this loss when the narrator asks where they will go and who will carry them (one could also say, who will carry her if she sees herself and her generation embodied in this book). The narrator explains that

Tout s’effacera en une seconde. Le dictionnaire accumulé du berceau au dernier lit

s’éliminera. Ce sera le silence et aucun mot pour le dire. De la bouche ouverte il ne

sortira rien. Ni je ni moi. La langue continuera à mettre en mots le monde. Dans les

conversations autour d’une table de fête on ne sera qu’un prénom, de plus en plus sans

visage, jusqu’à disparaître dans la masse anonyme d’une lointaine génération. (19)

Notice the attention to language as containing memory, a theme that pervades the text: s’effacer, le dictionnaire, mot, dire, la langue, mots, conversations. All of these words, she associates with

107 la bouche from which nothing will exit. In other words, death arrests bodily functions, including the emission of language. While these memories will be erased, language, she writes, will continue to put the world in words. And so, one can see that writing these memories, plucking them from the spatially diffuse and temporally fragile individual memory and placing them in a contained book form, could preserve them and possibly a version of the self from decay and degradation for one’s own reassurance or for future generations. Thus, while her work gathers materials from that inform her generation’s self-understanding, it does so to fix an individual or collective self that the narrator fears losing. It moves away from self-writing’s askêsis, or working on self-improvement, except in a longitudinal improvement on memory retention. Nonetheless, the text corresponds with and teaches future generations.

The text fights the wasting of elle’s memory and self as the narrator accumulates and preserves memories as a resource for her congeners, future generations, and possibly herself after macular degeneration.

Et d’une certaine façon, effaçant les paroles, les images, les objets, les gens, elle

préfigure déjà, sinon la mort, du moins l’état où elle sera un jour, s’abîmant, comme le

font les très vieux, dans la contemplation—plus ou moins floue à cause de la «

dégénérescence maculaire liée à l’âge » —des arbres, de ses fils et de ses petits-enfants,

dépouillée de toute culture et de toute histoire, la sienne et celle du monde, une

alzheimerienne, ne sachant plus quel jour ni mois ni saison on est. (250)

While the narrator states that she is erasing these words and memories by transferring them to the text, she appears to actually be at least temporarily preserving them. The book may someday be a resource for self-contemplation when her memories have gone, returning the objects and individuals to their proper “culture” and “history.” For that reason, purging them from memory into a new container may be a better description. Additionally, while the work may prefigure her

108 memory’s decomposition, it also combats it by recording her experience elsewhere and in collective memory through French book culture.

As an ethnology of her generation, Ernaux’s Les Années certainly adds to national collections of self-representative materials as in display spaces, but Ernaux’s writing demonstrates feelings of splintered identities. Early in the text, the narrator describes her feeling that she has multiple identities that never came together into a single self when she writes, “Il lui semble que ce sont ses moi qui continuent d’exister là” (104).49 Further, about the material form containing the memory of these selves, the book, the narrator writes that “Cette forme susceptible de contenir sa vie, elle a renoncé à la déduire de la sensation qu’elle éprouve, les yeux fermés au soleil sur la plage, dans une chambre d’hôtel, de se démultiplier et d’exister corporellement dans plusieurs lieux de sa vie, d’accéder à un temps palimpseste” (249). Elle does not want the text to be a look back over time with perspective. Rather, with individualized, contained, and non- continuous portraits, she creates a layering of individual selves that grants access to multiple times and spaces in history. Nevertheless, despite the form’s ability to contain her life, it cannot truly return her to the times and spaces of her past, but rather provides records of her existence therein.

Despite her poignant attempt to preserve her memories in a display space, they will inevitably disperse in time, and the text acknowledges this in several ways. The narrator describes all that wishes to maintain in spite of its inevitable meaninglessness to future generation when she explains,

49 This sensation was shared by Chateaubriand in Mémoires d’outre-tombe, tome II. Sheringham explains that for Chateaubriand, “if memory discloses being it is not by resurrecting the past or establishing continuity (‘c’était un autre moi, un moi de mes premiers jours finis, qui jadis habite à ces lieux, et ce moi a succombé, car nos jours meurent avant nous’, p.497), but by providing materials for the construction of a fundamentally anachronistic space” (French Autobiography : Devices and Desires : Rousseau to Perec 294).

109 Elle ne regardera en elle-même que pour y retrouver le monde, la mémoire et

l’imaginaire des jours passés du monde, saisir le changement des idées, des croyances et

de la sensibilité, la transformation des personnes et du sujet, qu’elle a connus et qui ne

sont rien, peut-être, auprès de ceux qu’auront connus sa petite-fille et tous les vivants en

2070. (251)

We will see that the tension or anxiety behind this impulse is the ineffective and unreliable modality of writing and other arts to contain a self in personal dictionaries, experiences, and materials in any form similar to the boundless experience of existence. The problem with the archive and other memorial spaces, whether on the individual level in an autobiographical text or on a societal level in a lieu de mémoire, is that it cannot be protected indefinitely, and will be revised or lost (as Ernaux’s epigraphs indicate) by future generations. Display spaces give the false impression that they will outlast waste spaces in memory preservation. As the narrator describes her forward-looking intentions for the book, it may appear that she is trying to control textual reception.

Following Barthes’ philosophy that the text’s meaning is in its destination, not in its origins, freeing the reader from intentional criticism accomplishes Ernaux’s stated goal of writing about generalizable ethnological experiences in order to connect to her audience. Admitting her intentions in an effort to aid the reader in textual interpretation is not unique; both of the other authors studied here do the same. Describing their intentions and purposes frees the reader from the work of deciphering those intentions, a kind of critical work that has long been out of vogue.

Simon Kemp argues that “Ernaux’s twenty-first-century texts show a clear increase in contamination anxiety from the narrating persona, and a more radical purging of writerly attributes from the experiencing persona” (168). While Ernaux does set up Les Années to largely block the narrating voice from a non-present je, as described earlier, the textual anxiety she expresses appears to arise more from her wish to undergird her language for future understanding.

110 With her generation’s postmodern propensity to rely on ephemeral products to self-represent, her concern may be well-founded.

Employing elle and nous may be less an anxiety than a desire for context, exchange, and a response to the environment, given Ruffel’s arguments about contemporary French literature from the Introduction. This strategy removes the limits imposed on the text by the individual who wrote it so that the text can become the personal journey of any number of women of Ernaux’s generation and milieu in France. Beyond this, as autobiographical work, Ernaux’s texts naturally contain information about her own or her narrator’s intentions on any number of actions. Despite the fact that as Kemp argues above Ernaux shirks her authorial persona, Ernaux’s self- understanding as an author is rather expressed in intratextual reflections on her work and intentions, just as reflections on her teaching, her love-life, or her childrearing might appear in the text. While the text may be based on the life of Annie Ernaux the person, this specific individual has no voice or is written out of the text, in a sense prematurely so that the narrating persona of all the elles will be the only one to continue to “speak” once the biological organism Annie

Ernaux, the je perspective from which she wrote many of her other texts, has expired.

No matter how hard the narrator tries to influence reader reception, the text will continue to evolve without her permission. As a literature teacher, she must certainly be aware of this propensity for texts to take on their own lives when in the mind or ears of the reader. Derrida’s

Otobiographies describes the manner in which authorial intentions influence reader perception and reception. Memory preservation in the ears of others stops decomposition. The idea is that we must be aware of the ways in which intent in autobiographical writing may differ from an author’s stated intention and how the discourse of intent serves the purposes of the author. As we record the words of the author (not written on paper but on our own memory) we become part of the system that the author creates. Ernaux takes advantage of the open nature of the ear by inputting her own memories and her own dictionaries into the reader’s system where they can be

111 preserved in the future. Our ears, or language-receiving organs, cannot be closed and, as such, can be filled by the author with whatever information the author would like carried on or perpetuated.

We are not free to interpret an autobiographical text because the parameters of our interpretation are set by the author whose many masks hide his true intent and control the ear. Our ear belongs to or is lent to the author when we read the autobiography. If this is the case, then the author need not fear controlling reader interpretation, as she has already done so by creating the entire system of the text in such a way as to control reader reception. That is, why would Ernaux need to restate in language the control parameters that she could easily surreptitiously place in the textual system itself? There is no need to control reader interpretation on a superficial level when you already control it on a profound, structural level.

Given this, I disagree then with Kemp and Willging that Ernaux’s anxiety relates to a desire to control the reader’s interpretation of the text. Rather, I argue that it arises from a deeper fear and indeed knowledge that this literary duplicate of her self will degrade over time both in meaning and in material, just as her material body will. In a separate book-length study about four authors’ narrative anxiety as caused by the inability of language to communicate the world,

Jennifer Willging argues that Ernaux’s “persistent, even obsessional efforts to represent her experiences accurately, not only in La Honte but also in many of her other narratives, attest to the very seriousness with which she undertakes literary representation and authoring” (Telling anxiety : anxious narration in the work of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert 22). Scaffolding the reader’s interpretation of the text by making clear the narrator’s intentions could equally be an effort to reinforce the unreliable modality of language that Willging argues is present in many texts.

In addition to her doubt in language’s ability to accurately represent the world, I argue that anxiety in Les Années arises from language’s inability to preserve memory as authors intend.

One cannot possibly use a linear, two-dimensional system to contain a four-dimensional, unfixed

112 memory. Rather one represents memory via examples, like entries in the archive, and these examples lose meaning even with appropriate explanatory support as language itself degrades or evolves over time. In seven published diary fragments he calls “Biodegradables,” Derrida wonders whether a text like any other living thing can biodegrade due to language evolution

(815) and explains that “proper meaning would de-compose in order to pass, having become unrecognizable, into other forms, other figures. It would let itself be assimilated, circulating anonymously within the great organic body of culture, as would one of those metaphors called

‘dead’” (816). Derrida’s conceptualization of language here, as participating in life cycles, furthers my argument that language, a bodily emission like any other, participates in the natural cycles as urine might in the nitrogen cycle. He goes on to observe language’s ever-tenuous state in larger discourse cycles. “Is not what we call rhetoric a large discourse, itself in a constant state of recycling, of that which in discourse submits to composition, decomposition, recomposition?”

(Derrida 815). Ernaux’s text, with its inclusion of waste materials in a fragmentary state within the text’s structure supports a view of language as cycling through time and space as do chemical elements.

Ernaux describes language as a physical material capable at once of structuring the world and shifting in space and time. The narrator anticipates misplacing her personal dictionary when she remembers her mother forgetting a word and saying “je l’ai su” (246). The narrator describes words like objects referring to “les expressions hors d’usage, réentendues par hasard, brusquement précieuses comme des objets perdus et retrouvés” (16). “Les phrases terribles…plus tenaces que d’autres” (16), these out-of-use, lost, and found objects have agentic capacity and power. “S’annuleront subitement les milliers de mots qui ont servi à nommer les choses, les visages des gens, les actes et les sentiments, ordonné le monde, fait battre le cœur et mouiller le sexe” (15). These words “served,” “ordered,” and “made” reactions. They are active materials.

The narrator writes that the language of her youth was “Une langue sans compliments ni flatterie

113 qui contenait la pluie transperçante, les plages de galets gris sous l’à-pic des falaises, les seaux de nuit vidés sur le fumier et le vin des travailleurs de force, véhiculait croyances et observations”

(33). This language is rooted in the landscape, the weather, human waste production, and consumption. It contains both resource and waste, but more important it has the potential if not the inevitable fate of becoming waste. Language in Ernaux’s text then has the potential to participate in the earth’s cycles, such as the water cycle in the weather. Her language has a weight and texture as she describes it containing dirt and the environment.

La langue, indissociable des voix puissantes et vigoureuses, des corps serrés dans les

blouses et les bleus de travail, des maisons basses avec jardinet, de l’aboiement des

chiens l’après-midi et du silence qui précède les disputes, de même que les règles de

grammaire et le français correct étaient liés aux intonations neutres et aux mains blanches

de la maîtresse de l’école. 33

If language is material, then these words that like supplements to her being formed self- understanding and represented her to the world will biodegrade with her material body. Their meanings will be lost. Writing is also instable because one cannot control textual reception and continued identification of the audience with textual references. This is especially true in the case of Ernaux’s text with so many references to materials and arts specific to her time and place, arts that may become waste over time. While the arts may be the best option available for preserving the self in a material form, marrying the feeling of boundlessness, of an uncertain time horizon continually stretching before us with the necessary, but limited material container of our existence, the body, they cannot guarantee an eternal life after death. The book, as a material support, is no more effective at preserving beings or languages than the cemetery. Words, memories, and material bodies shift shapes and forms as they cycle through larger systems that evolve in response to the environment.

114 Returning to the preface and metaphysician Bossuet’s “Sermon sur la mort” in which

Gérard Bucher hails Bossuet’s use of “une recréation du monde par la vertu résurrectionnelle de la parole (sa parole) ex nihilo” (25). In Bossuet’s time, it was the word of Jésus Christ that resurrected Lazarus, and it would be his word in the end that would resurrect humanity from their tombs to reunite purified bodies with worthy souls. Ernaux employs words to resurrect the body, not only of her mother as Pierre-Louis Fort notes of her text, Une femme, but also of Ernaux, preserved and resurrected at each reading of the text’s words, words she has meticulously gathered in memorial textual space. If, however, the word degrades over time, as language is wont to do, so shall the body recreated or doubled in the text. Despite Ernaux’s “Travail quasiment démiurgique de résurrection et de re-naissance” in Une femme that attempts to

“(re)donner corps à la mère” (Fort 189), the mother’s body remains waste. From this waste, however, comes a beautiful work of literature that despite its inability to resurrect the dead does stir the human imagination and plant the seeds of her mother’s memory in minds around the world. Later, Ernaux goes on to give birth through the word to her textual self in Les Années. At the same time, she is also birthing an entire generation of French women with whom she identifies and for whom she claims to be writing the history. Resurrection will only be temporary considering Derrida’s notion of the ear as unintentionally accepting and participating in the perpetuation of textual systems and his concept of degradable language. Should there no longer be an ear that comprehends (in language evolution) or hears the word (in the case of apocalyptic environmental disaster), there would no longer be a resurrected textual body. Language degrades over time as its users, the biological organisms that contain it, fade away. As a result, the books using the vehicle of language will also biodegrade. The dictionary in her mind will degrade and disappear and, what’s more, even once dumped on the page, those words will begin to degrade as they are taken up by other readers, recycled in other texts, and lost in the evolution of language and knowledge.

115 In Les Années, the narrator’s memory is reborn in the form of the word, turning the outwardly directed writing act as a more inwardly directed gathering, gestating, and then birthing gesture in its ethic of recreating not just the author but her entire generation. In her article,

“Digital Memory: Writing Memory After Agnès Varda,” Domietta Torlasco describes Varda’s cinécriture’s gleaning as a feminine collecting of abandoned materials, an invagination as

Merleau-Ponty would have it. She writes, “Varda’s camera, I claim, will allow us to propose a notion of writing in the digital age that stands before and after inscription: the camera that receives or, rather, gleans (gathers together and disperses) is the camera that writes” (Torlasco

397). While Ernaux is the gatherer in her text, in this alter-archiving act of rubbish collection, her writing both throws out seeds to be implanted and gathers them in the text to germinate in readers’ minds. Throughout the text, Ernaux incorporates historically hidden feminine experiences of everyday, community participation, self-sacrificing service, singular moments of creation rather than historical ones, and material body maintenance into the masculine semence of writing grand events for display space. Her language relying on degradable references, such as everyday gestures, disposable and consumable products, and ritual waste, in literature moves toward a more fully inclusive human form of expression, one that acknowledges human participation in environmental cycles.

Conclusions

Ernaux’s anxiety about her life’s materials and her writing’s language are clear. Having observed the dispersal of her grandparents’ language, memory, and material way of living, she is aware that memory can be transferred only in a modified form from person to person and within an imagined community of people where it resides. Display and performance transfer that memory, because unless we bring out the memories from that secluded space where they are preserved (the mind),

116 they cannot be passed on. Sometimes this display takes place in oral histories, sometimes in theater, sometimes in painting, sometimes in writing. Display is the transfer mechanism for shared memory, and Ernaux finds a way to transfer her memory to as many people as possible through one of the most powerful modes of display in French culture: the book.

And yet, there remains a palpable uncertainty and recognition that even this seemingly fortified space may eventually fall into disrepair. What will happen to her textual memory? Will it become waste and disappear? After all, that is what waste does in French society. It disappears, and for the most part, no one wants to know where it goes. Rather than diving into the future location of these materials (from landfills to recycled arts) as Varda will, Ernaux hints nervously at their instability and dispersion, struggling against them with an anxious pen. Nonetheless, rather than naming them waste and leaving them in the unnamed, nebulous, and hidden space of personal memory, she places them in the collectively shared book for temporary preservation and display as well as future dispersal.

Chapter 2

Reflecting Waste: Spaces in Between in Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse and Les Plages d’Agnès

The body’s ‘imminent status as waste’ … suggests finally that not everything can be reused but that crucially that which is eliminated is as important, as interesting, as that which is not. - Gay Hawkins

In a society whose postwar boom led to an obsession with the new and hygienic, waste is finally in again.50 The days of saving, re-using, and gleaning have long been out, but they are making a comeback in documentary film.51 Film offers not only narrative but also visual techniques that can distort, reframe, and repurpose different kinds of waste.52 Of the various media for representing waste, film may be the most challenging and the most effective; this is at once because it explores waste’s materiality without verbally glossing over the unsightly and because it visually situates waste in our daily lives.

Agnès Varda’s most recent documentary films glean, re-use, and preserve visual imagery and individual experiences of twenty-first-century France. Her literary style of filmmaking that she calls cinécriture paired with her background in the visual arts lends her work to close-reading and complements the literary texts of this dissertation. Varda writes on cinécriture that

50 For more on changes in consumer and personal habits in the postwar period, see A History of Private Life, Volume V and Kristen Ross’s Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. 51 See Chapter Two for more on changes in consumer habits and their representation in Ernaux’s work. 52 I consider all kinds of waste as well as waste processes that break down products into their constituent parts to make them available for re-use and up-take into new objects; this includes decomposition, decay, degradation, and fragmentation. Materials in waste spaces can be either the starting point or the end point for these processes as they can decompose, decay, or degrade as they fragment or materials in non-waste spaces can be moved to waste spaces after the processes of decomposition, decay, or degradation have begun.

118 Je [me sers de ce mot] pour indiquer le travail d'un cinéaste. [...] Un film bien écrit est

également bien tourné, les acteurs sont bien choisis, les lieux aussi. Le découpage, les

mouvements, les points de vue, le rythme du tournage et du montage ont été sentis et

pensés comme les choix d'un écrivain, phrases denses ou pas, types de mots, fréquences

des adverbes, alinéas, parenthèses, chapitres continuant le sens du récit ou le contrariant,

etc. ("Varda Par Agnès" 14)

In this sense, Varda’s entire cinécriture œuvre precedes or anticipates the media blending that

Ruffel outlined in contemporary French literature.

While Ernaux reflected on the transition from youth to age in dated consumer products and bodily waste, Varda does the same with “past-date” materials in liminal zones between display spaces and disguise spaces, such as the dumpster, the curb, and the post-season growing field. As Mary Douglas explained, materials in these transitional zones and times are undefined and possibly dangerous; therefore, individual users must determine their value. This is important because Varda’s films propose a further slate of waste materials for analysis as they model alternate treatment modes for these materials that question waste as a categorically negative metaphor. I will show how Varda’s visual framing of materials questions their waste categorization and in some cases creates aesthetic landscapes that reinforce waste’s new role as postmodern sublime, the razor’s edge between beauty and terror in 21st-century literature

(Yaeger). I will examine how Varda does this by splitting the visual voice of her film into subjective and objective voices that together place the spectator in a hybrid position in which she can choose how to perform ambiguous materials in Varda’s handheld camera/mirror, an uncertain liminal zone. Other scholars have discussed Varda’s identification with past-date materials and societal others, but my work focuses more precisely on how she employs the camera’s voice to place the viewer in her space from which one can literally see waste as a resource from her

119 perspective.53 This illuminates the manner in which artists facilitate and reflect changes in cultural attitudes toward waste. This furthers French Studies and Ecocriticism because it demonstrates how the arts can be a vehicle for more sustainable waste practices in France.

Varda’s Oeuvre

Agnès Varda’s work has played with the fluidity of borders from the beginning, and her most recent films in which she navigates the lines between past and present, product and waste, useful and useless, and youth and age are no different. Since her early films as a member of the Nouvelle

Vague, Varda has worked on themes of time and decay that combine subjective and objective perspectives, often in a fragmented form that challenges classical genre definitions (Smith 4).54

Varda pushed the limits of fiction into documentary film even before the genre became a box office success.55 In a 2000 interview for Cinéaste magazine she stated, “I've been trying all my life to put into fictional films the texture of documentary” (Anderson and Varda 27). Combining these two frequently opposed genres leads to the poignancy of her films as viewers question their understanding of fiction and non-fiction as well as the most effective means of communicating

“truth” in art. Many of her “fictional” films also contain autobiographical threads, and her most recent documentaries plunge even further into her thematic interests in self-understanding, time,

53 (Calatayaud; Cruickshank; Tryer; Bozak; Peters and Peters; Wilson; “Feminist Phenomenology and the Film World of Agnès Varda - Ince - 2012 - Hypatia - Wiley Online Library”; McFadden; Meyer) 54 Varda’s first film La Pointe Courte weaves together two seemingly unrelated storylines, of which one is narrative fiction and the other has the feel of a documentary about the everyday lives of a small fishing community. Her continued films weave together documentary and fiction forms. She says of the documentary form that, “a screenplay - and I am a screenplay writer when I make fiction films - often does not have the distinctive quality of imagination that real life has” (Anderson and Varda 25). 55 While it contains some fictional scenes and it is visually “told” from the perspective of a pregnant woman, her 1958 film L’Opéra-Mouffe consists largely of gleaned street images from la rue Mouffetard in Paris. Her work in this film interestingly juxtaposes vegetables and a pregnant woman’s body and goes on to include other metaphors for pregnancy including birds trapped in round glasses. Rather than anthropomorphizing, the film appears to be “vegetalizing” the human body and pregnancy. The film contains several other themes that recur in her work: aging, alcoholism, and (food) markets.

120 and decay. Varda describes her concept of subjective documentary as “I give enough of myself, so they [the viewers] have to come to me” (Meyer). Both films studied here employ a self- portraiture practice based on collective knowledge and other participation. Thematic continuity and juxtaposition create links between the cinéaste and her materials, including objects, arts, bodies, and stories.

