Reading Through Post-War French Fiction by Sonja Klara Stojanovic

Home , Anne Dufourmantelle, Georges Perec, Marie NDiaye, The Erstwhile

Spectral Preoccupations: Reading through Post-War French Fiction

Sonja Klara Stojanovic

B.S. / B.A. Andrews University

M.S. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

M.A. University of Notre Dame

M.A. Brown University

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of French Studies at Brown University

Providence, RI

May 2017

This dissertation by Sonja Klara Stojanovic is accepted in its present form

by the Department of French Studies as satisfying

the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date Thangam Ravindranathan, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date David Wills, Reader

Date Elissa Marder, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School

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Curriculum Vitae

Sonja Klara Stojanovic was born in 1984 in Strasbourg, France. After moving to Austria, she received her Matura (High School diploma) in 2003. She completed her higher education in the United States, receiving a B.S. in Psychology and a B.A. in French from Andrews University. She also received her M.A. in Journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007, and her M.A. in French and Francophone Studies from the University of Notre Dame in 2010. She has taught English as a foreign language in Rennes and Angers, France. At Brown since 2010, she has been teaching French language in the Department of French Studies, where she received her M.A. in 2013. She continued with her doctoral studies and successfully defended her dissertation in August 2016.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Thangam Ravindranathan in more ways than I can count. I would like to thank her for her advice and support, for the gift of her time, for not being deterred by my dangling modifiers, Gallicisms, and issues with punctuation, for encouraging me to reach ever further, to think more pointedly, more radically, and for showing me how to attend to the intricacies of language, for showing me how she thinks and for her many comments on my work, for the generosity and depth with which she read – many times over – countless drafts, papers, and articles, for guiding by example, for teaching me what it means to be a scholar of literature, and certainly for the many exchanges about life: Merci ! It is a debt that will remain en souffrance until, perhaps, one day I can have the pleasure to pay it forward.

My two readers have haunted my own readings long before I ever had the pleasure of meeting them; their incisive and powerful engagement with texts inspired me and nourished my thinking throughout this project. I would like to thank David Wills for his thought-provoking readings, for his encouragements, for his openness, for offering me the chance, before my interview, to rehearse my dissertation description over the phone, for declaring early on that “Cixous must figure in this dissertation,” and for his hospitality. Many thanks to Elissa Marder for the sharpness of her readings, for her wondrous Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which many a time has helped me go further, and for graciously and generously having accepted – following her incredible Baudelaire seminar – “to be in my life.”

For her mentorship and friendship, for her trust and her encouragements, for her passion for research and for teaching, I would like to thank Julia Douthwaite, without whom I would not be here.

I would like to thank all the professors and many cohorts of students in the Department of French Studies at Brown for the incredible opportunity to work and study with you. Before coming to Brown, I had the chance of working with many wonderful scholars and teachers, and I would also like to thank the professors in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame for giving me a chance to finally start studying literature.

Stéphanie Ravillon, Annie Wiart, and Youenn Kervennic: mille mercis for showing me how to be a teacher and how to think about teaching, for inspiring me with your dedication, your knowledge, your open doors, and your joie de vivre. I cannot thank you enough for your support and your advice.

For their stimulating and intellectually challenging seminars, I would like to thank in particular: Professors Réda Bensmaïa, Timothy Bewes, Maureen Boulton, Patricio Boyer, Matilda Bruckner, Odile Cazenave, Liliane Doukhan, Jacques Doukhan, Julia Douthwaite, Virginia Krause, Kristina Mendicino, Monique Pittman, Thangam

Ravindranathan, Lewis Seifert, Gretchen Schultz, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alain Toumayan, and David Wills.

Many thanks also go to Julia Douthwaite, Ariella Azoulay, Ourida Mostefai, Pierre Saint- Amand, and Marc Redfield for many insightful conversations and for trusting and helping me to translate into a language that is not my own; many thanks to Sarah Bernthal and Bruno Penteado for sharing this task with me. For their ever-encouraging words, I would like to thank Branka Arsić and Michelle Clayton. For the delightful conversations, many thanks go to Maan Alsahoui.

Merci, Mme Beinat, who made me want to be a teacher like her, already in the CE2. Merci, Mme Wenzel, whose French class was a haven in a sea of Deutsch, for giving me an impressive reading list, and upon directing my very first research thesis in French knew that I could do more.

Kathy Wiggins, Mary Oliver, and José Mendoza, thank you for working wonders behind the scenes, and for making Rochambeau brighter by your presence.

Geralyn Ducady and Tony Belz at the Haffenreffer Museum, thank you for giving me a beautiful space to work in for two summers.

Many thanks to the biliothécaires, who recognized early on my love for books and let me borrow more than the three allowed at one time; Later at Brown, Dominique Coulombe and Patricia Figueroa have been more than helpful in procuring books, journals and useful resources.

Merci, to my sometimes confusés students, who over the years have reminded me, week in week out, why it is all worth it.

I would also like to thank:

Christine Lietz and Shannon Bragg, my cohort, for making the challenging first year at Brown particularly memorable; Jack Sieber, for the madeleines he brings back from France for me and everything else; Anne-Gabrielle Roussel, Justin Gibson, Benjamin Fancy, Brigitte Stepanov, and Brittany Prescott for the many impromptu conversations, for sharing lesson plans and life lessons, and for making the most of our very small on- campus group this year.

Lucie Pautot for her kindness, her optimism, for giving me the hospitality of her office, for the many conversations and encouraging words, for haunting the gardens at Rochambeau, merci, merci, merci !

For dinners, drinks, conversations, (life) support, friendship, and so much more: Stefanie and Michael Sevcik (with Adalyne and Skylar), Ruffin & Jeremy Powell (with Archer), Silja Maehl and Rassin Grantab (with Johan), Natalie Lozinski-Veach and Dan Veach, Anja Jovic, Claudia Grégoire, and Andrew Naughton.

Snežana Kordovan, sister extraordinaire, for being there through it all: whether it was studying with me in the middle of the night, keeping me fed, or listening to my incessant talking with deep interest.

Yasmina Fawaz for always calling me even when I don’t call back, for always knowing exactly what to say, and for her incredible friendship.

Abi Doukhan, for every conversation and every piece of advice, for encouraging me, by example, to pursue a Ph.D., for showing me that you can have it all.

Christopher Hill, Vicky Hougasian, and Charlotte Barcat for Rennes and everything else. Vinciane Granmagnat for knowing me since the fateful days of collège and still being my friend. To the many friends, whose kindness and passion, in various ways, have brought me to this day: Robbie, Maria, Katie, Sara, Connie, Tim, Cédric, Markus, Alex, Sanja, Ivana, Klaus, Carsten, Sarah, Suzanne, Anita, Jovanka, and Wendy.

I cannot thank enough my parents, Slavica and Dragan, for surrounding my life with books and for not despairing when I pursued yet another degree. I could not have done any of this without their unconditional support and love. To my brother David, thank you for not forgetting about me even though I always had my nose in books. To my family, my cousins, particularly Sara, Lana, Dane and Saša (and the rest of the band): I promise to now attend every possible family reunion and show up without an article, paper, or dissertation to write; thanks for sticking with me.

To Stella Penteado Natividade for welcoming me into her family with an open heart. Especially to Carolina, Lobinho and Luana, but to all of the Natividades and the Moretos: for their hospitality, love, and patience with my Portuguese-learning: muito obrigada por tudo.

Many thanks to Žižeka, criancinha canina, welcoming other, for her eagerness to learn and her gentle affection.

Last but most of all, merci infiniment to the man who was already there when I first walked into the Naturalisme and Positivisme seminar – my very first class, on my very first day at Brown – Bruno Penteado, companion, first and last reader, who supports me (as much in its English as in its French sense) unwaveringly: sem você, nada.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments v

List of Illustrations x

Introduction 1

Brief Note on Nomenclature 3 Spectral Logic 5 Timely Meditation 9 Antigone’s Ghost 13 Spectral Preoccupations and Possibilities 16

Chapter 1 – Gaspard Winckler or Georges Perec’s Creation Anxiety 19

The Many Articulations of Gaspard Winckler 23 Who (Else) on Earth is Gaspard Winckler? 25 The Last Piece of the Puzzle 34 Unfinished Business 40 “Lazare Winckler, hein?” 42 Perec Planned it All 48

Chapter 2 – Literally Fictional: Patrick Modiano’s Spectral Objects 52

Literal, Historical, Material, and Spectral Traces 55 Inventory Misplaced 68 Legal 74 Visual 85 Legible 95 Tangible 99 Warnings and Complications 102

Chapter 3 – Marie Darrieussecq’s Ghost 107

“Just” Ghosts 114 Brief change of Words 117 Birth of Fiction 123 Reprenons 131 Writing and Reading Ghosts, mode d’emploi 136 Another Christmas Carol 142 Darrieussecq’s Ghost 146

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Chapter 4 – Hélène Cixous and the Book-Phone 150

A Proustian Recipe that is not a Madeleine but Almost 156 Distance: Null 159 The Shout 160 Literature’s Painful Secret 162 Writing with Baggage 167 Becoming Untimely 171 Becoming the Ghost 182

After Words 185

Bibliography 189

List of Illustrations

Figure 1:

Excerpt from Marie Darrieussecq, Bref séjour chez les vivants (2001), found on page 121.

FANTÔME, s. m. (Gramm.) Nous donnons le nom de fantôme à toutes les images qui nous font imaginer hors de nous des êtres corporels qui n’y sont point. Ces images peuvent être occasionnées par des causes physiques extérieures, de la lumière, des ombres diversement modifiées, qui affectent nos yeux, & qui leur offrent des figures qui sont réelles: alors notre erreur ne consiste pas à voir une figure hors de nous, car en effet il y en a une, mais à prendre cette figure pour l’objet corporel qu’elle représente. Des objets, des bruits, des circonstances particulières, des mouvements de passion, peuvent aussi mettre notre imagination & nos organes en mouvement; & ces organes mûs, agités, sans qu’il y ait aucun objet présent, mais précisément comme s’ils avaient été affectés par la présence de quelqu’objet, nous le montrent, sans qu’il y ait seulement de figure hors de nous. Quelquefois les organes se meuvent & s’agitent d’eux-mêmes, comme il nous arrive dans le sommeil; alors nous voyons passer au-dedans de nous une scène composée d’objets plus ou moins décousus, plus ou moins liés, selon qu’il y a plus ou moins d’irrégularité ou d’analogie entre les mouvements des organes de nos sensations. Voilà l’origine de nos songes. […] On a appliqué le mot de fantôme à toutes les idées fausses qui nous impriment de la frayeur, du respect, &c. qui nous tourmentent, & qui font le malheur de notre vie: c’est la mauvaise éducation qui produit ces fantômes, c’est l’expérience & la philosophie qui les dissipent.

––Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, “fantôme”

xi INTRODUCTION

N’en déplaise à Diderot,1 rather than attempting to dispel ghosts, in the following pages I endeavor to understand the function of their disruptive (re)appearances and analyze the ways in which they are created and experienced through reading and writing in the works of George Perec, Marie Darrieussecq, Patrick Modiano, and Hélène Cixous.

Commenting on the Encyclopedist’s hostility towards these spectral figures, Colin Davis notes that it was precisely, “[t]he mission of the Enlightenment […] to get rid of ghosts definitely.”2 However, as we know well and have observed in the centuries that followed, exorcising them has been impossible; everyone can readily think of many examples, to this day, of the steadfast popularity of ghostly matters.

Daniel Sangsue, in his colossal study of “literary pneumatology,”3 describes the

19th century as particularly obsessed with ghosts: “Des fantômes, on pourrait dire ce que

Flaubert disait des expositions: ‘sujet de délire du XIXe siècle’ (Dictionnaire des idées reçues). Jamais en effet les revenants en corps, spectres, esprits et autres morts-vivants

1 See entry “fantôme,” in Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe (University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, Spring 2016), 6:404, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.

2 Colin Davis, “Ghosts, Hearsay and Lies: the Strange Case(s) of Lord Lyttelton,” in Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Culture, edited by Kate Griffiths and David Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 16.

3 “Du grec pneuma, pneumatos, ‘le souffle, l’esprit.’” Daniel Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants: Essai de pneumatologie littéraire (Paris: José Corti, 2011), 21n16.

n’ont été aussi présents et n’ont autant obsédé les vivants qu’à cette époque.”4 Although ghosts are certainly “common currency in much of the nineteenth century, most notably in the rich seam of literature of the fantastic,”5 we are reminded that they can be found almost in any era and genre. Not to be outdone, contemporary literature (and culture) is also littered with these beings, and this prompts me to ask the following question: what does it mean to be contemporary to ghosts?

Stéphane Audeguy pertinently remarks, in his preface to a recent NRF issue entitled “Des fantômes” (2012), that “[l]a vérité est que notre époque n’est ni plus ni moins rationnelle qu’une autre; que tout revient toujours davantage au même que nous ne voudrions le croire.”6 Ghosts, albeit sometimes in other forms – I think here of experiments in psychography, spirit photography,7 cinema, art – are still surrounding us.

“La culture n’est-elle pas un culte particulier, non des morts, mais des fantômes? Ne sommes-nous pas hantés par des livres, et par certains personnages, étant entendu qu’un

4 Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants, back cover, emphasis in original. Michael Newton also locates the rise and fall of the English-language ghost story between the 1820s and 1950s and writes that although spectral figures appeared in texts before, “the ‘ghost story’ itself, as understood by literary critics, is a Romantic invention. Its prime begins, tentatively, in the 1820s, hits its stride in the 1850s, reaches its zenith between the 1880s and the outbreak of the First World War, and peters out in the 1950s.” Michael Newton, ed., Introduction to The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (London: Penguin Classics, 2010), xvi.

5 Kate Griffiths and David Evans, eds., Introduction to Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 1.

6 Stéphane Audeguy, ed., Introduction to “Des fantômes,” Nouvelle Revue Française 602 (October 2012): 9.

7 Rather than eliminate doubt, digital photography can still be said to reveal certain ghosts. See Howard Timberlake, “The intriguing history of ghost photography,” BBC, June 30, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150629-the-intriguing-history-of- ghost-photography.

personnage peut-être [sic] l’image d’un paysage, d’un animal, non moins que celle d’un homme?,”8 asks Audeguy (extrapolating from a short fiction by contemporary author

Gwenaëlle Aubry9). Ghosts have remained ever-present and assumed different forms despite the multiple attempts aimed at eradicating them.

Brief Note on Nomenclature

Is a specter a phantom, a phantom a ghost?10 Before tracing the various possible definitions, Sangsue noted the conundrum that such an endeavor entails in these terms:

“[c]omment définir ce qui n’a pas de réalité avérée, ce que tout le monde ne peut pas voir, ce qui reste entouré de mystère? À objet flou, définitions incertaines… .”11 Some writers and critics (such as Victor Hugo12 and Dominique Rabaté13) have argued against

8 Audeguy, “Des fantômes,” 9.

9 Gwenaëlle Aubry, “Court traité des fantômes familiers,” in “Des fantômes,” Nouvelle Revue Française 602 (October 2012): 203-09.

10 From the Latin spectrum, “to look, see,” both the English “specter” and the French “spectre” emphasize a visual quality, a degree of intensity, which we are reminded of through the use of the word in a scientific context (e.g.: spectrum of light). “Phantom” and “fantôme” both appear to originate from the Latin phantasma: “illusion, delusion, supernatural apparition, or ghost, mental image, figment, make visible, present to the eye,” while “ghost,” possibly derives from the German Geist (spirit) – though another pre-Germanic possibility comes from the Old Norse geisa (rage). “Spirit” and “esprit” come from the Latin spiritus, “breath, air,” also related to spirare, to “breathe.” Etymological information in English is found in the Oxford English Dictionary; in French, it is found in the Littré.

11 Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants, 17. For a more detailed analysis of the various terms used from the Middle Ages up until (at least) the 19th century, see Sangsue’s first chapter: “Nomenclature des revenants,” 17-21.

12 Cited and commented by Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants, 19.

13 In Désirs de disparaître (2015), Rabaté explains the difference between ghost (fantôme) and specter in the following terms: “le spectre n’est pas comme un fantôme: il

interchangeability and have ascribed to each word a different notion.14 However, more pragmatically, as María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren have noted, the term

“specter” is often preferred in academic circles not only because of its “more serious, scholarly ring,”15 but also because of its “etymological link to visibility and vision.”16

Jacques Derrida, resident spectral scholar, used these terms (“spectre,” “fantôme” and even the English word ghost) interchangeably (sometimes in the same sentence) and noted that they are “à peu près équivalents.”17 Yet, despite the differences and similarities of the specter, the phantom, the ghost, their most productive characteristic is not found in ne marque pas le retour du mort, ou du refoulement dont il faut lever le secret. Son économie romanesque est d’une autre nature. Entre présence et absence, le spectre représente un état d’existence amoindrie qui persiste à se manifester de façon intermittente.” Dominique Rabaté, Désirs de disparaître: Une traversée du roman français contemporain (Rimouski, Quebec: Tangence éditeur, 2015), 47.

14 This is observed by Claude Lecouteux: “Tout le monde connaît ‘fantôme,’ qui évoque l’idée d’illusion et de fantasmagorie, ‘spectre,’ auquel s’attache une notion d’effroi ou d’horreur, celle que provoque le squelette ricanant ou le cadavre en décomposition, ‘ombre,’ qui relève surtout du vocabulaire poétique et rappelle la dissolution du corps dans le trépas, ‘esprit’ qui reste vague et exprime la perplexité humaine face à des manifestations inexpliquées, […] ‘Ectoplasme’ est récent […] ‘Revenant,’ par contre, suggère immédiatement le retour d’un mort. Le terme est l’expression d’un simple constat et ne renvoie à aucune illusion.” Claude Lecouteux, Fantômes et revenants au Moyen-Âge (Paris: Éditions Imago, 1986), 7-8. Sangsue also partially refers to these definitions. See Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants, 19-20.

15 María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds., Introduction to The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 2.

16 Blanco and Peeren, The Spectralities Reader, 2.

17 He also highlighted the importance of their connection to what is visible, what is seen, what is seeing: “spectre, à la différence de revenant, dit quelque chose du spectacle. Le spectre c’est d’abord du visible. Mais du visible invisible, la visibilité d’un corps qui n’est pas présent en chair et en os. […] Fantôme garde la même référence au phainesthai, à l’apparaître pour la vue, à la brillance du jour, à la phénoménalité.” Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, “Spectrographies,” in Échographies de la télévision: Entretiens filmés (Paris: Éditions Galilée / Institut national de l’audiovisuel, 1996), 129, emphasis in original.

how they are defined or what word is used to describe them, but rather in how they work in a given text. Because the ghost is precisely unknowable, “on ne sait pas ce que c’est

[…] C’est quelque chose qu’on ne sait pas, justement,”18 what it is able to do and how it functions is of paramount importance; it is this very aspect which lies at the heart of this dissertation.

Spectral Logic

Most incisively in Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (1993) – though, as Blanco and

Peeren have pointed out, he was concerned with questions of spectrality from the very beginning of his philosophical writings19 – the figure of the ghost invites itself as a theoretical subject / object haunting the text (already before, as it were, the first words were even written20). The influential legacy of this work, as Davis describes at length, can be found in its many afterlives. Notwithstanding the book’s reception among some

Marxist readers,21 “in literary circles,” Davis writes, “Derrida’s rehabilitation of ghosts as

18 Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 25, emphasis in original.

19 Blanco and Peeren, The Spectralities Reader, 10. They also identify divergent theoretical engagements with the figure of the specter in the last decade of the 20th century during the so-called spectral turn: cf. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian (1993) and Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (1992).

20 Derrida points out his erstwhile forgetting of the ghost found in the first line of Marx’s Manifesto: “Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa – das Gespenst des Kommunismus.” Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 22.

21 See for example the edited volume written as a response (with contributions notably by Frederic Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Pierre Macherey): Michael Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (London: Verso, 1999).

a respectable subject of enquiry has proved to be extraordinarily fertile.”22 By emphasizing how the figure of the ghost can be found at work in the very constitution or disruption of concepts, Derrida unsettled the primacy of presence and coined a new term:

“Hanter ne veut pas dire être présent et il faut introduire la hantise dans la construction même d’un concept. De tout concept, à commencer par les concepts d’être et de temps.

Voilà ce que nous appellerions, ici, une hantologie.”23 If one comes to understand the ghost as that which is present and absent (both at the same time), the consequences reach beyond the (erstwhile incompatible) conception of being. This figure also prompts us to reconsider our linear and teleologically-motivated conception of time; in other words, if we only think diachronically (as evolving in and through time), we cannot be prepared for that which comes out of order, not in the proper sequence (which we conceive as: birth – life – death). When the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears (a privileged figure in

Derrida’s elaboration of hauntology), time becomes disjointed. To understand the ghost, one must learn to embrace its inner paradoxes, its coming out of time, at the wrong time, out of season, ever too early or too late: its being untimely (intempestif24).

When Derrida attempts to think of two things which typically do not go together

(he terms it the “disparate”25), we will notice that such thinking, according to him, is only possible in a time that is disjointed, that is, “dans un temps du présent disloqué, à la

22 Colin Davis, “État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms,” in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 53.

23 Derrida and Stiegler, “Spectrographies,” 255.

24 The French word intempestif, comes from the Latin: in (negative prefix) + tempestivus (coming at the proper time [venu à temps], in season). See Littré.

25 Ibid., 41.

jointure d’un temps radicalement dis-joint, sans conjonction assurée.”26 Derrida goes on quoting and offering a powerful declension of one of Hamlet’s most beloved sentences:

“‘The time is out of joint,’ le temps est désarticulé, démis, déboîté, disloqué, le temps est détraqué, traqué et détraqué, dérangé, à la fois déréglé et fou. Le temps est hors de ses gonds, le temps est déporté, hors de lui-même, désajusté. Dit Hamlet.”27 It is paradoxically only in an understanding of time as completely broken, as not following any sort of linearity, as being utterly disjointed that one can think and hold two different things (presence and absence, life and death, for example) together. It is through what

Derrida terms “cette intempestivité ou cette anachronie radicale à partir desquelles nous essaierons ici de penser le fantôme,”28 that the ghost’s most productive aspects are revealed.

Asking, like the sentinel in Hamlet’s opening, “Who’s there?”,29 I question what is already there, but not necessarily immediately visible – which Derrida terms the visor effect: “[q]ue nous nous sentions vus par un regard qu’il sera toujours impossible de croiser, voilà l’effet de visière.”30 As Thomas Keenan remarks, “[e]verything begins with a question about the identity of the one who is already there, the one who has, without speaking, provoked the question,”31 and although Keenan reflects specifically upon the

26 Ibid., 41-42.

27 Ibid., 42, emphasis in original.

28 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 52, emphasis in original.

29 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene 1.

30 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 27.

31 Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 7.

identity of the sentinel, the other who asks me who I am before explaining who he or she is, even though – and this is crucial – he or she was there before me, we can say with certainty that this exchange is thoroughly spectral. When upon realizing that I am not alone, that someone has been lurking in the shadows, I wonder and ask who it is, yet, instead of answering, this other turns the tables on me and asks me who I am, questions my own identity. It is in this way that the specter calls out to me, in response to my own calling. An important lesson to be learned from this interaction between two sentinels: one need not necessarily be a proper specter in order to engage in a form or logic of haunting.

Derrida, in fact, urged us to think “la possibilité du spectre, le spectre comme possibilité,”32 and it is in heed of this invitation that I write here, to show the potential of this figure when it is understood not only in its thematic aspect (which is certainly prevalent) but very much so in its productive capacities as a figure that one needs to read, that helps one to read, a figure, “qu’il ne faut pas chasser mais trier, critiquer, garder près de soi et laisser revenir.”33 I will read here, in works by Perec, Modiano, Darrieussecq, and Cixous, moments which are marked by a certain untimeliness, by [re]appearances that are out of order, marked by absences, which may be feigned, by instances where haunter and haunted become undistinguishable, and where writing produces ghosts that move the narrative forward even while drawing their life from our reading. Keenan, though in a different context (writing about Marx), highlights the intricacies of reading textual ghosts when he writes: “[t]he ghosts may be linguistic, but that does not make

32 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 34.

33 Ibid., 144.

them any easier to read. Indeed, precisely to the extent that they are placeholders, markers, catachreses, they become more linguistic and more trouble to read.”34 What an analysis of such textual or linguistic ghosts in the following chapters will show is each author’s profound engagement with questions of writing and reading fiction, and, in turn, an attention to the ways in which our own identity is marked and created by spectral remnants and the fictions that we tell ourselves – not least of which is the idea that our lives are coterminous with our time.

Timely Meditation

Sitting on a shelf in the Library at Rochambeau House, a book entitled The

Contemporary French Novel piqued my interest. Published in 1955 – meaning Perec,

Modiano, Cixous had yet to write their first novel, and Darrieussecq was yet to be born –, its main aim was to determine which contemporary novels could be understood as literature and according to what criteria.35 On the notion of the contemporary itself, however, there was nothing to be found. Indeed, as has been made clear in the edited volume Qu’est-ce que le contemporain ? (2010), up until recently, the notion of the

34 Keenan, Fables of Responsibility, 133.

35 Henri Peyre gives the following criteria: “Does the new writer stand up under the slow reading, the elaborate dissecting of three or four hours of lecture and of discussion of his work? The teacher and the students who struggle with his volume just off the press are also reading Sophocles, Racine, Tolstoy, Ibsen. To them they will compare Mr. Tennessee Williams, Mr. Christopher Fry, or M. Jean-Paul Sartre. Sad to confess, the rewarding writer who remains on the syllabus is the writer about whom the lecturer does not run dry after fifty minutes and whose solidity resists the irony and the severity of young apprentices.” Henri Peyre, The Contemporary French Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 9.

contemporary was “un de ces impensés de la tradition esthétique.”36 Instead, the question of the cut-off date for the contemporary is still very much a topic of choice.37

For his part, instead of understanding the contemporary according its etymology

(“être ensemble à un même point du temps”38) or looking at the ways in which it tends to be understood in relation to the past and/or to the future (“le contemporain est devenu un champ de bataille dans lequel il s’agit à la fois de dénoncer les dégâts du modernisme et de préserver ce qui peut encore l’être. Après le contemporain tiré vers le futur, voici le contemporain qui se nimbe de passé”39), François Noudelmann proposes seeing it from a different angle: “le contemporain se définit peut-être par des rythmes et non par l’orientation du temps.”40 What he hints at is the fact that the contemporary is punctuated from within: different declensions and relationships to time for different areas of life.41

36 Lionel Ruffel, ed., Introduction to Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? (Nantes: éditions Cécile Defaut, 2010), 9.

37 Ruffel, Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?, 10-12. See also Margaret-Anne Hutton, ed. Introduction to Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Writing, Modern French Identities 81 (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2009), 3-4.

38 François Noudelmann, “Le Contemporain sans époque: une affaire de rythmes,” in Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?, ed. Lionel Ruffel (Nantes: éditions Cécile Defaut, 2010), 59.

39 Noudelmann, “Le Contemporain sans époque,” 60.

40 Ibid.

41 He writes, for example, about questions of genealogy prevalent in contemporary life (“inscrire les individus dans des continuités,” in other words, knowing all the people that brought us to our own selves up to this specific moment), and about the interaction of different generations with each other, “[d]es générations se côtoient, sont contemporaines, mais la véritable rencontre peut s’exercer plus tard, selon de nouvelles courbures du temps,” but he also addresses the untimeliness of speaking and writing about dreams (“[u]n écrivain qui écrit ses rêves [he uses Cixous as an example] se livre

One noteworthy argument for my purposes here is that, according to him, one can speak of contemporariness specifically with regard to memorializing practices. He contends that since the 1980s, “le présent est vécu comme un passé,”42 and that there is a clear drive for a “museification” and an archiving of the present.43 For Noudelmann, the fact that one is even speaking about trauma, about a shameful collective past at this specific time is due to a very specific change: “un changement de paradigme dans la représentation du temps.”44 He argues that “[l]es discours sur l’ère du témoignage dans laquelle nous serions entrés après Auschwitz présentent une explication rétrospective peu convaincante car ils n’expliquent pas pourquoi il a fallu attendre près de 40 ans pour assumer le deuil des populations exterminées.”45 Whether or not one agrees with Noudelmann’s vision of things – and it is not my point here – the close relationship that he draws between time and our thinking about its effect on our current status forces us to ponder the tears in the fabric of the contemporary envisaged as presence and simultaneity. As much as we want to be contemporary, we are always already positioning ourselves in conjunction with something that is past (or even future). The contemporary’s resistance to its own definition makes it a notion that is thoroughly spectral, riddled with questions and paradoxical movements.

ainsi à un jeu plus ou moins maitrisé avec le temps de l’époque et le temps intime”). Ibid., 62, 67, 72.

42 Ibid., 61.

43 Ibid., 62.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

A small typo in the part of the article where Noudelmann discusses Jean-Paul

Sartre’s desire to be contemporary (“devenant le plus contemporain de tous les contemporains”46) is illuminating. He writes, “Sartre fut assurément un homme siècle, choisissant délibérément d’être synchrone avec ton [sic] temps.”47 Because of a simple letter, which addresses me, Sartre (in this reading) was choosing to be contemporary to my time, hence returning or appearing to me as an untimely ghost. What is shown here, I contend, is the contemporary’s deep-seated reluctance to being, as it were, contemporary.

It is through and through punctured by fault-lines, moments in which some slight contamination, some remnant, even something as small as an extra or a missing letter allows the heretofore contemporary to slip into a different time (through the work of a spectral logic).

When Lionel Ruffel writes that “[l]a coexistence avec les fantômes semble donc

être un enjeu fondamental [de la vie contemporaine] car la spectralité dépasse le cadre d’une pensée sur le temps et sur l’histoire pour devenir une réflexion sur les arts, sur leur impureté,”48 he points, it seems, to the very fact that being a contemporary of ghosts

(which necessitates, we will see, our own becoming untimely) allows for a reflection on writing and, I suggest, more precisely on the irruption of fiction (the impurity that Ruffel notes) in life. In the chapters that follow, it is this trait in Perec, Modiano, Darrieussecq, and Cixous’s works that I will explore. Setting four distinct tableaux where the specter is not necessarily always named as such, I will endeavor to understand each author’s own

46 Ibid., 69.

47 Ibid., 68, emphasis mine.

48 Lionel Ruffel, Le dénouement (Lagrasse, France: Éditions Verdier, 2005), 103.

specific and singular engagement with this figure, particularly concerning how the ghost has invited itself and inserted itself in the text both through and as language.

Antigone’s Ghost

More perhaps than any other figure of Greek tragedy, Antigone occupies a privileged position in the Western philosophical and literary traditions as evidenced by her presence in the writings of Hegel, Lacan, Irigaray, Derrida and countless others.

Whether she embodies the struggle between what she sees as divine law and the law of the state, whether she is evoked in order to show the strength of familial bonds, whether she posits that having no sepulture is a fate worse even than death, or whether she exemplifies through her tears “la question de l’étranger – de l’étrangère,”49 Antigone’s ghost is time and again brought up. The authors studied in this dissertation each engage with questions of dying, of mourning, of writing, of memory. Writing in the wake of the

Holocaust – and more specifically, following Noudelmann, given the current awareness about the significant influence of past experiences (whether lived or retold by someone else) on our lives and societies – haunted by the multitudes of graveless dead, and personally marked by the atrocities of war in one way or another, these authors make

Antigone’s struggles and choices echo throughout their works.

For Perec, who lost his mother to the death camps, the tragedy of her having no grave finds itself repeatedly inscribed within his oeuvre whether explicitly, “Ma mère n’a pas de tombe,”50 he writes in W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975), or structurally in the

49 Jacques Derrida, De l’hospitalité (Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre) (Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1997), 63.

50 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 62.

recurrence of missing letters, missing chapters, missing volumes. One need only think of his perhaps most celebrated novel entitled La Disparition (1969), compellingly translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A void. As Catherine Clément has pointed out in her essay “Auschwitz, ou la disparition,” for Perec, writing was an imperative: “Quand tout travail de deuil est rendu impossible parce que rien – absolument rien – ne marque la présence des morts, alors surgit la défense, le refuge, la nécessité: écrire, lire, boucher ou

édifier la tombe qui n’existera jamais. […] Quand on ne sait rien – ni l’heure, ni le jour, ni le lieu – et que seul le ciel sert de tombe, quand il ne reste que des lieux vides et petits au regard des millions de vivants qui s’y perdirent, alors, c’est la disparition. Elle est insupportable.”51 Writing fiction became an attempt to fill the void, to leave traces behind.

Modiano, born shortly after the end of World War II in 1945, weaves throughout his oeuvre his own fraught relationship to his father’s past and recognizes that he is obsessed with what he calls his prehistory, “ma préhistoire, c’est la période trouble et honteuse de l’Occupation: j’ai toujours eu le sentiment pour d’obscures raisons d’ordre familial que j’étais né de ce cauchemar.”52 In turn, his narrators, ever devoted to the

51 Catherine Clément, “Auschwitz, ou la disparition,” in Georges Perec (Paris: éditions inculte, 2005): 223-224. Also cited in Ali Magoudi, La Lettre fantôme (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1996), 21. An echo of Clément is found in Elie Wiesel, who recounted his own detention in the camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald in La Nuit (1955), when he speaks of writing as that which provides “an invisible tombstone, erected to the memory of the dead unburied.” Elie Wiesel, “My Teachers,” in Legends of our Time (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 8. Cited in Alan Astro, “Allegory in Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance,” MLN 102, no. 4 (September 1987): 872.

52 Cited by Joseph Jurt, “La mémoire de la Shoah: Dora Bruder,” in Patrick Modiano, ed. John E. Flower (Amstrerdam: Editions Rodopi, 2007), 93.

search for missing or disappeared persons with no belongings, no graves, sometimes not even names, are also intimately linked to the Holocaust and the Vichy regime.

For her part, making very clear that Antigone inhabits “[a]bsolument tous [s]es livres,”53 Darrieussecq also reveals that her own family trauma is centered around the death of a child who does not have a grave, “[o]n ne l’a pas enterré.”54 Around the same time as the revelation of the death, which happened before she was born, Darrieussecq learns about the Holocaust, and suddenly “la grande histoire et la petite histoire se sont percutées.”55 It is also at this time that she starts to read Perec’s works. Although her own works are not thematically related to the Holocaust, Darrieussecq notes that, “[mes livres] ont été fracturés par cela, par le simple fait que je suis née à la fin d’un siècle de massacres.”56

Cixous, born in Algeria to Jewish parents, “experience[d] the effects of the

[Second World] war and of colonialism at an early age and live[d] herself as doubly, even triply minoritarian.”57 For Cixous the question of mourning is found throughout her oeuvre, whether concerning the death of her father Georges in her early works such as

Dedans (1969) and Les commencements (1970), her son in Le jour où je n’étais pas là

53 Nelly Kaprièlian, “Marie Darrieussecq. Entretien avec Nelly Kaprièlian,” in Écrire, écrire, pourquoi? (Paris: Éditions de la Bibliothèque publique d’information / Centre Pompidou, 2010), 18.

54 John Lambeth, “Entretien avec Marie Darrieussecq,” The French Review 79, no. 4 (March 2006): 811.

55 Marie Darrieussecq, “Les 7 minutes de Marie Darrieussecq.”

56 Kaprièlian, “Marie Darrieussecq. Entretien avec Nelly Kaprièlian,” 19.

57 Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), xvii.

(2000), Derrida in Insister À Jacques Derrida (2006), or more recently her mother Ève in

Homère est morte (2014); it can be said that the drama at the heart of Antigone, how to bury a loved one (in writing), underlies, in a sense, each of Cixous’s texts.

Undoubtedly, much has been (and will continue to be) written about representations of war, about trauma, about writing after the Holocaust, about being a witness, and I could not possibly address each of these questions without writing (at least) another entire dissertation. The authors I study, writing their oeuvre in the wake of such traumatic events, are precisely concerned with questions of what it means to write

(fiction). I will be here concerned with more formal, structural, rhetorical, narratological, that is, very specifically textual ways in which ghosts, through questions of loss, writing, memory, manifest themselves: in the disruptions of grammatical tenses, the uses of certain pronouns, ellipses, silences, portmanteau words, and the irruption of the author figure, to name but a few. How a ghost is written and how it is read will be the focus of each chapter, keeping in mind the authors’ personal histories without necessarily focusing on them.

Spectral Preoccupations and Possibilities

I read Perec’s oeuvre by considering how its untimely articulation of the character of Gaspard Winckler brings together seemingly disparate works. Appearing in three novels, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, La vie mode d’emploi (1978), and the posthumous Le

Condottière (2012), the figure of Winckler is elusive, even ghostly. In this chapter, I show how each articulation of the character carries within it the others who have come before it and those who may come following it. This is most visible in the genesis of

Perec’s early novel written in 1960 but only published for the first time thirty years following the author’s death; thus Winckler’s possibly last apparition comes some fifty years after its inception and first appearance. Perec’s choice in (re)casting Winckler in all stages of life – in the manner of Thomas Cole’s 1842 painted series, The Voyage of Life, which features the titular hero through the stages of Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old

Age – hints at the importance of this figure for the author himself who was accompanied

(haunted?) by Winckler throughout his career; I suggest a link between Perec’s own vision of himself as a writer and his writing process and Winckler’s status as a (failed) artist, forger.

Chapter two is centered on an inventory of objects left behind or lost by protagonists in Modiano’s novels. In tandem, I consider how narrators’ creation of fictional traces becomes a way to access a previously unattainable past. I argue that the ever-repeating and paradigmatic figure of the search found in every single novel

(prompting the judgment that Modiano keeps writing the same book) is made possible by leaving open certain loose ends, urging readers to look for clues in other works. In their perpetually failed searches, Modiano’s protagonists leave traces that cannot always be accounted for by the narratives’ economy,` and it is there that the ghost appears from within the text’s own fabric, as a marker of its fiction.

In the third chapter, through Darrieussecq’s oeuvre, I consider more insistently the function of the author and the reader in the elaboration of and communication with ghosts. As an author deeply engaged in reading her own works, Darrieussecq becomes somewhat of a ghost herself. In tracking her (mis)readings and her insertions within her texts, I argue that there are some ghosts which only become manifest in the process of

reading; they can no longer be said to haunt protagonists but should rather be understood as haunting the reader. This makes me wonder whether we, the readers, are not also, and in turn, the ghosts of the text.

In the final chapter, I show how Cixous pushes the cohabitation with ghosts to its paroxysm by proposing a spectrality in which our own ghosts (produced in writing and reading) mingle with those of others. For Cixous, the very act of writing puts one in relation with ghosts and this is in fact precisely, I argue, what Derrida called for when he wondered when another scholar would come and think “la possibilité du spectre, le spectre comme possibilité.”58 Cixous’s radical spectrality, as an answer to Derrida, proposes an engagement with ghosts, which allows us through literature – its reading, its writing – to become untimely ourselves – if only for a brief moment – enabling us thus to welcome and partake in the community of ghosts in order to live, to write, to read otherwise, and most importantly “avec eux.”59

By being attentive to the internal paradoxes and moments of tensions that certain words, objects, names, and sentence structures reveal within a text, I hope to show that by reading the ghost beyond its thematic presence, that is, by understanding it as an estranging yet constitutive principle in a given oeuvre, we can be encouraged to read differently but also to learn to welcome the otherness, the paradoxes, the fictionality lodged within our very selves.

58 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 34

59 Ibid., 15, emphasis in original.

18 CHAPTER 1 Gaspard Winckler or Georges Perec’s Creation Anxiety

Car l’essence douloureuse du manque ne réside pas dans la souffrance présente – le manque est indolore à l’échelle de l’instant –, mais dans la perspective de la souffrance, dans la richesse de l’avenir qu’on peut lui imaginer. Ce qui est insupportable, alors, dans le manque, c’est la durée, c’est l’horizon vide qu’il laisse ouvert devant soi, c’est de savoir qu’il demeurera aussi loin que l’on puisse imaginer.

––Jean-Philippe Toussaint, La Télévision

De tous les caractères d’imprimerie, il m’avait dit qu’il préférait les points de suspension.

––Patrick Modiano, Chien de printemps

Tout ce qui précède oublier.

