La Ligne D'écume
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La Ligne d’écume Pavement Books London, UK www.pavementbooks.com First published 2016 © Gilles Chamerois, Christopher Collier, Patrick ffrench, Sophie Fuggle, Nicholas Gledhill, Fiona Handyside, Áine Larkin, Claire Launch- bury, Thérèse De Raedt, Zoë Roth Cover Photograph by Emmanuelle Groult. Reproduced with permission from the artist. The authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, me- chanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the authors and the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-9571470-7-2 La Ligne d’écume: Encountering the French Beach edited by Sophie Fuggle and Nicholas Gledhill STRANDS book series A strand is a thread, a trajectory, a train of argument or thought. It is also a road, a promenade, the place where beach meets cityscape. It is a limit as well as a line. It is the site of encounter, conflict and confrontation. As borders are reinforced and sea levels rise, spaces of inclusion become those of exclusion. The strand gives way to the stranded, marooned, isolated, imprisoned and alienated. This series presents a range of perspectives and critical methodologies aimed at ques- tions of space and our sociocultural engagement with it. As such it incorporates studies and approaches from cultural studies, literature, film and media studies, anthropology, political science, architecture and human geography. Current titles Return to the Street edited by Sophie Fuggle and Tom Henri Taking Up Space edited by Jamal Aridi and Jessica Glendennan La Ligne d’écume: Encountering the French Beach edited by Sophie Fuggle and Nicholas Gledhill CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Notes on Contributors ix Note on Translations xi Introduction 1 SOPHIE FUGGLE & NICHOLAS GLEDHILL I. Beach Archaeologies 11 Beneath the Cobblestones, the Beach: An Idea in 13 Everyone’s Mind? CHRISTOPHER COLLIER Devant la mer: Thresholds of Fiction and Theory 35 PATRICK FFRENCH Death on the Sand: From Tragic Humanism to Depressive 49 Realism NICHOLAS GLEDHILL II. Framing the Beach 65 Proust and the Beach as Écran 67 ÁINE LARKIN Vacance: vacancy and vacation in the films of Jacques 89 Rozier GILLES CHAMEROIS III. War Zones 111 Bodies on the Sand: Corporeality and the Beach in the 113 Films of Catherine Breillat and François Ozon FIONA HANDYSIDE Colonies de Vacances 133 SOPHIE FUGGLE ‘Elle ne sera bientôt qu’une épave soudée à ses rochers’: 159 Women Writing the Wreck of Beirut CLAIRE LAUNCHBURY IV. Eroded Identities 175 Between Real and Ideal Space: Writing, Embodiment and 177 the Beach In Michel Houellebecq ZOË ROTH The Beach as Liminal Site in Abderrahmane Sissako’s 193 Heremakono THÉRÈSE DE RAEDT Index 217 vi CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The idea for this collection emerged from a series of discussions between the editors while they were both based in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Gold- smiths, University of London. Preliminary thoughts on this were further de- veloped during the Taking Up Space Conference held at Goldsmiths in 2012 which led to a film night dedicated to the French beach organised by Jessica Glendennan. Additional encouragement for the project was provided by friends in the French department at King’s College London including Patrick ffrench, Johanna Malt and Sanja Perovic and subsequently by colleagues in the French department at Nottingham Trent University especially Enda McCaffrey and Chantal Cointot. Special thanks also go to John and Theodor Hutnyk and to Emmanuelle Groult for her cover image. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Gilles Chamerois is Associate Professor at the University of Brest, France. He was a student at the French Louis Lumière National Film School and has written articles on film and adaptation (Terrence Malick, Robert Kramer, Ken Loach and John Huston) and co-written two books on novels and their adaptations, Jane Eyre with Élise Ouvrard and The House of Mirth with Marie-Claude Per- rin-Chenour. He has also edited or co-edited two collections of essays on Thom- as Pynchon, and written a number of articles on this author. Christopher Collier is completing a doctorate in the School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex. His research examines the re-emergence of the avant-garde practice of ‘psychogeography’ during the 1990s. He has several articles on the topic in print and forthcoming. He also teaches part time at Essex Business School and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. At the time this text was written Christopher was precariously employed as a somewhat psychogeographical travel writer - producing marketing copy about beaches he had never visited, and possibly never will. Sophie Fuggle is Senior Lecturer in French at Nottingham Trent University. She is author of Foucault/Paul: Subjects of Power (Palgrave, 2013) and has co-edited various collections on space and culture including Word on the Street (IGRS, 2011) and Return to the Street (Pavement Books, 2015). Her current research focuses on cultural representations of incarceration. Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King’s College London. He is the author of The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (Oxford UP, 1996), The Cut: Reading Georges Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil (British Academy, 1999) and After Bataille: Sac- rifice, Exposure, Community (Legenda, 2007), co-editor (with Roland-François Lack) of The Tel Quel Reader (Routledge, 1998) and (with Ian James) of Expo- sures: Critical Essays on Jean-Luc Nancy (Oxford Literary Review, July 2005). He is currently working on two book length projects - Proust’s cinemas - on how A la recherche du temps perdu might allow us to imagine cinema differently, and Spasms: the Politics of Moving Bodies, on late 19th- and 20th-century discourses around bodily movement. Nicholas Gledhill is a London-based writer, musician, teacher and intercultural training consultant. He has postgraduate degrees from the University of Leeds and the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also an editor of the arts and cultural theory journal Nyx. His current research is focused on the development of modernist themes in the European novel. Fiona Handyside is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and French at the Univer- sity of Exeter. She is the editor of Eric Rohmer: Interviews (2013) and co-edi- tor with Kate Taylor-Jones of International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts (2015). She has written Cinema at the Shore: The Beach in French Cinema (2014) and is currently completing a monograph on Sofia Coppola. Áine Larkin is Lecturer in French at the University of Aberdeen, and author of Proust Writing Photography (Oxford: Legenda, 2011). She has contributed chap- ters to a number of books, including Marcel Proust in Context (ed. Adam Watt, CUP, 2014) and Cent ans de jalousie proustienne (eds. Erika Fülöp and Philippe Chardin, Classiques Garnier, 2015). She co-edited a special issue of Romance Studies (2014) entitled Unsettling Scores: Proust and Music. Funding awards in- clude a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the IRCHSS (2008) and an RSE Workshops award (2014). Her research interests include Proust studies, medical humanities, and dance in the modern novel. Claire Launchbury is Research Fellow in French and City Studies at the In- stitute of Modern Languages Research and the Centre for Metropolitan Stud- ies, Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Her research focuses on issues of memory and representation in postwar Lebanon and on francophone voices of resistance in the Middle East more broadly. Her second monograph, Beirut and the Urban Memory Machine will be published by Am- sterdam University Press in 2016. Thérèse De Raedt is Associate Professor of French at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Her research has focused around the theme of ‘otherness’. Her publications include several articles on the novel Ourika by Mme de Duras, on the film Vers le Sud by Laurent Cantet, on the Holiday resort Club Med, on Franco-Senegalese mixed race couples, and on the film Congo River by Thierry Michel. She has published several interviews with African writers and artists. Zoë Roth is Lecturer in French at Durham University. Her work broadly ad- dresses the relationship between lived experience and aesthetics in twentieth- and twenty-first century comparative literature and visual culture. She has pub- lished in such journals as Word & Image and Philip Roth Studies. x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS The French beach as site of encounter has been subject to multiple readings, writings and translations. As the essays in this collection attest, it is a site that is inhabited, occupied, appropriated and exported globally. The use of English translations alongside original French citation throughout the book is intended to reflect such appropriations beyond a Francophone community. However, the editors have as far as possible respected the varied translation formats of the book’s contributors, some of whom have provided their own translations to the French original, others who are working primarily with established translations. INTRODUCTION Sophie Fuggle & Nicholas Gledhill I. Mapping the French Beach According to a well-worn anecdote, Louis XIV complained that, with the advent of new scientific methods for calculating the coastline, he was conceding more territory to the astronomers than he was to his enemies.1 To attempt to map any coastline is perhaps always an exercise in futility. Castles in the sand will be washed away at high tide. The same applies to the beach as site of creative inspi- ration and cultural production. Consequently, this collection resists an affirma- tion of the French beach as fixed space giving rise to a coherent set of themes.