The 2000 film Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse explores the meaning and evolution of gleaning in French culture covering agricultural gleaning, “dumpster diving,” object recuperation, and her own gleaning of images and ideas with her camera. Ben Tryer explains that in this film,

Varda discovers ‘beauty’: in the lives (and looks) of the marginaux; in the image of a

drowned sheep that recalls her short film Ulysse (Varda, 1982); in the heart-shaped

potatoes that she gleans, which are never to be eaten, but rather allowed to grow old and

wizened before the camera; and, of course, in the various works of art that she

encounters. (170)

This film offers a glimpse at variability in collective attitudes toward past-date materials (foods, appliances, and people). The audience travels from agricultural fields to artists’ studios to meet people who derive resources from materials intended for disguise spaces. With handheld-camera close-ups and intimate gleaner portraits (including Varda’s own autoportrait), the film transforms this excess into sustenance and its gleaning into an art. As it explores materials between display scenes and waste spaces, the film dispels the illusion that waste disappears when it goes in the dump truck, that all apples are perfectly shaped, that all packages are undamaged, and that we will never age (subjective immunity to our mortality). For many of the characters in her film, materials in transitional states compensate for a lack of self-sustaining resources and create new landscapes of opportunity for artistic creation. While Varda exposes consumer culture’s excesses

121 and the human impact ignorance about them can have, her willingness to share her personal journey of self-discovery prevents a didactic tone.56 Ruth Cruickshank has argued that

through the integration of traces of the past in the present and the editing and

juxtaposition of fragmentary insights into the individual ethics and aesthetics of gleaners,

viewers are invited to glean potentially critical perspectives from those who, in the age of

global consumption, are routinely disregarded or discarded. (131)

Despite its inclusion of typically wasted materials in a display space, this film garnered much critical acclaim, won awards around the globe, and solicited profound emotional responses from the audience (to such an extent that Varda made a sequel two years later, Deux ans après).

In her book about the ethics of French cinema in which she explores alterity through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas, Sarah Cooper argues that Varda’s film ethically values others over the self (Selfless Cinema? 89). She explains in a later article that

certain films within a particular tendency in French documentary were questioning this

logic of resemblance and articulating a non-reductive relation to alterity. An ability to ‘let

the Other be’ suggested the registering of distance from others, yet such distance did not

correlate with indifference; on the contrary, in Levinasian philosophy, […], such distance

emerged from within relations of extreme proximity, a proximity without which ethics

would be impossible. (“Looking Back, Looking Onwards” 58)

While the film’s goal may have been to ethically value others from misshapen potatoes to social outcasts, such others in the film accidentally become mirrors. Varda notes that she did not intend to make a film about herself, but naturally became a part of it. When read as an autobiography,

56 By focusing on endpoint impacts for waste, Varda avoids the human impact of commodity aesthetics and out-of-season overproduction on farmers whose chemical sprays can cause them health problems and on the lives of migrant workers paid pitiful wages and living in squalid conditions. These topics have been addressed in other documentaries: Nos enfants nous accuseront (Food Beware: the French Organic Revolution) discusses the impacts of modern industrial agriculture and Mondovino briefly discusses migrant workers in the wine industry.

122 the film employs others as two-dimensional reflections of the autobiographer’s self- understanding, each one communicating a message about the autobiographer herself, and complementing her own self-portrait. Certainly, many of these mirrors in the film have their own compelling stories, in particular the professor who Varda went on to interview in the second film.

And yet, from his perspective in the sequel to Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, the autobiographical part of the film detracted from the film’s message (Varda).

Perhaps it did, but it also united a patchwork of interviews with strangers whose stories, no matter how compelling, would not attract and retain audience interest in the way Varda’s documentary does. The well-known and –loved French artist’s underlying narrative of self- rediscovery bolsters the film and audience attention. The parallels Varda makes between herself and the human and material others in the film help the audience make the sympathetic link to identifying with others by acting as a bridge. That is, the viewer relates to Varda, Varda relates to others, and as a result the viewer can sympathetically relate to gleaners. She sacrifices some of her privacy and many might argue, dignity, to help viewers make the leap. Emma Wilson explains that “susceptibility to being undone by others, is the body’s state of being from its opening into the world. It is this fleshy existence and experience that open us affectively and ethically to others” (58). Varda’s film invites others into the experience of her ageing body, publicly sacrificing her image in a youth-obsessed culture in a way that reinforces connections between the audience and the documented populations. Rather than a self-centered desire to self- resurrect, the film is driven by a desire to reach out.

Varda’s later autobiographical film, Les Plages d’Agnès, gleans images from Les

Glaneurs et la glaneuse and her previous films as it returns to questions of the aging body, memory, and time. Sarah Cooper summarizes the film spatially, “From Belgium to Sète, through

California to Noirmoutier, Varda’s inner landscape is defined through the principal geographical spaces of the film” (“Looking Back, Looking Onwards” 61). Ari J. Blatt explains how “The

123 director’s rummaging through the visual archives invites spectators to visualize the memory of those moments, to rescue those people, places, and events, however briefly, from the proverbial dustbin of the past” (187). This film gives an individual perspective on ageing bodies and minds as well as materials in transitional states as Varda reflects on her cinematic career and personal life.57 The film repurposes and recontextualizes earlier films within new reconstructed or metaphorical scenes in colorful sets. It explores Varda’s autobiographical space through other people’s memories of her and her own ruminations on life and cinema. This film is a space for individual and collective self-reflection, fitting it firmly in the self-writing category described above and the literary trends of the contemporary period. The film earned wide acclaim, including the 2008 Prix Méliès and César for best documentary film.

Self-Writing Collections and Correspondance

As described in earlier chapters, societies perform perceived waste materials by excluding them in waste spaces. These disguise spaces grant limited access to materials that may threaten a society’s functioning and self-understanding. For example, the landfill and homes for the mentally and physically unwell require special credentials to enter and isolate materials and individuals that may be harmful or harmed if allowed in general circulation. By contrast, archives, museums, and libraries (display spaces) encourage access to materials intended to facilitate society’s functioning and self-understanding. For example, museums, archives, and

57 This is a theme she took up in her film for the centennial of cinema, Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma, in which the cinema is allegorized as an old man who mixes up all the cinematic images of the past. Varda says of the film, “My idea for that film was that a bad memory can become an unorganized gleaning. Simon Cinema [Michel Piccoli] picks things that he has in his mind, but are not well-organized. His 'saving' of memory isn't too good, so he mixes things up. And I like the idea that he makes mistakes all the time in his memory. He allowed me to be free about the history of cinema and very free about what I picked.” Melissa Anderson and Agnès Varda, "The Modest Gesture of the Filmmaker: An Interview with Agnès Varda," Cinéaste 26.4 (2001): 26.

124 retail spaces allow public access to valued materials. There may still specific rituals for entering and exiting (specifically as concerns certain archives), but the buildings that house these materials are often prominently located and invite visitors.58 As I have established in previous chapters, self-writing contained in the space of a book is a display space as well, and self-writing film follows this pattern. Varda mixes materials gleaned from memorial spaces such as the museum, the library, and the film archive to complement the found materials and stories that she uncovers in undefined spaces, thus establishing them all as valuable and challenging waste’s normal exclusion.

We should return again to Foucault’s “Ecriture de soi” to see the commonalities between this form and the two films studied in this chapter. This is important because it underlines links between self-writing and contemporary literary trends of blending multiple media and creating ethnographic collections of materials as established in the Introduction. It furthers this argument by explaining how such trends challenge existing separations by blending previously incompatible materials, just as Varda does in her filmic collections of disparate cultural materials.

Self-writing, rather than being a direct “récit de soi,” has two important components in dialogue with one another. The hupomnêmata is a sort of aide-mémoire or livre de vie intended to guide behavior. Written, it is a “mémoire matérielle des choses lues, entendues, pensées pour servir à d’autres fins plus tard” to serve as primary material for more systematic writing later on

(Foucault, Dits et Écrits : 1954-1988 826). The writing or gathering in tangible form of collected materials from memory in hupomnêmata prevents la stultitia, or the agitation of the spirit that results in the fragility of the self that comes from too much reading without writing. Rather than substitute for memory, it is intended to provide a framework for exercises including reading, rereading, meditating, and dialoguing with oneself and with others (Foucault, Dits et Écrits :

58 Exchange of money and/or verification of identity are often required for entry/exit.

125 1954-1988 826). Varda’s films contain a variety of references to collected knowledge such that one would find in these hupomnêmata (references to artwork, literature, and philosophy) that she uses to instruct her audience and also learn more about herself and the various communities to which she belongs (generation, lifestyle, nation, profession, etc.) during the film. Both films rely on intertextuality, or a recycling of other arts, to deepen their meaning. This technique typically uses other texts to help shape the meaning of a new text. Archives and museums, where cultural materials collect, accumulate, and serve educational purposes, are also hidden to a large swath of the population and unable to adapt to the present if they never get repurposed.

At the same time, were it not for these archives, history would also be definitively past as

Pierre Nora has argued that preserving these items in such spaces keeps history alive.59 When

Varda recycles or repurposes artwork in her film, she is not only making reference to other artists, but giving this work new relevance and new life in a modern context. This intertextuality is not only a kind of aesthetic efficiency but also relates the subject of gleaning and self-reflection to previous generations of artists. It demonstrates that an artwork is not an end-product, but an evolving resource material for self-reflection on an individual and a collective level. The film moves them from the fixed memorial space and pairs them with abandoned materials in liminal spaces. This move challenges the barriers between these zones and as well as treating the content of these various spaces as truly Other.

Varda’s film style as a dialogue between the cinéaste and the audience links it with correspondance, the second type of self-writing that Foucault describes. Varda’s cinécriture works both on the intended viewer and the writer as she puts her collected knowledge to use,

59 Poirrier, Philippe. L’état et la culture en France au XXe siècle. Paris: Le livre de Poche, 2000. Print. Pierre Nora wrote that the BnF, “engage le Cœur de la culture nationale. Il n’y va pas que de la conservation du patrimoine; il y va autant de sa réactualisation, de la transmutation d’un savoir mort en savoir vivant. Le sort de la future bibliothèque va conditionner la production en France de l’histoire, de la critique littéraire, des humanités, de la culture, de tout ce qui juge le niveau intellectuel du pays” (185).

126 represents herself to others, and learns by advising others (Foucault and Defert 423). In the case of Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, Varda notes the way in which the filming process led her down a self-reflective path. Of the film, she said,

Je voulais faire un documentaire. [...] Et puis cette petite caméra numérique me poussait à

faire quelque chose de personnel, j'avais envie de m'infiltrer dans le film de façon

charnelle. [...] On est toujours en train de s'autoportraiturer: on décline notre état des

lieux, on le conjugue, mais avec discrétion et sans complaisance. [. . .] Je me suis faufilée

parmi [les glaneuses] comme une filmeuse-glaneuse. (“Ciné-Brocante: Propos recueillis

par Frederic Bonnaud et Serge Kaganski” 32)

Presumably, given the informative nature of documentary film, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse may have begun with the purpose of informing the public on questions of waste production and gleaning, but as the filmmaker gathered information from various knowledge domains the writing began to inform the writer as much as the audience. In the process, Varda became both the author and to some extent the subject of her film. “Thus she underpins her role as filmmaker-gleaner whilst contemplating a natural process of wasting: her own as an ageing subject” (Cruickshank

119). Les Plages d’Agnès would later dialogue with the intended spectator regarding the goals of her project and the lessons she learned from others, just as one might in a correspondance.

Given Varda’s inclusion of materials read, heard, and seen to supplement her arguments, the films’ commonalities with la correspondance, and Varda’s concept of cinécriture described above, these two films are a style of self-writing. As such, they create a locatable filmic space that could be described as memorial display space. In Chapter One, I described how this locatable space holds memory (individual or collective) in a fixed and organized form that slows the decay that occurs as the mind ages and memory revises itself over time. It is, however, only a snapshot of memory constructed for a particular purpose that cannot evolve in same ways mental memory

127 can.60 As Varda demonstrates, it will necessarily be fragmentary and incomplete, but this space will influence self-understanding both during its creation and in hindsight. I will return to the idea of film as influencing self-understanding synchronously and asynchronously later when I discuss the mirror and the handheld digital camera. For now, let us explore how Varda undermines spatial practices of waste and display.

Liminal Spaces

Within the two films described above, Varda further probes the limits of waste practices by displaying unclaimed materials in transit from one zone to the next. As Mary Douglas has described in her ground-breaking work on dirt, interstitial zones tend to be regarded as dangerous, as are the materials within them, many of which are considered potential waste materials.

Douglas explains that

Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the

next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in

danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely

separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his

new status. (97)

Rituals of spatial and temporal exclusion decrease danger in the same way that placing materials in disguise spaces limits danger. Materials in transition are as dangerous as individuals and require rituals, often in the form of story told on paper (for example, customs declarations or

60 Allowing memory to fade can sometimes be just as beneficial as allowing it to solidify in an ordered textual format. The text can bolster self-understanding by remaining fixed when self-understanding becomes fragile, but forgetting traumatic events may also support a healthier self-understanding as well. Sometimes, rewriting traumatic events in a narrative form that constructs the victim as a survivor can be equally helpful and demonstrates the extent to which self-writing can recreate self-understanding through self-determined self-representation.

128 other forms for goods in transit between owners or insurance database accident records, etc.) or orally (requiring the presence of the buyer and seller), to mitigate their perceived danger (for example, that goods may be counterfeit or tampered with).

No longer housed in display or living spaces in which their ownership and value are clearly established and not yet transported to their resting place in landfills or other disguise spaces, these materials elicit uncertain responses from many who encounter them. Part of this uncertainty can be attributed to their lack of story (Phillips and Sullivan 447). When ownership is established or owners are present, stories of possession, condition, and origin can be told to allay fears of materials’ unknown past, but when neither owner nor recognizable waste space can assuredly define a material, it can be tainted by any number of negative imaginary histories, which comes back to the French notion of abandonment equaling waste. Varda’s films disregard this possibility and interact with “abandoned” individuals and materials in a way that elucidates their history.

By contrast, retail spaces reinforce the illusion of certified purity. Almost always perfect, meticulous, and well-arranged, these spaces create an image of idealized life through product purchase. As Ernaux described in Les Années, the products contained within them become a

“supplément d’être” (207) that compensates for lacking qualities and creates a more perfect form of the individual or the society, or at least the image of one. These spaces make every effort at creating a utopic atmosphere and give the impression that Utopia is a tangible, achievable, if not noble, goal for shoppers.61 They may not indeed be Utopia, but there is a utopic atmosphere created within them, for example in selling only fruits and vegetables of idealized shape, size, and

61 Utopia is a concept and a research focus that has a long history. For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus solely on Foucault’s definition within “Des espaces autres” as it relates to Heterotopia. In this article, Foucault describes Utopia as “des emplacements sans lieu réel. Ce sont les emplacements qui entretiennent avec l’espace réel de la société un rapport général d’analogie directe ou inversée. C’est la société elle- même perfectionnée ou c’est l’envers de la société” (Foucault 755).

129 color. Nadia Bozak argues that “The free-market democracy of industrial and now post-industrial culture is enabled by the ability, if not the right, to inconsequently dispose of our personal and collective undesirables” and “conspicuous waste is, like its companion conspicuous consumption, a social and political demonstration of status, power and sense of personal freedom” (218).

Similar to Ernaux’s text, Varda’s film acknowledges that “contemporary, consumer-culture identity is organized around the accumulation of commodity items that are transformed into person possessions” (Bozak 223). While this chapter will not dwell on retail space, it will consider how Varda presents materials that are either thrown out of these spaces or that are refused entry into them in the first place.

The mirror equally creates a blended real/unreal atmosphere, as a virtual space that nonetheless reflects a real space while permitting a self-reflexive regard. As an unreal space reconstituting a real space with reflected light, the mirror permits the onlooker to question his or her perception of the real space that she or he occupies and examine its correlation with her or his self-perception or self-understanding. An interstitial zone, the mirror carries dangerous associations and many cultures have special rituals relating to them (for example, covering mirrors during times of mourning, superstitions about breaking mirrors, etc.). Materials appearing in the mirror, at once real and unreal, are not reliable, always moving, and changing subject to perspective.

Nonetheless, both of Varda’s films use mirrors and the camera as a mirror to represent the self and others. The materials the spectator encounters in the films are not mirrors because they are entirely real, locatable, and three-dimensional materials while the mirror is only two- dimensional recreation of the three-dimensional world; they are, however, when framed in the two-dimensional filmic space the equivalent of the mirror, real objects in an unreal filmic space that Varda constructs in a way that encourages self-reflection. After viewing these materials in the way Varda frames them, the spectator should begin to turn his or her regard back toward him-

130 or herself in a new way. As we will see in the following sections, Varda’s films explore a variety of interstitial spaces and highlight the subjectivity in abandoned materials’ and individuals’ waste categorization. With this spatial framework in place, let us turn to Varda’s films to see how these concepts play out in her individual and collective self-representations.

Framing Liminality

As established earlier, self-writing, museums, and retail spaces have the function of display and the landfill’s function is disguise, and all these spaces inform self-understanding and represent individuals and collectives, either intentionally in the former or unintentionally in the latter.

Varda takes the viewer to unfamiliar spaces inhabited by abandoned materials and individuals, such as the dumpster, curb, and post-season growing field. Her characters show that if liminal danger is ignored the materials in these spaces have the agentic capacity to compensate for resource deficiency in society. From gleaned market leftovers to reframed age-damaged skin,

Varda’s characters find value in the conventionally useless and ugly. In general, unowned and unidentified materials in non-waste space are considered pollution. These films (and some artists represented in them), however, transform this “dangerous” liminal material into art. These materials take on a new meaning through their place either at the table or in the artistic space, where, in either case, their consumers are nourished. Bringing public waste practices into self- writing filmic space creates a resource for individual and collective self-reflection and allows

Varda to perform physical waste as a valuable resource with the authoritative voice of a venerable artist.

For Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, Varda set out to make a documentary about gleaning, but found that the individuals she met and the intimacy that nascent digital filmography afforded her led her on an introspective journey. “As it negotiates the practical and aesthetic dimensions of

131 what was just then emerging as a dominant cinematic form, The Gleaners and I establishes how a lightweight, handheld digital camera can liberate an otherwise marginalized individual and keep an aging woman mobile, self-sufficient and therefore socially proactive” (Bozak 223). Indeed, many of Varda’s images would not have been possible without it. Gleaning itself is the act of collecting unclaimed or unwanted materials from transitional spaces. Enmeshed in Varda’s self- study, are several consistent, albeit fragmented, strands of waste use: rural agricultural gleaning, urban dumpster gleaning, urban object gleaning for re-use, urban object gleaning for art, and

Varda’s own gleaned images. Each one contributes to her self-portrait using the portraits of other gleaners.

Hunger and Abundance

Varda meets a variety of food gleaners who do not shy away from potentially dangerous liminal zones. Establishing trust and following the natural energy of her “characters,” Varda explores the social impact of food waste one individual at a time. Each portrait offers a personal experience with modern agriculture’s overproduction in the name of commodity aesthetics. Generally, people encounter agricultural products in two spaces: the growing field or the marketplace.

Between those spaces materials are sorted for sale or dumping. When not sold, they end up gleaned from the fields or buried underground to fuel next year’s crop (a natural transformation of waste to resource). Agricultural gleaners, such as chef Edouard Loubet, enjoy the act of gleaning, while others such as Clyde do it out of necessity. Loubet runs a restaurant in which he re-uses nearly everything he can from the kitchen and gleans many of his ingredients from the surrounding agricultural areas. Abandoned and unowned herbs and produce inspire his menus and become part of his culinary creations. Although not discussed in the film, these practices are environmentally beneficial. And yet, if all restaurants and supermarkets did this, it would be

132 harmful to individuals like Clyde who glean from supermarket dumpsters where excess food is dumped. The contrast between their two situations encourages debate regarding private waste as private resource or private waste as public resource. 62 Loubet participates in more traditional gleaning that went out of fashion when French culture exited wartime scarcity to enter postwar abundance (that is, saving, reusing, and recycling as much as possible, as briefly described by

Ernaux in Les Années).

Clyde, by contrast, gleans in a culturally dangerous zone of questionable ownership—the supermarket dumpster. Not yet buried in waste spaces that hide this excess food production and no longer in the retail display space, these materials are uncategorized, and this alone discourages many from treating them as resources. Individuals willing to ignore the potential danger come under social and legal criticism. Tryer writes that “This aestheticisation of the gleaner occludes the reality of her social exclusion” (Tryer 169). However, Varda interviews a supermarket manager who blocked and locked dumpsters full of edible food from young bohemians who frequently fed themselves there. These young people challenged not only social conventions but legal authority when they protested their right to these apparently ownerless materials in court.

Nonetheless, the very fact of having entered these liminal spaces casts suspicion on their character and intentions (not to mention their “landless” status which we will discuss further in

Chapter Three). Individuals who frequently ignore the danger in unstoried materials in

62 Since the original writing of this chapter in 2013, the movement toward reducing food waste in France has grown wildly and spread throughout the European Union, and 2015 has become the “Year Against Food Waste” in the EU. Aside from individual changes in behavior, les grandes surfaces, beginning with Intermarché, have begun their own programs to reduce food waste through the sale of typically unmarketable produce: les fruits et légumes moches. This move avoids problems associated with past-date foods, a problem that is also being addressed through French legislation passed in 2015 that requires certain goods to be donated to benevolent organizations after expiration. Indeed, the very transformation of former food waste into currently marketable goods and the surrounding theatrics that support it indicates that waste is merely a socially-mediated performance. When we change our discursive practices to talk about traditionally value-less foods as having value, we change our behavior toward them. These foods move from the field where they were buried with among previous years’ waste to the produce section of the supermarket where they acquire a similar space (but lower price) as other fruits and vegetables.

133 transitional spaces become dangerous themselves. And yet, for dumpster gleaners, these materials compensate for a lack of personal resources, leading them to view such spaces with exuberance and marvel.

Like many “freegans” (individuals who live off gleaned foods), ethical and environmental concerns push another character, François, to live from “100% récupes.” He says,

“Je fais récupération uniquement par souci d’éthique parce que…c’est absolument scandaleux de voir tout ce gaspillage dans les rues” (Varda Les Glaneurs Et La Glaneuse). François briefly shifts the focus of the film from a largely social to an environmental one, when he says, “Tous les autres, ils peuvent crever dans leurs appartements, sur leurs poubelles--c’est pas un problème.

