Sites of Memory
Tracing France's Cultural Self-Consciousness
Paroles Gelees
special Issue
Volume 16.2 1998
Selected Proceedings from
UCLA French Graduate Students'
Third Annual Interdisciplinary Conference
Sites of Memory
Tracing France's Cultural Self-Consciousness
Selected Proceedings from
The UCLA French Department Graduate Students'
Third Armual Interdisciplinary Conference
April 17-18, 1998
Ce serait le moment de philosopher et de
rechercher si, par hasard, se trouvait ici
I'endroit ou de telles paroles degelent.
Rabelais, Le Quart Livre
PAROLES GELEES
Special Issue
UCLA French Studies
Volume 16.2 1998
Sponsors: Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation
Consulat General de France, Lxis Angeles
UCLA Department of French
UCLA Program in European Studies
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Center for Modem and Contemporary Studies
Campus Programs Committee
UCLA French Graduate Students Association
Editor: Stacey Meeker
Assistant Editor: Vanessa Herold
Special Committees: Stacey Meeker, Vanessa Herold, Martha Moore,
Marcella Munson, Madeleine LaCotera, Vera Klekovkina,
Sheila Espineli, Daniel Johnson, Julie Masi, Bendi Benson,
Brian Brazeau, Helen Chu, Diane Duffrin, Heather Howard,
France Lemoine, Alison Rice, Michael Stafford, Lena Udall
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Copyright 1999 by the Regents of the University of California
ISSN 1094-7294
CONTENTS
Introduction 5
Stacey Meeker
Sites, Sights, and Silences of Memory 9
Eugen Weber
Oublier 1' avant-garde? 19
Jean-Frangois Foumy
Details and Reproducing Domination: The Birth of the Ballet School,
the Prison, and Other Correctional Facilities 33
Regina Fletcher Sadono
Memory as Construction
in Viollet-le-Duc's Architectural Imagination 43
Aron Vinegar
Cliches of Unity: History and Memory in Postwar French Film 57
Marc Siegel
Naming la Guerre sans nom: Memory, Nation and Identity
in French Representations of the Algerian War, 1963-1992 65
Naomi Davidson
Swann, Vinteuil et Marcel, et la memoire involontaire 91
Joseph Jenkins
French Folic: Memory and Madness in Buiiuers Belle de Jour 101
Mary M. Wiles
Conference Program 119
Ordering Information 122
Introduction
Stacey Meeker
Pour exercer avec tons les Frangais leur droit a la longue memoire.
Marc Fumaroli
Directeur de r Academic Fran^aise
President de I'Listitut
It was in a distinctly French climate of retrospection and remembrance
that Sites of Memory was chosen as the subject for the UCLA French Gradu-
ate Students' Third Annual Interdisciplinary Conference in the fall of 1997.
The French Institut, the plenary body of the five Academies, had officially
dedicated October 21, 1997 to la memoire, reaffirming that for the French,
memory is a matter of national import. Pierre Nora's monumental study,
Les lieux de memoire, had demonstrated its popularity and influence by
appearing in paperback form in May, and the second volume of its English
translation had just crossed the Atlantic. Hanoi, erstwhile "Paris of the
Orient," had just hosted the seventh Francophone summit, reminding us
once again of the global reach of things French. Finally, October 1997 saw
the opening — after fifteen years of preparation, longest in French history —
of the trial of Maurice Papon, General Secretary of the Gironde region un-
der Vichy and later a prefect in Algeria and Paris, accused of "crimes against
humanity" for having deported over 1500 Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
(On April 2, 1998, just two weeks before our conference, France's continu-
ing ambivalence toward the Vichy years was demonstrated as Papon was
found guilty, then left free on appeal.)
Both a scholarly achievement and a cultural event, Les lieux de memoire
insists on the centrality of memory to French national self-consciousness at
all levels of the social order, from the individual to the state. While empha-
sizing the distinction, even the opposition, between history and memory,
Les lieux also points to the uncontrollably fluid nature of any such distinc-
tion. The ongoing struggle between history and memory has not dimin-
ished the enduring seductive power of French culture's paradoxical claim of
universality — au contraire. By examining chosen Sites of Memory, we hoped
to discover the means by which memory a lafrangaise undermines, mourns,
or reinforces sentiments of collective identity, a crucial issue for those en-
gaged in French Studies in the age of globalization.
Our participants' contributions map the variety of media in which
memory manifests itself, in sites ranging from the traditional art forms —
ballet under Louis XIV, Viollet-le-Duc's naturalism-informed architecture,
the canonical literature of Chateaubriand and Proust — to the popular — post-
6 PAROLES GELEES
war film, the neo-polar and the contemporary novel, the patchwork of post-
ers and BD surrounding the Algerian War. In our undergraduate exhibit,
students transformed their personal experiences of franc isat ion into poetry
of their own creation or explored the accruals of memory around the figure
of Salomd in late nineteenth-century decadent painting and literature. The
open discussion of Francite et memoire sur "la Toile" ventured onto the
new terrain of the Internet and its role in the creation and/or deconstruction
of both memory and "Frenchness" in centers multiplied far beyond the Hexa-
gon.
The selection of articles contained in this volume represents the breadth
and subtlety of the reflection imposed by memory. They range across the
historical spectrum but frequently choose the still unhealed wounds of Vichy
as the point of origin both for the divergent paths of French history and
memory and for the emerging self-awareness of this divergence. The preoc-
cupation with the "Vichy syndrome" puts into question the very bases of
national identity and identification.
In Sites, Sights, and Silences of Memory, UCLA's Eugen Weber, an
eminent French historian and himself a contributor to Nora's Lieux de
memoire, reminds us that the French create national memory "by teaching,
and by the accumulated teaching of their monuments." Yet silence and
forgetting are as important to memory as remembering. Weber suggests
that French history, built upon rifts and resurrections, may be likened to
Jewish history in its creation of "mythology, liturgy, and the demanding
God of thepa/r/a." Weber's argument points to a form of collective identity
older than that of the modem nation-state and reminds us that nation and
memory cannot be reduced to partners in hegemonic hoodwinking but must
be considered in the broader context of a communal faith, a re-ligio without
which no society can survive.
Jean-Francois Foumy's Oublier I 'avant-garde 7 explains the paradox of
how Guy Debord and the Situationists disappeared from sight and apparent
memory only to form a unique site in the history of French twentieth cen-
tury avant-gardes. Foumy argues that Situationism, by the very fact of hav-
ing been largely forgotten, has emerged as the most authentic and durable
avant-garde movement where the more visible Surrealism and Tel Quel have
become institutionalized memories, commodified and turned into spectacle
by the very culture to which they were opposed.
If spectacle dominates questions of memory in Debord's case, Regina
Sadono's Details and Reproducing Domination: The Birth of the Ballet
School, the Prison, and Other Correctional Facilities builds on spectacle as
INTRODUCTION 7
a defining element of Louis XIV's pouvoir absolu. Coincident uith the
beginning of the modem nation-state, the Roi-Soleil's conception and insti-
tutionalization of ballet imposes a new form of memory on the subject by
reassembling and dominating the body. This institutionalized corps de bal-
let remains a site of memory yet today.
Aron Vinegar's Memory as Construction in Vwllet-le-Duc's Architec-
tural Imagination demonstrates that a similar principle of dissection and
reconstruction dominates Viollet-le-Duc's use of memory as an "imagina-
tion technology" in his nineteenth-century restoration of "Gothic" French
monuments. Viollet-le-Duc's creative reconstruction, however, follows the
naturalist's anatomical model rather than an autocrat's corrective mechan-
ics. Cathedrals and chateaux are reconstituted as organic wholes in the
spirit of Georges Cuvier's reconstruction of prehistoric vertebrates from fos-
sil bone fragments.
Joseph Jenkins's Swann, Vinteuil et Marcel, et la memoire involontaire
tackles Proust, the writer whose petite madeleine springs to mind at the
very mention of the word memoire. Jenkins demonstrates through close
textual analysis how the Proustian text exceeds in sophistication its narra-
tor-protagonist's professed theory oi memoire involontaire. The reader who
encounters Vinteuil's petite phrase as a memory trace in the context of
Swann's love for Odette must await its release from this role in the Sainte-
Euverte soiree before he can savor its particularity as an esthetic moment
liberated from Time.
In Proust's novel, history as narrative is performed through the me-
dium of memory. In Cliches of Unity: History and Memory in Postwar
French Film, Marc Siegel describes the New Wave's revolt against the "tra-
dition of quahty" as reflecting a consciousness of social and psychological
rifts that could not be integrated into the "Resistancialist" narrative of French
national unity that de Gaulle attempted to impose after World War II. For
Siegel, the spatio-temporal coordinates of traditional narrative, which im-
plicitly assert the continutity of postwar with pre-war France, are disrupted
by the New Wave's snapshot images of personal memory that reduce history
to cliche.
Mary Wiles also links personal memory to the (re)writing of history in
her French Folie: Memory and Madness in Bunuel's "Belle de Jour" which
explores the productive interplay between the film's implied psychoanalytic
and Surrealist readings of protagonist Severine's difficulty in reconciling
herself to her personal history. For Wiles, Severine's story is an allegory of
postwar France, which too found itself traumatized by repressed memories
of its past. In contrast with the psychoanalytic intertext that reveals the
need to obliterate memory in a return to historical normalcy, the surrealist
subtext points to the liberation of memory from history figured by the trope
of blindness.
Finally, Naomi Davidson's Naming "la Guerre sans nom": Memory,
Nation, and Identity in French Representations of the Algerian War, 1963-
1992, examines nationhood in its colonial context by exploring the dichoto-
mies between the official history of the French-Algerian War and the sub-
versive personal memories of the conflict that have emerged in cultural prod-
ucts ranging from comic books to films and novels. Davidson shows how
institutional France's long refusal to recognize and commemorate the war
reflects the challenge that its richly ambivalent memories pose to the very
notion of "Frenchness." The broad conclusion suggested by Davidson's
article as well as those of our other participants is that, however much our
perspective on History becomes fragmented and problematic, our drive to
narrativize remains intact.
We would like to thank our sponsors and the graduate students whose
work made this conference possible. Bendi Benson, Brian Brazeau, Helen
Chu, Diane Duffrin, Sheila Espineli, Vanessa Herold, Heather Howard,
Daniel Johnson, Vera Klekovkina, Madeleine La Cotera, France Lemoine,
Julie Masi, Martha Moore, Marcella Munson, Alison Rice, Michael Stafford,
and Lena Udall deserve special mention. Jean-Claude Carron, Chair Patrick
Coleman, conference advisor and web site designer Eric Cans, and Nicole
Dufresne were particularly helpful at crucial moments. Finally, we wish to
extend our very special thanks to Professor Weber for his gracious participa-
tion in our own Site of Memory.
Sites, Sights, and Silences of Memory
Eugen Weber
Memory is what we make it. Memory is what we make of it. When I
was asked to talk about "Sites of Memory," I went back to two documents:
Pierre Nora's great monument to the subject, and Sellers & Yeatman's J066
and All That. Les Lieux de Memoire, in case you don't know, consists of
seven volumes, the first of which came out in 1984, the last in 1992, and it
includes 4710 pages and 155 essays by 106 contributors. J 066 came out in
1931 and its subtitle reads "A Memorable History of England, comprising
all the points you can remember, including 103 good things, 5 bad kings,
and 2 genuine dates." The dates are 55 BC when the Romans invaded
England and 1066 when the Normans landed at Hastings. "The Norman
Conquest was a Good Thing, as from that time on England stopped being
conquered and thus was able to become top nation." The book is 1 16 pages
long, including five test papers with questions like:
"Which came first, AD or BC? (be careful)"
"What is a Plantagenet? Do you agree?"
"Deplore the failure of the Gunpowder Plot." And so on.
We have here two conflicting approaches to memorable memory, and I
shall not try to reconcile them. But if serious subjects deserve to be treated
seriously (sometimes). Sellers & Yeatman also make a serious point that has
often been made more pretentiously and at greater length: that memory is
what you remember, but also misremember, invent, are told or taught. It
becomes part of our mind's furniture and that of the society or social groups
in which we move, a symbolic capital of commonalities, commonplaces,
cliches that acquire significance and force by being held in common, that
mold a particular idiom of the mind, that act as passwords and as bonds
(remember that this is what religio means). There are, of course, memories
that function as personal and private affairs — madeleines, if you like. But
these only become significant when they go public: when they are shared
with a friend, a lover, an audience, after which they also operate as bonds
and identifiers to initiates until, precisely as in the case of Proust's madeleine,
they enter the baggage, and the flow, of public memory.
To a historian, events, doings, lives matter as part of a public story.
Most of the time, the personal and private counts when it ceases to be per-
sonal and private and becomes part of the public sphere. And all, or almost
10 PAROLES GELEES
all, of the documents we work with originate in whole or part in private
contributions or initiatives: letters and diaries, literature and art, but also
inscriptions, charters, monuments, contracts, wills, treaties, reports, accounts,
reflect the activities, minds, hands, styles, or forgeries in which private and
public mingle.
Memory does too. It tends to be recast, recreated, created even, by
reading, transmission, reflection, retrospection. My own impression of par-
ticipating in events like battles is very much like that of Fabrizio del Dongo
at Waterloo; and a true account of experience recollected in tranquility would
be confused, busy, incoherent, and difficult of access. But when, in the
course of research, I have interviewed actors of historical situations, they
had ordered their doings, reordered them in quest of clarity, accuracy or
political correctness, read up on the background, sometimes even read their
own published memoirs and accounts of events. So public memory, on which
I want to focus, is less likely to be spontaneous and artless, more likely to be
contrived, deliberately or not. But private memory is too. And I myself
have read accounts of what is now called the Battle of the Bulge, the better
to orient myself before going back to the Ardennes where I was wounded.
The French approach this finding that memory is less spontaneous than
contrived by declaring it a non-issue. Yes, memory is an artefact and its
purpose (though not always acknowledged) is to sketch out and confirm the
image, entity, identity of a person or, historically speaking, of a society.
Let's say the word: a Nation. A common history does not make a nation, but
it helps to keep it united. That is a serious consideration for a nation as
disunited and riven as the French, which has indeed been held together not
just by force, but by imagined and inculcated identities, including a passion
for building barricades.
You know what Ernest Renan said about this, but I shall quote him all
the same: "Avoir des gloires communes dans le pass^ . . . avoir fait de grandes
choses ensemble . . . voil^ des conditions essentielles pour etre un peuple."
Common glories, common deeds — the memories detailed, retailed in Nora's
Realms demonstrate that this is the case. But I have left out two clauses, so
let me cite Renan's lines in full: "Avoir des gloires communes dans le passe,
une volonte commune dans le present; avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble,
vouloir en faire encore." This is where the memory of past achievements
can make up for present failures of commonality and will. When cohesion
is weak or threatened, the symbols in the armory of national memory can
restore or reaffirm it.
SITES, SIGHTS, AND SILENCES OF MEMORY 11
Again, the success of Nora's enterprise demonstrates the demand for
this sort of reassurance. And remember that in the years when Realms was
in gestation France was on the wobble. The trente glorieuses had petered
out, the economy was limping, unemployment was beginning its perilous
ascent, immigration was becoming an issue (again!), politics looked increas-
ingly precarious. No wonder that the 1980s were a great time for com-
memorations: 1980, centennial of making July 14 a national holiday; 1981,
centennial of free elementary education; tricentennial of the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes in 1985, fiftieth anniversary of the Popular Front in
1986, Millenary of the Capetian Monarchy in 1987, twentieth anniversary
of May 1968 in 1988, bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, cen-
tennial of General de Gaulle's birth in 1990. The one anniversary that did
not evoke celebration was the bicentennial of Louis XVI's execution in 1991.
Evidently, having done or undone great things together was supposed to
cement solidarities that were getting very skittish.
Now look at the subjects that Pierre Nora's first volume sets out to evoke.