––Samuel Beckett, “Assez”

Introduction

To begin a reflection on the function of ghosts with Georges Perec is not self- evident; indeed, whether ghosts are even present in Perec’s oeuvre is a valid question

(posed to me by contemporary author Pierre Lemaitre one late September evening in

2015). Yet, although we are not presented with traditional ghost stories – I speak here in terms of their form in the nineteenth century – other types of ghosts are present in his oeuvre. It is certainly not a coincidence that Dominique Rabaté decided to read Perec in his Désirs de disparaître, giving him “une sorte de rôle tutélaire dans cette traversée des

différentes figures de la disparition dans le roman contemporain.”1 Perec’s importance for a certain type of engagement with the contemporary owes much to his insightfulness when it comes to the ways in which literature can “remettre en jeu une autre manière de composer avec la disparition, à la fois en la littéralisant et en la déplaçant.”2 By inscribing disappearance elsewhere, Perec also shows how something can come back from a direction one did not expect through an eerie untimeliness.

I would like to turn to one recurring character in particular, one whose many reincarnations in somewhat similar roles prompts the question of his significance to

Perec’s creative process. I concur, here, with Kate Griffiths and David Evans, who remark that “[a] variety of authors and artists, in very different eras, use the spectral as a means to evaluate their own artistic act.”3 For them, “[p]ut simply, spectres in texts occasionally serve as a means to allow texts to consider their own spectral textual status.”4 In Perec, the specter in question is embodied by a protagonist’s untimely reappearances, which trouble and link some of Perec’s most notable works. In his revisiting of this figure, Perec engages with the following questions: what does it mean to paint? to write? to create?

Critics have compared and contrasted Perec and his protagonist Bartlebooth, given their predilection for constraints. Peter Consenstein, for example, suggests that “the

1 Dominique Rabaté, Désirs de disparaître: Une traversée du roman français contemporain (Rimouski, Quebec: Tangence éditeur, 2015), 29.

2 Rabaté, Désirs de disparaître, 29.

3 Kate Griffiths and David Evans, eds., Introduction to Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 3

4 Griffiths and Evans, Haunting Presences, 4.

composition of the character Bartlebooth, the different states of mind attributed to him, his goals and his procedures, resemble the artisanal and technical work of Perec himself as author and as member of Oulipo.”5 Nevertheless, Bartlebooth’s autotelic puzzle project, which makes up the central plot of La Vie mode d’emploi (1978), is peculiar in that it was, in the end, supposed to completely disappear without leaving any trace of its fifty-year long duration6 (the same can certainly not be said about Perec). If Bartlebooth succeeded in his mission, it would be as if nothing ever happened.7 Fortunately (for us), the project utterly fails due to a devious puzzle maker named Gaspard Winckler, whose

5 Peter Consenstein, “Memory and Oulipian Constraints,” Postmodern Culture 6, no. 1 (September 1995): paragraph 23, DOI:10.1353/pmc.1995.0037

6 Here is a detailed description of the project: “Bartlebooth […] décida un jour que sa vie toute entière serait organisée autour d’un projet unique dont la nécessité arbitraire n’aurait d’autre fin qu’elle-même. […] Pendant dix ans, de 1925 à 1935, Bartlebooth s’initierait à l’art de l’aquarelle. Pendant vingt ans, de 1935 à 1955, il parcourrait le monde, peignant, à raison d’une aquarelle tous les quinze jours, cinq cents marines de même format […] Chaque fois qu’une de ces marines serait achevée, elle serait envoyée à un artisan spécialisé (Gaspard Winckler) qui la collerait sur une mince plaque de bois et la découperait en un puzzle de sept cent cinquante pièces. Pendant vingt ans, de 1955 à 1975, Bartlebooth, revenu en France, reconstituerait, dans l’ordre, les puzzles ainsi préparés, à raison, de nouveau, d’un puzzle tous les quinze jours. À mesure que les puzzles seraient réassemblés, les marines seraient ‘retexturées’ de manière à ce qu’on puisse les décoller de leur support, transportées à l’endroit même où – vingt ans auparavant – elles avaient été peintes, et plongées dans une solution détersive d’où ne ressortirait qu’une feuille de papier Whatman, intacte et vierge.” Georges Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 152-154.

7 In contrast, the project that Valène (another character in the same novel) was dreaming up had the exact opposite purpose: it was meant to leave a trace, a documentation of life within his building’s walls (reminding us of Perec’s own project in writing this novel). This project’s failure, due to Valène’s death, means that nothing was recorded. The novel concludes on the following melancholy note: “La toile était pratiquement vierge: quelques traits au fusain, soigneusement tracés, la divisaient en carrés réguliers, esquisse d’un plan en coupe d’un immeuble qu’aucune figure, désormais, ne viendrait habiter.” Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi, 580.

appearance in this novel is neither his first nor his last, and who most resolutely allows us to question Perec’s relationship to creation.

An interesting example of Perec and Winckler’s interconnectedness came about in

1990 when Georges Perec’s longtime companion Catherine Binet released a “chef d’œuvre de dissection de textes,”8 a documentary made for television entitled Un film sur

Georges Perec and composed of two parts: “Te souviens-tu de Gaspard Winckler?” and

“Vous souvenez-vous de Gaspard Winckler?”9 Even more significant than the eerie title

(which seems to be calling out both to the reader and to Perec himself as the author of Je me souviens (1978), published the same year as La Vie mode d’emploi) is the description of the film as a dissection of texts (appearing under the aegis of Winckler). In this project, it is the putting together (in an untimely communion) of disparate texts, of disparate words written by Perec, which reminds us how Winckler himself is but a dissection of other texts, a composite-character constantly reappearing (as if for the first time) in different works.

8 Marina Vlady, C’était Catherine B. (Paris: Fayard, 2013), 55.

9 Vlady describes the shooting of the film in this way: “Le tournage se passe dans le bonheur du travail bien fait. Chacun apporte son style à la lecture des bribes choisies par une Catherine très stricte, très directive quant à l’exactitude des mots, des silences, des reprises sur les mouvements de caméra, laquelle s’approche quelquefois en si gros plan qu’on ne voit à l’écran que les yeux de l’interprète. Derrière nous, un aquarium où des poissons bizarres, des mini-monstres marins, évoluent, soulignant par leurs volte-face tantôt gracieuses, tantôt violentes le sens et le style du texte.” Vlady, C’était Catherine B., 56. For a description of the actors involved and the film’s reception, see pages 55-57, 61. The only existing copies of the film are on VHS tapes housed in a few French libraries and not available in the United States.

The Many Articulations of Gaspard Winckler

Who is Gaspard Winckler? Is he the young child who disappeared after a shipwreck or the deserter who took his name in W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975)? Is he the forger of Gaspard pas mort, or of Le Condottière (2012), or the puzzle maker in La

Vie mode d’emploi? Each Gaspard is made greater (multiplied) by the force of another

Gaspard: Gaspard times Gaspard times Gaspard times Gaspard. This endless chain goes beyond Perec, for Gaspard Winckler has captivated the imagination of others, like novelist Martin Winckler, who lifted his nom de plume from La Vie mode d’emploi and as such nests himself within Perec’s lineage. M. Winckler begins the story of his father’s life, “Ange, sa vie mode d’emploi” with a Perecian inventory;10 he also recounts how he used to listen to Perec on the radio,11 and even confesses that he dedicated his medical school dissertation, “À la mémoire du docteur Bernard Dinteville,” the fictional physician of La Vie mode d’emploi, having wanted Perec to be part of this moment: “[j]’ai depuis longtemps décidé,” he writes, “que Georges Perec, mort le 4 mars 1982 à l’âge de quarante-six ans, serait lui aussi présent à ma soutenance de thèse.”12 But more than on an anecdotal level, his encounter with Gaspard Winckler is telling: in 1978, Marc Zaffran

(who would become Martin Winckler) discovered Perec for the first time through the then recently published book La Vie mode d’emploi found on a bookstore table. “Ce gros livre me dit quelque chose,” he writes, “[j]e tourne autour plusieurs jours de suite sans l’acheter. J’en ai les moyens, mais je n’ose pas. Comme si je n’en étais pas digne. Mais

10 See Martin Winckler, Plumes d’Ange (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2003), 32.

11 Winckler, Plumes d’Ange, 33.

12 Ibid., 450.

tout m’attire.”13 Spoken to, directly addressed by the book, Winckler is called to read. He continues: “Quant au personnage central, Gaspard Winckler, son nom capte immédiatement mon attention. J’ai le sentiment qu’il m’est familier. Peut-être parce que, telle une métaphore de l’écrivain, ce type-là fabrique des puzzles.”14 The mysterious familiarity with Gaspard Winckler and the decision to take his name15 – a gesture that has already happened in W ou le souvenir d’enfance, where the adult Gaspard Winckler takes his name from a child – point to Martin Winckler’s adoption of a Wincklerian scheme.

Indeed, as Claude Burgelin has aptly remarked: “[l]e premier des liens qui rattache un individu à la société où il vit, c’est son nom.”16 Analyzing the way that names are given or withheld on the island W in W ou le souvenir d’enfance, Burgelin points out that “la règle générale est qu’un nom ne s’obtienne que par la lutte et par la victoire,”17 noting the myriad of people who are denied a name in the island’s system. Burgelin continues, “[c]e qui ressort de tout ce système, c’est donc qu’un nom n’est nullement perçu comme une

13 Ibid., 402, emphasis in original.

14 Ibid.

15 When asked by his father’s first wife why he chose the pseudonym Winckler responds: “Je ne sais pas…” Ibid., 513. Gaspard Winckler seems familiar to him and though the book La Vie mode d’emploi triggers this sense of familiarity it does not give him any further indications nor the ability to exactly pinpoint what caused it. In yet another way, Martin Winckler aligns himself with the rest of Perec’s protagonists, who are characterized by deferment, suspension, open-endedness, and often a certain obliviousness.

16 Claude Burgelin, “Engendrement, affiliation, nomination,” in analyses et réflexions sur Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, l’humain et l’inhumain (Paris: ellipses, 1997), 29.

17 Burgelin, “Engendrement, affiliation, nomination,” 29.

donnée sociale immédiate […], mais comme un enjeu.”18 What then are the stakes in

(re)using the name Gaspard Winckler?.

Who (Else) on Earth is Gaspard Winckler?

The first time most readers (i.e. the general public) saw Gaspard Winckler’s name was on November 16, 1969, in the feuilleton entitled “W,” published in La Quinzaine littéraire (number 83), which would later become the (clearly) fictional part of W ou le souvenir d’enfance. The name first appears in a question about identity that is in fact a rhetorical question: “– Vous êtes Gaspard Winckler? me demanda-t-il, mais en fait la phrase était à peine interrogative, c’était plutôt une constatation.”19 The man, Otto

Apfelstahl, who asks the question, already knows who Gaspard Winckler is, or more precisely knows that the name Gaspard Winckler is not Gaspard Winckler the person, but a placeholder, a subject position. His question is not aimed at acquiring a knowledge he does not possess but rather at awakening in his interlocutor a sense of lack, the sense that he is the one missing some information. He thus asks: “– Vous êtes-vous déjà demandé ce qui était advenu de l’individu qui vous a donné votre nom?”20 The chapter ends with a cliffhanger leaving readers as baffled as Winckler, whose answer is: “– Pardon? fis-je sans comprendre.”21

18 Ibid., 30.

19 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 32. Also found in La Quinzaine littéraire 83, November 16, 1969, 29.

20 Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 33.

21 Ibid.

If those reading the feuilleton would have to wait about two weeks (until

December 1, 1969) before some clarification, readers of W ou le souvenir d’enfance are given an autobiographical chapter detailing Perec’s birth – and more importantly his naming – before returning to the matter of Winckler’s own name: “C’est mon père, je crois, qui alla me déclarer à la mairie. Il me donna un unique prénom – Georges – et déclara que j’étais français.”22 The mention of the “unique prénom” undoubtedly refers to the fact that Perec has no middle name, but wedged between two chapters that revolve around a name that is anything but uniquely owned – the name of Gaspard Winckler is a name that is gifted to multiple individuals – it also serves, counter-intuitively perhaps, as a marker of the uncertainty inherent in a name (and we will also see in Modiano how legal identity turns out to be at least in part, fictional).

Given that there are at least two Gaspard Wincklers (in this text) – and that one also possesses another name – it is striking that it is emphasized that Georges is the proprietor of merely one name. Furthermore, this declaration is appended with an endnote found on the next page, and the clarification of the declaration that Georges was French

(but also at the same time signifying that Georges is Georges) is stated another two times in the text. One could assume that the first declaration occurred shortly following the birth: “Je suis né le samedi 7 mars 1936, vers neuf heures du soir, dans une maternité sise

19, rue de l’Atlas à Paris, 19e arrondissement. C’est mon père, je crois qui alla me déclarer à la mairie. Il me donna un unique prénom – Georges – et déclara que j’étais français.”23 But in the endnote Perec clarifies: “[e]n fait, cette déclaration, répondant aux

22 Ibid., 35.

23 Ibid.

dispositions de l’article 3 de la loi du 10 août 1927, fut souscrite par mon père quelques mois plus tard, très exactement le 17 août 1936, devant le juge de paix du 20e arrondissement.”24 Perec is legally declared a citizen (and an individual in the eyes of the

State) months after his birth. We are told once more of the declaration, because Perec has a copy of it he wants the reader to know about, and this declaration, while further proof of his being Georges, a Frenchman, is at the same time also a testament to the existence of Perec’s mother. He writes: “[j]e possède une copie certifiée conforme de cette déclaration, dactylographiée en violet sur une carte de correspondance datée du 23 septembre 1942 et expédiée le lendemain par ma mère à sa belle-sœur Esther, et qui consiste l’ultime témoignage que j’aie de l’existence de ma mère.”25 The declaration of the name is thus three times reiterated, emphasized, and finally used to prove the existence of at least three people: Perec, his father, and his mother.

When we return to the “W” story, the uncertainty surrounding the name Winckler is dealt with in a very circumscribed way, echoing the retelling of Perec’s own naming.

The deserter answers the question in the following way: “–Il n’y a pas qu’une seule personne qui m’ait, comme vous le dites, donné mon nom.”26 Winckler tries to skirt the question27 but in doing so also reveals something about his assumed name – if only

24 Ibid., 36.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 39.

27 The man who asked the question sees Winckler’s statement as a way to avoid revealing what he knows and clarifies his query: “– Je vais donc vous préciser ma question, puisque vous pensez que cela est nécessaire; je ne fais pas allusion à votre père, ni à l’un des membres de votre famille ou de votre entourage dont vous pourriez tenir votre prénom, c’est une coutume, je crois, encore assez répandue; je ne pense pas non plus à l’un de

malgré lui. One can, of course, understand it as a naming that multiple people have contributed to, or also as Winckler’s acknowledgement that he uses several names, but it can also point to the fact that the name Gaspard Winckler is indeed a placeholder and that there are several individuals who have occupied the same space and held that name.

While the deserter thought that the name was a fake, he is told of the story of the deaf- mute eight-year-old child who gave him his name.28 The child’s mother Caecilia

Winckler29 was part of “une organisation d’objecteurs,”30 which provided “passeports, cartes d’identité et tampons authentiques” for people in need of them, such as the deserter himself.31 The chapter ends with the revelation that the ship, with Gaspard Winckler the child, traveling with his mother, on board, was shipwrecked.

When Winckler the deserter learns of the existence of a child whose name he carries, he is suddenly unsure about his own status: “M’appelais-je encore Gaspard

Winckler ? Ou devais-je aller le chercher à l’autre bout du monde ?”32 However, when

Otto Apfelstahl recounts the story of the young Gaspard Winckler, the narrator notes that his words seem to refer to him: “(et sa voix me paraissait étonnamment proche, et le

ceux qui, il y a cinq ans, vous ont aidé à acquérir votre actuelle identité, mais, bel et bien, à celui dont vous portez le nom.” Ibid., 39.

28 Ibid., 40.

29 Note that the name Perec’s mother goes by is Cécile: “Cyrla Schulevitz, ma mère, dont j’appris, les rares fois où j’entendis parler d’elle, qu’on l’appelait plus communément Cécile.” Ibid., 49.

30 Ibid., 15.

31 Ibid., 41.

32 Ibid., 67.

moindre de ses mots m’atteignait comme s’il m’avait parlé de moi).”33 Gaspard Winckler the deserter is then given the strange mission to look for his namesake: “je voudrais que vous partiez là-bas et que vous retrouviez Gaspard Winckler. […] il y avait un sixième nom sur la liste des passagers, celui d’un enfant d’une dizaine d’années, Gaspard

Winckler, et ils ne retrouvèrent pas son corps.”34 Winckler the deserter needs to find the one whose name he took, he needs to find someone whose body was not found, in other words: he needs to find a ghost.

Given some more information as to the circumstances of the last days of the ship’s voyage,35 Winckler hazards two possibilities: “– Ils ont fait demi-tour pour partir à sa recherche, cela peut vouloir dire que l’enfant s’était enfui, je ne dis pas le contraire, mais cela peut vouloir dire aussi qu’ils l’avaient abandonné et qu’ensuite ils s’en étaient repentis.”36 Michel Bernier identifies a difference between Winckler the adult, the usurper, and Winckler the child based on one’s ability to narrate himself and the other’s silence: “Il dialogue longuement et prouve par là sa différence par rapport à l’enfant dont il porte le nom, enfant enfermé dans son silence”37 One is reminded of the etymological weight of the word for child, infans, meaning the one who cannot speak – and this child named Gaspard is precisely unable to speak, to narrate himself – and perhaps in such a

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., 69.

35 He is told that the commander of the boat did not write down the ship’s last position on the logbook, which means a terrible thing must have prevented him from doing so.

36 Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 86.

37 Michel Bernier, “L’écriture, mémoire de l’inhumain,” in analyses et réflexions sur Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, l’humain et l’inhumain (Paris: ellipses, 1997), 16.

way to be found. Indeed, Otto Apfelstahl, who is charging Gaspard the adult with the mission, has himself searched for both Wincklers and tells him: “[v]ous étiez beaucoup plus facile à retrouver que l’autre. Il n’y a que vingt-cinq consulats helvétiques dans toute l’Allemagne….”38 To which Winckler responds “– Et plus de mille îlots dans la Terre de

Feu, ajoutai-je comme pour moi-même.”39 The sentence that closes the first part of W ou le souvenir d’enfance indicates that Winckler’s search will be solitary: “Je me tus. Un bref instant, j’eus envie de demander à Otto Apfelstahl s’il croyait que j’aurais plus de chance que les garde-côtes. Mais c’était une question à laquelle, désormais, je pouvais seul répondre….”40 Before the central ellipsis of the book, there is the ellipsis of the final sentence of the first part, the question that only Winckler can answer: figuring out whether the child Gaspard is indeed “pas mort.”41 The search for Gaspard Winckler begins and ends with an ellipsis, for we are left hanging, never knowing what the search may have yielded.42

Haunted by the mystery of this missing child, the reader embarks on the second part of the journey, expecting at every turn to find Gaspard on the island “W” (whose inner workings are depicted in part two), but to no avail: Gaspard Winckler the child will

38 Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 87.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Perec explains that Gaspard pas mort is one of the working titles of what would become Le Condottière. Ibid., 146.

42 In the issues 86 (final sentence of part one in W ou le souvenir d’enfance) and 87 (beginning of part two in W ou le souvenir d’enfance) of La Quinzaine littéraire, neither ellipsis appears. See Perec, “W,” La Quinzaine littéraire 86, 1 January 1970, 29 and Perec, “W,” La Quinzaine littéraire 87, January 16, 1970, 28.

not be found in this text. Furthermore, Gaspard Winckler the deserter also disappears as the first-person narrator. Readers had been warned in the very first chapter of W ou le souvenir d’enfance that Gaspard Winckler, the narrator, would retell what he had seen in a very distinctive manner: “je voudrais pour les relater, adopter le ton froid et serein de l’ethnologue.”43 We may have forgotten, thrilled by the enigma of the false name, the missing child, the shipwreck, that the first part of the text is only given to follow the genre of ethnography: “Néanmoins, pour satisfaire à une règle quasi générale, et que, du reste, je ne discute pas, je donnerai maintenant, le plus brièvement possible, quelques indications sur mon existence et, plus précisément, sur les circonstances qui décidèrent de mon voyage.”44 The second part of the story “W” is indeed told in an impersonal third person, in a cold and scientific tone. Hence the question, what happened to the two

Gaspard Wincklers?

When “W” ran as a serial in La Quinzaine littéraire, before each installment Perec would provide a short summary of what had happened previously. The summary that precedes what in W ou le souvenir d’enfance inaugurates the second part of the book

(following literature’s perhaps most famous ellipsis45) reads as follows: “Résumé des

43 Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 14.

44 Ibid., 15.

45 The ellipsis has fascinated critics and been interpreted a myriad of ways: “le livre se divise en deux parties séparées par des points de suspension entre parenthèses (…) qui marquent, plus que l’ellipse du récit et de l’écriture entre les chapitres XI et XII, la fracture indicible de l’enfant séparé à jamais de sa mère en 1941 ou 1942, séparation qui entraîna la perte de tous ses souvenirs d’enfance.” Bernier, “L’écriture, mémoire de l’inhumain,” 6. Ross Chambers calls it “an eloquent silence.” Ross Chambers, “A Poetics of Quandary. Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance and the Figure of Assemblage,” French Forum 31, no. 2, (Spring 2006): 68. While Warren Motte considers it: “[t]he most eloquent site of such a memorial … that remains well beyond language – and perhaps beyond thought, too.” Warren Motte, “The Work of Mourning,” in “Pereckonings:

chapitres précédents: Il n’y avait pas de chapitres précédents. Oubliez ce que vous avez lu; c’était une autre histoire, un prologue tout au plus, ou bien un souvenir si lointain que ce qui va venir ne saurait que le submerger. Car c’est maintenant que tout commence, c’est maintenant qu’il part à sa recherche.”46 Perec indeed asks readers to forget.47 Yet he keeps referring to what has happened before. Though readers are told to proceed as if they had not read a single chapter, to brace themselves for the beginning of the story, the possessive determiner “sa” points to an antecedent. Indeed, who or what does Perec mean when he says “sa recherche”? It could refer to the “souvenir” – though the fact that the memory will be submerged makes this very unlikely – it could also possibly refer to

Gaspard Winckler the child. But there is yet another search in W ou le souvenir d’enfance, one that takes place at the very beginning: the journey to W, the reason this testimony is even written down. While the initial reason for the trip is Gaspard

Winckler’s disappearance, the reason behind the narration is what happened on the island

W. Gaspard Winckler, the narrator of the first part, lets the reader know from the start

(first paragraph) that the search for Gaspard Winckler the child was unsuccessful: “cette mission ne fut pas accomplie – mais qui aurait pu la mener à bien?”48 and that he is not

Reading Georges Perec,” ed. Warren Motte and Jean-Jacques Poucel, special issue, Yale French Studies 105 (2004): 62.

46 W, La Quinzaine littéraire 87, January 16, 1970, 28.

47 Incidentally, another text also published in the Quinzaine littéraire takes a related approach to the task of rewriting. Samuel Beckett’s sentence cited as an epigraph: “Tout ce qui précède oublier,” was part of a text “Assez” published in the inaugural volume of La Quinzaine littéraire no. 1, 15 March 1966, 4-5. Karine Germoni and Pascale Sardin remark that in the fifth pre-text, Beckett takes an even more violent route: “Tout ce qui précède détruire.” Karine Germoni and Pascale Sardin, “De ‘Assez’ à ‘Enough’ ou l’androgynie comme figure du bilinguisme beckettien,’ Palimpsestes 21 (2008), http://palimpsestes.revues.org/67.

going to play a part in the story: “je fus témoin, et non acteur. Je ne suis pas le héros de mon histoire.”49 Once the narrator has given the reasons for the journey, we are left hanging story-wise. The ellipsis in the middle of the book, and Perec’s injunction regarding the need to forget remind us that to know more about the fate of the two

Gaspard Winckler characters, we must wait (as it turns out for an infinitely long time).

The only mention of the name Winckler in the second part of W ou le souvenir d’enfance is made in an autobiographical chapter, where Perec indicates his predilection for a painting, which inspired him: “le Portrait d’un homme, dit Le Condottiere [sic] d’Antonello de Messine, qui devint la figure centrale du premier roman à peu près abouti que je parvins à écrire: il s’appela d’abord ‘Gaspard pas mort,’ puis ‘Le Condottiere’

[sic]; dans la version finale le héros, Gaspard Winckler, est un faussaire de génie.”50

While readers are still wondering what happened to the two Wincklers of the first part, a third Winckler appears, one who is also duplicitous (“un faussaire”), but also one who was there before the other two, since he is central to Perec’s first accomplished novel. We must indeed wonder not only what happened to Gaspard Winckler the child who gave his name to the deserter, but also what happened to the one who was carrying the name first: the Gaspard who is not dead.

Claude Burgelin remarks that there is a narrative incoherence between the two parts of the book:

Les deux moitiés du récit de fiction ne forment pas un ensemble cohérent (qu’est devenu l’enfant Gaspard Winckler? comment le narrateur est-il

48 Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 13.

49 Ibid., 14.

50 The painting is also important in Un homme qui dort (1967). Ibid., 146.

parvenu à W ? autant de questions sans réponse) comme si le narratif avec ce qu’il suppose de conclusif et d’abouti avait été brisé ou partiellement détruit, ne laissant place que deux morceaux d’un puzzle qui ne s’emboîtent guère. Il y a à l’œuvre une cassure à l’image de celle que symbolisent les points de suspension de la page 85. Parce qu’elle signifie une éjection de l’Histoire, elle donne à voir la brisure même de toute possibilité de faire récit – ou, en tout cas, de faire un récit qui obéisse aux règles usuelles de cohérence narrative.”51

Burgelin evokes the image of an unsolvable puzzle, which links W ou le souvenir d’enfance to La Vie mode d’emploi. The latter novel is not only a how-to manual on life

(in a building in Paris), but it is also an artist’s manifesto, an autotelic endeavor – art for its own sake – even though it amounts to nothing left behind. Yet, through the figure of

Winckler, as I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the project remains ever unfinished, suspended.

The Last Piece of the Puzzle

Before turning to the Gaspard Winckler of Le Condottière, we must first consider

Gaspard Winckler, the puzzle maker of La Vie mode d’emploi. When the novel opens, on

June 23, 1975, Gaspard Winckler has been dead for almost two years.52 His wife

Marguerite died in 1943 giving birth to a stillborn child53 and Winckler left no family behind save a very distant cousin.54 Yet, years after his death, he is central to the story:

51 Burgelin, “Engendrement, affiliation, nomination,” 25.

52 “Il y a presque deux ans que Gaspard Winckler est mort.” Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi, 28. The obituary gives the exact date: “Gaspard Winckler / décédé à Paris le 29 octobre 1973 dans sa 63e année / la levée de corps aura lieu le 3 novembre 1973.” Ibid., 148.

53 Ibid., 301.

54 Ibid., 23.

“Gaspard Winckler est mort, mais la longue vengeance qu’il a si patiemment, si minutieusement ourdie, n’a pas encore fini de s’assouvir.”55 Much like a ghost, Winckler keeps on returning, seeking to settle a score. But what score and why?

The first chapter of La Vie mode d’emploi takes place in the staircase of the building, an in-between space, a site of passage frequented by all, the living but also the dead: “[d]ans les escaliers passent les ombres furtives de tous ceux qui furent là un jour.”56 The stairs are a mode of communication, between levels of the building but also between inhabitants, past, present, and future. There is also another site of passage in which communication occurs between people who need not be face to face, a passage in which one must essentially follow a ghost. In the preamble to La Vie mode d’emploi – itself a gigantic puzzle – a short explanation is given regarding the art of making puzzles:

“chaque geste que fait le poseur de puzzle, le faiseur de puzzle l’a fait avant lui; chaque pièce qu’il prend et reprend, qu’il examine, qu’il caresse, chaque combinaison qu’il essaye et essaye encore, chaque tâtonnement, chaque intuition, chaque espoir, chaque découragement, ont été décidés, calculés, étudiés par l’autre.”57 The one who completes the puzzle must follow the path of the one who created the puzzle (and is hence following a ghost), but what is also very interesting is that the creator of the puzzle, the puzzle maker (“faiseur de puzzle”) also happens to follow – yet beforehand – all the possible moves that the puzzle doer (“poseur de puzzle”) might consider, anticipating his steps,

55 Ibid., 24.

56 Ibid., 87.

57 Ibid., 20. This explanation is found again at the beginning of chapter XLIV, in which it is explained how Gaspard Winckler answered the ad taken out by Bartlebooth to find his “faiseur de puzzle,” and how Winckler proceeded to make those puzzles. Ibid., 242.

following him before he even begins the puzzle.58 As such, both creating and completing a puzzle are forms of entering into conversation with someone who is not there yet or someone who has already been there. The description of the art of the puzzle bears a striking resemblance to the relationship between author and reader. Every bend in the road has been thought through in anticipation of someone who will one day follow. When

Perec said that of all the characters of La Vie mode d’emploi, his favorite was Winckler, it is precisely because he identifies with this relationship to the creation of a work: “[i]l y en a un [personnage] toutefois que j’aime plus que les autres, Winckler, l’artisan qui fabrique les puzzles. […] C’est l’artisan, c’est-à-dire qu’il est un peu comme moi. C’est lui qui fabrique les puzzles, comme moi je fabriquais le livre.”59

In Bartlebooth and Winckler’s case, this conversation is particular since both parties are known to one another: when Winckler created the puzzles, he had Bartlebooth in mind, when Bartlebooth was trying to reconstruct the puzzle, he knew he was following in Winckler’s footsteps. Winckler’s vengeance is thus very personal and carefully planned. We are told in the explanation of the art of the puzzle that on the path to completion, the ambushes are premeditated: “au lieu de laisser le hasard brouiller les pistes, il entend lui substituer la ruse, le piège, l’illusion: d’une façon préméditée, tous les

éléments figurant sur l’image à reconstruire […] serviront de départ à une information trompeuse: l’espace organisé, cohérent, structuré, signifiant du tableau sera découpé non

58 This refers of course to puzzles created by hand and not machine-cut ones: “les puzzles sont fabriqués à la machine et leur découpage n’obéit à aucune nécessité: une presse coupante réglée selon un dessin immuable tranche les plaques de carton d’une façon toujours identique.” Ibid., 18.

59 Cited by Paul Schwartz, Georges Perec: Traces of his Passage (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1988), 90.

seulement en éléments inertes, amorphes, pauvres de signification et d’information, mais en éléments falsifiés, porteurs d’informations fausses.”60 Each element of the puzzle is both a piece of potentially false information or an accurate one, but it is foremost one which actively communicates. There is a back and forth between maker and doer, but despite all the tricks61 that Winckler uses, and the strategies that Bartlebooth employs, there is only one thing which seems to work: waiting. In a very characteristic Perecian way – like Valène in front of his canvas,62 like Perec in W ou le souvenir d’enfance – it is waiting that gives way to (re)creation and that enables Bartlebooth to complete the puzzle laid out front of him. This next passage describes in vivid details what happens following the wait:

Plus souvent, heureusement, au terme de ces heures d’attente, après être passé par tous les degrés de l’anxiété et de l’exaspération contrôlées, Bartlebooth atteignait une sorte d’état second, une stase, une espèce d’hébétude tout asiatique, peut-être analogue à celle que recherche le tireur à l’arc: un oubli profond du corps et du but à atteindre, un esprit vide, parfaitement vide, ouvert, disponible, une attention intacte mais flottant librement au-dessus des vicissitudes de l’existence, des contingences du puzzle et des embûches de l’artisan. Dans ces instants-là Bartlebooth voyait sans les regarder les fines découpes de bois s’encastrer très exactement les unes dans les autres et pouvait, prenant deux pièces auxquelles il n’avait jamais prêté attention ou dont il avait peut-être juré pendant des heures qu’elles ne pouvaient matériellement pas se réunir, les assembler d’un geste.63

60 Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi, 241.

61 They are laid out in details in chapter LXX.

62 Though Valène never completes his project, Perec completes it in his stead when he writes La Vie mode d’emploi.

63 Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi, 404, my emphasis.

Following this suspenseful wait, Bartlebooth is said to enter an altered state, one in which he is absent to himself, he is almost described as a ghost:64 an empty spirit, a floating attention, detached from the body (this is also how Marie Darrieussecq and Hélène

Cixous envisage the moment of writing). While the path of making and doing the puzzle involve a spectral communication, the solving of it requires that the doer become a ghost.

Indeed, when Bartelbooth comes out of this state he regains bodily mass and is bound again to patiently wait: “[t]rès vite Bartlebooth redevenait comme un sac de sable, … attendant pendant des heures sans comprendre ce qu’il attendait.”65 Once again we encounter this suspenseful wait for something that is yet unknown but nonetheless, in the end, productive.

This game of waiting, however, takes an especially tragic turn when Bartlebooth begins to lose his sight, which causes the delay of the reconstruction of the puzzles.66

Following Winckler, some twenty years behind, as Bartlebooth is completing puzzle number 439 (out of 500), he dies, faced with a peculiar enigma and holding the last piece of the puzzle in his hand: “Assis devant son puzzle, Bartlebooth vient de mourir. Sur le drap de la table, quelque part dans le ciel crépusculaire du quatre cent trente-neuvième puzzle, le trou noir de la seule pièce non encore posée dessine la silhouette presque parfaite d’un X. Mais la pièce que le mort tient entre ses doigts a la forme, depuis longtemps prévisible dans son ironie même, d’un W.”67 The vengeance the readers were

64 In a ghostly clin d’œil to Hamlet we read: “Une fois il resta assis 62 heures d’affilée … devant un puzzle inachevé qui représentait la grève d’Elseneur.” Ibid., 405.

65 Ibid., 404.

66 Ibid., 463.

67 Ibid., 578.

warned about at the beginning of the book finally takes place some 570 pages later, but why “W”? Could it be W for Winckler? Frédéric Yvan has noted that Bartlebooth’s death follows closely the publication of W ou le souvenir d’enfance in May 1975,68 reminding us of the island “W,” of the other Gaspard Winckler whose fate is unknown.69

When Gaspard Winckler finished creating the five hundred puzzles as he was to do, he had to take up other projects: first, he started making wooden toys, then puzzle- like rings called “anneaux du Diable.”70 Finally, Winckler dedicated himself to making convex mirrors or “miroirs de sorcières.”71 Yet, despite their ominous names, the only real “objet magique,” as Isabelle Dangy points out, was “le puzzle qui tue Bartlebooth.”72

Gaspard Winckler gets his vengeance not only after a long wait but only as a ghost

(having been dead for the entirety of the novel). If one wonders as to the reason for the

68 “La publication, en mai 1975, de W apparaît d’ailleurs signifier un point d’achèvement du travail analytique: Perec décide de mettre fin à son analyse avec Pontalis un mois plus tard; la même année et le même mois que la mort de Bartlebooth.” Frédéric Yvan, “Figure(s) de l’analyste chez Perec,” Savoirs et clinique 6 (2005), www.cairn.info/revue- savoirs-et-cliniques-2005-1-page-141.htm. According to Perec’s biographer David Bellos, on the same day of Bartlebooth’s death (June 23, 1975), Perec and Catherine Binet started their relationship: “Don’t you see, Perec later explained to Catherine, ‘it’s when the old man died.’” David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill, 1993), 566, emphasis in original.

69 In his youth, the puzzle maker Gaspard Winckler sculpted a wooden buffet decorated with scenes of Jules Verne’s L’Île mystérieuse and its “naufragés de l’espace,” an interesting counterpart to one Gaspard Winckler’s shipwreck and the other’s voyage to the mysterious island “W” in W ou le souvenir d’enfance. Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi, 50.

70 Ibid., 52.

71 Ibid., 53.

72 Isabelle Dangy, “Le Mystère du Personnage dans La Vie mode d’emploi,” in Écrire l’énigme, eds. Christelle Reggiani and Bernard Magné (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), 94.

vengeance, La Vie mode d’emploi is mum, never explaining the gesture, leaving us hanging (much like in W ou le souvenir d’enfance), and forced to infer what motivates

Winckler. In the preface to Le Condottière, Claude Burgelin returns to La Vie mode d’emploi and proposes a reading of Winckler’s decision: “[v]engeance du serviteur méprisé, de l’artisan humilié de voir la perfection de ce travail ne servir qu’à une œuvre de mort (la destruction des images reconstituées).”73 It is indeed when looking back (or forward) to Le Condottière that Burgelin’s reading is particularly resonant, for it draws a parallel to yet another Gaspard Winckler, one who may have had the answer all along.

Unfinished Business

Like some of his protagonists, Perec had a few unfinished projects of his own: early texts like Les Amis parfaits and La suie, the inventory of all the beds he had slept in

(Lieux où j’ai dormi), or the twelve places in Paris he wanted to chronicle over twelve years (Les Lieux).74 The open-endedness of a literary project was important to him, in his

1979 conversation with Jean-Marie Le Sidaner, Perec likens his oeuvre to an unfinished puzzle: “Il faut encore une fois partir de l’image du puzzle ou, si l’on préfère, l’image d’un livre inachevé, d’une ‘œuvre’ inachevée à l’intérieur d’une littérature jamais achevée. Chacun de mes livres est pour moi l’élément d’un ensemble; je ne peux pas

73 See Claude Burgelin, “Préface,” in Le Condottière (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2012), 19. Burgelin already offered a similar reading in Les parties de dominos chez Monsieur Lefèvre: Perec avec Freud, Perec contre Freud (Strasbourg: Circé, 1996), 40.

74 Concerning Les amis parfaits and La suie, see Letter to Jacques Lederer (n˚8) in August 1957 in “Cher, très cher, admirable et charmant ami…” Correspondance Georges Perec – Jacques Lederer (1956-1961). Regarding Lieux où j’ai dormi, see Georges Perec, “La chambre” in Espèces d’espaces (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1974), 31- 37. Regarding Les Lieux, see W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 72-73, Espèce d’espaces, 76- 77, and Lejeune, La mémoire et l’oblique.

définir l’ensemble, puisqu’il est par définition projet inachevable […] je sais seulement qu’il s’inscrit lui-même dans un ensemble beaucoup plus vaste qui serait l’ensemble des livres dont la lecture a déclenché et nourri mon désir d’écrire.”75 Perec’s oeuvre hence repeatedly enacts a suspenseful wait for an unfinishable project: whether through Valène or Bartlebooth or through Jérôme and Sylvie, the protagonists of Perec’s first published novel Les Choses (1965), whose dream apartment – described in a wishful conditional in the first chapter of the novel – never becomes reality, or through the final sentence addressed to the protagonist (or the reader) of Un homme qui dort: “Tu as peur, tu attends. Tu attends, place Clichy, que la pluie cesse de tomber,”76 or in the short companion essay to the documentary Ellis Island (1995), which can be summarized in two open-ended words: “ces deux mots mous, irrepérables, instables et fuyants, qui se renvoient sans cesse leurs lumières tremblotantes, et qui s’appellent l’errance et l’espoir.”77

Now, for Perec time spent waiting is particularly fruitful. Bartlebooth’s death prevents him from destroying his paintings and Valène’s death becomes the last memorialized death of La Vie mode d’emploi. Though the painter’s project (his

“mausolée grotesque”78) never comes to fruition as a painting, it does as the book that is

La Vie mode d’emploi. There is another project, another wait that Perec, like Valène, would never see fulfilled – the publication of his first “roman à peu près abouti,”

75 Jean-Marie Le Sidaner, “Entretien avec Georges Perec,” in Georges Perec (Paris: éditions inculte, 2005): 25-26.

76 Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1967), 163.

77 Georges Perec, Ellis Island (Paris, P.O.L éditeur, 1995), 64.

78 Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi, 164.

Gaspard pas mort, finished in 1960 but published posthumously,79 thirty years after the author’s death in 1982, as Le Condottière. When Eric Beck Rubin points out that

“[a]lthough Perec shelved Le Condottiere [sic], its animating spirit lived on,”80 the spirit he mentions is not Gaspard (Rubin speaks symbolically in terms of the book’s inner drive). However, it is literally what happens: in this long wait for the reappearance of Le

Condottière, we realize that its main character (Gaspard) has for years been weaving in and out of other texts like a ghost – having been there all along.

“Lazare Winckler, hein?”