D’abord les oiseaux.” Here the film cuts away to beach- and animal-clean-up footage after the

Erika oil spill off the coast of France. François is the first individual in the film to connect consumer waste with the environment, and Varda makes no further comment beyond including the spill footage. She says in an interview that, “I had been filming the Black Tide because I was shocked. I didn't think it had a connection with my subject, gleaning. I went to the ocean to see it

- it was horrifying, all these black beaches. Thank God I had filmed that so I could, when he spoke about it, edit in my footage” (Anderson and Varda 25). The move is subtle, but it offers some brief perspective on the real dangers associated with agricultural and industrial materials in transit. At this point, when François associates wasted food and products with their impact on the carbon cycle through fossil fuel use, the ethical implications of waste performance become clear.

While, given negative associations with transitional materials in undefined spaces, it may appear that dumpster divers and “recuperators” live dangerous, unethical lives, François suggests that it is wasters not waste harvesters who live unethically.

As Varda does not dwell on waste itself as menacing or turn toward the typical rhetorical treatment of waste seen in what Laurence Buell calls “Toxic Discourse” (640), the film maintains a view of undefined materials as an individual and collective choice to be categorized as resource

134 or as waste.63 The film proposes gleaning, which is essentially performing unclaimed materials as resources rather than waste, as an individual solution to this consumer excess. Early in the film, one of Varda’s interviewees says, “Glâner, c’est l’esprit d’antan…finir ramasser pour pas gaspiller.” Gleaning returns in the 21st century as the solution to excess (even in literature, according to Ruffel), but it requires individuals to ignore the danger associated with liminal spaces, materials, and individuals.

Gleaning, we will soon realize, is not only what she documents but also what she

performs as she gathers images from the contemporary world and the history of painting,

printmaking, and cinema, tracing constellations that at once display and repeat the

humble gesture of the glaneuse. This is how she remembers—her own life, the lives of

those whom she has loved and with whom she has worked, and the history of cinema, all

being woven together in a memory that presents no clear-cut boundaries nor orderly lines

of transmission. (Torlasco 391)

Varda frames herself as a model gleaner as well, elevating gleaning from a modest gesture to an art form. She decribes her role as she recreates Jules Breton’s La Glaneuse, she says, “l’autre glaneuse, celle du titre de ce documentaire, c’est moi. Je laisse volontiers tomber les épis de blé pour prendre la caméra.” Varda notably uses a mirror in Figure 2-2 to draw her self-portrait as she will later do in Les Plages d’Agnès.

63 Buell argues that “Toxic Discourse” forces anthropocentric and ecocentric values to come together by insisting that environmental health and human health are linked. The rhetorical strategies employed, however, aim to create suspicion toward waste. While this may certainly be valid for waste that is unassimulable on human time and directly harmful to human health and cannot be reclaimed or repurposed, such as radioactive waste or high concentrations of mercury in fishing waters, it reinforces negative attitudes toward all waste as well as those who live or work with it as suspicious and dangerous.

135

Figure 2-1 Screenshot of Gleaner, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse

Figure 2-2 Screenshot of Varda, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse

Varda then models gleaning behavior for viewers in a way that empowers the individual to enter taboo zones to perform liminal materials as resources. As noted above, French policies and attitudes toward food waste have changed in the 15 years since this film was made, perhaps as a result of its sensory ethics. “It is as if she gives her work a pulse, a life force. Coupling her description here with my own sense of the experience of viewing her films, and their unwitting, sensually pleasing, just, carefully weighed attention to their subjects, I suggest that cinécriture involves a sensory ethics, a sense of bodily, fleshy rhythm, which indicates the involvement of the filmmaker with her subjects, of the viewer with the films” (Wilson 60). More and more,

136 alternative waste performances are becoming acceptable. This film also introduces used appliance and household goods gleaners who repair or repurpose undefined materials, some in the arts.64

Arts and Abandoned Materials

Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse introduces the viewer to other artists of varying levels of cultural recognition who also question waste performance by harvesting materials from sidewalks and landfills. The film shows Bodan Litanski’s garbage masonry, children’s artwork from garbage in

“Poubelle ma Belle,” and collage work by VR99 and Louis Pons. All these artists, the last two in particular, use fragments of found materials to create artwork.

One way of interpreting the images of artworks made from discarded consumer products

is to view them as a means of exposing the mythologizing sign systems of global

consumption, revealing how they conceal empty promises predicated on waste. Moving

beyond this structuralist mode of demystification, Varda’s footage evokes Derrida’s

extension of Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage to any discourse countering the Western

false premise of a text having a heritage or a stable coherence, instead being bricoleur,

always already part of a tissue of texts, made up of provisional, differing and deferring

meanings. (Cruickshank 127)

VR99 recognizes the agency of these materials in his work explicitly when he says, “Ce qui est bien avec les objets de récupération, c’est qu’ils ont une existence déjà, c’est qu’ils ont déjà vécu.

[…] Ils sont encore bien vivants. Il suffit juste de leur redonner une deuxième chance.” Using language of product life-cycle, VR99 recognizes that place influences use life. Recycling used materials in non-waste space extends their lifespan. “As it negotiates the practical and aesthetic

64 Later we will further discuss gleaning used appliances in Jean Rolin’s La Clôture.

137 dimensions of what was just then emerging as a dominant cinematic form, The Gleaners and I demonstrates how a lightweight, handheld digital camera can liberate an otherwise marginalized individual and keep an aging woman mobile, self-sufficient and therefore socially proactive. By equating her camera’s images with the disposable objects and humanity she encounters (including her own self and aging body), Varda duly resuscitates them, however briefly, via cinematic exposure. So it is that Varda reconfigures what seems to be her film’s deceptively simple topic— subsistence gleaning—into a cinematic aesthetic and practice that is based on what was in 2000 still a rather subversive principle: unauthorized reclamation and reuse of commodity goods. The defining logic behind The Gleaners and I is to reinstate gleaning as a necessary social, economic and cultural practice capable of disrupting the patterns of over-consumption and waste that are at the heart of industrialization” (Bozak 223). Louis Pons recognizes the ambiguous nature of recuperated materials that Varda highlights in the film when he says, “Pour les gens, c’est un tas, c’est un tas de saloperies. Pour moi, c’est une merveille. C’est un tas de possibles.” “Junk is pure potential: it is junk as long asit embodies this potential not to turn to trash” (Bardini 4). This perspective highlights the undefined nature of interzone materials and the fact that each individual must make a value judgment rather than allowing place to determine meaning.

Age and Self-Conception

Beyond these clearly liminal food and household materials that may end in waste space, Varda considers individuals in transition toward another kind of wasting—age. As Varda parallels her own self-reflections and self-understanding with waste-dependent populations, she encourages reconsideration of those who live from garbage and also what it means to be “past-date,” or old.

“Thus describing what is here conceptualized as a “secondhand cinema,” the term makes it possible to understand and critically assess digital cinema’s technological, ideological and

138 ecological core” (Bozak 223). Varda most clearly enters her own aging self-portrait as she layers film of her hands over Rembrandt postcards, a gesture that recycles one self-portrait to enhance another. She describes what she films: “Saskia en détail, et puis, et puis ma main en détail. C’est-

à-dire, c’est ça mon projet : filmer d’une main mon autre main, rentrer dans l’horreur, je trouve ça extraordinaire, j’ai l’impression que je suis une bête, c’est pire, je suis une bête que je ne connais pas.” The camera at once creates intimacy by allowing her to get very close to her own body while filming, but it also gives her visual distance from herself to see her aging body in two dimensions, a flattened and compressed image. When she then lifts the finger she was filming to reveal Rembrandt’s self-portrait, she says, “Et, voilà l’auto-portait de Rembrandt. C’est la même chose, en fait, c’est toujours un auto-portrait.” She then covers the postcard with her finger, again layering her own self-portrait on his. Two materials of a similar kind meld together into a new image, a new self-portrait that includes another from a foreign time and place. As she shares her aging body with the public she says, “Non, non, ce n’est pas ô rage; non, ce n’est pas ô désespoir; ce n’est pas ô vieillesse, ennemi. Ce serait peut-être ma vieillesse amie et tout de même il y a mes cheveux et mes mains qui me disent que c’est bientôt la fin.” Varda replays a feminine version of the famous monologue from Corneille' s Le Cid. When the Comte de Gomès slaps Don Diège and causes his sword to fall, Don Diège cries, “N'ai-je donc tant vécu que pour cette infamie?” He laments his aging body that prevents him from avenging himself. Varda’s aging body by contrast allows her to avenge herself by displaying her gathered knowledge to the public. In a display of her hands’ power to gather, to hold, to comfort, to collect, this film places an emphasis on creation rather than destruction as the phallic sword might. Her body becomes a mirror, gathering and reflecting what it sees in collective society.

139

Figure 2-3 Screenshot of Varda’s hand, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse

Figure 2-4 Screenshot of Potatoes, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse

In regards to her work collecting the invisible images of modern life and giving a display space to disguised materials, one can interpret Varda’s film as a new kind of feminine archive.

Domietta Torlasco explains that

As the film progresses, she will take us on a journey that crosses the boundaries between

the personal and the collective, the human body and the landscape, and the ephemeral and

the long-lasting. Through gleaning, I will maintain, Varda provides us with a heterodox,

140 subversive mode of archiving and, concurrently, a use of digital technology that counters

the patriarchal logic still lingering in the thought of dissemination. Indeed, her

intervention opens up the possibility of elaborating a notion of impression that, starting

with (but not being confined to) the capabilities of the digital, redefines and expands our

concept of the archive, as well as our very definition of writing. In Varda’s films, the

impression ceases to be an inscription left by a writing implement (stylus) onto a writing

surface, emerging instead as a folding of the visible onto itself, a turning inside-out or

rolling back that occurs within the texture of perception; at the same time, the dispersal of

meanings and forms that gleaning entails (what we might be tempted to call

dissemination) is reconfigured as an operation that unfolds in and through the fabric of a

self-differing visible, its creases and knots, pleats and lips. (393)

Torlasco sees Derrida’s description of thinking and writing as a masculine seming process, while

Varda’s cinecriture’s gleaning as a feminine collecting of abandoned materials, an invagination as

Merleau-Ponty would have it. This perspective offers a unique preview of aging for the spectator who, like many in Western society, may view aging as a crisis. Foucault explains that in France

“la vieillesse, c’est une crise, mais également une déviation, puisque, dans notre société où le loisir est la règle, l’oisiveté forme une sorte de déviation” (Foucault 757). Varda places her transforming body in the same frame with culturally significant artworks gleaned from display space.

The parallel elevates the status of the aging body from a material designated for waste space to one that deserves a place in display space. Shirley Jordan argues that “Varda comes to terms with the idea of the old woman by displaying and performing age, by creative clowning” and “affords a rare example of insistence on the physical visibility of old women and invites us to touch, challenging ideas that it is indiscreet, uninteresting or undignified to focus on an old woman’s body” (Jordan 140). This blending of display with disguise gives Varda’s work its

141 poignancy. It encourages the invisible or silent old woman to creatively explore her body as a resource. As Jordan notes, “while the physical and emotional experiences of younger women are dwelt upon, there has been little attentiveness to those of the old” (139). Varda reconceives ageing in the 21st century as a creative, rather than a destructive process, a space for growth rather than decline.

While much of Western society celebrates youth and the new, often excluding the aging from art, Varda creates moving tableaux from her skin and hair by reframing them on the handheld camera’s screen. The most poignant aspect of Varda’s self-writing is the way in which she weaves these mirror-style images of her own body’s changes in with other handheld camera footage of rejected materials, such as her molding ceiling, her clock with no hands, and surplus potatoes. Such a treatment indicates that Varda identifies closely with rejected consumer materials and perhaps that age performance places one in a state of uselessness that is not any more real than a state of usefulness. In other words, aging, while a real physical process, is also a performance. In “Des espaces autres,” Foucault describes maisons de retraite as Heterotopia, or other space, of deviation and crisis, because age is both a deviation from youth-obsessed culture and a crisis for the individual experiencing it. They hide deviation and crisis from everyday life. A

History of Private Life tells us, “Old age is a social construct” (Prost and Vincent 250), but Jordan describes it as a performance above. When Varda includes a frank portrait of aging in her self- writing film display space, she challenges the idea of age as a determination of value. Her rotting ceiling becomes more beautiful while still functioning; her broken clock becomes more poetic without hands; and the rejected potatoes she gleans, despite their blemishes, still taste good. As one gathers from the success of her film, Varda’s creativity and ability to reach her audience have also improved despite an external appearance of having “passed her prime.” Consigning “useless” bodies and materials to hiding spaces would deprive society of their creative power; rather, Varda brings them into the filmic space to yield their continued potential.

142 Varda engages herself in the defense of others in this film as she forces viewers to see the lives of the poor, a group she calls “les abandonnés” in a 2012 interview for ARTE. She goes on to say in this interview that

en faisant voir aux autres il y a quelque chose qui se réveille qui est la compréhension

que le monde est déjà coupé en deux entre les riches et les pas riches mais en dessous de

ça il y a des abandonnés…et même des veuves…ce sont des catégories dont on s’occupe

pas et j’ai un peu tendance à m’en occuper…par le cinéma. […] J’essaie d’avoir des

commentaires assez clairs mais pas revendicatifs.

Noting the parallel with French legislation’s definition of waste as “abandoned,” Varda remarkably includes widows among the “abandonnés” that she defends. Indeed, deceased husbands leave behind wives, abandoned in a sense to live out their lives as “leftovers” of pairs that disappear. The personal dictionary to which Ernaux referred in Les Années exists equally for couples who have their own language and shared referenced. As such, those left behind find blank spaces everywhere even in the language they use to express the world. In Varda’s cinécriture, the blanks are filled in by mirrors to others who complete her fragmented self- portrait, other gleaners/abandonnés who collect and create. Her installation work on the widows of Noirmoutier, Varda filmed women telling stories of their deceased husbands and played them in a collage on one screen so that the viewer could listen to any one of them at once in a sort of private audience through headphones. Varda appears with them but remains silent. Accumulating images and stories such as these is a common means of compensating for a loss that some associate with archiving (Edwards). Despite this accumulation of stories, Varda remains silent, unable to put her story into words.

143 Creating with Fragments

In Les Plages d’Agnès, Varda continues to challenge age or fragmentation as determinant factors in waste categorization. The process of writing about the self in a life review allows the opportunity to break down, sort through, and organize life experiences and to share and recycle gathered knowledge. While this film includes some direct consideration of consumer waste, it also gleans fragments from her own and others’ artworks and fills in the spaces with interviews with friends and reconstructed scenes from her memory. Incomplete and partial materials often end up in landfills, but rather than consigning her previous work, both successful and unsuccessful, to the past and leaving it in a disguise space, Varda brings a remarkable variety of objects, films, and people together to give them a new form or shape. This transforms the leftovers of her life into a new art form and gives them new meaning in a new frame.

Self-Portraiture

Varda frequently questions the extent to which portraits and self-portraits can fully represent whole individuals whose subjectivities are spread across a variety of networks. Varda’s self- portraits have been fragmented since her first called “Autoportrait 1954.” Repurposing the work in this film, Varda says of this collage of tiles with spaces between pieces of herself, “le puzzle me plait.”65 The opening scene discussed below also includes a self-portrait in which Varda is both present and absent in fragmented reflections. The rest of the film continues this trajectory

65 “Like a Byzantine mosaic - doubtless a tribute to her Greek ancestors – her "Autoportrait 1954" (cf. Varda 1994:10) gives us a foretaste of the "portrait-puzzles" of Mona in Sans toit ni loi (1985) and of Jane Birkin in Jane B. par Agnès V. (1986-87). In her "Autoportrait à Venise, parmi quelques hommes de Gentile Bellini" (1960) (cf. Varda 1994:4-5), Varda takes a photograph of herself in profile, in front of Bellini's painting” Agnès Calatayaud, "Les Glaneurs Et La Glaneuse: Agnès Varda's Self-Portrait," Dalhousie French Studies 61.Winter (2002): 113-14.

144 with various moving and still collages of images and films from Varda’s career as a photographer and filmmaker. Over the course of the film, she recontextualizes and amalgamates at least 60 scenes from previous films. She also recreates a number of scenes in which the Varda of today appears alongside a fictional Varda of the past. Here, Varda literally stands next to a child version of herself and says, “Je sais pas. Je sais pas ce que c’est de reconstituer une scène comme ça. Est- ce que ça fait revivre ce temps-là? Pour moi c’est du cinéma. C’est un jeu.” This multiplicity of self recalls Ernaux’s multiple mois and plays with Kathleen Woodward’s notion of reminiscence as an act that takes place “between two different instantiations of oneself over time” (8). Again, this self-portrait in the past seems to be part of an incomplete puzzle that reconstructs but does not replace an earlier Varda. Later in the film she says, “l’idée de fragmentation que j’aime beaucoup…correspond vraiment à quelque chose de la mémoire.” This underscores the variable and fragmentary access we all have to our memories that prevents any complete self-portrait.

Varda indicates that this previous self is as inaccessible and unreconstructable as the other when she questions her ability to reconstitute the great actors on display in portraits she took many years before. These displays cannot resuscitate their bodies or beings. Even when alive, they could never have become what they had been. In this sense, not only writing but also photography is incapable of resurrecting the dead. Are Varda’s photos then valueless in their inability to recreate the past? Why, then, does society display them? Perhaps these photos fill in gaps in collective memory and pass on an image of the past to future generations.

Other-Portraiture

Varda’s work makes use not only of her own fragmentary memory, but of the experiences of a variety of other people, from old friends losing their memory to strangers gleaning for survival or out of kindness. She does not leave these individuals in disguise spaces, but brings them to the

145 center of her films, repurposing them and extending their value in a way that does not allow them to disappear.

As a life review, Les Plages d’Agnès works with the changing capacities of aging minds and bodies. Rather than framing these experiences as failures, Varda highlights the unique skills of old friends who suffer from memory loss. For example, Varda says of her childhood friend, “et depuis quelques temps aussi Andrée perd doucement sa mémoire. Ce dont elle se souvient, c’est de la poésie.” Despite all the personal details that may have left her, Andrée can still recite all- manner of poetry, including Paul Valéry’s “Le Cimetière Marin.” This archived work helps

Andrée maintain a connection to an earlier self-understanding and the world around her. Which is more valuable, a mind’s ability to remember personal or collective meaning?

The film indicates that fragmentary capacities are not necessarily lesser than “complete” ones. Varda herself notes of her time in America that “quand j’y réflechis, toutes les époques se confondent” (Varda Les Plages D'agnès). While memory loss creates difficult and sometimes tragic challenges for individuals and families, the film implies that it may generate and enhance creativity in individuals. Of her mother’s memory loss, she says, “c’était son problème et sa liberté” (Varda Les Plages D'agnès). Losing the memory that anchors one in time and space can create interesting encounters and connect a person to larger concepts or liberate a person from the burdens of knowledge.66 While Ernaux feared this time and fought against it, Varda explores it with the curiosity and creativity of a child.

The magical possibilities of such a liberation come together in Simon Cinéma from her film Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma who makes a second appearance in this film (Varda,

Piccoli and Mastroianni). Simon is an aging allegory of cinema whose memories are detached from time and space. This allows him to imagine remarkable combinations of actors and directors

66 See Chapter One for Ernaux’s description of memory loss as living in fluid, undefined space and time.

146 from various eras. This kind of fragmentary collage of real elements decontextualized from time and space is not a destructive but a creative force for both Simon and Varda.

Material-Portraiture

At the end of Les Plages d’Agnès, Varda constructs a house from a failed film. In doing so, she transforms an item destined for waste space into an installation in a display space. She calls the work “la cabane de l’échec,” and says that “en vraie glaneuse” she re-used failed film strips to build the house. She says that cinema is “de la lumière qui arrive quelque part et qui est retenue par des images plus ou moins sombres et coloriées” and that when she is in the house, “j’ai l’impression que j’habite le cinéma, que c’est ma maison. Il me semble que j’y ai toujours habité”

(Varda Les Plages D'agnès). In this sense, “valueless” materials that may have ended in waste space become an external displayed support for her memory, a museum and later her film.

Gleaning and repurposing fragments or aging materials infuses them with value, and do so in a public way that encourages others to do the same.

Varda elicits such material voices to speak for individuals and collectives. Using a handheld digital camera, Varda films food waste, garbage bags, and her aging body so closely that they decompose into delightful abstract landscape portraiture. She also zooms in on and reframes her molding ceiling as art. The fragmentary visual elements of the films “process” potential waste and decay that Varda encounters in transitional zones. Adopting waste from liminal space and framing it as art while at the same time juxtaposing it with Varda’s ageing body and great works of art, the film elevates the status of potential waste material to a resource of individual and collective self-reflection.

A sort of visual decomposition takes place in the extreme close-up, filming en gros plan.

Because the viewer lacks distance from the material, it becomes categorically undefinable,

147 permitting her to consider the object’s aesthetic qualities without interference from its cultural status or location. These scenes demonstrate perhaps more than any others the potential for choice in categorizing materials. For example, in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse Varda returns home to a moldy (that is, microbe-laden) ceiling from a water leak in her apartment. Some may be repulsed by this sign of deterioration, but Varda films it close-up like a landscape and put frames around various parts of it. She says, “les moisissures, je m’y suis habituée. Finalement, j’aime bien ça.

On dirait un paysage ou une toile de peintre abstrait: un Tapiès, un Guo Qiang, un Borderie.”

Indeed, there appears little aesthetic difference between the intentional arts and her framed ceiling. Locating the ceiling in a frame prepares it for the museum space rather than the waste heap.

In later scenes, the camera continues to find new materials for contemplating waste categorization. For example, when filmed up-close, the materials below could be monochromatic paintings.

Figure 2-5 Screenshot of Crushed metal, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse

148

Figure 2-6 Screenshot of Plastic Sheet, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse

These materials are crushed metal and plastic sheets, respectively, but when viewed in a film display rather than a landfill, they become art. This reinforces the idea that materials are only waste as a result of their physical location in waste space, not based on inherent qualities.

In Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse Varda closely films the skin of misshapen and surplus potatoes abandoned in a field in Northern France. Using her handheld digital camera, Varda brings the viewer into her perspective as she bends over, chooses a potato, and stands up to place it in her bag. The spectator follows Varda’s movements and her hands become the spectator’s hands, her skin the spectator’s skin. Close-up film of potato skin recalls the close-up film of

Varda’s own skin. In Les Plages d’Agnes, Varda includes footage of how she re-used and enhanced this potato work at the Venice Biennale to create “Patatopia,” an installation in which she dressed as a potato and paired close-ups of potatoes with pictures of her own body.67 The vegetable not being much different from human skin, this technique probes in an ecocritical fashion human versus vegetable, human versus nature, and subject versus object.

