INTERRUPTED VISIONS: SEEING and WRITING the MEDITERRANEAN of the TWENTIETH and TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES by Shannon Katherine Winst
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INTERRUPTED VISIONS: SEEING AND WRITING THE MEDITERRANEAN OF THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES By Shannon Katherine Winston A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Professor Michèle Hannoosh, Co-Chair Professor Tomoko Masuzawa, Co-Chair Professor Jarrod Hayes Professor Marjorie Levinson Professor Karla Mallette ¤ “J’ai banni le claire, dénué en toute valeur. Oeuvrant dans l’obscur, j’ai trouvé l’éclair.” “I have discovered clarity as worthless. Working in darkness, I have discovered lightning.” André Breton, Art Poétique © Shannon Katherine Winston 2014 Acknowledgements This dissertation is the result of years of hard work and collaboration. First and foremost, I’d like to thank my committee for helping me in what was a very circuitous path towards refining this work in its current form. I consider myself especially lucky to have had such wonderful co-chairs. I am indebted to Michèle Hannoosh for her guidance in helping me situate my project within Mediterranean Studies. More generally, her intellectual generosity, thoughtful insights, and excellent mentorship were invaluable. Tomoko Masuzawa’s steadfastness, rigor, and belief in my scholarship have made this dissertation possible. I am also a much better writer because of working with her. Jarrod Hayes was a crucial mentor in helping me develop my own critical voice within francophone studies, and in helping me understand how to situate myself within the field more clearly. Karla Mallette’s insights about refining my work within Italian literary studies more clearly were also greatly appreciated, and allow me to see how I can carry this project forward in its next incarnation. Marjorie Levinson’s love of literature fueled my own in this process. I am especially thankful for her sensitive readings, her rigorous conceptual engagements with my project, and support. My dissertation could not have been completed without the sustained help of the Sweetland Writing Center. Sharing my work my Raymond McDaniel was always a pleasure and our conversations made me grow as a writer and thinker. Paul Barron’s willingness to read my Khatibi chapter at the Dissertation Writing Institute was incredibly productive; his statement that reading my work made him love writing again was one of the highest ii compliments that I have ever received— and it reminded me of what I love most about writing. Gina Brandolino, who saw the first chapter and the last, helped me understand how to write a dissertation. Her urgings to write more forcefully and to state my thesis upfront were among my first and most crucial lessons I learned in this process, although it’s something that I continue to refine. Teri Ford was a delight to greet at Sweetland and she reminded me to laugh even when things got difficult. This dissertation is for my friends, colleagues, and neighbors, Basak Candar and Christopher Meade, whom I will miss dearly and who always reminded me to take things in stride. Hilary Levinson, Richard Pierre, Rostom Mesli, Amr Kamal, Cassie Miura, Mélissa Gelinas, Etienne Charriere, Harry Kashdan, Patrick Tonks, Olga Greco, and Nancy Linthicum made every day of graduate school a pleasure. I am grateful for their friendship, sense of humor, and willingness to read my work. Helena Mesa, Blas Falconer, and Rebecca Porte reminded me to keep writing poetry, and keep my creative investments going. Jennifer Solheim inspired me to think about how my creative writing informs my scholarship. Catherine Brown told me to always study things that matter and to never to lose sight of myself regardless of outcomes. Peggy McCracken has been a crucial, unofficial mentor, especially on the job market. The Mediterranean Topographies Group and its participants inspired every page of this project. Frank Kelderman, Liz Harmon, Kristy Rawson, and Camela Logan were all attentive and generous readers of my work. None of this would be possible without the support of my family: my mother, Jane, my sister, Erin, brother-in-law, Jona, and nephews, Joaquin and Jael. My brothers, Erik and Peter Van Rossum and their wives, Carla and Reina, have been such amazing supporters of what I do even from a distance. Finally, to my partner, Gen, who taught me the value of taking intellectual risks, and whose steadfast love allowed me to see this work through to iii completion. Tye and Lynkn, our dog companions, showed me the importance of play, walks, and enjoying the everyday that makes scholarship possible in the first place. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Abstract vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Mediterranean as Mirror: Anna Maria Ortese’s “Un paio di occhiali” and L’Iguana 23 “Un paio di occhiali”: At the Interstices of the Visible and the Invisible 27 L’Iguana: Disruptions in the Visual Field 44 Conclusion 61 Chapter 2: In the Blink of an Eye/in the Shift of the Kaleidoscope: Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Mediterranean Morocco 64 La Mémoire tatouée: Between Two Waters 66 Triptyque de Rabat: An Encircled Sea 80 The Mediterranean: The First Triptych 81 Nafissa and the Port City: The Second Triptych 88 “The Order” and the Shifting Powers: The Third Triptych 92 Conclusion 93 Chapter 3: Mediterranean through the Frame: Assia Djebar’s La Nouba du Mont Chenoua, “La Femme en morceaux,” and La Femme sans sépulture 96 Against Transparency: The Obstacles of Sight in La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua 99 Excavations of the Visual in “La Femme en morceaux” 107 Narrative Circulation: The 1001 Nights in Algeria 117 The Mediterranean as Film and Mosaic in La Femme sans sépulture 124 v Masking and Unmasking: Social Struggles in the Mediterranean 132 Conclusion: Between Frames: Djebar’s Visual and Textual Aesthetics 135 Chapter 4: Micro Visions, Macro Narratives: Magnifying the Mediterranean Puzzle in Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Khéops 136 Jean-Claude Izzo and the Mediterranean Noir Genre 138 Izzo’s Marseille: The Violence of Two Pasts 141 Lole: Le Panier and Marseille’s Classical Past 149 From Photographs to Jensen’s Bas-Relief 155 Leila: La cité and France’s Colonial Past/Postcolonial Present 159 Conclusion 172 Coda: Through the Rearview Mirror: Glimpses of the Mediterranean and into History 175 Works Cited 178 vi Abstract Since at least Albert Camus’ novel L'Etranger (1942), vision has been a major element of literary works on and from the Mediterranean. This dissertation seeks to show how the common correlation between seeing and knowing is undone in the works of writers from around the Mediterranean, including: Anna Maria Ortese’s “Un paio di occhiali” and L’Iguana, Abdelkebir Khatibi’s La Mémoire tatouée: Autobiograhie d’un décolonisé and Triptyque de Rabat, Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, “La Femme en morceaux,” and La Femme sans sépulture, and Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Khéops. In short stories, novels, and films from 1953 to 2002, modes of seeing that are marked by interrupted vision, in particular, figure the problem of understanding and writing the colonial past and the post-colonial present. Ortese and Djebar employ images of framed vision — through eyeglasses, doorways, and narrative frames — to write what lies just outside of them, and to highlight what is only partially seen. In Khatibi, one finds the blink and the syncope, which attempt to map visually Morocco’s liminal position as defined by a dynamic of rupture and continuity between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Finally, Jean-Claude Izzo focuses on the crime genre as a frame, which allows him to engage with the criminal and ethical problems of France’s desire for cultural homogenization. These works reveal a persistent desire and effort to “see” past the constraints of the past and the present, including those of the nation state. In so doing, they create new visual configurations and perceptual networks that imagine and reimagine the twentieth-century Mediterranean as a space defined by contradiction, liminality, and interconnected histories. vii INTRODUCTION “A picture holds us captive. And we could not get out if it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself inexorably.” -Wittgenstein Albert Camus’ L’Etranger (1942) is one of the paradigmatic works of twentieth- century Mediterranean literature. The image of the protagonist, Meursault, standing on Algeria’s scorching beaches as he faces off with “the Arab” has long captured readers’ imaginations (Camus 51). Blinded by the sun and the water’s reflections, Meursault’s vision blurs as sweat drips into his eyes. Mirages dance before him. The “Arab” disappears, only to reappear with a knife glinting in his hands—or so Meursault believes as he opens fire. This face-off captures colonial violence between France and North Africa, a relationship facilitated by the Mediterranean Sea, and it underscores the centrality and precariousness of vision in shaping depictions of the twentieth-century Mediterranean while highlighting the elusiveness of what, beyond mere geography, the term means. Definitions of the Mediterranean are as intangible as the mirages that flicker before Meursault’s eyes. The sea has been conceived of as a temperament, a geography, an ecology, and a metaphor, as a series of separations and, inversely, as networks of separations. Some scholars maintain that “the Mediterranean” is a European, Orientalist construction. The field of Mediterranean Studies is so rife with contradictions that Lebanese poet and writer, Salah Stétié once