In early 2012, Perec’s first finished novel, Le Condottière, is finally published some fifty years after its inception. The novel had been rejected a few times,81 and – much like the serial “W” some ten years later82 – was deemed a failure. Claude Burgelin, who read the 1960 version found the text confusing and admits to not having understood

79 Another of Perec’s early manuscripts was found and has been housed at the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine – Abbaye d’Ardenne). It was published this year. See L’Attentat de Sarajevo (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2016).

80 Eric Beck Rubin, “Georges Perec, Lost and Found in the Void: The Memoirs of an Indirect Witness,” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 119.

81 See Burgelin, Preface to Le Condottière, by Georges Perec (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2012), 10-14.

82 See Philippe Lejeune, “The Genetic Study of Autobiographical Texts,” Biography 14, no. 1 (1991): 8-9; and Philippe Lejeune, La Mémoire et l’oblique: Georges Perec autobiographe (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 1991), 92-138. The serialized fictional story “W” was deemed a failure and confused readers who expected something else from the acclaimed author of La Disparition (1969). In La mémoire et l’oblique, Philippe Lejeune retraces the reworking of the story and notes that after the failure of “W,” Perec planned to incorporate it in what he hoped would be a three part narrative: the fictional “W”, autobiographical chapters, and an explanation of the two called at times “intertexte” or “critique.” Lejeune, La mémoire et l’oblique, 112. The text we read today was published with two parts only: the fictional “W” interlaced with an autobiographical part.

the point of the novel: “le livre me paraissant bel et bien loupé, le refus des éditeurs n’avait rien de mystérieux.”83 Fifty years later, when Burgelin re-reads the text, with the hindsight of Perec’s oeuvre, suddenly everything makes sense; having seen the tree, he finally understands how it came to be: “Maintenant qu’on connaît toute l’œuvre de

Georges Perec, l’arbre et ses branches, voir désenfouies les racines, entrevoir où elles plongent, comment elles s’enchevêtrent, cela devient très excitant. On a là un matériau narratif à la fois brut et sophistiqué, opaque et illuminant.”84 In Le Condottière one finds echoes of La vie mode d’emploi, Un homme qui dort, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, Les

Choses, and many other intertextual gems.85 It also happens that one also finds a very detailed answer to the question of vengeance already alluded to in La Vie mode d’emploi.

In Le Condottière, Gaspard Winckler is no longer a supporting character, he has the lead role, and we are privy to his innermost thoughts, his musings, and the mulling over his murderous gesture. The plot of Le Condottière is rather simple: Gaspard Winckler, an exceptionally talented forger – in his opinion, “le plus grand faussaire du monde”86 – is commissioned by a man named Anatole Madera to create a forged painting that could sell for hundred-fifty million francs.87 Winckler chooses to forge an Antonello da Messina and decides, for this very specific commission, to work differently. Instead of creating a

83 Burgelin, Le Condottière, 9. See also Bellos, A Life in Words, 229.

84 Burgelin, Le Condottière, 9.

85 For example, one finds in Le Condottière the narration in the second person of Un homme qui dort, the cataloguing of Les choses and La Vie mode d’emploi, paintings also found in Un cabinet d’amateur, and of course Gaspard Winckler.

86 Georges Perec, Le Condottière (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2012), 117.

87 Perec, Le Condottière, 120.

painting – Winckler calls it a puzzle – out of the elements of three or four existing paintings88 – as he used to do – he wants to paint a new Portrait of a Man (The

Condottiero), “en partant du Condottière, un autre Condottière, différent, au même niveau.”89 When he finds himself unable to complete his project, unable to create something entirely of his own, Winckler murders Madera and makes his way to (what was then) Yugoslavia.90

Having escaped through a tunnel dug from his painting laboratory, Winckler finds shelter with Streten, “the Serbian painter who was first introduced in L’Attentat de

Sarajevo.”91 In a series of dialogues with his counterpart, Winckler retells the steps that led him to become a forger and to murder Madera, meditating on his place in the world, and his relationship to art. What is particularly striking is the self-awareness of Winckler when he considers his role as a forger, which he likens to being a ghost: “ça ne veut rien dire, vivre, quand on est faussaire. Ça veut dire vivre avec les morts, ça veut dire être mort, ça veut dire connaître les morts, ça veut dire être n’importe qui, Vermeer, Chardin.

Ça veut dire passer un jour, un mois, un an à vivre dans la peau d’un Italien de la

Renaissance ou d’un Français de la troisième République.”92 Gaspard Winckler, by

88 Ibid., 123.

89 Ibid., 124.

90 Ibid., 113.

91 Bellos, A Life in Words, 224. For Bellos, the fact that Streten is a character in another novel could mean that Perec wanted a connection between the two novels or, “it is also possible that the reuse of the name meant that the old Sarajevo plot had been killed off and was now buried.” Ibid., 224. Streten would thus rise from a dead and buried plot, as another ghost in Perec’s cupboard.

92 Perec, Le Condottière, 142.

spending his life channeling others, by being in someone else’s body like a parasite, has the feeling of having lost himself: “[m]ais pendant six mois, nuit et jour, pendant la veille et pendant le sommeil, on s’est appelé Hans Memling […] on s’est mis à sa place, on a refait le chemin en sens inverse… Gaspard Winckler, connais pas. Pendant douze ans, ça a été la même chose.”93 Winckler’s plight is palpable, his melancholy fills page after page, his voice trails off in one ellipsis after another, hinting at the suspenseful wait for what will come next – except this “next” is only a repetition of the mystery of Gaspard, retold in different forms, in different novels. In a particularly moving litany, Winckler lists the people he has been, lamenting his fate:

Gaspard faussaire. Gaspard Theotokopoulos dit El Greco. Gaspard de Messina. Gaspard Solario, Gaspard Bellini, Gaspard Ghirlandaio. Gaspard de Goya y Lucientes. Gaspard Botticelli. Gaspard Chardin. Gaspard Cranach le Vieux. Gaspard Holbein, Gaspard Memling, Gaspard Metsys. Gaspard Maître de Flemalle. Gaspard Vivarini, Gaspard anonyme de l’École française, Gaspard Corot, Gaspard Van Gogh, Gaspard Raphael Sanzio. Gaspard de Toulouse-Lautrec. Gaspard de Puccio dit Pisanello… Gaspard faussaire. L’orfèvre-esclave. Gaspard faussaire. Pourquoi faussaire ? Comment faussaire ? Depuis quand faussaire ? Il n’avait pas toujours été faussaire…94

But Gaspard is wrong, he has always been – and will always be – someone else: whether as a child or a deserter in W ou le souvenir d’enfance or as the puzzle maker in La Vie mode d’emploi. Gaspard Winckler is, I have said it before, a placeholder, a subject position, a ghost. Tellingly, when he lists all these artists whom he has inhabited, he keeps repeating his own name (albeit partially): Gaspard, Gaspard, Gaspard. Surely, one can see a loss of identity in this list, but more importantly, in a certain way, it is an

93 Ibid., 143.

94 Ibid., 79-80

identity infinitely multiplied: all these figures are him, he is the ghost of all ghosts. When he reflects upon his life he reveals that he follows in the steps of others, trying to recreate gestures they have made before him:

Je vivais dans un monde faux, […] je vivais dans un monde insensé. Je passais ma vie dans des musées et dans des ateliers. Je passais ma vie à la recherche exacte de gestes que d’autres avaient faits avant moi, mieux que moi, dans l’illusion toujours récompensée d’une similitude à atteindre. Comprends-moi. Je n’existais pas. Gaspard Winckler, ça ne voulait rien dire. Aucune police du monde ne me recherchait, aucun être au monde ne savait qui j’étais. […] J’étais le plus grand faussaire du monde, parce que personne ne savait que j’étais faussaire…95

Winckler is the ultimate forger because he is hiding in plain sight; no one knows that he exists. Yet, it is this very invisibility that enables him, through the act of re-creating, to create. The issue at hand is not whether or not Winckler was experiencing feelings of guilt (he wasn’t): “Entre faire des faux Chardin et faire des vrais Vieira da Silva, je préfère encore faire des faux Chardin… Si j’avais été un vrai peintre, je ne crois pas que j’aurais fait quoi que ce soit qui fût susceptible d’être accepté,”96 it is rather that he was feeling suffocated with being someone else, with being a ghost.

To the question asking him who he is, Winckler responds: “[j]e ne suis personne, je suis n’importe qui.”97 He has no past, since no one knows what he has done, there is no painting of which one could say: “this is a Winckler.” In killing Madera, he killed himself, he ended his life as a forger; he is now “[s]ans passé et sans histoire… Mort et ressuscité… Lazare Winckler, hein? Mais cela ne sert à rien, cela non plus ne mène nulle

95 Ibid., 117, my emphasis.

96 Ibid., 138.

97 Ibid., 144.

part….”98 Even though, as Burgelin remarks, Gaspard finds himself in a similar situation as Hamlet and chooses a different path, his freedom comes at a price: “Hamlet-Gaspard ici se sent libéré d’avoir tranché dans le vif à l’inverse du prince de Danemark tout à ses inhibitions et procrastinations.”99 Gaspard not only kills his father-figure when he murders Madera, he also kills his mother making himself twice an orphan.100 We will recall how Freud explained the word for wood, ‘madeira’ in Portuguese, to show that it shares similarities with the word for “mother.”101 It is plausible that Perec, who underwent analysis with three different psychoanalysts,102 was aware of this when he chose the name Madera. In killing Madera, he commits both a patricide and a matricide.

It is the complete emancipation of Gaspard Winckler, who would be finally free, free from a world in which he is no one, nothing but a ghost.

Little does Gaspard Winckler know that he will remain the ghost that haunts the rest of Perec’s oeuvre, uncannily reappearing at every turn. Le Condottière marks the first

98 Ibid., 194.

99 Burgelin, Le Condottière, 19.

100 In 1939, Gaspard Winckler’s parents sent him to Switzerland because of the war; they then immigrated to the United States. When in 1945 they sent for him, he refused to follow them and at the time of the events in Le Condottière it has been fourteen years since he has written to them. He is already an orphan by choice. Ibid., 132-133.

101 “Now there is an island in the Atlantic named ‘Madeira’. This name was given to it by the Portuguese when they discovered it, because at that time it was covered all over with woods. For in the Portuguese language ‘madeira’ means ‘wood’. You will notice, however, that ‘madeira’ is only a slightly modified form of the Latin word ‘materia’, which once more means ‘material’ in general. But ‘materia’ is derived from ‘mater’, ‘mother’: the material out of which anything is made is, as it were, a mother to it. This ancient view of the thing survives, therefore, in the symbolic use of wood for ‘woman’ or ‘mother’.” Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1966), 197.

102 See Yvan, “Figure(s) de l’analyste chez Perec.”

and the last time that Winckler appears (at this point in time), but instead of finally elucidating the mystery that surrounds him in every text, Le Condottière emphasizes and cements his ghostliness. Gaspard Winckler is no one and he is everyone: the child, the deserter, the puzzle maker, and even Perec himself. For Bellos, “[t]he first Gaspard

Winckler is a false orphan; because he is merely a forger, he is also a false image of

Georges Perec. Winckler is a figure of Perec’s anxiety, not of his ambition,”103 but I would like to suggest that these two are not incompatible, but must rather be held together. In its untimeliness, Le Condottière figures as the two bookends of Perec’s oeuvre: finally, at long last discovered though it has been there all along. Gaspard

Winckler may be a figure of Perec’s creation anxiety, but he also certainly embodies a tremendous literary ambition that already in 1960 foresaw Gaspard Winckler’s triumphant return.

Perec Planned it All

In 1979, Perec published a short story entitled “Le Voyage d’hiver,” which recounted the story and research of one Vincent Degraël.104 This young professor discovered that the most acclaimed late 19th-century French poets had plagiarized their entire oeuvre from Hugo Vernier’s novel Le Voyage d’hiver. Perec’s story is about

“anticipatory plagiarism” – an Oulipian concept105 – although he does not say it in these

103 Bellos, A Life in Words, 230.

104 Georges Perec / Oulipo, Le Voyage d’hiver & ses suites (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2013).

105 The co-founder of the Oulipo, François le Lionnais, coined this term. See La Littérature potentielle (Créations, Re-créations, Récréations) (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 27.

words.106 Later, Jacques Roubaud and other Oulipians added their own versions to his story, resulting in a fascinating collection entitled Le Voyage d’hiver & ses suites

(2012).107 In the second Post-Scriptum to the collective work, Roubaud writes of Perec’s foresight, his ability to anticipate what would happen – much like in Perec’s description of puzzle making. Roubaud based his own reading of the story on what he thought was a typo (“coquille”) made by the publisher, but after giving it some thought, Roubaud wonders if Perec had not deliberately left something “en attente,” suspended, waiting for something to be read in an indeterminate future:

Et tout à coup, je me dis : la coquille qui, dans l’une des publications de la nouvelle de GP, m’a mis sur la trace du Voyage d’hier, était-ce vraiment une coquille d’imprimeur ? N’était-ce pas plutôt un indice disposé là, ‘pas par hasard’, en attente, par Perec ? Autrement dit, dans l’affaire Vernier, ne vérifie-t-on pas, à nouveau, le fameux apophtegme souvent invoqué dans les réunions de l’Oulipo : Georges y avait pensé108

Is Le Condottière’s reappearance half a century after its inception, another instance of

Perec’s foresight, his decision to make us wait? What are we to make of the following letter to his friend Jacques Lederer: “Le laisse où il est, pour l’instant du moins. Le reprendrai dans dix ans, époque où ça donnera un chef-d’œuvre ou bien attendrai dans ma

106 In his version of the story, however, Jacques Roubaud defines it clearly in these terms: “ce livre était en fait un gigantesque ‘plagiat par anticipation’ de toutes les grandes œuvres poétiques de la fin du XIXe siècle français.” Jacques Roubaud, “Le Voyage d’hier,” in Le Voyage d’hiver & ses suites, 23.

107 For a reading of Jacques Roubaud’s and Marcel Bénabou’s versions of Le Voyage d’hiver and their reading of Perec, see Paula Klein, ‘Le Voyage fantôme’, Acta fabula, vol. 15, n° 9, ‘La bibliothèque des textes fantômes’, Novembre 2014, http://www.fabula.org/revue/document8997.php, retrieved December 8, 2014.

108 (427, emphases in original)

tombe qu’un exégète fidèle le retrouve dans une vieille malle t’ayant appartenu et le publie.”109 Perec was entirely right: “[u]ne fois de plus, Perec a mis dans le mille,” says

Burgelin. Indeed, as he remarks: “cette publication intervient près de trente ans après sa mort, après des retrouvailles du tapuscrit très genre ‘vieille malle’” (7).

Serendipity aside, what remains of importance is that the re-appearance of Le

Condottière very clearly reminds us what has already been taking place through all these years. There is always going to be a ghost who is already there and is waiting to be found: whether Gaspard Winckler the child or the one (could it be Perec?) who carefully planned a vengeance that plays out well beyond the grave. Waiting for the ghost is productive not because the ghost has not arrived yet, it is especially productive because it is already there. While we appear to wait for it, it is waiting for us.

In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud points out that one of the strategies employed by those who are grieving is a mechanism that closely resembles the creation of a ghost. While Freud does not use this word, he points out that during the work of mourning, due to the unbearable loss and to delay facing reality, the person will “prolong the psychic existence of the object.”110 Essentially, he is describing a ghost that is created to fill the void. I do not want to dwell, however, on a psychoanalytical reading of Perec

(which certainly has its place111), but rather emphasize the addition of ghosts, each one

109 Préface Le Condottière, 7. Cited from Lettre à Jacques Lederer, 4/12/1960 in “Cher, très cher, admirable et charmant ami…” Correspondance Georges Perec – Jacques Lederer (1956-1961), 570.

110 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 14, (London” The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1957), 245.

111 See Motte, “Perec and the Work of Mourning”; Magoudi, La Lettre fantôme; Lejeune, La mémoire et l’oblique: Georges Perec autobiographe; Yvan, “Figure(s) de l’analyste

supplementing the other, in a never-ending chain of Gaspards. If we have now found

Gaspard Winckler the forger of Le Condottière, what about Gaspard Winckler the child who has disappeared and who may well be: “pas mort”? In the successive accumulations of Gaspards, the wait that everything hangs on is never over: “Comme si l’écrivain,

‘disparu’, tel Gaspard Winckler, quelque part du côté de la Terre de Feu, se tenait là, tout proche, attendant de nous le signe de reconnaissance qui lui permettra de savoir qui il est.”112

chez Perec.” Also see Burgelin, Les parties de dominos chez Monsieur Lefèvre: Perec avec Freud, Perec contre Freud.

112 Bernard Pingaud, “Ceci n’est pas un puzzle,” in Georges Perec (Paris: éditions inculte, 2005): 21.

51 CHAPTER 2 Literally Fictional: Patrick Modiano’s Spectral Objects

[J]e m’efforce de réaliser un projet d’écriture dans lequel je ne ré-écrirai jamais deux fois le même livre, ou plutôt, dans lequel, ré-écrivant chaque fois le même livre, je l’éclairerai chaque fois d’une lumière nouvelle.

—Georges Perec

Mais tant que les objets continueront de parler à sa place, il aura la certitude d’être vivant.

—Daniel Canty, Wigrum

Introduction

In his Discours à l’Académie Suédoise pronounced on December 7, 2014 in acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Patrick Modiano, having been hailed as “a

Marcel Proust of our time”1 by Peter Englund, the Academy’s Permanent Secretary, amended the comparison by remarking that Proust’s delving into the past – unlike his own – read “comme un tableau vivant,”2 where every little detail is recalled. In his own work, Modiano pointed out, memory functions more elliptically and is less certain of its source: “la mémoire est beaucoup moins sûre d’elle-même et … elle doit lutter sans cesse

1 Alexandra Alter and Dan Bilefsky, “Patrick Modiano, a Modern ‘Proust,’ Is Awarded Nobel in Literature, New York Times, October 9, 2014, http://nyti.ms/1sjGXQA. Modiano’s novels, though well read in France, had hardly been translated (into English) before the announcement.

2 Patrick Modiano, Discours à l’Académie Suédoise (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), 30.

contre l’amnésie et contre l’oubli.”3 By making this distinction, Modiano undeniably recognizes his work as the work of the archive. In Mal d’Archive (1995), pondering

“l’instant d’archivation stricto sensu,” Derrida makes the difference between “la mémoire dite vivante ou spontanée” and “une certaine expérience hypomnésique et prothétique du support technique.”4 I would like to note here, since Derrida speaks about modern technology’s contribution to and possible disruption of the archive, that, in Modiano, the

Internet and its search engines fail to provide useful leads (and sound rather menacing).

This is explicitly addressed and stated for the first time (Modiano’s narrators had lived in what seemed like an Internet-free world) in his latest novel, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier (2014): “Les rares personnes dont il aurait aimé retrouver la trace avaient réussi à échapper à la vigilance de cet appareil. Elles s’étaient glissées à travers les mailles du filet parce qu’elles appartenaient à une autre époque et qu’elles n’étaient pas des enfants de chœur. […] Aucune trace de son père dans l’ordinateur. […] Et quand il tapait sur le clavier une question directe […] l’ordinateur était incapable de répondre, et l’on sentait passer à travers les multiples fils qui reliaient l’appareil à des prises

électriques une certaine hésitation et une certaine gêne. Parfois, vous étiez entraîné sur des fausses pistes.”5 Rather than solving the enigma of various disappearances, modern- technology complicates it and offers no viable leads; as a result, it is the work of fiction,

(the task of imagining a possible narrative) that allows protagonists to move forward.

3 Modiano, Discours à l’Académie Suédoise, 30

4 Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive: Une impression freudienne (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1995), 46.

5 Patrick Modiano, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2014), 73.

Modiano notes that the work of forgetting seems at times to be stronger than the work of memory, “[à] cause de cette couche, de cette masse d’oubli qui recouvre tout, on ne parvient à capter que des fragments du passé, des traces interrompues, des destinées humaines fuyantes et presque insaisissables.”6 Modiano, it is known, approaches time as a palimpsest; it is understood not as a succession of moments in a linear timeline, but rather as an onion that needs to be peeled off, layer by layer to reveal its different states.

We find, throughout his oeuvre, several characters and narrators who act out this preoccupation, most emblematically perhaps the photographer Jansen in Chien de printemps (1993), who strips away layers of posters to bring to light different times in the

Parisian landscape: “[i]l m’avait expliqué qu’il lacérait lui-même les affiches dans les rues pour qu’apparaissent celles que les plus récentes avaient recouvertes. Il décollait leurs lambeaux couche par couche et les photographiait au fur et à mesure avec minutie, jusqu’aux derniers fragments de papier qui subsistaient sur la planche ou la pierre.”7

Throughout the painstakingly surgical task of revealing the palimpsest that is made up of the different Parisian eras, this photographer creates a memorial of the ever-changing cityscape: Jansen thus acts both as an archeologist and as a curator.8 The same certainly holds true of Modiano, who was awarded the Nobel precisely “for the art of memory with

6 Modiano, Discours à l’Académie Suédoise, 30.

7 Patrick Modiano, Chien de printemps (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 36. See also Modiano’s earlier book, Livret de famille (1977), where the narrator engages in the same behavior: “Je décolle les affiches placardées par couches successives depuis cinquante ans pour retrouver les lambeaux des plus anciennes.” Patrick Modiano, Livret de famille (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 179.

8 This is also Derrida’s conclusion: archeology and the archive are closely intertwined (though very distinct from one another, and one should not be substituted for the other). See, Derrida, Mal d’Archive, “Prière d’insérer,” n.p..

which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the [O]ccupation.”9 In his various projects, Modiano claims to be retracing steps and uncovering documents that testify to the difficult and troubled period of the Vichy regime but in writing fiction rather than a historical account, Modiano also starts creating traces himself,10 the nature and textual function of which need to be further explored.

Literal, Historical, Material, and Spectral Traces

Undoubtedly more forcefully following the turning point that critics identify as taking place in Modiano’s fourth novel, Villa Triste (1975),11 it is understood that for the

Nobel laureate memory is closely linked to a geographical anchoring: specific places and streets are carefully written down and revisited, and as such give a sensation of familiarity, even of déjà-vu.12 Modiano himself (acknowledging perhaps the critical topos that he always writes the same book) blatantly asserted in his Nobel lecture the

9 “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 – Press Release,” Nobelprize.org, October 9, 2014, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2014/press.html, emphasis mine.

10 Modiano writes in Dora Bruder (1997) of a young woman who was in a police wagon at the same time as his father. Though this woman is not Dora Bruder, Modiano notes that writing about her allows her trace to be recorded and thus her memory to be part of collective memory: “[s]i je n’étais par là pour l’écrire, il n’y aurait plus aucune trace de la présence de cette inconnue et de celle de mon père dans un panier à salade en février 1942, sur les Champs-Élysées.” Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1999), 65.

11 Maryline Heck and Raphaëlle Guidée, ed. Cahier Modiano (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, collection “Cahiers de L’Herne” 98 (2012): 10.

12 See among others Jean Poucet, Jouy-en-Josas dans l’œuvre de Patrick Modiano (Études et Promotion Ville de Jouy-en-Josas, Musée de l’Ile de France, Sceaux). Régine Robin, “Le Paris toujours déjà perdu de Patrick Modiano,” in Heck and Guidée, ed. Cahier Modiano, 93-100; Luc Mary-Rabine, “Les lieux de Modiano,” in Heck and Guidée, ed. Cahier Modiano, 101-104.

parameters of his writing practice: “chaque nouveau livre, au moment de l’écrire, efface le précédent au point que j’ai l’impression de l’avoir oublié. Je croyais les avoir écrits les uns après les autres de manière discontinue, à coups d’oublis successifs, mais souvent les mêmes visages, les mêmes noms, les mêmes lieux, les mêmes phrases reviennent de l’un à l’autre.”13 Goading critics with his masterful forgetting, Modiano appears to encourage both intertextual readings of his work in order to find what links them and careful attention to details such as faces, names, places, and even sentences, which make up a meticulously orchestrated style that is known as “la petite musique de Modiano.”14

Philippe Azoury and Joseph Ghosn’s article and project for the Nouvel

Observateur, published a day after the announcement that Modiano had won the Nobel

Prize, speak to the appeal of retracing Modiano’s steps in mappable space: “[q]ue la tentation est grande, désormais, de relire Modiano une application Google Map à la main

– au risque d’en briser le charme.”15 A temptation that the authors evidently gave into, as

13 Modiano, Discours à l’Académie Suédoise, 13, emphasis mine.

14 “‘La petite musique de Modiano’… Voilà la ritournelle convenue sur l’écriture bien tempérée de Modiano.” Marie Darrieussecq, “Du plus loin de l’oubli,” in Heck and Guidée, 195. “Mais les variations de la fameuse ‘petite musique’ sont nombreuses.” Heck and Guidée, ed. Cahier Modiano, 9.

15 Philippe Azoury and Joseph Ghosn, “Le Paris de Modiano, version Google Map” Nouvel Observateur, 10 October 2014. http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/romans/20141010.OBS1793/le-paris-de-modiano-version- google-map.html. To take it even further, the preservation society of Jouy-en-Josas, a town where Modiano spent some years during his childhood, imagines “un parcours ‘modianesque’ dans Jouy avec audioguide associé,” as well as the “publication de souvenirs, de documents […] et pourquoi pas, soyons fou!, transformation du café de l’Espérance, en ‘Café de la Jeunesse Perdue’ et en Maison littéraire de Patrick Modiano.” “Patrick Modiano à Jouy,” http://www.jouyenvironnementpatrimoine.fr/patrimoine- 1/patrick-modiano-à-jouy/. Modiano’s stay in Jouy also inspired a local doctor, Jean Poucet, to self-publish a short text with photographs entitled Jouy en Josas dans l’œuvre de Patrick Modiano (1993), excerpts of which appear in the Cahier de l’Herne.

the article proceeds to include a link to Google Maps with marked places, and as a

“bonus” a list of a few books and the respective places that can be found in them, prefaced, tongue-in-cheek, with the following words: “Pour les maniaques de Modiano, dont nous faisons fièrement partie, voici un relevé des rues citées dans ses romans.

Certains livres manquent, certaines rues nous ont sans doute échappé, mais, comme le veut toute liste, le jeu consiste bien à retrouver ce qui manque. Précision : nous avons renoncé à relever les garages et les numéros de téléphone donnés par Modiano. Ce sera pour son prochain Nobel.”16 The authors tellingly underscore the fact that missing items in a list are the very ones that encourage a game of searching (and reveal themselves as perhaps the most interesting ones), while also pointing us to the fact that Modiano’s novels lend themselves to such a taxonomic reading.

Although theirs is certainly a fruitful task (similar to my own approach in this chapter), some dangers stemming from a cartographic literalism in approaching

Modiano’s novels nonetheless remain. Indeed, mapping out the actual streets mentioned in Modiano’s work neglects the possibility that the excessive presence of realist markers begging to be noticed, recorded, and retraced, rather than producing a presence of reality, functions as a specter of the text’s very own fictionality: l’effet de réel, in its excessiveness, ends up becoming what Akane Kawakami has named “l’effet d’irréel.”

Exploring Barthes’s effet de réel in relation to Modiano’s oeuvre, she suggests that recognizable names and places do more than create a link between text and empirical world; she writes that “the general effect is one of unreality, in spite of the precision and

16 Ibid, emphasis mine.

reality of the facts. Or perhaps it is because of the facts.”17 Modiano’s predilection for lists rather than pointing to “reality” does something else entirely and points inward:

“[h]is use of lists may appear to be disarmingly referential, but it soon becomes clear that these are as prone to non-referentiality as narrative, and that they depend on narration in order to be made sense of.”18 What becomes increasingly apparent when reading

Modiano is the fact that it is fiction itself that comes closest to holding the key.

Sneakily, in his opinion, the narrator (a writer) of Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier claims to have smuggled reality into his own novel in order to send a message (recurring scene in Modiano) to a person from his past: “[i]l avait décrit la scène avec exactitude et il savait que ce passage ne correspondait pas au reste du roman. C’était un morceau de réalité qu’il avait fait passer en fraude, l’un de ces messages personnels que l’on lance dans les petites annonces des journaux et qui ne peuvent être déchiffrés que par une seule personne.”19 However, through a mise en abyme, in the fictional novel within the novel that we read, if reality is used as an attempt to communicate with the outside, it nevertheless still points inside, that is, within our narrative: there is no getting out. One should perhaps resist the temptation to look, as it were, only outside.

A comparison of two reviews that appeared in the same journal, shortly following the publication of Voyage de noces (1990), is helpful here and sheds light on yet another pitfall encountered when underestimating the role and function of fictionality (that is, feigning) of/in fiction which is paramount to an engagement with the project of writing.

17 Akane Kawakami, A Self-conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2000), 52, emphasis in original.

18 Kawakami, A Self-conscious Art, 75.

19 Modiano, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, 71.

While Colette Michael rightly points out that lines become blurred, “[i]l est parfois difficile de savoir où commence la fiction dans la fiction,”20 Marie Naudin attempts to close the gaps, to give reasons where none are given, to link the suicide of the protagonist

Ingrid to her family history and to her father’s deportation by the Germans,21 even though it may all have been imagined by the narrator – besides, we are reading the tale of someone who was preparing a book on Ingrid. It is then no wonder that an attempt to read the text in a way that explains what refuses to be explained22 dismantles and undermines the very project of writing fiction, and can thus determine the book to have been much more a failure than a success. Thus Naudin concludes her review with the following statement: “Toutefois son [Modiano] coup de crayon s’avère ici un tant soit peu forcé et le narrateur ne réussit pas lui-même à prendre très au sérieux sa période de déprime.”23 It is, however, the proximity and similarity of the narrator and Ingrid in their perception

(“[c]e sentiment de vide et de remords”24) that are emphasized in the text: “[l]e narrateur

20 Colette Michael, review of Voyage de noces, by Patrick Modiano, The French Review 65, no. 2 (December 1991): 346.

21 She writes, “[e]lle n’a probablement pu se pardonner l’abandon de son père au moment de l’arrestation de celui-ci par les Allemands et n’a pas réussi à éterniser ce long ‘voyage de noces’ et de fainéantise passé sur la Côte d’Azur en compagnie de Rigaud qui la sauve et la perd en l’entraînant avec lui dans une clandestinité explicable après la guerre par des moyens de vivre apparemment peu honnêtes.” Marie Naudin, review of Voyage de noces, by Patrick Modiano, The French Review, 64, no. 4 (March 1991): 725-726.

22 Furthermore, at the beginning of the book, Modiano’s narrator emphasizes through his use of the conditional that the motive of the suicide may forever remain unknown: “Il y avait peut-être à ce geste un motif que j’ignorerais toujours.” Patrick Modiano, Voyage de noces (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 15.

23 Naudin, 726.

24 Modiano, Voyage de noces, 158.

parle en connaissance de cause,”25 the other reviewer writes. Indeed, the narrator shares

Ingrid’s feelings, and the words which frame this realization strikingly suggest that outside of fiction (the circumstances and the décor that was built as its frame) there is nothing, save a trace of affect, an experience shared by an anonymous “vous” [which here takes on the qualities of “on”] of narrator, protagonist, and reader: “Peu importent les circonstances et le décor. Ce sentiment de vide et de remords vous submerge, un jour.

Puis, comme une marée il se retire et disparaît. Mais il finit par revenir en force et elle ne pouvait pas s’en débarrasser. Moi non plus.”26 These last sentences which close the book leave the reader without closure, with perhaps a shared feeling of emptiness and regret; that is, until one opens the next book and the same thing starts all over again. The point is not the frame, the décor, the implausible circumstances that bring the narrators from one point in the narrative to another, it is rather the process itself and the sensation derived from it. Reading Modiano only referentially, whether in conjunction with Google Maps, or by pointing to something that can be explained away by characters’ association with their past distorts a key aspect of his project, which is very much rooted in fiction (in its etymological sense of fingere: shape, form, devise, feign). Keeping in mind this warning,

I aim to show in tracking certain objects in Modiano’s oeuvre, that these traces point inwards (towards narrative) rather than outward (to the world of History and Google

Maps).

25 Michael, 346.

26 Modiano, Voyages de noces, 158, emphasis mine.

That is not to say that History is not a central concern for Modiano: on the contrary, its ramifications and turns permeate his oeuvre.27 Nonetheless, Modiano’s project is not of the order of historical representation, but rather very much concerned with creating (fictional) traces. In Livret de famille, Modiano’s “auto-bio-fiction,”28 the narrator (Patrick) explains his obsession with the Paris of the Occupation (a timeframe to which each of Modiano’s novels alludes and – in a certain way – leads) and reveals a conception of memory that precedes rather than follows the self’s experiences: it is a space in which the narrator becomes a repository for fleeting fragments, and where he shapes them as much as they shape him: “[j]e n’avais que vingt ans, mais ma mémoire précédait ma naissance. J’étais sûr, par exemple, d’avoir vécu dans le Paris de l’Occupation puisque je me souvenais de certains personnages de cette époque et de détails infimes et troublants, de ceux qu’aucun livre d’histoire ne mentionne. Pourtant, j’essayais de lutter contre la pesanteur qui me tirait en arrière, et rêvais de me délivrer d’une mémoire empoisonnée. J’aurais donné tout au monde pour devenir amnésique.”29

The admission that the narrator’s memory precedes his birth has two consequences: there is something that inevitably draws him to the past but, at the same time, this past is not one of History, at least not the History taught in school. What emerges from this different

27 Much has been written about this aspect of Modiano’s work. See for example, Nicolas Xanthos, “Un sentiment de vacance et d’éternité: Dora Bruder contre l’histoire,” MLN 127, no. 4 (2012): 889–908; Joseph Jurt, “La mémoire de la Shoah: Dora Bruder,” in Patrick Modiano, ed. John E. Flower (Amstrerdam: Editions Rodopi, 2007).

28 Johnnie Gratton, “Postmemory, Prememory, Paramemory: The Writing of Patrick Modiano,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 59, no. 1 (2005): 41. According to Gratton, who coins this term, Modiano’s Livret de famille makes use of several distinct genres: “[it] combin[es] the features of a novel, a book of short stories, an autobiography and a family biography” (40).

29 Modiano, Livret de famille, 96.

engagement with History is that, as will be shown, these memories allow for fictional traces to be created, and these can in their turn become a refuge from the world outside of fiction. Pointing inward, to the narrative itself, allows for a way to be remembered without being tracked, it allows for a ghost to appear in the very absence of a body (a ghost of a ghost). Modiano’s is a fictional past, one that possibly only exists for him and therefore poisons his present and his present only, as indicated by his confession that he would have liked to forget this past, to lose these memories which are only his by what one critic would call a certain “paranormal form of mediation.”30

In Johnnie Gratton’s reading, this type of memory is slightly different from

Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory (and its temporal “displacement, its vicariousness and belatedness”31). Postmemory, by now a well-known concept, attempts to situate the experiences and the imaginative investments of generations marked by a trauma they did not personally experience, but which was rather transmitted to them by their parents or grandparents often through the latter’s inability to talk about their trauma.

In her most recent engagement with this question,32 Hirsch notes that what has been transmitted by the generation that has lived through trauma is so powerful that it becomes more than a mere tale or a piece of family history: “these experiences were transmitted to

30 Gratton, “Postmemory, Prememory, Paramemory,” 42.

31 Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 9.

32 Modiano actually makes two brief appearances in Hirsch’s recent book, one as an epigraph (which is actually taken from Modiano’s own epigraph in La Place de l’Étoile [‘histoire juive’], the other in a list that Hirsch gives commenting on the gendered aspect of the transmission of postmemory (often narrated as happening between father and son). Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 98.

them [the generation after] so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”33 If Gratton identifies the preoccupation with a past not lived not as postmemory or even prememory but rather as “paramemory,”34 it is because for him, and most interestingly for my purposes here, paramemory has no legal or historical status; this means that Modiano’s narrators must find “unorthodox, innovative ways of accessing that past and smuggling back memories of it into the present.”35 Gratton’s word choice is deliberate: it is intended to underscore “that which comes to memory allogenically,36 with no firm underpinning, no prior language, no referential passport.”37 Yet, in his description, rather than being completely detached from the graspable realm (no “firm underpinning,” “no referential passport”), memories also are metaphorized as tangible sediments that need to be smuggled, carried over, transported into a different time: their immateriality thus slowly wanes and they progressively gain a hint of substance. In this way, memories become apprehensible as objects, as archeological finds that are smuggled out after being excavated. Modiano himself spoke in geological terms in an interview to underscore his work as an archeologist of memory: “j’écris justement pour lutter contre cette érosion, pour trouver dans ce sable mouvant un ancrage.”38 It is these

33 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 5.

34 Gratton, “Postmemory, Prememory, Paramemory,” emphasis in original.

35 Ibid., 43, emphasis in original.

36 Gratton borrows this term from the its use in geology, where it describes “a mineral or sediment transported to its present position from elsewhere.” Ibid., 42.

37 Ibid., 45.

38 Patrick Modiano cited by Maryline Heck, “La trace et le fantôme. Mélancolie de l’écriture chez Patrick Modiano,” in Lectures de Modiano, ed. Roger-Yves Roche (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2009), 344.

types of memory which interest me: memories that rely on something other than first- person experience or, as in postmemory, on the generation after. Modiano’s project, his goal (mon dessein) is, in his own words: “me créer un passé et une mémoire avec le passé et la mémoire des autres.”39 I would like to explore who – or more accurately what – these others are and suggest that the bearers of these memories are not subjects per se.40

As Gratton explains, in Modiano’s imaginary memory is created paranormally: it does not rely on scientific accuracy or on proofs.41 One way that it distinguishes itself from postmemory is in the creation of traces that hold as much value as historical ones. In

Dora Bruder, Modiano mentions a peculiar moment in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables that happens as Cosette and Jean Valjean are running away from Javert in Paris. The streets that they are taking, Modiano points out, are “actual” streets (“jusque-là, ils traversaient les vraies rues du Paris réel”) but in the blink of an eye they are “projetés dans le quartier d’un Paris imaginaire.” Interestingly for Modiano, Hugo’s imaginary

Parisian garden where Cosette and Jean Valjean hide is located in the same “actual” street as the convent where Dora, years later, would also be hiding; this realization prompts

Modiano to speak about the “don de voyance” of novelists, which allows through the

39 Emmanuel Berl, Interrogatoire par Patrick Modiano suivi d’Il fait beau, allons au cimetière (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2003), 9.

40 Martine Boyer-Weinmann, for example, identifies an object (the telephone) as taking on a life of its own, becoming a character in Modiano’s fictional universe, a character who itself can be said to possess objects: “un véritable effet-personnage du Téléphone, générateur fictionnel lui-même fortement rattaché à des accessoires standardisés: agendas, Bottins mondains, annuaires, cartes et plans Taride.” Martine Boyer-Weinmann, “‘Sur combien d’agendas ce numéro de téléphone, qui a été le mien, figure-t-il encore?’” in Lectures de Modiano, ed. Roger-Yves Roche (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2009), 311, emphasis in original.

41 Gratton, “Postmemory, Prememory, Paramemory,” 42.

work (the efforts, he says) of imagination (rather than historical research for example) to have some sort of “intuitions ‘concernant des événements passés ou futurs.’” Hugo thus created the traces that Dora and subsequently Modiano would literarily (not literally) follow.42 “Modiano clearly feels a strong urge to ‘do’ or ‘make’ history through the possibilities of ‘anachrony,’”43 Gratton points out, and one could substitute

“untimeliness” for “anachrony,” which more forcefully reminds of the possibilities of the ghost. For it is in such troubled and disjointed times – or has Gerald Prince has noted by very fittingly conjuring up an echo of Hamlet, “[t]ime is dilated, bloated, difficult, imprecise”44 – that the ghost is able to appear. In the back and forth between then and now,45 in the blurring and reappearance of spectral traces, narrative space is made in order for the ghost to reveal that it had been there all along.

Commenting, in Dora Bruder, on watching a film that had been showing at the time of Dora’s disappearance, the narrator feels something from the past irrupting in his present: “Et tous ces regards, par une sorte de processus chimique, avaient modifié la substance même de la pellicule, la lumière, la voix des comédiens. Voilà ce que j’ai ressenti, en pensant à Dora Bruder, devant les images en apparence futiles de Premier

42 Modiano, Dora Bruder, 51-53. This “capacité annonciatrice de la littérature” is, incidentally, the subject of the forthcoming book by Pierre Bayard in the third volume of his study of “literary anticipation.” Pierre Bayard, Le Titanic fera naufrage (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2016), 16, 18.