They are symbols like the tricolore and the Marseillaise, monuments like
war memorials and the Pantheon, commemorations like the Quatorze Juillet,
and the pedagogy that rubs them in — especially as found in textbooks. Be-
ing the work of historians, the volume acknowledges that where there's myth
there's also counter-myth; so counter-memories receive their due attention,
like the Vendee and the Mur des Federes at the Pere Lachaise. But these
account for only ten per cent of the collection. A subsequent volume en-
titled "Les France" features other conflictual inheritances: Catholicism and
secularism, Red and White, Right and Left, not to mention Vichy and xeno-
phobia. But all emphasize the very French aspects of these divisive con-
flicts, all thereby fortify the image of national personality and identifiable
national peculiarity. Whereas the Dreyfus Affair gets no mention.
You probably know that, under Mitterrand, Jack Lang ordered a very
large bronze statue of Captain Dreyfus to be placed in the courtyard of the
Ecole Militaire, where the unfortunate captain had been stripped and hu-
miliated in December 1894 (another commemoration!). The military re-
belled; and the statue, created by cartoonist-sculptor TIM, was banished to a
distant, discreet comer of the Tuileries, where it languished until, a year or
two ago, it was shifted to an equally unsung square on the Rive Gauche.
So certain memories are better swept under the carpet. You can't do
that with Vichy, or with the Camisards; but you can at least try with Dreyfus;
and sometimes, with some memories, you may even succeed. You can see
this in the little town of Dreux, not far from Chartres, where four memorials
honor: (1) those who died in the Great War, in the subsequent less-great
12 PAROLES GELEES
Second War, and in Indochina and Algeria; (2) those who died after being
deported by the Germans in the 1940s; (3) young local Communists shot for
resisting the Germans. And these are all the object of annual ceremonies on
Armistice Day, November 1 1 .
The fourth memorial, which receives little notice, is an obelisk inscribed
"to the French soldiers killed outside its walls, the town of Dreux"; it marks
the occasion, in October 1870, when the municipality decided not to resist
the Prussians. They disarmed the National Guard, they demanded an evacu-
ation of what troops there were, and they declared Dreux an open city. Cer-
tain patriots nevertheless wanted to try to stop the enemy, and their unto-
ward enthusiasm led to an unfortunate incident in which anti-Prussians and
anti-anti-Prussians fired on each other, with both parties suffering casual-
ties. So the French killed outside the walls of Dreux in 1870 were killed by
other French. These are the dead commemorated by the obelisk, and these
are the memories — not exactly forgotten, because provincial memories go
back a long way — but tacitly occulted when others are celebrated.
Renan had something to say about that too: "L'oubli, je dirai meme
I'erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la creation d'une nation, et
c'est ainsi que le progres des etudes historiques est souvent pour la nationality
un danger." Renan cites as typical sources of friction differences in lan-
guage, religion, and race — meaning ethnic origin; and he is pleased to note
(his lecture was delivered in 1882) that all these count for less and less.
1882 was the year in which Jules Ferry's schools kicked in, which meant
that within a generation or so most of the French would be speaking French;
and that meant that memories would be couched and relayed in French, and
would be learnt both orally and visually in the national language. It also
meant that one of the great Franco-French conflicts, the religious war that
goes back well beyond the French Revolution to the massacres of the six-
teenth century, would rise to heights unprecedented for a hundred years and
culminate in the separation of Church and State in December 1905.
Memories of religious conflict go back past the Vendee and the mini-
Vendees that raged over other parts of France in the 1790s, to the times of
the Catholic League in the sixteenth century and the Camisard rebellion in
the seventeenth century, both of which left their mark on family and local
remembrance, grudges that resurged into national awareness when they ex-
pressed themselves through universal suffrage, but also in the bloody disor-
ders and broken careers that marked religio-political struggles from the 1880s
to the early 1900s. It would take the hecatombs of the First World War and
sometimes the massacres of the Second to paper that canyon over, to prove
that pedagogy and commemorations had done their edulcorating job, that
SITES, SIGHTS, AND SILENCES OF MEMORY 13
memory had largely shifted from village and region to city and nation, to
persuade most normal folk that they shared not only the same memories but
also the same bygones.
It would be a long haul. The Belgians and the Italians who had been
trickling into this large underpopulated country before the First World War
were not much more foreign than Bretons and Auvergnats and Provengaux,
who also spoke dialect, not the national language, and who had to learn it,
along with the rituals of urban living and the rites of national belonging that
school and military service taught. Recurrent festivities were also designed
to expose all the citizenry to the allegedly common and commonly shared
memory of a national past that led to the national present of democratic
politics and of elections (another festive ritual), and of shared conflict —
between Reds and Whites, Catholics and Anticlericals, French and French.
Franco-French wars overrode even class war, even xenophobia; and they too
reaffirmed a national identity first learned, then inscribed in personal memory
and personal pride.
All these motifs and that of private memory bound and jointed with
more public memories come out in the Resistance, and in the memorial
treatment of Resistance, which are not mentioned in Nora's work. That is a
pity, because here is an object lesson of how realms of memory are created,
accreted, managed, manipulated, assimilated even as they are commemo-
rated and studied; but also how they feed on each other.
We know a great deal about the competition between the Gaullist model
of Resistance, unitary and patriotic; and the Communist model, class-con-
sciously dominated by workers and peasants. We know less about the me-
morial tug-of-war between the uniformed Resistance in the African and Ital-
ian campaigns of the war and the clandestine resistance de I'interieur. We
hardly ever hear about the conflict between Resistance and Counter-Resis-
tance that you can read about in Marcel Ayme, or view in films like Lacombe
Lucien. All of which should remind us that memory is not a bloc, but a
mosaic or a jigsaw whose parts often assert themselves over the would-be
whole. Like family memory, which differs from clan to clan, political-fam-
ily memories differ too. So do the memories and memorial claims of subsid-
iary groups that have in the past ten or twenty years claimed attention for
their resistance activities: women; foreigners, especially Spaniards; and Jews
who, in turn, tend to divide between Communist /ra/ic-f/rewr^ et partisans
and those who identify themselves as Jewish rejects of an anti-semitic society.
Then there is the fact that the Resistance itself was the heir of memories
and of traditions that it sometimes ignored, but often drew upon for identi-
fication and legitimation. It called upon Joan of Arc, it referred to the na-
14 PAROLES GELEES
tional revolutionary tradition: lessoldats del' an II, Valmy, the levee en masse.
The communists invoked the Bolsheviks of the great revoutionary war and
the Republicans of the Spanish War. But most references went beyond, or
around, Right and Left; and many bypassed general criteria inspired by na-
tional or international history for more specifically local memories.
In Lozere for example, the Catholic north of the department was imper-
vious to Resistance and so, largely, was neighboring Aveyron. In the more
difficult country of southern Lozere, Herault, Ardeche, the C6venols lik-
ened themselves to Camisards, as Audois referred to Cathares, as the Varois
referred to the republicans of 1851 who rebelled against Louis-Napoleon's
coup d'etat of December 2, 1851. In Brittany, the Chouans of 1793-96,
their sons and their nephews, had risen against Napoleon during the Hun-
dred Days under the command of a La Rochejaquelein (brother of the lead-
ers of 1793), then rose again in support of the Duchess de Berri in 1832, this
time under a La Rochejaquelein and a Charette, then flowed into the Zouaves
Pontificaux in the 1 860s and volunteered against the Prussians in 1 870. Yet
Chouan regions showed little interest in Resistance in the 1940s. On the
other hand, the central part of Brittany which in 1675 revolted against
Colbert's new taxes, provided recruits for another kind of insurgency against
foreign oppression. And everywhere the traditional guardians and inter-
preters of tradition — pastors, priests, instituteurs — mediated these interpre-
tations too.
But, where it functioned, popular imagination established other paral-
lels between resistance to authorities then and now: maquisards were as-
similated to Mandrin and other social bandits, to smugglers who always
played a social role in the countryside, to refractaires who had fled con-
scription for a century and a half, above all to the Jeunesse — traditionally
transgressive, violent, festive, and defending their community, their terri-
tory, against horsains from the outside.
So once again, memory, its transmission, its utilization, turn out to be
matters of selection, of choice out of a stock of references that are there to be
revivified at need, that suggest themselves when the moment is right.
Then, when the moment of action was past, it was time for the memo-
rable action to be institutionalized, to be declared an official part of patriotic
patrimony, to be homogenized so that internal rivalries and dissentions were
edulcorated, and unwanted participants like the Armee Secrete or General
Giraud could be evaporated and, as the French say, occultes. It was time for
memory to be eviscerated and stuffed for public exhibition and edification,
ritualized by the State, defended by associations, played out in ceremonies
and commemorations. That was when we got the cult of those who died in
SITES, SIGHTS, AND SILENCES OF MEMORY 15
battle, the victims transfigured as heroes and martyrs, the emblems like the
Cross of Lorraine and the V for Victory, the memorials and monuments like
that at Glieres: the constitution of contemporary mythology.
That was also when the authorities, but not the authorities only, set out
to conscript the cinema (films d'interet national, as the Ministry of Informa-
tion put it in 1945) to produce a national and international memory of the
Resistance as an inspiring national heritage. They did what they could to
suppress embarrassing presentations like Marcel Carne's Les Partes de la
nuit; they supported and subsidized and publicized Rene Clement's very
fine La Botaille du rail, with its epic account of the resistance of railway
workers that culminates in the sabotage of a German armored train, but that
never hints (why should it?) that railwaymen never tried to sabotage a single
train deporting Jews either to Drancy or to Germany.
We all know that Max Ophuls's Le Chagrin et la Pitie, made in 1970,
was only shown on French television in 1981. It is not so well known that
in 1945 a director called Jeff Musso made a film about the Resistance called
Vive la Liberte, which sank without trace in 1946, the year La Bataille du
rail triumphed, because it suggested en passant that French people who
respected the authority of Petain and of the Vichy regime might think them-
selves to be as good French as those who opposed them. In other words,
again, deep divisions had to be papered over, which they were for some
decades; and that had to be done because the past, as always, represents the
present's idea of the future; and manipulating the past is one way of affect-
ing the future, and the furture of the future.
Now let me go back to generalities. Just ten years ago, in 1988, Isaiah
Berlin remarked on the explosion of what he called "religious bigotry" which,
he said, not one of the most perceptive thinkers of the nineteenth century
had predicted. I suggest that if they did not, that was because, in the spirit
of their time, they marginalized "bigotry" or swept it under the carpet; they
privileged inventive imagination, Utopian, millenarian, over that other imagi-
nation of the resurrectionist kind that we call memory. But even inventive
imagination works by rearranging recollections.
The fuel that imagination runs on is the information and misinforma-
tion that we accumulate by experience and vicarious experience. Ideas and
images do not arise by immaculate conception: they are bom of ideas and-
images. Personification of memory, Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine
Muses, and her realm, much vaster than that of lived experience, offers
memories for all times; and you never know what a time or a situation will
call for. The first lieu de memoire in Western history, which is Christian
history, is Jewish history: the genealogies, genocides, and other shenani-
16 PAROLES GELEES
gans of the Old Testament. Israel is a land of fathers and forebears. They
and their deeds are remembered in words and in celebrations that com-
memorate historical — or allegedly historical — events.
Religio-historical sites, Jerusalem and the Temple, Megiddo and
Babylon, a whole sacred geography, concretize remembrance and screw it
firmly into sanctified space. A liturgy of feasts — Passover and so on — re-
calls moments in a national history that is not just redemptive but inspiring
and energizing; that marks a people with an indelible mark, that ties them
together with a powerful bond, that willy-nilly gives them a sense of elec-
tion, identity, solidarity, loyalty — not necessarily with and to each other, but
in terms of a common destiny and a common piety about the higher entity
that comprehends and transcends them.
The storehouse of memory is not monopolized by Jewish and Christian
material. It is easy to discover other references in it, for example Greek and
Latin ones. And it is not surprising, in retrospect, that some of the most
thoughtful agnostic intellectuals of the fin de siecle should have been epicu-
reans and stoics; just as it should not surprise us that some of the most
strident voices of our fin de siecle should be evangelical and fundamental-
ist. Nor that so many founders and innovators of contemporary societies
(notably in France) should have sought to create and recreate sacred histo-
ries of their own, complete with prophecy, liturgy, mythology, and theology.
It should not surprise us that tribes and sects in this country attempt to do it;
and that nationalists and other French tribes and sects have worked at it for
two hundred years.
It is the function of a functional memory first to stir the imagination,
then to pervade it, permeate it, and settle in it, so that it can pop up as a
matter of course. The French have succeeded in establishing their lieux de
memoire, not necessarily all of Nora's 150 but enough for them to count,
and in fixing them as firmly as the Hebrews did: mythology, liturgy, not
least the jealous, demanding God of the patria. And they have done it, as
the Hebrews did it, largely by teaching, and by the accumulated teaching of
their monuments.
A father's first duty to his son, says Jules Michelet, is to teach him
about the fatherland. He takes him to Notre Dame, to the Louvre, to the
Tuileries, to the Arc de Triomphe. From a balcony or a rooftop he shows
him the people, the army marching past, the shimmering bayonets, the
drapeau tricolore. "There, my child, look, there is France, there is the
fatherland." A hundred years after Michelet, a lad who described himself as
un petit Lillois de Paris had a similar experience: "nothing struck me more
than the symbols of our glories: night falling over Notre Dame, the majesty
SITES, SIGHTS, AND SILENCES OF MEMORY 1 7
of evening at Versailles, the Arc de Triomphe in the sun, the flags we con-
quered floating under the vaulted roof of the Invalides." Charles de Gaulle
had certainly imbibed the lesson from his father, but his vision is much the
same as that of Michelet.
Now, as Mona Ozouf has suggested, let us move on to May 1981, when
the newly-elected President of the French Republic walks up the steps of the
Pantheon, flanked by a guard of honor, and on into the grim, gray nave of
the building. On the face of it, he is engaging in a piece of public ritual
much like what you find in other modem states: the new President inaugu-
rates his term of office by paying homage at a shrine which is supposed to
represent the unity and continuity of his country. The frieze over the portico
under which Mitterrand passes proclaims the official intention: Aux Grands
Hommes, la Patrie Reconnaissante. This was the didactic agenda which
Mitterrand had in mind with his inaugural innovation: a ceremony of inte-
grative memory, a gathering of the national community around its great
men, a reaffirmation of French unity around their national greatness.
Except that the Pantheon does not stand for national consensus the way
the Washington Monument does, or even the Lincoln Memorial. First of
all, it is a disaffected church and hence a permanent reminder of one major
Franco-French conflict. Second, it is a monument to men. And whilst
anachronism is a menace, it is still hard to avoid the fact that the first and so
far only woman, Marie Curie, entered it only as part of a couple in 1985. It
is also a monument not just to any men, but specifically to Revolutionary
and post-Revolutionary men, with earUer times represented only by Rousseau
and Voltaire. Which reflects its third aspect: the sectarian significance of
the great men enshrined in what appears to be a monument less to inclusion
than to exclusion.
Just what this means you can see if (in Ozouf's wake) we contrast
Mitterrand's ceremony at the Pantheon with the ceremony that followed it
when Mitterrand crossed from the left bank of the Seine to the right bank
(and remember not just the connotations of Left and Right, but the Eiffel
Tower on the Left facing the Sacre Coeur on the Right), crossed from the
Pantheon to the Hotel de Ville, to be honored by the mayor of Paris, Jacques
Chirac.
At the Pantheon, Mitterrand had evoked the spirit of the place by call-
ing up great key presences: Lazare Camot, who organized the citizen armies
of the Revolution, Victor Hugo, who celebrated the suffering poor, Jean Jaures,
the socialist tribune and advocate of justice, Jean Moulin, the Republican
martyr of the Resistance — a kind of Popular Front of radical, populist fig-
ures. Across the river, in the town hall that the Commune burnt and the
18 PAROLES GELEES
Third Republic rebuilt, the memories that Chirac summoned were of Ste
Genevieve, Ste Jeanne d' Arc, Henri IV, General de Gaulle, none of whom is
represented in the Pantheon. And when elected to the presidency himself in
1992, Chirac's first official act was a flying visit to de Gaulle's grave at
Colombey, followed by a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe.