67 This is not the first time Varda paired vegetables with her changing body. See above note.

149 In the scene of her hands and hair in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse mentioned above, Varda reverses an old quote from Le Cid by Corneille. Rather than old age my enemy, Varda says, “old age, my friend” as she captures images of her graying hair and spotted hands that she finds horrifying yet strangely beautiful. The extreme close-up of the camera grants access to a sublime experience of human materiality. When we observe Varda paralleling her own flesh with misshapen vegetables and plastic sheets, they too become mirrors for self-reflection.

Fewer extreme close-ups decompose objects in Les Plages d’Agnès than in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse. Varda edits a series of close-ups from years earlier of her then dying husband,

Jacques Demy. Varda films these shots so closely to the eyes, hands, hair, and face that post- mortem bodily decomposition is prefigured visually. Here, however, the body remains intact and human landscapes offer a new perspective on beauty. She says that she wanted to “filmer…ses cheveux comme un paysage…la matière même de lui, Jacques en train de mourir mais Jacques encore vivant” (Varda Les Plages D'agnès). Focusing in so closely highlights the terrifying beauty of the fragile human body and transforms an ailing liminal body into an art object. Despite its intricate detail, this two-dimensional portrait is only light and shade, an equally terrifying realization of the inability of representation to replace bodies and materials.

And yet, Les Plages d’Agnès equally posits death as fertile. The film includes personal images of Jacques Demy as well as film from his biography (Varda Jacquot De Nantes). Several of the scenes inserted into the film are close-ups that record Demy’s dying body. His gray hair and age spots resemble closely those of Varda in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse. These visual memories could be disturbing reminders of human fragility but become intimate parallel portraits of the changing bodies of two lovers. Demy’s impending death adds value to these living images and spurns creative activity in the making of his biographical film. “We confront death finally as an opening to the infinite and the Other, and the subject is rendered human and mortal through this relation” (S. Cooper, “Looking Back, Looking Onwards” 58–59). “Yvette Biró suggests that

150 ‘[w]hat makes Varda’s films beautiful is that the idea of death becomes a fertile, vital principle’ and while Les Glaneurs is perhaps a more ponderously morbid approach to the subject (Biró

1997: 6), death is nonetheless a generative topic in the film” (Tryer 173). In so many ways in this film, what appeared to be lifeless becomes a resource.

Voice and Self-Reflection

The most novel way Varda challenges 20th-century waste associations is by placing the viewer in her visual space so that she may literally see waste differently. As other authors in this dissertation and contemporary French literature have experimented with multiple voices in their work, Varda creates a blended subjective/objective film voice that grants the spectator a position to choose her own performance of these materials. That is, Varda models gleaning behavior by placing the viewer in the gleaner’s visual perspective as she navigates past-date materials with the handheld camera/mirror.

Focalisation

Both films’ perspectives and editing place the viewer in a shifting space between two subjective viewpoints and one objective viewpoint: the mirror position in which she sees Varda’s reflection in the camera’s eye, Varda’s own vision with the handheld camera (in which the viewer sees what

Varda sees through the viewing lens, not the reversed screen as mirror), and an objective vision with a second standard camera. The digital camera inspires Varda to break up the visual voice of the film into internal focalization (digital) and external focalization (standard), a cinécriture effect that would have been more difficult or impossible with standard cameras. Her greatest innovation, however, is using the camera as a mirror, not simply filming herself filming in a real

151 mirror. Perhaps the original cinematic selfie, this viewpoint allows the viewer unprecedented and frank access to the aging female body. There is more to the selfie here, however, than meets the eye, literally. This footage places the viewer in the subjective self-reflexive vision of the artist. As a game of perspective, this recalls the unprecedented visual access granted to the monarchs’ visual space in Las Meninas. As Velasquez literally put the viewer in the monarchs’ self-reflexive place seeing themselves in the hazy mirror across the room, Varda places the viewer in the artist’s visual space looking in the camera mirror. As Velasquez invites the people into the rulers’ subjectivity, so Varda invites the spectator into her self-reflexive subjectivity. This creates an intimacy beyond the perspective of her eye through the camera because it shows the viewer how

Varda sees herself when she is engaged in self-care, brushing her hair. For example, in the scene in which she gleans heart-shaped potatoes we see her shots taken with the small camera up close.

These alternate with pulled-back shots of her filming taken by an unknown cameraperson. The same happens later as she films in a flea market. The effect breaks the scene into visual pieces, but also creates multiple filming “voices,” like multiple narrators. The handheld camera becomes a first-person “voice” while the pulled back camera becomes a third person “voice.” Although she cannot film with both cameras at once, Varda can later edit the visual “voices” together into a single first-person perspective verbally. Varda’s voice-over provides some continuity between the shots. In these scenes, however, Varda is at once the subject filming and the object of the camera’s eye.

Mirrors

Varda turns a handheld digital camera toward herself and uses it as a mirror in her film and that mirror image is then recorded in a locatable, asynchronous film form. Memory arguable plays a fundamental role in self-understanding, but it is ever-changing as its physiological support

152 varies constantly depending on life conditions, and subsequent life experiences revise how and what one retains in memory. In many ways, memory allows ephemeral and totally synchronous access to an internal self-understanding. And, as Ernaux and Varda both show, this memory is fragmentary and unreliable. Self-writing attempts to use language to fix that memory on an external page for later review and study, which can either reinforce self-understanding or, some may argue, prevent adaptation. Self-writing film similarly fixes a representation of the self in the filmic space that may influence self-understanding, but it uses light as a means of recording and reproducing its record.

Barthes discusses the effect of photography on the spectator as separate from the photographer and from the object photographed in La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie.

Additionally, Barthes notes that photography has a power of authenticating the past’s presence but also documents its absence in the present. In an earlier text, “Rhétorique de l’image,” Barthes noted that the photograph is “une conjonction illogique entre l’ici et l’autrefois.” With the handheld digital camera with reversible screen, the photographer (or filmmaker), spectator, and object are one in the same, and the film itself is both a conjunction between the here and now when viewed synchronously and a conjunction between the here and then when viewed asynchronously. In this sense, noting that collecting images as a gleaner has something in common with accumulation, an act that we earlier established as compensatory for a loss, then viewing collected images in film asynchronously (if we consider film as a series of chronologically taken and arranged still photos) authenticates past objects and events and works to compensate for the absence of the past. Mirrors may authentic the present as photos/films do the past, but more important to consider may be digital film’s capacity to create an absence of the present when viewed synchronously. The person filming experiences the here and now in the frame of a heterotopic/utopic space that is both real and unreal, present and absent.

153 As a mixed zone of real and unreal space that gathers and reflects light, the mirror also plays an important role in self-understanding. Self-writing film collects and projects light to reconstitute the self and space on two-dimensional surfaces. Prior to the handheld digital camera with which Varda experiments in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, film was entirely asynchronous for two reasons: the filmographer’s viewing lens was opposite to the camera’s eye and playback required rewinding. That is, one could see images of oneself but only at a later time, unlike the mirror which is absolutely synchronous and in which images disappear as soon as they are produced. Rather than seeing oneself as one is, one saw oneself in film as one was. With the handheld digital camera the camera’s viewing screen can be positioned on the same side of the camera as the lens and one can see oneself exactly as one is in the screen’s frame, just as one would within the frame of the mirror. A live person becomes a framed display. Maybe we are accustomed to this now with our pocket cameras and continual self-observation, but in the early

2000s Varda’s work was innovative and exploratory. Her willingness to experiment, to cross boundaries, and blend materials is what transforms an informative film into an immersive experience. Everyone becomes an artist in Varda’s work whose work clearly pioneered the current trend Ruffel note of literary co-creation. This incredible ability to reach out to an imaginary viewer and welcome a stranger into her space may be what makes Varda’s work so approachable and poignant to viewers. As she plays the little old lady in Les Plages d’Agnès, she encourages the viewer to take an extra moment to hear the stories of the aging, to listen more closely, to learn something, to absorb the knowledge they can share.

As the viewer observes in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, Varda uses the handheld camera as both a camera and a mirror to her graying hair and age-spotted hands. The camera provides the distance and frame that a mirror does, but it also records what one views to permit further examination by oneself or others at a later time. It has the power to place the spectator in the position of the cinéaste/author/artist and vice versa. When looking through Varda’s hand-held

154 camera, the spectator gets a cinéaste’s inside perspective and the cinéaste is granted a viewer’s outside perspective of her subjective vision.

In her self-portrait, Varda invites viewers into a frank discussion about the aging body, a process many would prefer to hide. Varda uses the camera with the screen flipped around toward her as a mirror to comb her graying hair up close and with the screen facing outward as a frame for her age-spotted hands. This median viewpoint as spectator/cinéaste gives the spectator the choice of seeing the aging hair and hands as either her or his own or as Varda’s. This glimpse at the subjectivity of an individual with an aging body can be poignant either for the young who can preview this experience or for those aging with Varda who may find common ground in this experience of their changing material reality. It equally places the male viewers in the subjective place of the female self-reflexive gaze. It allows men the opportunity to feel the aging woman’s slow disappearance.

As she parallels her own portrait as a gleaner with the portraits of others and tells her own life story alongside those of others, the narrative point of view also shifts from one individual to the next in both films. Rather than allowing the film to be told entirely by outsiders, Varda inserts her own voice in the film. She said of the process of filming Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse that

What I'm saying is that this kind of film has two very important things for me: it really

deals with the kind of relationship I wish to have with filming: editing, meeting people,

giving the film shape, a specific shape, in which both the objective and subjective are

present. The objective is the facts, society's facts, and the subjective is how I feel about

that, or how I can make it funny or sad or poignant. Anderson and Varda 26

In this sense, Varda acknowledges the subjective and objective blending of the films’ content.

In Les Plages d’Agnès, Varda explains her role in the film when she says, “je joue le rôle d’une petite vieille, rondouillarde et bavarde, qui raconte sa vie.” Together with the broken pictorial voice, the entire possibility of the film as an objectively-driven autobiography is called

155 into question. As many other authors claim authenticity in their films, Varda opens the film with a declaration of subjectivity and reverie, of fragmented self-evaluation and imperfect self- knowledge. Varda describes the hybrid nature of her project as “transmettre à mes proches et à d’autres quelques-uns des faits et travaux de mon parcours de vie. Et plus encore, tourner les miroirs vers les autres, ceux qui m’ont formée, ceux que j‘ai rencontrés, ceux que j’ai aimés.” In this sense, the film contains some objective materials and some subjective mirrorwork. Varda makes use of the mirror’s, and possibly the camera’s, distortive tendency in Les Plages d’Agnès.

The film opens with an elaborately staged mirror scene in which the spectator observes not only the mirrors in place on the beach, but the process of their placement and the team involved in staging them. With the wind whipping her scarf around her face, Varda looks toward the camera but not in it and says, “Voilà mon idée du portrait—que je sois dans des miroirs foutus et derrière des foulards.” The scene cuts during this line to a faded mirror in which Varda’s head is obscured by a poor reflection and then to a mirror in which we see Varda’s reflection clearly but behind the scarf. The world one perceives in the mirror is an instantaneous, evolving and unlocatable representation, perhaps just as opaque in many ways as the scarf. When either the mirror’s surface or the mind is damaged the reflection or memory is distorted. The language used in self-writing, or the display of memory, can be unreliable as it is time- and location- dependent.68 In Varda’s films, the mirror and the camera’s lens become unreliable as well, calling into question any number of self-reflexive spaces.

As one notes in the opening scenes of Les Plages d’Agnès, the mirror is tricky, dangerous even. In one scene, the camera focuses on a mirror in such a way that water that appears to be coming toward the camera is actually arriving from behind the camera. The spectator only sees

68 Film, while heavily reliant on language to structure its narrative can to some extent mitigate language deficiencies using images. Nonetheless, visual symbols used in film will also vary in interpretation over time and space.

156 this when the water hits the mirror and splashes off. Playing with this liminal space within the display film space encourages consideration of the unreal aspects of the well-ordered self-writing space. In an edited-in scene from Jane B. par Agnès V. Birkin dumps out her purse and says,

“même si on déballe tout, on ne dévoile pas grand-chose.” With this in mind, the film seems to be questioning whether materials of any kind can accurately represent individuals or if they simply deflect attention from self-representation, as the mirrors in the opening scene do.

Conclusions

Whereas Ernaux’s work challenges the latest landfill-bound consumer products as enhancements to self and bodily emissions as shameful and demoralizing, Varda’s work questions the danger associated with materials in transition from display spaces to disguise spaces. The materials she reframes become facsimiles for exploring her materiality in another form, an unreal site of self- reflection. Interstitial materials allow such contemplation as uncategorized medial surfaces open to interpretation, not unlike the mirror. Varda grants the viewer a visual perspective on seemingly end-of-life materials, including her own body and mind, that interrogates society’s treatment of waste materials and individuals metaphorically and metanymically associated with them. She displays how waste is a personal performance that helps us understand and situate materials and ourselves in value regimes, encouraging viewers to unlink pernicious associations between individuals and waste. Displaying this valuing process in an external dialogue encourages societal reflection on habitual or accepted waste practices, some of which may be detrimental to society as we will see in the next chapter.

157 Chapter 3

Locating Waste: Waste and Collective Self-Understanding in Jean Rolin’s La Clôture and Un Chien mort après lui

De “zone urbaine sensible” on est passé à l’appellation “quartier sensible” pour désigner un lieu identifiable d’abord par ses problèmes sociaux et aboutissant à la stigmatisation de ses habitants, surtout dans un contexte sécuritaire où ces derniers seront moins perçus comme précaires que comme dangereux. - Alain Vulbeau

Entrouverte, la porte métallique du second pilier—celui qui soutient le périphérique

extérieur, et dans lequel n’habite pas Gérard—laisse deviner de grands amoncellements

d’objets qui ont déjà servi, et que le commun des mortels estimerait impropres à tout

usage : des frigos, de nouveau, des machines à laver, des téléviseurs, des portes ou des

hayons de véhicules utilitaires, un groupe électrogène, une boîte de vitesses, un canapé

convertible et d’autres meubles, des lampadaires, de la vaisselle, un renard empaillé. Le

long du trottoir sont alignés des véhicules dont seuls deux ou trois paraissent en état de

marche. Rolin, La Clôture 91

Gérard, a main character in Jean Rolin’s La Clôture, and his friends collect recyclable garbage and reusable goods from Paris sidewalks and roadsides for a living. This activity may make their particular corner of the neighborhood a bit messier, but it contributes to “cleaning” its remaining areas and performs the larger task of ensuring that useful goods do not end up in landfills. This area appears to be a miniature dump for outsiders, but for Gérard it is a display space in which he

158 stocks materials that will support him in the future, resources in which he sees potential. These objects have already served humans in a community of mortals who consider them to be finite

(also “improper,” possibly “unclean” as well as “unfit” in translation), but Gérard’s infinite vision of materials extends their existence beyond others. This antihero in his grand vision places value on mere mortals’ undesirables, seeing their resource potential. Such vision contributes to his mythological character, a power that not many possess. This uncommon perspective turns people who harvest society’s leftovers from the “décharges sauvages” (48) into archivists and curators of society’s waste. Gérard’s imagination for a future for these discarded objects may reflect recognition that many in his society may also have given up on him as useful. The potential he sees in the discarded may be the possibility he still sees in himself and those around him, other

“deviants” mis au rebut by society.

Throughout this dissertation, we have observed that what one keeps and what one gets rid of can equally represent an individual or a society. Spaces for saving or rejecting accumulate revelatory materials in which one can examine a society’s values. This is just as true in a landfill

(hiding space) as in an archive or museum (display space). As we witnessed in Ernaux’s work, materials from display space become supplements that enhance self-representation and positively influence self-understanding. On the other hand, as discussed in Varda’s work, materials between display and waste spaces generate uncertainty and fear that may challenge self-understanding by forcing individuals to make value judgments without guiding spatial demarcations. In this final chapter, we will consider further the impact of materials in waste spaces on the self- understandings of those affiliated with them in Jean Rolin’s novels, La Clôture and Un Chien mort après lui. First, waste spaces Rolin records. Then, I will consider how such spaces influence the self-understanding of human beings dependent on those spaces and materials in them. Finally,

I will consider the impact of such spaces in the author’s individual self-representation and collective self-understandings in his society. This final chapter will complete our examination of

159 the evolving role of waste materials in literature and its influence on individual and collective self-understandings in 21st-century French society.

Rolin’s Oeuvre

Jean Rolin is an award-winning French writer and journalist whose work frequently focuses on life outside the mainstream in French and global society (poverty, asylum, homelessness, sex work, and joblessness) and on borderlands (Bergé; Gibourg; Thibault). A well-recognized author,

Rolin won the Prix Albert-Londres in 1988 for his story Ligne de front: un voyage en Afrique australe, the Prix Médicis in 1996 for L'Organisation, the Prix Louis-Guilloux in 2000 for

Campagnes, and le Prix Ptolémée in 2006 for L'Homme qui a vu l'ours. Then in 2013 he won the

Prix de la langue française “qui récompense l'œuvre d'une personnalité du monde littéraire, artistique ou scientifique ayant contribué à en illustrer la qualité et la beauté” (AFP). While he has recently moved toward the fictive, Rolin is still well-known for his documentary style based on months of site research and personal observations (detailed to the extent that he has been compared to George Perec in both L’Express and La Libération).69 According to Alain Vulbeau,

Rolin’s on-site research methodology goes beyond the abstract research that comes from libraries and archives and “rendre les concepts eux-mêmes sensibles” (9). Among the qualities his work shares with Ernaux and Varda are “l’attention à la vulnérabilité des personnes, l’intérêt pour la mémoire, pour l’imaginaire, et la prise en compte d’une géographie dévalorisée, avec la description d’arrière-pays isolés des bourgs centraux” (Vulbeau 9). Working with populations on society’s fringe, Rolin’s work necessarily explores exclusionary waste spaces, where such

69 Perec once attempted to enumerate everything he consumed in the year 1974 in Je suis né. He also tried to write everything he saw during the day in a square in Paris in Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien.

160 individuals frequently reside. As nationally recognized literature, his work on such populations encourages national scale self-reflection on waste practices.

A genre-elusive author (his work could well be considered autobiography, journalism, documentary, biography, among others), Jean Rolin aligns most closely with domestic and international travel literature.70 In this genre, authors visit and document locally as well as internationally well-known sites. By opposition, Rolin’s work covers lesser-known or even notorious areas of large cities. Aline Bergé observes that Rolin’s interest in “les transformations de paysages,” “« lignes de catastrophe » et les « situations limites »” take him to the most unlikely places all over the planet (636). While other travel authors take great pains to detail the well-known architecture, landscapes, people, and materials of a particular culture, Rolin attends to the unknown and hidden areas visited and populated by locals. Bruno Thibault explains that “Il est clair que Rolin n’est pas un flâneur comme Baudelaire ou comme Apollinaire, tour à tour fascinés par le spectacle de la vie moderne et exaltés par le vent du large. Au contraire, Rolin est un rôdeur qui cherche à dévoiler l’envers du décor de la modernité” (71). In a passage in Un

Chien mort après lui, Rolin reads an excerpt from a “typical” travel book and ironically summarizes a single day in its text, with all its excitement and novel experience. In contrast, while Rolin travels and interviews locals to capture a place’s character, he observes quotidian life.

He writes that creating new routines, “aussi régulières et astreignantes qu’à domicile, constitue l’essence même du voyage” (Un chien mort après lui, 41). In his local and global wanderings,

Rolin takes an approach that Vulbeau calls “sensible.”

L’actualité des recherches en anthropologie met en avant le concept de ‘terrains

sensibles’. Il s’agit de désigner de nouveaux espaces d’enquête et donc de nouvelles

70 The domestic travel literature genre shrinks the travel map to offer a more concentrated guide to and history of an area. For non-locals it offers an in-depth visit to a place while for locals it gives greater depth and a fresh look at familiar territory. This is a trend best represented by Maspéro and Frantz’s Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (Mansfield).

161 populations comme les immigrés clandestins, les réfugiés politiques, les personnes

marginalisées et en souffrance. L’approche est dite sensible en ce qu’elle rompt avec une

approche ethnologique qui avait fini par être d’abord puis uniquement théorique,

renvoyant le terrain au statut de ‘boîte noire’ dont seuls les éléments entrants ou sortants

méritent de l’attention. Ainsi la posture sensible est attentive à la proximité et non plus à

l’exotisme. (9)

This ethnology encourages local study of one’s own culture in underrepresented spaces and highlights what all cultures have in common, including ubiquitous waste practices and their impact on local populations.

As a journalist trained in on-site interviews and observations, rather than examining waste materials ex situ (as in Vik Muniz’s portraits that remove waste from the landfill mentioned in the Introduction), Rolin works in situ to see waste how and where it resides, a trend he helped pioneer in contemporary literature. Like many people he meets and documents, Rolin lives an itinerant and temporary lifestyle as he moves from one marginal space to the next. The parallels he makes between the materials he sources in waste spaces and those in display spaces (his library and museum research) as well as the comparisons he draws between himself and the individuals he meets alters the cultural status of waste materials and waste-dependent individuals.

This chapter unpacks two of Jean Rolin’s novels that deal most closely with waste spaces and populations. While Rolin has been writing since the 1980s, the first text chronologically to be studied here is La Clôture from 2000 in which Rolin portrays himself and an historical figure through a Heterotopia of illusion and its inhabitants. The historical figure, Maréchal Ney, was a disposable general in Napoleon’s army whose liminal social and political status led him to meet an untimely end in front of a firing squad not far from the Parisian boulevard that carries his name. La Clôture (translated as “the enclosure” or “the fence”) documents a year of living in a hotel in the neighborhood around Boulevard Ney, meeting its residents, and learning its history.

162 “La zone désignait autrefois l’espace inconstructible qui s’étendait au-delà des fortifications de

Paris. Dans l’entre-deux-guerres, c’était une petite ville de plus de 40 000 habitants, chiffonniers pour la plupart, qui vivaient dans des habitats de fortune. La zone a ensuite été remplacée par le boulevard périphérique et divers équipements collectifs” (Vulbeau 11). In addition, I will study

Un Chien mort après lui, which Rolin narrates as he travels the world to study cultures of errant dogs and their unique relationship with waste practices, “une enquête approfondie sur le pouvoir d'action, de déplacement et de reconfiguration des rapports de l'homme au monde par l'animal”

(Bergé 635). Making long-term stops in various countries around the world, the narrator learns the histories of errant dogs and the human groups they follow.