43 Gratton, “Postmemory, Prememory, Paramemory,” 44.

44 Gerald Prince, “Re-Membering Modiano, or Something Happened,” SubStance 15, no. 1, issue 49 (1986): 40.

45 In the words of Claude Burgelin, “Les temps se confondent ou se répètent.” Claude Burgelin, “‘Je me suis dit que j’allais me réveiller’ Lecture d’Accident Nocturne,” in Heck and Guidée, ed. Cahier Modiano, 124.

rendez-vous.”46 Though the film itself holds little interest for him, something else is transmitted in its projection. For Maryline Heck, the trace left on the film is spectral but paradoxically so: “[t]el serait le paradoxe de la trace fantôme : à la fois subjective et impalpable, mais précisément inscrite sur la pellicule de cinéma. Modiano donne ici au plus intangible, les regards, une réalité matérielle, concrète.”47 Heck identifies in the act of writing the creation of traces, the paramemory that remedies the absence or the void that previously reigned: “une certaine fonction de l’écriture, comme moyen non pas tant de conservation […] que de création de traces, permettant de pallier les vides laissés par la disparition de Dora.”48 Such material traces which transcend linear chronology and which appear paranormally (or more precisely, are written out through the act of narration) are key to decrypting a certain spectral logic in the text.

Readers of Modiano know that in every novel there is a search for someone – be it someone else or the narrator’s own past identity – that spans years and sometimes countries, a search which is started and then abandoned only to be taken up again;49 a search, however, that ultimately, and perhaps necessarily, fails. Prince remarks, “[t]he self is not illuminated. The quest comes to no end. The past is not recaptured (Modiano’s masterful use of tenses only underlines the elusiveness of what was, what has been, and

46 Modiano, Dora Bruder, 79.

47 Heck, “La trace et le fantôme,” 337, emphasis mine.

48 Ibid., emphasis mine.

49 See for example, Voyage de noces, where the narrator engages in the search several times over the span of decades, and its companion Dora Bruder. See also, Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue and L’Herbe des nuits.

what is). The riddle can’t be solved. But something happened.”50 It is precisely because

“something happened” that certain traces can be found. Modiano is “en mal d’archive” as

Derrida would have it, he suffers from “cette contradiction interne,” where “une pulsion de destruction [semble] contredire la pulsion même de conservation.”51 And Derrida very interestingly remarks that, “[i]l n’y aurait certes pas de désir d’archive […] sans la possibilité d’un oubli qui ne se limite pas au refoulement.”52 It is such a forgetting that I find yields particular significance to the paradigmatic figure of the search in Modiano’s oeuvre. Pierre Assouline, writing about Modiano’s brilliantly titled, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, so astutely notes the importance that things can have in these repeated searches: “[p]our ouvrir une brèche dans le temps, l’auteur s’est appuyé sur la perte d’un carnet d’adresses et sur l’absence qu’elle creuse en nous. Qu’importe, au fond, que ce soit un objet ou une personne : seul compte le manque qui avive la mémoire.”53

And indeed, rather than looking for someone, I look for some thing that was left behind, some thing that exceeds narrative economy and thus track a few lost, missing or misplaced objects in Modiano’s oeuvre to show the possibilities afforded by their spectral

(re)appearances.

50 Prince, “Re-Membering Modiano, or Something happened,” 43.

51 Derrida, Mal d’Archive, 38.

52 Ibid., emphasis mine.

53 Pierre Assouline, “Géographies de la mémoire,” Le Magazine Littéraire 548 (October 2014), 11.

Inventory Misplaced

First, a list of lost objects (in no particular order of importance) that one can find when reading Modiano’s novels: photographs, notebooks, address books, trophies, sunglasses, dresses, shirts, hats, maps, books, different forms of identification (passports, birth certificates), cookie boxes, files, umbrellas, manuscripts, pens, business cards, pieces of paper, handkerchiefs, letters, and pieces of luggage. These objects, though at first glance of little monetary value, due to their sheer number nonetheless point to their importance in the narrative economy. In Mal d’Archive, Derrida notes that one of the functions of the archive is to strive (and fail) for the (perfect) inventory, one where there is no loose end: “l’acte de consigner en rassemblant les signes. […] La consignation tend

à coordonner un seul corpus, en un système ou une synchronie dans laquelle tous les

éléments articulent l’unité d’une configuration idéale. Dans une archive, il ne doit pas y avoir de dissociation absolue, d’hétérogénéité ou de secret qui viendrait séparer

(secernere), cloisonner, de façon absolue.”54 With this in mind, let us turn to the master of the inventory, Georges Perec, who in Penser/Classer (1985), defined a perfect filing system – also known as utopia – in the following manner: “[d]errière toute utopie, il y a toujours un grand dessein taxinomique: une place pour chaque chose et chaque chose à sa place.”55 If Perec’s description can be used as a working definition of narrative economy,56 then, it can be said that lost objects and misplaced things in Modiano

54 Derrida, Mal d’Archive, 14, emphasis in original.

55 Georges Perec, Penser/Classer (Paris: Hachette, 1985), 156.

56 Derrida does ascribe this quality (economy) to the archive: “Archive éco-nomique en ce double sens: elle garde, elle met en réserve, elle épargne mais de façon non naturelle, c’est-à-dire en faisant la loi (nómos) ou en faisant respecter la loi.” Derrida, Mal d’Archive, 20, emphasis in original.

paradoxically drive the narrative forward by exceeding the system that keeps them in check.

The focus of this chapter on lost objects stems from their understated but powerful contrast with the blurred and fragmented memories that protagonists bring up in their searches for an elusive past: objects or things actually have a better chance of standing the test of time, and this is a fact all the more devastating when we pause to think that certain objects outlive us. In their longevity, they are consequently able to tell us something about ourselves. Derrida distinguishes the archive from the work of memory or anamnesis: “[b]ien au contraire : l’archive a lieu au lieu de défaillance originaire et structurelle de ladite mémoire […] L’archive est hypomnésique.”57 The word, Derrida explains, comes from the Greek, “hupómnēma, supplément ou représentant mnémotechnique, auxiliaire ou aide-mémoire,”58 it is a trace left behind to supplement what has (or may have) been forgotten. And thus insidiously, because of the inaccessibility of the event, fiction can be introduced in the supplement, ni vu ni connu.

Written messages are not the only things left behind in Modiano’s fiction, and certain objects may take on the function of these aides-memoires. As Prince noted, searches in Modiano often fail; yet, if the failure to find answers may suggest that the search was in vain, that, when all avenues have been exhausted, one comes back, as the

57 Derrida, Mal d’Archive, 26.

58 Ibid. See also the dictionary entry for hupómnēma, “ὑπόµνηµα,” in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). The word means: “remembrance” or more precisely, “the means of remembrance, written reminder, note.”

narrator of Quartier perdu (1984) points out, “au point de départ,”59 something still remains. Lost objects can be understood as the last witnesses of this same narrator’s life:

“[q]uel témoin se souvenait encore de ma vie antérieure.”60 These objects are, both the proof that “something happened,” or more accurately that some things remain or have yet to be found, and at the same time an assurance that the search will be able to go on

(perhaps even indefinitely). As such, lost objects – Heck very perceptively points out that melancholy in Modiano’s works “tiendrait […] d’une clinique […] de l’objet perdu”61 – function as remainders and reminders, as things that are begging to be found in order to allow a memory to be created. Misplaced and “excessive,” they cannot always be accounted for by the economy of the narrative in which they are apprehended. The loose end becomes thus the site, the locus of a potential return (as it were, from the dead).

Though there is critical consensus that Modiano’s narrators are obsessively driven to collect proofs of life and to draw inventories, not much attention has been paid to how exactly these objects function in the narrative. Maryline Heck, by arguing that writing does not follow traces but rather precedes them, hints at the role that objects take on in

Modiano’s narratives but stops short of including them in what she calls the “[t]race

‘fantôme.’”62 In the following sections, I will consider several types of (spectral) objects, which narrators find, lose, and rely on in order to make sense of the past (whether these characters search for someone else or leave behind signals for others).

59 Patrick Modiano, Quartier perdu (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1984), 13.

60 Modiano, Quartier perdu, 13.

61 Heck, “La trace et le fantôme,” 329.

62 Heck, “La trace et le fantôme,” 334.

In Livret de famille, the narrator hints at his predilection for papers, his “intérêt respectueux” for all legal affirmations of identity. There are, however, other things, other objects that have only sentimental value, but are nonetheless vital to the question of identity, as the narrator of La Ronde de nuit (1969) makes clear: “lunettes, porte-clefs, mouchoirs, cravates – pauvres objets qui n’ont d’importance que pour celui auquel ils appartiennent.”63 Even so, these seemingly worthless objects are able to touch the narrator deeply: “[ils] m’émeuvent encore plus que le visage des morts,”64 he says. If these objects have the means to elicit an affective response even more poignant than the sight of a dead human face, one of the reasons is evidently that these objects once belonged to someone who was alive, and now they uselessly remain while the person they belonged to has disappeared. Though their historical, monetary or artistic worth is null, they are perhaps the only traces left of this person’s existence and their value becomes inestimable.

In the preface to Family Frames, where Hirsch first works out the notion of postmemory, which relies particularly on transmitted artifacts, “images, stories, and documents passed down from one generation to the next,”65 she writes that this book had a specific impetus, namely the discovery that some photographs of her grandmother had been found by a family member only to be lost again. Her book is an answer to this loss and a realization that it is the viewer who gives meaning to the photographs – echoing

63 Patrick Modiano, La Ronde de nuit (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1969), 21.

64 Modiano, La Ronde de nuit, 21.

65 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: photography, narrative, and postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 12.

Bill Brown’s “thing theory”66 – something she would have been able to do had the pictures not been lost: “[i]n some strange way, I have written this book in response to the disappearance of those photographs. I needed to explain why, images that to my cousin were anonymous, meaningless, and even funny, because she could not identify them, to me would have been integral pieces of a life story, full of meaning and resonance.”67

Hirsch differentiates between the object itself and the meaning that is ascribed to it by its reader: “[f]amily pictures depend on such a narrative act of adoption that transforms rectangular pieces of cardboard into telling details connecting lives and stories across continents and generations.”68 Modiano’s narrations, I find, are based on such gestures, going even further, as pointed out earlier, in that they adopt memories that are not necessarily connected to a specific subject and thus not only connect people (and their things) across generations of the same family but also call upon everyone to be a witness.69

For example, in Dora Bruder, we read that the story of Dora has already been adopted into another narrative, Voyage de noces, published 7 years earlier: “[i]l me semblait que je ne parviendrais jamais à trouver la moindre trace de Dora Bruder. Alors

66 In “Thing Theory,” Bill Brown identifies the morphing of an everyday object into a thing: a thing is “what is excessive in objects, […] what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects – their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.” Bill Brown, “Thing Theory” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.

67 Hirsch, Family Frames, xii.

68 Ibid., emphasis mine.

69 This echoes to some extent Robert Harvey’s call in Witnessness, which posits that everyone (l’on) has an inherent capacity to be a witness whether or not he or she was present (or even alive) at the time.

le manque que j’éprouvais m’a poussé à l’écriture d’un roman, Voyage de noces, un moyen comme un autre pour continuer à concentrer mon attention sur Dora Bruder, et peut-être, me disais-je, pour élucider ou deviner quelque chose d’elle, un lieu où elle était passée, un détail de sa vie.”70 Or maybe find an object left behind? To whom does this

“amas d’objets hétéroclites qui semblaient abandonnés là depuis longtemps,”71 on the balcony, where Dora and her parents once lived, belong?

Voyage de noces occupies a special place in the genesis of Dora Bruder: it is both its precursor but also its follower. Modiano’s concern was to leave some traces on Dora’s behalf (and the other missing persons whose names he records and letters he copies72).

He is not concerned whether these traces are historical or fictional,73 what matters to him is that someone someday may take up a similar search. Relying upon documents, pictures, and other loose ends, Modiano slowly builds his own archive, even though at its center lies that which has the potential to destroy it74: Dora’s secret. In order to deploy

70 Modiano, Dora Bruder, 53.

71 Ibid., 14.

72 Ibid., 87-88, 101, 104-106, 112-113, 117-127.

73 Dora Bruder, though based on an actual person, is also a deliberate fictional engagement with the motif of the search itself. For example, the erasure of the collaborative research conducted with Serge Klarsfeld serves to anchor Modiano’s project in a larger literary oeuvre concerned with traces rather than Klarsfeld’s archival and historically significant preoccupations. See Alan Morris, “‘Avec Klarsfeld, contre l’oubli’ Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder,” Journal of European Studies 36, no. 3 (September 2006): 269–293; Mireille Hilsum, “Serge Klarsfeld/Patrick Modiano: enjeux d’une occultation,” in Heck and Guidée, ed. Cahier Modiano, 187-191.

74 Derrida underscores the fact that “partout où du secret et de l’hétérogène viendrait menacer la possibilité même de la consignation, cela ne pourrait manquer d’avoir de graves conséquences pour un théorie de l’arche comme pour sa mise en œuvre institutionnelle.” Derrida, Mal d’Archive, 15, emphasis in original.

the ways in which objects function as (spectral) traces in Modiano’s work, I created my own inventory of legal, visual, legible, and tangible clues.75

Legal

Livret de famille, which, as its title indicates, is notably concerned with questions of legal identity, provides a cogent starting point for thinking about missing pieces and objects in Modiano’s narratives. Though not necessarily concerned with lost passports or certificates, the following examples stress the close link between documents and the conception and construction of identity. As mentioned earlier, Patrick is interested in

“tous les papiers officiels, diplômes, actes notariés, arbres généalogiques, cadastres, parchemins, pedigrees…”76 One of the reasons for his attentiveness to this bureaucratic paperasse is precisely a certain apprehension vis-à-vis the spectral nature of identity, in other words, both the reliance upon official statements of identity to provide solidity to an otherwise ethereal concept, and the fact that legal identity paradoxically fails to wholly express a person’s identity. As Patrick recounts his excursion to City Hall following the birth of his daughter to have her officially recorded, that is, inscribed within the city’s registry [registre d’état civil], and thus recognized as part of his genealogy, he ponders his own identity. The man who accompanies him in this task and acts as a signatory witness is an enigmatic figure from the narrator’s past who leaves as furtively as he

75 The figure of the inventory has been associated with the pathological (inventory of symptoms or of diseases) but also can be said, in the words of one critic, to “carr[y] a potentially reparative function,” and it is in this sense that I would like to consider its role in making sense of things that are left behind. See “Haunting Histories of Transgenerational Trauma in Lydie Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres (1997): A Taking Stock of ‘Madness’ and ‘Transmission,’” Modern Languages Open, forthcoming.

76 Modiano, Livret de famille, 10.

appeared at the beginning of the narration. Even so, the presence of the man’s name on the legal document allows for the possibility that one day someone (his own daughter perhaps) will investigate and wonder about the name: “Un jour, dans vingt ans, si elle avait la curiosité de consulter ce registre – mais pourquoi l’aurait-elle ? – à la vue de cette signature, Zénaïde se demanderait qui était ce Jean Koromindé.”77 The question phrased in the conditional tense is contingent upon a certain curiosity on the part of Zénaïde, though, as we find out two pages later, her looking into the civil registry in twenty years is highly unlikely and that is probably due to a very simple fact: “elle avait obtenu du premier coup le bien mystérieux qui s’était toujours dérobé devant nous : un état civil.”78

With a completely legal identity, Zénaïde will not think twice about the meaning of these various documents (état civil, birth certificate, passport, etc.), while quite a few characters and every single one of Modiano’s narrators (male and the few female alike), in struggling to come to terms with their past and their identities, understand that legal proofs of existence can be forged, given to/taken from someone else, and that, in the end, legal identity relies on an acceptance of its potential inaccuracy (its fiction). This is the paradox that Derrida notes in his discussion of the signature: in order to be (legally) accepted, to be legible, that is read by someone else, it must be reproducible and as such its “purity” is always already muddled. The signature in itself always contains the possibility that it will be a counterfeit; one can thus say it deals in fictionality.79 Or, as

77 Modiano, Livret de famille, 20.

78 Ibid., 22.

79 Derrida writes: “Les effets de signature sont la chose la plus courante du monde. Mais la condition de possibilité de ces effets est simultanément, encore une fois, la condition de leur impossibilité, de l'impossibilité de leur rigoureuse pureté. Pour fonctionner, c’est- à-dire pour être lisible, une signature doit avoir une forme répétable, itérable, imitable;

Elissa Marder strikingly puts it, in her discussion of Hélène Cixous’s dog/ape Fip(p)s:

“The letters in the word ‘signe’ can always be reversed, read backward, and turned around. The sign for a name can always be turned into an ‘ape,’ an imposter, a denunciation, and a betrayal.”80 What Marder suggests is that in its most intimate parts

(its letters), the sign or the signature is opened to another, in this other’s role as betrayer or hostile witness.

A signature on a legal document (such as the signatures of Patrick and Koromindé in Zénaïde’s case) attests to the presence of someone (anyone, really), but not necessarily to his or her identity. It is for this reason that the narrator of Les Boulevards de ceinture

(1972) is able to scam unsuspecting buyers of rare books. Since purchasing rare editions

(in order to resell them) was too expensive for him, the narrator decides to buy cheap copies and, “je résolus de faire moi-même de fausses dédicaces qui révéleraient, chacune, un aspect inattendu de tel ou tel auteur.”81 The narrator, upon realizing that people are eager to get their hands on books that have a private insight into the lives of their authors, is pleased to oblige: [m]es dédicaces prirent alors un tour graveleux et mes prix augmentèrent de ce fait.”82 By imitating the handwriting of Charles Maurras, Maurice

Barrès, and even some contemporary authors who were alive at the time, the narrator elle doit pouvoir se détacher de l’intention présente et singulière de sa production.” Jacques Derrida, “Signature, événement, contexte,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 392. Derrida comes back to this several times in Mal d’Archive.

80 Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 224, emphasis in original.

81 Patrick Modiano, Les Boulevards de ceinture, (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1972), 95.

82 Modiano, Les Boulevards de ceinture, 96.

underscores the fictionality of the event of the signature: how to prove whose signature it is if we were not present at the event? One is thus forced to believe in this fiction.

However, even though a signature or a document proving legal identity cannot possibly render and account for a specific person’s presence or someone’s entire life, it says that someone was there; the rest, is simply, as Modiano puts it in Dora Bruder: “ce blanc, ce bloc d’inconnu et de silence.”83 Invoking Apollinaire’s “Zone” and his “juge d’instruction” at the end of Un pedigree (2005), Modiano declares the following: “[e]t le juge me présente des photos, des documents, des pièces à conviction. Et pourtant, ce n’était pas tout à fait cela, ma vie.”84 This is perhaps why, in L’Herbe des nuits (2012), when the narrator Jean is asked the following question: “Faux ou vrais papiers, est-ce que tu crois que pour nous cela a vraiment de l’importance?,”85 he confesses his own suspected fictional legal identity: “je doute que mon extrait d’acte de naissance soit exact et j’attendrai jusqu’à la fin que l’on me donne la fiche qui a été perdue et où étaient inscrits mon vrai nom, ma vraie date de naissance, et les noms et prénoms de mes vrais parents que je n’aurai jamais connus.”86 The anxiety felt by these characters is due to the fact that what is written on paper does not feel as though it reflects how they feel about themselves, who they feel they are. Their legal and personal lives do not coincide with each other.

83 Modiano, Dora Bruder, 28.

84 Patrick Modiano, Un pedigree (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2006), 126.

85 Patrick Modiano, L’Herbe des nuits (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2012), 118.

86 Modiano, L’Herbe des nuits, 118.

Counterfeiting an identity or being conscious of the fiction that one’s identity is becomes a way to hide and remain elusive. Another character found in Livret de famille,

Henri Marignan, who reminds Patrick of his father,87 very clearly underscores this aspect: the fact that legal identity need not be coterminous with the life of the person who carries it. Speaking of an event taking place in the past, he admits: “[d]u temps où j’avais encore un état civil et où je n’étais pas un fantôme, comme aujourd’hui. Vous savez que je suis mort en 45, hein ?”88 Lack of legal identity thus allows one to become a ghost (both dead and undead) prematurely. In La Ronde de nuit, the narrator uses his missing legal identity to thus paradoxically proclaim his non-existence: “Agent double ? ou triple ? Je ne savais

89 plus qui j’étais. Mon lieutenant, JE N’EXISTE PAS. Je n’ai jamais eu de carte d’identité.”

Even so, beyond the deeply personal identity crisis that this can cause, hiding one’s legal identity or taking on someone else’s serves also as a way to efface one’s tracks, to remain untraceable, nowhere to be found; a crucial quality when the possibility of being found has deadly consequences.

Hence, in Rue des Boutiques Obscures (1978), the amnesiac narrator must rely on other people’s legal identities in order to figure out or imagine his own. On the blank agenda that a woman named Denise (who possibly knew him) forgot or left behind, he finds a piece of paper, a birth certificate belonging to her: “[j]’enfonçai l’agenda et l’acte de naissance dans ma poche intérieure, avec l’enveloppe qui contenait les photos, et je ne

87 Patrick writes about him: “il me semble même qu’il fut l’une des multiples incarnations de mon père,” which suggests that Patrick’s father took on or put on, throughout his life, many identities. Modiano, Livret de famille, 23.

88 Ibid., 26.

89 Modiano, La Ronde de nuit, 132, emphasis in original.

sais pas pourquoi une idée me traversa : celle de dissimuler, dès que je le pourrais, tous ces trésors dans les doublures de ma veste.”90 The narrator’s gesture of putting these treasures closest to him, the wish to bury them within his own clothes reveal that the intimate construction of his assumed identity takes place in a back and forth between the possession of items belonging to Denise (the document that proves her legal existence, her birth in Paris, and the photographs which testify to someone [her?] presence in very specific locations) and the fact that these items are the last witnesses of a possibly shared past that he is unable to remember.

In a strikingly similar fashion, in Livret de famille, upon receiving the copy of his own baptismal certificate Patrick holds it close, in the inner pocket of his jacket, and returns to it to feel a connection to the past: “J’ai tâté à travers l’étoffe de ma veste l’extrait de mon acte de baptême. Depuis, bien des choses avaient changé, il y avait eu bien des chagrins, mais c’était tout de même réconfortant d’avoir retrouvé son ancienne paroisse.”91 For Patrick, the religious aspect is not important, in fact he calls it“[u]n baptême de hasard”92 that probably happened “par prudence”93 because of his Jewish ancestry. But the fact is that this church in Biarritz, where he received this document many years later, holds a piece of him that links him to a certain place in time; therefore it makes it “son ancienne paroisse” (note that the etymology of paroisse points to the home [oikos]), a way to anchor himself to the past in a very specific (homely) location;

90 Patrick Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, Folio (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 118- 119.

91 Modiano, Livret de famille, 95.

92 Ibid., 94.

93 Ibid., 95.

he returns home through the archive.94 However, the presence of such archival records in the search for identity ought also to be understood in their risky and perilous aspect, as

Patrick recalls looking in vain for another of his father’s distant relatives: “J’ai voulu moi aussi en savoir plus, mais je n’ai pas encore trouvé la moindre trace la moindre preuve du passage de James Levy sur terre. J’ai même consulté des archives à la mairie d’Enghien.”95 While the archives can provide a way to conclude the search, they can also be the very source of doubt. Even so, and perhaps deliberately so, it means that the search

(and thus fiction) can continue, for certain blanks will not and cannot be filled. Patrick’s own birth certificate as opposed to his daughter’s is riddled with questions, which he calls

“les méandres de mon état civil”96: “[j]’ignore en effet où je suis né et quels nom, au juste, portaient mes parents lors de ma naissance.”97 As such, he is able to loosely recreate for himself a family history, an entirely plausible other life: this is, incidentally, the plot of Rue des Boutiques Obscures.

Writing in order to fight against forgetting,98 in Dora Bruder, Modiano evokes

“les sentinelles de l’oubli” – those whose purpose it is to keep the past from resurfacing99

94 Derrida notes the etymology of the archive, which always send us back home, with the following words: “le sens de ‘archive’, son seul sens, lui vient de l’arkheîon grec: d’abord une maison, un domicile, une adresse, la demeure des magistrats supérieurs, les archontes, ceux qui commandaient.” Derrida, Mal d’Archive, 12-13, emphasis in original.

95 Modiano, Livret de famille, 38, emphasis mine.

96 Ibid., 10.

97 Ibid.

98 “Avec Klarsfeld, contre l’oubli” is the title of an article Modiano published in Liberation on November 2, 1994, where he mentions reading about Dora Bruder and wanting to know more about the tragic destinies of the Bruder family. Reprinted in Heck and Guidée, ed. Cahier Modiano, 176-177.

– encountered in his search for the vanished girl. He writes, “[u]n moment, j’ai pensé qu’il était l’une de ces sentinelles de l’oubli chargées de garder un secret honteux, et d’interdire à ceux qui le voulaient de retrouver la moindre trace de l’existence de quelqu’un.”100 The reason given for the search is twofold: on the one hand, there is a potential knowledge that can be gained by examining certain traces, and on the other there is a need to counter the (unwittingly perhaps) nefarious work of these sentinels. He continues, “[d]es traces subsistent dans des registres et l’on ignore où ils sont cachés et quels gardiens veillent sur eux et si ces gardiens consentiront à vous les montrer. Ou peut-être ont-ils oublié tout simplement que ces registres existaient.”101 However, at the same time, looking for clues and answers may also shatter all hope, or prove dangerous.102

It is perhaps for the first reason (loss of hope) that the narrator of Dora Bruder admits three times not going himself to the archives, to the school records for a closer look: “Un jour, j’irai. Mais j’hésite. Je veux encore espérer que son nom figure là-bas.

99 We’ll remember that in Mal d’Archive, the Prière d’insérer (as such both Derrida’s first and last remark) begins with the dark side of the archives: “[l]es désastres qui marquent cette fin de millénaire, ce sont aussi des archives du mal: dissimulées ou détruites, interdites, détournées, ‘refoulées.’” Derrida, Mal d’Archive, “Prière d’insérer,” n.p., emphasis in original.

100 Modiano, Dora Bruder, 16.

101 Ibid., 13.

102 Derrida, throughout his text, repeatedly emphasizes that archives bring out the desire of (self)destruction closely linked to the Freudian death drive (see in particular pp. 24– 27): “[o]n ne renonce jamais, c’est l’inconscient même, à s’approprier un pouvoir sur le document, sur sa détention, sa rétention ou son interprétation.” Derrida, Mal d’Archive, “Prière d’insérer,” n.p..

C’était l’école la plus proche de son domicile.”103 Later on, with the promise of one day going to check, the narrator describes the same well-intentioned refusal to take another step: “[u]n jour, j’irai à Sevran, mais je crains que là-bas les maisons et les rues aient changé d’aspect, comme dans toutes les banlieues.”104 And finally again, a promise that may never be fulfilled is made by the narrator: “Un jour, je retournerai à Vienne que je n’ai pas revue depuis plus de trente ans. Peut-être retrouverai-je l’acte de naissance d’Ernest Bruder dans le registre d’état civil de Vienne. Je saurai les lieux de naissances de ses parents.”105 At the same time, we can notice that though the search for a certain type of knowledge fails, the search invests in its own (potential future) existence by ensuring that it may go on perpetually.

The danger associated with being found takes on tragic proportions in Dora

Bruder because History irrupts in the safe space of fiction. Indeed, sometimes it is better for the search to fail in order to protect the missing person; the following sentences are a testimony to Modiano’s deeply ethical engagement with the question of memory and the search for missing persons. Bringing to the fore the other, darker side of looking for people and the traces associated with them, forcing us thus to occupy structurally not only the place of the witness, the detective, but possibly also the executioner, Modiano remarks:

Un père essaye de retrouver sa fille, signale sa disparition dans un commissariat, et un avis de recherche est publié dans le journal du soir. Mais ce père est lui-même « recherché ». Des parents perdent les traces de leur enfant, et l’un deux disparaît à son tour […], comme si l’hiver de cette

103 Modiano, Dora Bruder, 14.

104 Ibid., 19.

105 Ibid., 22.

année-là séparait les gens les uns des autres, brouillait et effaçait leur itinéraires, au point de jeter un doute sur leur existence. Et il n’y a aucun recours. Ceux-là même qui sont chargés de vous chercher et de vous retrouver établissent des fiches pour mieux vous faire disparaître ensuite – définitivement.106

We’ll remember, on this point, the double and perhaps triple agent, who interacts both with the Resistance and with Vichy collaborators in La Ronde de nuit (the second novel of the so-called Occupation trilogy) and whose job is to compile such files: “[j]e leur parlais des petites fiches que mes patrons me chargeaient de tenir à jour et sur lesquelles

étaient mentionnés leurs noms à tous et leur curriculum vitae. Pas très brillantes, ces petites fiches.”107 In Modiano’s subsequent novel, Les Boulevards de ceinture, the narrator, whose search for his father leads him on the trail of a band of misfits and shady characters, engages in a similar behavior but for different reasons – to leave traces on their behalf but also to try to understand his father: “[j]e consignais, sur de petites fiches, les renseignements que j’avais glanés. Je sais bien que le curriculum vitae de ces ombres ne présente pas un grand intérêt, mais si je ne le dressais pas aujourd’hui, personne d’autre ne s’y emploierait. C’est mon devoir, à moi qui les ai connus, de les sortir – ne fût-ce qu’un instant – de la nuit. C’est mon devoir et c’est aussi, pour moi, un véritable besoin.”108 Significant in this project is the fact that the narrator uses the information in an engagement with fiction: “Je me penche sur ces déclassés, ces marginaux, pour

106 Modiano, Dora Bruder, 82.

107 Modiano, La Ronde de nuit, 99-100, emphasis in original.

108 Modiano, Les Boulevards de ceinture, 68-69.

retrouver, à travers eux, l’image fuyante de mon père. Je ne sais presque rien de lui. Mais j’inventerai.”109

Modiano deliberately withheld information found (or refused to go look) in his search for Dora Bruder and he also chose not to correct certain erroneous details for the new Folio edition of his book.110 Modiano is no historian, and though many of his works rely on historical data, his intention is to record (fictional) traces and to give form to a lack of evidence, a void. Serge Klarsfeld’s lists of names, date of birth, and last-known addresses included in Le Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France and Le

Mémorial des enfants juifs déportés de France (where Modiano found Dora’s name inscribed after having read about her in an old newspaper) can only begin to render the sheer horror of having one person’s entire life only known through a few pieces of information included on a list for a convoy leading to almost certain death.

Something must thus remain unknown in the search for Dora in addition to the loose ends that the narrator has been leaving by not following the lead, the secret that he associates with Dora, her few weeks as a young runaway: “C’est là son secret. Un pauvre et précieux secret que les bourreaux, les ordonnances, les autorités dites d’occupation, le

Dépôt, les casernes, les camps, l’Histoire, le temps – tout ce qui vous souille et vous détruit – n’auront pas pu lui voler.”111 Though in leaving things behind there is always

109 Ibid., 82, emphasis mine.

110 Critics, such as Denise Cima and Alan Morris, have pointed out that Modiano had more details about his search than he includes in the book. Denise Cima, Étude sur Patrick Modiano: “Dora Bruder” (Paris: Ellipses, 2003). Alan Morris, “‘Avec Klarsfeld, contre l’oubli’ Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder,” Journal of European Studies 36, no. 3 (September 2006): 269-293. I thank Priscilla Charrat for bringing this to my attention

111 Modiano, Dora Bruder, 145.

the potential for them to be found one day; the possibility also remains that not every trace will be followed and that one’s secret will be forever out of reach. Fiction, as such, provides a temporary and secret refuge, a way for the character to escape if not in the outside world, then at least in the world of the narration.112

Visual

Distinguishing between traces that can be followed and those that cannot,

Xanthos, in an article locating different modes of linking the present and the past, points to the description in Dora Bruder of a picture of two women officers standing in front of a door, from which no information can be gleaned, and notes the following: “[e]n termes de stricte économie narrative et fictionnelle, il s’agit d’un élément sans rentabilité, et dont la mention ne se justifie pas.”113 He reads this picture as a companion to another instance where the convent that Dora briefly attended is said to have left no trace – not even a picture. Xanthos even speaks in terms of an “affranchissement économique,”114 that is, of the novel’s investment or focus on its poetics rather than its economy.115 Yet, it is

112 Note the moment where Modiano explains that Jean Valjean and Cosette, in Hugo’s Les Misérables, escape into a fictional Paris and thus are able to elude Javert. The moment when Dora escapes is one which only fiction can safely imagine, leaving Dora ever shielded from complete annihilation. The unknowability that allows for the protagonist Dora to live many (fictional) lives, is, however, only possible if Dora also escapes to writing, that is, if she leaves absolutely no traces.

113 Nicolas Xanthos, “Sentinelles de l’oubli et reflets furtifs: Permanence, rupture et régimes d’historicité dans Dora Bruder,” Orbis Litterarum 66, no. 3 (2011): 218.

114 Xanthos, “Sentinelles de l’oubli et reflets furtifs,” 218.

115 For Xanthos it points to the irretrievability of the past: “un rappel ponctuel de tout ce que le passage du temps a pu faire disparaître, et donc de la rupture entre le présent et un passé inatteignable.” Ibid.

precisely because it cannot be accounted for by this narrative’s economy that this seemingly useless detail serves not only a remainder but also a reminder. In fact, a remainder is always a reminder: it points to other searches, to someone else’s memory, someone else’s life. Indeed, as an excess, a loose end, this photograph, which is not mentioned again, has a purpose that could potentially become important if, in a subsequent narrative, one of the two women were identified, or if someone were to remember this place, if someone (let me be clear, a fictional being in another novel), upon picking up Modiano’s text, were to find herself or her mother thus described.116

Furthermore, these lost, missing, worthless, or only potentially significant things, when they are found, have a specific role in the narrative: they serve as breadcrumbs, as clues, and sometimes, admittedly, red herrings in narrators’ searches. In another description by the narrator of a picture, this time one of Dora, he notices a seemingly purposeless object: “[e]lle a posé sa main gauche sur le rebord d’un grand cube blanc ornementé de barres noires aux motifs géométriques, et ce cube blanc doit être là pour le décor.”117 But the appearance of this cube in another picture where one reads the description of Dora with her mother Cécile Bruder anchors it within a certain period of time: “[u]ne autre photo, prise dans le même lieu, à la même époque et peut-être le même jour : on reconnaît le carrelage du sol et ce grand cube blanc aux motifs noirs géométriques sur lequel est assise Cécile Bruder.”118 This useless decorative object is, years after these subjects’ disappearance, a singular trace that links them and anchors

116 Modiano’s doubles, his narrators often write about sending signals within the novels, hopelessly hoping, as I showed earlier, that someone will reach out.

117 Modiano, Dora Bruder, 32.

118 Ibid.

them in a specific place. The rest must be inferred, imagined in much the same way that the narrator of Livret de famille compares himself to an archeologist, who has to rely on imagination in order to interpret an artifact: “[i]l suffisait de rêver sur les deux ou trois

éléments dont je disposais, et je parviendrais à restituer le reste, comme l’archéologue qui, en présence d’une statue aux trois quarts mutilée, la recompose intégralement dans sa tête.”119 Objects, things, fragments thus give way to a reconstitution of the person to whom they belonged, and in a way briefly lend or give to that fictional paper person a form, a hint of solidity.

Though for Hirsch (and for others approaching it from different angles – like

Barthes, Sontag, or Didi-Huberman before her) photography reveals the presence of ghosts – it “brings the past back in the form of a ghostly revenant, emphasizing, at the same time, its immutable and irreversible pastness and irretrievability”120 – there seems to be at first no room for this “revenant” to work. Hirsch continues, “[Photographs] cannot be redeemed by irony, insight, or understanding. They can only be confronted again and again, with the same pain, the same incomprehension, the same distortion of the look, the same mortification.”121 Hirsch, however, points out in the following sentence that the effect of the photographs is not one of representation but rather of

(thought/traumatic) provocation, a repetition that hence enables a slight displacement in the viewer. The object, the photograph though “affixed” allows for a reading that is not frozen. I’d like to stress that the “visual” clues that I am speaking of are only properly

119 Modiano, Livret de famille, 155.

120 Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 21, emphasis in original.

121 Ibid., 28.

visual to the narrator and protagonists in the book, the reader is only presented with the description of photographs,122 a fact that already implies that an interpretation – a fictionalization even – has taken place, and which differentiates the reader of Modiano’s works from Hirsch’s readers (who are often presented with the photographs) and Hirsch herself.

Even the status of the photograph within the fictional narrative is closely linked to a written trace, not only in its descriptions but also through the need to record the very fact that a photograph has been taken. In Chien de Printemps, the narrator begins working as an archivist for the photographer named Jansen (the one who took pictures of the palimpsest of posters). He, the narrator, decides to draw an inventory of all the pictures taken and out of extreme worry for the safekeeping of traces actually keeps a duplicate copy (or a double of the double):

J’avais acheté deux cahiers rouges de marque Clairefontaine, l’un pour moi, l’autre pour Jansen, afin que le répertoire des photos fût établi en double exemplaire. […] Aujourd’hui, il me cause une drôle de sensation lorsque j’en feuillette les pages : celle de consulter un catalogue très détaillé de photos imaginaires. Quel a été leur sort, si l’on n’est même pas certain de celui de leur auteur ? Jansen a-t-il emmené avec lui les trois valises, ou bien a-t-il tout détruit avant son départ ? Je lui avais demandé ce qu’il comptait faire de ces trois valises et il m’avait dit qu’elles l’encombraient et qu’il ne voulait surtout pas avoir « un excédent de bagages. » Mais il ne m’a pas proposé de les garder avec moi à Paris. Au mieux, elles achèvent de pourrir maintenant dans quelque faubourg de Mexico.123

It is interesting to note that the photographer refers to the record of his life’s work (for these three bags hold all of his photographs) as excess luggage. Excess is thus understood

122 Even if the photographs of Dora and her mother are available (in the English translation for example), Modiano chose not to include them in his book as it was first published.

123 Modiano, Chien de printemps, 33-34.

as that which goes over the bare necessities but, in this instance, it also refers to that which exceeds its rightful place in the narrative; in other words, what is the use of these pictures if they have already been recorded (twice) in the narrator’s notebooks? For the photographer they refer to the past, to an endeavor which aimed to keep traces of the city: a project which no longer interests him. For the narrator, however, this very “excess” constitutes proofs of an “archive fever” that merits being kept: “un intérêt documentaire puisqu’elles témoignaient de gens et de choses disparus.”124 When Jansen makes fun of the narrator for keeping such detailed records in these notebooks, he suggests that he, the narrator, should go even further and keep a record of places (and I am here encroaching on the next type of clue). He tells him: “[j]e ferais un répertoire général où seraient mentionnés par ordre alphabétique les noms et les lieux qui figurent sur ces photos…”125

Even though he was only joking, the narrator begins this task the very next day: “[m]oi, je ne plaisantais pas. Si je m’étais engagé dans ce travail, c’est que je refusais que les gens et les choses disparaissent sans laisser de trace. Mais pouvons-nous jamais nous y résoudre ?”126 The narrator inherits, in this way, an archiving task, one which, however, can never be fully completed, for how can one even account for everything and everyone in a simple notebook? When Jansen disappears one day without forewarning, his disappearance is complete: “J’ai fouillé les placards de la mezzanine mais ils ne contenaient plus rien, pas un seul vêtement, pas une seule chaussure. On avait enlevé les draps et les couvertures du lit et le matelas était nu. Pas le moindre mégot dans les

124 Ibid., 24.

125 Ibid., 34.

126 Ibid., 35.

cendriers. Plus de verres ni de bouteilles de whisky. Je me faisais l’effet d’un inspecteur de police qui visitait l’atelier d’un homme recherché depuis longtemps, et je me disais que c’était bien inutile puisqu’il n’y avait aucune preuve que cet homme ait habité ici, pas même une empreinte digitale.”127 There remains only an undeveloped roll of film with pictures that Jansen took of the narrator and which, as such, may only offer “visual” proof of the narrator’s existence and that of his friend. Yet, these remaining photographs also elude appropriation: “[j]’ai l’impression qu’il s’agit d’autres personnes que nous,”128 the narrator writes. No matter which pictures remain, they do not point to anyone in particular and cannot thus offer any proof at all: Jansen’s pictures are ever changing – which goes against the very nature of photography – they are documenting a world that no longer coincides with itself (like the pictures paradoxically don’t coincide with their subject). With everything gone, no clothes, no glasses not even a sheet on the bed, Jansen essentially dissolved into thin air: a clean break.129 A simple catalog of imaginary pictures is left behind in the narrator’s own account; enough however for someone else to take up this search, maybe find the missing luggage, maybe even in order to publish a book about Jansen, something the narrator predicted at the beginning of his narration, a

127 Ibid., 103-104, emphasis mine. See Derrida’s discussion of the famed Gradiva’s own “empreinte (Abdruck) de la pointe des pieds,” which remains her secret. Derrida, Mal d’Archive, 153.