The rift of French history, the conflict of rival memories, comes out in
the resonances of such contrasts. Hotel de Ville and Pantheon are both
intended to represent commonality, civic and national patriotism, shared
emotions of pride and gratitude. Yet both retain a partisan significance, and
the Pantheon especially so. Insofar as it represents a monument to memory,
it is to the memory of continuing cleavage and continuing feuds — precisely
what the French have in common, which is their history, or at least their
memorable histrionics.
That brings me back to Sellers & Yeatman's Memorable History of
England, which is not multiple but singular, not complicated but simple;
and that features only two dates, of which only one matters. How different
this caricature looks from a comparable caricature of French memorability,
which would be surfeited with bad kings, and with more bad things than
good, and with far more dates than just 1066. As Michelet said somewhere
(who insisted that history is not about narrative or analysis, but about resur-
rection), in France nothing is finished; everything always begins again: 1789
and 1815 and 1830 and 1832 and 1848 and 1851 and 1871 and 1968 and
Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Which is another thing that the French
have in common with the Hebrews: the soil of France, like that of Palestine,
has an uncommon propensity to resurrections.
Eugen Weber is the Joan Palevsky Professor of Modern European History,
Emeritus, at UCLA.
Oublier I'avant-garde?
Jean-Frangois Foumy
This presentation will deal with what is generally referred to as the
second moment of the avant-garde in France in the twentieth century. The
Situationist International (SI) was active in the late fifties and the sixties
(1957-1972) so it came after surrealism and before the Tel Quel Group (TQ).
These three intellectual movements shared many features, the main one be-
ing that they were all self-appointed avant-gardes before the very term avant-
garde would be dropped for reasons I will discuss later. As for the differ-
ences between surrealism, situationism, and the TQ group, I will just men-
tion for the moment that, unlike surrealism and TQ, situationism and its
driving intellectual force, that is Guy Debord, remained largely ignored,
underesearched, or, I'd rather say, forgotten until the mid-nineties. Let us
just say that it is still somehow shrouded in mystery. Thus, the question of
why Guy Debord and the situationists were suddenly remembered, or redis-
covered, in the 90s must be addressed as a flow of books keeps appearing in
several countries. It should first be said that this quasi-disappearance from
the cultural memory for nearly twenty-five years had nothing to do with a
lack of relevance: on the contrary, one may suspect that it was voluntary
until it became impossible to ignore Debord any longer. Today Debord and
his opus magnum The Society of the Spectacle are everywhere. However, it
would be easy to show that Debord generates an enormous anxiety of influ-
ence since most French or Italian intellectuals who have made it their busi-
ness to talk about society and the media, alleged hyperreality, or the role of
images in today's world, define Debord negatively or start by taking a stand
against him so that everybody understands that they will not repeat Debord.
In other words, let's make sure that we exclude Debord before saying any-
thing meaningful about the society of the spectacle we live in. No doubt
Debord, who shot himself in 1994, was aware he was voluntarily forgotten
by those who were so indebted to him; but he had never been interested in
stardom, unlike Breton or Sollers, leaders of past and future avant-gardes.
In fact, he had started killing himself through drink well before he commit-
ted suicide, as if his death was the price or the sacrifice to pay for future
recognition. He wrote shortly before his death:
[J]'ai aime ce qui est au dela de la violente ivresse, quand on franchit ce stade: une paix
magnifique et terrible, le vrai goQt du passage du temps . . . c'est un fait que j'ai ete
continuellement ivre tout au long de periodes de plusieurs mois; et encore, le reste du
temps, avais-je beaucoup bu. (Panegyrique 43)
19
20 PAROLES GELEES
And then Debord, the man who first wanted to forget himself, proudly
quotes Chinese poet Li Po: "Depuis trente ans je cache ma renomm^e dans
les tavemes" (47).
Nevertheless, it remains true that the reason why Debord could not be
entirely forgotten and is now being resuscitated is because his work amounts
to a powerful updating of Marx's Capital that can be summarized by the
famous thesis No. 34 of The Society of the Spectacle: "The spectacle is
capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image." Here, the word
"image" should encompass, of course, the images provided by the media but
also the spectacle of speculation where capital is denoted by absurdly ab-
stract and unreal numbers such as 7,000,000,000,000 (whatever the cur-
rency) manipulated by people who don't even know what they are referring
to (Bracken). In fact, no one knows what these figures refer to because they
cannot be broken down into a precise and conceivable amount of hours of
work, manufactured objects, square miles of property, and so on.
Along with the first serious, not to say prophetic, thinking on the iden-
tity between media and late capitalism, Debord and the situationists also
provided a new approach to architecture and the modem city while chal-
lenging, well before poststructuralism, the notion of the author. Thus, my
point is that situationism was the most productive avant-garde of the cen-
tury. Surrealism has been relegated to museums and turned into an object of
historical study. As for TQ, although credited for diffusing a new type of
literary theory in the sixties and seventies, it amounts no more today than to
another object of study or section of a PhD exam reading list. Debord, as
opposed to Breton and Sollers, remains a most intimidating presence.
I would Hke, in what follows, to start briefly with three current and
accepted definitions of what an avant-garde is in the historical sense. In a
second part I will propose to compare surrealism and situationism so as to
outline their common features — often typical of all avant-gardes — and their
very real differences. I will finally try to ascertain the relevancy of Debord's
writings in the context of French media studies since important figures such
as Pierre Bourdieu and Regis Debray eire now condescending to busy them-
selves with the impact of television and images on society. And I will also
try to explain why Debord disapppeared from public memory for so long.
What is an Avant-Garde?
In his well-known Sociology of Culture Raymond Williams spends a
fair amount of time on avant-gardes and literary movements so as to estab-
lish a typology. Based on what he calls "Internal organization," Williams
OUBLIER L' AVANT-GARDE? 21
divides these movements into three groups:
1 ) Those based on formal membership, with varying modes of internal authority or decision,
and of constitution and election;
2) Those not based on formal membership, but organized around some collective public mani-
festation, such as an exhibition, a group press or periodical, or an explicit manifesto;
3) Those not based on formal membership or any sustained collective public manifestation,
but in which there is conscious association or group identification, either informally or occa-
sionally manifested, or at times limited to immediate working or more general relations
(68).
As examples of group 2 ("Those not based on formal membership, but
organized around some collective public manifestation, such as an exhibi-
tion, a group press or periodical, or an explicit manifesto") Williams men-
tions the Futurists and the surrealists. I should point out that situationism
met the criteria of both group 1 ("Those based on formal membership, with
varying modes of internal authority or decision, and of constitution and
election") and group 2 since it was organized as an international associa-
tion.
More interestingly, Williams argues that the emergence of these so-
called "alternative and oppositional groups" is indicative of changes in the
social basis such as:
A. The crisis of the transition from patronage to market.
B. The crisis of the transition from handwork to machine production.
C. Crises within both patronage and the market, in a period of intense and general social
conflict.
D. The attachment of certain groups to a pre-capitalist and/or pre-democratic social order.
E. The attachment of other groups to the democratization of the social order, as part of the
process of general liberation and human enrichment to which the arts, if they were
allowed, could contribute. It is this last criterion that situationism fits in the pre- 1968
years.
As for the other two definitions of the avant-gardes I will ask you to
bear in mind, they are those of Andreas Huyssen and Peter Burger, which
pick up and develop the last point made by Raymond Williams about "the
process of general liberation and human enrichment to which the arts, if
they were allowed, could contribute."
22 PAROLES GELEES
Huyssen defines modernism as an attempt to maintain art's autonomy
and preserve its purity against mass culture, technology and urbanization
(one can think of Adomo, among many others). On the contrary, the avant-
gardes try to make art closer to everyday life, or equate both, which sup-
poses a social vision or a certain sense of society's future. The important
point here is that Huyssen posits an underground complicity between avant-
gardes and official culture in industrial societies, since the former do not
reject technology as promoted by the latter. They may object to the social
uses of technology but still want to put it to better social uses: in other
words, technology is liberating if you know how to use it. As we shall see in
a moment, this statement fully applies to the situationists.
Finally, Peter Burger does not differ much on this point with Huyssen,
but adds that avant-gardes were always caught in an insuperable contradic-
tion. On the one hand, free or true art supposes a distance that allows for a
critical "cognition of reality." On the other hand, merging art and reality
would abolish this distance and this freedom (240). That may explain why
twentieth-century avant-gardes were destined to fail, and I am thus taking
the word "avant-garde" in a limited historical sense.
I will just add, before moving on to situationism proper, that Williams,
Huyssen, and Burger pay very little attention to the role of scandal in the
making of an avant-garde — scandal and its orchestration through manipu-
lations of the press as dada and surrealism did. The reason why there are no
more avant-gardes may also be explained by the fact that there can be no
more scandals since we are used to everything. Or also, as Debord would
probably suggest, because it is now the press that manipulates everything.
Surrealism and Situationism
In 1958 the very first page of the very first issue of the journal
L' International situationniste opens with the title "Surrealism's Bitter Vic-
tory," and from its early days to its official disappearance in 1972, situationism
will entertain its own anxiety of influence with surrealism, the first avant-
garde, thus initiating a cascade of mimetic identifications with surrealism
that will later be picked up by TQ.
Debord and his followers are literally obsessed with what they call the-
"avant-garde of the 30s," that is, surrealism, because, more than anything,
they want to avoid "repetition." And I should point out right away that next
to this situationist keyword, the terms "passe," "boredom," "everyday life,"
"playfulness," and "desire" represent the situationist lexical contributions
to the events of May 1968. This obsessive fear of repetition may be ex-
OUBLIER L' AVANT-GARDE? 23
plained by the fact that the structure of the hterary field obviously contained
since surrealism a space to be occupied by angry young men. It was thus
structurally inevitable that the situationists would to some degree repeat the
surrealists or would often give new names to surrealist practices while ada-
mantly denying it. But first how did the situationists define themselves?
Like the surrealists, they claimed to represent an artistic and political avant-
garde aiming at social revolution. However, surrealism lost its revolution-
ary impulse when it allowed its art to be commodified and also because it
believed too much in the unconscious and occultism. But also like the
surrrealists, the situationists found dictionary-like entries or definitions a
most convenient way to introduce key concepts. I will mention just a few:
— PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY that studies the effects of the urban envi-
ronment on emotions and behavior. On this the situationists are not being
deeply original because it is a technocratic concern during this period of
post-war reconstruction.
— DERIVE: "a technique of transient passage through varied ambi-
ances. The derive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of
psycho-geographical effects, which completely distinguishes it from the clas-
sical journey and the stroll." I would say that you still have to take a walk
and that, in spite of their disclaimers, the situationist derive remains very
close to the surrealist stroll in Paris as described in Nadja or elsewhere. I
would even add that the situationists here maintain, although in a repressed
manner, the romantic element that since Baudelaire confers upon cities magic
and mystery.
— SITUATION: Here I should mention that in the intellectual context
of the times the word "situation" meant Jean-Paul Sartre, or his use of the
term both as a key philosophical concept and the very visible title of a twelve-
volume series of literary criticism started in 1948. When Sartre's name is
mentioned in situationist literature it is usually followed by insults, as to be
expected in a general context of Sartre scapegoating. Still, the word "situa-
tion" is to be understood as "a constructed situation," "a moment of life
concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a
unitary ambiance and a game of events."
— And finally, DETOURNEMENT: as "the integration of present and
past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this
sense, there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist
24 PAROLES GELEES
use of these means." There is an essay (No. 3, p. 11) explaining what a
detoumement is supposed to be, but, to make a long story short, suffice it to
say that Marcel Duchamp had already practiced it when painting a mous-
tache on Mona Lisa. It simply means removing cultural artifacts from their
context so as to show how meaningless they are. All these playful practices
were to contribute enormously to the festive and camavalesque atmosphere
of May 1968.
As for other feared "repetitions" of features and tics of previous avant-
gardes one could mention:
— the QUESTIONNAIRE addressed to readers, echoing the famous
surreahst questionnaires on people's sex life.
— the appeal to REVOLUTIONARY ARTISTS AND INTELLECTU-
ALS, a surrealist "specialty" in the 1930s.
-— the ANONYMOUS LETTERS from within the group and false death
announcements as a symptom of the same INTERNAL CONFLICTS that
had plagued surrealism. A dissident situationist faction announces offi-
cially in 1967 that Guy Debord passed away, an announcement that trig-
gered an avalanche of angry denials and subsequent purges. Over fifteen
years, and out of 70 members, 45 members were excluded, 19 resigned, and
2 took a secessionist stand (Gray 163). Debord will later be accused of
being a CIA agent.
— HEGELIANISM. Hegelianism, here, should be understood as an
attempt to reconcile what has been separated, to reunite the extremes within
a totality. Breton yearned to reconcile the conscious and the unconscious or,
as he put it so poetically, to reunite night and day. The twentieth-century
avant-garde's project to abolish the distinction between everyday life and
art, as pointed out by Huyssen and Burger, partakes of the same totalizing
ambition aiming at reuniting the contraries. And I would add, in Debord's
case, a most Hegelian obsession with time.
The Society of the Spectacle Then and Now
I don't think that it would be too fiir-fetched to suggest that some cur-
rent media events are not only predicted but described by The Society of the
Spectacle that Debord wrote in 1967. To take a few examples thirty years
later:
OUBLIER L" AVANT-GARDE? 25
— As president in a recent movie Michael Douglas appears to be a
better actor than Bill Clinton but not as good as Ronald Reagan.
— However, Bill Gates may very well be the best actor in the world and
Karla Faye Tucker and Monica Lewinsky are in dead heat for the prize for
best supporting actress.
— And in the past an important event used to be followed by a movie.
Now, a movie featuring Dustin Hoffman (Wag the Dog, 1997) and depicting
a sex-crazed president about to launch a questionable war comes first.
In other words, as Debord put it in Thesis No. 9 of The Society of the
Spectacle, "In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a
moment of falsehood." But what did Debord mean by "spectacle"?
The Spectacle can be said to represent a higher stage of capitalism and
is consubstantial with the rule of the mafia. That is, the Spectacle and
organized crime embody the supreme stage of capitalism when the mafia
becomes the model for all business, but more on this later. The Spectacle is
both a principle of world-wide unification and a principle of separation since
access to reality is now mediated through representation and the word must
somehow be understood as a re-presentation without origin in the Derridian
sense. However, contrary to Derrida (and I mean the "classic" Derrida of
the 60s and early 70s), this re-presentation or Spectacle is a social relation-
ship translating class domination:
The Spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between
people that is mediated by images. (Thesis No. 4)
And again, mediation in the sense of separateness and unity:
The spectacle divides the world in two parts, one of which is held up as a self-represen-
tation to the world, and is superior to the world. The spectacle is simply the common
language that bridges this division. Spectators are linked only by a one-way relation-
ship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another The spectacle
thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness. (Thesis No. 29)
The society of the spectacle is the result of a long historical process that
starts with the traditional privilege granted to sight by Western philosophy
along with the technical rationality that turns the spectacle into the material
reconstruction of the religious illusion (No. 20). However, this slow matu-
ration will reach its full effects only when the modem State emerges through
26 PAROLES GELEES
Bonapartism. I do not need to dwell upon the importance of the two Napo-
leons to Hegelianism and Marxism, and Debord, after Marx, reads the
Bonapartist episodes as the first fusion of State and capital, fusion that leads
the bourgeoisie to relinquish all historical life so as to be reduced "ro the
economic history of things" as Marx put it. Consequently, the social cleav-
age expressed by the Spectacle goes hand in hand with the modern state. In
Debord's Hegelian total history very few periods can be said to represent
freedom and true democracy.