Collective Self-Writing

Rolin’s work offers definitively less personal self-reflection than the other self-writing studied in this dissertation. Rather, his work investigates more collective attitudes and behaviors toward materials and populations in waste space. His texts are first-person accounts that share some of the author’s personal information and experiences from his research with the reader, and as in the case of self-writing, are not a direct “récit de soi.” When Rolin repurposes existing work, he treats it as raw waste materials that are not simply end-products, but evolving resource materials for self-reflection on a collective level similar to hupomnêmata for the individual. Rolins work contains ecclectic resources as Bergé explains that his books that are “nourris de références littéraires doivent aussi une part de leur gai savoir aux sciences naturelles, humaines et animales,

à l'ethnologie et à l'éthologie, à l'ornithologie ou à la zoogéographie” (Bergé 636). For the Greeks, these notebooks accumulated knowledge to help supplement the writer’s life experience and provided a framework for exercises including reading, rereading, meditating, and dialoguing with oneself and with others (Foucault 826). In La Clôture and Un Chien mort après lui, the narrators

163 rely on materials from museums and libraries to enrich their representations of local cultures.

This process not only marries materials from one kind of space with another but enhances the texts’ temporal and geographical depths by juxtaposing incompatible spaces and causing ruptures with time through intertextuality.

In the introduction to their volume on intertextuality, Still and Worton explain that

“inevitably a fragment and displacement, every quotation distorts and redefines the ‘primary’ utterance by relocating it within another linguistic and cultural context” (11). When considered from this perspective, this intertextuality displaces the narrative time and place of the primary projects as far back as Biblical time and as far spread as the author’s own travels around the globe. Such incongruous references textually align asynchronous and far-flung references in a single book space. For example, the reader’s very first interaction with Un Chien mort après lui, the title, borrows from another author’s work; the intertextual references grow from there to include the Bible, the Illiad, first-person témoignages from war zones, non-fiction essays on dogs, photography, painting, and film. On the whole, with blending self-representative materials from one type of cultural space with those of another, his work provides a multimodal mirror for societal self-reflection, including the arts we want to preserve with the creations we want to hide.

Additionally, in the spirit of self-writing, the texts share with the reader the author’s goals for the information he learned during his research, travels, and interviews, just as one might in a correspondance. In La Clôture, the narrator explains that has set out “le projet assez vaste et confus d’écrire sur le maréchal Ney du point de vue du boulevard qui porte son nom…ou d’écrire sur le boulevard… mais du point de vue présumé du maréchal Ney” (19). For the second book, the narrator explains that he was inspired to write his book by Jonathan Littell’s Les

Bienveillantes. “Le projet de ce livre avait été inspiré à Jonathan Littell par une photographie prise pendant le siège de Leningrad et représentant le corps d’une jeune femme en partie dévoré

164 par des chiens” (206). He goes on to say that the same photo inspired his own study of errant dogs.

As a reflection on French and global waste practices, these texts create locatable display spaces. This locatable space fixes memory (individual or collective) on the page or film screen and packages it in a way that it can be shared. This accumulated and contained memory can influence collective self-understanding as it represents aspects of society that may challenge accepted beliefs and practices regarding waste-dependent populations and waste-containing spaces that may have relatively little representation in museums, libraries, and archives. Natalie

Edwards has argued that choosing materials for these spaces is not just “incomplete and subjective” but depends on the established content of the self-representative space (3). This can be particularly acute in when it comes to representing everyday life and the lives of marginal populations. That is, if an archive does not exist to represent waste-affiliated materials, they will not be preserved.

The texts studied in this chapter focus almost exclusively on individuals and materials often thrown out of collective-memory-containing spaces. More likely to literally end up in the landfill, the topics and concepts studied here fight against this incomplete documentation. They indicate a desire to conspicuously preserve materials for cultural memory in opposition to the waste spaces that hide materials for this same purpose. Such spaces remove undesirable elements from society to make it appear more utopic. The landfill cordons off materials that society does not want in order to create the illusion of order and cleanliness and need for more materials, arguably, with goods produced to end in the landfill.

While their function may be to make our world seem more ordered by hiding disorder,

Gay Hawkins argues in The Ethics of Waste that, “what we want to get rid of tells us who we are”

(2). As other authors in this dissertation have done, Rolin’s work probes waste spaces as self- reflexive, three-dimensional mirrors and supplements his observations with varied materials from

165 display spaces, including the archive, the museum, and the library. Together the two kinds of space offer a more complete picture of French and global self-understanding through waste space, specifically those waste spaces upon which marginalized populations depend.

Heterotopia

Societies design waste spaces to hide or disguise unwanted, unneeded, or potentially dangerous materials. While this may seem like a simple, healthy, and even natural choice, the practice comes with unintended consequences for individuals and the environment. To further understand the impact of such separations, I turn to Michel Foucault for whom spatial practices underlie subjectivity and power relations.71 Specifically, Foucault’s science of Heterotopia, or other spaces, provides the necessary bridge to understanding how waste, largely considered an “other object” in Western culture, is distributed in cultural space.

Foucault first introduced this concept on its own and the science he intended to study it, known as Heterotopology, during a radio interview in 1966 about “Utopie et Littérature.”

Heterotopia are “other spaces” to be studied by “non pas une science des utopies mais hétérotopies, science des espaces absolument autres” (“Utopies et Hétérotopies”). Foucault later elaborated on and formally discussed Heterotopia at a conference given by the Cercle d’études architecturales de Paris in 1967. Certain parts of this talk were published in L’Archittetura, cronache e storia in 1968, but otherwise, the text went unpublished until 1984 when it appeared in a companion text for an exposition in Berlin, AMCS, Revue d’architecture. This text was quite different but later became part of Dits et écrits. Despite Foucault’s reluctance to further develop this concept and some criticism that nearly any space could be a Heterotopia, it remains effective

71 See “Questions à Michel Foucault à la géographie” (Foucault, Dits et Écrits, Tome 2: 1976 - 1988) and “Espace, savoir et pouvoir” (Foucault, Dits et écrits).

166 for conceptualizing and interpreting spatial organization of waste.72 Given that Foucault “trashed” this theoretical concept, so to speak, it is particularly apt in a dissertation that concerns itself with waste as a resource that I recycle and repurpose it. Keeping in mind that recycling requires an additional energy investment and often results in some original material still being cast aside, I rework and build on the scraps of this argument that are germane to my waste theorization.

Employing Foucault’s definition of Heterotopia in my definition of waste spaces performs the double function of setting up waste as reflective of the individual or society that produces it and tying it to the self-reflexive literary space that I set out to study, self-writing, a separate

Foucauldian conceptual space with heterotopic qualities in which individuals accumulate materials reflective of the society in which they live to represent themselves to others. What’s more, in an interview for Hérodote in 1976, Foucault described the relationship between geographical terms and power structures, noting that “territoire, c’est sans doute une notion géographique, mais c’est d’abord une notion juridico-politique: ce qui est contrôlé par un certain type de pouvoir” (Dits et écrits 32). Space, in this sense, becomes a power tool to maintain social and political structure in society. Uneven distribution of knowledge can be a means of maintaining spatial separations of waste where minimal knowledge about material histories and capacities to contain danger creates fear about waste spaces. Thus, while this particular theory of space, Heterotopia, may have been left behind as Foucault continued to work on concepts related to space, in conjunction with his other theories about space its relation to knowledge and power and its ability to reflect the society that creates it the theory can elucidate and contextualize the waste practices observed in Rolin’s texts.

72 Similar criticism could be made of Marc Augé’s Non-lieux, but the concept remains useful in categorizing urban space.

167 Crisis and Deviation

For individuals, Foucault outlines two types of Heterotopia: crisis and deviation. For

“hétérotopies de crise, c’est-à-dire qu’il y a des lieux privilégiés, ou sacrés, ou interdits, réservés aux individus qui se trouvent, par rapport à la société, et au milieu humain à l’intérieur duquel ils vivent, en état de crise” (756-7). This would be situations involving health, birth, or death, essentially liminal states of existence in which invisible and mysterious borders between living and non-living are navigated. Foucault explains that these Heterotopia of crisis have been largely replaced by Heterotopia of deviation, in which “on place les individus dont le comportement est déviant par rapport à la moyenne ou à la norme exigée” (757). Foucault mentions mental institutions, prisons, and retirement homes as Heterotopia of deviation. In terms of retirement homes, individuals in those spaces may be in a health/age crisis but they will also deviate by being outside the active population since “dans notre société où le loisir est la règle, l’oisiveté forme une sorte de déviation” (Foucault 757). Similar to retirees, when an individual’s behavior appears idle because their participation in society is invisible or their contribution to society is difficult to measure or remunerate, those individuals seem deviant. In many cases, as Rolin demonstrates, individuals who appear idle or whose work is invisible due to a lack of proper evaluating metrics are no less active than any worker within the norm, such as prostitutes, object recuperators, and les sans-papiers.

Society places some individuals with deviant behavior in hidden spaces (mental institutions, prisons, etc.). As discussed in Varda’s films, materials in transition from one space to another, such as past-date foods or even goods in transit without proper documentation/story, appear dangerous. Similar concern arises when faced with individuals continually in transit,

168 whether they are undocumented (unstoried) immigrants, homeless, or living in mobile homes.73

Living between defined spaces leaves people outside the patterning of society, but to be outside a space one must be inside another.74 What happens if an individual’s behavior deviates by not having a recognizable place? In her book Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas asks readers to

“consider beliefs about persons in a marginal state. These are people who are somehow left out in the patterning of society, who are placeless. They may be doing nothing morally wrong, but their status is indefinable” (Douglas 118). Douglas examines negative reaction in many societies to individuals who do not fit easily into one social category or another. One can extend these observations to individuals without a physical place, and, in some cases, having no social place means having no access to a physical place in certain societies and vice versa. In such cases, individuals who are not forcibly placed in a hiding space, such as a prison for vagrancy, frequently turn to more open and less regulated forms of such spaces for shelter, including landfills, abandoned lots, or small border areas, as is the case for those in La Clôture and Un

Chien mort après lui.

A person’s place, both social and physical, contributes to her or his self-understanding.

Ecocritics have placed a great deal of importance on the idea of place in forming self- understanding and protecting natural landscapes with which local populations identify. As described in the Introduction, Neil Evernden describes the manner in which some animals behave differently in their own territories, as though the territory is an extension of self.75 Returning to

Brubaker and Cooper’s article on “identity,” this self-understanding is a kind of “‘situated subjectivity’: one’s sense of who one is, of one’s social location, and (given the first two) how

73 Varda and Ernaux discuss concerns about old age, another transitional state in which the body and mind may become unreliable. 74 The question becomes, what does a placeless space look like? How can we define it? We could turn to Augé’s idea of non-lieu for an alternative or enhanced perspective. 75 The differences between place and space in De Certeau and Augé, whose definitions contrast, play a role in daily practices of self.

169 one is prepared to act” (17). Evernden considers a person’s situation not just socially but in the geographical sense and their familiarity with that location’s physical elements as influencing their actions. On a larger scale, as Brubaker and Cooper describe other-categorization, it is how individuals in a society or the state may categorize individuals based on having a certain sameness with a particular group, which may or may not be the way the individual views her- or himself (15). Putting the two together with Douglas’s work, one can see how social place, physical place, and other-categorization come together to influence a society’s collective patterning of spaces for individuals and materials, including spaces for those who deviate, and how this patterning may or may not relate to an individual’s personal self-understanding. This may be because, as noted in the Introduction, materials and spaces carry meaning for humans but that meaning can vary as materials both accept and resist our characterizations. Rolin’s work in

La Clôture and Un chien mort après lui provides background stories for the placeless, many of whom rely on waste materials and spaces for survival, and offers a view into how other- categorization influences their physical and social locations and in some cases their self- understandings.

Even though such spatial practices may occasionally come under attack or scrutiny, there will always be arguments for maintaining divisions. These may be practical in part, especially as concerns potentially dangerous waste materials or individuals with contagious illnesses. In “Des

Espaces autres,” Foucault argues that human placement as it pertains to spatial practices is deeply entrenched.

Or, malgré toutes les techniques qui l’investissent, malgré tout le réseau de savoir qui

permet de le déterminer ou de le formaliser, l’espace contemporain n’est peut-être pas

encore entièrement désacralisé… Et peut-être notre vie est-elle encore commandée par un

certain nombre d’oppositions auxquelles on ne peut pas toucher, auxquelles l’institution

et la pratique n’ont pas encore osé porter atteinte. (Dits et Écrits : 1954-1988 754)

170 As Mary Douglas explains, such sacred practices are deeply embedded in culture and “expressed by rituals of separations and demarcation and by beliefs in the danger of crossing forbidden boundaries” (Douglas 22). Deeply founded cultural beliefs about danger are difficult to eradicate even when they are no longer practical. From Foucault’s perspective, it is not only sacred objects and individuals that are surrounded by these engrained forbidden boundaries but spaces that may also take on a sacred status. We will observe in Rolin’s work associations of danger with both visibly and invisibly bounded hiding spaces, be they landfills in the first case or neighborhoods in the second.

Transfer

Rolin’s narrators observe how individuals modify their behavior when they must cross borders between living spaces and “other” spaces. According to Mary Douglas’s work these modifications are driven not only by a desire to create and maintain order but also to prevent disorder from overtaking existing order. “This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognise that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolizes both danger and power” (Douglas 117). This potentiality may transfer from the spaces Rolin studies to the materials in them and individuals who depend on them. For some, excluding individuals associated with disorder prevents that disorder from entering ordered spaces as though it were a material carried with them.76 When one must contact such spaces one way to limit contamination is through ritual performance of verbal or physical distancing, as we will see in La Clôture (for example, declaring oneself to be an outsider to waste space, creating physical barriers, or wearing protective clothing). The behavior may also be reversed in order to

76 Given more time, we could examine associations with mental and physical disorders as well as generalized disorder.

171 purposefully contaminate others. For example, one may use metaphors or similes to transfer negative qualities associated with waste space onto others, for example those of low social status.

We will see examples of this as well.

Susan Signe Morrison warns, however, of the ethical implications of transferring the qualities of waste disposal spaces to individuals in her article, “Waste Aesthetics: Form and

Restitution.” Physically and economically placeless individuals take on waste’s associations with the useless, dangerous, or disposable, making their living situations and social status increasingly precarious. Documenting the placeless’s histories with which society can identify may alter exclusionary practices or help improve the social standing of these individuals tainted by their physical or metaphorical proximity to waste. Brubaker and Cooper note that identifying oneself is

“to categorize oneself, to locate oneself vis-à-vis known others, to situate oneself in a narrative, to place oneself in a category” (14). As we will see, Rolin’s work “identifies” those who deviate by not having a clear social or physical “place” and inhabit “other spaces.” It does this by situating them in narratives, creating mythological figures from the characters the narrator meets, and drawing subtle parallels between the narrator (a placeable member of society) and waste- dependent populations. In the process, the narrators’ own personae morph as they compare themselves to one deviant individual after another and inhabit one waste space after another.

Véronique Bragard explains that literature has the capacity to give waste a sensuous quality

(461). Rolin’s work is unique in the scope of waste-dependent populations storied from those who collect literal waste for employment or survival to those linguistically associated with waste through metaphor, such as sex workers.

172 Waste Spaces

Now let us turn to the texts to consider the role of waste spaces in France and around the globe.

First, we will explore the space of La Clôture as presented by the narrator, area residents and workers, and outsiders. As Un Chien mort après lui visits all manner of spaces, we will then explore the landfill and the cemetery in regular and war time, as well as display space for comparison.

France

Like a glance from the highway, a cursory read of La Clôture presents the Paris border neighborhood as one would expect: dirty, polluted, and full of plight. At the time of its writing in

2000, the neighborhood was full of out-of-use factories, poorly maintained green spaces, and liminal highway spaces unsuitable to most uses. About his book, Zones, Vulbeau “L’imaginaire de ce lieu a sans doute persisté bien au-delà de son existence réelle et la notion de zone renvoie à un espace marginalisé, sans hygiène et dangereux. C’est d’ailleurs à la recherche de cet espace imaginaire que l’écrivain Jean Rolin se consacre” (11). The narrator describes it in the following manner: “tout ce secteur de Paris offre d’ailleurs de nombreux exemples des techniques mises en

œuvre par la société pour rendre moins visibles, plus furtifs, des maux qu’elle a depuis longtemps renoncés à prévenir ou à combattre” (134). Here renoncé could be another word for abandonné which we have established as associated with waste in French law. Given this, the area appears to be a waste space, chosen to contain elements of life that through their exclusion make life outside that space more utopic. The narrator goes on to describe the visible physical separation of this space using a fence: “Cette hypothèse est d’autant moins farfelue que déjà, dans le même dessein, on avait élevé un haut mur en parpaings entre le talus au chien mort et la déchetterie sis à l’angle

173 du boulevard Macdonald, dressé le long des voies ferrées de nouvelles clôtures” (134). While the neighborhood may not be an official waste space, it contains waste, is home to illicit activities and groups who deviate from the norm (immigrants, drug dealers, homeless, sex workers), it juxtaposes the city with the suburbs, and it has a function with “normal” space of hiding undesirables. The neighborhood, however, while preserving architecture and historical markers from earlier eras does, to a certain extant layer earlier times under the present. Nonetheless, simply by being a recognizably “other space” that represents danger and hides elements in a way that makes all remaining spaces seem more utopic, the neighborhood becomes a waste space.

Much of the waste material found in the neighborhood comes from the outside as in a landfill. In addition to literally bordering an official déchetterie, the narrator calls the area a

“décharge sauvage” (48) and describes how an area resident recuperates from it: “il a passé toute la nuit précédente à tourner au volant de sa voiture, une R25 grise, au hasard de ce quartier et d’autres no man’s land, tant parce qu’il ne parvenait pas à trouver le sommeil que dans le dessein d’être le premier à choisir parmi les objets mis au rebut” (93). This quote implies that this neighborhood and other spaces in which objects are “mis au rebut” are no man’s lands. A no man’s land is unowned, placeless, statusless, and dangerous. In war time, these liminal zones pose a risk but also an opportunity for conquest. They are neutral, unowned buffer zones between opposing cultures. Unlike real no man’s lands, the rhetorical ones in La Clôture separate classes that treat waste objects as valueless from classes that survive on them. As in Varda’s film, objects in these spaces reflect the value that finders see in them.

Rolin documents several conversations in which individuals associate the area with waste metaphorically, one of the many voices he gathers. A long-time neighborhood resident laments what she sees as the decline of the the neighborhood by using language of waste and filth when she says, “c’est un sale quartier” (167). She goes on, however, to note that she would rather live in this neighborhood than in another where “ils ont tué un tas de vieilles” (167). Even referring to

174 her own cohort, the old woman describes the dead as un tas, a pile, a term often used for waste.

The original comment is an example of how individuals use verbal dirt to devalue the materials with which they associate them. The second comment demonstrates how notions of dirt and danger blend and how the presence of one may entail the other for an observer.

Others who must cross into this neighborhood for work create verbal distance between themselves and the area around them to avoid being tainted by waste space. The narrator remarks with irony on such commentary in another testimony he collects.

Tantôt c’était une Russe, et tantôt une Ukrainienne, qui tenait le matin la réception de

l’hôtel La Terrasse. Toutes deux étaient très blanches de peau, un peu molles, toutes deux

horrifiées par l’écosystème de la porte de Clignancourt, effectivement plein de périls, au

moins la nuit, pour d’aussi candides créatures. […] Aucune des deux, Dieu merci,

n’habitait le quartier. (100)

This description repeats typical neighborhood perceptions. While these immigrants work there, they would be unwilling to live there, as they explain due to the “ecosystem” (presumably the various human “species” and state of the environment). These women’s approach others waste space through literal spatial separation (not living where they work) and verbal distancing

(making a point of saying so). The narrator’s “Dieu merci” ironically hints at his attitude toward the repulsion and fear “other” spaces generate. It also indicates that the narrator may not agree with the extent of the danger the speaker perceives.

A later scene provides an example of how materials and individuals are excluded for fear of spreading disorder or contamination. The narrator observes a film about exploited women, from sex workers to wives, being shot in the neighborhood. The narrator notes that “L’ironie de toute cette affaire, c’est que ce sont bien entendu de fausses putes qui font les vraies, et sur le territoire de ces dernières, dont il a bien fallu les évincer au préalable” (148). Sex workers, a group often described using waste metaphors due to their “deviant” business practices, work in

175 this neighborhood that society has abandoned. Not only does the director remove these

“deviants,” but she also removes the potential waste materials present.

Auparavant, la grande maigrichonne s’est accroupie à plusieurs reprises au pied d’un vrai

platane pour rechercher entre ses racines un petit objet dissimulé parmi de faux déchets :

car il est inconcevable que le tournage ait utilisé les vrais, potentiellement dangereux, qui

pourtant se trouvaient sur place en abondance. 149

Rather than making creative use of the waste already present on the site, as Varda may have, or the sex workers as extras, the film crew first “clean” the site to make it “dirty” with “clean” waste.77 The film employs dirt and waste as props to underline area dangers.

Despite the film’s message about empowering exploited women, the director, cast, and crew maintain physical distance from the people, objects, and space they reproduce in the film.

That is, even though they are giving a storied body to people, places, and materials associated with disorder, in practice their perceived dangers and taboos are so strong that exclusive behaviors persist even among the sympathetic. One could argue that the crew equates the sex workers given their exclusion of both. This small-scale observation of society’s actions on a city- wide scale exemplifies the neighborhood’s danger in local imagination, how society transfers waste’s qualities to the materials and individuals there, and how society alters behavior toward them. The scene also creates a frame in which to view and question society’s irrational behaviors in reaction to waste’s agentic capacity, when it comes to physical proximity to it.

More deeply, it stimulates contemplation of “fake” versus “real” in collective self- representation. If the filmmaker was attempting to accurately reflect societal attitudes and behaviors, she may have been better served to use “real” extras and props. The scene shows,

77 Such a film highlights the difference between a film such as Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse and other films. Using “real” waste was an innovative and brave choice on Varda’s part. While it may be less obvious today now that dumpster diving and rehab projects have become trendy with the rise of the sharing economy, in 2000 her work was cutting edge.

176 however, the manner in which society may alter its self-representational materials in order to create a more perfect self-representation even when it comes to the materials that it rejects. This furthers the argument that we must look directly at our waste spaces to better know ourselves because our intentionally self-representative arts and spaces are only that, representation.