128 Modiano, Chien de printemps, 13.

129 In Vestiaire de l’enfance, the narrator also speaks of a piece of luggage – unopened since his departure from France – where one would find “une masse de vieux papiers qui se rapportent à ma vie antérieure,” yet he is reluctant to open these archives (as he calls them) and instead decides to live “un présent éternel,” without the need to go back. Patrick Modiano, Vestiaire de l’enfance (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1989), 42-43.

book “illustré par les photos qu’il retrouvera.”130 However, because our only access to the original photographs has been through the narrator, who is to say that should the photographs turn up, they will actually be the correct ones? A margin of error remains: a vague trace that can’t ever be reconstituted without some imaginative creative investment.

Pointing to the vanishing of a picture (featuring “Réné et moi, avec le chien”131), in the last of Modiano’s three short unrelated narratives grouped under the title, Des inconnues (1999), Jean-Bernard Vray convincingly argues that “la fiction organise la disparition de la photo.”132 The young female narrator, after attempting several times to recover the picture taken by a “photographe ambulant,”133 a spectral figure haunting

Modiano’s novels, resigns herself to the ill-fated fact: “[o]n avait voulu supprimer la seule trace de notre existence, à René, à moi, au chien, la seule image où nous étions réunis.”134 It is interesting that this unknown and anonymous “on” takes the blame, and that from this point on, as she visits known and cherished places, the narrator becomes essentially a ghost: “[e]t maintenant, le lien était coupé, j’étais de trop dans tous ces endroits, comme si j’y revenais après ma mort.”135 It is as if the narrative wanted to

130 Modiano, Chien de Printemps, 18.

131 Patrick Modiano, Des Inconnues (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2000), 133.

132 Jean-Bernard Vray, “Noirceur de Modiano. Disparition et photographie,” in Lectures de Modiano, ed. Roger-Yves Roche (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2009), 361.

133 Modiano, Des Inconnues, 134.

134 Ibid., 137.

135 Ibid., 140-141. In Rue des Boutiques Obscures, the narrator makes the same connection between the loss of connection to the past and being a ghost: “[j]’avais déjà vécu ma vie et je n’étais plus qu’un revenant qui flottait dans l’air tiède d’un samedi soit.

change gears and needed to push the narrator into a different direction by offering her a clean slate: “[o]ui, avant le départ de René et cette sale histoire de photo, je ne me posais pas beaucoup de questions.”136 While it appears to be working – the narrator subsequently encounters a group interested in spreading certain metaphysical teachings and becomes the typist of their brochure titled “le travail sur soi”137 – a specter (in this case the ghost of the picture) is not easily exorcised. The book ends with the following admission: “[j]’avais peur de m’endormir et de lui confier dans mon sommeil ce que je gardais pour moi depuis si longtemps : René, le chien, la photo disparue.”138 Refusing to forget the lost object, the narrator defies the rules of narrative economy, keeps this excess to herself (in fear perhaps of retribution), but nonetheless, by revealing it to the reader, all things considered, she emerges victorious.

The amnesiac narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, has a different experience when it comes to pictures: he obsessively thinks that he is the one who is featured on photographs, even though others disagree and do not see the resemblance.139 He thus confronts the fictional potential of photography and accepts it regardless of the fact that he looks different from the picture; adopting this fiction, if only for a while, is for him a worthy lead in his quest. Even more dramatically, when it comes to the character called

“l’homme des plages,” the narrator’s drive to find an identity, any identity, leads to the

Pourquoi vouloir renouer des liens qui avaient été sectionnés et chercher des passages murés depuis longtemps?” Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, 63.

136 Modiano, Des Inconnues, 149.

137 Ibid., emphasis in original.

138 Ibid., 171.

139 Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, 45.

man’s disappearance: “Cet homme avait passé quarante ans de sa vie sur des plages ou au bord de piscines, à deviser aimablement avec des estivants et de riches oisifs. Dans les coins et à l’arrière-plan de milliers de photos de vacances, il figure en maillot de bain au milieu de groupes joyeux mais personne ne pourrait dire son nom et pourquoi il se trouve là. Et personne ne remarqua qu’un jour il avait disparu des photographies.”140 I propose here to consider whether one could say that “planned obsolescence” is at work in this narrative’s economy: that is, the built-in short lifespan of this character, figuring in the background of certain pictures, only to serve a singular purpose after which he disappears. He allows for the narrator to believe, once again erroneously, that it could be him: “[j]e n’osais pas dire à Hutte mais j’ai cru que ‘l’homme des plages’ c’était moi,”141 to which his interlocutor replies that we are “des ‘hommes des plages.’”142 This underscores the fact that this man is but a shell, that everyone could find himself or herself in him, and since no one notices this man’s absence (save within this level

[Hutte’s tale] of the narration), he is not one whose life needs to be followed and found, he is not a missing person like other Modianian characters. We can say that the man’s purpose is entirely wrapped-up in pointing to the narrative’s fictionality: this trace is provided in order for the narrator to continue his identity search, and it is made to disappear once it no longer serves its purpose.143

140 Ibid., 72, emphasis mine.

141 Ibid.

142 Ibid.

143 It appears, however, at the end of the novel, that the narrator realizes that his life is also a fiction, that he is a character: “Est-ce qu’il s’agit bien de la mienne? Ou de celle d’un autre dans laquelle je me suis glissé?” Ibid., 238.

To the contrary, refusing to play the game, in effect, stops the search. Let us consider the female narrator (one of the very few in Modiano’s oeuvre) of La Petite Bijou

(2001), who, in a dream is handed a photograph that would allow her to identify a body:

“c’était une photo anthropométrique que quelqu’un me tendait – un commissaire de police, un employé de la morgue – pour que je puisse identifier cette personne. Mais je restais muette. Je ne savais rien d’elle.”144 Having been abandoned by her mother, “la

Petite Bijou” only possesses a few items (that she keeps in a cookie box145) to make sense of her own past but even in a dream she is unable (or rather unwilling) to engage creatively with what she is given: “[p]armi les rares objets qui me restaient d’elle, dans la boîte à biscuits en métal, un agenda et un carnet d’adresses dataient de l’époque des photos, cette époque où l’on m’appelait la Petite Bijou. Quand j’étais plus jeune, je n’avais jamais la curiosité de consulter cet agenda et ce carnet, mais, depuis quelques temps, le soir, j’en tournais les pages. Des noms. Des numéros de téléphone. Je savais bien qu’il était inutile de les composer. D’ailleurs je n’en avais pas envie.”146 In order for the narrative to continue, for the search to go on, there must be someone willing to

144 Modiano, La Petite Bijou (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2001), 10.

145 Boxes are often, in Modiano, the repository of aides-memoires that propel forward the search for clues. Very tellingly, boxes not only hold cookies or photographs, to the extent that they can be understood as coffins, they become the very location of spectral traces, the last remnants of the missing bodies narrators are searching for. It is not a coincidence that the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures remarks: “[d]écidément, tout finissait dans de vieilles boîtes de chocolats ou de biscuits. Ou de cigares,” while later noting, “[e]n somme, c’était la première fois, au cours de ma recherche, qu’on ne me donnait pas de boîte. Cette pensée me fit rire.” Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, 95, 117.

146 Modiano, La Petite Bijou, 15.

invent, to confabulate, to link places, names and objects, even if the person doing it – in the event of a refusal on the part of a protagonist – is the reader.147

Legible

While photographs may take on a legible quality in Modiano’s narration, some items such as letters, notes, and business cards rely exclusively on reading in order to be made sense of. Some artifacts can be read as tales, such as the journal of a man in La

Ronde de Nuit “[qui] avait laissé en partant un cahier rouge où il consignait ses souvenirs.

Je l’ai relu bien des fois, au cours de ces nuits de veille. […] Il avait le sens de l’éphémère, cet homme.”148 The narrator is thus (through the possession of this object) the only witness of the existence of a certain number of people who are no longer present, who have vanished into the night. What remains are their names in the narrator’s own notebook and some trivial information – the trace of a trace: “‘Frank Le Harivel résidait

8, rue Lincoln. On a oublié ce parfait cavalier dont la silhouette était jadis familière aux promeneurs de l’allée des Acacias…’”149 The narrator also finds a few pictures and letters, the last traces of someone’s passage (in the pages of the book) and he is the only one who can attest to their erstwhile presence: “[s]i je n’écrivais pas leur nom : Coco

Lacour, Esmeralda, il n’y aurait aucune trace de leur séjour en ce monde.”150 Because

147 A film in which “la petite Bijou” starred as a child is shown in the boarding school to the main characters of De si braves garçon (1982). Patrick Modiano, De si braves garçons (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1982), 57.

148 Modiano, La Ronde de nuit, 87.

149 Ibid., 87.

150 Ibid., 91.

objects need to be interpreted, to be imagined with a rightful owner, it is only writing that can, at last, inscribe the memory that objects alone were unable to preserve. Other items remain in the realm of potentiality as they are either forgotten151 or may not have even been there in the first place.

Modiano’s “petite musique” is one that is decidedly written in the conditional mode. Had the amnesiac detective of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, upon entering a hotel where he may have at one time stayed, dared to leaf through some volumes in that hotel’s library, he may have found a trace that may have led him to another piece of his lost identity: “Un soir, j’ai peut-être pris l’un des volumes avant de monter dans ma chambre, et oublié à l’intérieur la lettre, la photo ou le télégramme qui me servait à marquer la page. Mais je n’ose pas demander au concierge la permission de feuilleter les dix-sept volumes, pour retrouver cette trace de moi-même.”152 Though he loses a potential avenue to find out more about himself, the narrator, by refusing to act upon this desire to verify his existence, may have allowed for someone else to find his trace. Indeed, he is told by a seasoned detective of the invaluable traces that can be found in such commonplace items as phonebooks: “des outils de travail irremplaçables dont il ne se séparait jamais. […] ces

Bottins et ces annuaires constituaient la plus précieuse et la plus émouvante bibliothèque qu’on pût avoir, car sur leurs pages étaient répertoriés bien des êtres, des choses, des mondes disparus, et dont eux seuls portaient témoignage.”153 Many narrators in

151 In Fleurs de ruine, three pages from the narrator’s manuscript are left behind with a typist and never referenced again, thus begging the question: are they included in the book we are reading?

152 Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, 125

153 Ibid., 12.

Modiano’s oeuvre speak of their obsession with phone numbers154 and old phonebooks precisely because of what can be found in them, and we find often reproduced the very format of the phonebook when a narrator happens upon a name or a phone number; for example, the entire chapter 41 of this novel consists only of the following entry:

AUTeuil 54-73: GARAGE DE LA COMÈTE 5, rue Foucault. Paris 16e.155

By assembling small snippets of knowledge, the simple trace of someone’s presence at an address, narrators are able to prolong the search. Even if it takes a while, one thing leading to another, gradually a clearer idea will emerge.

It is in such a fashion that Patrick in Livret de famille embarks on the search for the father of a woman from his past: “Il fallait d’abord réunir les preuves matérielles du passage d’Harry Dressel sur la terre. Et cela mettrait du temps.”156 The narrator goes on to list various ways of finding this proof, from reading old newspapers to finding his name as footnotes in different advertisements: “Je découpai ces documents et les collai sur un grand carnet à dessin. Je les observais à la loupe pendant des heures, tant j’avais fini par douter de l’existence d’Harry Dressel.”157 Upon finding out that Dressel had a dog, Patrick looks for the dog breeder who – as if by magic – still has records of a sale that happened forty years prior. What is revelatory is that this man, in true Modianian

154 This narrator wonders, for example, if his old phone number figures on peoples’ Rolodexes. Ibid., 102.

155 Ibid., 239. Could the rue Foucault have been chosen for the address, in a deliberate nod to the author of Les Mots et les Choses (1966) and L’Archéologie du savoir (1969), which are concerned with the question of epistemology and the classification of knowledge?

156 Modiano, Livret de famille, 153.

157 Ibid.

fashion, is in the business of keeping a tight inventory: “[i]l rêvait de créer un fichier central où tous les chiens seraient répertoriés à leur naissance.”158 An emblematic figure who has dedicated his entire life to tracking and consigning to paper traces of past lives, this breeder would have liked to extend his own record-keeping to memorialize the existence of missing dogs: “Il aurait aussi voulu collecter tous les documents – photos, films de long métrage ou d’amateurs, témoignages écrits ou oraux – se rapportant à des chiens disparus. Son tourment à lui, c’était de penser à tous ces milliers et ces milliers de chiens morts dans l’anonymat total et sans qu’ils eussent laissé la moindre trace.”159 The narrator finds in this man a kindred soul who like him with his notebook acts as a repository actively working to counter the erasure of time: “[j]’ai collé le pedigree et la photo du labrador sur le cahier à dessin, parmi les autres pièces relatives à Harry

Dressel.”160 Patrick, who is planning to write a book about this man, relies on traces left behind to conjure up the matter for his book. Having even a few objects allows the researcher to dig up and then reconstitute the past, by dreaming it into reality if all else fails. Things left behind thus enable a loosely coherent (or fictional) reconstitution of the person to whom they belonged and in such a manner briefly lend to that person a spectral form. This becomes clear in a rhetorical reproach that the narrator makes to Dressel; he accuses him of having doubted his own existence and therefore of leaving almost no traces: “[j]e suis sûr que vous avez douté de votre vie, ce qui explique que je n’ai presque

158 Ibid., 154.

159 Ibid.

160 Ibid.

rien retrouvé d’elle.”161 It is almost as if the narrator has asked Dressel where his ghost had gone – why he did not leave a remnant of himself in the form of a tangible clue.

Tangible

The tangible, solid aspect of objects in Modiano often acts as a stable counterpart to the ephemeral nature of identity. Patrick in Livret de famille speaks of a man whose pipe becomes an anchor to reality even while he is alive: “Cette pipe, je ne pouvais en détacher les yeux car elle était la seule chose stable et rassurante au milieu du vide et de la désolation de ce décor. Plus tard j’appris qu’Yvon Stocklin passait des nuits entières, assis sur son lit, à fumer la pipe. C’était sa façon à lui de lutter contre le caractère fluctuant et chimérique de son métier de producteur. Toute une vie dissipée pour du vent… Quand il fumait sa pipe, il avait enfin le sentiment d’être un homme de poids, un

‘roc’ et – comme il disait – ‘de rassembler ses morceaux.’”162 In a world where people’s identities fluctuate, where one is unsure about the people around, objects provide a way to bring together these disparate pieces. For both the narrator and Yvon, the pipe becomes a way to get out of the blurry, smoky present in order to matter, to have weight, to leave a mark.

In Modiano’s imaginary, objects last longer than the ephemeral world around them. People change identities because they are often, as has been noted by critics, vagabonds doing mischief, engaging in illicit activities, always hiding. Therefore the

161 Modiano, Livret de famille, 156.

162 Modiano, Livret de famille, 79.

“points de repère” can be either topographical163 but also objects, as the narrator of Un cirque passe (1992) intimates: “[a]u cas où elle me fausserait compagnie, j’avais quelques points de repère : le café de la rue Washington dont Jacques était un habitué, l’appartement d’Ansart et surtout les valises.”164 (At the end of the novel, the narrator will indeed be left behind by Gisèle/Suzanne Kraay as she has a fatal car accident, and all that will remain is the luggage that she left in the hotel room. Hence, a seemingly useless object, a simple container, a luggage (or cookie-box in “la petite Bijou”’s case) can become something else in the eyes and hands of another, “however materially stable objects may seem, they are […] different things in different scenes.”165 A lost (and subsequently found) object at once propels the search forward by lending possible clues, and even when it may not lend any, the potential for future discovery remains; as such the search is never fulfilled, it is just differed to another time, another place, it is in this sense that the object acts as a ghost, ever deferring its reappearance, its graspability; staying always a little further ahead.

With a possible dénouement more than forty years later, in Villa Triste, the narrator forgets a piece of luggage left with a train employee. Upon his arrival at the station, the narrator had considered leaving everything behind, or at least he wasn’t the least bit worried about the luggage’s fate: “J’ai contemplé de nouveau mes bagages. Trois ou quatre cents kilos que je traînais toujours avec moi. Pourquoi ? A cette pensée, j’ai été

163 Though a geographical marker does not ensure continuity: “Les magasins changent de propriétaire. C’est le commerce. On finit par ne plus savoir très bien la place exacte qu’occupaient les choses.” Livret de famille, 37.

164 Patrick Modiano, Un cirque passe (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), 54, emphasis mine.

165 Brown, “Thing Theory,” 9.

100

secoué d’un rire acide. […] je suis sorti de la gare en laissant mes bagages sur le quai.

Leur contenu n’intéresserait personne. D’ailleurs, ils étaient bien trop lourds à déplacer.”166 When he finally climbs into the train, the narrator notices the employee running on the platform with a single piece of luggage before giving up. Very ominously, the narrator notes: “Il gardait la valise à la main et se tenait très droit sous les lumières du quai. On aurait dit une sentinelle qui rapetissait, rapetissait. Un soldat de plomb.”167 Even though the narrator has told us that his pieces of luggage would not interest anyone, the fact is that this sentinel, this soldier closes the book and leaves us hanging as to what may happen with the missing suitcase. Will this man become a “sentinelle de l’oubli,” preventing anyone from ever finding out? Will the suitcase reappear somewhere else, with some crucial information?

An echo is heard, in fact, in Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, which prominently centers on the fear of both being lost and being found. The narrator retells a recurring dream (significantly a result of too much fiction reading), where one can perhaps locate the missing suitcase of Villa Triste or the one of Livret de famille168: “Et c’est sans doute à cause de cela qu’un rêve le poursuivra toute sa vie : des valises que

166 Patrick Modiano, Villa Triste (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1977), 202.

167 Modiano, Villa Triste, 209.

168 In Livret de famille, a briefcase is left behind: Patrick’s mother (an actress) loses a case containing a scenario that she was given by the film’s producer when they learned that the Wehrmacht had invaded Belgium: “[e]lle s’aperçut brusquement qu’elle avait perdu sa mallette où étaient rangés les produits de beauté d’Elizabeth Arden et le scénario. […] Ce qu’elle avait gardé à la main sans y prêter attention jusque-là, c’était le feutre noir à bord roulé d’Openfeld Senior.” Modiano, Livret de famille, 48. Could this scenario one day be found? What happened to Openfeld’s hat – no answers are given in the narration, but the reader, knowing that some object may turn up years later, cannot help but be on the lookout for a scenario with an unknown and unclear origin and a random black hat.

101

l’on égare dans un train, ou bien le train part avec vos valises et vous restez sur le quai.

S’il pouvait se souvenir de tous ses rêves, aujourd’hui, il compterait des centaines et des centaines de valises perdues.”169 It is as if the fictional world of fiction (the dream) is the ultimate repository for Modianio’s inventory, safely located somewhere where it will do no harm, where it is shielded in utter and complete fiction.

Warnings and Complications

As mentioned in connection to Dora, the risk involved in leaving traces behind is that someone may actually track us down; for finding a lost object means finding a piece of someone’s history. In Villa Triste, the narrator reveals his great attachment to objects, even those that don’t belong to him proper. His lover Yvonne won a trophy but what happened to it? “Cette coupe, où se trouve-t-elle maintenant ? Au fond de quel placard ?

De quel débarras ? [...] Nous avons dû l’oublier dans la chambre d’hôtel et je m’étonne, moi qui suis pourtant attaché aux objets, de ne pas l’avoir emportée.”170 The narrator wonders why, even though the trophy belongs to Yvonne, he did not take it with. For him, the trophy represented the beginning of what he dreamed would be an illustrious career for her: “[p]lus tard elle en parlerait avec attendrissement devant les journalistes, car il ne faisait pour moi aucun doute qu’Yvonne deviendrait une vedette de cinéma.”171

However, the cup could also serve another purpose because it imparts certain information

169 Modiano, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, 143.

170 Modiano, Villa Triste, 122.

171 Ibid.

102

inscribed upon it: “‘Coupe Houligant. 1er prix.’ Plus bas, le chiffre de l’année.”172 If someone were to engage in some research about the proprietor of the trophy, that person would certainly find something else, the article that retold the competition of that year, and along with some information about Yvonne’s place of birth, a photograph173 and mention of the narrator and the name that he chose for himself that summer: “le comte

Victor Chmara.”174 After having been so careful to hide his identity,175 not to leave any traces behind, he runs the risk that a simple object (that isn’t even his) will unravel it all.

Leaving the trophy behind thus means leaving information about oneself that could lead someone onto one’s tracks or provide someone with vital information – at least enough to write a denunciatory letter. For we should not forget that the period of the Occupation

(Modiano’s writing ground) is, as one critic put it, “l’âge d’or de la délation.”176

In certainly less dramatic, but nonetheless illuminating, terms, this is also the experience of Jean Daragane, the protagonist of Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le

172 Ibid., 96;

173 A similar event takes place in Rue des Boutiques Obscures: a picture, “minuscule, plus petite qu’un timbre-poste” appears accompanying an article retelling of a horse-race and this (“que quelqu’un à la gare de Sallanches ou à Megève, dans la pâtisserie près de l’église, eût pu le reconnaître”) terrorizes the man pictured. Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, 220.

174 Modiano, Villa Triste, 117.

175 The prologue of the novel paints this narrator as extremely worried about being found out: “le narrateur, un apatride, est venu se réfugier pour échapper à une menace qu’il sentait planer autour de lui et pour combattre un sentiment d’insécurité et de peur panique. Peur d’une guerre, d’une catastrophe imminente? Peur du monde extérieur? En tout cas la proximité de la Suisse, où il comptait fuir à la moindre ‘alerte’, lui apportait un réconfort illusoire. Il se cachait […] dans la foule des estivants.” Ibid, n.p.

176 André Halimi, La Délation sous l’Occupation (Paris: Éditions du Cherche-Midi, 2010), 11.

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quartier. Jean is a character who not only loses an important object (in addition to the hundreds of dreamt lost suitcases), but even forgets its very loss, “[s]i l’inconnu n’avait pas téléphoné, il aurait oublié pour toujours la perte de ce carnet.”177 By losing this object – an address book with names that he was once associated with, Jean leaves a trace, something that can be connected to him. Even though the names in the address book are for the most part of a professional nature and do not reveal much about him, the fact that the narrator’s own name figures in it bothers him. Daragane even likens it to a threat, “il resterait toujours quelque chose en suspens, une menace.”178 There remains always the possibility that someone will pick up the search upon finding the object and perhaps seeing in it a clue; Daragane, throughout the narrative is indeed plagued

(haunted?) by the person who found this notebook and insists on giving it back.

But should every lost object be found? We have seen that in certain cases, it is better for the search to fail completely. Warning that “[t]outes les utopies sont déprimantes,” Perec, who thus opens his musing about utopia, in a sense, calls for lost objects, for loose ends, for fiction to play its role. The reason he gives is the following:

“parce qu’elles ne laissent pas de place au hasard, à la différence, aux ‘divers’. Tout a été mis en ordre et l’ordre règne.” It is no wonder that the author of W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) or “Les Lieux d’une fugue” (1965), understood that any (utopian) system, by giving in to its totalizing drive and by not leaving any space for randomness or unpredictability, would run the danger of quickly becoming nefarious.179 A perfect

177 Modiano, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, 13.

178 Ibid., 14.

179 This warning is oft-repeated in Mal d’Archive: “engageant l’in-fini, le mal d’archive touche au mal radical.” Derrida, Mal d’Archive, 39.

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inventory becomes a prison from which no escape is possible. The lost object, the loose end that remains ever elusive, an unexorcised, unexorciseable ghost, is, as such, the system’s safeguard against itself.

To return one last time to Livret de famille and to the narrator’s failed search for

Harry Dressel, there is one more crucial object, which is not given in the initial inventory for Dressel’s belongings: “Le lit, la peau de léopard, la coiffeuse au satin bleu ciel, ils allaient passer par d’autres chambres, d’autres villes, un débarras peut-être et bientôt plus personne ne saurait que ces objets avaient été réunis, pour un temps très bref, dans une chambre de l’avenue Malakoff, par la fille d’Harry Dressel. Sauf moi. J’avais dix-sept ans et il ne me restait plus qu’à devenir un écrivain français.”180 There may be no more use for Dressel’s leftovers, but the narrator by recording them into his book ensures that his readers are aware that “something happened,” that some things were left behind.

The powerful potential of (Modiano’s) fiction lies both in tempting us to go after such spectral traces (places, characters, objects) “literally,”181 only to remind us that they are (like ghosts themselves) literally fictional, and in redirecting us inside, urging us to ever look for them within pages of other books. If these disparate objects are the silent witnesses to someone’s life,182 if in their reappearances they speak to more than their own

(fictional) materiality, if these objects ensure that even fictional lives have weight, then

180 Modiano, Livret de famille, 158, emphasis mine.

181 See also Derrida’s comment regarding the desire to follow the Gradiva’s footsteps literally: “[o]r voici une précision dont on ne tient jamais compte, ni dans la lecture de Jensen, ni dans celle de Freud, et cette précision confond plutôt qu’elle ne distingue: Hanold est venu chercher ces traces au sens littéral.” Derrida, Mal d’Archive, 151.

182 We’ll remember the eerie “amas d’objets hétéroclites” found on the balcony in Dora Bruder. Modiano, Dora Bruder, 14.

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maybe the only way to ensure that a search remains ever possible is indeed to seal them – as do the narrator of Livret de famille and many others before and after him – within yet another object: a book, which we, dear readers, can certainly find in a bookstore filed under the letter F for Fiction.

106 CHAPTER 3 Marie Darrieussecq’s Ghost

– Je ne peux pas vous la vendre. – Mais pourquoi, Madame ? – C’est qu’elle est hantée. – Hantée par qui ? – Mais elle est hantée par vous, Monsieur.

—Philippe Forest, Le Chat de Schrödinger

Introduction

Following Truismes (1996), her best-selling debut, Marie Darrieussecq was spoiled for choice as to the direction in which she might take her writing career. She elected a less commercial path and surprised those who expected more of the same;1 this choice was praised by critics following the release of her second novel, Naissances des fantômes (1998): “Darrieussecq vient d’apporter avec son deuxième roman, Naissance des fantômes, la preuve qu’elle n’est pas l’écrivain d’une saison, qu’elle n’est pas non plus empêtrée dans un succès qui la condamnerait à faire du Darrieussecq,”2 notes a

1 See for example the introduction to an interview with Darrieussecq, which makes a difference between her early success Truismes and the novel that follows it, Naissance des fantômes in terms of potential readers: “[c]ertains de ses lecteurs, émoustillés par un premier récit d'un érotisme rocambolesque, ont été sans doute pris au dépourvu par son deuxième roman, Naissance des fantômes (1998).” John Lambeth, “Entretien avec Marie Darrieussecq,” The French Review 79, no. 4 (2006): 806.

2 Martine de Rabaudy, “Darrieussecq se mouille,” L’Express, 26 February 1998, last modified 26 February 1998, http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/naissance-des- fantomes_798006.html. See also a review of Darrieussecq’s second novel, which states

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journalist. “Tous mes livres ont un style différent,”3 insists the author whose ambition by her own admission is to be read a hundred years from now and to be recognized for the way she helped literature move forward. Already early on in her career, Darrieussecq made this fact known: “Je ne vois pas à quoi ça sert d’écrire si on n’a pas l’ambition d’être lu dans cent ans! Moi, je l’affirme, ça ne regarde que moi, j’écris pour rester, laisser des traces, faire avancer la littérature. Je ne suis pas un écrivain de loisirs.”4

If Truismes narrated the excessively fleshy transformation of a woman into a sow, the more understated Naissance des fantômes focuses on the unraveling of the narrator and the dematerialization of everything she knows following her husband’s disappearance.

Written in “a more reflective, intimate tone,”5 “more sober, more literary and more tightly focused,”6 the novel describes the loss of solidity, the becoming ethereal that is attained through the reconfiguration of a world as seen on a molecular level. Darrieussecq describes, for example, a peculiar dinner party as a chemistry experiment that results in a potential ghost: “[t]ous ces atomes se mélangeaient dans l’éprouvette du salon, une

the following: “On se demandait si Darrieussecq allait s’empêtrer dans le succès de son premier roman […] [Elle] semble avoir survécu. Moins outrancier, moins satirique, son second roman est un roman de la disparition.” Martine Motard-Noar, review of Naissance des fantômes, by Marie Darrieussecq, The French Review 73, no. 1 (October 1999): 162.

3 Lambeth, “Entretien avec Marie Darrieussecq,” 809.

4 Olivia de Lamberterie, “Marie Darrieussecq: ‘J’ai fait la paix avec mes fantômes,’” Elle, September 10, 2001, 102.

5 Pamela A. Genova, review of Naissance des fantômes, by Marie Darrieussecq, World Literature Today 72, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 794.

6 Shirley Jordan, “Saying the unsayable: identities in crisis in the early novels of Marie Darrieussecq,” in Women’s writing in contemporary France: New writers, new literatures in the 1990s, eds. Gill Rye and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 142.

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chimie audacieuse combinait de nouvelles matières: d’un nanomètre de cil maternel et d’une mole de canapé (de poisson, de silicone, de conseiller) naissait une hypothèse minuscule, un potentiel de quelque chose en suspension dans l’air ou enfoui dans la moquette, les flagelles frétillant virtuellement d’espoir.”7 In fact, Darrieussecq’s focus on the spectral has not ceased to develop: most recently, a disappeared ghost can be found in her latest work, Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes (2013), a novel for which she was awarded the Prix Médicis. And while it is true that the ghosts of dead children abound in her novels – a fact stressed by her editor Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens: “[i]l y a des enfants morts dans tous les livres de Marie Darrieussecq”8 – one should note that they are not the only ghosts to figure in her imaginary. Darrieussecq’s oeuvre actually presents the reader with two different types of ghosts: the first and more traditional one features the figures of those who were once (presumed) dead and have now returned in a different form – these range from the elusive husband of Naissance des fantômes and the narrating chorus of ghosts in White (2003) to the phantom encountered in the Eurostar in Le Pays (2005).

The second type comprises the ghosts that are created through the intervention of the reader, who will give a form to that which is omitted, which is not said, and thus participate in the production of ghosts.

Born after the tragic death of her brother, Darrieussecq repeatedly states – like

Perec before her – that this loss wrapped in silence stands at the core of her writing project: “j’ai une tradition autobiographique de silence dans ma famille, à la fois très lourde et très belle, de ce silence où les gens ne disent rien y compris sur des drames qui

7 Marie Darrieussecq, Naissance des fantômes (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 1998), 137.

8 Philippe Lançon, “La légitimité du vécu: une perversion,” Libération Livres, 30 August 2007, 3.

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nous ont tous fracassés. […] Ce silence, il faut trouver sa forme, il faut trouver la forme littéraire du silence et du secret.”9 Yet, in order to respond to two accusations of plagiarism – one of aping (singerie) by Marie NDiaye, who, following the publication of

Naissance des fantômes, claimed that it took (spectral) elements and themes from two of her own novels: Un temps de saison (1994) and La Sorcière (1996),10 and one by Camille

Laurens who accused her of “plagiat psychique”11 following the publication of Tom est mort (2007) – Darrieussecq broke this silence and disclosed her family history to explain herself. In doing so she linked the ghosts of her novels to a personal tragedy, thus running the risk of having her readers focus on the people these ghosts allegedly represent rather than what they do and how they function in the novel.12

Darrieussecq’s stance has been arguably paradoxical insofar as she has insisted that she should not have to justify herself in writing something she has not personally experienced. She remarks: “Je ne veux pas me légitimer d’une expérience vécue par mes

9 Nelly, Kaprièlian, “Marie Darrieussecq. Entretien avec Nelly Kaprièlian,” in Écrire, écrire, pourquoi? (Paris: Éditions de la Bibliothèque publique d’information/Centre Pompidou, 2010), 15, 17.

10 See Antoine de Gaudemar, “Marie NDiaye polémique avec Marie Darrieussecq,” Libération, 3 March 1998, 35; Patrick Kéchichian, “Marie Darrieussecq a-t-elle ‘singé’ Marie Ndiaye?” Le Monde, 4 March 1998, 28.

11 See Camille Laurens, “Marie Darrieussecq ou Le syndrome du coucou,” La Revue Littéraire 32 (Fall 2007): 1-14.

12 Darrieussecq explains: “[j]e connais moi-même très bien le sujet, mes parents ayant perdu un enfant.” Danielle Laurin, “Entrevue avec Marie Darrieussecq: Le parti de l’indicible,” Le Devoir 6-7 October 2007, F5; “La hantise que j’ai que mon mari me quitte, meure, disparaisse, je sais d’où elle vient. Elle vient d'un deuil que j’ai vécu petite, et qu’un jour je saurai contenir dans un livre.” Marie Darrieussecq, “La réponse de l’auteur de ‘Truismes’ et de ‘Naissance des fantômes’ à Marie NDiaye. Sorguina.” Libération, 10 March 1998, http://www.liberation.fr/livres/1998/03/10/la-reponse-de-l- auteur-de-truismes-et-de-naissance-des-fantomes-a-marie-ndiaye-sorguina_232749.

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parents. On a le droit, comme écrivain, de prendre en compte ce qu’on n’a pas vécu personnellement,”13 but at the same time, she has repeatedly offered up to pasture fragments of her personal life, thus contributing to the ongoing controversy. Returning most consequentially to the accusations in Rapport de police (2010), her recent book- length essay on plagiarism, she would state that she wrote Tom est mort “dans […] [un] esprit d’exorcisme,” even while immediately adding: “Sur les raisons intimes de mon

écriture, je n’ai rien à ajouter. C’est ma sorcellerie à moi.”14 One cannot help but wonder whether this statement, which refuses to return to the personal, comes too late. Since

Darrieussecq’s extensive metadiscourse is marked by the recurring mentions of her family affair15 and the plagiarism scandals, she has become something of a specter herself, or as Jean-Pierre Martin put it commenting on writers’ mediatized presence,

13 Laurin, “Entrevue avec Marie Darrieussecq,” F5.

14 Marie Darrieussecq, Rapport de police: Accusations de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance de la fiction (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2010), 368.

15 To give but a few examples in order to underline the extent to which she returns, time and time again, to this subject: “Il y a un fantôme dans ma famille,” she says, “un deuil dont on ne parle pas. Moi, si. Ecrire c’est ma façon de parler.” Lamberterie, “Marie Darrieussecq,”102; “Ce secret tourne autour de la mort d’un enfant […] Il a une histoire très particulière que je ne suis pas encore prête à dire, d’ailleurs, je ne sais pas si je le pourrai un jour. Mais la chose particulière, c’est qu’il n’a pas de tombe. On ne l’a pas enterré. Et je suis complètement hantée par ce non-passage, j’ai fait une psychanalyse pendant six ans.” Lambeth, “Entretien avec Marie Darrieussecq,” 811-12; “Il me faut tous mes romans pour déplier ça.” Marie Darrieussecq, “Les 7 minutes de Marie Darrieussecq,” 43èmes journées de l’Ecole de la Cause freudienne, “Trauma,” 12 November 2013, https://youtu.be/BZydfQXWo2Q. “Le silence de mes parents […] a été très longtemps pesant pour moi […] Mais, après en avoir souffert […] j’ai appris à le respecter, et même à l’aimer […] J’aurais été incapable de raconter leur histoire de façon directe, j’ai eu besoin de décaler la réalité, par amour pour eux, mais aussi pour mieux la voir, pour taper dedans. C’est ce ‘pas de côté’ […] ce besoin de recourir à la métaphore.” Nathalie Crom, “La peau sur les mots,” Télérama.fr, 25 August 2007, http://po.st/cmnlzX.

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“[l]es livres se lisent à peine, mais on en parle beaucoup.”16 But if Darrieussecq’s self- portrayal to the media stresses the importance of this family tragedy, I would like to advance that by frequently revisiting this site of trauma, by weaving a different kind of plot each time she comes back to it, and by directing the reader to a (now familiar) family history, Darrieussecq is making us blind to the presence of other ghosts in her oeuvre.

She has said that for her, “[é]crire, c’est donner voix aux fantômes,”17 but one should be careful not to see in these “ghosts” a person, an Other with a (newfound) voice.

In Darrieussecq, when ghosts are used in the plural, “les fantômes,” they often refer to something in language. “Un fantôme,” however, usually refers to a specific ghost, like a dead sibling, spouse or child. These specific ghosts are never given a voice though; we are not privy to their perspective, their words. In the novel Tom est mort, it is the mother’s grief we witness, when she hears voices which she records on tape, she is the only one who hears them. And as Leslie Barnes perceptively points out, the novel is never able to provide an out, a way to get at the bottom of grief. She writes, “But there is no center, no end to the spiraling and unspiraling. The novel’s last lines, which finally explain Tom’s death and thus the unusual sound with which the novel begins, circle us right back to the beginning,”18 that is to the mother’s own voice. Indeed, the only time we really hear what Tom may have to say (or at least a statement in the first person singular:

16 Jean-Pierre Martin, La bande sonore: Beckett, Céline, Duras, Genet, Perec, Pinget, Queneau, Sarraute, Sartre (Paris: José Corti, 1998), 22.

17 Darrieussecq, “Entretien réalisé par Becky Miller et Martha Holmes en décembre 2001.”

18 Leslie Barnes, “‘J’entendais l’abîme’: Sound, Space, and Signification in Marie Darrieussecq’s Tom est mort,” French Forum 40, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 81.

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“Je suis Tom. Je suis mort” 19) is when he appears in Chloé Delaume’s book, Dans ma maison sous terre (2009), where she makes the dead – and Tom – speak. Indeed,

Darrieussecq understands “les fantômes” as referring to what is silenced: “j’appelle les

‘fantômes’, c’est-à-dire tout ce qui est passé sous silence, tout ce qui est tu, tout ce qui est non dit.”20 Darrieussecq is not concerned with an ethical gesture when claiming to give a voice to otherwise silenced ghosts,21 she is rather concerned with speaking about unspoken things, speaking her hantise, naming ghosts and as such making them disappear

(we shall see that for Hélène Cixous, on the contrary, naming a ghost allows him/her to return).

We are reminded here of the notable exception where ghosts do seem to have a voice: in Darrieussecq’s third novel, White, narrated by “nous, les fantômes.”22 Yet, one would be too quick in accepting this novel as one that “gives voice” to ghosts; suffice it

19 Chloé Delaume, Dans ma maison sous terre (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 2009), 59.

20 Jeannette Gaudet, “‘Des livres sur la liberté’: conversation avec Marie Darrieussecq,” Dalhousie French Studies 59 (Summer 2002): 111.

21 Similarly, Catherine Rodgers has pointed out that the author’s concerns lie not in championing a feminist message: “Et pourtant, pour chaque texte, il est difficile de dégager un message ou une position clairement féministe, comme si l’enjeu de son écriture était… ailleurs, dans l’évocation d’un monde autre qui serait aussi le nôtre. Afin de montrer cet ailleurs cependant si présent dans notre quotidien, Darrieussecq a recours au fantastique […] l’étrange réside de plus en plus au cœur de notre réalité, et l’écriture fantastique se combine de plus en plus étroitement au réalisme. Catherine Rodgers, “‘Entrevoir l’absence des bords du monde’ dans les romans de Marie Darrieussecq” in Nouvelles écrivaines: nouvelles voix? eds. Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2002), 84.

22 Marie Darrieussecq, White (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2003), 20. All subsequent references to White will be indicated in parentheses in the text.