Along with other twentieth-century left-wing mavericks such as Simone
Weil, Debord developed a special fondness for Renaissance Florence. He
agreed with Marx that the growth of cities and their increasing power as
opposed to the backward countryside was an important step in the civilizing
process. Here, the sixteenth-century Florentine Republic, maintaining its
independence both against the feudal class and the emerging state, allowing
a noisy street life and carnivals, epitomizes the very freedom the bourgeoi-
sie and its state were soon to erase. Cities are at the heart of history, and in
a way they are history, so the next step had to do with the reorganization of
space and time.
In terms of space, and I am now returning to the situationist interest in
urbanism through their concepts of psychogeography and urban derive, the
present period is marked by the disappearance of the traditional opposition
between city and countryside. Let's remember that Debord is writing dur-
ing the post-war reconstruction era that saw the generalization of cars, tele-
vision, and suburbs, and the quick elimination of the rural life millions of
Europeans had shared for many centuries. Out of the same political milieu,
for example, Jean Baudrillard was pubHshing his early books such as La
Societe de consommation or Le systeme des objets.
Through the suburb, the city disappears but so does the countryside: the
suburbanized middle class replaces the peasants on the land in a pseudo-
countryside without being either peasants or city dwellers. The reason is
that the city means history and, of course, violence (because they are one
and the same) so it had to be destroyed:
The city is the locus of history because it embodies at once a concentration of social
power, which is what makes the historical enterprise possible, and a consciousness of
the past. (Thesis No. 176)
And after all, what kind of truly historical event mobilizing masses of
people could take place in a shopping mall parking lot? Moreover, if capital
was in the past concentrated in cities it now needs to spread everywhere and
absorb the periphery so as to reshape geography in its own image. A suburb
OUBLIER L' AVANT-GARDE? 27
can thus be said to be the very face of capitahsm for all to see. As Thesis No.
50 states: "Society in its length and breadth becomes capital's faithful por-
trait." But next to space, the reorganization of time also involves the eradi-
cation of memory, be it individual or collective.
A recent best-seller in France (Jean Ziegler, Les seigneurs du crime:
Les nouvelles mafias contre la democratie) is a fascinating study of the
emergence of criminal cartels after the Cold War and the problems the au-
thorities encounter when dealing with them. We are not talking here about
the traditional neighborhood mafiosi but rather about gigantic organiza-
tions involved both in violent acts on a planetary scale so as to enforce their
rule and crimes such as drug-trafficking, arms, and petrochemical and nuclear
illegal exportation and, of course, money laundering. According to Ziegler,
one of the reasons why the authorities' task has become nearly impossible is
because time seems to have disappeared. Electronic communications make
it possible to transfer money in a matter of seconds from one point of the
planet to another or to make it vanish. I doubt very much that Guy Debord
ever used a fax machine or sent an e-mail, but the 1967 book already an-
nounces the complete unification of human time and its natural cycles by
the world market. And by natural cycles, I mean things as simple as night
and day, with the different moods and maturation processes they may in-
volve, the elementary sense of geographic distance, and so on. In other
words it is history that has to go, history with its fragmented, parallel, and
often contradictory times and memories. The Spectacle and the market can
only tolerate the false immediacy of representation:
The development of capitalism meant the unification of irreversible time on a world
scale. Universal history became a reality because the entire globe was brought under
the sway of this time's progression . . . Unified irreversible time still belongs to the
world market — and by extension, to the world spectacle. (Thesis No. 145)
If time in its individual and historical dimensions is now abolished,
both history and memory are paralyzed (that's the word Debord uses). And
one can think of the way the movie Amistad, with its false appearances of
slaves in a Massachusetts court, is now marketed to high school teachers
along with a Hollywood-designed handbook. The Amistad hero appeared
before a Massachusetts court, even though historians deny he did, but he
still did because we saw the movie. Guy Debord himself never appeared
before a TV camera, so he never existed because we never saw him, and this
Amistad anecdote clearly means that the Society of the Spectacle has com-
pleted Napoleon's project of "monarchically directing the energy of memo-
ries" (Debord's quote, Thesis No. 108).
28 PAROLES GELEES
I will now move on to my conclusion.
For a Debordology
There is now in France something called la dianologie, in reference to
the late Princess of Wales. One of the most amazing phenomena is that a
sort of shrine has developed in Paris just above the tunnel in which she died
and where people still come to pay their respects and leave flowers and
notes. The first wave of mourners in the aftermath of her death was mostly
American and European. Even more amazing, Lady Di's shrine is now
mostly visited by poor Muslim women who have turned her into a saint
because they think she was murdered by the British when about to convert
to Islam. So Guy Debord was both right and wrong.
He was right because Lady Di somehow epitomized the society of the
Spectacle and the false temporality of glamour and paparazzi, when land
mines only become real because there is a picture of the Princess next to
them before we move on to the next issue, be it the Albanians or the next
White House scandal. He was wrong because this unspectacular anony-
mous female Islamic devotion brings back the archaic, such as a medieval
spontaneous sanctification and the theological resistance that Islam, by the
way, opposes to images. It is really not for me, as a man, to comment on
Lady Di, who obviously struck a very deep chord in many women, but she
was the Society of the Spectacle incarnate. Nevertheless, it is through her
that what Debord was most concerned about is maintained. Debord feared
that the little people, the average person, would never be able to register
their lives or, literally, inscribe them. Thesis No. 157 about the little people:
Such individual lived experience of a cut-off everyday life remains bereft of language
or concept, and it lacks any critical access to its own antecedents, which are nowhere
recorded. It cannot be communicated. And it is misunderstood and forgotten to the
benefit of the spectacle's false memory of the unmemorable.
To begin with, I doubt very much that the lived experience of the aver-
age person in Debord's beloved Florentine Republic was better recorded.
Secondly, the little personal notes in Arabic and the flowers left every day
on the Lady Di shrine are just that. They individually commemorate an
event that took place a very long time ago in media terms — August of 1997 —
and are not meant to generate any money. They represent the archaic that
the Society of the Spectacle still lives with and that Debord's books failed to
envision.
OUBLIER L'AVANT-GARDE? 29
And why is Debord both forgotten and remembered? That's what a
debordology should explain and one easy, but also obvious, possible answer
would be to say that he always refused to deal with the media. We all tend to
personalize everything at the urge of the society of the spectacle and there
are very few pictures of him and very few witnesses to his life. Moreover,
and for reasons unclear, after May 1968 he spent several years hiding in
Spain and Italy. A debordology would thus have to do without pictures,
biography, literary anecdotes, and salacious stories, which would be a re-
freshing exercise.
A book as old as 1979, Le pouvoir intellectuel en France by Regis Debray,
created a scandal because it claimed that books' sales were strictly related to
television appearances. In other words, literary fame and intellectual power
had become a beauty contest with TV personalities as referees. Nearly ten
years later, another book. La Republique du centre, written this time by
three bourgeois intellectuals Debord would have deeply despised (Julliard,
Rosanvallon, Furet), announced that le "createur" had now replaced the
flamboyant intellectual in the tradition of Voltaire, Hugo, Zola, Sartre, and
Foucault. Since then, those in the generic category of createur, which in-
cludes movie stars, top journalists, high fashion designers, great soccer play-
ers, and advertising executives, among others, were claiming for themselves
the title of intellectuals. Hence the avalanche of bad novels and essays turned
best-sellers written by journalists, reviewed by other journalists and pro-
moted by newspapers, magazines, and TV programs run by the very same
joumahsts. What the three authors of this book were worried about was the
disappearance of scholarship or serious thinking at the expense of quickly
written essays aimed at traditional Fall sales ("le roman de la rentree") or at
the literary prizes of the season.
Finally, now in 1998, another book became a best-seller — but this one
Debord might have liked a lot because it could be regarded as an additional
footnote to The Society of the Spectacle itself, an additional chapter to Marx.
I should say, to be fair to Debord, that Serge Halimi's Les nouveaux chiens
de garde adds very little at the theoretical level to The Society of the Spec-
tacle but was not meant to be marketed the same way because it is, precisely,
a 100-page essay. Halimi describes the interesting schedule of a well-known
TV personality, Alain Duhamel, who can be described as a newspaper and-
TV journalist, a self-appointed authority on contemporary literature, a talk-
show host, an expert on international and French politics, and, if time al-
lows, a political science professor specializing in elections with an appoint-
ment in a Paris University. Here is his weekly schedule according to Halimi:
30 PAROLES GELEES
Duhamel speaks seven times on national radio between the 7"" and the lO"" of January
1995. The following Saturday Duhamel is involved in a TV literary program. On
Sunday morning, at 8 am, he hosts a poltical radio program. At noon, he quizzes a
national politician on national TV. The next day, that is Monday, at 7:25 am, he is
back on the same radio program. At 7:00 pm Duhamel runs a political TV program
featuring the General Secretary of the French Communist Party, then departs immedi-
ately to another TV studio to interview, thirty minutes later, the President of the Re-
public. The following day, that is Tuesday, Duhamel is "I'invite" of a political pro-
gram on the French equivalent of CNN. (Halimi 77)
I suppose that I do not need to comment on the quality of Duhamel's
comments or recommendations when it comes to novels. More interest-
ingly, Les nouveaux chiens de garde quotes Debord twice and, in particular,
Debord quoting Hegel. So here is Halimi, quoting Debord's Thesis No.
127, himself quoting Hegel:
C'est "[' interminable serie des ajfrontements derisoires" qu'6voquait Guy Debord
dans La sociele du spectacle, avant d'en conclure, citant Hegel: "L'errance des
nomades est seulementformelle, car elle est limitee a des espaces unifomtes." (Halimi
95)
So the nomads can go anywhere they want, but for Debord after Hegel,
and unlike his contemporaries Deleuze and Guattari, they go nowhere be-
cause they never run into the mountains, the valleys, or city streets. It is
because they travel the desert, the most enclosed of all territories, that their
moves are meaningless just like Duhamel reviewing books he admits he did
not have time to finish, or like Pat Buchanan "for the right" or Geraldine
Ferraro "for the left" on CNN arguing within the confines of an intellectual
desert preset by the network.
So Debord was both right and wrong. He was right, and convinced to
be very right, in everything he predicted, well before Debray, Julliard,
Rosanvallon, Furet, and Halimi, minus technicalities and anecdotes. He
was wrong regarding memory. But first, why did Debord want to disap-
pear?
An interesting essay on the Situationist International states that:
The quasi-clandestine nature of the organization as well as the systematic censorship
that it had been subjected to by the political and artistic establishment, explain why so
little is known and said about it. (Tardy 102)
OUBLIER L' AVANT-GARDE? 31
And it is also true that Debord had also written:
Je meprise la presse, j'ai raison; et voila pourquoi je refuse depuis toujours toute inter-
view. Je la meprise pour ce qu'elle dit, et pour cc qu'elle est. (Cette mauvaise . . . 32)
I would only make one comment that may also apply to Huyssen's and
Burger's views on the avant-garde, be it political or artistic. Revolutionary
organizations want to change everyday life, that among their members them-
selves to begin with. Interpersonal dealings are supposed to be emancipated
from greed, selfishness, and sexism as well as from any repressive type of
morality in the midst of a society that is still dominated by them. Debord
himself wrote:
The revolutionary organization cannot allow the conditions of division and hierarchy
that obtain in the dominant society to be reproduced within itself. (Thesis No. 121)
However laudable this undertaking may be in itself, it amounts to claim-
ing that the avant-garde is ahead of the rest of society and can only nurture
an "us versus them" paranoia. Two left-wing groups that were bom during
the situationist / May 68 years, that is, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire
and Lutte Ouvriere, have been making an unexpected comeback during re-
cent French elections. They claim to be the avant-garde of the proletariat
and seem to be more interested in fighting each other rather than the bour-
geoisie because, like all Girardian mimetic twins, they are very much alike.
They are the most paranoid political organizations in France, with secret
membership and meetings, their archaic Bolshevik rhetoric of the twenties,
and an obsession with "deviationism" and police informants. These pa-
thetic remnants of the sixties give us a good idea of what life was at the
Situationist International. Thus, all I am suggesting is that the elitist men-
tality often cultivated by all these different groups and quickly turning into
paranoia should be taken into account in the definition of the avant-garde in
the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, and in spite of his own paranoid attempts to disappear
and refusals to deal with the media, Debord is better known and read today
than thirty years ago. In other words, the very unspectacular Debord sur-
vives in the Society of the Spectacle. And I would finally add that through
32 PAROLES GELEES
him the living memory of what was perhaps the true twentieth-century avant-
garde survives because it was never commodified or turned into a spectacle
as a pre-condition to being quickly forgotten.
Jean-Frangois Fourny is Associate Professor of French and European
Studies at the Ohio State University.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. La societe de consommation. Paris: Denoel, 1970.
. Le systeme des objets. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.
Bracken, Len. Guy Debord Revolutionary. Venice, C A: Feral House, 1997.
Biirger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: U of Minesota
Press, 1984.
Debord, Guy. Cette mauvaise reputation.... Paris: Gallimard, 1993.
. Panegyrique, I. Paris: Gallimard, 1993.
. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books,
1994.
Debray, Regis. Le pouvoir intellectuel en France. Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1989.
Furet, Fran9ois, Jaques Juliiard, Pierre Rosanvallon. La Republique du centre. Paris: Calmann-
Levy, 1988.
Gray, Christopher. The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International. London: Free Fall
Publications, 1974.
Halimi, Serge. Les nouveaux chiens de garde. Paris: Liber- Raisons d'agir, 1998.
Huyssen, Andreas. Afterthe Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1986.
Internationale Situationniste (1958-1969). Paris: Arthfeme Fayard, 1997.
Tardy, Yvan. "The Situationist International: 1957-1972." Contemporary French Civilization
20.1 (1996): 91-105.
Williams, Raymond. The Sociology of Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1982.
Ziegler, Jean. Les seigneurs du crime: Lesnouvellesmafiascontrelademocratie. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
Details and Reproducing Domination: The Birth of
the Ballet School, the Prison, and Other
Correctional Facilities
Regina Fletcher Sadono
On March 30, 1662, Louis XIV wrote:
Dance, besides the pleasures it accrues in divertissements for the eyes, forms impres-
sions of decorum and resourcefulness in those who practice it, and in the minds of those
who see it: these impressions can be of some use to the Nation, either for its politeness
or for its facility in military exercises. {The Establishment of the Royal Academy of
Dance in the City of Paris, quoted in Franko 182)
In his Letters of Patent, Louis XIV goes on to appoint thirteen dancing
masters to safeguard the nobility of dance and to protect it from all degrad-
ing influence. These men are to meet once a month to discuss their curricu-
lum, and anyone else who dares to call himself a dancing master will be
subject to a fine. No one can join this ehte group except by royal invitation,
and these men and their heirs are to be in control of dance and dance peda-
gogy for all the days to come.
In the Letters of Patent, Louis XIV explains that the teaching of dance
is much too important to be left in the hands of the unworthy. Dance has
several important functions:
[T]he Art of the Dance has always been recognized as one of the most honorable and
necessary for forming the body, and giving it the first and most natural dispositions for
all sorts of exercises, and among others the exercise of arms, and consequently has
been considered one of the most advantageous and useful for our Nobility, and for
others who have the honor of approaching us, not only in wartime in our armies, but
even in peace time in our Ballets . . . (Franko 176)
The connection between dance and the military is an important one and
has had a long-term effect on the way ballet is taught, as well as on the
aesthetic that ballet perpetuates. "Naturally, a great ballet always is an im-
age of its epoch," writes Jan Kott:
Moreover, it becomes its epoch. I understood this when I first saw "The Swan Lake" in
the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow . . . The ballet dancers stand motionless with glassy
smiles glued to their faces, stiff, prostrate, all of the same height — as the soldiers of the
guard. They stand stiffly on two toes of one leg, the second they throw up high — as at
an army parade. Then, suddenly, a battement, and the pirouettes begin. Corps de
ballet busy themselves as the guard at the tsar's inspection. This classical ballet sur les
33
34 PAROLES GELEES
pointes is abstract as a military muster, liturgical as an army parade, hieratic as a court
ball. It has no face, and it is ready to react to a wave of hand — like the adjutants. A
classical ballet is the guard and the court at once. Pushkin was the first to notice it.