Rolin’s narrator also verbally imports materials from areas outside the neighborhood, but in a manner that undermines the dangers others associate with it when he stages scenes from

Ney’s life in the neighborhood and when he describes his experiences living there. On one occasion he projects an imaginary war zone onto the waste-filled neighborhood, but area danger is mitigated via comparisons to well-known battle disasters. When looking for a space to reenact

Maréchal Ney’s participation in the Battle of Waterloo, he first finds

un endroit tellement lamentable—en dépit de la très relative note de gaieté qu’y introduit

le stand de lavage de voitures à l’enseigne de l’éléphant bleu—avec ses amoncellements

de détritus, ses flaques d’huile de vidange et d’autres fluides corrosifs, ses épaves de

bagnoles cramées et désossées et ses restes épars de vies brisées (je pèse mes mots), sacs

de couchage pourris ou vieux matelas de mousse, que même une évocation de la Berezina

y eût été déplacée. 113

Comparing this square to a war zone testifies its societal neglect. Often in “waste zones” environmental pollution goes unmitigated, presumably owing to the low status of its inhabitants.78

In a vicious cycle, the presence of waste materials causes the area to become a waste dumping zone, encouraging some to leave and opening abandoned areas to placeless individuals whose low social status create an atmosphere in which society may not make an effort to clean up the waste already present.

78 Urban ecocriticism describes and discusses the ways in which environmental justice is reserved for the wealthy and white. Waste sites of all kinds are typically located in areas that appear to be deserts (that is, areas where visible life is not humanlike or traditionally beautiful) or near low-income areas in which individuals are too poor and underrepresented in government to fight their placement.

177 In the above quote it would appear that one of French military history’s most devastating moment’s aftermath would be less foul than this neighborhood. While the text creates the war analogy to tie the narrator to Ney (the stated purpose of the text), it also plays on area fears. The discrepancy between the real wars referenced and the narrator’s experience in his imagination highlights how modern French life deviates from past wartime suffering. The narrator compares the present with such past collective experiences, for example, when walking home in the rain after his imaginary battle reenactment. He says, “ainsi en ce 24 novembre, aurais-je éprouvé quelque chose du passage de la Berezina” (200). Walking wet city streets and traversing Russia barefoot in the snow, however, are clearly unequal. While making these comparisons the text appears to reinforce area dangers, but actually undermines them. No comparison could be made between these two experiences without the modern day situation’s gravity being lightened. Critics who read the text with preconceptions about this area commented on the author’s “detached” style and his portrayal of “the hell of our societal borderlands.”79 Individuals living in real war zones would likely dispute the inflated rhetoric many use to refer to this waste space which attests to waste and placelessness’s power in the imagination.

In addition to interrogating this imaginary power, the text “cleans up” the neighborhood’s image when it breaks up the cityscape using rural metaphors and lexical fields. Aside from simply calling the area he is studying an “ecosystem,” the narrator describes it as such with all its constituent parts: rivers, flora, fauna, etc. He creates an aesthetic experience with bucolic vocabulary and imagery that recall painting and blends artistic media. Certain areas of the neighborhood reveal “un pan de ciel si vaste qu’on pourrait se croire au bord de la mer” (25). The narrator relies on natural images and metaphors to describe the tranquil physical sensations of the city. “Au passage des véhicules, si l’on se tient juste en dessous et que les deux autres niveaux de

79 The two quotes come from the following reviews on P.O.L.’s web page: Marie-Laure Delorme in Le Magazine littéraire of January 2002 and Guillaume Chérel in Regards of March 2002.

178 circulation sont momentanément silencieux, il en émane des sonorités aquatiques, cailloux mollement roulés dans le lit d’une rivière ou bulles rejetées par un plongeur en immersion” (98).

This linguistic “cleaning” layers natural space on waste space and elicits positive feelings that question its categorization as dangerous and unclean. This is a reversal of traditional uses of nature in which poets project human emotions on nature in the pathetic fallacy. Here nature is projected on human spaces. This reversal would not be unexpected, considering Yaeger’s argument, discussed in Introduction, that waste has become a postmodern sublime. Nature and waste appear to be evolving categories for human self-contemplation, self-representation, and self-understanding. Other aquatic language brings the discursive “purity” of nature into this

“wasted” zone. This is not a “natural” space, but employing such language to describe this

“artificial” area supports Stéphanie Posthumus’s view that for the French “nature and the human are seen as ultimately, always and necessarily intertwined.”80 They are intertwined in the same material earth processes in which waste circulates as well. Following Yaeger’s argument in

Rubbish Ecology, the 21st century must now perceive humans and waste as ultimately, always, and necessarily intertwined on a global scale.

The Globe

The second text Un Chien mort après lui travels from one country to another visiting neighborhoods similar to the one described in La Clôture as well as landfills and warzones. I have

80 Obviously, “nature” is as complicated for Francophones as it is for Anglophones. Entire books have been written on the topic, including Kate Soper’s What is Nature?. Several authors have discussed a “French” approach to nature, such as Christian Leveque in Ecologie de l’écosystème à la biosphère, who discusses French naturalists, such as Buffon (1707-1788), who “glorified a nature cultivated by man, a civilized nature” (206). See also Michael Zimmerman, “What can Continental Philosophy Contribute to Environmentalism?” in Rethinking Nature: Essay in Environmental Philosophy for a longer discussion of continental philosophies of nature.

179 chosen several examples to highlight waste spaces’ potential as resource and their dependence on society for maintenance.

In Un Chien mort après lui, the narrator encounters people who treat waste spaces as areas for consumption similar to display spaces. In a landfill in Egypt, the narrator notes “Bordées des deux côtés de talus de débris sur l’un desquels nous venions d’apercevoir un chien mort, un de ses cuissots dressé vers le ciel et toujours revêtu de son poil, tel un gibier à la devanture d’une boucherie” (76). Like the companion dog that may have been purchased through a pet shop window, here an errant dog becomes another consumable product. Choosing words such as dressé and revêtu and placing them in the context of a staged display in a butcher shop window invites the reader to reconsider the trash dump. No longer a haphazard accumulation of filth, the waste transforms into consumable products on display. Of the same waste site in Cairo, he describes “l’abondance de la resource” available to the still living dogs occupying the dump, alongside “le peuple de cabane” who also finds resources there (78). The landfill for these populations is a resource site, a shopping mall of sorts in which a material’s status as waste or non-waste depends on how they perform it.

Indeed, reading this text, individuals who do not depend on waste sites may also find them remarkably beautiful. The narrator describes another author’s experience in landfills, noting the surprising attraction of such spaces.

Coppinger décrit la décharge de Tijuana telle qu’elle lui a apparue pour la première fois,

en sorte de Jérusalem Céleste, dans la lumière oblique du couchant, celle-ci réverbérée ou

diffractée par une myriade d’emballages métalliques, de sacs ou de bouteilles en

plastique, tandis que de cette montagne de déchets, percée de tuyaux pour l’évacuation

des gaz, émanait une puanteur évoquant le jour du Jugement, et que s’affairaient encore

sur ses pentes, séparément ou conjointement, des engins motorisés et des hommes à pied,

des milliers d’oiseaux et plusieurs centaines de chiens. 218

180 Attending to the author’s Biblical representation of the landfill inscribes the place in a well- known literary tradition that at once highlights its “heavenly” and “hellish” attributes. Varda’s

Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse recycles Van Der Weyden’s Le Dernier jugement in her exploration of modern-day gleaning practices in which human bodies resurrect from the earth while tortured sinners scramble to escape. This chaotic end-of-times imagery recurs in waste-site descriptions, but this landfill description includes a resurrectional, celestial beauty as well. The scene recalls

Edward Burtynsky’s photographs in the 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes by Jennifer

Baichwal that make beautiful the most insidious and lifeless extreme manmade environments.

Rolin’s image, as did Varda’s in gleaning’s context, equates material burial sites with body burial sites with their rituals of sorting, transportation via specific vehicles and containers, their burial underground, and hope for resurrection. In a sense, the material extensions of our selves receive the same treatment as our bodies in the end.

In contrast to focusing in on these glints of beauty in waste space, at one point the text sheds light on manufactured environments’ artifice. Rather than making all other space seem more ideal, as waste sites typically do, this artificial space makes all other spaces seem less utopic. After having described an idyllic scene of coconut trees against a dark blue sky lit by a beautiful moon and an iguana hiding under a bush, the narrator notes that simply opening up the scene produces a different impression of the area, not so very different from La Clôture.

Tout ce décor, idyllique, et assez conforme à l’idée que certains font de la nature, est un

pur artifice. Car si on élargit un peu le champ, on découvre sur la berge du lac une

autoroute, animée en ce début de soirée par une circulation dense produisant une rumeur

incessante, et au-delà, sous un dais de lumière orange, les pistes de l’aéroport de Miami,

d’où à chaque instant s’éloignent ou se rapprochent d’innombrables avions, leur fuselage

étincelant dans les dernières lueurs du couchant, avec un bruit fracassant dont il faut

reconnaitre qu’il est aussi particulièrement excitant. 158

181 Indeed, changing the focalization of the text shows how nature and luxury are as much of a performance as waste when it comes to space. While other travel authors might ignore the exterior scene and focus on the manufactured environment’s delights, Rolin points to the larger picture. Although he typically works in the opposite direction exposing the hiding places of all things non-utopic and demonstrating their juxtaposition to utopic environments, this section with which those who frequent hotels can identify demonstrates how easily the illusion of performance can dissipate. Manufactured environments’ unreality and very perfection put the visitor ill-at- ease. As behind them all are the spaces that hide the waste required to construct and maintain them.

Unlike his explorations of mock battlefields in Paris, Un Chien mort après lui documents sites of true destruction and waste, that accumulate incongruous materials in ways that erase cultural specificity. War itself both destroys existing waste spaces and creates haphazard new ones. As an activity planned for in the institution of most societies (plans for defending their resources and spaces), war is a specific temporal space with rituals of opening and closing in paper declarations and treaties that transform normal space into “other” space where deviant behavior becomes the norm. War is a collective activity, but a violent experience that feels uniquely personal and intimate to individuals. All cultures and peoples have had to rehabilitate and assimilate landscapes torn apart by war, familiar places rendered unfamiliar by violence.

Even after clean-up, the lasting traces of destruction and the loss of life remain and cast a long shadow over following generations. The past haunts war’s waste sites unable to catch up with the present, being a temporal space out of time. For example, the landscape of Northern France and

Belgium bears the remnants of both World Wars. Both identifiable and unidentifiable hunks of concrete and metal, as well as occasional human remains unearthed by farmers, hide under the landscape, unique physical reminders of an intangible, collective experience. When and where they unearth, they bring war time back into individual and collective feelings about this

182 unintended archive. Many of them move into display spaces, resurrected waste given new life in museums. Burial grounds, like landfills, represent the past as well as organized archives and are in fact possibly more durable.

As Un Chien mort après lui visits active war zones readers observe the role society plays in maintaining waste performances. This is nowhere more clear than when he describes the landscape as grey and the dust as rendering everything unidentifiable. In Lebanon, he writes

De là-haut, ce qu’on découvre évoque une reproduction en miniature du sabordage de la

flotte française à Toulon : les embarcations détruites ont pour certaines chaviré, pour

d’autres non ; les plus grandes n’ayant coulé qu’à demi, leur coque repose sur le fond

tandis que tout ou partie de leurs superstructures émerge de l’eau du bassin. L’ensemble

est uniformément recouvert de cette couche de matière pulvérulente et grise que l’on

observe sur tous les sites bombardés, effaçant les couleurs des objets, et estompant leur

contours, comme il arrive parfois dans les paysages de cauchemar ou de science-fiction.

99

Having studied the history of Toulon in Terminal Frigo this intertextual reference hooks the present image to a past one familiar to French readers. Erasing the territory’s color and individuality makes it universal, placeless, and borderless. The edges of areas normally maintained by society disappear. In addition, the text points to the ecological effects of this scale of waste production. “A en juger par l’étendue des destructions dans les quartiers sud de la ville, il se peut aussi qu’ils aient décidé de réduire en cendres non seulement tout le patrimoine immobilier du Hezbollah, mais également le biotope, ou la niche écologique de celui-ci” (98).

Space opens up in time of war, becomes blanketed one color, a single zone in which human waste systems are difficult to maintain. Waste boundaries become fluid reinforcing the idea that materials are not inherently waste, but are chosen to be waste or resource based on social context.

If only a space can ultimately designate waste (in the sense of déchets ultimes in French law),

183 then without society’s reinforcement of spatial separations, all performances become possible.

Without organization, spaces evolve and some may even disappear. Consider for example the recent destruction of Palmyra in Syria. This global heritage display space would have been sacred in ordinary cultural space, but in times of war it turns to waste in the fight for cultural territory.

Despite the dangers to human self-understanding that erasing waste space boundaries might have in war zones, life continues for populations habituated to war and living amid waste.

Children continue playing and commerce continues to thrive even in largely abandoned and destroyed zones. “On y voit déambuler, ou pêcher à la ligne, de paisibles vieillards, cependant que les ordures que plus personne ne collecte attirent des chats errants…et, en plus petit nombre, des chiens” (111). The landfill is not the only waste space with fluid borders.

Later in the text, a cemetery loses its function in wartime. “Entre deux champs de ruines, un cimetière s’étend de la chaussée presque jusqu’à la mer. En bordure du cimetière, un bâtiment sans étage abrite ce qui doit être une morgue, et devant celle-ci un cercueil vide et tout neuf, en bois clair, est abandonné sur le trottoir” (113). This cemetery, a normally hallowed ground with special rituals for entering and exiting and a specific task for rendering society more utopic (that being the disposal of our materiality after death), cannot perform its function during war when death stops being individual and creates haphazard burial zones in bomb craters and piles of rubble. The empty coffin, a material to disguise death, rests abandoned (wasted), an object ready to claim from the sidewalk, an object without a proprietor, an open invitation or foreboding void fillable by any number of candidates laid to waste by war, but just as properly a bed or storage box for weapons when waste site borders are no longer enforced. When such sites function, we can perform the human body as sacred and reserve it as separate from other bodies. This function has evolved over time as death itself has been individualized and human beings have been memorialized on an individual scale in cemeteries. Without such borders, we can question the categorization of our flesh: are we human? animal? vegetable (for Varda)? commodity (for

184 Ernaux)? Individuals living on spatial and temporal borders must pose these questions, as we shall see of Rolin’s characters.

Waste-Dependent Populations

In Rolin’s texts, “la rive permet moins d’affirmer une identité que d’interroger une altérité. D’où la nécessité de lier ensemble le thème de la rive et celui de la dérive” (Thibault 69). When Rolin’s narrators travel border spaces, they interrogate alternate subjectivities. In La Clôture the narrator documents alternative individual performances of waste in the French capital. The text

“declassifies” individuals of marginal groups and dissociates them from larger stereotypes about waste populations by presenting their individual circumstances. It also makes their behavior less deviant when presented in a display spaces.

Unsanctioned Dependence

One of the main characters of the boulevard comes from a community of homeless men living under the highway. When undertaking the project, Rolin explained in an interview that “Avant de travailler sur le boulevard, j’avais travaillé à la bibliothèque Thiers sur la vie de Ney. L’idée d’une adéquation possible de ce personnage avec les héros de la périphérique m’est apparue de plus en plus pertinente” (Gibourg 22). Rolin, as other authors in contemporary French literature would come to conclude (Ruffel), determined that cultural display spaces were not adequate to represent even an historical figure. Rather, he needed to exceed such spaces to create a full portrait by visiting a cultural waste space. Conventionally homeless, Gérard and his community illegally inhabit a public space and could be forced to leave it at any time, but like the gypsies in

Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse they have made a home society’s unusable waste space and

185 have a history and community that differs very little from legally established communities. The narrator introduces him in laudable terms, even heroically, without pity or repulsion as in common portrayals in popular culture.

S’il faut l’en croire, Gérard Cerbère serait né le 25 juillet 1945, deux mois et demi après

la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Cela ne fait pas de lui un personnage historique,

même si, envisagé sous un angle adéquat, il présente quelques traits légendaires. Quelque

chose de la figure mythologique dont il porte le nom, se tenant l’intérieure de son pilier

comme à la limite de deux mondes. Quelque chose aussi de Mao dans sa grotte de Yenan,

en moins grandiose, certes—on n’imagine pas André Malraux s’entretenir avec Gérard

Cerbère—, mais en plus rigolo. Invariablement assis, tel un bouddha dont le sanctuaire

serait ce pilier creux du périphérique, environné de la fumée de ses Gauloises comme de

vapeurs d’encens. 68-69

Making Gérard the rather humorous “hero” of this novel presents an alternative to squatter representations that use them as scenery or support. There is something heroic about living on the border between two worlds, on the fringes of Paris proper, between an acceptable lifestyle and one presumed to be dangerous. Holding himself up in this perceived transitional state cannot be easy, especially when his space could be repossessed at any time (he mentions the encroachment of prostitutes on his territory) and many people would treat him as suspicious given the amount of liminal material he amasses around him for re-use. These materials impact his social reality— while they are resources for him, others may perceive them as waste out of its recognizable space, a threat to systems of order.

Oher neighborhood dump sites become commerce zones for individuals willing to deal in other people’s trash, offering an opportunity to make an invisible living through deviant employment while at the same time performing a service to the neighborhood. As individuals unload their waste in unsanctioned waste space others come along to repair, reclaim, or resell it.

186 This creates a special niche for individuals without traditional employment and the resources to acquire new material goods. A second description of the area explains, “Des réfrigérateurs […], pêle-mêle avec d’autres épaves d’origine électrique et ménagère, sont entassés dans l’espace libre entre les deux piliers. On dirait le front d’un glacier, ou les restes d’un magasin Darty après le passage d’une avalanche” (91). Again, Rolin employs natural language to describe man-made goods. Large geological processes give a sense of our waste problem’s enormity and imply their intangible weight in carbon footprints. In addition, this natural phenomenon metaphor plays on the cold generated by refrigerators and elicits two important aspects of their environmental impact. The first is the ironic reality that creating and running these chilling machines contributes to warming greenhouse gases that cause real glaciers to melt and slowly disappear, threatening entire ecosystems that depend upon them. The second is the considerable danger and unpredictability that avalanches present; even with modern technology, they remain one of the most devastating and unpredictable environmental disasters. They depend on a critical mass and are stable until a tipping point. What is the collective tipping point for changing human attitudes toward waste production and disposal? Are these machines poised to suddenly roll over and destroy us? What can human populations do in the face of such enormous quantities of waste, both in terms of the carbon emissions they generate and their waste management? While little can be done to decrease the refrigerators’ carbon footprint while they are running, refurbishing used ones limits the carbon footprint of creating a new one to replace it. In this sense, the work that

Gérard and his friends do serves the larger local and global community, at once removing local pollution and global greenhouse gases. Rather than treating these objects as waste, they are employing them as resource, like to the snowmelt that runs from a glacier. In doing so, they preserve the raw materials that would go into creating new ones and prevent their disintegration in the ground from polluting local soils and watersheds (for example, refrigerant and heavy metals from these machines are harmful to human and animal populations). Certainly, for Gérard

187 the environment may not be his first concern, but as Rolin presents him in the text, Gérard has local and global potential that many could not imagine of a placeless person.

Nonetheless, Morrison argues that “certain classes of humans are seen as trash due to their status” (467). Their status includes not only cultural and literal capital, but also productive capacity. If an individual is not “producing” or “performing” a remunerable service, then they become waste. This leaves out unremunerated services, such as recycling wasted materials, or economically invisible illicit services, such as drug sales and sex work. Susan Signe Morrison explains that “Anyone who touches dirt or waste is contaminated socially as waste him or herself and becomes ‘thrown out’ socially, geographically, economically, and morally” (467). This works in both directions. For example, touching waste creates social outcasts, ragpickers, etc. who work outside the classic economy. At the same time, working outside the classic economy can make one associated with trash. This is the case for sex workers, drug dealers, and informal object recuperators. As mentioned above, these are the classes that inhabit this neighborhood and who deviate either by having no place to live or no place in the measurable economy.

Interestingly, as outsiders to society, in Rolin’s text, they do not seem to carry the same negative self-perceptions that individuals on the inside have. Official waste workers in La Clôture also recycle waste in the material world, but, as members of mainstream society, carry negative views about their work.

Official Dependence

As opposed to the squatters collecting abandoned objects and working unofficially for the city, these workers have a sanctioned and paid relationship with waste. They have an economic and physical place in society and physical barriers between themselves and waste materials (gloves, suits, and tools). These barriers should make their affiliation with waste “safe.” Nonetheless,

188 talking to these municipal workers the narrator learns that their work is very demoralizing, despite its importance to the city’s functioning. They lament how their culture undervalues their work. If they were to leave waste in public spaces, the general population would be horrified, but because their work is low-skill and only visible when it goes undone, their value is difficult to measure. The narrator says that “un peu théâtralement, on pourrait envisager leur discours comme une prosopopée de la « classe ouvrière », ou plutôt de ce qu’il en reste” (144). After one worker refuses a drink because he is taking anti-depressants, the other,

le plombier, semble trouver cela tout naturel : il souligne que la proportion d’employés de

la ville atteints de désordres psychiques est très élevée, d’après lui, dans la dévalorisation

de leurs métiers, et aussi, convient-il, dans leur oisiveté croissante, telle que beaucoup

d’entre eux disposent désormais de « trop de temps pour ruminer ».” 144

Rather than attributing their psychological sufferings to their work’s nature, he attributes it to its devaluing. When individuals interact with waste objects, those items’ typically negative associations taint those who work with them. For an example taken from caste societies, certain groups of people whose low caste status confines them to work with waste, such as cleaning latrines. While less formally established, a similar confinement takes place for the French waste- dependent populations in this text. The waste can cause the low social status and the low social status can determine a lifetime of interaction with waste, or dependence on waste spaces.

Interspecies Dependence

As in his domestic works, Rolin’s international “travel literature” focuses as much if not more on what cultures have in common than on what separates them, specifically waste spaces and populations. Inspired by the image of a dog eating the body of a young woman, Un chien mort après lui travels the globe documenting the origin and behavior of various dog populations and

189 human systems of canine management. The narrator introduces his project: “J’envisage…d’écrire une histoire au sujet des chiens féraux” (23). Rolin relies on distinctions between domesticated

(placed) dogs and errant (placeless) dogs. In many countries governments have policies addressing what they see as the problem of errant dogs. These range from euthanasia to hormonal therapy to no policy whatsoever. In several places the difficulty appears to arise when determining an animal’s ownership in the sense that there is no physical marker for errant dogs.

Indeed, their only problem appears to be their very lack of place. This alone sets them apart and makes them dangerous as compared to placed dogs whose owners let them loose during the day.

The dogs like waste make those who encounter them uncomfortable because without a place in a human home, they are open to interpretation. If they make an error, there is no one to be responsible for them.

Rolin’s work also engenders a complex conversation regarding the meaning of possessed versus wild life forms. Why do only owned dogs have value in so many cultures? How do unowned animals end up in animal landfills or euthanized? Why does possession by a human increase a lifeform’s value? Should not all life forms have some dignity or protection under the law? The feral dog presents a challenging addition to our consideration of material ownership.