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to say for now that the novel certainly merits a close inspection of this narrating “nous.”23

The proliferation of ghosts in Darrieussecq’s writing seems to happen precisely because ghosts are not an external entity, which come as a plague to haunt, but they are rather produced through writing and through the reader’s relationship to what is silenced. If phantoms are (in) the non-said – as she has claimed – the reader gives them their form when noticing an absence.

“Just” Ghosts

Before delving deeper into Darrieussecq, I want to address the question of the ghost’s ontology (what it is but also whether or not it belongs to anyone) and its significance for the question of reading. Invited to the table as an example of ill-advised symptomatic reading, the figure of the ghost finds itself stripped of its most productive aspects in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s “Surface Reading: An Introduction.”

Indeed, in their account of “the way we read now,”24 they urge readers and critics to consider the apparition of ghosts in a text not as a symptom of something hidden,25 “as surface signs of [a] deep truth,”26 but rather something to “just read.”27 Going against

23 One should also keep in mind that Darrieussecq claims to get rid of ghosts in this novel. I will come back to this novel later in this chapter.

24 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ed. “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” in “The Way We Read Now,” special issue, Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 6.

25 Best and Marcus note that a symptomatic reading would consider the occurrences of closets and ghosts to be signs found on the surface of something hidden deeper, for instance of “a homosexuality that cannot be overtly depicted.” Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 3.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 12.

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symptomatic readings’ focus on “absences, gaps, and ellipses in texts,”28 and their meanings, Best and Marcus argue that, in contrast, “[j]ust reading sees ghosts as presences, not absences, and lets ghosts be ghosts, instead of saying what they are ghosts of.”29

As a reader of her own spectral universe, Darrieussecq prompts us to further consider the relationship between ghosts and reading practices. We already saw in

Modiano’s case how attempting to read certain spectral places and objects literally occulted the role of fiction, the crafting and creation of said memories. The self- reflexiveness at work in Darrieussecq’s oeuvre encourages readings that pay particular attention to how the texts are writing themselves or being written. that As Helena

Chadderton remarks in her book-length study of Darrieussecq: ‘[h]er techniques […] suggest the active role of linguistic and textual features in the process of meaning creation.’30 Using Darrieussecq’s engagement with(in) her oeuvre as both a pretext and a cautionary lesson of sorts, I will show here that Best and Marcus’s injunction to let

“ghosts be ghosts” cannot be achieved by just reading. Indeed, the ghost is both nothing more than a ghost and nothing less than a ghost, and therefore must be read for all the possibilities and paradoxes it reserves.

To “let ghosts be ghosts” is indeed only possible if one can agree on what constitutes a ghost. When Best and Marcus argue that we should not read ghosts as ghosts

28 Ibid., 3.

29 Ibid., 13, emphasis in original.

30 Helena Chadderton, Marie Darrieussecq’s Textual Worlds: Self, Society, Language (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 4.

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of, they mean that ghosts should not stand for anything other than what they are31 – though their wording is perplexing precisely because even in its most rudimentary definition a ghost is usually understood as being the ghost of someone or something – they are probably following a consensus definition that sees ghosts as “[t]he soul of a deceased person, spoken of as appearing in a visible form, or otherwise manifesting its presence, to the living” (OED). As such, to be a ghost means to be the ghost of someone: a presence. However, as can be attested throughout literature (and history), ghosts have appeared “as anything from figments of the imagination, divine messengers, benign or exacting ancestors, and pesky otherworldly creatures […] to disturbing figures returned from the dead […] Their representational and socio-cultural functions, meanings and effects have been at least as manifold as their shapes.”32 As Elaine Freedgood (though writing the afterword [with Emily Apter] to the “surface reading” volume, she has subsequently argued for reading ghosts literally and allegorically “both at once”33) remarks regarding the ghosts found in Shakespeare but also elsewhere, “we have asked

31 Best and Marcus indeed point out that in Marcus’s monograph Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007), she argued that critics did not look at female friendship as signifying friendship in Victorian novels, “out of an insistence on reading female friendship as something other than it is.” Ibid., 12, emphasis mine.

32 María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities,” in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by María del Pilar and Esther Peeren (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 1.

33 Elaine Freedgood, “Ghostly Reference,” Representations 125, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 40. In the Afterword to “Surface Reading,” we already read (problematically, if I may, for the argument of surface reading) that “[l]iteral reading is of course a metaphor.” Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood, Afterword to “The Way We Read Now,” special issue, Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 139.

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much more about what [they] mean than what they are.”34 I would shift the emphasis here: the question surely should be about what ghosts do. For Derrida, as we have seen, the specter is precisely unknowable,35 and as such one could advance that it is always more complex than what its name suggests, precisely because of what it does, what it is able to do, what it makes us do, or as Thomas Keenan indicates, “ghosts are there to be read, again and again.”36

To “let a ghost be a ghost” thus means seeing the results of its doings, and this includes, I contend, more than a mere return from the dead, precisely (and paradoxically) because of its ability to return as a ghost from the dead, to inhabit multiple spaces and temporalities at once, to appear as if out of nowhere, showing itself to have always already been lurking in the shadows.

Brief Change of Words

Darrieussecq’s fourth novel Bref séjour chez les vivants (2001), which follows a day in the life of the three Johnson sisters – Jeanne, Anne, and Nore –, their mother and estranged father, has a ghost at its heart. The author even taunts us with the words she carefully crafted for the back cover,37 an invitation to wonder, to keep watch: “Nous

34 Freedgood, “Ghostly Reference,” 43, emphasis in original.

35 He writes, “on ne sait pas ce que c’est […] C’est quelque chose qu’on ne sait pas, justement.” Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 25, emphasis in original.

36 Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 125.

37 Darrieussecq, like the rest of P.O.L’s catalogue of authors, writes each of her back covers: “L’une des caractéristiques de Paul [Otchakovsky-Laurens], c’est qu’il veut que ce soit les auteurs qui écrivent la quatrième de couverture. […] C’est un exercice très

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sommes dans leur cerveau. Il y a un fantôme.” Having suggested herself in an interview that all her novels are “habités par Antigone,”38 Darrieussecq has noted that this figure

(of a mourning of a death without a grave) forms “évidemment […] le centre de la spirale, l’œil de l’ouragan…”39 in Bref séjour chez les vivants. Indeed, at its heart stands the drowning of Pierre, the third of the four Johnson siblings, and the fact that he has been completely erased, without even a tomb: “les photos, les vêtements, la tombe, ils

[les parents] ont pensé à effacer.”40

Yet, if Pierre is indeed the ghost that haunts the narrative, he is certainly not the only one. The novel ends with the death of Jeanne, the oldest sister, who wonders as she drowns: “est-ce qu’on voit défiler sa vie? j’apprends tout ce qu’ils ignorent, maman John

Anne et les autres, qui raconte le film de ma vie?”41 In the paperback edition (Folio) of the novel published some two years after the first P.O.L edition, this sentence appears as:

“j’apprends tout ce qu’ils ignorent, maman John Anne et les autres, film de ma vie tu parles.”42 Darrieussecq has spoken of her decision to change “une phrase extrêmement lourde” in the Folio version: “Il a fallu que dans la version POL [sic], parce que je n’avais

difficile. […] La quatrième c’est du marketing: le texte doit attirer l’attention des lecteurs et leur donner envie de lire le livre.” Fanny Clouzeau and Karine Le Bricquir, eds, Marie Darrieussecq parle des Éditions P.O.L (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris 10, 2006), 43-44.

38 Kaprièlian, “Marie Darrieussecq,” 18.

39 Ibid.

40 Marie Darrieussecq, Bref séjour chez les vivants (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2001), 188.

41 Darrieussecq, Bref séjour chez les vivants, 305.

42 Marie Darrieussecq, Bref séjour chez les vivants (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2003), 257 (Folio). This sentence ends without any marks of punctuation in the original.

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pas assez confiance dans le lecteur, j’écrive la phrase: ‘Anne est en train de raconter le film de la vie de Jeanne.’ Quand j’ai relu cette phrase, je me suis dit que je prenais le lecteur pour un imbécile. Il n’a pas besoin de ça. Et dans le Folio, cette phrase est enlevée. Comme d’autres phrases.”43 However, the sentence that Darrieussecq claims to have removed does not figure as such in the P.O.L version; instead it is the sentence I quoted above: “qui raconte le film de ma vie?”44 Darrieussecq, in her revisiting of the text, essentially removed the question “who is speaking for me?” While she herself claims that Anne is speaking for Jeanne, in the question originally posed, it is the figure of the author that looms – it is in fact Darrieussecq who is writing as if she were Jeanne.

It is almost as if the character, on the verge of death, realizing that she is but a puppet, momentarily severs the ties that hold her to the puppeteer and calls her out on it. And the author figure then goes back not only to erase it in the Folio version, but also, when speaking of it, puts yet another character in charge of the narration, deflecting from her own role.

While it may seem obvious that an author is behind a written text, and though we may suspend our disbelief and become engrossed in the story and its narrators, there are reasons nevertheless to sense here that there is a haunting at work, one that is carefully orchestrated to haunt the reader, not the characters. Since the narration (as our only access to the story of Pierre) is comprised only of their thoughts and (erased or repressed) memories, these characters are not exactly haunted by the ghost of Pierre returned from

43 Jean-Marc Terrasse, “‘Comment j’écris’: Marie Darrieussecq, entretien avec Jean- Marc Terrasse,” in La création en acte: Devenir de la critique génétique. Edited by Marion Schmid and Paul Gifford (Amsterdam: Éditions Rodopi, 2007), 264.

44 Darrieussecq, Bref séjour chez les vivants (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2001), 305.

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the dead; rather, a ghost is created through the family’s inability (or refusal) to speak and think of him and through the absence this reticence comes to signify. We finally learn of the drowning through something as innocuous as a riddle attributed to the mother: “Mon premier est Jeanne, mon deuxième est Anne, mon troisième est Nore, mon tout est. Il en manque un: Toto tombe à l’eau. Que reste-t-il ? Les procédés mémo… mnémotechniques.”45 We see the mother’s incapability of addressing the trauma directly

(she uses the famous Toto – the butt of all jokes – to speak of the drowning) and to face the memories – we see her trailing off at mémo…46 – she is incapable even of thinking the words procédés mémoriels and rather represses them.

In a different episode, the mother remembers being pregnant with yet another child (possibly Pierre) and recalls being told: “Mais Madame Johnson il y a des moyens.

Les noyer comme des petits chats.”47 The sentence trails off without any punctuation marks and the next paragraph begins abruptly without any reference to what the “après” could be: “[l]e plus étonnant c’est d’être encore en vie après, et que cette vie continue, combien, vingt-cinq ans après.”48 It is the blank space, the movement between the two paragraphs linked by the lack of punctuation that the trauma hinges on. If we also

45 Ibid., 58.

46 Which could also be read as “mes mots,” another trace of the author drawing itself in.

47 Ibid., 65. This image will be found several more times in Darrieussecq’s subsequent novel, White, as an image that haunts the text and which links the ghost (spirit) to the animal (etymologically speaking both are defined as “having breath”): “ce truc dans l’eau c’est peut-être un chien mort, est-ce qu’un chien reconnaît un chien mort […] C’est un petit dauphin peut-être, un bébé phoque, un enfant mort ballotté de mer en mer; […] Une vague a ravalé le ballot, la chose.” Darrieussecq, White, 80-81.

48 Darrieussecq, Bref séjour chez les vivants, 65.

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consider the way that the sentences are laid out on the page, we will notice in the move from one sentence to the next that the “après” refers to the drowning of Pierre.

Fig. 1: Marie Darrieussecq, Bref séjour chez les vivants (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2001), 65.

While we read about drowning cats and are unexpectedly forced to jump from an unfinished sentence to the beginning of the next paragraph, our eyes fall from the final

“s” of the “chats” to the “L” of “Le”; both letters are perfectly aligned, and in the fall on the page, a glissement occurs between the drowning of the cats and the drowning of

Pierre. The ghost of Pierre appears in the space left by the mother’s inability to say the words, even to herself, even twenty-five years later. It is not a ghost that willingly comes back to haunt, it is a ghost identified by the reader because of the narrator’s inability to speak the trauma. The ghost of Pierre is not the ghost of Pierre, it is rather the lack of

Pierre that is expressed in silence, yet a silence that screams its emptiness and begs to be filled.

It is then surely the reader who is at the receiving end of blanks, silences and missing pieces and who will construct a scene of haunting. When in the mother’s mind we learn that she has had “trois filles et quatre accouchements,”49 we the readers realize that one child is missing; throughout our reading of the novel we will be haunted, we will look in every corner to see if his ghost is lurking in the not said, looking for clues planted as if on a crime scene. Even the novel Clèves (2011) which was deemed too trashy by

49 Darrieussecq, Bref séjour chez les vivants, 21.

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many,50 and would seem the last place to find a reflection on ghosts, features a deceased brother no one speaks of: “Au salon aussi il y avait une photo. Elle était là comme […] tout un tas de choses qui n’ont pas de nom parce que justement elles sont là, là d’avant, avant elle, Solange. Le petit garçon appartient à la photo comme l’objet pendu à côté appartient au mur.”51 In this novel, the ghost of the little boy is precisely a ghost because no one speaks of it, we only gather that he has no name and he comes from “before.” As such, the reader is the one who supplements the silence and slowly creates something that would resemble a ghost.

In reading Darrieussecq, one can see how ghosts are no longer only thematic but now are also part of the text’s economy. They appear to the reader in a different way than to the characters, it is the reader who perceives the ghost that has been crafted by the author, and it is up to the reader to identify where the author erases her tracks; to

Darrieussecq’s description of the novel, “[n]ous sommes dans leur cerveau. Il y a un fantôme,” the following sentence could be added: “Et le fantôme, c’est moi, Marie

Darrieussecq.” Ghosts are willfully assembled or omitted, because they are there “for us,” the we of the author and the reader: one who makes them, and the other who reads them into the blanks and missing pieces of the text. We want and need them there: therefore they appear.

50 See for example, Delphine Peras, “Marie Darrieussecq a-t-elle versé dans le trash avec Clèves?” L’Express, 29 August 2011, http://po.st/hyoaui. For one of the only scholarly articles written (so far) on this novel see the recently published: Annabel Kim, “Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves: Adolescence Rewritten,” Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature 40, no. 1 (March 2016): Article 3, http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1849.

51 Marie Darrieussecq, Clèves (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2011), 33.

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The Birth of Fiction

Darrieussecq’s second novel, Naissance des fantômes is, so to say, her “patient zero” – she has called this text “naissance de la fiction”52 – and notably locates the “birth of specters” in and through language. The French title, while certainly poetic, is all the more powerful in that it also complicates our reading of the novel, whereas in its English translation, My Phantom Husband gives potential readers a less esoteric title but also determines a possible way to read the novel. But as actual readers will necessarily discover, the “phantom husband” may not be a “phantom” in the traditional sense. While

Naisssance des fantômes could have easily been translated as “The Birth of Phantoms,” to retain the ambiguity as to the fate of the husband, Anglophone readers will expect the husband to be a ghost.53 In addition, to address another of the novel’s spectral concerns, its refusal to adhere to chronological time by rendering it fragmented, elongated,

52 Gaudet, “‘Des livres sur la liberté,’” 112.

53 In Spanish and in Italian, the original meaning of the title is kept with: “Nacimiento de los fantasmas,” and “Nascita dei fantasmi.” Though it is arguably easier to keep the original wording across Romance languages, in German, the ambiguity (and the plural) is kept in the translation, “Gespenster sehen,” [“Seeing Ghosts”]. This is not the only time that Darrieussecq’s novels will be tailored for an English audience. Her fourth novel, Bref séjour chez les vivants, [A Brief Stay with the Living] was changed following the assumption that the English audience is not as smart as the French one; the name of each narrator (The Mother, Anne, Nore and Jeanne) is added before the paragraph told from their perspective. Darrieussecq says, “j’ai accepté que l’on mette le nom du personnage en entrée de paragraphe parce qu’il semble que les Anglais sont plus bêtes que les Français. C’était l’avis en tout cas de mon éditeur.” Terrasse, “‘Comment j’écris’: Marie Darrieussecq, entretien avec Jean-Marc Terrasse,” 263. The hesitation and ambiguity provided by not always being able to tell who is speaking is lost in English. Furthermore, the absences of final punctuation marks at the end of paragraphs and sentences have often been rendered as ellipses, implying a suspension of thought rather than an abrupt abandon and change.

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redefined,54 and the belatedness at work, which can be noted as happening from the onset of the novel, both contribute to the creation of a ghostly universe.

Very late in the novel, we find out that the narrator had decided to use her husband’s office at the real estate agency to write down, each day, what she calls: “le récit de mon attente,”55 making us wonder whether or not the words we have been reading are the product of her récit. This inkling is proven right when at the end of the novel the narrator lets us know that she is (envisaging) whether or not to continue writing

“cette histoire.”56 We also discover the inevitable: she is unable to write as fast as she lives. The narrator phrases it the following way: “[c]e récit se dédoublait en effet, je n’écrivais pas aussi vite que je vivais, et pourtant cette vie était lente.”57 The English translation by Helen Stevenson highlights the disjunction of writing by interpreting it as such: “[i]n fact it became a schizo-story. My writing couldn’t keep up with the experience and yet I was living my life slowly.”58 The narrator then imagines her new form as something that is moving and composed of different layers of translucent matter.

The disjunction between her writing and her life is precisely what constitutes her, what gives her form; and this being is described as a ghost. We read: “Pourtant ce qui vibrait

54 The narrator refers to her husband’s disappearance and subsequent possible reappearance as “un dérapage dans l’espace-temps” (18), “je pensais avoir rejoint un nouvel espace-temps” (42), “le temps commença à se dilater” (139). Marie Darrieussecq, Naissance des fantômes (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 1998).

55 Darrieussecq, Naissance des fantômes, 110.

56 Ibid., 158

57 Ibid., 111.

58 Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband, trans. Helen Stevenson (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 103, emphasis added.

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dans la distance entre l’écriture et ma vie, cette nappe feuilleté, que j’imaginais aussi mouvante qu’un rayon de soleil lamifié à mes fenêtres, était précisément ce qui me constituait: le retard que prenait sur ma vie le récit de cette disparition, ou plutôt de ses effets en négatif, ce retard était celui que je me sentais prendre sur mon fantôme de mari, parti beaucoup plus loin que moi dans des espaces qui m’échappaient.”59 This realization comes to the narrator in the moment of writing, it is when she sits down to write that she realizes that she is made of something else: a translucent entity. Here the belatedness (“le retard”) of the writing is what allows a ghost, her ghost to move further and further away.

The French language allows, in fact, for a double reading of this sentence in that the narrator could have also said “le fantôme de mon mari,” yet we read, “mon fantôme de mari.” In this other reading, we can stop short of the husband: “ce retard était celui que je me sentais prendre sur mon fantôme.” When the sentence is read this way, the narrator can be seen as both the subject (“je me sentais”) and the object (“mon fantôme”) of the sentence. There is a ghost which haunts the text, it is “mon fantôme.” Hidden in the search for the phantom of the other, we realize that the narrator is splitting herself into a narrating entity and (for syntactic reasons) her own ghost. At a loss as to how to catch up, the narrator experiences time in a disjointed fashion, the gap becomes greater and greater, so much so that at the end of the novel, when the husband makes a final appearance in his ghostly form, the narrator follows him as (something of) a ghost herself: “Et lorsque je sentis mon mari m’entourer par la seule extension de ses mains peu matérielles, et me charger à mon tour de cette énergie-là … lorsque je me fondis dans sa nébuleuse, je regrettai le temps où je pouvais me lover dans ses bras sans me poser de question, mais je

59 Darrieussecq, Naissance des fantômes, 112.

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me sus gagnée, aussi, par la force impatiente de deux cents cerfs-volants. Je ne compris jamais si nous traversâmes la fenêtre, ou si mon mari l’ouvrit pour nous laisser passage.”60 Although it could be argued that the narrator is merely flying alongside her phantom husband, she also describes herself as melting into his nebula and possibly traversing the window. The narrator is already split through the writing of her experience into the subject of enunciation (“je”) and her phantom (“mon fantôme”) that she is chasing after. Seeing the narrator as producing herself as a textual ghost – one that is produced in the writing of the text – will allow me to read the final sentence of the story as the moment in which the birth of phantoms takes place.

Although one can certainly read the end of the novel, as Martine Motard-Noar has, as “un clin d’œil moqueur, non académique, bien typique de Darrieussecq, où la gageure est de décrire l’acte d’amour d’une femme avec un mari-fantôme,”61 I propose another reading which questions the very appearance of the ghost. In the morning, coming back from a tumultuous night, the narrator considers her options, yet one should note that it is “avec une sobre impuissance.”62 Unable to decide whether she should make herself a coffee or continue writing her story, she finally has the important realization63

60 Ibid., 157, emphasis mine.

61 Martine Motard-Noar, review of Naissance des fantômes, by Marie Darrieussecq, The French Review 73, no. 1 (October 1999): 163.

62 Darrieussecq, Naissance des fantômes, 158.

63 Note that it is in the moment of utter passivity, powerlessness (“impuissance”), that epiphany, revelation happens. This powerlessness brings us back to another one at the beginning of the narration: “mon impuissance devant les rues désertes me vidait les jambes, mon corps se défaisait de moi pour se remplir d’un fluide étranger, comme un réservoir de farine ou de larmes.” Ibid., 17. It is interesting here to point out that both flour and tears – through the whiteness of the flour and colorless tears – evoke ghostliness. And powerlessness is that which brings out the ghost. As the narrator finds

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which ends the novel: “je sais seulement avoir cessé, à ce moment-là, de me demander si mon mari (si les chats, les oiseaux, les poissons et les mouches aux yeux à facettes) sentait et voyait tout de même ce que moi je sentais et voyais.”64 These final words are an echo to a moment during her mother’s dinner party, about fifteen pages earlier, where the narrator, having seen her husband appear, fantasized about what she (they) would do:

“[n]ous verrions les mêmes couleurs, les mêmes formes, et je cesserais de me demander si mon mari (si les chats, les oiseaux, les poissons et les mouches aux yeux à facettes) sentait et voyait tout de même ce que moi je sentais et voyais.”65 If we look at the only difference in these two statements we will notice that “nous verrions” and “je cesserais” are in the conditional tense in their first occurrence. The conditional, here in fact, demands a condition to be fulfilled in order for the wish to move from wishful thinking to actuality.

During this episode, as the narrator is making her move across the room, shortly before stating this wish, she says: “Je ne le quittais pas du regard, il me semblait qu’ainsi je le maintenais là; comme une image que l’on vient tout juste de discerner dans un tapis, en dégageant de l’entrelacs des lignes et des piquetis de laine, un visage que nul n’y a sciemment tissé, et que l’on perdra si l’on cille.”66 The phantom husband is only appearing due to the stillness of her gaze, her concentration in making him appear, herself impuissante, she decides to return home and sees herself with her husband both as ghosts: “Il suffisait d’un mouvement dans les branches, d’une variation sous les lampadaires, pour que je nous aperçoive tous les deux, marchant dans les rues, comme ces soirs où notre ombre double nous précédait.” Ibid., 17-18.

64 Ibid., 158.

65 Ibid., 142.

66 Ibid., 140, emphasis added.

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though only from her own desire (“un visage que nul n’y a sciemment tissé”). Not only did she wish to see her husband and possibly as a result made him appear the first time,67 she makes sure that it happens again. Following her wish for them both to see everything like each other, she returns to the simile (“comme une image que l’on vient tout juste de discerner dans un tapis”) of the carpet: “Le tapis défilait lentement sous mes pieds, … la trame s’allongeait. Les dessins grandissaient, se compliquaient, s’emmêlaient, je suivais une ligne bleue qui soudain s’enroulait sur une ligne verte, et je ne savais pas si j’étais victime d’un sortilège tissé avec la laine, de ma propre impatience à le rejoindre, ou de quelque chose entre nous, qui aurait détendu les fils du temps et de l’espace.”68 More than merely trying to compare her slow progression towards her husband, the narrator is here describing the writing process; in French, the word “trame” is also used to speak about the plot (of a novel, a film). For this reason, we understand that his being present is made possible by her wish to join him and the disjointedness of time and space through the writing process. We finally realize that it could be that she is the one who has made it all happen, who has phantomized, through writing, her husband’s reappearance. In retelling her first night alone, the narrator explains that she believes in the power of suggestion: “Pourtant je savais bien que c’était là faire leur jeu. On commence à croire à

67 It can be argued that the narrator’s mother-in-law is seeing him (her son) as well: “je crus alors être la seule à voir entrer mon mari, mais le cri que poussa ma belle-mère démentit tout de suite cette hypothèse.” Ibid., 140. However, the second scream of the mother-in-law is related to the noise of something falling: “il y eut un bruit énorme, ma belle-mère cria de nouveau et de grosses bulles éclatèrent en voix variées à mes oreilles. J’eus le temps de saisir comme un paillettement, une lumière qui me resta dans les doigts et dans les yeux.” Ibid., 143. The “disappearance” of the husband happens following this scream. One could argue that the mother-in-law is susceptible and that her first scream has another cause, maybe the door suddenly opening. We have no access to what the mother-in-law is seeing, just two screams.

68 Ibid., 142.

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la présence des ombres, et les ombres se nourrissent de ce soupçon; leur réalité gagne, et leur présence devient bientôt une évidence. Rallumer la lumière, c’est admettre leur existence, de même, dans le noir, garder les yeux ouverts.”69 By believing in them, we make their reality grow and their presence a fact.

Speaking about the possible influence of Hervé Guibert70 on her choice of title,

Darrieussecq mentions a quote drawn from a letter by the Marquis de Sade to his wife, which reads as follows, “vous m’avez fait former des fantômes qu’il faudra que je réalise.” Guibert turned that into a book title: Vous m’avez fait former des fantômes

(1987). Darrieussecq, explaining the significance of this phrase, says: “C’est une phrase terrifiante. Il écrit à sa femme, en gros, ‘je fantasme sur vous et il faudra que je réalise mes fantasmes.’”71 While Darrieussecq affirms that she does not know whether or not she thought of Guibert’s book consciously,72 this terrifying sentence precisely encapsulates

Naissance des fantômes. The narrator has to make the ghost of her husband come true, she needs to make it real; the French verb réaliser (like the English “to realize”) points to the creation of something. Like Sade has written, the phantoms or phantasms must not

69 Ibid., 40.

70 Darrieussecq is a dedicated reader of Guibert and one of the very first scholars to write about his oeuvre: “Le premier travail universitaire, après sa mort, est celui de Marie Darrieussecq, […] qui intitule sa Maîtrise: Hervé Guibert, l’homme qui disait tout? (1992).” She also completed a dissertation in 1997 entitled: “Moments critiques dans l’autobiographie contemporaine: L’Ironie tragique chez Serge Doubrovsky, Hervé Guibert, Michel Leiris et Georges Perec.” Arnaud Genon, “Hervé Guibert en 2004: état des lieux des études guibertiennes,” Fabula 5, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 6, 9 [numbers refer to paragraphs not pages], http://www.fabula.org/revue/document232.php.

71 Gaudet, “‘Des livres sur la liberté,’” 112.

72 She says, “Je ne sais pas si j’y ai pensé consciemment.” Ibid., 112.

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only be formed, they need to become real: the ghost is that which is made to become real because of one’s desire.

To go back to the final scene of this novel, it is only at the very end that the narrator possibly catches up with the ghost. While the sentence begins with the powerlessness to make a decision, the last option is to return to the agency to write:

“quand je me retrouvai seule dans la lumière bégayante de l’aube, et que j’envisageai avec une sobre impuissance de me faire un café, d’accompagner ma mère au départ de son bateau, et de retourner à l’agence écrire cette histoire, je sais seulement avoir cessé, à ce moment-là de me demander si mon mari (si les chats, les oiseaux, les poissons et les mouches aux yeux à facettes) sentait et voyait tout de même ce que moi je sentais et voyais.”73 Even though we read that she is powerless in her envisaging – and note once again the word choice (envisager), which comes from seeing a face, “[r]egarder face à face en esprit” (Littré), that is, seeing face to face in spirit but we can also read as spirit – it is in this exact moment (of being face to face with a spirit) that her desire is fulfilled, the ceasing of wondering, the giving up. It is also the moment in which we realize that she indeed chose to go to the agency – since we are reading the story – and is as such yielding to the possibilities provided by language, the possibility that in writing, the narrator can make the husband appear, can en-visage him. The end of the story is also its beginning, the moment she decides to write the story as we read it.

73 Darrieussecq, Naissance des fantômes, 158, emphasis mine.

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Reprenons

Darrieussecq’s fifth novel, written in the wake of the events of September 11,

2001,74 brings us to the Antarctic.75 First conceived as a thriller, a spy story,76 the White we read features scientists who share the space with the ghosts on that continent. It is in this space, that we find once more such a furtive irruption. These ghosts – for the most part unidentified and fused as a collective, “nous, les fantômes”77 – are purposefully in charge of the narration until, the author tells us, their replacement by another “nous,” the one of the leading couple of the novel: “La narration est prise en compte par un nous collectif qui est celui des fantômes, celui de la névrose et celui de la convention sociale.

C’est un vaste nous, celui des morts qui nous pèsent, celui de l’empêchement généralisé, et peu à peu ce nous va basculer – il y a là un attrait théorique – vers le nous du couple en

74 A reference remains in the text: “[t]u enfonces ta main jusqu’au coude et tu ramènes celles [les cendres] du World Trade Center.” Marie Darrieussecq, White (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2003), 152.

75 Darrieussecq says about the choice of location, “j’en ai tellement entendu parler par mon mari, qui y va souvent […] qu’il ne me restait plus qu’à l’écrire.” Marie Darrieussecq, “Marie Darrieussecq par elle-même,” Décapage 46 (Hiver/Printemps 2013): 79. See also: “Mon mari travaille là-bas deux mois par an. J’ai donc énormément de matériau imaginaire, ou plutôt réel pour le coup.” Terrasse, “‘Comment j’écris’: Marie Darrieussecq, entretien avec Jean-Marc Terrasse,” 267.

76 Darrieussecq explains: “La seule fois où le réel est vraiment venu interrompre mon écriture, à ma grande surprise, c’était pour le 11 septembre 2001. Beaucoup d’écrivains ont témoigné sur l’impression qu’ils avaient d’être en train d’écrire un bouquin totalement anecdotique, à côté de la réalité. On écrit, puis on allume sa télé et on voit les deux tours s’effondrer. J’étais en train d’écrire une version de White – qui se passe au pôle Sud – où la narratrice était un agent secret. C’était un récit d’aventure, extrêmement romanesque, qui n’a pas tenu le choc. J’ai totalement changé le point de vue, parce qu’écrire un roman d’agent secret, au moment où la CIA n’avait apparemment rien vu de ce qui allait se passer, n’avait aucun sens.” Kaprièlian, “Marie Darrieussecq. Entretien avec Nelly Kaprièlian,” 38 [numbers refer to paragraphs not pages].

77 Darrieussecq, White, 20.

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train de se former, pour devenir une espèce de Nous Deux [magazine populaire français spécialisé dans les histoires d’amour à l’eau de rose] plus sentimental.”78 However, as

Martina Stemberger, in an article entitled “We the ghosts or who, when we speak, speaks,” has remarked, “it remains open, who actually speaks in the name of this we. The narrating perspective in White is centrifugal like the ghosts themselves.”79 When the ghosts are rendered silent at the end of the novel it is precisely through a force described as centrifugal: “Une force centrifuge est en train de nous expulser – ils prennent toute la place, ils veulent faire sans nous! […] – nous résistons : nous pouvons parler pour eux!”80

Centrifugal movement is a movement that moves away from a center (Lat.: centrum, fugere), and while it can be argued that the force at the center is the couple Edmée/Peter, there is another force which has even more say in this story: the author who is behind this we, the ghosts and the one who has professed that she would get rid of them, “dans le livre que je viens d’écrire, White, je leur tords le cou.”81 In other words, while the ghosts claim that they can speak for the couple, they are not the only ones to do so.

The two protagonists, Edmée Blanco and Peter Tomson will be conceived as answers to the question posed by Darrieussecq on the novel’s back cover: “[j]usqu’à quel point faut-il se débarrasser des fantômes pour faire l’amour?” The ghosts in question are made of clichés – commonplace notions of romance we readers may have ourselves

78 Terrasse, “‘Comment j’écris,’” 267-68

79 “[E]s bleibt offen, wer nun eigentlich im Namen dieses Wir spricht. Die narrative Perspektive in White ist zentrifugal wie die Gespenster selbst.” Martina Stemberger, “Wir Gespenster oder Wer, wenn wir sprechen, spricht: Zu Marie Darrieussecqs Roman White.” Romanische Forschungen 122 (2010): 63, emphasis in original, my translation.

80 Darrieussecq, White, 192-193.

81 Lambeth, “Entretien avec Marie Darrieussecq,” 812.

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thought up in reading Edmée and Peter’s story – and old memories which must be expelled: “[c]ramponnés aux haubans de la tente, un blizzard fantôme déchiquette nos corps sans matière – ‘it was love at first sight!’, ‘amour avec toujours!’, ‘strangers in the night!’ – poulailler de fantômes, caquètement de plumes et de nuées – ‘nous! nous!’ – hiboux centrifugés à tous vents, valdinguent dehors, dehors!”82 Who will be speaking now that the ghosts are gone? We immediately find another nous, manifestly identified with Edmée and Peter: “personne ne frappera à notre porte […] nous sommes seuls, l’air, l’avenir, l’espace, sont dégagés et libres, nous sommes impeccablement seuls, nous n’avons rien d’autre à faire qu’à chercher, à chercher comment nous allons faire.”83 Yet this nous does not prove a sustainable narrating successor to ghosts. This point of view lasts for less than a paragraph, and should rather be understood as a brief access to one of the main characters’ thoughts, who is speaking for the other. The narration indeed continues under the guise of another nous. It is, however, no longer the nous of the ghosts

– whose voices since their expulsion are rendered in quotation marks and italics84 – nor that of the protagonists.

The nous that interests me is implied in an imperative, a simple: “Reprenons.”85

In this one-word sentence, the author betrays her presence, her taking over of the ghostly

82 Darrieussecq, White, 193, emphasis in original.

83 Ibid., 194.

84 We read the following declaration: “‘Cette femme est trop bien pour toi’, braillent à tue-crâne les fantômes dans la sirène de la centrale, ‘ça ne marchera jamais!’” Ibid., 195, emphasis in original.

85 Ibid., 196.

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nous (and her inclusion of the reader in the process).86 Through this one word, we are reminded who is in charge, who does to ghosts, and to the couple, what she wants.

Darrieussecq’s objective in this story was to test a theory, but perhaps not the one she first intended. Rather than merely a story about haunting,87 this is the story of an experiment in narratology: who, when ghosts no longer speak, speaks?88 Or to put it differently: how long can the narration be sustained when its narrators are rendered silent? The novel, by getting rid of its narrators, adopts the cold eye of a scientist – the author – observing impassively, only signaling its presence through a “reprenons,” ‘let’s continue with this.’89 The novel ends with the (scientific) description of the conditions needed for a pregnancy to be sustained: “En terme de nourriture, de chaleur et d’oxygène, les conditions sont réunies: une indifférence souveraine est opposée à toute autre forme d’événement.”90 The word indifférence is used in chemistry to explain “the state of a body whose chemical affinities are satisfied” (Littré), and which will remain as is,

86 The following sentence features a direct object pronoun (“pronom personnel complément d’objet direct”) in the third person plural (“les”) rather than the first (“nous”): “Reprenons. Ici, personne ne viendra les déranger.” Ibid., 196, emphasis mine. If the “Reprenons” were the one of the couple, the next sentence would logically read: “personne ne viendra nous déranger.”

87 Even though there are traumatic events both characters are running away from and hoping (but unable) to forget: the death of Peter’s sister (Ibid., 120) and the deaths of Edmée’s young neighbors, drowned by their mother (Ibid., 142).

88 To borrow Stemberger’s title.

89 Notice the similarity with the ending of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos: “Eh bien, continuons,” which signals the unresolved/unresolvable situation of the characters. Here, much like Sartre’s Garcin, Estelle and Inès, Edmée and Peter have no choice but to continue Darrieussecq’s experiment. Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos suivi de Les mouches (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2007), 95.

90 Darrieussecq, White, 222, emphasis mine.

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without any future coupling with other elements. The end of the experiment is reached when Peter and Edmée shut the ghosts out (of their tent, of their heads) and finally make love; the ghosts are no longer needed; they are locked out, irrelevant. The point of the experiment was to get rid of them: now that all the “chemical affinities are satisfied,” and the coupling of those who should be together takes place, we are left exactly where we started, with the beautiful sea where we first meet Edmée:91 “la mer est belle […] tout est calme et blanc.”92 Once the experiment is over, the tools are all put away, the ghosts are eradicated, and it may seem as if nothing has happened. However, there remains a tiny reminder, the new ghost signified by conception. When the community of “nous, les fantômes,” earlier in the novel wondered: “comment distinguer parmi nous qui a vécu, qui est resté dans les limbes?”,93 they reminded us that there are many types of ghost, and notably of the fact that the category Derrida calls “les fantômes de ceux qui ne sont pas encore nés,”94 is not to be understood in only symbolic terms. More importantly though, there are some other ghosts that remain, ones that were already there, ones unlike the narrating ghosts of White, which are “evident, perceptible, apprehensible.”95 From the first page of the novel, these narrators readily identified themselves as “nous, les fantômes.” But in this “nous” one cannot forget to include both author and reader who

91 The novel opens with a paragraph narrated by the ghosts on the Antarctic continent, and we first meet Edmée as she is making her way to the base in the second section of the opening pages: “La mer est belle, c’est-à-dire (Edmée Blanco l’apprend dans le manuel de bord) presque plate, avec un petit clapot tranquille.” Ibid., 10.

92 Ibid., 222.

93 Ibid., 184.

94 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 16.

95 Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 9.

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played a part in getting this story to conclusion and who remain long after the narrating ghosts have been shut out; we who have been included in the innumerable ghostly “nous” from the very beginning of the novel, the only inhabitants of the space of the plot: “Et nous bien entendu, mais comment nous compter?”96

Writing and Reading Ghosts, mode d’emploi

The point is that ghosts for Darrieussecq are, then, not only ghosts but also pawns of a sort, carefully crafted and thought out, whether as paradoxical signifiers of

“absence,” as uncanny doubles, or as a way of experimenting with form. This can be seen quite literally in Le Pays (2005),97 Darrieussecq’s only autofiction to date. In fact, the text offers a variety of ways of engaging with these questions both thematically and on a more formal level: in Le Pays, Marie Rivière is also writing a book named “Le Pays.” In the one we read, there are two interlaced narrations using different points of view signalled by different fonts (first-person narration in bold, third-person in regular font); Marie’s two brothers are named Paul and Pablo; the I (j/e) is often split in two;98 and Marie

96 Darrieussecq, White, 9.

97 Le Pays is comprised of two alternating narrations: the first one in the first-person singular (printed in bold font), the second in the third-person singular (printed in normal font). Quotes from the narration in the first-person singular for ease of reading have been changed here to normal font, quotes in the third-person singular will be indicated in a footnote.

98 While Darrieussecq’s practice is certainly reminiscent of Monique Wittig’s own use of split pronouns, Gill Rye has remarked that her use of it differs from Wittig’s. See Gill Rye, “Marie Darrieussecq’s Le Pays: threshold worlds,” in Margaret-Ann Hutton, Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Writing (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 43. This also recalls Iris Marion Young, who remarks that ‘the pregnant subject […] is decentered, split, or doubled in several ways’. Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience:“Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46.

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Rivière’s pregnancy, as Gill Rye has described, accompanies the reader throughout:

“[t]he time-span of the novel is nine months, which coincides with Marie’s second pregnancy.”99 We also learn a telling fact towards the end of the book, which underscores how, for the narrator, the figure of the double is part of the very fabric of the self and a feature that defines us all: Marie Rivière writes of the Icelandic legend which explains that everyone has his or her double, and the fact that in Icelandic, the word ‘double’ is the same word that is used to refer to “placenta.”100 Yet, more significantly, Marie Rivière, the narrator and a writer who has returned to her native country after living in Paris, is obsessed with visiting “la Maison des Morts” likening it to an addiction.101 Resisting what has become “la névrose du pays”102 – filming one’s loved ones and oneself in anticipation of death and “resurrection” through holographic technology – Marie is more concerned with crafting the hologram of her brother Paul, who died as a month-old infant.103 Marie’s reflection and her design of the hologram echo the manner in which other Darrieussecqian ghosts function, hinting at a way of reading them. What also transpires is Darrieussecq’s writing process, or the ways in which she inscribes her ghosts within her fiction.

