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The Aesthetics of Waste: Michel Tournier, Agnes Varda, Sabine Macher

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The Aesthetics of Waste: Michel Tournier, Agnes Varda, Sabine Macher University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 The Aesthetics of Waste: Michel Tournier, Agnes Varda, Sabine Macher Melissa Dunlany University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons Recommended Citation Dunlany, Melissa, "The Aesthetics of Waste: Michel Tournier, Agnes Varda, Sabine Macher" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2264. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2264 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2264 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Aesthetics of Waste: Michel Tournier, Agnes Varda, Sabine Macher Abstract In this dissertation, I engage with authors and works that sweep waste to the center, destabilizing our expectations of what waste is, and what it does. They do so through an aesthetics of waste that foregrounds waste as a major theme and mode of artistic creation. By waste, I refer to the wide material and metaphorical implications of the word – from trash, refuse and excrement, to textual debris that would typically be discarded from a finished work of art. My corpus is composed of contemporary French works and spans the genres of novel, film and poetic notebook. It begins with a trash-centered reading of Michel Tournier’s Les M�t�ores (1975), before moving on to Agn�s Varda’s documentary Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000) and a selection of Sabine Macher’s poetic notebooks (1992 – 2005). Through these works, my dissertation interrogates the relationship between writing (�criture and cin�criture) and waste. Tournier, Varda and Macher mount a critique of commodity culture and its values of standardization, homogenization, over-consumption and plastic perfection. At the same time, they locate waste as a subversive site for new artistic creation. Waste in these works thus functions as an alternative aesthetics and a social and ecological critique. Waste also emerges as an ambiguous concept, negatively figured as the by-product of our relentless production-consumption, and positively figured as a means of escaping such a system. Each genre and work under study lends itself to its own blend of “waste making” or “waste management” techniques, including recycling, bricolage, gleaning and a poetics of lack. In self-conscious gestures, Tournier, Varda and Macher place themselves in their works to model their waste-making practices as trash aesthete-pickers, gleaners and bricoleurs. My dissertation thus approaches the issue of waste from a literary, artistic and aesthetic perspective, while incorporating discourses from the fields of eco- criticism, ethics, postmodernism and waste studies. Ultimately, I argue that waste is the ‘stuff’ that works of art are made of. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Romance Languages First Advisor Philippe Met Keywords aesthetics of waste, trash, trash aesthetics, waste Subject Categories English Language and Literature | Film and Media Studies | Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2264 THE AESTHETICS OF WASTE: MICHEL TOURNIER, AGNÈS VARDA, SABINE MACHER Melissa DunLany A DISSERTATION in French For the Graduate Group in Romance Languages Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation _______________________ Philippe Met Professor of Romance Languages Graduate Group Chairperson __________________________ Andrea Goulet, Associate Professor of Romance Languages Dissertation Committee Gerald Prince, Professor of Romance Languages Michèle Richman, Professor of Romance Languages THE AESTHETICS OF WASTE: MICHEL TOURNIER, AGNÈS VARDA, SABINE MACHER COPYRIGHT 2017 Melissa DunLany This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere thanks to all who have supported me through this long process: to my advisor, Philippe Met, and to my committee members, Gerald Prince and Michèle Richman, for your patience and thought- provoking courses that sparked the initial idea for this dissertation; to Samuel Martin, for your encouragement and advice in the final stages; to my Geneva cohort, especially Meg, Kathy and Fred, for your much-appreciated support; to my family, Birgit, Heinz and Connie for offering help in all possible ways; to Ada for lightening the mood; and most of all to Kaspar, without whom these words would have never made it on the page. iii Abstract THE AESTHETICS OF WASTE: MICHEL TOURNIER, AGNÈS VARDA, SABINE MACHER Melissa DunLany Philippe Met In this dissertation, I engage with authors and works that sweep waste to the center, destabilizing our expectations of what waste is, and what it does. They do so through an aesthetics of waste that foregrounds waste as a major theme and mode of artistic creation. By waste, I refer to the wide material and metaphorical implications of the word – from trash, refuse and excrement, to textual debris that would typically be discarded from a finished work of art. My corpus is composed of contemporary French works and spans the genres of novel, film and poetic notebook. It begins with a trash-centered reading of Michel Tournier’s Les Météores (1975), before moving on to Agnès Varda’s documentary Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000) and a selection of Sabine Macher’s poetic notebooks (1992 – 2005). Through these works, my dissertation interrogates the relationship between writing (écriture and cinécriture) and waste. Tournier, Varda and Macher mount a critiQue of commodity culture and its values of standardization, homogenization, over-consumption and plastic perfection. At the same time, they locate waste as a subversive site for new artistic creation. Waste in these works thus functions as an alternative aesthetics and a social and ecological critique. Waste also iv emerges as an ambiguous concept, negatively figured as the by-product of our relentless production-consumption, and positively figured as a means of escaping such a system. Each genre and work under study lends itself to its own blend of “waste making” or “waste management” techniQues, including recycling, bricolage, gleaning and a poetics of lack. In self-conscious gestures, Tournier, Varda and Macher place themselves in their works to model their waste-making practices as trash aesthete- pickers, gleaners and bricoleurs. My dissertation thus approaches the issue of waste from a literary, artistic and aesthetic perspective, while incorporating discourses from the fields of eco-criticism, ethics, postmodernism and waste studies. Ultimately, I argue that waste is the ‘stuff’ that works of art are made of. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... iii Abstract ............................................................................................................................ iv Chapter 1. Introduction: Writing Waste ...................................................................... 1 Works of Waste ......................................................................................................... 5 Towards an Aesthetics of Waste ............................................................................ 7 What is Waste? .......................................................................................................... 7 French Literature in the "Garb-Age" .................................................................... 10 Waste Studies .......................................................................................................... 16 Chapter 2. Tales of Trash: Les Météores and Tournier’s Textual Recycling ...... 20 Part 1. Waste as Theme ............................................................................................. 26 L’empereur des gadoues ....................................................................................... 27 The Abject and Erotic ............................................................................................. 29 An Idol in the Dump .............................................................................................. 31 Trash Art .................................................................................................................. 35 Reading and Writing the Garbage Dump ........................................................... 37 The Crematorium, or Hitler’s Trash .................................................................... 40 Human Rejecta ........................................................................................................ 42 The Innocents .......................................................................................................... 43 The Jean-Paul Freak Show .................................................................................... 47 Part 2. Tournier’s Story-making, from Recycling to Bricolage ......................... 50 The Copy of the Copy: Tournier and Alexandre’s Aesthetics of Waste ........ 52 Piecing Together Les
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