After all, as concerns any life form, from an animal to in some cultures a woman or a child, do not their “owners” only have legal possession of their bodies and minds? As all living beings belong in collective and collaborative circles (as described in the Introduction), how can a linear ownership relationship be established? These are the complex questions authors raise when they divert materials from the linear cradle to grave routes industrial economies designed to reposition them in cyclical social and material exchanges in literature.

While the work purports to be about dogs it attends equally to their dwellings and cohabitants, as well as international waste management practices, because where there are dogs, there is waste. This is not surprising considering that dogs evolved to thrive on human waste over

190 millennia and still depend on it today. Dogs, of course, are commonly represented in archived materials as anthropomorphized human companions. Rolin, rather, works on the placeless dog, the errant dog. Taken with his other work on placeless people, his texts examine “deviants” that rely on waste to survive—unplaced materials and border spaces where deviants are hidden/hide.

When production activity leaves an area, it slowly turns to waste space for non- contributory members of society. The text reinforces the idea that inactivity leads to a decrease in value and power.

L’effondrement de l’activité industrielle, dans laquelle les hommes tenaient le haut du

pavé, et son remplacement progressif par une économie de troc ou de bricolage, où

c’étaient les femmes qui se débrouillaient le mieux…les hommes, privés de travail

salarié, étaient en train de perdre le pouvoir, et les femmes de s’en emparer. 19

In Turkmenistan, idle men, waste, and dogs are on the same footing. Those whose behavior deviates from the norm are left outside at night “parmi les ordures et les chiens” (19). They are excluded from society like the objects and animals that surround them, non-contributory members of society who pass their days in waste spaces become waste themselves. Economic productivity and power are linked nearly universally just as unmeasurable contributions and weakness are.

Individuals (often including the homeless, children, elderly, and women) are considered

“wasteful” and associated with societal garbage. In the case of the men in Turkmenistan, spending time in abandoned waste sites among the remnants of war, decaying symbols of their previous power, decreases their value.

Throughout this text, the narrator relies on Coppinger’s dog research for background.

When describing a dump in Tijuana where many dogs feed themselves, Coppinger offers a bit of canine and human sociology as he notes their interactions with waste dumps.

Dans le cours de sa description, Coppinger répertorie les différents groupes humains, et

les différentes sortes de chiens, qui se rencontrent sur la décharge, et analyse les relations

191 qu’ils entretiennent. Outre des travailleurs rétribués…la décharge accueille un certain

nombre de squatters, qui en ont fait leur résidence permanente, et d’autres collecteurs de

rebuts, venant chaque jour de l’extérieur, dont les activités peuvent entrer en concurrence

avec celles des précédents. 219

These spaces allow alternative living for “deviants.” Individuals who live in waste space do not see them as other, but rather as a place or home. In Coppinger’s classification he sets aside those who work in the space legitimately, as though they are outside classification given their professional status that grants them a certain metaphorical distance from those who live there.

At one point the narrator refers to the negative impact studying dogs had on Coppinger’s self-perception. Coppinger visited many landfills and, in his words, “a payé de sa personne” (218) for having become a specialist in waste spaces during his research and recognized that his proximity to waste cultures transferred to his reputation to a certain extent. The text quotes

Coppinger as writing, “« Ce n’est probablement pas bon pour mon image, écrit-il dans la conclusion de son ouvrage, mais je dois reconnaitre que la décharge de Tijuana est un des lieux les plus fascinants où j’aie observé des chiens »” (218). Not unlike Rolin, this Anglophone author found waste sites, objects, and populations inspiring and fertile grounds for creativity. Rolin, however, seems to have not been tainted by his affiliation with studying such subjects given his awards and cultural recognition.

Self-Reflection in Waste

As Varda did in her films, Jean Rolin’s narrators serve as the point of transfer between the materials and individuals from waste spaces into the book’s memorial display space. As their observations pass through his perspective into his language, like a filter, the traces of materials he transfers remain on his self-understanding. Throughout his texts, the reader can observe how

192 those remnants create commonality between the narrator and the voices he collects across space and time. Through constant comparison between himself and his characters, Rolin’s narrators can clearly see reflections of themselves in those they encounter. These individuals’ willingness to engage with these objects creates a certain taboo around them, a taboo that paradoxically does not exist around Rolin himself who frequents these same waste locations and populations. This, arguably, is because Rolin has the cultural capital to avoid direct affiliation with the objects that he studies, and he does so by choice rather than by need. Rolin’s work equalizes rather than demoralizes. His work does not appear to use waste to represent an inward emptiness or lack of value. In some cases, waste objects make these populations relatable by joining their needs to the general population’s. For example, amid a pile of waste, “parmi les habituels vestiges de bacchanales nocturnes, dont seule la quantité aujourd’hui sort d’ordinaire, se remarque un semis d’objets plus délicats, étrangers au génie du lieu : pots et tubes de crèmes, élastique serre- cheveux, flacons de parfums, dont un, décapité, de Shalimar” (190). These self-care materials common to all people join the needs of whoever lost them to readers. As he looks deeply into the characters he studies, the narrator sees commonalities between himself and those he meets. In the following section I will discuss comparisons the narrators make between themselves and

Maréchal Ney and Gérard in La Clôture and the errant dogs in Un Chien mort après lui.

La Clôture’s self-declared objective is “le projet assez vaste et confus d’écrire sur le maréchal Ney du point de vue du boulevard qui porte son nom…ou d’écrire sur le boulevard… mais du point de vue présumé du maréchal Ney” (19). Rather than a composed, single-focus narrative, Rolin departs on a similar journey of portraiture. While Varda drew her own portrait through the portraits of others participating in a similar activity, Rolin portrays himself and an historical figure through a place and its inhabitants. The work shows no categorical bias, frequenting human as well as animal and vegetal neighborhood inhabitants. The book is divided into two parts, with the first being in and around Rue de la Clôture and the other being in

193 Sheffield, England to view a painting of Ney’s death. This second part, however, contains a sort of epilogue describing what happened to certain characters in the book after the narrator’s stay and providing still more fragments of the broken up life stories. The narrator himself has two portraits in the book. Each of the two sections begins with a two-page introduction in italics with an omniscient narrator writing in the third person. Each describes the narrator in a hotel room looking out at the scenery. The text that follow the italics then continue in the first person until the beginning of the next section. The first section begins as follows: “Quelques heures avant la fin du XXe siècle, l’homme se tient debout, un peu en retrait, une cigarette calée entre deux doigts de la main gauche, devant la fenêtre ouverte de la chambre 611” (Rolin 13). Toward the end of the section, the man in italics comes together with the first-person voice of the rest of the text: “je me suis installé dans la chambre 611 de l’hôtel Villages, dont la fenêtre donne sur le périphérique” (217). Rolin thus fragments the narrative voice and obviates the subjectivity of the

“je” narrator by juxtaposing it with what is often considered a more reliable third-person and objective narrative voice in italics. The “je” narrator does not attempt omniscience and recognizes in several contexts the limits of his knowledge and his ability to manipulate his observations. He writes, “de mon côté, j’ai pu les [the stories told by the squatters he meets] infléchir ou les déformer, de bonne ou de mauvaise foi, en les reproduisant” (70). The first-person narrator displaces his subjectivity on to characters both current and historical, human and not. Always at a distance from his subjects, the novel appears to be an unsuccessful attempt at an intimate connection that rests on the very impenetrability of others’ subjectivity. The experimentation with voice in a text that is self-descriptive, more on a national scale as a member of the French population than a personal scale, parallels the question of voice in Ernaux and Varda who also probe the possibility of self-awareness in autobiography given the post-structural impossibility of truth in representation or indeed of self at all.

194 The filtered information the reader gleans through portraits of other characters and places gives weight to the environment in drawing the the book’s main character’s portrait. For example, we learn about him when having seen two plaques that “commémorent l’exécution par les

Allemands de Codde Paul, âgé de cinquante et un ans, le 21 août 1944, et de Garnieri Edilio, agé de dix-sept ans, le lendemain,” he writes “le 17 juin 2000, alors que je venais d’atteindre, quant à moi, l’âge de Codde Paul” (75). The narrator also makes some ironic comparisons between himself and Maréchal Ney as Ney’s persona intersects with and parallel’s the narrator’s. Like a palimpsest the two characters are built on top of each other and next to one another despite decades of temporal distance. As Rolin juxtaposes history and the present in Paris, he creates a narrative palimpsest to accompany the cityscape. Olivier Mongin writes that the city is a palimpsest, “un objet qui se construit par destruction et reconstruction successive, tout en gardant l'historique des traces anciennes” (50). The term is taken from geology where it means that the different landforms that make up a landscape are not of the same age, but are rather parallel, juxtaposed, or mixed. That is, the landscape is not a uniform area, but a fragmented one that can be broken down into historically unrelated parts. The narrator describes the physical traces of past architecture mixed with present building as he painstakingly reconstructs Boulevard Ney. The city takes on temporal depth with this multi-aged architecture and historical locations, such as markers in the place where Mesrine was gunned down or World War II bombing resulted in casualties. The narrator also displaces other geographical forms onto the city as when he searches for a “battlefield” to reenact Waterloo (114). This is a way to bring in other voices from other times, but also give depth to his narrator in the comparisons he makes between himself and current and former boulevard inhabitants.

At certain points the chapters alternate between the two but often the narrator is compared or contrasted with Ney within chapters. Of his first encounter with Ney, albeit in the form of a statue, the narrator writes, “je l’ai côtoyée si souvent, dans les années soixante-dix et

195 quatre-vingt, et dans des états de conscience parfois si altérés, qu’il faut peut-être chercher aussi de ce côté l’une des sources de ma prédilection pour le joueur de flute [Ney]” (22). A narrator who believed in a coherent self may offer more information about himself at the beginning to lend reliability to his voice. Instead, these rather disjointed descriptions and bizarre comparisons sketch an unclear, fragmented, and occasionally ironic picture of the novel’s main voice. For example, his physical description comes up in relation to that of his friend making rounds in the neighborhood with him in a 405 blanche.

Lancien est d’assez petite taille, moustachu, il porte ce soir-là un blouson de cuir, je suis

quant à moi d’assez grande taille, le front largement dégarni, mal rasé et vêtu d’un

imperméable sombre. Je ne donne ces détails vestimentaires qu’afin de faire ressortir la

ressemblance, fortuite mais évidente, que nous présentons avec un couple de vieux flics

patrouillant à bord d’une voiture banalisée. (47)

This unwilling self-portrait, apparently given only in an effort to make the upcoming encounter with sex workers on the boulevard more amusing, his self-portrait comes out in reluctant comments tied to the materials and individuals he studies, external supplements to his textual being. This returns again to what Varda’s Laplanche theorized regarding the anti-philosophie du sujet, or the idea that the self is found in others or in commodities in elle’s case in Les Années.

For the narrator, his self-understanding cannot be entirely linked to the body in which he resides but may be spread out among the people and places that surround him.

In Un Chien mort après lui, the narrator frequently compares himself to his object of study, the errant dog. Indeed, with his constant travels and finding literary resources in societal waste, they share foundational characteristics. Nonetheless, the errant dog begins the text threatening his life in a scene Bergé describes it as an “Autoportrait ironique dont Jean Rolin est coutumier : au-delà du frisson inaugural que suscite ce gros plan de film d'épouvanté, le « film » du récit se poursuit dans les chapitres suivants, où la question de la survie est reposée en de

196 nouvelles circonstances” (640). Later on, however, the narrator identifies with and creates a parallel between himself and the dogs finding resources in waste when he notes that both he and the dogs need only fear the dump guards controlling who goes in and out of the waste space (78).

Later in Haiti, however, local culture includes tales of errant dogs feasting on human flesh. When afraid for his life during a rain storm in which his car was stuck on a dangerous road, he noticed a dead dog and thought if he were attacked or drowned, someone might say

“somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”81 This is the last line in Malcolm

Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a cult work in the semi-autobiographical genre.82 The line that becomes Rolin’s title references the main character’s body’s disposal in a ravine with that of a dead dog. This quote describes a rather typical unsanctioned waste site, a ravine, a geographical feature often used as a make-shift dumping site, a natural opening in the earth inviting to be filled.83 In this case, animal and human bodies are discarded in the same fashion without the rituals associated with human death. Lowry uses the site to create a sinister, if not cynical, end for his semi-autobiographical alcoholic character in which his body is nothing more than a dog’s with no self-preserving ritual—a material like any other. If Rolin’s narrator will end in a ravine with a dead dog thrown after him, is he then his equal, a scavenger feeding on societal remnants?

81 Oddly enough, he described the discarded body of another dead dog in La Clôture. 82 The work also happens to be one of Michel Foucault’s favorite works, as he stated in an interview with R. Martin at the University of Vermont in 1982 (Foucault, Dits et Écrits : 1954-1988 780). 83 Considering Torlasco’s arguments in Chapter Two regarding the masculine seming act of writing as compared to the feminine gathering act, this natural tendancy for depressions in the earth to become waste dumps opens itself to all manner of analysis, perhaps including a comparison with women’s bodies as cultural waste dumps that may foster their interest in waste materials, and the blossoming of interest in waste as more women enter the forefront of literature and scientific research.

197 Conclusions

Paralleling waste and waste-dependent populations with the author challenges classically negative associations with waste. While Rolin focuses much of his work on the social and ecological aspects of modern life in a somewhat decomposed and fragmented structure, he also slowly builds a collective self-portrait of his culture’s relationships to waste. Intertwining well-known arts and narratives of self-discovery with refuse elevates waste to a higher level of interest for the reader. As waste becomes a part of how the author expresses himself and sets up relationships among himself and the people he meets, its important role in how French society and individuals define themselves becomes clearer. I have shown with close and careful waste studies how including both the positive and the negative aspects of this universal human byproduct, his oeuvre establishes commonalities between cultures, populations, and classes, all linked in their creation of and dependence upon waste. This is important because such work encourages a change in attitudes as waste may no longer be perceived as a foreign or finite end-product, but an infinite resource for ourselves and for othered populations who become more relatable. Not just waste space but waste itself is a border material in which commonalities are established through universal material necessities. “Waste allows us to see the fundamental similarity among us all, just as metaphor or simile allows us to see the affinity between two things or states of being not previously perceived” (Morrison 471). These are the shared necessities of material existence that connect us via networks of production and consumption to a variety of individuals whose lives and values may differ significantly but who may depend upon one another in an uncertain ecological future.

198 Conclusions

Veni et vide.

- Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

Throughout this dissertation I have argued that 21st-century French self-writing has problematized and expanded waste’s traditional metaphorical role. Annie Ernaux, Agnès Varda, and Jean Rolin incorporate waste in resourceful ways into their self-writing, illuminating its evolving social status, self-representational potential, and impacts their social realities. I examined, for example, how Annie Ernaux explores the paradoxical transcience of written memory by linking it to waste, how Agnès Varda contemplates human aging through bodies of discarded vegetables and furniture, and how Jean Rolin challenges litter as useless and socially dangerous. These complicated alternative perspectives arise at a critical juncture in waste history in France and around the world. Over the course of the 20th century various sciences confirmed the dangers of consumer, manufacturing, and toxic wastes (toxic waste spills, climate change, overflowing landfills, etc.), but at the same time increasingly turned to waste to replace primary resources.

This mentality shift introduces challenging complexities into authors’ thematic and metaphoric selections for self-representation, as is brought out in these authors’ experiments with waste’s conventional and nonconventional roles that at once reflect and influence the bimodal mentalities and practices of waste.

The analysis has been complicated because waste touches so many spheres of individual and collective life from personal waste-management practices to government waste regulations to linguistic expression and social behavior. Rather than turning away from these complexities, I embraced the texts’ at times contradictory waste themes and metaphors. The texts primarily employed everyday bodily and household wastes in a way that steered my focus away from larger

199 questions of industrial waste and climate change. This human-scale waste perspective complements texts addressing global-scale waste-related crises such as climate change, species extinction, and natural disaster. That broader point of view, while valuable, puts a distance between waste and the individuals who produce and rely on it. By contrast, the French authors in this dissertation bring forth the private relationships humans have with wastes in ways that readers and viewers can feel viscerally in their personal behaviors and interactions with others.

This human scale is the only one on which individuals may impact waste’s meaning, whether through changes in their speech, management of, or assumptions about those related to waste.

This study’s significance arises from this very focus on the individual scale of waste, because while decisions about waste management at a collective scale impact personal lives and daily practices on smaller scales, it is on the individual scale that change is enacted. I chose to approach the problem of waste’s changing metaphorical role from this personal perspective specifically for this reason, which is why I sought data in self-writing, one of the most individually focused writing genres that also engages with collective mentalities by pairing cultural materials with self-reflection. Thus, while larger issues affecting environmental challenges are not directly addressed here, the way authors treat waste metaphorically and how their perspective may be taken up and shared by readers and viewers profoundly impacts those larger conversations. As stated above, waste moves through societies in such complex ways that this entanglement is inevitable.

So, what have we learned through this study of 21st-century French self-writing? In these texts, literature and cinécriture decrease the distance between society and its waste and offer an opportunity to revisit collective human choices about what should be discarded and disguised.

Throughout the texts, the narrators compare themselves to waste-dependent populations in the age-old image of the ragpicker, the collage maker, the collector, the gleaner, the gatherer, the poet. In “Le Chiffonnier,” Baudelaire indicates that the poet has an ethical obligation to recognize

200 and record humanity in all its forms. The authors in this dissertation relate personally to those marginalized and paradoxically sustained by this ubiquitous yet hidden facet of human materiality—waste production and management. In Ernaux’s work, her narrator and other women lead materially separate lives as a result of their association with bodily waste. In Varda’s work, the narrator identifies with the poor and unconventional personalities who find resources in waste as she reflects on her ageing body and mind as a kind of social waste. In both their work explores the gradual marginalization of ageing women who having been formerly displayed social commodities are hidden when their bodies and minds perform differently than before. Rolin’s narrator relates personally to the discarded and placeless people and animals who thrive on societies’ wastes as he finds literary inspiration in them.

The texts also question how society defines waste when they show how the discarded challenges borders and forces those who encounter it to make value judgments without the cultural apparatus of clearly-defined spaces. In Les années, anticipating her memory’s wasting in dementia or death, Ernaux’s narrator dumps her memories of everything from cultural products and history to bodily waste and family rituals into a lieu de mémoire whose eventual degradation she anxiously writes against. What may appear to be a wasting or wasted accumulation of knowledge and memory in an ageing woman’s head becomes a literary inspiration. Is her memory waste to be lost in history or a product to be collected and displayed? Varda’s interviews accompanied by images of abandoned food and household goods demonstrate the subjectivity involved in classifying such materials as goods or wastes. What appears valueless has value for someone. Varda and Rolin’s works highlight the productive capacity of individuals who glean discarded materials. In Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, the gleaners see possibility in waste as Varda sees possibility in age. In Rolin’s works, liminal characters turn disguise spaces into display spaces in which waste is not just a possibility but a sustainable resource for survival.

201 While the cultural capital afforded these poet-gleaner-ethnologists creates some distance between them and the waste being studied, it is not without difficulty that they interpret waste onto the page or the screen. Even if the materiality of the waste is lost in this gesture as it becomes marks on paper or pixelated pulses of energy on a screen, the association with waste materials risks tainting the author’s career. Waste and filth’s links to the earth and to the non- human recalls the hierarchical taxonomies of organisms that place every living creature based on its distance from the male human as the standard measure. These authors bring readers and viewers artificially close to individuals they would otherwise fear in part due to their association with liminal materials. Certainly, if the text manages to bring waste into mainstream discourse, it helps that, as Barthes notes, “écrite, la merde ne sent pas.” Nonetheless, even with the hygienic distance permitted by the transfer of material waste from the street to the immaterial waste on the page, works that highlight alternate waste performance still push waste in the faces of readers and force them to view it up close. As all these authors demonstrate, there is more to Barthes’ astute observation than meets the eye, because when written, as in storied, waste’s social plurality becomes clear and palatable.

Telling the stories of waste and waste-dependent people opens the door to inclusion in

France’s lieux de mémoire. No matter what material a society calls waste at any particular moment that waste is typically excluded in disguise spaces sought out by the vulnerable who cannot access display space. In Histoires des hommes et de leurs ordures du moyen âge à nos jours, Catherine de Silguy explains that “Depuis la nuit des temps, les déshérités glanent dans les déchets des plus nantis tout ce qui peut les aider à survivre” (61). “Disinherited” from society and primary resources, they seek out secondary resources, which can make them second-class citizens. The word “déshérité(e)” means “une personne qui a été privée de sa part d'héritage” according to Larousse. This refers not only to the monetary or material heritage that they cannot access but also a place in the national cultural heritage that largely excludes them from display

202 spaces. Their reliance on this resource paradoxically further marginalizes them, just one of waste’s growing complexities in changing societies. Appearing with their stories in these texts by renowned authors and among lists of celebrated cultural materials, these individuals slip into

France’s cultural memory.

Nations beyond France are repositioning waste in their cultural memories and productions. Patricia Yaeger’s theorization of Rubbish Ecology describes the 21st-century propensity for all arts to embrace and re- rather than de-value trash. The aestheticization of trash, she argues is taking place for four reasons: trash objects are individuated in opposition of the uniformly-produced and -available commodity, trash refuses Enlightenment dialectics of the similar, trash has moved in and out of the cycle of exchange, and trash’s epistemology is shifting toward an embrace of the toxic (335-8). In the 21st century, humans now have more to fear from themselves and their terrifying capacity to alter the planetary cycles they rely on than they do from the Nature they feared in the past. Artists may now be less likely to turn to a mythological

Nature to portray an end, as one did in les natures mortes, than to convey origins (Nature as a quaint and innocent life-giving garden rather than a life-taking adversary).84 In this sense, enormous quantities of waste (toxic and otherwise) grant greater access to the highest heights of human creative capacities and the darkest depths of the human soul as our collective wasted creations may come together to snuff us out. As temporary avatars of our existence, watching them amass and decay in arts gives us advanced access to our own material decomposition.

In addition, I would argue that where Nature was once an other space that contained excluded non-humans as Others, granted the human privileged existence, and in which humans could ponder their own mortality and decay in Other beings, waste spaces have now taken on that role. Nature itself has become a commodified product available for consumption by tourists and

84 Carolyn Merchant’s chapter, “Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative,” offers an historical perspective on efforts to “reconnect” humans to an origin in the natural world.