This ballet does not exist without a tsar. (Kott 20)
Kott, seeing the ballet in the late twentieth century, easily traces its
relationship, not only to the military, but to the colonization of the body-as-
subject that characterizes rulership by kings.
Ballet pedagogy, set in motion by Louis XIV in 1662, developed in a
cultural climate that deliberately sought to colonize the body and enlist it in
a form of socio-economic servitutde. Ballet was a fertile ground for this
predatory approach to the human body, since the aim of ballet, from its
establishment during the reign of Louis XIV, was to appropriate grace and
decorum in the service of a mystique of superiority that rationalized rulership
by an aristocracy endowed with divine authority. The discourse of the con-
temporary ballet classroom is still permeated with this notion of genetic
privileging: now referred to as "Genetic Pool." This obsession with a par-
ticular body type reproduces the myth of Apotheosis that was structured into
the first dance academy by Louis XIV.
The story of ballerina Merrill Ashley about her first class with the leg-
endary George Balanchine illustrates this point. Here, Ashley's story is
linked to the stages in the myth of heroic ascension identified by Joseph
Campbell in his book. Hero With a Thousand Faces (245-46).
Call to Adventure
Class with Balanchine! Class in the presence of this man who, like a
god, embodied everything we admired and revered. Class given by this
man who we had to please above all others. It was terrifying. Everyone
in the class seemed straighter, more alert, expectant. We all had mixed
feelings about getting his attention. We wanted to be noticed but we
feared his corrections. What if we couldn't do what he wanted right just
after he showed us?
Appearance of a Helper
Balanchine entered the studio in a very business-like manner — no
greetings, no idle words to create a friendly atmosphere. We were all at
the barre, in preparation for the plies that always started our classes at the
School.
DETAILS AND REPRODUCING DOMINATION 35
Crossing of the Threshold
Class began. We held the barre with our left hand, while our right arm
was extended out to the side.
Encounter with the Shadow Presence
We hadn't done anything and we were wrong already!
"Stand like a turkey," he said, thumping his chest. "Chest out,
shoulders back, head high. Look awake and alive."
Dismemberment and Descent
After we had straightened up a little bit, he said, "And what about your
hands?"
He took the hand of a girl standing near me, tried to round the palm
and make it more concave. He separated her fingers, indicating the right
position of each one. He still wasn't happy: "Dear, too soft; looks like
dead chicken. Mustbestrong, like this. Feel mine!"
With that the giri took his beautifully sculpted hand and squeezed it as
hard as she could. Not a finger moved.
"Yours should be like that, dear."
Wonder Journey
To me it seemed like magic. Where did the strength come from? I tried
to imitate him, but my hand simply looked like a claw.
Balanchine's immediate involvement in our first gestures fascinated
and frightened me. Before, he had been only a distant figure, but now he
was suddenly among us, touching us, chiding us, elaborating on the
basics that we thought we had already mastered. He seemed so alert and
animated, he didn't act at all like a man in his sixties. Slender, erect,
quick and energetic, he didn't look like one either.
Tests/Helpers (Assumption of the Magical Object)
Slender, erect, quick and energetic, he didn't look like one either. That
quiet, impassive figure on the platform high bove the class was quite
unlike the man now in our midst, who was tireless in his pursuit of
perfection.
As we began our pli6s, he demanded a perfect fifth position, with the
heel of the front foot even with the tips of the toes of the back foot. Most
teachers would give you a half-inch leeway or more, but he gave you
nothing. Overcrossing was just as bad as undercrossing: the position of
the feet had to be exact.
36 PAROLES GELEES
Then came the battements tendus: sixteen in each direction, more than
we had ever done at one time. While we were doing them, Balanchine
was down on one knee, next to various students, repositioning feet and
guiding legs.
Supreme Ordeal
Each successive combination of tendus was faster than the last, and soon
we were trying to do them faster than we had ever done them before. It
was all so extreme and made our muscles bum with fatigue.
As the barre progressed, we did exercises in which he wanted us to
move our limbs as if they were meeting resistance. He would provide
that resistance by pushing and pulling us with his hands.
Apotheosis or Transflguration
But it was when we moved to the center that the real surprise came.
Suddenly Balanchine was jumping, landing, catlike, executing steps like
a dancer half his age. He seemed more godlike than ever.
Return Flight as Emissary, or through Obstacles and
Transformations
What a relief when it was all over! The class had been terribly
stressful — physically, mentally, and emotionally. Fear of the unknown
had been the worst part. We had wondered whether he would be patient
and understanding or stem and unforgiving. We feared his high
standards, yet he proved to be reasonable.
Return to the Threshold and Re-emergence into the
World, Bringing Restoring Elixir
He never raised his voice or got angry, but he was very defmite about
what he wanted. He didn't praise anybody; the most he said was, "That's
right." (Ashley 14-16)
This story of blatant hero worship rests on a narrative scaffolding around
which Ashley constructs Balanchine in her imagination, and for the reader,
in god-like proportions. The master has kept himself apart from these stu-
dents, who have danced in his school for years without knowing him. They
have seen him (Ashley tells us earlier in her book) only when he came in to
stand high above them, Olympian, on a platform. Here is the reigning King
DETAILS AND REPRODUCING DOMINATION 37
of Exclusivity, that private and privileged Wonderland where only the most
radiant beings may ever hope to shine. Balanchine holds the mystical key to
this world, the restoring elixir, the magic words: That's right.
The master delivers judgments. He makes pronouncements, thumping
his chest. Next, the master seizes upon the merest detail, the position of a
finger. This detail, as we will seem, is the Glorified Obstacle that is
constructed into the ballet classroom discourse. Ashley remarks how the
master's hand is so beautifully sculpted, so magically strong that, by
comparison, the hand of the young girl seems like a claw. One senses her
hope that the alchemy of the class may someday transform her into a golden
being such as she sees now before her kneeling next to various students,
repositioning feet and guiding legs, symbolically dismembering these
youthful organic beings into an assortment of mechanical parts.
"The training of the dancer is not unlike the initiation of a shaman,"
writes Joan Blackmer — a Jungian analyst — in Acrobats of the Gods: Dance
and Transformation, "though it often takes ten years in the underworld space
of the dance studio to complete the process of the body's dismemberment
and renewal. Certainly, and above all, 'the candidate must watch his dis-
memberment with his own eyes'" (Blackmer 43-44). In ballet, the detail is
the scalpel by which the dancer is separated from her body, so that she can
be reassembled by the teacher. "I frequently received verbal corrections
addressed to each part of my body in isolation," remembers ballerina Gelsey
Kirkland, "figuratively dismembering me and dispelling any semblance of
grace" (Kirkland 33).
When the mono-myth of heroic ascension is mapped onto Ashley
Merrill's story, the reader of the Ballet Myth can locate a synthesis of light
and dark forces in the figure of the ballet teacher, who is both Helper and
Shadow Presence. This phenomenon reflects certain peculiarities of the
ballet teacher/learner identification process, whereby the master absorbs the
identity of the student, which then polarizes into the aspects of the Self that
are idealized and those that are disowned. In the ballet classroom the indi-
vidual is configured by correctness, discarding any aspect of her being that
falls outside this narrowly prescribed aesthetic. The ones whom society
casts as inferior, and therefore in need of reformation, are the most likely to
be vulnerable to this process.
The aspects of the self, the body and the being that can't be assigned the
value of correctness are disowned by the dancer and collected into the aura
of the Shadow Presence, who can carry them back to her in the form of
threats and admonitions. Thus in the ballet classroom the student can be
blamed and even abused for an incorrect performance. Fused with the dark-
38 PAROLES GELEES
ness of the Shadow Presence is the shadow of the dancer's self-abnegation.
In short, she becomes her own enemy. While the dancer constructs an ex-
ternal ideal to enact for the teacher's validation, she also constructs an inner
antagonist to conspire with the teacher's dark side. "In the dance world,"
writes Gretchen Ward Warren in her recent book. The Art of Teaching Bal-
let: Ten Twentieth Century Masters, "of course, it is not unusual for dancers
to forgive cruelty or eccentricity in teachers or choreographers if they sense
they are in the presence of greatness" ( 1 84).
During a ballet class, the student projects herself into the teacher, and
she also projects herself into the mirror as a screen which frames the Ballet
Myth, forming a kind of self-policing gaze that merges with the omnipotent
gaze of the Helper/Shadow Presence to colonize her body and her being.
The conscious dancer lives out a sense of incorrectness and strives for an
ideal correctness, which can only be awarded to her by the omniscient teacher/
mirror. However, this process is hazardous to the soul:
To the extent that a dancer becomes a complacent reflection, he or she does not learn
how to test beauty, how to discover its inner life. In this way, the mirror can trap a
dancer's soul, ultimately breaking creative spirit. Such a dancer is created, but does
not know how to create. (Kirkland 73, my emphasis)
The final product, glittering on the ballet stage, is the successful narcissist
having a fulfilling and intimate romance with her teacher/mirror-self. "The
relationship between the dancer and her mirror image," writes Kirkland, "is
an intimacy of extraordinary power and potentially perilous consequence"
(73).
The body in our culture is often linked to the feminine as a lower form
of being, and ballet is a process that can elevate this feminine body into a
higher state. "Ballet a woman's world?" asks Sigrid Nunez, in A Feather
on the Breath of God:
But it was men who invented ballet — and the ballerina. It is men who put her feet in
those shoes, and who take the food out of her mouth. All this to get the desired crea-
ture, more boy than woman, a kind of third sex — could it really be? — a woman with a
penis, a woman capable of an erection. (Nunez 1 1 5)
Thus, little girls who feel outcast by the male-dominated society can go
through a glass darkly into the miraculous world of ballet, and be corrected.
Joan Blackmer, the Jungian analyst, writes:
DETAILS AND REPRODUCING DOMINATION 39
I remember, when I was one of a class of rank beginners, being told by the teacher
never to expect any help whatsoever from our bodies. The body, appallingly subject to
the pull of gravity — the Great Goddess at her most insistent — longs to sit still, to sink
into its mother soil. It reacts with pain, lethargy, obstinacy to the efforts of the dancer
to move and train it. From the very start of dance training one is torn between the
opposites of the body's lethargy and the ego's will. (Blackmer 26-28)
According to this doctrine, the body — with its appalling relationship to
gravity — is the dancer's burden, it is her enemy, and must be lifted up into a
realm of higher values by extraordinary measures.
This calls for heroic efforts on the part of both dancer and teacher,
creating the ballet class as a proving ground for heroic ascension. In Syn-
cope: The Philosophy of Rapture, Catherine Clement writes, "I recall hav-
ing heard a very young choreographer explaining in disjointed words why
she had come up with the idea of having her dancers dance along a wall,
vertically. There is no longer any other way to reach the sky, she said, there
is no longer any other way to rejoin something like a god" (230). Over the
course of three centuries, ballet has conserved a technology that rationalizes
the divine right of kings.
In support of this, Balanchine tells us in his inspirational Preface to
JOJ Stories of the Great Ballets, that "The arts point to the glories we might
attain as human beings, perfecting as they do God-given gifts some are lucky
to have" (Balanchine and Mason x). Balanchine, as we have seen, was able
to play his part in this script to the hilt, appearing to the young dancers in
his school as a god-like entity with magical powers. Clement goes on to
write that "Another dancer said without hesitating for a second: 'it is like
the salt in food. It is the pebble in your shoe, the obstacle.' If, within the
moral norms that are imposed on us, it is a matter above all of getting over
obstacles and of overcoming resistance, dance on the contrary glorifies and
sublimates the obstacle" (Clement 231).
The Glorified Obstacle is the key to the discourse of ballet, and is repro-
duced in the ballet classroom by the teacher's use of language. "Nobody
knows how to stand," is just one example. In Warren's The Art of Teaching
Ballet, there are hundreds. In today's ballet classroom, there are thousands.
The dance student must struggle relentlessly against these Glorified Ob-
stacles, which are more than just the physical challenges faced by an ordi-
nary worker.
An illustration of the Glorified Obstacle and its importance in the con-
struction of the Ballet Myth can be found in the Hans Christian Andersen
tale of The Princess and the Pea. The pea is the Glorified Obstacle, mani-
fested in the discourse of ballet by a scrupulous attention to the Almighty
40 PAROLES GELEES
Detail. "For the disciplined man, as for the true believer," writes Foucault,
"no detail is unimportant, but not so much for the meaning that it conceals
within it as for the hold it provides for the power that wishes to seize it"
(Foucault 140). "Details make the difference between the amateur and the
professional, and between the professional and the artist," says contempo-
rary ballet teacher, Larisa Sklyanskaya (Warren 193). "She has an incred-
ible eye," says a student quoted in Warren about her ballet teacher, "and will
find nuances and details to bring out an individual's personality and tech-
nique" (84).
Who owns the nuances and the details of the dance performance? The
teacher or the learner? The performance of dance and language intersect,
since the dancer can no more be conscious of all of the nuances and details
that make up a successful performance than a speaker can be conscious of
all the rules of grammar and pronunciation that combine to produce a suc-
cessful spoken communication. The language student takes possession of
the information that is presented to her in class so that she may use it to put
across her own message. However, in ballet, the teacher remains in sole
possession of ballet information. She seizes the Almighty Detail for the
sake of the power it gives her. Ownership of ballet information remains a
privilege bestowed by higher powers upon the worthy, the chosen ones. The
teacher/choreographer performs, using the student as a mouthpiece. The
dancer has nothing to say for herself, she is the trained soldier who marches
in step.
"Balanchine's disciples still speak of his ballets as being dancer proof,"
writes Gclscy Kirkland. His ballets are "dancer proof because the dancer is
a living VCR who records and plays back the movements in a way that
completely bypasses her own creative process. She is reciting, not speak-
ing. "Balanchine's conception of the human form was essentially mechani-
cal. The body was a machine to be assembled" (Kirkland 185). This con-
ception of the body as something mechanical that must be policed by the
teacher permeates the Ballet Myth. "When you move you belong to the
world of physics and mechanics, just like any other machinery," says Gabriela
Taub-Darvash (Warren 88).
Dance, like language, has existed in every civilization since the dawn
of recorded history. It is a natural and necessary expression of the human
spirit. In 1662, Louis XIV recognized dance as a way to cultivate the body
and harness its "decorum and resourcefulness" in the service of "the Na-
tion." On the other hand, the body has an innate wisdom, a dance instinct.
"I believe that the dance instinct inside of young students must be encour-
aged," says ballet teacher Anne Williams, "then, very slowly, you add the
DETAILS AND REPRODUCING DOMINATION 41
medicine" (Warren 263). The dance instinct is diseased, it needs the medi-
cine of ballet training; the body is a machine for the choreographers in their
dancer-proof works. "The individual body becomes an element that may be
placed, moved, articulated on others," writes Foucault (164).
Every ballet student must subscribe to the glorification of the detail in
the context of an anxiety about time that penetrates her life: the pressure to
start young, the relentlessly ticking biological clock, musical time, classes
and schedules and contests and curtains that go up and down like clock-
work. Most of all there is the cry of the ballet teacher: "There's never
enough time!" mourns Christiane Vaussard (Warren 237). "There is never
enough time!" yells Larisa Sklyanskaya (Warren 175). "Time penetrates
the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power," writes Foucault
(151-52). "This means that one must seek to intensify the use of the slight-
est moment, as if time, in its very fragmentation, were inexhaustible" (Fou-
cault 154).
Regina Fletcher Sadono teaches Theater Arts at California State University,
Los Angeles.
Works Cited
Balanchine, George, and Francis Mason. 101 Stories of the Great Ballets. New York: Anchor
Books, Doubleday, 1975.
Blackmer, Joan Dexter. Acrobats of the Gods: Dance andTransformation. Toronto: Inner City
Books, 1989.
