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Copyright by Claire Catherine Jones 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Claire Catherine Jones Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: From the Countryside and City to the Edges and Interstices: Places and Spaces of the Quotidien in Contemporary French Film and Literature Committee: Alexandra Wettlaufer, Supervisor Paola Bonifazio Michael Johnson Hervé Picherit Charles Ramírez Berg From the Countryside and City to the Edges and Interstices: Places and Spaces of the Quotidien in Contemporary French Film and Literature by Claire Catherine Jones, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Dedication For my children Acknowledgements I am grateful to Alexandra Wettlaufer, my dissertation director, for her unwavering optimism and guidance, which sustained me throughout my project. Her clarity of thought and expression helped me order my own thinking and writing. I am fortunate to have worked with such a dedicated and brilliant scholar and mentor, and my gratitude is heartfelt. I also wish to thank Michael Johnson who challenged me to grapple with ideas on the quotidien. I hope that my work bears the fruit of this meaningful exchange. His serenity around my dissertation process also gave me confidence for its completion. Paola Bonifazio, Hervé Picherit, and Charles Ramírez Berg were generous with their time and care for my project, and I am honored to have had their participation on my committee. Their insights, suggestions, and critical response to my work have been most helpful. I also wish to acknowledge Dina Sherzer and François Lagarde for their help in defining my project in its early stages. The late Professor Bob Dawson was an inspiration as I pursued my doctoral program. I think of him each time I pass the Harry Ransom Center, where he worked to make the literature and philosophy of eighteenth-century France so memorable. Merci, Bob! The Department of French and Italian, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin enabled me to conduct research for v my dissertation, participate in conferences, benefit from time in which to write, and gain meaningful experience as an instructor of French. I am so thankful for their support during my graduate career. I am also grateful to the following individuals and entities for their support during this process: graduate coordinators, Sylvia Grove, Kevin Hendryx, Rolee Rios, and Chaz Nailor, whose assistance and encouragement have buoyed me since my arrival at UT; Bob Penman, for helping me so graciously in the final stages of assembling my dissertation; Janice Duff, for providing me with space in which to work at the Perry- Castañeda Library; fellow graduate students, for their camaraderie; my earliest mentors in French, Judy Petzoldt and Paulette Maggiolo; the Undergraduate Writing Center; the university’s Audio Visual Library; and finally, InterLibrary Services, for tracking down needed materials and sending me care packages of books while living in Vermont. Finally, I thank my husband, Jonathan Davis, for his eagerness to discuss my work as it developed, and my children, for their patience and joy. vi From the Countryside and City to the Edges and Interstices: Places and Spaces of the Quotidien in Contemporary French Film and Literature Claire Catherine Jones, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Alexandra Wettlaufer This dissertation examines the use of the quotidien (the everyday) in contemporary French film and literature to understand its relationship with notions of place and space. Defined as the paradoxical process of how one repeatedly constructs each day “anew” on a routine basis, the quotidien in the texts of my analysis is not static, but rather a means for articulating changes in French communities and ways of life, while further reflecting ongoing changes to attitudes, politics, and identity. I advance current readings of the quotidien by viewing it as both descriptive, a recurring manifestation of change, as well as transformative, able to effect change. I argue that, in these depictions, the quotidien effectively erodes traditional spatial categories to create and reveal new and less stable versions. Specifically, places lose their real and symbolic sway to indeterminate spaces in which meaning is uncertain, in flux, or non-existent. vii My dissertation is novel for its interest in tracing the quotidien across spatial categories, so that its chapters move from the more “stable” categories of the rural and the urban to those in more obvious flux, edges and interstices. Chapter 1 studies the depicted quotidiens of rural France in Agnès Varda’s film, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), and Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret’s film series, Profils paysans (2000-2008). Chapter 2 investigates the quotidiens of urban centers in Cédric Klapisch’s film, Chacun cherche son chat (1996), Patrick Modiano’s novel, Dora Bruder (1997), and Laurent Cantet’s film, Entre les murs (2008). Chapter 3 examines everyday France at the periphery of Paris in Gérard Gavarry’s novel, Hop là! Un deux trois (2001). The Conclusion addresses the emergence of a new space, the interstitial, in which its dwellers float, move, or exist between places on a daily basis, such as a commute to work. I analyze Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’s short film, Loin du 16ème (2006), Abdellatif Kechiche’s film, La Graine et le mulet (2007), and Alain-Paul Mallard’s film, L’Origine de la tendresse (1999). These mini-ethnographies of French society reveal a France grappling with issues related to globalization, shifting populations, the relative newness of the European Union, and consequently, identity. Who is French, and where does “authentic France” lie? viii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: The Quotidien of the Rural.......................................................59 CHAPTER TWO: The Quotidien of the Urban...................................................109 CHAPTER THREE: The Quotidien of Edges.....................................................179 CONCLUSION: The Quotidien of Interstices.....................................................223 Bibliography ........................................................................................................242 ix INTRODUCTION Genesis of Project While re-reading Madame Bovary for my comprehensive exams in 2008, I was struck by the resonance between its subject matter – the quotidien of nineteenth-century French rural life – and that of Raymond Depardon’s documentary film, La vie moderne, then receiving critical attention at the Cannes Film Festival for its focus on waning, daily farm life in early twenty-first century France. How had Flaubert managed to make Emma Bovary’s tortured experience of the countryside’s tedium, contrasted with the lures of urban modernity, so riveting then? How has Depardon, 150 years later, appealed to French nostalgia for its rural heritage in his trilogy, Profils paysans, with La vie moderne as its third installment? Though displaying different attitudes towards the realities of rural France, Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Depardon both use the quotidien, or everyday, as a point of entry for their stories and source of their drama. Flaubert’s use of detail to construct Emma’s rural environment and psyche parallels Depardon’s choice to film his subjects in long and uninterrupted sequences of daily life on the farm, including the most mundane of tasks. Beyond considering the noteworthy leap from a literary representation of the quotidien of rural life to a filmic one, taking into account the changes in available medias and “views” since the time of Flaubert, I wanted to know more about how the use of the quotidien in recent French culture could be different from its nineteenth-century counterpart. 1 In my research for contemporary French texts on the quotidien, I remained close to a set of films and novels that not only foreground their protagonists’ everyday, but make important statements about where those days unfold. It became clear that there are indeed enough texts on the quotidien of the urban and rural to indicate that the dichotomy of Paris-province (all that lies outside of the capital) is still a viable way to partition France in the popular imagination. Nonetheless, this traditional binary division is no longer truly reflective of French life in the twenty-first century, which, instead, occurs increasingly now at created and shifting edges, and in agonizing interstices, which is, furthermore, reflected in several well-received films and novels. My chapter breakdown soon evolved, moving from the everyday of the traditional categories of rural and urban life to the more recent ones of edges (suburbs, coasts) and interstices (literal and metaphorical), as settings in dialogue with changing quotidiens. This intersection of recent depictions of quotidiens and their spatial arguments – where they occur and meaning ascribed to or produced by those locations – is the subject of this dissertation. Le Quotidien defined Le quotidien refers to the “everyday,” but is more charged as a term in French because of its legacy in French thought and culture.1 Little consensus exists on defining the concept because of its personal and