99 Rye, “Marie Darrieussecq’s Le Pays,” 32.

100 Marie Darrieussecq, Le Pays (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2005), 269.

101 Darrieussecq, Le Pays, 247.

102 Ibid., 202.

103 Ibid., 214.

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The novel’s alternating narrations are clearly demarcated and separated by a star save for three instances.104 It is the third instance that interests me, for it shows the appearance of the ghost in the very fabric of the text. When Marie hears her father on the phone saying to someone, “[o]n nous l’a pris,”105 she begins to weave a fiction of her own to answer the unsaid, “[d]e quoi parlait-il? Ça avait commencé là, sa fiction, son fantasme.”106 The next section will alternate between paragraphs in the first person and paragraphs in the third person. In the novel, Marie is writing a book also entitled “Le

Pays,”107 which could plausibly be comprised of the fragments in the third-person narration. It is in order to face the hollowness of Paul’s absence that fiction is needed to speak about the unsaid. Indeed, we only find out about him in the third-person narration:

“[t]out ce qu’elle savait, c’était son prénom, Paul, et qu’on en parlait pas.”108 It is thus by means of fiction, by way of writing fiction that the ghost of Paul can be created. Marie concedes, “[i]l se trouve qu’écrire vous tient à une table, dans une grande disponibilité aux fantômes,”109 but far from being separated from such ghosts, she makes it clear that she is their very source: “[m]on souffle, et les mouvements de mes yeux les faisaient

104 The first two instances are as follows: one where the narration in the third person (normal font) begins a new paragraph following the first-person narration (bold font) but still within the same section (Ibid., 14), and one where the switch happens mid-sentence (Ibid., 39).

105 Ibid., 105. This quote is from the narration in the third person.

106 Ibid. This quote is from the narration in the third person.

107 Ibid., 79.

108 Ibid., 104. This quote is from the narration in the third person.

109 Ibid., 83.

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naître.”110 It is through writing that the ghost is inscribed and through reading that it appears. By writing her questions about Paul in the third person, Marie also fictionalizes herself and is able through the back and forth to break the silence that her parents are so desperate to preserve. It is following her fictionalized theories about what happened to the boy111 that Marie begins to go to La Maison des Morts to finally give his absence another form.

When she decides to make her brother’s hologram, she has nothing with which to start, he does not even figure amongst the family holograms. And even though the prospect of seeing an empty hologram is terrifying, because of its sinister familiarity, its uncanniness (“Une forme humanoïde debout, translucide, animée d’une lente oscillation.

Un pantin quadrillé d’abscisses et d’ordonnées. Prêt à l’emploi, prêt à être nourri d’informations pour devenir le spectre de quelqu’un”112), Marie begins crafting the ghost of her brother, because a mere translucent form will not do. A ghost needs to be worked on, nourished with information, it has no life of its own; unsatisfied with the hologram of a generic baby that she created using scanned pictures from magazines,113 Marie will attempt to make the hologram more personal using a memory of an encounter with what she claims was Paul’s ghost.

110 Ibid.

111 “[L]’été l’avait pris, les arbres l’avaient pris, la lumière l’avait mangé…” Ibid., 107, narration in the third person.

112 Ibid., 207-208.

113 Ibid., 248.

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The encounter is retold in the first-person narration, but interestingly it is retold as a story, where the end is known right at the beginning.114 Marie recalls an event ten years prior, in the Eurostar coming back from London, where she believes she saw Paul as an adult. Marie wonders whether this encounter is due to the fact that she was a little drunk or tired, or that Paul had wanted to communicate something to her, but most importantly she wonders whether it has to do with his absence needing a form: “Quelque chose que je portais depuis longtemps, une impression profonde, la forme en creux d’un disparu, allait projeter dans l’espace une sorte de corps.”115 Paul’s ghost, understood in these terms, is not so much a ghost returning to haunt Marie as Marie’s creation, the filled-out, inverted, phantasmic projection of something missing.

When Marie endeavors to give the hologram the features of the man seen on the train, she at first fails to realize that Paul’s ghost cannot assume its own visual substance, but only beget a more and more unworldly double. As she combines and recombines the options, “[l]es yeux de mon père, la bouche masculinisée de ma mère, le nez de ma grand-mère,”116 all she achieves is the crafting of another creature, a monstrous one, which is her poor double: “je les recombinai, je cherchais quelqu’un mais des monstres naissaient. Quand l’ordinateur, dans son infinie patience, me fournit un hologramme de moi en homme, un pathétique travesti à côté duquel Pablo [Marie’s other brother] lui-

114 The entire London-trip is recounted and punctuated from the perspective of the encounter: “Dans moins de cinq heures j’allais apercevoir mon frère dans l’Eurostar” (Ibid., 235); “Dans trois petites heures j’allais rencontrer mon frère” (Ibid., 241); “Dans moins de trois heures j’allais tomber sur mon frère” (Ibid., 242).

115 Ibid., 236, emphasis mine.

116 Ibid., 250.

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même gardait un certain sex-appeal, découragée je me déconnectai.”117 It is the last time in the narration that we have a glimpse of this hologram, the failed experiment. As Marie attempts to materialize the ghost of Paul she is left with her own monstrous reflection, and a truth about ghosts perhaps who are not in their own likeness when represented: they are meant to be developed neither narratively nor visually, because they do not belong to the order of representation, but precisely appear in writing and reading.

I dwell on these details because, tellingly, the last revelation, the last paragraph of the text – which may well be the other epiphany of the book – can seem incongruous if one does not consider it in relation to the making of holograms, the making of ghosts. At the end of the novel, Marie gives birth to a daughter, Épiphanie, but ends up reflecting on the nature of ghosts. She writes: “[l]es fantômes ne rôdent pas dans les limbes. Ils n’existent que dans la rencontre. Ils n’ont d’autre lieu que leur apparition. Quand ils disparaissent, c’est totalement. Ils n’ont pas de vie intérieure, ils n’ont pas de vie quelque part, ils n’ont ni psychologie ni mémoire. Ils ne souffrent pas. Ils naissent de notre hantise, qui les allume et les éteint, oscillants, pauvres chandelles. Ils ne sont que pour nous.”118 Unsettling a more traditional conception of ghosts, where ghosts actively and purposefully return to haunt the living, here it is our own volition, our own revisiting that brings them forth – we haunt them, the way that Marie has willed her brother Paul to age if only for a moment. These ghosts are a complete creation, a (technologically enhanced) fiction.

117 Ibid., 250.

118 Ibid., 297. This quote is from the narration in the third-person.

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In a lecture delivered in Italy in 2007, Darrieussecq would return to Le Pays and stress that the reason that this book is an autofiction is not the obvious one: “Si Le Pays est une autofiction, ce n’est pas parce que la narratrice me ressemble, c’est parce que, tout en me ressemblant, elle parle à des hologrammes.”119 If Darrieussecq’s interest is in emphasizing the “fiction” part of “autofiction,” what she says also points to the inherently hologrammatic or holographic nature of fiction (understood in its etymological sense).

Ghosts are as such a metafictional figure, a reminder that behind fiction – and behind them – there is nothing. They are not an external presence haunting the text: they are the text.

Another Christmas Carol

This ghost-making is best illustrated with one of Darrieussecq’s nouvelles à chute found in the fifteen-story collection Zoo: Nouvelles (2006). “Noël parmi nous” is a

Christmas ghost story, which, unlike one English Christmas classic, does not assert right away that the character, who will appear as a ghost, is dead.120 Quite to the contrary, readers of Darrieussecq’s story only find out in the last sentence that the adult first-person

119 Marie Darrieussecq, “Je est unE autre, ou pour qui elle se prend,” in Écrire l’histoire d’une vie. Edited by Annie Oliver (Rome: Edizioni Spartaco, 2007), 113.

120 Note the incipit of A Christmas Carol: “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9. Regarding the coupling of Christmas and the appearance of ghosts, Michael Newton notes that “it was very likely Dickens who established for Victorians the connection between Christmas and ghost stories […] The festive ghost is a curious conjunction, though one that expresses the central paradox of the genre: that is, the intertwining of cosiness and terror. The bond between Christmas and ghost stories would in time become a cultural cliché.” Michael Newton, ed., Introduction to The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (London: Penguin Classics, 2010), xvii.

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narrator actually died when she was 11 years old. Though there are hints throughout the story that the narrator is ignored or not seen by others, that her body is imperceptible,121 that she was run over by a bus in a tragic accident,122 nothing prepares us for the ghost of an adult. Instead of the ghost of the young girl, which would be the ghost expected, we have a ghost that claims to have aged, married, found a job, and even (though unsuccessfully) tried to have children of her own.123 As Simon Kemp has put it, “the narrator […] is the ghost of the adult who would have existed had her childhood self not been killed.”124 We could also suggest that the narrator is the ghost of someone who has never existed, or more precisely, the ghost of a ghost. Rather than seeing this merely as a surprising ending, and a choice in line with the short story genre, close attention to grammatical choices reveals another possible reading.

The story opens with the narrator being told by her mother to take a few days off and to go enjoy a little vacation in her childhood home: “– Tu sais où sont les clés, m’a dit ma mère. Sous la deuxième marche du perron.” This is followed by the narrator’s comment, that her mother is “toujours très précise dans ses indications.”125 When the narrator finally arrives there, she once more recalls what she was told and methodically completes the tasks that were required of her: “« Je suivis la longue liste des instructions

121 Marie Darrieussecq, “Noël parmi nous,” in Zoo: Nouvelles (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2006), 207.

122 Darrieussecq, “Noël parmi nous,” 213.

123 Ibid., 206.

124 Simon Kemp, “The Ghost and the Machine: Minds and Spirits in Darrieussecq,” Marie Darrieussecq. Edited by Helena Chadderton and Gill Rye. Special issue of Dalhousie French Studies 90 (2012): 70.

125 Darrieussecq, “Noël parmi nous,” 205.

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de ma mère. Tu enclencheras le compteur électrique, tu te rappelles où il est ? »

J’enclenchai le compteur électrique. « Tu allumeras la chaudière », j’allumai la chaudière toute neuve.”126 On Christmas Eve as her entire family comes to the house, the narrator’s niece, pointing to the narrator’s picture on the mantel, asks who it is. The narrator’s mother responds with the sentence that ends the story: “« J’ai rêvé qu’elle était vivante, dit ma mère en baissant la voix, mariée à Paris, que nous parlions au téléphone et qu’elle venait passer Noël parmi nous. »”127 Quotation marks in this story are exclusively dedicated to recalling the mother’s instructions, while the utterances of many characters

(the father, the husband, even the mother in other instances) are marked only by the dash and the italics. The quotation marks also share the distinction that each instruction is followed by the actual performance of this task: “« Tu allumeras la chaudière », j’allumai la chaudière toute neuve,”128 except in the final sentence, which ends the story, and which is not, at first glance, directly followed by a completion of the task. One should note that in these instructions, the mother uses the future tense, more precisely the “futur injonctif”129 while the narrator reports what she did in the passé simple. The particularity of this futur injonctif is that it involves specifically two people: “Le locuteur doit

126 Ibid., 208. I have retained the French quotation marks (« ») in these quotes to emphasize the difference between the types of reported speech in this story.

127 Ibid., 217.

128 Ibid., 208.

129 “Comme une injonction porte sur l’avenir, le futur peut en exprimer, avec différentes forces, les diverses nuances: règle morale, ordre strict, suggestion, consigne pour un devoir, etc. […] Le futur simple permet d’expliciter l’époque où doit se réaliser l’ordre, qui est généralement moins strict qu’à l’impératif, à cause de la part d’incertitude inhérente au futur.” Martin Riegel, Jean-Christophe Pellat, and René Rioul, Grammaire méthodique du français (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 551.

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s’adresser explicitement à la personne concernée: c’est surtout la deuxième personne qui est en position de sujet du verbe et d’agent du procès exprimé.”130 While this future is bound by the moment of utterance – there needs to be a specific person addressed in the present regarding a future time – the passé simple is not bound by such logic, “le passé simple n’est pas formellement mis en relation avec le moment de l’énonciation […] Il est donc plus apte à rapporter des faits passés coupés du présent de l’énonciateur.”131 In these sentences, on the one hand we have the mother who is explicitly addressing her daughter, and on the other hand we have the daughter’s action that is not put in relation with the moment of utterance. This is further complicated by the use of quotation marks, which indicates that the narrator is recalling the moment of utterance. This temporal disjunction between the utterance, the recalling of the utterance and the moment of action opens up another space, a space where the ghost can live and age.

It could be said then that it is the future tense that enables the aging of the ghost; the mother, by giving her daughter tasks to complete, ensures that she will be around to do them – in the future. While the last sentence is neither an instruction: “« J’ai rêvé qu’elle était vivante, dit ma mère en baissant la voix, mariée à Paris, que nous parlions au téléphone et qu’elle venait passer Noël parmi nous, »”132 nor in the future tense, the fact that it is in the imperfect makes it possible, through a grammatical slippage, to read the sentence as a subjunctive, which places it thus in the realm of potentiality. The verb parler conjugated in the first person in the imperfect (nous parlions) shares its form with

130 Riegel, Pellat, and Rioul, Grammaire méthodique du français, 551-552.

131 Ibid., 538.

132 Darrieussecq, “Noël parmi nous,” 217, emphasis mine.

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the subjunctive (que nous parlions). In this particular sentence, the clause introduced by que can be read in the subjunctive – it expresses a desire, a wish for something to happen

(in the future). In the same way that the instructions in the future tense grammatically produce the possibility for the actions to be completed, the dream in the past (j’ai rêvé) can be seen as wishful thinking, wishful dreaming, which begs the subjunctive and outlines another possible unfolding of lives. Grammar here works as a space of possibilities and potentialities, it allows multiple readings on different planes of time, and for this reason it enables a ghost to appear and to exist as if in time. Yet, what also transpires in this story is that the ghost – even a ghostly narrator – has no autonomous agency. Instead of the ghost haunting her mother, it is the mother who, through a dream and a desire to be reunited with her daughter, makes the ghost appear, age, have another life, if only briefly. In the end, it is the mother who is the author of the ghost, who gives it life through words spoken on the telephone in a dream.

Darrieussecq’s Ghost

In one last reflection before concluding this chapter, I would like to turn to a ghost that, unlike the others previously mentioned, has been (almost) completely and purposefully erased. In Darrieussecq’s latest novel, Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes, a

French actress named Solange – the very Solange seen as an adolescent in Clèves is now a young woman – lands the much-coveted (by her) role of the ghost-like fiancée (“La

Promise”) in a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. At the premiere, after she has flown in her entire family to see the film, she realizes that she has been purged from the final cut: “Elle aurait dû être là. Maintenant. Apparaître. Robe blanche et

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mains tendues. […] Elle n’apparaissait pas. La forme blanche qu’elle aurait dû être. ‘Ce loquace fantôme.’ Le fantôme, personne. Sa voix, perdue.”133 As Solange wonders where her three scenes have gone, she realizes that she has set up everything in vain: “elle les avait convoqués, elle avait organisé, pris des billets d’avion, elle les avait tous assis, là, d’autorité, pour assister à son absence.”134 Yet, this is not even correct, because Solange finally grasps that her absence is not even felt or noticed in the film – a similar story was told in Le Pays as a fait-divers that Marie Rivière was to keep in order to include in another novel: “L’acteur a convoqué sa famille, sa fiancée et ses amis, pour assister au spectacle de sa disparition”135 – we can even say that Solange is deprived of her own ghost, one which would produce, if not its presence, then at least its absence: “[e]t elle

était ce fil qu’il [le réalisateur] avait défait, un personnage détricoté du film, facilement, qui ne manque pas, un spectre qui ne laisse pas le creux de son absence.”136 Indeed, in

Solange’s thoughts we find the definition of a ghost selon Darrieussecq, one which is signified, however paradoxically, through its absence, not in its haunting presence.

Darrieussecq, throughout her oeuvre, much like the réalisateur, the one who makes the film come to life, has woven her plots and inserted her specters sometimes “en creux,”137

133 Marie Darrieussecq, Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2013), 305.

134 Darrieussecq, Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes, 306.

135 Darrieussecq, Le Pays, 229.

136 Ibid., 307.

137 In Naissance des fantômes, the narrator describes her becoming ghostly as the dissolution of her being, which could then be preserved in “un musée d’absences comme les corps en creux de Pompéi,” signaling that there is a form to absence – the form constitutive of a ghost. Darrieussecq, Naissance des fantômes, 85.

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sometimes not, and what Solange’s story clearly shows is that Darrieussecq can very well do away with her (just as she did with the ghosts in White). In the last chapter of the novel entitled “Bonus,” in a wink to the reader, Solange receives the DVD with the extended version of the film, where her cut scenes are to be found only in “la partie bonus,”138 and hence not incorporated in the filmic narrative. Furthermore, since they are available in their “entirety” to the reader only in the descriptions of the filming of her scenes earlier in the novel, “la partie bonus” simply emphasizes how irrelevant they – and her presence in the film – actually are. In showing her ghost(s) sometimes, Darrieussecq makes us aware of where the very work of (writing) fiction takes place, where the scene has been wiped clean, with no traces of its author.

While Darrieussecq’s family trauma is certainly central to her personal life and perhaps extends to her writing choices, to claim that her writing is haunted, as she has

(“Tous mes livres sont hantés. Le manque, l’absence, le deuil”139), is to forget who revisited the stories, who carefully demarcated the blanks, calculated the omissions, and removed her traces. In a text drawn from the novel Le Chat de Schrödinger (2013)140 by

Philippe Forest, we read a ghost story entitled “L’histoire parfaite.”141 The main protagonist is looking for the house that haunts his dreams every night. After years of traveling the world and finally retiring on the coast, one day as he walks about he

138 Darrieussecq, Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes, 311.

139 François Busnel and Thierry Gandillot, “Deux femmes la mort dans l’âme,” L’Express, 23 August 2001, http://po.st/ioyHCF.

140 Note that Schrödinger’s cat is one that is both alive and dead at the same time: thus very much a ghost.

141 Philippe Forest, “L’histoire parfaite,” in “Des fantômes,” ed. Stéphane Audeguy, special issue, La Nouvelle Revue Française 602 (October 2012): 112.

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happens upon this very house, which turns out not only to be real but also to be inhabited by a woman. Surprised and not knowing what to say, he blurts out that he would like to purchase the house. The story ends with the dialogue between the woman and the protagonist (cited as an epigraph):

– Je ne peux pas vous la vendre. – Mais pourquoi, Madame ? – C’est qu’elle est hantée. – Hantée par qui ? Mais elle est hantée par vous, Monsieur.142

What is striking in this story (in the same way as it happens in “Noël parmi nous”) is the fact that a dream provides the means for haunting. In Forest’s story, the main protagonist dreams night after night of the same house. The cause of the haunting is thus reversed: while the man thought he was haunted in his dream, he was the one haunting the house

(of his dreams). Before introducing this “perfect tale,” the narrator tells us that the story will be used as an example of a theory that shows: “le monde comme si se superposaient en lui deux états opposés de la réalité dont l’existence dépend uniquement de l’observation dont chacun est l’objet.”143 Therefore, depending on the person who is observing, here on the one hand, the protagonist, on the other, the woman whom the house belongs to, the haunting changes: who or what is haunting whom has to do with perception. To Darrieussecq’s claim that her writing is haunted, one could indeed reply:

“Mais elle est hantée par vous.”144

142 Forest, “L’histoire parfaite,” in “Des fantômes,” 120.

143 Ibid., 111.

144 To which the author herself might justly retort: “[Et par vous,] Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère”! Charles Baudelaire, “Au Lecteur,” in Les Fleurs du mal (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), verse 40.

149 CHAPTER 4 Hélène Cixous and the Book-Phone

Or ce qui paraît presque impossible, c’est toujours de parler du spectre, de parler au spectre, de parler avec lui, donc surtout de faire ou de laisser parler un esprit. Et la chose semble encore plus difficile pour un lecteur, un savant, un expert, un professeur, un interprète, bref pour ce que Marcellus appelle un scholar. […]Marcellus anticipait peut-être la venue, un jour, une nuit, quelques siècles plus tard, le temps ne se compte plus ici de la même manière, d’un autre scholar. Celui-ci serait enfin capable, au- delà de l’opposition entre présence et non présence, effectivité et ineffectivité, vie et non-vie, de penser la possibilité du spectre, le spectre comme possibilité. Mieux (ou pis), il saurait s’adresser aux esprits. Il saurait qu’une telle adresse n’est pas seulement déjà possible, mais qu’elle aura de tout temps conditionné, comme telle, l’adresse en général. Voilà en tout cas quelqu’un d’assez fou pour espérer déverrouiller la possibilité d’une telle adresse.

—Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx

Introduction

If the ghost is untimely (and thus we never know where or when it is), how can we initiate a conversation with it? I will show that Hélène Cixous, by way of a spectral telephone, has a solution. Derrida, reader, critic, prophet, noted the importance of this device, this machine for Cixous in H. C. pour la vie, c’est à dire… (2002),1 but he was –

1 Derrida makes the following remarks (while also giving dissertation-topic suggestions): “Comme je devrai souvent le faire, j’abandonne ici, en passant, comme le programme ou le titre de dix ou vingt thèses à venir dans l’université, demain, quand elle devra bien canoniser le corpus de H.C. Sujet: les téléphones et la question du téléphone dans l’œuvre de H. C. Je donne quelques références, mais je ne le ferai pas chaque fois. Je reparlerai beaucoup du téléphone – il est par ici partout chez elle, du côté de chez elle – et vous dirai comment elle parle, elle, au téléphone, mais voici déjà, pour commencer par les

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it seems – unaware of the extent to which the literary telephone may have been the answer to his own call years before. I would like to explore here an aspect hinted at in

OR, les lettres de mon père (1997) – Derrida’s reading of the telephone in Cixous’s oeuvre is partly a gloss on this book – but most deliberately made explicit in Cixous’s recent works: the telephone as a powerful and transformative conduit of spectral communication.

In OR, the timeframe and the conditions for what we could also call a communion

(literally: community, participation, union) are limited. There is a certain formula that needs to be followed in order for something to take place: the two parties must be known to each other and the event needs to happen soon following someone’s passing. Cixous even makes clear that there is a strong difference between types of death. She writes:

On ne peut d’ailleurs rattraper d’anciens défunts car ils sont totalement morts, rien ne sert d’appeler alors. Les appels de résurrection s’adressent aux personnes récemment mortes car elles restent encore entre deux portes pendant une huitaine de jours. Peut-être quinze. Pendant ces jours il est encore possible de les ramener de ce côté. Évidemment il est nécessaire que certaines conditions délicates soient remplies : il s’agit du lien vital qui unit deux créatures, lien dont on peut penser qu’il est symbolique tant il est imperceptible ou transparent mais qui existe en réalité comme peuvent l’attester ceux qui sont parmi la tribu des raccordés. Ce cheveu extensible, une espèce de nerf, se conduit comme un cordon de téléphone vivant.2

commencements, une référence pour qui voudrait en prendre note: bien avant Messie (1996), qui élève un immense hymne au téléphone, non pas à AT and T mais à T.I.T (Tristan et Iseut au Téléphone), il y avait Les Commencements (1970). Une voix met une majuscule à cette Histoire: ‘Je pourrais aussi écrire l’Histoire du téléphone et comment nous l’avons dompté…’” Jacques Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, c’est à dire (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2002), 22, emphasis in original.

2 Hélène Cixous, OR, les lettres de mon père (Paris: Des femmes, 1997), 20-21. Also quoted and commented by Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, 72-76.

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One way to understand how this connection functions is to look at how resurrection is possible through the calling by name, that is, in a moment of deep intimacy and acknowledgement of loss, which Elissa Marder describes as follows: “the name almost always calls from and to the name of an irrevocably lost, but intimately familiar, place or person.”3 In Cixous, this name becomes a way to be brought back from the nothingness of death: “je te tiens solidement au-dessus du néant par ton nom, je te tire de la fosse par la tresse de nom.”4 This braid of hair, of names, which links caller and called, acts,

Cixous says, as a living phone cord, in other words, it allows for a type of communication which drags one out of the void, back to life, back to the possibility of speech. Trying to describe scientifically what happens is not possible, yet she assures us that something nonetheless takes place, “[l]eurs ossements se sentent invoqués, je ne sais pas comment décrire par science la transmission spirituelle je sais seulement qu’à chaque lecture de leurs noms une poussière respire.”5 However, for Cixous, here in OR, without knowledge of the name there is no possible return, no chance of contact.6 Marder offers here a promising way to understand what is at stake when name-braids and phone cords are understood as sharing more than their shape: “[f]or Cixous,” she writes, “names that call from the other in me to the other who is not me are the infinite source from which writing

3 Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 217.

4 Cixous, OR, 21, emphasis mine.

5 Hélène Cixous, Corollaires d’un Vœu (Abstracts et Brèves Chroniques du temps II) (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2015), 15.

6 See the story of the nameless cat who left and could not return retold in Cixous, OR, 22- 23. Also quoted and commented by Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 217.

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springs.”7 Elaborating on this aspect, Marder emphasizes all the possibilities that this type of writing entails, enjoining us to understand the far reaches of this communication:

“Writing the name is the way she discovers a secret door – a hidden passage and passageway – that leads to other worlds, and other lives. These other worlds and other lives do not belong to us, but they are ‘ours’ in the deepest sense. They are all of the lives

– the infinite potential lives – that we live unbeknownst to ourselves. […] Through them, we might invent other ways of living together and could imagine communities not restricted by the laws of nationality, identity, citizenship, gender, or proper names.”8 The unrestricted aspect of these communities is especially important, if we pause to think that

Cixous’s writing urges a reaching out beyond the traditional boundaries that separate the living from the dead; Marder thus hints at what I would call a powerful communion with certain “fantômes présents passés futurs,”9 through writing, but more on that shortly.

While the calling of the name certainly seems to allow for a communication between living and dead, the dead who are mentioned here are not “completely” dead, that is, they remain in-between and are thus able to be brought back “de ce côté.”

Incidentally, Derrida’s argument in his address (published as H.C. pour la vie, c’est à dire…) is that Cixous finds herself, positions herself for life, in other words, “du côté de la vie.” Derrida, in contrast, sees death as inevitable and this thought, the fact that we die too soon, is unbearable, impossible to accept. It is impossible to learn (we can also think

7 Ibid, emphasis mine. We will see later how this “other in me” becomes a vital interlocutor in spectral conversations.

8 Ibid., 218.

9 To borrow the narrator’s words in Chloé Delaume, Dans ma maison sous terre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2009), 23.

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here of Maurice Blanchot’s gripping dialogue between the young man and his “je,” a lesson to remember regarding the suspended, suspenseful wait, and the unknowability of the instant of death: “l’instant de ma mort, désormais toujours en instance10”) until one finds oneself on the other side (not the side of life).

Yet, these “recently deceased” have not actually crossed over “totally,” they are, one could say, in purgatory, needing only to be called or prayed back into life; these

“dead” are not “revenants,” in the strictest sense of the word. Furthermore, in this description of the process, the telephone or the telephone cord that allows for the communication is described as a “vital” connection, a connection on which life depends.

It certainly also suggests that the two people in communication need to already have been connected in life, by life, through life before the event of death, that is, death not understood in its “total” sense; this communication is thus also limited in its scope, one cannot communicate with just anyone, “[s]’il y a lien alors, et si des deux côtés l’on veut ressusciter […] alors un retour à la vie est possible.”11 However, when the two parties are not personally acquainted, something else must become or take on the function of the telephone cord.

Already in OR, a different sort of resurrection takes place in and through books: the process is different from communication with loved ones due to the fact that books,

Cixous explains, have been “créés comme objets doués de forces surnaturelles (we are here reminded of Modiano’s paramemories which create fictional traces that are subsequently retraced) pour mettre une illimite aux limites […] créés comme monde qui

10 Maurie Blanchot, L’Instant de ma mort (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), 20.

11 Cixous, OR, 21.

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déjoue à jamais la date limite, un clin de téléphone sur l’étagère et c’est 12 floréal 1804 je suis le matin cinq heures de suite avec Stendhal qui ne vieillit jamais.”12 Books are able to collapse centuries and to allow for communication with those who are long dead

(Stendhal for example but elsewhere Proust, Sophocles, and Kafka). Still, at this point in

Cixous’s writing, books, while they are not read, are it seems in a death-like state only to come back to life when opened: “[c]’est pour cela que j’aime les livres. Parce qu’ils vont et viennent meurent et ressuscitent ici même dans ma chambre, dans mon bureau, jour et nuit. Parce qu’ils sont fidèles comme mon père qui est un revenant sur lequel je peux compter je crois. Un rang de morts qui respirent encore déjà. Mes proches délicats et démesurés.”13 Books are described as spectral receptacles (dead but breathing – we’ll remember that the word for spirit comes from breath) that are able to help the reader, to be summoned but also to summon (to call) and ask to be read. Cixous is very conscious of that fact when she observes that, “[t]o begin (writing, living) we must have death...

The one that comes right up to us so suddenly we don’t have time to avoid it, I mean to avoid feeling its breath touching us. Ha!”14 Positioning herself opposite to death, yet deeply affected by it, since its breath (a ghost?) is able to touch her, Cixous begins writing and thus possibly keeps death at bay. We can see how the specter (the spirit, the breath of death) is at the very source of writing, it precedes it, it is unavoidable and it functions as an element of textual production – we can also think here of the breath that is

12 Ibid., 23-24.

13 Ibid., 12.

14 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 6. This text was originally delivered in English by Cixous and subsequently revised for publication. See Susan Sellers, ed., The Hélène Cixous Reader (London: Routledge, 1994), 199.

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spoken into the receiver of the telephone, transmitted through language, through the pauses in-between words.

If Jean-Luc Nancy makes the connection between the work of literature and the telephone in remarking that it (literature) communicates, “la littérature téléphone – allo ! allo !,”15 Cixous, in Ayaï: le cri de la Littérature (2013), most plainly and definitively asserts how and to what extent it works by making literature not only the subject that is found communicating on the telephone but by also making it the support through which this communication takes place, allowing for a shift in our understanding of spectral communion. “La Littérature c’est le téléphone antimort,”16 she writes.

A Proustian Recipe that is not a Madeleine but Almost

That is not to say that Cixous has been able to banish death but rather to emphasize the way she has found to make it possible to communicate despite death.

Maxime Decout has pointed out that Cixous’s double status as a novelist and a literary critic is significant in her continual engagement in her oeuvre between the text and the moments of its writing; he observes, “[f]orte de cette double filiation, elle ménage toujours dans ses récits une véritable conscience critique vis-à-vis de la fiction.”17 Cixous not only writes, she writes about the steps that she takes in order to write, she describes her notebooks, the color of the sheet of paper where she scribbled a word, the exact page

15 Mathilde Girard and Jean-Luc Nancy, Proprement dit. Entretien sur le mythe (Paris: éditions Ligne, 2015), 62. Quoted by Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre, Téléphonez-moi (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2016), 19.

16 Hélène Cixous, Ayaï (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2013), 48.

17 Maxime Decout, “Hélène Cixous: Le récit comme tissage de la vie et de l’écriture,” Itinéraires, no. 1 (2013): 122.

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number and time of the day that she found something significant in someone else’s book.

This is what Marie-Chantal Killeen notes with regards to narratives written in a disembodied voice: “[q]uelle que soit son inflexion, la narration d’outre-tombe ne survient pas dans la littérature contemporaine comme une simple thématique ou une audace purement formelle, mais comme un puissant instrument de réflexion sur les enjeux du roman.”18 When Cixous describes Literature’s effects, its inner workings, its way of writing itself – all of this understood as both happening simultaneously throughout centuries, and here, live, in the moment of writing the text – past present future are brought on the same page by her keen metafictional voice. Once the line of communication is opened, once there is willingness to reach out, magic does the rest.

Citing Proust and his “Demoiselles du téléphone”19 as incontrovertible proof, Cixous stresses the fact that one only needs to wish for an encounter for it to become possible. It is, in fact, simply, “sur le souhait qu’on exprime,” writes Proust and subsequently Cixous, that a connection can be established, that is, “la liaison entre nous, les orphées orphelins et nos êtres chers invisibles, en apparence, mais présents.”20 Cixous speaks about ghostly beings – ghosts whose structuring principle, we have seen, is their untimely

(re)appearance – and proposes a back and forth exchange with them that will radically change us, and allow us to embrace the fictionality that comes with being readers.

18 Marie-Chantal Killeen, En souffrance d’un corps: Essais sur la voix désincarnée (Quebec City: Éditions Nota Bene, 2013), 53.

19 Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes I, in À la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Éditions Gallimard Quarto, 1999), 848.

20 Cixous, Ayaï, 48.

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According to Cixous (still via Proust), in order to communicate with these invisible yet present beings – the specters – there is an easy recipe: “[n]ous n’avons, pour que le miracle de la résurrection s’accomplisse, qu’à approcher nos doigts du parallélépipède rectangle magique que nous appelons d’un mot magique aussi, Book.”21

Within books, there are, she posits, “des chaînes de mots qui possèdent une puissance de résurrection.”22 These special words, when they brush past our minds or our lips, open a line of communication: “[d]es mots, des noms peut-être qui ont des doigts légers, qui nous touchent les paupières de l’âme, les lèvres closes, et d’un seul coup nous sommes réveillés, juste à temps pour décrocher le téléphone, au bout duquel mon père, ma mère, my beloved, se sentent abandonnés, maintenus sous effacement.”23 The words written in books hence allow communication not only with the beings contained in them but with others who may have never even written a book or been featured in one – and this is a departure from OR. Taking her cue from Orpheus descending into hell to welcome back to life the phantom of Eurydice, Cixous takes into her hands, one after the other, the books written by (amongst others) Proust, Stendhal, Kafka, Montaigne, Faulkner, Joyce,

Sophocles, and Homer, in order to allow them and their characters to cross over into her own life, her own book, and to mingle with her own personal specters, the ones of her loved ones departed too soon. She observes: “Une fois le processus successorial déclenché, il n’y a plus de fin. Je suis une descendante de morts. Je suis additionnée coupée mêlée tissue issue. Mes morts vivent dedans moi. Mon père est passé de vie à

21 Ibid., emphasis in original.

22 Ibid., 30.

23 Ibid.

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mon for intérieur. Et par la suite mon fils, mon chien, plus tard ma grand-mère.”24 It is hence a necessity to allow for such a communication to take place because it is a way to keep the dead ever close, ever ready for textual resurrection.

Distance: Null

For Cixous, Literature is not only the telephone, it is also that which is spoken – or more precisely that which it speaks – into it(self). Literature is both receptacle (form) and content: by extension, completely autonomous. It allows distance to be entirely reduced; upon picking up the phone one realizes this phone had already been speaking.

Commenting on two sentences (“Tu me téléphones. Je t’écoute.”25) found in Cixous’s short text, “Nous en sommes,” Eric Prenowitz states, “[t]his parataxis, with no conjunction or logical articulation between the two independent clauses, gives the sense that causality and temporality have been suspended by the telephone.”26 The act of putting next to each other (here the côté makes another furtive appearance) with no regard for logical connection, which parataxis signifies, further confirms that in/through the telephone a shift in our linear understanding of time is happening. To phone, to be on

24 Hélène Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” in Mireille Calle-Gruber and Marie Odile Germain, eds., Genèses Généalogies Genre: Autour de l’œuvre d’Hélène Cixous (Paris: Éditions Galilée / Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2006), 238. At the time she wrote this address, Cixous’s mother and Jacques Derrida were alive and are therefore not included in the list.

25 Hélène Cixous, “Nous en sommes,” Littérature 142 (2006): 102.

26 Eric Prenowitz, “Crossing Lines: Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous on the Phone,” Discourse 30, no. 1-2 (2008): 135.

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the phone, or to be the telephone,27 invites us to be suspended, to enter a different timeframe through the distance visibly reduced by allowing someone absent to be present

(through the disincarnated voice, an “orphan” voice that is en souffrance d’un corps28).

As Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre makes clear, “[l]e téléphone permet de faire fi des distances (il est conçu pour passer outre [that means, in other words, au-delà, beyond]), par son immédiateté, il inscrit notre rapport au temps du côté de la synchronie – en cela, il s’oppose à une conception généalogique et diachronique de l’univers (les communautés ont tendance à raisonner en termes de descendances et de lignées).”29 It is powerful to think that through the telephone, communities, which could once be understood as deeply preoccupied with lineage and linearity, become aware of and are able to partake in a different way of understanding their place in time, in the world. Through Cixous’s telephone, interlocutors are not concerned by distance or state (alive or dead) and are able to coexist. Whereas one formerly had to call out a name in order for the communication to be established, it is now through the power of a single word, nay a simple scream, that a line is opened.

The Shout

In Ayaï, Cixous tracks the sounds made from Ajax to Derrida, sounds of the dead, sounds of death that are resonating through centuries and centuries of writing. “Ayaï !,”

27 Prenowitz further notes that grammatically speaking we can also understand “tu me téléphones” as meaning, “you transform me into the telephone.” Prenowitz, “Crossing Lines,” 136.

28 To borrow the title of Killeen, En souffrance d’un corps.

29 Toudoire-Surlapierre, Téléphonez-moi, 12, emphasis in original.

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Cixous explains, this scream of a man in pain, is actually a wordplay that Sophocles creates with the letters of the name Ajax, Aïas in Greek. “Ayaï” is the complaint “aïe, aïe,” or “alas” in English.30 By screaming in pain, Ajax also screams his own name. And these screams resonate, Cixous shows, with Milton, Dostoyevsky, Proust, who themselves took these sounds in, collected them and reignited them (“recueillis et rallumés”31). Cixous is here concerned with the ways that literature itself is thinking, she is wondering about how something so small as a syllable can be said to be breathing or carrying a ghost. Cixous is in fact, at the moment of writing Ayaï, preparing for her keynote speech for the conference called “Re-thinking Literature.”32 When she intimates that “[ç]a ne pense qu’à ça, la littérature, à remuer les cendres, à refaire avec des mots des phrases inouïes, à ressusciter, à ranimer les feux. Cri et feu. Cris du feu roi Hamlet recueillis et perpétués. Cri muet de mon père gardé sous la lettre [OR is here invoked],”33

Cixous reiterates the communicative injunction that is Literature by underscoring that it is within the very shout that transfer and resurrection are slated to happen; one syllable suffices to call, and when one shouts, one thus calls for another and another to respond

(the shouts, the screams hence becoming a long chain of braided signifiers) adding to a scream resonating throughout centuries.

Indeed, ten years before Ayaï !, in L’amour du loup: et autres remords (2003), she had noted the importance of the scream and its connection to life: “Seuls les enfants

30 Cixous, Ayaï, 57.

31 Cixous, Ayaï, 58.

32 This conference took place in the Fall of 2013 at New York University.

33 Cixous, Ayaï, 12.

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crient dans notre société. Je suis pour le cri, dans tous les cas. Les chats aussi crient, on n’a qu’à les entendre. Les livres n’arrêtent pas de crier. Ma mère est un cri de victoire de la vie.”34 Screams happen throughout the world, they thus globally engage us and show us how similar we are as seen from the vantage point of the scream; they are, as Cixous describes, “la première note de notre douleur … Le mot universel, l’Appel.”35 This call, which evokes the telephone call, is the scream following our birth and the one that accompanies the burials of our dead. These screams, though an event which we can hear, are also in and through writing a textual event: they are transcribed and transcreamed

[trans-cri] through a telephone call from / to the beyond.