Campbell, Joseph The Hero With aThousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949.
Clement, Catherine. Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture . Trans. Sally O'Driscoll and Deirdre
M. Mahoney. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. NY:
Vintage Books, 1977.
Franko, Mark. Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1993.
Kirkland, Gelsey. Dancing on My Grave. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1986.
Kott, Jan. "Moes." ALOES. DZIENNIKl I MALESZKICE. Trans. Anna Krajewksa-Wieczorek.
Warszawa: Cztelnik, 1997.
Nunez, Sigrid. A Feather on the Breath of God. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995.
Warren, Gretchen Ward. The Art of Teaching Ballet: Ten Twentieth Century Masters. Gainesville:
UP of Florida, 1996.
Memory as Construction in Viollet-le-Duc's
Architectural Imagination
Aron S. Vinegar
The nineteenth-century architect and theorist Eugene Viollet-le-Duc
made a lasting impact on France's memory of its architectural past — and its
imagination of an architecture of the future — through his restorations of
numerous Gothic structures for France's state-run Monuments Historiques.
Not surprisingly, he had a sophisticated conceptual, methodological, and
practical understanding of the role of memory and imagination in historical
investigation. This understanding is never explicitly discussed in scholarly
commentary on Viollet-le-Duc, yet it is fundamental for his entire theory
and practice of architectural restoration.
In his Entretiens sur l' Architecture, a series of lectures published in
two volumes beginning in 1863, Viollet-le-Duc offers a meta-methodologi-
cal explanation of the roles memory and imagination play in epistemologi-
cal inquiry.' Viollet-le-Duc was directly inspired by D'Alembert's "Pre-
liminary Discourse" to the first volume of the Encyclopedic and Voltaire's
discussion of Passive and Active Imagination in his Philosophical Dictio-
nary.^ Included in D'Alembert's "Preliminary Discourse" was a genealogi-
cal tree of knowledge — the famous Systdme figure des connaissances
humaines. The Syst^me figure was divided into three faculties which gave
rise to three major divisions of knowledge: Memory, which produced his-
tory; Reason, which resulted in philosophy and science; and Imagination,
which created poetry and the fine arts. These faculties differed from each
other according to how they processed sensations: memory received them,
reason reflected upon them, and imagination combined them. In the "Pre-
liminary Discourse," D'Alembert provides a detailed commentary on each
of the three faculties, their interaction, and order of operation within the
mind, a formula which Viollet-le-Duc followed closely.'
Viollet-le-Duc insists throughout the Entretiens that in architecture there
is no invention ex-nihilo, "we must necessarily have recourse to the past in
order to originate in the present"(Lecture VI, 173). Memory, the first fac-
ulty to be exercised, involved recalling sensations or ideas passively received
by the mind. Viollet-le-Duc — like Voltaire and D'Alembert — uses the term
"passive imagination" for this process rather than the word "memory" and
believed that although passive imagination alone could not create, it was
the fundamental basis of creative imagination. Active imagination is the
next faculty to come into play. According to Viollet-le-Duc it was "nothing
43
44 PAROLES GELEES
more than the application of reasoning to the passive imagination"(174).
Active imagination compares, chooses, and orders what the passive imagi-
nation— memory — presents in a confused mass. As VioUet-le-Duc noted,
"In order to originate, judgment must arrange the elements gathered by the
passive imagination"(174). Thus, active imagination was the analytic step
leading to synthesis or creative imagination.
Viollet-le-Duc sums up the interaction of the passive and active imagi-
nation in his example of the centaur in the first and sixth Entretiens: "the
passive imagination of a Greek presents the idea of a man on a horse; his
active imagination suggests the combination of the two in a single being;
reason shows him how to weld the torso of the one to the breast of the other:
he creates a centaur, and this creation has style for us as well as the
Greeks"( 1 77).'' VioUet-le-Duc's use of the centaur, the most extreme ex-
ample of a fantastic entity generated from imagination and lacking an ob-
jective correlate in the real world, continued a long line of philosophico-
epistemological commentary on such chimeras extending back to John
Locke.^ Viollet-le-Duc understood the figure of the centaur as the perfect
model of an impossible being, which, if given the coherence and organiza-
tion of a real biological entity, was classifiable "as if it was indeed a natural
kind existing "out there," independent of the consciousness that had con-
ceived it.^
The imagination conceives the centaur, but the artist is responsible for
giving an air of reality to this fiction: "his reasoning faculty has led him to
observe how the different parts of an animal are united and welded together;
he will therefore join the vertebral column of a man with that of the horse,
the shoulders of the horse will give place to the hips of the man. He joins
the abdomen of the man to the breast of the quadruped with such perfect
address the most experienced critic would imagine he was contemplating a
correct and delicate study from nature"(Lecture I, 25-26). For Viollet-le-
Duc, an understanding of anatomical structure and physiological organiza-
tion was the marker of any creation's life-like status. By constructing such
an internal structure, Viollet-le-Duc notes, "the impossible becomes so like
reality that even now we think of the centaur as living and moving; fit is] as
well known to us as the dog or the cat"(26).' Viollet-le-Duc believed that
the centaur (picture) had become so legible and coherent that it now existed
independently of its radically subjective production; it had acquired an ob-
jective stability and repeatability verging on the scientific. Centaurs were
now "classifiable" entities with distinct properties that could thus poten-
tially generate further knowledge: a body of information that could be inter-
subjectively shared, rather than intra-subjectively imagined.
MEMORY AS CONSTRUCTION 45
Viollet-le-Duc's contemporary in England, John Ruskin, provides a simi-
lar example with his "True and False Griffins" in volume three of Modern
Painters ( 1 846-60) ( 1 04- 11 ). The "true" Lombardic Griffin is made through
such a convincing union of both horse and eagle that it appears to have been
generated naturally from within, rather than artificially composed from with-
out.* According to Ruskin, the imagination creates the griffin "as if [my
emphasis] it were gathering up the bones of the real creature out of some
ancient rock"(109).
In Viollet-le-Duc's drawings for Pierrefonds (Figs. 1, 2), a chateau re-
stored for Napoleon III, both real and chimerical creatures are rendered
with striking white highlights which provide an underlying anatomical struc-
ture to their surface appearance.
Figure 1
These drawings display an internal structure — a syntax — that is not only
achieved through patient observation of real organisms, but also through an
experimental imagination that probes or dissects beneath the surface of rep-
resentation in order to produce new knowledge.^ As Claude Bernard, the
great experimental physiologist and contemporary of the architect, noted,
"With the help of active experimental science, man becomes an inventor of
phenomena, a real foreman of creation"(18). Gothic architecture — which
was previously maligned or romanticized as incoherent and mystical — is
analytically dissected and imaginatively shown by Viollet-le-Duc to have an
internal structure and order equivalent to any living organism. Through
dissective strategies of presentation, Viollet-le-Duc could re-member Gothic
architecture "as if it was a completely scientific and rational structure. His
drawings for Pierrrefonds are but two specific examples of Viollet-le-Duc's
systematic, graphic re-imagination of Gothic architecture.
The most effective and sustained application of Viollet-le-Duc's dialec-
tic between dis-membering and re-membering occurs in the illustrations —
better yet, demonstrations — found in his ten volume Dictionnaire Raisonne
46 PAROLES GELEES
of French Gothic architecture, published between 1854 and 1868).'° The
Dictionnaire was the amalgamation of all his experience restoring Gothic
architecture for the Monuments Historiques; it was the locus not only for his
observations about the architectural past but also for his belief in the French
Gothic as a laboratory for future architectural creation. The anatomical
analogy is the guiding metaphor of the Dictionnaire: to cut, separate, and
imaginatively synthesize the structures of Gothic architecture is the modus
operandi of his most famous text." In particular, Viollet-le-Duc was influ-
enced by the conceptual and graphic practices of the famous comparative
anatomist, Georges Cuvier. Cuvier's practice offered the most sophisticated
example of dissective methodology as applied to the study, excavation, and
reconstruction of extinct fossil vertebrates: a methodology that Viollet-le-
Duc imaginately adapted for his own architectural investigations and resto-
rations.
In the entry on "Restoration" in the Dictionnaire, Viollet-le-Duc spe-
cifically acknowledges his debt to Georges Cuvier: "Cuvier, by means of his
studies of comparative anatomy, as well as his geological research, unveiled
to the public almost literally from one day to the next a very long history of
the world" ("Restoration," Foundations 197). Cuvier's "unveiling" of his-
tory was at the heart of his radical departure from the old order of natural
history. His move from a Linnean taxonomy — based on external character
traits — to a classification centered on the internal functions of the biologi-
cal organism, initiated a paradigm shift from natural history to a history of
nature. As Foucault noted in the The Order of Things: "From Cuvier on-
ward it is life in its non-perceptible purely functional aspects that provides
the basis for the exterior possibility of classification ... the possibiHty of
classification now arises from the depths of Ufe, from those elements most
hidden from view"(268).
Following Cuvier's example, the restoration and classification of
France's architectural past — under the guidance of Viollet-le-Duc — would
henceforth be predicated on internal structures and functions rather than a
taxonomy of external and historical forms. Viollet-le-Duc specifically indi-
cated that although the architect responsible for restoration must be familiar
with the style and form of the building he is restoring, more importantly, he
must know "the structure, anatomy, and temperament of the building" ("Res-
toration," Foundations 216). For Cuvier and Viollet-le-Duc, the primary
means of revealing the interior structure of the biological or architectural
organism was dissection. Viollet-le-Duc's Cuverian amalgamation of
dissective methodology, anatomy, and physiological explanation is neatly
summed up in the preface to the Dictionnaire, where he states that in order
MEMORY AS CONSTRUCTION 47
to understand the complex nature of Gothic architecture and its numerous
parts, one must "dissect, as it were, each building, as well as describing the
functions and applications of all the component parts" (vi).
If Viollet-le-Duc was going to implement anatomico-physiological strat-
egies to maximum effect in the Dictionnaire , he would have to inscribe
them not only conceptually and textually, but also visually. The spatial
relationships of anatomy were best conveyed by visual means. As Cuvier
often noted, the functional relationship of organs was a physiological coor-
dination rather than a geometrical juxtaposition (Coleman 68). Viollet-Ie-
Duc utilized the techniques of representation from anatomy itself because
the strict architectural set of plan, elevation, and section was exactly the
type of geometrical abstraction inimical to both his physiological interpre-
tation of Gothic architecture and to his valorization of what Foucault has
called the regard medical: the increasingly analytic gaze of nineteenth cen-
tury science.
In addition, I would suggest that it was also anatomy's graphic capa-
bilities to direct the viewer's gaze, and hence knowledge of the object pre-
sented, that Viollet-le-Duc found so attractive. Anatomy and its graphic
representation is, by its very definition, an active critical process involving
the cutting, separating, and exposing of certain organs for display at the
expense of others. By inscribing the anatomical metaphor within his archi-
tectural drawings, Viollet-le-Duc could filter the viewer's conception of
Gothic architecture through his own appropriation of anatomy's selective
methods of representation. Thus the Dictionnaire operates as an imagina-
tion technology: it is an instrument for the extension of imagining or visu-
alizing activities through the selective amplification and suppression of mat-
ter, form, and content.'^ The images in the Dictionnaire are never merely a
reflection of a historical entity called Gothic architecture but rather a criti-
cal element in the construction of that history.
The two large-scale exploded views of a vault springing (Fig. 3) and a
portion of a nave wall construction from Notre-Dame at Dijon (Fig. 4) are
the most obvious examples of Viollet-le-Duc's novel drawing techniques
and are emblematic of the visual strategies implemented throughout the
Dictionnaire. There is no precedent for the exploded view in the tradition
of academic architectural drawing; however, it has a long tradition in ana-
tomical and machine drawing dating back to the sixteenth century." The
exploded view reappeared with renewed vigor in nineteenth century ana-
tomical illustration due, in no small part, to Cuvier's use of it to demon-
strate his system of classification based on function.
48
PAROLES GELEES
Figure 3
Figure 4
Dorinda Outram's pertinent observation that Cuvier's Gallery of Com-
parative Anatomy at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle was full of objects to
be looked not at, but into, probably refers to the striking number of skeletal
parts displayed demontees and separees (175-76).'" Exploded skulls (Fig.
6) and vertebrae (Fig. 5) were pried apart, each bone separated from the
next by metal rods. They encouraged the visitor to compare, contrast, and
look into the differences and resemblances between species according to the
functional properties of each bone, and the functional interrelationship of
each bone within individual specimens. Cuvier's exploded views were quickly
adopted by functional anatomists such as Jean-Marc Bourgery (Fig. 7), whose
anatomical atlas was owned by Viollet-le-Duc and reviewed twice by Etienne
Delecluze, Viollet-le-Duc's uncle.'^
Figure 5
MEMORY AS CONSTRUCTION
49
The materiality of Bourgery's finely dissected parts were characterized
by Delecluze as veritespalpables, palpable truths ("Des travaux anatomiques"
210). Prosper Merimee characterized Viollet-le-Duc's images for the
Dictionnaire in similar terms: "The plates . . . thus render the descriptions
palpable" (216); and further, "it's as if reality was substituted for conven-
tion" (217).
Figure 6
Figure 7
Viollet-le-Duc's exploded views (Figs. 3, 4) "showed" the organic in-
terrelation of adjacent parts where each element that carried a load main-
tained its own independent function and could be freely compressed. With
Viollet-le-Duc's visual and textual guidance, the reader/viewer, in an act of
participatory cognition, reconnected the exploded masonry and in the pro-
cess reenacted how the stress and strain of the vaults was transmitted down
and out to the buttresses. Each stone in the springing of the vault served a
definite purpose and related to the next in an organic union of interacting
forces. Because Viollet-le-Duc believed medieval architecture embodied and
distilled the principles of nature, he considered it a veritable "architectural
organism" ("Style," Foundations 259).
Thus the exploded view "figured" a fundamental concept for Cuvier,
Bourgery, and Viollet-le-Duc: natural kinds. The concept of natural kinds
posits that there are divisions, gaps, or orderings in nature that exist inde-
pendently of our conceptualization of them. Philosophical parlance often
50 PAROLES GELEES
describes natural kinds as "cleaving nature at the joints." This unfortunate
phrase taken from Plato, though inaccurate, does serve a point. It appears
that it is difficult to avoid speaking of natural kinds in anything but meta-
phorical terms — to describe nature as a vertebrate dissected at its articula-
tions.'" Viollet-le-Duc conflates literal description and metaphoric analogy
by inscribing the exploded view directly into his drawings; the drawings
collapse the semantic space necessary for the technique of metaphor. The
metaphorical vertebrae become the literal backbone of his Gothic architec-
ture (Fig. 4), and the reader/viewer is encouraged to scientifically analyze
the structure "as if it were a real organism by the instructions in the adja-
cent text: "Let's dissect this construction piece by piece" ("Construction,"
Dictionnaire 140)."
In a striking visual contrast to the paradigm of graphic dissection in the
Dictionnaire, Viollet-le-Duc also synthesized features from numerous Gothic
cathedrals into ideal typologies. Viollet-le-Duc's entry on "Restoration" in
the Dictionnaire begins with the following highly epigrammatic — and enig-
matic— summation of his views on architectural restoration: "To Restore an
edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor to rebuild it; it
means to establish it in a finished state, which may in fact never have actu-
ally existed at a given time" ("Restoration," Foundations 195). The ulti-
mate visual embodiment of Viollet-le-Duc's statement is the bird's-eye view
of the "Ideal Cathedral" (Fig. 8) in volume two of the Dictionnaire. As
Barry Bergdoll has noted, Viollet-le-Duc created "an ideal invented com-
posite, a perfect Gothic cathedral as such as even the Middle Ages had failed
to realize in a single building"(251). However, like Viollet-le-Duc's cen-
taur, this imaginative construction is intended to produce real inter-subjec-
tively shared knowledge even though it does not correspond to any known
Gothic structure in existence.
