IDENTIFYING THE DISPLACED SELF : A STUDY OF SELECTED WORKS BY DRISS CHRAIBI AND TAMAR BEN OELLOUN. La Ï1a Ibn1fassi Univers 1 College London Ph . D 1 9 9 8 ProQuest Number: U642927 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U642927 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT Francophone Maghrebian literature is concerned, in general terms, with cultural and socio-political issues. Because this theme recurs, it seems logical that critical approaches used to the study of this literature are often sociological, political or linguistic (in the sense of dealing with language issues in the Maghreb). The aim of this thesis is to step back from such pre-ordained approaches and adopt a novel perspective that can enhance and enrich the reading of this literature. As such, the objective of this work is to deduce the autobiographical act from what seem purely fictional texts, and to use a psychoanalytical approach which enables the reader to consider how a protagonist's search for selfhood is reflective of its creator, i.e. the author. The psychoanalytical perspective in this thesis helps mainly to detect a self, which for various reasons is fragmented. Freudian, Lacanian and Kleinian tools are used to provide an interpretation of the self in selected work of Driss Chraibi and Tahar Ben Jelloun, which are viewed as exemplars. The discussion starts with the idea that the self is split and conflictual; but this situation is misrecognised, denied and displaced by the authors in question. This misrecognition operates at the expense of the female characters in the novels studied and the female gender in general. The patriarchal Moroccan society provides men with a freedom which is denied to women. However, men's freedom is merely a mask; so to express their true inner feelings, the male writers studied here appropriate women's voice - that is, the voice of absence. Accordingly, women and their absent voices become rhetorical devices, such as metaphors, which are used as a means of displacement and distantiation whereby it is men's subjectivity which is constructed. Both Chraibi and Ben Jelloun use the female figure in an attempt to resolve their own inner conflicts and inadequacies, in terms of cultural and sexual identities respectively. The detour taken by these writers to achieve their selfhood is here interpreted as a game of postponement on their part of what seems like an underlying knowledge of the impossibility of such achievement. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The help of a number of people enabled me to complete this thesis. I would like to thank my supervisor. Professor Annette Lavers, for being a stimulating source of ideas, for her guidance and also for her personal kindness. I would also like to thank my husband, Michael Saward, for his moral and practical support; Nicki Hitchcott for her friendship and encouragement; Mina Taous, and my mother Hajja Fatima Ben Abbess, whose presence at various stages has allowed me time and space for writing; and Sheila Sweet for computing help. My late father, Haj El Khayatti Ibnlfassi, sent me a great deal of material from Morocco. More importantly, without his open- mindedness and encouragement throughout my education, the thesis would not have been written. He would have been very proud to see the project completed. My thanks also go to both Tahar Ben Jelloun and Driss Chraibi; the former for granting me an interview and the latter for agreeing to speak at a research seminar held at London Guildhall University. Finally, to my daughter Nadia, whose arrival and presence has been a source of great happiness. To the memory of my father and my little brother Tarik Table of Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 3 Introduction 6 Part One; Driss Chraibi Chapter One: The Chraibian Hero, the Mother 25 and the Family Chapter Two: The Alienated Subject-Hero and 71 a Theory of Doubles Part Two: Tahar Ben Jelloun Chapter Three: The Ambiguity of Self-Structure 109 Chapter Four: Ben Jelloun's Nature of the Self 141 Chapter Five: The Appropriation of the Female Voice 160 Chapter Six: The Absence of the Self 182 Conclusion 214 Appendix One: Seminar Transcription: Driss Chraibi 218 Appendix Two: Interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun 232 Bibliography 241 INTRODUCTION The trigger for the writing of this thesis, and my research in the field of francophone Maghrebian literature more generally, can be traced back to my high-school years in Rabat in the early 1970s. My French-subject teacher (Madame Degueret) was teaching us the fundamentals of the French language and introducing us to French literature. We were following the Moroccan national syllabus. Arabisation^ had not yet begun. The French literature we were introduced to consisted of shortened versions of Balzac's Eugénie ^ The process of arabisation in Morocco began in 1957 (soon after independence)^ the ftrst attempts to arabise the educational system were unsuccessful due to Berber opposition, led by Addi Oubihi, and to the lack of qualified teachers of Arabic. Morocco had to employ a number of teachers from Egypt, Syria and Iraq in the early stages of arabisation. For further reading, see "Annexe 1: Chroniques de l’arabisation" in Gilbert Granguillaume, Arabisation et politique linguistique au Maghreb. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1983, pp. 171-193. 7 Grandet. Malot's Sans famille. Saint Exupéry's Le petit prince and the like. From time to time, our French teacher would also distribute to us extracts of Feraoun's Le Fils du pauvre to read and comment on. We were told that we would identify more readily with this kind of literature. It was indeed a novelty for us; we did identify with what was familiar to us, starting with the names of the characters and expressions which were of Arabic origin. At the same time, we found the latter amusing because they were written in French. We thought it a deficiency on the part of the author; we believed that he did not master the French language enough to be able to use the exact expressions of that language. Also, being post-independence city school children, we could not have identified with the colonized and poor Kabyle peasants described in Feraoun's book. Madame Degueret's action could easily be interpreted as that of a concicscendiog colonial teacher who patronised her indigenous pupils. But far from being malicious, her intentions were to open up the reading horizons of the Moroccan pupils and make them aware of their own literary patrimony. It was rather an anti-assimilationist attitude in an educational system based firmly on the French heritage which was alienating to the Moroccan pupil. Years later, with more reading of francophone Maghrebian texts and with the help of a critical competence acquired 8 through education and through personal experience, I identified more closely with these texts; not in terms of similarities, but rather in terms of dissimilarities. The female gender depicted in male writing does not seem to allow for the passage of time to the extent that women in such literature seem to be literally stuck in the past. New generations of women in the Maghreb have moved away from the confined spaces and life-style of older ones (though, to a certain extent and in a contradictory way, the fundamentals of being a woman in a male-dominated society have changed very little), making it harder to find grounds for identification in this male writing about women. However, an awareness of one's enunciation is a major aspect of modern critical theory, and it is particularly crucial here, hence the necessity for a few details which will characterize this particular reader, and focus particularly on the (highly ideological) frontier between the public and the private and the forms it takes in different cultures. The reading of the authors studied in this thesis is inevitably subjective. It is a reading stamped by a shared background with both authors, by a reader who is Moroccan, Muslim and living within a culture different from the native one. The gender difference, however, initiates the focus on thematic issues about women and their representation, as well as the discourse used to do so. As in the case of the authors examined here, the contact with Western culture came first through 9 education, and because of that there was, to a certain extent, not so much an alienation as a resentment towards certain aspects of my culture which were constraining. While it is a fact that social constraints are an extension of family constraints, my own encounter with them was (ironically) located mainly outside the family. The private sphere, far from being opposed to education and knowledge (as provided by the public sphere) taught me that these bring independence and a sense of freedom. However, the private, in this case, was more permissive and more open than the public, for the latter was always more eager to remind me that I belonged to a certain group -my gender- which for them was inferior by definition. This discrimination resulted in anger and resentment. There is thus to a certain degree an identification with the writers studied here.