Literature’s Painful Secret

Now, before getting to the purpose of Literature’s dealings on the telephone,

Cixous reveals a number which has a significant importance and which she names “le nombre secret de la littérature.”36 The number 59. She notes that there are 59 chapters in

As I lay Dying, that there are 59 moments in Derrida’s Circonfession, that “en 59 vers toute l’horreur du monde est versée par the Ghost dans l’oreille de Hamlet fils.”37 Cixous notes that she will have to ask Stendhal, Melville and Celan what this number means to them, reminding us that one can certainly communicate with the dead (provided one

34 Hélène Cixous, L’amour du loup: et autres remords (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2003), 13.

35 Cixous, Ayaï, 24.

36 Ibid., 31.

37 Ibid.

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knows how). This number 5938 reappears a little later in the text when Cixous declares having found in Proust’s 59th notebook the following injunction: “trouver le rythme de la double souffrance.”39 Cixous also finds this double suffering in Sophocles’ Ajax (and she will find it elsewhere again). It ensues that these two sufferings, although separated by centuries, resonate and communicate, and Cixous herself feels this double suffering when reading: it is, in short, the suffering of the suffering of another. However, it is not in the

59th notebook of Proust that this sentence can be found.

In the conferences (of the same name Ayaï: le cri de la littérature) that Cixous gave during the 2013-2014 academic year, she does say that she finds these words in the notebook 54 (it is indeed the actual notebook where Proust writes this sentence), which is the same notebook from which she learns the death of Albertine from Proust’s own hand.

One could read this as a simple typo or as revealing something else. By writing that she finds this injunction in notebook 59, Cixous is, in a sense, revealing another secret of literature. To inscribe this double suffering under this secret number, to hide it in an altogether different book (even if by mistake) is to confirm and declare that it is not so much verifiable fact or reality that matters, but rather that something is being communicated in literature even though it may take its roots in imagination, in fiction.

The notebook 59 that Cixous speaks of (with the very sentence actually found in notebook 54) is not one that can be found at the Bibliothèque Nationale along with the seventy-five other cahiers – its mistaken identity makes it a thoroughly fictional

38 Cixous does not spend much time on this number, due to, she says, a lack of time because, simply put: “59 c’est un de moins, un de moins que 60, […] cette méditation ne doit pas durer plus de 60 minutes.” Ibid., 33.

39 Cixous, Ayaï, 58.

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notebook. Nonetheless, its words can powerfully communicate through Cixous’s fiction

(even if we don’t learn it directly from Proust – we would have to read notebook 54 –, through Cixous we are able to partake in this community). The question is not only how to suffer or to show, to represent suffering but much rather how not to suffer alone: to suffer from the suffering of another in order for her, for him, for me not to be alone, a burden that can be shared in fiction, through it, no matter the direction (temporal, spatial) it takes.

On the next page, which is – coincidence or not – page 59 of Ayaï, Cixous writes, keeping in mind Proust’s magic: “[j]’ajoute que si cette double douleur m’arrive, c’est par la force électrique de l’écriture-qui-garde, par la toute-puissante littérature, notre mère mémoire-oubli, et retransmet la musique du cri par architéléphonie.”40 If some critics see the telephone as a threat, as a death warrant,41 Cixous places it as a tool which works against death, enabling communication through time, accross centuries.

We might note here, in contrast to Cixous, the place of the telephone in Barthes’s

Fragments d’un discours amoureux. For him, rather than abolishing distance, the telephone emphasizes it (Barthes however agrees with Cixous that the phone cord plays a vital role – though for him it has the opposite effect): “le fil du téléphone n’est pas un bon objet transitionnel, ce n’est pas une ficelle inerte; il est chargé d’un sens, qui n’est pas celui de la jonction mais celui de la distance: voix aimée, fatiguée, entendue au

40 Ibid., 59.

41 See Avital Ronell’s hypnotic Telephone Book, where she consigns many different reactions to this device. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). See also Marder, “The Toxic Maternal,” in The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

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téléphone: c’est le fading dans toute son angoisse.”42 The telephone is, for Barthes, also the source of an anxiety brought on by waiting – and not understanding – a wait which makes me doubt my own behavior, it is a “cacophonie [qui] laisse passer […] la mauvaise voix, la fausse communication […] Je vais te quitter, dit à chaque seconde la voix du téléphone.”43 Though Barthes reads the same Proustian passage as Cixous referring to “les Demoiselles du téléphone” (he focuses on the anxiety of knowing that it is an “eternal separation” that the phone call prefigures), he does not remember the magic but only the anxiety: “s’angoisser du téléphone: véritable signature de l’amour,”44 writes

Barthes. However, Marcel also sees the telephone as a means of communication and if trepidation is felt, it is nonetheless as much a question of impatience as of anxiety:

“aussitôt que notre appel a retenti, dans la nuit pleine d’apparitions sur laquelle nos oreilles s’ouvrent seules, un bruit léger – un bruit abstrait – celui de la distance supprimée

– et la voix de l’être cher s’adresse à nous.”45 Even when the person on the other line is not the one expected, as is the case with Marcel and another young man’s grandmother,46 and though lines may become crossed, communication can happen despite it being a miscommunication.

For Cixous, if there is an anxiety, it emerges and is expressed differently, it is no longer the anxiety of the telephone but rather, as mentioned earlier, a suffering that

42 Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), 132, emphasis mine.

43 Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, 132, emphasis in original.

44 Ibid.

45 Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes I, 848.

46 Ibid., 849.

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transmits also, that comes through the telephone, it is a suffering that transcends time and space in order to arrive at my house, to allow me to suffer with someone else, or someone else to suffer with me. She writes, “Comment ! Une pensée qui blessa une âme il y a

2500 ans serait-elle là, ici, de façon perceptible, dans mon bureau, dans mes papiers, dans ma petite mémoire ? Oui. Non. Pourtant oui.”47 For those of little faith, Cixous provides a very concrete example; she explains that when Derrida writes États d’âme de la psychanalyse (2000), it is without having had the chance to reread Ajax; yet, she points out, “par quelque secrète télépathie les râles d’Ajax avaient hurlé en lui toute la nuit.”48

The screams that are the screams of literature are thus transmitted through telepathy, through an arch-telephone, the biggest telephone and the very first, the telephone before the telephone, so finely tuned that it allows screams to be heard 2500 years into the future, though as if at the same time. No sense of chronology here, according to Cixous, if Sophocles tells this tragedy to Poe, care of Baudelaire (who is actually Poe’s translator and thus communication is already inverted), one cannot be surprised that the letter is actually signed by Blanchot.49 Daniel Sangsue remarks that when one starts thinking about ghosts, one realizes how literature functions as ghost as well: “[e]n récoltant des textes littéraires sur les fantômes, on ne cesse en effet de mettre à jour des filiations: un texte renvoie à un autre texte, la même histoire ou le même thème se retrouvent d’un auteur à l’autre à travers les âges, si bien que, nous le verrons, la véritable revenance est

47 Cixous, Ayaï, 59.

48 Ibid., 59.

49 Cixous, Ayaï, 76.

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celle des textes.50 But Cixous takes this further in that it is not only the texts which communicate, it is the characters in the texts, the authors of the texts, who are sending her messages through the telephone or the telegraph. Cixous, for example, also writes that

“Gregor lui écrit des lettres surnaturelles. Plus tard elle les trouve imprimées dans une correspondance entre Kafka et Milena. […] La littérature l’a avalée. La littérature la recrache. […] Le fantôme de Kafka lui apparaît.”51 Significantly, in the epilogue to his treatise on the ontology of the mobile phone, entitled Where Are You?, Maurizio Ferraris also invokes Kafka writing to Milena by quoting his moving letter about the ghosts that feed on communication (through letters and also the telephone),52 and through Ferraris, through his words, we now hear Kafka, Milena, Gregor and Cixous each phoning us:

“can you hear me now?”53 When Cixous reads, when she hears the shout on literature’s telephone, she asks whether it is Derrida or Rousseau or Stendhal or Proust or Montaigne, or her mother Ève or even she herself who has written, who has screamed; and this is the question we must also prepare to ask ourselves.

Writing with Baggage

There are very specific ways in which, through writing, one can call out to ghosts and hear their calls. When Cixous lost her father at the age of ten, she began to write in a

50 Daniel Sangsue, Fantômes, esprits et autres morts-vivants: Essai de pneumatologie littéraire (Paris: José Corti, 2011), 23, emphasis in original.

51 Cixous, Corollaires d’un Vœu, 40.

52 Maurizio Ferraris, Where are you? Ontology of the Cell Phone, translated by Sarah De Sanctis (Fordham University Press, 2014), 183-184.

53 Advertising campaign slogan for Verizon wireless.

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notebook, she tells us in Ayaï, “je me suis accrochée à un cahier et la littérature a commencé son travail de colmatage de l’abîme”54 – we’ll remember the abyss, the void, le gouffre, le néant from which one can be pulled out by a phone-braid. What is written in this notebook not only serves to hold on to but also overflows so as to begin to fill the emptiness below. The process of writing words down shows Cixous that when all seems pointless and lost, something still remains, something very powerful: “tout est perdu sauf le mot et sa polyphonie polyphénix.”55 This portmanteau word brings together the two words “polyphonie” and “phénix,” which already in each of their individual meanings point to a certain proliferation: “polyphonie” suggests that a multiplicity of voices can be heard through one same word and “phénix” suggests an endless potential for rebirth. In addition, by eliminating letters and spaces between these two words, Cixous gives the gift of a new space, a radically other space: a new word that – as the phoenix that constitutes it – becomes alive every time it is pronounced and read; such a portmanteau word is not found in the dictionary, it has not become so common as to lose its power. And hearing it is as if we were finally able to put our ear to the phone cord and hear a multiplicity of other voices.

In her book, Insister: À Jacques Derrida (2006), Cixous reveals her predilection for long words because, “ça donne le temps et l’espace pour réfléchir.”56 This confession is, interestingly, preceded by a portmanteau word, which paradoxically opens a new space by closing the spaces that usually separates words to allow for a new resonance to

54 Cixous, Ayaï, 24.

55 Ibid.

56 Hélène Cixous, Insister: À Jacques Derrida (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006), 28.

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be heard. The word is “Commecitationnellement”57 – or in Peggy Kamuf’s beautifully rendered “Asifinquotationally.”58 Its conditional inflection “comme si” and its “citation” reveal the secret formula: by bringing in other words, other people’s words as if they were there, one is able to join them in a different timeframe. Writing a long word

(especially a portmanteau one) and reading it, slows down time – even suspends it as one is forced to pay attention to every detail, to all the possibilities this word reserves. In

Corollaires d’un vœu, Cixous emphasizes the need for long words by cutting them, ever suspending their last syllables, the end of the word always to come: “Dans cette scène elle prononce les mots coupés, surtout les grands. C’est son idée pour empêcher la folie de lui voler la langue. Comme ça : terro-, définiti-, gén-, trahiz-.”59 Cixous by working as close as possible to language, down to its very atoms and their possibilities allows her to join the dead by stepping into their world through their words. When Cixous speaks, for example, of the “ravensquirrels,” in the time allotted by this portmanteau word, it is Poe who appears between the letters, and we’ll remember that she describes the work of literature in this way: “refaire avec des mots des phrases inouïes, ressusciter, ranimer les feux.”60

The same goes for the irruption of foreign languages within the text, whether

English, German or Spanish; Cixous makes them resonate with other voices. When she dreams about Agamemnon retelling her his death, Cixous writes that he spoke, “grec en

57 Cixous, Insister, 28.

58 Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 31.

59 Cixous, Corollaires d’un Vœu, 41.

60 Cixous, Ayaï, 12.

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anglais,” and she gives us a transcription of the sentence: “As I lay dying je cherche à lever les mains, the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.”61 Cixous, in this way, links Homer and Faulkner, and through the screams and the groans, she links, as well, the death of her father, Hamlet’s and Derrida’s. As she had done with the word “los”62 in Chapitre Los (2013), Cixous takes an inventory of the

English word “done” and its resonances in French: “l’idée me vient que la grand symphonie anglaise a dû commencer, avec un coup de done. De Beowulf à John Donne, de Shakespeare à Joyce, la mémoire de l’anglais résonne de ces éclats de Glas dont

Derrida nous a fait entendre les infinies portées de sens dans le français.”63 By listening to language, one notices that literature does not cease to scream various declensions of the same scream in various languages, and that this scream is found from Sophocles to

Cixous. Literature is not content with simple representation of suffering, it prefers, according to Cixous, to communicate actively by hiding within certain syllables and words, from Ajax to Ayaï, through its telephone that is made up of atoms, phantoms and their screams, the double suffering that makes me suffer from another’s suffering. And

Cixous makes it clear in the closing lines of her book that the phone-braid can communicate both ways through the delightful ambiguity of the pronoun “on,” which can take the place of all singular and plural subject pronouns: “Silence ! On crie.”64 However,

61 Ibid., 28, emphasis in original.

62 Cixous notes the resonance of this word, wondering if it is Spanish, German, or English: “Los est le nom du fantôme, ghost ou spectre ou Gespenst ou fantasma qui hante maman pendant presque toute la journée.” Hélène Cixous, Chapitre Los (Abstracts et Brèves Chroniques du temps I) (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2013), 20.

63 Cixous, Ayaï, 26.

64 Ibid., 87.

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I’d ask, who screams what to whom and when? Cixous proposes a time, which does not look directionally but follows the scream – from whatever end it comes – this disjunction of time allows the ghost to appear, to bypass linear chronology; it follows that its effects on the reader are of particular significance.

Becoming Untimely

Indeed, while one (l’on) is writing, while one is on one end of the line, one is inevitably getting ready to join the voices on the other end (even before one’s own death).

In a chapter (the first to be published but not necessarily the first) of a ghost book, which

Cixous calls “[le] Livre-que-je-n’écris-pas,”65 entitled Chapitre Los – a book subtitled

“Abstracts et Brèves Chroniques du Temps,” in a nod to Hamlet,66 which is also concerned by spectral temporalities – Cixous shares her thoughts upon learning of the death of Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes: “Tant de personnes ont été lancées dans la mémoire mondiale par ses actes d’imagination qu’il a pris place depuis longtemps parmi la petite foule des êtres taillés dans le tissu mythologique. En partie fictifs, ces gens sont toujours déjà en voie de rayonnement renouvelable.”67 Understood in this sense, Carlos had already joined Homer, Sophocles, Stendhal, Derrida, and others even before death through the power (puissance, Derrida would emphasize) of the written word. By writing,

Cixous suggests, Carlos not only became partly fictional, but since before his death he

65 Cixous, Chapitre Los, “À mes lisant,” n.p.

66 Cixous quotes as an epigraph the following line: “Let them be well used; for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Act II, scene 2.

67 Cixous, Chapitre Los, 25.

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was already “en voie de rayonnement renouvelable,” one can say that he was already part ghost. Cixous describes him, throughout Chapitre Los, as joining his voice to others’, by writing, as it were, telephonically, before and after his death.

However, in Cixous’s second published chapter of “Le-Livre-Que-Je-N’écris-

Pas,”68 entitled Corollaires d’un Vœu, the exhuberance of Ayaï! and Chapitre Los, has, it seems, subsided. Cixous’s writing takes on a mournful tone, and shows the other side of this being already ghost. It is a book about mourning, but a book in which she mourns herself, her lives, the fact that she will not read the finished product of this book that she does not write. Rather than emphasizing the partly fictional being that she proposed

Carlos was, she sees herself as already partly dead: “Tout le monde est mort […] C’est comme si j’étais un peu morte, déjà en partie, et l’étant peut-être, la volonté d’écrire le

Livre augmente et s’impose à moi comme détachée de toute tergiversation intérieure

Troptard n’est pas loin, dis-je. Tous ceux qui me peuplaient gisent.”69 Cixous wonders whether she will have the strength to keep going for them (her loved ones who have died), to be both on the side of death, on the side of life, to be stronger for them, to allow them to live through her by feeding them the light of day, by welcoming them in her own body: “[i]ls s’en vont […] ceux qui font partie de nous, et non seulement ils nous ôtent un père, une mère, un aimé, l’ami, une bien-aimée, et leurs absences nous diminuent, nous rétrécissent, mais encore sur cet affaiblissement il nous faut prendre pour nourrir leurs

68 Which incidentally grew some capital letters since its first chapter perhaps emphasizing (shouting!) that she is not the one writing it. Hélène Cixous, Corollaires d’un Vœu (Abstracts et Brèves Chroniques du temps II) (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2015), “Prière d’insérer,” n.p.

69 Cixous, Corollaires d’un Vœu, 13, there is no punctuation between “intérieure” and “Troptard”.

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traces. Nous sommes plus faibles et nous devons fournir le jour et le présent aux absents impuissants.”70 Yet, Cixous reiterates the fact that she believes in Literature, “[j]e crois à la bibliothèque du monde. Je crois encore.”71

In an early discussion of the book that she is not writing (she had, at the time, yet to publish any chapters) Cixous had wondered about its form, its purpose, and intriguingly pointed to yet another connection to death: “Est-ce que c’est un livre ça ? Ce cercueil dressé qui bâille, douane pour les fantômes, entrée d’envers ? Cette chose hagarde et violente et mordue de mort ?”72 I turn here, for a possible answer, to Marder’s reflection on two scenes of mourning in which Cixous takes with her some piece of death, of her dead, of a possible tomb(stone), and encloses it in a casket-like coffer.

Marder comments: “we come to recognize that those tiny caskets are placeholders for that which has no proper place. Like a fictive, fantasmatic camera obscura, they give birth to new images that belong neither to the realm of the living nor to that of the dead.

Their unique mode of reproduction gives new life to inassimilable bits of death.”73 For

Marder, these two coffers that are smuggled by the subject are “perform[ing] an uncanny work of mourning,”74 and she links them to other “unruly reproductive containers”75 examined in her book for their work as sites of repetition of a certain reproducible

70 Cixous, Corollaires d’un Vœu, 14.

71 Ibid., 15.

72 Hélène Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” 236.

73 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 248.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid., 249.

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maternal function. However, one container, which uncannily – if I may – is coffin-like in its dimensions and its content is not exactly named as such (though certainly implied) in

Marder’s list: “freezers, case studies, photographs, labyrinths, miniature portraits, dreams, crypts, and tiny coffins.” It is namely, the word-container “book,” in which all of the prior containers mentioned are themselves contained. Books, to use Marder’s description of the function of caskets, “preserve bits of death and reproduce new forms of life from them.”76 That is what Cixous’s project is: in writing or not writing books, it allows for bits of death, of life, of ghosts to be preserved and to be reproduced, multiplied, and distributed (read). Marder (referring to bits [mors] that have been cast out and cannot be [re]attached to any specific concept due to their, one could say, spectral unassimilable trace) writes, “[s]ome of the bits of language that cannot be assimilated into concepts get spit out as literature.”77 To the question, then, that Cixous asked about the thing that is “mordue de mort,” I would answer with another one of her questions: in the Prière d’insérer of Chapitre Los addressed “À mes lisants,” Cixous asks herself and asks us readers: “cette vie née de la mort, ce serait la littérature ?”78 She thus evokes another type of life, a life that would come from death to become life otherwise. In other words: yes, “cette chose mordue de mort,” is a book, very precisely a book, a container that “preserve[s] bits of death and reproduce[s] new forms of life from them.” Despite

76 Ibid. It is in no small part that my focus on the figure and function of the ghost stems from an extensive engagement with the figure of the mother (what Marder calls the maternal function) in texts by Darrieussecq, Perec, and Cixous. The disruptive principle of the maternal function allowed me to start thinking about the function of the ghost in textual creation, and in turn, as quietly as a ghost, it vanished from sight; but I understand it to still be there.

77 Ibid., 240, emphasis in original.

78 Cixous, Chapitre Los, “À mes lisant,” n.p.

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moments of temporary disillusionment or rather the realization of the paradoxical weight that comes with dealing with specters, Cixous’s sorrow and worry are, I propose, directly linked to the fact that her conception of spectrality requires an intimate and radical transformation and reorganization of one’s own being, a willingness to carry within oneself some ugliness and inassimilable pain, some bits of death, in order to be able to communicate, to commune with others.

Hence, when in Ayaï, she recalls a conversation with her son and the meditation that followed it, she claims that she is part of something that one is yet unable to think.

Yet, Cixous, in this description, already sketches out the very possibility for a communion with ghosts. She writes:

Ajax n’est plus. Plus rien. Aujourd’hui 2014, Jacques Derrida n’est plus J. D. 2000. Tu n’es plus H. C. 2000, dit mon fils. Il n’y a pas un atome commun de ton corps 2014 avec ton corps d’il y a quinze ans. Et pourtant il y a un toi qui est toi. La mémoire est plus forte que la mort. En toi vit un texte matériellement inscrit qui te fut télégraphié par Homère c/o [care of] Sophocle. La mémoire survit à la matière dans laquelle elle est inscrite. Atomes du génie de Shakespeare et de Freud, musiques, vous êtes ici, et mêlés au ronronnement de Philia et Aletheia, vous m’environnez dans une organisation qu’on ne sait pas penser actuellement…79

This new organization of being that one is not yet able to think – because we are limited by our bodies’ own limits, by our conception of temporality – this organization reveals precisely the possibilities of the specter, the specter as possibility that Derrida years before called for: that is, a spectrality that begins long before death and goes beyond death, a spectrality that allows us to be at the same time as ghosts.

While untimeliness [intempestivité] – such a crucial term in Derrida’s elaboration of hauntology – permits such a traveling in time, a re-appearing that is “out of season,”

79 Cixous, Ayaï, 59-60.

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spectrality according to Cixous is focused on the transformation that happens to the one who welcomes the haunting. In fact, in the very aptly titled, Le Détrônement de la mort:

Journal du Chapitre Los (2014), Cixous describes a scene with three people, before correcting herself and explaining that there are actually seven beings in it – allow me this long quotation before I unpack the very important moves, which make it possible for us readers to become ghosts ourselves:

[E]n apparence fausse de réalité, nous sommes trois personnes, en vérité nous sommes sept êtres dont trois acteurs incarnés en été 2014, ma fille, mon fils, moi, et quatre sujets tenaces radieux, en pleine forme, Carlos, mon fils, ma fille, moi, en 1969. […] J’ai été, je suis. Ces cinq-là sont mes témoins. […] Nous sommes assis tous les trois donc tous les sept, les présents et les archiprésents […] pour les quatre d’entre nous qui sont plus que présents moins que présents, pour les quatre présents-autrement, il n’y a pas encore de mot. Je le cherche. Nous le cherchons. Tout est spectre, nous sommes tous spectres. Spectre, ce n’est pas ça. Le mot halo apparaît, halote, fait le paon, la roue pleine d’images et d’échos, mais ce n’est pas ça. – Le passé est avec nous comme présent, dis-je. – On pourrait dire que ces quatre autres nous qui sont avec nous-mêmes sont des replis, des épaisseurs de la même feuille, dit mon fils. Mais ce n’est pas ça. – Nous nous regardons, nous nous parlons, nous sommes bien sept. Sept également spectres également présents. – On ne peut pas appeler “revenants” ces êtres qui restent, qui ne reviennent pas, qui ne faiblissent pas, qui rémanent. – C’est nous qui revenons, à nous, songe ma fille, où ça a lieu. – Le lieu est très fort, dis-je. Chaque fois que je passe devant La Guitoune, Carlos ouvre la fenêtre qui donne sur la toile gris argent du Bassin, dis-je. Et aussitôt nous passons pour la millième première fois devant La Guitoune. Tout est vivant : tout va mourir. Tout va. Tout reste. On est en même temps. Ce temps est un présent quasi gnomique. C’est un présent sorcier 80

Cixous, leaving her sorcerous present hanging, reveals a crucial way to understand how communication, communion with specters works. When she writes that “en vérité,” there

80 Hélène Cixous, Le Détrônement de la mort: Journal du Chapitre Los (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2014), 14-16, emphasis in original, the final sentence ends without punctuation.

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are seven beings present, she makes no difference between alive or dead, a 1969 self and a 2014 self, all are able to coexist at the same time as their different incarnations – we’ll also remember that she is no longer H. C. 2000 (yet she could also be at the same time H.

C. 2000 and 1969 and 2014). While she attempts to find a name to speak about these otherwise present others, Cixous rejects many words because she is looking for something that would best explain what “ça” is, how “ça” works.

In an overturning of the assumption of the untimeliness of the specter, it would seem that for Cixous, a shared temporality is what allows for communication with ghosts:

“On est en même temps,” she writes. The present (gnomique) that Cixous is talking about is a present that expresses generally known facts (etymologically speaking it comes from the same family as the verb “comprendre” [Gr. gignôskein]81), this present of knowledge means that there is no sense of time, it is something that holds itself outside of time and that can be understood always as if “pour la millième première fois.” The pronoun “On” is also significant because of the plurality of the persons that it can stand for en même temps. The “on” can also mean that one returns to oneself, that is, the multiple incarnations of our selves (ca. 1969, 2014, etc.) are returning and existing individually, yet at the same time. The words of Cixous’s daughter hint at the shift that occurs: “[c]’est nous qui revenons, à nous, songe ma fille, où ça a lieu.”82 To return to the previous scene,

Shakespeare’s atoms join the atoms of Cixous’s body because of her spectrality: her being an ever-changing fiction (the atoms that make her herself today are not the same ones that made her herself fifteen years prior). In order for Shakespeare and Cixous to be

81 See Le Grand Robert.

82 Cixous, Le Détrônement de la mort, 16.

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at the same time, it is she who needs to change, who needs to become untimely, to embody atoms that made her (taken from different segments in time), to return and bring different iterations of her selves to the table, that is, to herself. In the untimely appearance of the specter of Carlos, Cixous, her daughter, her son, become reacquainted with their

1969 selves, while being at the same time in 2014, or in 2016 as I am writing these words.

Therefore, there is an order of being for Cixous that is not linked to a particular body (which does not mean that the body loses its very important materiality) but rather to a global, collective body, a body of work, a literary corpus, a book made flesh:

“Chaque phrase a ses doubles, ses ombres, ses fantômes. Il faut être plusieurs à recevoir la lettre. La vérité est là, entre les lignes et leurs vibrations intérieures. Un point change tout. La difficulté est d’accepter d’être plusieurs qui la lise(nt). L’une de mes moi pourra s’amuser de ce qui fait trembler une autre moi,”83 she writes in Corollaires d’un vœu. She makes it possible for other selves to read the same letter and to react in his/her/their own ways, she is inviting others into the fold, into the folds of her very being. This is exactly what Frédéric Regard intuits when he writes that “Cixous reads Derrida as her contemporary, as a guest writer, as if she were inviting herself along to the

‘Circumfession’ ceremony, as if an active participant in this ‘Circonfession.’”84 Later he would call her the text’s “posthumous ghost writer,”85 although it is not entirely clear that

83 Cixous, Corollaires d’un Vœu, 50.

84 Frédéric Regard, “‘Reiterature’, or the Haunting of Style in the Portrait de Jacques Derrida by Hélène Cixous,’ in Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Culture, edited by Kate Griffiths and David Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 132.

85 Regard, “‘Reiterature,’” 134.

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this posthumous ghost writer could not also be Derrida himself. However, the distinction does not really matter if we read this according to a Cixousian spectrality: Cixous,

Derrida, the text, all contemporary by way of an untimely embrace. Cixous is a ghost, she is untimely, she goes back as much as other ghosts come forth. Reading ghosts the way that Cixous does, means for readers to be open to their own radical spectrality in an engagement that holds past present future on the same plane. Words, memories, screams and other means of communication for Cixous are transmitted through atoms to form a new kind of body, expressed in a being while / through writing (for this is all happening in a text and in writing scenes), or what Marder refers to in a new definition of life writing, “[a] form of life that is only possible in writing and that only writing makes possible.”86 It is precisely in this sense, that Cixous can declare, “[e]n 1907 les atomes de

Sophocle reviennent saupoudrer un cahier de Proust.”87 Proust, in his own being-spectral is thus able to communicate, to enter into a communion with Sophocles, and later Cixous, and me, and you, in our becoming-spectral can engage with them and each other.

What Cixous’s vision of untimeliness and contemporaneity (at-the-same-time- ness) allows us to understand is that rather than being diametrically opposed, untimeliness and contemporaneity become joined in the radical mise en œuvre of

86 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 220. Life writing is an “umbrella” term that has come to encompass, in academic circles, all sorts of genres and traditions that spoke to the “apparent dissolution of life into story,” or also meaning more plainly, “the writing of one’s own or another’s life.” Margaretta Jolly, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001), ix.

87 Cixous, Ayaï, 23.

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literature: it is through untimeliness that contemporaneity with ghosts is possible.88 Even for Derrida, untimeliness fuels an attempt to come closer. A true contemporary in

Derrida’s sense would be one who welcomes (who provides hospitality for) the untimely ghost in order to learn to be contemporary with it: “Que serait une hospitalité qui ne serait pas prête à s’offrir au mort, au revenant?”89 Indeed, what Derrida calls

“l’hospitalité absolue” is one which requires me to open my home, “mon chez-moi” not only to the stranger but also “à l’autre absolu, inconnu, anonyme, et que je lui donne lieu, que je le laisse venir, que je le laisse arriver, et avoir lieu dans le lieu que je lui offre, sans lui demander ni réciprocité (l’entrée dans un pacte) ni même son nom.”90 Learning to live with ghosts, as Cixous has urged us to do necessitates welcoming them in the most intimate spheres of our lives, it necessitates an absolute openness to what can appear to be radically other but which all the more reveals the otherness in our own selves.

88 Giorgio Agamben in a short text entitled “What is the contemporary?” emphasizes, through his reading of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, that a certain disjunction is necessary to understand the contemporary. Nonetheless, we see sketched out a being that is detached from his or her time, who does not belong, who is as such alone (alone recognizing the truth of his or her time) rather than pointedly engaging with others in a spectral communion: “Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time. […] Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism.” Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 40-41, emphasis mine.

89 Derrida’s remarks are here quoted back to him by Anne Dufourmantelle. Jacques Derrida, De l’hospitalité (Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre) (Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1997), 25, emphasis in original.

90 Ibid., 34.

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Rather than making the ghost contemporary, it makes us untimely, allowing us to live in several temporalities at the same time: “Ce texte se passe en 1995 comme en 1965 en 1976, en 2014, en 96-97, en même temps. Il se présente à sa tête, à tout moment, comme l’éternité, qui n’a pas d’âge.”91 In her explanation of the temporality of the book that she is not writing, Cixous complicates things further by reminding us that untimeliness is not only from the past, she speaks of an event in the future (the ghost that is yet to come): “[i]l est daté de l’avenir, c’est-à-dire de ma mort – un événement qui détermine désormais tous mes choix et mes actes […] ma mort est là, dans toute ma vie, maintenant que les mots ‘ma mère est morte’ me sont entrés dans le dos, dans le cou, les paumes des mains, me frappent violemment la main droite.”92 Her mother Ève was the last link to life, now Cixous is conscious in her very body that she is already a ghost, about to cross over to the other side. This realization is linked to writing. She explains that it is the right hand (the writing hand) that still allows her to remain in the here and now, when she had been unable to use it for several weeks, she understood something:

“J’ai été en répétition de mort pendant plusieurs semaines. J’ai été condamnée. J’ai été posthume, je suis revenue, je me le tiens pour dit. Cet accident n’est qu’un petit exemple parmi les messages que la fin m’adresse.”93 Cixous is now all the more conscious of what will happen, what is happening to her because of the death of her mother and her own advancement in age. While the death of the father is that which allowed for writing to begin, the death of her mother brings death very clearly into Cixous’s own self (we’ll

91 Cixous, Corollaires d’un Vœu, 19.

92 Ibid.

93 Ibid., 20.

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remember that it is in the same book that she recounts being partly dead), it makes her a ghost: “C’est parce que j’ai passé la ligne de la limite deux fois en une année que j’ai le visa absolu. Maintenant je suis libre comme les morts. Ce passage a eu lieu il y a six mois : d’une part maman est morte, le jour même elle s’est installée en moi, je suis avec morte, cela a changé ma nature, je suis dans l’état dont on ne parle jamais, j’étais prête à porter la mort ou le mort.”94 In the event of the mother’s death, the carrying of her within is the most radical gesture of this contemporary untimeliness, it is haunting that is welcomed, a possession that is sought. It is perhaps therefore that Cixous states: “Je ne sais pas vivre sans faire revenir Ève par l’avion de la littérature.”95 Here literature has moved from a telephone call to a plane, pointing perhaps to the fact that the mother’s return in not enough in a disincarnated voice but that Cixous rather longs for the mother body and soul, so as to incorporate her within herself.

Becoming the Ghost

I wrote at length about Marie Darrieussecq’s ghost, but what happens surreptitiously or unconsciously in her oeuvre is made loudly and clearly explicit by

Cixous in hers. When, in 2003, she donated her manuscripts to the Bibliothèque

Nationale, she referred to herself in these terms: “vous qui me recevez moi – mon spectre en la personne fourmilleuse de mes manuscrits.”96 She also called her books or the

94 Ibid., 27.

95 Ibid., 60.

96 Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” 231.

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process by which her books come to her “ce hantement, […] ce supplantement interne.”97

To name her preparations in integrating the library, Cixous finds the following description: “ce passage odysséen entre la vie et les morts.”98 She puts the journey that she is preparing under the banner of the Odyssey and thus declares that she is going home: into the library, into the world of books. When Cixous started writing, it was in order to mourn the loss of her father and she explains that this other world became a new way of being in this world: “Finalement, j’avais refait un monde en papier en 1968. Ce deuxième monde fut toujours réparable. Des pages entières du livre peuvent être arrachées. On flambe, un moi est calciné, on refait de l’encre avec la cendre. Il n’y a pas de hiatus. Et puis la famille mentale s’accroît. On a des parents et amis par littérature, des frères, des sœurs, des chiens. On ouvre un volume, on entre. Fais comme chez toi, dit la littérature. Dans ces pages tu trouveras toutes les joies et tous les deuils dont tu as besoin.”99 Cixous thus starts interacting with certain figures in order to understand what she once did not and what they perhaps did not either. Hence, speaking with the ghost of

Stendhal’s Fabrice, Cixous reads his meeting with an anonymous cadaver, this figure of death, as an event which prefigures her own transformation: “Je suis celui que tu étais. Tu es celui que je serai. Tu me changes de sujet, d’espèce, de genre.”100 We could say even say, you make me a ghost. It is a becoming ghost that allows for the reader to become untimely in communication, that is, through the following of another ghost: je suis (I

97 Ibid., 236.

98 Hélène Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” 232.

99 Cixous, Corollaires d’un Vœu, 17-18.

100 Hélène Cixous, “Le Livre que je n’écris pas,” 238.

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follow/I am). This following has for a consequence a change in being, a change in subject position, in species, in gender.

My aim, in this chapter, was not to track phone calls and telephones in Cixous’s oeuvre as I did with certain lost objects in Modiano’s, but rather to use Cixous’s pointed treatment of the modes of calling to propose a different way of reading literature as telecommunication, that is, to communicate with ghosts. In order to communicate, to commune with these others we ourselves have to finally understand that we have always already been, that we are revenants to ourselves, exceeding our own bodies and minds, to some extent containing our own ghosts within our thoughts, our voices, our names. We can thus keep engaging with other temporalities, other communities, which are not bound by presence, space or even by life but rather connected through actions, through the willingness to read, to write, to lend an ear, to hear and respond, or simply shout: through

Literature.

184 AFTER WORDS

One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted – One need not be a House – The Brain has Corridors – surpassing Material Place –

—Emily Dickinson

In Perec’s reflections on the process of creation, on the question of originality, in

Modiano’s creation of traces as a way of coming to terms with an impossible memory, in

Darrieussecq’s furtive insertions into her own text, or in Cixous’s communion, the figure of the ghost reveals itself in and through language: it is not external to the text, but is rather made possible by the text itself, by its fiction. As critics pondering the question of the contemporary have stressed,1 the realization that one is unable to be completely coterminous with one’s own time (for what time are we exactly speaking of?) reveals certain chips in the façade we have made for ourselves. By emphasizing the ways in which we are disjointed, the figure of the ghost urges us to turn inward and face the little inassimilable remainders of fictionality that make up our own selves.

In her introduction to a collection of essays dealing with the fantastic, Margaret-

Anne Hutton described contemporary French literature as deeply concerned with questions of (re)turns; for her, “this is a fiction which is never innocent, but always

1 I think here in particular of the edited volume Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? Lionel Ruffel, ed., Qu’est-ce que le contemporain? (Nantes: éditions Cécile Defaut, 2010).

185

written au second degré; it is a literature which has staged various ‘returns’: of the subject, of ethics, of history, of story-telling etc. It is, in other words, a literature of revenants, a spectral literature.”2 One of the aspect of this “spectral (re)turn” that I have mentioned in passing (most explicitly in the case of Modiano’s oeuvre though it underlies many of the works by the authors mentioned above) merits further consideration and study: that is, the responsibility that reading ghosts implies and demands, and I would like to take a few moments to sketch out further avenues of research.

Robert Harvey writes in his monograph Witnessness that “[f]rom the beginning there was the witness, the third party,”3 and we are here reminded of Derrida’s claim in

Spectres de Marx that “[t]out commence par l’apparition du spectre.”4 Rather than seeing these two propositions as part of different projects, I am struck by how much sense it makes to juxtapose them in order to say that from the beginning there was the ghostly witness. For Harvey, witnessness, or the capacity for witnessing is inherent to everyone regardless of his or her presence at an event; this capacity for witnessing by proxy allows for a universal ethics.5 In order to speak for the other without taking his or her place and usurping his or her voice, Harvey proposes a few solutions, one of which is the necessity of imagination, which, he suggests, creates a bridge between me and the other.6 He also

2 Margaret-Anne Hutton, ed. “Introduction,” Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Writing, Modern French Identities 81 (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2009), 6, emphasis in original.

3 Robert Harvey, Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility (New York: Continuum, 2010), 6.

4 Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 22.

5 Harvey, Witnessness, xi.

6 Ibid., 120.

186

argues for “entering another as if he were hollow… Not a phony or fake supplanting the real thing, but a ghost, like the writer who brings forth the story of another.”7 By accepting my capacity for being a witness (though by proxy and through fiction), by letting the other speak through me, I am responding to the ethical injunction that calls explicitly for “the responsibility to all others before me,” writes Harvey reading

Emmanuel Levinas.

Derrida’s discussion of responsibility (he calls it “general” where Harvey calls it

“universal”) in Spectres de Marx is precisely articulated through the figure of the specter.

He writes, “aucune éthique […] ne paraît possible et pensable et juste, qui ne reconnaisse pas à son principe le respect pour ces autres qui ne sont plus ou pour ces autres qui ne sont pas encore là, présentement vivants, qu’ils soient déjà morts ou qu’ils ne soient pas encore nés.”8 Ethics is considering all others: whether I have met them, whether they are alive, dead, or, perhaps, not even human. A genuine communion with the figure of the ghost could thus be understood as the beginning of ethics (one where we would acknowledge our own spectrality and be opened to spectral others, wherever we may find them).

I have written that for Darrieussecq there is no message or no ethical gesture in making ghosts speak, and here I would like to emphasize that it is indeed not the speaking ghosts of White that call out to us and ask for an ethical engagement (they are but narratological placeholders for the author herself). Rather, it is the ghosts that appear between the lines, the ones that materialize between unspoken words, the ones that

7 Ibid., 32-33.

8 Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 15, emphasis in original.

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underscore the resurrecting power of fiction (as Cixous would have it) that remind us of the fact that a space has been made, in and through fiction, for the appearing and welcoming of all others, whether they are human, animal or even ghostly. Because it is possible for fiction to testify, to be a witness (as we have seen in Perec and Modiano), reading becomes a responsibility (and an incredible possibility as Cixous has shown). If we follow Harvey’s call for witnessness (Derrida’s call for responsibility), accepting to act as a ghost writer and a ghost reader is to accept being haunted by the other. It is then also an ethical gesture, which accepts the other within me. Harvey beautifully renders it by emphasizing the ghostly nature of this communion, “I shade into you and you shade into me.”9

I thus depart, dear readers, in spectral fashion, that is by pointing not to the end but rather to another beginning, to the work that remains to be done. What Perec,

Modiano, Darrieussecq, and Cixous through their own spectral preoccupations have taught us (and what they still can and shall teach us) is the importance of careful attention to the possibilities of the act of reading, of writing. Each in his or her own way showed us that ghosts quietly appear in the most inconspicuous of places: sometimes in-between books, sometimes in-between or within words, but also at all times sitting next to us while we read, while we write. The following injunction – which is also an invitation – best summarizes the lessons learned (in the pages you have just read) and those yet to come (to be included in a future book entitled): Mind the Ghost…

9 Harvey, Witnessness, 140.

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