The process that led to Viollet-le-Duc's "Ideal cathedral" involved a
similar idealizing process on a smaller scale. Each individual Gothic monu-
ment was graphically restored to its supposed original state according to the
purity of its ideal-type, worked out by Viollet-le-Duc in terms of regional
schools of architecture ("Architecture," Foundations 79)."* Such an ideal-
izing composite figure is also a prominent feature in Cuvier's fossil recon-
structions and Bourgery's practice of functional anatomy. Bourgery, in the
first volume of his anatomical atlas, explains that he created an ideal human
body type in order to facilitate comparison between all anatomical elements
in the atlas (Traits complet S).'** As Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison have
MEMORY AS CONSTRUCTION
51
noted, "The purpose of these atlases was and is to standardize the observing
subjects and observed objects of the discipline by eliminating idiosyncra-
cies" (84-85).
ii<
1 « i 'IT f " J ^ i
Figure 8
The comparative method initiated by Cuvier and adopted by Bourgery
and Viollet-le-Duc was a procedure for eliciting the secrets held by empiri-
cal data. The ultimate goal was to subsume the constant flux and variation
52 PAROLES GELEES
of phenomenal data to law-like statements. Thus, the interpretive act in-
volved in constructing the ideal type — the differentiating of the perfect from
the accidental or variable — was never seen as a submission to subjectivity,
but rather as a bulwark against it. Like Cuvier or Bourgery, Viollet-le-Duc's
exhaustive anatomical exploration of the Gothic monument was only pos-
sible through the matrix of ideal typologies. Therefore, there is no real
dichotomy between dissective analysis and imaginative synthesis in the
Dictionnaire (Figs. 3, 8) — one cannot function without the other. In Viollet-
le-Duc's method, the construction of ideal types allowed him to explore the
minutiae of each structural element with law-like confidence, and the dis-
section of each element in the Gothic structure provided — or perhaps con-
firmed— the knowledge for the construction of those ideal-types.^"
Viollet-le-Duc's graphic restorations problematize any clear distinctions
between fact and theory, analysis and construction, scientific objectivity and
creative imagination. Viollet-le-Duc's approach to the architectural past
was not about reclamation or revival, but an act of critical imagination — an
analysis that distilled and transformed the material structures of the past
into new "relevant kinds" of architecture for the present. Viollet-le-Duc's
incessant probing of Gothic architecture in the Dictionnaire Raisonn^ con-
structed a scientific body of architectural knowledge, the critical and rhe-
torical power of which continues to influence our understanding of the ar-
chitectural past and present to this day.
Awn Vinegar is a doctoral student in Art History at Northwestern University.
Notes
' Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens sitr I' architecture, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Morel et Cie., 1863-
1 872), particularly the first and sixth Entretiens. All English quotations are taken from the trans-
lation by Benjamin Bucknall, Discourses on Architecture, 2 vols: (New York: Grove Press, 1 959).
^ Jean le Rond D' Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans.
Richard N. Schwab (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963); Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, 2
vols., trans. Peter Gay (New York: Basic Books, 1962) is footnoted by Viollel-le-Duc in Lecture
VI, p. 174. Voltaire also wrote the article "Imagination" in vol. 8, pp.560-63, of Diderot and
D' Alembert 's Encyclopedie. Viollet-le-Duc appears to have drawn upon all three sources for his
understanding of memory and imagination in the Entretiens.
'D' Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, pp.50-53 and 143-55. Considering Viollet-le-Duc's
careful reading of D' Alembert's commentary, it is hardly surprising that Viollet-le-Duc incorpo-
rated part of the title and much of the conceptual organization of Diderot and D' Alembert's
Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, des Arts, et des Metiers, 17 vols. (Paris
and Neuchatel, 1751-1780) into his own ten- volume Dictionnaire Raisorme de l' architecture
franfaise du Xe au XVe slide, 10 vols. (Paris: Bance and A. Morel, 1854-1868).
MEMORY AS CONSTRUCTION 53
" Viollet-le-Duc provides a more detailed discussion of the centaur in Lecture 1 , pp. 25-26.
' See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). For centaurs see bk. 3, chap. 3, p. 420, and bk. 3, chap. 10, pp.
506-07; the two related chapters on "mixed modes" are bk. 2, chap. 22, pp. 288-95. and bk. 2,
chap. 5, pp. 428-38. Of the numerous philosophical commentaries on chimeras and mixed modes
in Locke's work and beyond, I found the following particularly helpful: Michael Ayers, Locke,
Volume 2: Ontology (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 80-81; Paul de Man, "The
Epistemology of Metaphor," On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: U of Chicago Press,
1979), pp. 19-20; and John McCumber, The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and System-
atic Philosophy {Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1993), pp. 279-89.
*Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of "As if" a System of the Theoretical, Practical, and
Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1925).
For a sophisticated interpretation of fiction in Vaihinger's philosophy of "as if see Wolfang Iser,
The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1993), pp. 130-52. The relation between fiction and natural kinds — two seemingly polar oppo-
sites — is at the essence of my .argument in this paper. I provide a more detailed discussion of
natural kinds at a later point in the paper.
'The passage continues: "The physiologist — Cuvier in hand — comes and proves that this
creature, which you know as well as if you had seen it running in the woods, could never have
existed — that scientifically it is a chimera — that it could neither walk nor digest — that its two
pairs of lungs and its two hearts are the most ridiculous of suppositions. Which would be the
barbarian, the savant or the Greek sculptor? Neither: but the criticism of the savant shows us that
Art and the knowledge of facts — Art and Science — Art and Civilization — may hold their course
utterly apart. What matters it to me as an artist that a man of science proves to me that such a being
cannot exist, if I have the consciousness of its existence; if I am familiar with its gait and its habits;
if my imagination pictures it in the forests; if I endow it with passions and instincts? Why rob me
of my centaur? What will the man of science have gained when he has proved to me that I am
taking chimeras for realities? Most certainly the Greeks of Aristotle 's time knew enough of anatomy
to be aware that a centaur could not actually exist; but they respected the Arts in an equal degree
with Science, and would not suffer the one to destroy the other. . . "
'See Stephen Bann's commentary on Ruskin's 'True and False Griffins" in his introduction
to Frankenstein, Creation, and Monstrosity, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion Books Ltd.,
1994), pp. 5-6. Bann states that "what is being vindicated [in the example of the "True and False
Griffins"] is the psychological truth of an aesthetic effect that is also, and crucially, the result of
patient and clear-sighted observation." And the result, I would also add, of imaginative excava-
tion, dissection, and reconstruction as the following quote from Ruskin indicates.
'The best book on experimental realism is Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening:
Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983).
Dissection has been the root metaphor for active "experimental" imagination (as opposed to pas-
sive observation) since Bacon and Locke.
'" Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire Raisonne de I ' architecture frangaise du Xle au XVe
siecle, 10 vols. (Paris: Bance and A. Morel, 1854-1868). I have also drawn on the English trans-
lations of a few key entries from the Dictionnaire in The Foundations of Architecture: Selections
from the Dictionnaire Raisonne, intro. Barry Bergdoll and trans. Kenneth D. Whitehead (New
York: George Braziller, 1990). All other English translations are my own.
"See my "Architecture under the Knife: Viollet-le-Duc's Illustrations for the Dictionnaire
Raisonn6 and the Anatomical Representation of Architectural Knowledge," M.A. thesis, McGill .
University, 1995.
54 PAROLES GELEES
'^ My understanding of "imagining technologies" is inspired by Patrick Maynard's The En-
gine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography {Uhaca: ComeU UP, 1997); however, for
the larger issue of "deletion and supplementation" in "worldmaking" see Nelson Goodman, Ways
ofWorldmaking (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1978). pp. 14-16.
"I have provided a more in-depth account of the historical development of the exploded view
in my M. A. Ihesis, Architecture under the Knife. See footnote 11.
'■' J.P.F Deleuze's Histoire et Description du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, 2 vols. (Paris,
1823), pp. 670-72., lists extensive numbers of exploded skulls, hands, and feet in Cuvier's Gallery
of Comparative Anatomy.
"Jean-Marc Bourgery, Traite complet de I 'anatomic de I 'homme, comprenant la medicine
opiratoire, par M. le Dr. J.M. Bourgery, avec planches lithographiees d'apres nature, par
N.H. Jacobs, 8 vols. (Paris: C.A. Delaunay, 1831-1854). Etienne-Jean Del^cluze's reviews ap-
peared under the following titles: "Des travaux analomiques de M. le Docteur Bourgery," Revue
de Paris 3 ser. 17 (Mai 1840a), p. 210, and 'Traite complet de I'anatomie de I'homme, comprenant
la Medicine opdratoire par M. le docteur Bourgery, avec planches lithographiees d'apres nature,
par N.H. Jacob." Feuilleton du Journal des Debats ( 1 5 Novembre 1 834). Aside from the Traite
complet, Viollet-le-Duc owned Bourgery's Expose philosophique du systime nerveux (Paris.
1844) and Anatomie microscopique de la rate dans I'homme et les mammiferes (Paris, 1843).
"This quote and the following are taken from M6rimee's review of volume one of the
Dictionnaire which appeared in Le Moniteur universel, samedi 30 decembre 1 854.
"Hilary Komblith. Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground: An Essay in Naturalistic
fpwremo/ogy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 15. See also Ian Hacking's informa-
tive articles on natural kinds: "Natural Kinds," Perspectives on Quine, eds. Robert B. Barrett and
Roger F. Gibson (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 129-41; and "A Tradition of
Natural Kinds," Philosophical Studies 61 (1991). pp. 109-26. Hacking makes it clear that the
concept of natural kinds was revived by the classificatory sciences — primarily biology — in the
19*^ century.
"The striking use of the scientific imperative (let's) and ostensive language (this) in this
short sentence is, in fact, ubiquitous throughout the Dictionnaire.
"Viollet-le-Duc classified the high Gothic churches into the following regional schools: Ile-
de-France, Champagne, Picardy, Burgundy. Anjou and Maine, and Normandy.
^"The ideal body is a thirty year-old Caucasian male "dou6 des plus heureuses proportions."
^' Whether this is a vicious or productive methodological circle is still debated within the
scholarship on Viollet-le-Duc.
"Goodman, Ways ofWorldmaking, p. 10: "I say 'relevant' rather than 'natural' for two
reasons: first, 'natural' is an inapt term to cover not only biological species but such artificial
kinds as musical works, psychological experiments, and types of machinery (including imagina-
tion technologies such as VioUet-le-Duc's Gothic Architecture); and second, 'natural' suggests
some absolute categorical or psychological priority, while the kinds in question are rather habitual
or traditional or devised for new purposes."
Works Cited
D' Alembert, Jean le Rond. Preliminary Discourse on the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Trans. Rich-
ard N. Schwab. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.
Bergdoll, Barry. Leon Vaudoyer: Historicism of the Age of Industry. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press and Architectural History Foundation, 1994.
Bernard, Claude. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. Trans. Henry Copley
Greene. New York: Dover, 1957.
Bourgery, Jean-Marc. Traill complet de I'anatomie de I'homme, comprenant la medecine
MEMORY AS CONSTRUCTION 55
operatoire, par M. le Dr. J.M. Bourgery, avec planches lithographiees d'apres nature,
parN.H. Jacobs. 8 vols. Paris: C.A. Delaunay, 1831-1854.
Coleman, William. Georges Cuvier, Zoologist: A Study in the History of Evolution Theory.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard, UP, 1964.
Daston, Lorraine and Peter Gallison. "The Image of Objectivity." Representations 40 (1992):
81-128.
Delecluze, Etienne-Jean. "Traite complet de I'anatomie de I'homme, comprenant la Medicine
operatoire, par M. le docteur Bourgery, avec planches lithographiees d'apres nature, par
N.H. Jacob." Feuilleton du Journal des Debats 15 Novembre, 1834.
. "Des travaux anatomiques de M. le Docteur Bourgery." Revue de Paris. 3 ser. 17 (Mai
1840a).
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Vintage, 1973.
Merimee, Prosper. Lettres aViollet-le-Duc {\%'i9-\%lQ). Ed. Pierre Trahard. Paris: Librairie
Ancienne Honore Champion, 1927.
Outram, Dorinda. Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science, and Authority in Post-Revolutionary
France. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984.
Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. Vol 3. New York: John Wiley & Son, 1866.
VioIlet-le-Duc, Eugene. Discourses on Architecture. 2 vols. Trans. Benjamin Bucknell. New
York: Grove Press, 1959.
. Dictionnaire Raisonne de I' architecture fran^aise du Xle au XVe siecle. 10 vols. Paris:
BanceandA. Morel, 1854-1868.
. The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonne. Intro. Barry
Bergdoll and trans. Kenneth D. Whitehead. New York, George Braziller, 1990.
List of Dlustrations
1 . Eugene VioUet-le-Duc, Drawing of a Chimera, support for a dormer window, Pierrefonds,
Compositions et dessins de Viollet-le-Duc, 1884. (Photo Northwestern University Library)
2. Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, Drawing of a Cat, support for a dormer window, Pierrefonds, Com-
positions et dessins de Viollet-le-Duc , pi. 58, Paris, 1 884. (Photo Northwestern University
Library)
3. Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, Exploded view of a vault springing, Dictionnaire Raisonne, vol. 4,
p. 93, pi. 48 ter, 1859.
4. Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, Exploded view of a nave wall construction, Notre-Dame at Dijon,
Dictionnaire Raisonne, vol. 4, p. 141, pi. 80, 1859.
5. Georges Cuvier, Exploded view of vertebrae from a Mastodon, Recherches sur les Ossemens
Fossiles, atlas 1, p. 23, 1834-1836. (Photo Northwestern University Library)
6. Exploded view of a skull, Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, Museum d'Histoire Naturelle,
Paris, 1853.
7. N.H.. Jacob, Disarticulated skull with three exploded cervical vertebrae, J.B..M. Bourgery,
Traite complet de I'anatomie de I'homme, vol.1, pi. 30, Paris, 1832. (Photo Osier Library
of the History of Medicine, McGill University)
8. Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, Bird's-eye view of an Ideal Cathedral, Dictionnaire Raisonne, vol.2,
p. 234, pi. 18, 1854.
Cliches of Unity: History and Memory in Postwar
French Film
Marc Siegel
The final scene of Claude Autant-Lara's 1947 film, Le diable au corps,
takes place at Marthe's funeral. As the pallbearers carry her coffin down
the church steps, they hear the bells, raise their heads, and smile. The bells
ring out peace, the Armistice, thus the end of World War I. But for Frangois,
Marthe's lover, who hovers in the background, the funeral is not a day for
rejoicing. "Go hang your flags!" he shouts as he retreats into the darkness
of the church. His personal grief, however, is no match for the pallbearers'
joy. In the foreground of the image, they continue walking into the light of
day (the brightness of the country's future?), while Fran9ois, with his memo-
ries of Marthe, remains in the shadows behind them.
With its juxtaposition of two different orders of commemorative events,
Marthe's funeral and Armistice Day, this overdetermined image can serve
as a starting point for a consideration of the complex relationship between
history and memory in postwar French film. After World War II, French
society was divided by internal conflicts stemming from competing opin-
ions about the war, the Occupation, Vichy, and the Resistance. According
to Henry Rousso, the bitter experiences under the Nazi Occupation and the
Vichy Regime resuscitated a history of ideological differences among the
French people dating as far back as the Revolution. Of these various
"guerrels]franco-frangaise[sJ" the Occupation has remained the most di-
visive, as a result largely, though not exclusively, of the significance of the
home-grown Vichy regime. As Rousso notes, "civil wars have always been
the hardest to deal with afterward, for in a foreign war the enemy goes home
when hostilities end — in a civil war the 'enemy' remains" (8). De Gaulle's
triumphant return to France in 1944 was in itself insufficient cause for the
unification of the country after such a hostile civil war. Whence the emer-
gence and importance of what Rousso calls the "Gaullist resistancialist myth,"
a unifying vision for the country with the "unavowed objective [of present-
ing] an interpretation of the past in light of the urgent needs of the present"
(18). This myth served in part to subsume the bitter personal differences,
among the French beneath the image of an eternal France united in resis-
tance to external enemies.