203 enthusiasts who perceive it as a utopic space that presents little danger. Additionally, ecoporn has contributed to an infantilization/objectification of Nature as requiring protection and saving by the human (Welling 58).85 As an innocent, idealized concept, Nature straddles to a lesser extent than previously the razor’s edge between beauty and terror that early centuries encountered.86

Nature has been found not only to no longer exist separate from humans but it also has a reduced capacity to snuff out humanity. This is why, as Bruno Latour has argues, we must recognize that there are multiple natures rather than a singular Nature.

As we observed in the Introduction, waste resists objective definition as it changes constantly in response to cultural, scientific, and environmental contexts. Individuals must make personal choices with the guidance of culture, science, and technology. Each culture constructs its own frameworks for dealing with waste and its break-down, or decomposition, and artists and scientists contribute both to maintaining and to interrogating these frameworks. In her book about changes in human subjectivity as a result of modern biotechnology Liminal Lives, Susan Merrill

Squier writes that “science functions as the site of the construction of the objectively known other, while literature is the site of the construction of the subjectively known self” (29). The two, however, are not unrelated, because if sciences inform the way we conceive of materials, such as what is waste or resource, healthy or dangerous, etc., that we use to represent ourselves, then changes in sciences will certainly cause changes in self-reflexive arts. Societies often turn to the

85 While the argumentation does not do enough to combat an assumed male/subject and female/object heteronormative dichotomy in pornographic arts, Welling’s underlying premise about creating a visually consumable product from Nature has merit. He argues that Nature represented in visual arts (and one could argue literary arts by extension) shares many characteristics with pornography, and that even though Ecoporn’s creators and vendors may be trying to promote the cause of Nature, these arts may indeed be detrimental. His two most convincing arguments are that “ecoporn perpetuates ways of seeing feminized” lands and indigenous populations, for example, as “untouched” (58) (given more time it would be interesting to elaborate on the clean/dirty sexual implications here) and that “ecoporn places the viewer in the role of the male surveyor… to Nature’s aestheticized female object” (58) (given more time it would be also be useful to elaborate on the assumed male gaze as consumer of pornography and opposite-gendered aestheticized object). 86 Singular “Nature” itself is a concept with a long, difficult history. Please see Kate Soper’s “What is Nature?” for a thorough description of the various concepts of “Nature” in Western cultures.

204 sciences to treat their waste, many placing their faith in science to solve our ecological problems.

For example, Dietmann argues that “il ne fait aucun doute que les ressources cognitives de la science permettent la prise en charge de tous les autres produits résiduels de l’activité humaine pour les inscrire dans un nouveau cycle” (14). Given how we have observed the fluidity and subjectivity of the concept of waste, however, it is difficult to conceive of the sciences taking on this task without the imaginative and discourse-forming arts. When considering the authoritative role the sciences often play in environmental policies, in Politiques de la nature: comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie, Bruno Latour argues that neither the sciences nor politics alone can affect environmental challenges. Given the long-held opposition between authority (sciences) and speech (politics), Latour argues for a larger collective of actants that includes more than human voices. His new approach conceives of “natures” (rather than “la nature”) to which humans relate through attachments to human and non-human others. While Latour sets up various groups to take part in a new collective, the authors discussed in this dissertation would be his

“moralists” whose work encourages society to recognize the value of various others, both animate and inanimate, in our natures.

Waste, as we have observed, has a complex relationship with Nature or natures. At times, people consider waste to be anathema to Nature. For example, when waste is out of place, people use language that equates waste with dirt and impurity and call it pollution. In addition, these materials appear dangerous and this danger taints individuals who interact with it. Waste as it degrades, however, becomes integrated into Nature. For example, microbes decompose waste into useful compounds on forest floors or in landfills. Certain kinds of waste, such as bodily waste, link people to Nature in a way that permits society to treat them differently due to this affiliation, as we saw, for example, with women in Ernaux’s work. As such, given this evidence from throughout the dissertation, we can refer to a plurality of wastes in constant evolution.

205 Taking a cue from Latour, Timothy Morton similarly proposed an alternative to the traditional dualistic approach to viewing nature. In his guest column for PMLA, “Queer Ecology,” he writes that “ecology itself… demands intimacies with other beings that queer theory also demands” (Morton "Queer Ecology" 273). He argues that the boundaries set up in the former dualistic approaches to nature (nature/culture, inside/outside, human/non-human, etc.) defy reality because all life forms and abiotic elements of the environment ignore boundaries. Morton points out the inherent violence in previous ways of defining nature, many built on oppositions or categorizations. He argues for a need to transgress boundaries, to recognize that “beings exist precisely because they are nothing but relationality, deep down—for the love of matter” (Morton

"Queer Ecology" 277). Our shared DNA, he argues, calls for all life forms to participate in a collective, not a community, which is naturally exclusionary (277). The environment must therefore, he argues, become “intimate.” In the study of biogeochemical cycles barriers do break down as elements cycle through animate and inanimate bodies. In biological systems, however, borders must exist to protect life in the form for example of integuments, cell walls, and other containers that protect their contents. Nonetheless, they must also be permeable allowing for exchange whether of materials, information, emotion, or language. How do we maintain the individual integrity of borders while seeking the intimacy, fragmentariness, weakness, and multiplied differences Morton desires?

One way to do this is by writing and reading down barriers, building exchanges between wastes and the arts and opening the self as in Varda or Ernaux or society as in Rolin to what we disguise. The method throughout the works studied here has been to transgress boundaries between display and disguise spaces to explore wastes multiple meanings in society. As a material common to all cultural and biological spaces, waste is the passport that each author uses to explore a border in some way, whether a transition in age, in space, or in society. Waste can be the common link between multiple populations, spaces, natures, and scales of life.

206 On a large scale, a crucial role for the nation-state is to protect citizens from their own waste, specifically with environmental regulations of toxic and nuclear wastes and setting air and water quality standards. Before garbage collection many people disposed of their garbage in bodies of water and ravines and other natural pits, burned it, or collected it for tanning, fertilizer, or other local chemical applications. Most societies now participate in waste management on the collective scale. Pits in the earth became natural hiding spaces and the Earth itself became a waste collector, gathering and recreating new forms from it. Some imagined communities may recognize their belonging less based on territory, language, faith, or politics than on waste practices. That is, for example with the COP21, national governments represented their communities’ needs in relation to carbon dioxide waste, including indigenous global populations who have little in common except the threats to their traditional ways of life from climate change.

The same goes for the global community that may not see itself as related except in its vulnerability to (or culpability in) climate change. Corvellac and Hultman argue that waste management does not simply benefit society in a hygienic and aesthetic sense or help businesses create products; it is also necessary to support economies based on goods consumption by making

“possible a functional urban life in materialist and pro-growth economies” (140).87 That is, society must hide its waste or it would stop consuming. No longer a matter of physical health, waste management is a matter of economic health. The nation has an interest in a healthy population guaranteed by waste practices that limit the spread of disease and resource overuse.

Large waste spaces now serve as resource collection sites from methane harvesting in landfills to

87 The authors go on to describe how “Waste management companies shape the sociomateriality of waste through their communicative and managerial practice. Their logistic choices determine the minutes, rhythms and paths of waste mobilities. They form a critical infrastructure that offers a service that not only brings a practical solution to the problems experienced by waste producers who wish to get rid of their waste, but waste management companies also connect the commodity and post-commodity phases of products, and bridge design, production, distribution and consumption stages to the reuse, recycling or landfill stages of materials” (140).

207 metal scrap recycling in junkyards. As societies recognize shrinking primary resources, the landfill has evolved into a new resource-recovery site. No longer an “empty” space with no utility, the landfill now provides energy and materials to many communities and decreases reliance on primary resources from conflict zones around the globe.

By contrast, cultural resources for self-representation and long-term memory preservation via material accumulation happens in libraries, museums, and archives. Within these institutions that I call display spaces, there may be arts and other materials that represent individual and national self-understanding (for example, a self-portrait or national history book) and stand in for the variety of individuals that have contributed to that society over the course of its history, as on the individual scale the self-writing book can stand in for the writer. Their purpose is not only to preserve these materials for national consumption but to represent the nation to the international community (even in their architecture), and they are often tourist destinations that influence international perceptions of that society. Depending on their contents, the performance of these cultural institutions may compensate for a variety of shortcomings on national and international scales, including human rights violations, perceived lack of government transparency, poor economic productivity, international aggression, domestic repression, a loss of international power, etc. These institutions also play a role in the nation’s “devoir de mémoire” in which remembrance of past trauma takes place on a personal level as a duty of citizenship for the sake of the collective.88 In short, as with self-writing, these institutions seek to represent their nations to others and to themselves with specific goals in mind. The duty of remembering presents loss, prevents actions from falling out of history.

88 Micheline Labelle, Rachad Antonius et Georges Leroux (éds), Le Devoir de mémoire et les politiques du pardon, Québec, Presses de l’Université de Québec, 2005; Olivier Lalieu, "L’invention du ‘devoir de mémoire’", Vingtième siècle 69 (1), 2001, p. 83-94; Paul Ricoeur, La Mémoire, l’Histoire, l’oubli, rééd., Paris, Seuil, coll. « Points-essais », 2003; Emmanuel Kattan, Penser le devoir de mémoire, Paris, PUF, 2002.

208 The texts in this dissertation add to the nation’s lieux de mémoire as they accumulate materials from waste and display space in a single memorial space that will preserve and distribute human experiences of various natures: feminine, working class, marginalized, etc. In other words, the landfills, waste sites, and waste materials they include in their work also include national memory. Thus, aside from physical and economic health, landfills may also promote a cultural longevity as alternate lieux de mémoire. Memory on any scale is selective and incomplete. Waste remembers what society may wish to forget, the foil of display texts and institutions. Because one constructs an identity by deciding both what to include and what to exclude, those excluded materials contain equal but opposite information about individuals and collectives. The authors in this dissertation use these materials to self-represent in novel ways. While literature can be accused of remembering only the uncommon, these authors bring this back in a new realist mode that writes about daily rituals in ways that remember waste.

France’s conventional memory collections are abundant, as evidenced by Pierre Nora’s

Lieux de mémoire project and other national projects designed to preserve France's “héritage collectif.”89 Nora argues that the purpose of remembering these times and places of national significance is to reveal through contrast with what the nation once was what the nation is now, allowing “le déchiffrement de ce que nous sommes à la lumière de ce que nous ne sommes plus”

(xxxiii). Indeed, these display spaces such as archives, museums, and libraries help the nation search for its “introuvable identité” (Nora xxxiii). The sense of loss instigating these national display spaces for containing memory may be an unfindable single French identity that was a false goal from the beginning. Rather, French waste in self-reflexive texts reveals a nation with multiple identities—feminine, masculine, hungry, alcoholic, migrant, homeless, rural, urban, poor, and rich in literary and artistic innovation. Nonetheless, conventional lieux de mémoire

89 David Bell argues that this term proposed by Gallimard could also be translated as “inherited collections” (148).

209 clearly play an important role in constituting national and individual self-understandings. Indeed, one could argue that the nation-state’s roles revolve largely around identity creation, providing both small- and large-scale self-representative images for citizens to carry in global society.

Certainly, not everything can or should be on display but in a time of overwhelming waste abundance, societies should be looking directly at it, not turning away or hiding away the human products that challenge the notion of human creation as uniquely beneficial. The French may seek self-knowledge in the display spaces that amass humanity’s celebrated creations, but they must also recognize waste spaces as unintentional mirrors of another kind of human creation.

Such spaces are unique zones that persist despite French society’s attempt at more inclusive practices. There are some exclusions people are not willing to let go, and many of these help them deny the environmental impact of their material practices, their implication in global cycles, their fragility on the planet, and their mortality. Material divisions of space fluctuate over time, and one must wonder if these waste spaces will still exist when climate change forces global placelessness. Will society’s collective junk will still remain buried with human bodies in the earth or will it become a resource? How societies organize and locate material bodies in space is fundamental to collective self-understanding, and sometimes history necessitates that they look just as closely at the hidden as that on display. By placing waste, not hiding it but displaying it in a literature and film, understanding societal fears, and acknowledging that all materials impact social realities, Varda, Ernaux, and Rolin help us to reimagine the communities impacted by cultural waste metaphors and spatial organization.

As mentioned in the Introduction, Michel Foucault’s herméneutique du sujet, as described by Frédéric Gros, explains a shift in the subject from an “œuvre”, or work, in Antiquity to an “objet de connaissance” in Western society after the arrival of Christianity. Instead of posing the question “who am I?” the self-writers of Antiquity understood their subjectivity as an answer to the question, “what should I do?” Similarly, rather than asking “what is waste?” these

210 authors respond to the question “what should I do with the waste in my life?” In other words, how can I see waste as a potential rather than a fixed concept.

One way to consider this may come from the French perspective on the body, the container of a being. In a podcast on France Culture, a panel of medical experts discussed the question, “notre corps, nous appartient-il?” Panel members explained an important difference in questions of bioethics for policy-makers and scientists from Anglo-Saxon versus French or continental nations. In Anglo-Saxon usage, one perceives the body in the sense that “I have a body.” his implies that it is separate from “I” or “me,” that it is breakable into parts, that it is somewhat out of my control (has its own agency as a separate entity) and that it is an object of belonging. In the French judiciary system (and, by extension, in the culture that created and sustains that system of regulating society), one considers the body in the sense that “I am a body” and that this body belongs to the human collective—therefore, one has the usufruit, or use without right to disposal or abuse, of this body as part of the collective.90 From this proposition, it would seem that being a body within a group, rather than having or possessing one refocuses the body as a connected process, a verb, not a noun. Such a perspective would allow intimacy with the non-identical through focus on the processes of exchange, not simple relationality but activity.

Instead of becoming intimate with the non-identical, perhaps the solution is to look at the distance between the self and the non-identical as a work following the model in Foucault’s

écriture de soi of tension between the self one is and the self one wants to become both through writing the self into being and in being differently. Part of the problem with Morton’s argument, which is shared by many ecocritics is an assumed original identity with nature. For example,

Laurence Buell describes ecocriticism’s goals as “protection of the endangered natural world and

90 This discussion could lead to questions regarding Foucault’s concept of bio-pouvoir, state support and surreptitious partial possession of the body, but the state is less important in this debate than the societal perception of the body. This also has implications for Donna Haraway’s partial subjectivities.

211 recuperation of a sense of how human beings have been and might be imagined as (re)connected with it, notwithstanding the threat of the death of nature from industrialism or postmodernity”

(640). Most ecocritics assume that humanity and nature were once unified, that human beings had the ability to understand the subjectivity of nature or that their subjectivities were fused

(participating unwittingly in the Natalie Merchant’s “Recovery Narrative of Western

Civilization”). They, however, make this crucial error of engaging in a herméneutique de la nature that treats nature as an “objet de connaissance” instead of an “oeuvre,” a process that never has and never can be fully known or understood, despite the miracles of science (or in defiance thereof, since science cannot work without transforming beings into objects of observation, study, and explanation). Rather than approaching nature with intimacy in mind

(which is still casting nature or the other as well as the self as objects of knowledge) we, following Varda, Ernaux, and Rolin’s lead, should pose the question “what can I do to match my ethics of appreciating otherness with my actions?” This focus on process or activity allows for adjustments to changes in the environment and recognizes non-identity with others in a healthy, active way, allowing for the possibility of evolution. Intimacy should proceed with caution. There is an ethical obligation to respect the privacy and private territories of others. One might find the solution to ecological problems via a revised self-reflection, self as œuvre, working self or body of work building on the knowledge and wisdom of others and cycling through networks of relations rather than possession.

In “Des espaces autres” Foucault explains that we live in a time in which space is conceived of as a network of connections. “Nous sommes à un moment où le monde s'éprouve, je crois, moins comme une grande vie qui se développerait à travers le temps que comme un réseau qui relie des points et qui entrecroise son écheveau” (Dits et Écrits : 1954-1988 752). The links in this network are often material, in the products that supplement our being, the materials that communicate meaning to others, and the objects that contain our stories. We enclose these

212 materials in physical spaces with varied purposes, but whether hidden or on display, they all impact our placement in society and in their physical excess our placement on this planet. We may be in the era of simultaneity, but that synchronicity no longer takes place as a point on an indefinite horizon--climate change and recognition of our species’ eventual disappearance due to changing and limited resources has brought a limit to our excess of self, space, and time. The human’s relationality with other species takes place not only in culturally determined spaces, but on time-limited horizons in which our wastes are increasingly hard to hide and will surely outlast our accumulations of cultural products in display spaces. Ernaux, Varda, and Rolin encourage us to look directly at both spaces as sites of reflection on ourselves and our society. These authors touch waste, dig it, smell it, feel it, eat it, become it, squish it between fingers and teeth. Their work ignores the perceived dangers of the excluded, especially as concerns disguise spaces that prevent intimacy with aspects of humanity that reveal human deficiencies and mortality.

If wastes have in recent history been held outside society, then literature and film that display wastes modifies its definition. When wastes move into creative space, their meaning deepens. We can read statistics and facts about waste accumulation and waste populations, but unless we are experts we cannot process it appropriately. When scaled down to human stories, waste’s complicated role in society surfaces. Beyond a simple display, the texts and films take the further step of altering anticipated reactions to waste. Trash and dirt are the paragons of immorality, vulgarity, and insignificance. Requiring the viewer or reader to tolerate them in an art form exacts additional effort from her or him because it requires a repositioning of anticipated connotations. When the context reverses those connotations it opens pathways toward changes in denotation; that is, changing our associations with waste as an object to be automatically eschewed opens it up for examination and contemplation. Literary discourse to some extent creates cultural meaning that in turn shapes cultural behavior. When discourse shifts, behavior moves with it, and vice versa. While it may be impossible (and not very useful) to determine

213 which happens first, such movements in language can be observed in texts. In this case, if texts can change connotations of waste as useless, dangerous, and other, texts can alter its denotation from separate to included, from marginalized to embraced, an intimate partner in human living.

Intimacy with waste, another facet of human materiality that for the last two hundred years humans have been avoiding for practical and aesthetic reasons, promotes deeper self- knowledge and awareness of shared ecological materiality. Daily interaction with waste may help humans physically grasp in comprehendible quantities the scalar impact of individual behavior on the world. If one had a pile of trash in the yard, one might find ways to conserve, re-use, recycle, and compost better. As pet owners, parents, or children of aging parents might agree, dealing with another being’s sustenance and waste becomes quotidian more quickly than one can imagine and promotes an unparalleled intimacy—it gives waste value when that waste stands for health and vitality. Handling waste, one might also realize the profound connection that exists between human beings when they share their materiality with one another (one body for mother and child, one meal for the family, dependence on one another for comfort and cleanliness in dealing with our bodily functions)—perhaps this physical need and dependence forces individuals to be too present in our bodies, the time-limited container for their existence. Reading about or viewing waste, illness, aging, and death brings us back to our material reality, the flipside to the pleasures of materiality, abundance, health, warmth, and sensuality. When authors acknowledge this often hidden aspect of human materiality by recording it in public space and collective memory, instead of hiding it in private and forgetting it, they acknowledge how personal choices connect humanity over vast networks and cycles of attachment with each other and the earth.

In short, waste space and its representation in self-writing fills in gaps in other self- representative spaces. But the fact is, societies do not only disguise end-of-life materials. They bury bulbs and treasures; they plant seeds; they pile up compost; and they implant embryos.

Hiding or disguising helps some resources grow. Even the bodies planted in the ground will

214 nourish the plants that grow on them, the microbes that feed on them, the trees that sway in the breeze above them. Death is fertile. Decay and decomposition are creative and giving forces that nourish new life. These texts model how to view end-of-life materials as valuable spaces for self- reflection in an ecological age.

As I began this dissertation with an organic metaphor for literature, I will end by encouraging us to think organically about wastes. In the 20th century, Western cultures tried to reduce large circular systems to small, self-contained, and predictable linear systems. In doing so, they lost sight of the secondary impacts of everything from social to mechanical systems.

Organisms have porous, complex relations with the environment in widening circles of influence.

How societies think about wastes, as how they thought about industry, can damage humans and the planet. In a linear system, waste dies. In a cycle, waste lives. The works presented here display end-of-life materials that make room for death to create life, for resurrection, from ageing minds to discarded fruits and microwaves. Bossuet may have been a metaphyisician and this analysis may be materialist, but both agree on one thing: the tomb is fertile, what appears to be the end of life may just be the beginning.

As humanity generates more wastes and more people that depend on it for survival, now is the time to understand how and why societies exclude certain materials and individuals from living space and determine if and how these behaviors may be changing. While the sciences search for technical solutions to waste production on a global scale, self-writing documents personal responses to a problem that overwhelms the individual human. Each person has to face the material world and make his or her own choices about what those materials mean, what value they hold, and how they represent her or him. Society provides guidelines, but individuals decide what messages they want to send with their waste practices. We all face our waste alone, mark ourselves with it, and set up territories with it. These self-writers model alternative attitudes toward wastes, recognizing that they may be repulsive, obscene, and disturbing, but they are also

215 informative, productive, and vital to life. As readers and viewers open up to wastes’ 21st-century complexities, they can engage in a needed process of self-discovery and self-understanding on the individual and collective scales at this critical moment in environmental and human history.

216

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VITA

Laura Kmonicek Call 423 Withers Hall NC State University Raleigh, NC 27695 814.404.5645 www.lauracallportfolio.weebly.com

Education  Ph.D., French Literature (December 2016) Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania Dissertation Title: “Self and Refuse: Waste on the Human Scale in 21st-century French Écriture de soi” Director: Vincent Bruyère Chair: Jennifer Boittin Committee: Rich Doyle, Jean-Claude Vuillemin & Monique Yaari  M.A., French Linguistics (May 2008) Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania Thesis Title: “The Enclosure: the infiltration of an urban ecosystem in Jean Rolin’s La Clôture”  B.A., French, summa cum laude (August 2006) Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina Minor: Education  B.A., Environmental Sciences (May 2003) The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia Minor: Biology

Conference Presentations  “STEM in the L2 Classroom,” at the Foreign Language Association of North Carolina Convention, October 7 – 8, 2016 in Durham, North Carolina  “Urban Ecology in Jean Rolin’s La Clôture,” at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, March 15 – 18, 2012 in Rochester, New York  “La Fête des Lumières: Rooting and Universalizing in Lyon,” at the University of Pittsburgh Idea of France Conference, November 10 – 12, 2011 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania  “The Enclosure: the infiltration of an urban ecosystem in Jean Rolin’s La Clôture,” at the Conference of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment, October 14 – 17, 2008 in Alcala, Spain

Publication  “Placing the Self: Ecocriticism & Twenty-first Century French Autobiographical Writing” (forthcoming December 2015 in the edited collection Ecocritical Approaches to Francophone Literatures)