Made soon after De Gaulle's return, Le diable au corps is an adaptation
of Raymond Radiguet's 1923 novel by the prolific "tradition of quality" screen-
writers Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. The novel is a remembrance of the
57
58 PAROLES GELEES
adolescent narrator's torrid love affair with an older soldier's wife during
World War I. Claude Autant-Lara has explained that he was led to make the
film because he saw Radiguet's book as an "anti-war novel" (qtd. in Truffaut
236). Instead of making an anti-war film, one that could explicitly draw
attention to the complexity of emotions raised by World War II, Autant-Lara
retained the time period of the Radiguet novel. His turn to the past, how-
ever unwittingly, exemplifies one of the central components of the
resistancialist myth, the assertion of a "thirty years' war." By forging a link
between the two wars, GauUism attempted to suppress the disparate per-
sonal memories of the Occupation in favor of the more unified image of
World War I remembrance — Armistice Day (Rousso 22).
Marthe's funeral scene, as described above, depicts the occurrence of
two different commemorative events, the funeral and Armistice Day, indi-
cating two different orders of memory, personal and national. In a crucial
departure from the novel, the film joins in one image these two competing
relationships with the past. In fact the desire for some kind of unification of
memory within history was apparently so great that the filmmakers created
Marthe's funeral scene (nonexistent in the novel) and set it on Armistice
Day. This can be viewed as an attempt to remember Marthe's death, and the
death of her relationship with Fran9ois, through the lens of the Armistice.
More specifically, it can be seen as an effort to suppress personal memory in
favor of history. As Pierre Nora notes, "history is perpetually suspicious of
memory and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it" (9).
This Gaullist revisionism runs counter to the interests of the novel within
which the order of personal memory, specifically childhood memory, reigns.
In spite of appearances, however, nothing in the world has the power to age us, and it
was as a child that I took part in the adventure which a grown man might well have
found confusing. I was not the only one. My comrades will retain of that epoch a
memory unlike that of their elders. Let those already hostile to me consider what the
war meant to many very young boys: a four year holiday. (9)
From the perspective of the twelve-year-old narrator, the war offered great
liberties. His parents and schoolmasters, conveniently distracted by the grave
events, did not pay such close attention to his comings and goings. Thus his
relationship with Marthe and his corresponding series of truancies were
allowed to flourish. The intensity of the narrator's personal concerns was
such that even the collective celebration on the occasion of the Armistice
could not distract him from his "four year holiday."
CLICHES OF UNITY 59
I must confess that this rejoicing inspired me with little envy. I considered that I alone
was capable of feeling emotions which are attributed to the crowd. I looked for patrio-
tism, but in my unfairness, perhaps, I saw only the gaiety of the unexpected
furlough . . . This spectacle, which I had thought would distress me, or make me jeal-
ous, or even infect me with the contagion of a sublime emotion, seemed as dull to me as
any Saint Catherine's day. (135)
The novel, with its depiction of a dull Armistice unable to infect the
narrator's emotions, differs from the film in which the first signs of peace
are celebrated precisely /or their abihty to disrupt the couple's union. Leav-
ing Marthe's house after peace has been declared, Francois is chastised by
the landlords. Laughing at him, they place their flags into position outside
their window. Though Marthe's neighbors had previously expressed their
disapproval of her adulterous relationship by turning their heads, they now
do so by displaying their flags. Thus what was previously a moral conflict
in a small town has taken on national proportions. Separating the couple
has become a patriotic gesture.
Cloaked in patriotism, this attack on Marthe's sexual relationship by
fellow French citizens raises the specter of France's postwar purge, in which
women were publicly humiliated as punishment for their sexual relation-
ships with the Germans. The juxtaposition of Marthe's funeral scene with
Armistice Day thus takes on connotations specific to World War II. For her
death may be read as a punishment for her wartime sexual relationship with
not an external but an internal enemy. In this reading of the film, Marthe's
death appears to be a necessary sacrifice that paves the way for the nation's
future.
As expressed in the novel, however, Marthe's death is linked instead to
the future of the couple's child. "In the end order takes things in hand. Had
I not just learned that Marthe had died calling for me, and that my son
would have a reasonable life?" (144). This order which organizes the events
of memory into some kind of timeless meaning ("my son [will] have a rea-
sonable life"), is not the order of patriotism, or GauUism, which emerges in
the film. Yet, both means of transmitting memories from one generation to
another — the metaphysical order invoked by Radiguet's narrator and the
Gaullist myth reflected in the film — are relics of the past, according to Pierre
Nora:
We have seen the end of societies that had long assured the transmission and conserva-
tion of collectively remembered values, whether through churches or schools, the fam-
ily or the state; the end too of ideologies that prepared a smooth passage from the past
to the future or that had indicated what the future should keep from the past — whether
for reaction, progress, or even revolution. (7)
60 PAROLES GELEES
Order can no longer be expected to "take things in hand" because memories
are not so easily gathered together. They escape containment and instead
secrete themselves within what Nora calls lieux de memoire, or symbolic,
material, and functional sites of memory.
The Gaullist desire for unity in the face of conflict and ambiguity is
perhaps what Gilles Deleuze refers to as the "properly French 'dream'" which
hindered the creation of a new cinematographic image in postwar France
{Cinema I 211). Seeking a smooth passage from the past to the future,
French cinema attempted to reconstruct what Nora might call milieux de
memoire, or "real environments of memory" (7). In Le diable au corps, for
example, the relationship between the present and the past is not mediated
by lieux de memoire. Instead, these different temporalities are united within
individual consciousness as signaled by the use of the flashback. The flash-
back, often used in New Wave films to emphasize a disjuncture between
past and present — the films of Alain Resnais are exemplary in this regard —
is employed by Autant-Lara to suggest the possibility of an unbroken conti-
nuity between memory and experience. The subject thereby remains intact
as the transmitter of memory from one discrete present to another. Without
any intermediary between memory and experience, the "spatio-temporal co-
ordinates which were left over from the old Social Realism" remained domi-
nant (Deleuze, Cinema I 213).
The Cahiers du Cinema critics also bemoaned the inability of French
postwar cinema to create a new image. Fran9ois Truffaut, for instance, in
his diatribe against the "tradition of quality" films, points to Jean Aurenche
and Pierre Host's theory of equivalence as one stumbling block. By substi-
tuting equivalent scenes in the screen adaptation for presumably unfilmable
ones in the original, Aurenche and Host privilege, according to Truffaut, the
literary idea over the mise-en-scene. These equivalent scenes are only ways
"of resolving on the soundtrack problems that concern the image, plunder-
ing in order to no longer obtain anything on the screen but scholarly fram-
ing, complicated lighting-effects, and 'polished' photography" (Truffaut 230).
In other words, the tradition of quality directors were simply metteurs-en-
scene. They created a polished image without developing a new visual style.
For Jacques Rivettc, this new visual style could only emerge when linked to
"a conception of the new world:"
I defy anyone ... to find any conception of the world in Clouzot's films, or Becker's or
Clement's films. At very best it would be a conception of the world that is banal,
literary, and twenty or thirty years out of dale. (Bazin et al. 34)
CLICHES OF UNITY 61
By linking the creation of a new image to a conception of a new world,
Rivette echoes Deleuze's claims that a new cinema can only come about
when the spatio-temporal coordinates of the old world, the old literary real-
ism, are recognized as "out of date."
One of the escape routes from the old world taken up in New Wave
films, according to Deleuze, is the "voyage-form" (Cinema I 215). In the
movements of New Wave narratives, the journeys of the characters through
the city or from the city to the provinces, the coordinates of a new world are
mapped out. By forging new spaces, the New Wave characters generate as
well kinks or breaks in the sensorimotor mechanism which enabled them to
function so smoothly in the "old world." Exemplary of the voyage-form is
Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour I'echafaud (1957), an early New Wave film
that depicts two generations of lovers implicated in two different murders.
The movement of the world in Ascenseur pour I'echafaud is ironically
generated by a central character's immobility (Deleuze, Cinema II 60).
Julian's murder of his boss, designed to ensure his and his lover's (the boss's
wife's) freedom, only leads to his own more severe immobility. When an
efficient building attendant turns off the power, Juhan finds himself trapped
in the elevator. His inability to meet his lover Florence leads her to wander
aimlessly throughout the streets, while his abandoned automobile becomes
the means by which the young couple, Louis and Veronique, move from the
city to the suburban motel. Since the characters cannot be said to generate
the reasons for their own actions, they would seem to be implicated in what
Deleuze calls "white events, events which never truly concern the person
who provokes or is subject to them, even when they strike him in the flesh"
{Cinema I 207).
For Deleuze, white events occur in a disconnected world where charac-
ters' actions do not effectively unify dispau^ate spaces. Though Florence's
initial wanderings throughout the city are motivated by a desire to find Julian,
her actions only serve to map out the coordinates for a new spatiality of the
city, "the city as horizontal or at human height" (Cinema I 207). Louis and
Veronique' s horizontal movement leads them away from the city. In their
flight they link up with the German tourists who redirect them to a new
space, the motel. Even Julian, though confined to the elevator, etches out
the lines for a different, in this case, vertical space, the burrow of the eleva-
tor shaft. These chance actions suggest the spatial configurations of a dif-
ferent world, a world in which connections between situations, actions, and
reactions are not predictable or formalizable. Without the usual unifying
links between movement and action, the only place in this world where one
can find unity is within what Deleuze calls "the cliche."
62 PAROLES GELEES
We ask ourselves what maintains a set in this world without totality or linkage. The
answer is simple: what forms the set are cliches, and nothing else. Nothing but cliches,
cliches everywhere ... (Cinema 1 208)
These cliches, which surround us and invade our psyche, are images or
conceptions of the past which circulate in the present. These could be both
literal images, like snapshots for instance, or figurative, mental images.
The opening scene of Ascenseur eslabUshcs the importance of the clichd
as a reference point in the film. An extreme close-up of Florence's face
introduces her character as she proclaims her love and her desire to join her
lover: "You know I'll be there. I'll never leave you." We then cut to Julian
also proclaiming his love. The passion expressed by the lovers suggests a
physical proximity. Through alternating zooms-out, however, they are each
revealed within separate, enclosed spaces — Florence within a phone booth;
Julian within a modem high-rise. Their only connection with each other is
through the phone lines over which they express a desire to be together.
Florence's emphatic demand ("Kiss me!") only reinforces our awareness of
the spatial distance between them and calls attention to its incommensura-
bility with their passion. In contrast to Le diable au corps where the lovers'
expression of passion is coincident with their physical proximity, Ascenseur
presents us with an image of passionate embrace as an impossibility. The
disjunction between Florence and Julian's dialogue and their situation thus
reveals this image of lovers as a cliche.
In such a love story it is only appropriate that Florence and Julian's
eventual union occurs within the space of another cliche, the photo. After
her wanderings, Florence finds herself in darkroom. Here we (and she)
encounter(s) the first literal image of the lovers united within a single space
and time. A close-up reveals the image appearing within the photographic
liquid, while on the soundtrack the detective provides his reading of the
photo, namely that it proves their guilt. Visually, this scene recalls the
opening moments of the film, as an extreme close-up of Florence's well-lit
face in an undifferentiated dark space dominates the screen. As in the scene
where she was only linked to JuHan by the phone lines and their jointly
invoked image of a passionate embrace, her connection to him here is medi-
ated through the photo/cliche. Unable to touch her lover, she contents her-
self by "reading" the photos with her hands. Revealed in a close-up, her
hands arrange the images in the liquid while we hear her attempting to
arrange her memories in her head: "I did love you. But we are together.
Somewhere. We are together." Florence is so enraptured by the image of
passionate love that she ignores the image's signification as proof of her
CLICHES OF UNITY 63
guilt (for involvement in the plot to murder her husband). This relationship
between a photo and the past is not missed by the detective beside her. Nor
does it escape Louis who has entered the darkroom in an attempt to recover
another photo precisely because he knows that it proves his culpability in
the murder of the German tourists.
In contrast to Florence and Julian, the younger generation, Louis and
Veronique, displays an acute awareness of the signification of cliches. In
our first glimpse of Louis, he is assessing himself and his new leather jacket
in a reflection on the wall while Veronique is praising a romanticized image
of Julian Tavernier. Noting Tavemier's paramilitary action in Indo-China,
North Africa, and the Foreign Legion, his "English chic," and his success-
ful present career as a businessman, Veronique fantasizes about a life she
could only "dream of." For Louis, however, these comments, which glorify
a continuum between war and business, are "outdated." Later in the film
Veronique also reveals a sensitivity to the contemporary function of the
cliche. When she realizes that her and Louis' actions, namely stealing cars
and killing tourists, will lead to their separation by the police, she takes
comfort in the existence of another world, that of newspaper photos: "They ' 11
separate us. We'll only be together on the front page." As their love is
inevitably destined to become a cliche, she suggests that they end their own
lives in order to generate a caption for the front page photo: "Tragic Lov-
ers." Louis' desire not to "leave any traces," and Veronique's awareness of
the power of providing captions for her newspaper photo distinguish them
from the older generation that still believes in a smooth passage from past to
future. As Louis tells the middle-aged German tourist, Louis' generation
"thinks of other things, four years of Occupation, Indo-China, and Alge-
ria." The younger generation's present alienation then is derived in no
small part from an awareness of the failure inherent in unifying complex
experiences, in obscuring attention to the traces of those memories which
remain in the present. That Louis and Veronique's movements in the film,
however, are still circumscribed by traces of Tavemier's identity — his car,
gun, camera, and jacket — positions them as the prototypical New Wave char-
acters in embryonic form.
With its reconfiguration of space and its relegation of unity to the closed
set of the cliche, Ascenseur pour iechafaud offers a conception of the world
that is anything but "banal, literary, and twenty or thirty years out of date."
In contrast to Le diable au corps, which attempts to contain personal memory
within the continuum of history, Malle's film suggests instead that memory
often escapes history's grasp, that memory, as Pierre Nora has noted, ac-
crues into locahzable sites. These lieuxde memoire are "moments torn away
64 PAROLES GELEES
from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet
death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded"
(12). By acknowledging these sites of memory, by attempting to incorpo-
rate, not brush away, "the shells on the shore," Malle's film and the New
Wave films that followed it generated new possibihties for the cinemato-
graphic image.
Marc Siegel is a doctoral student in Film Studies at UCLA.
Works Cited
Bazin, Andre, et al. "Six Characters in Search of auleurs: A Discussion about the French Cin-
ema." Trans. Liz Heron. Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New
Wave. Ed. Jim Hillier. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985, 31-46.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema I: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota?, 1986.
. Cinema II: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1989.
Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les lieux de memoire." Trans. Marc Roudebush.
Representations 26 (Spring, 1989): 7-25.
Radiguet, Raymond. Devil in the Flesh. Trans. Kay Boyle. New York: Signet, 1949.
Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944. Trans. Arthur
Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.
Naming la Guerre sans nom: Memory, Nation and
Identity in French Representations of the Algerian
War, 1963-1992
Naomi Davidson
Introduction: History, Memory and the Nation
Historian Jean-Pierre Rioux proclaims that
De memoire nationale fran9aise du conflit algerien, il n'y en eut pas depuis 1962;
jamais ne furent rendus a cette guerre sans nom les honneurs de la memoire. On
pardonnera la brutalite de ces affirmations, qui peuvent choquer tel membre de tel
groupe qui entretient avec ferveur son souvenir propre de la tragedie. Mais I'evidence
est massive, a repetition, et des lors, indiscutable: dans la memoire metropolitaine,
cette guerre fut a la fois 'un fantome,' un tabou... (Rioux 499)
Inherent in this assertion that there is no French national memory of
the Algerian War even though the individual groups that comprise France
may hold their own memories of the event is Rioux's proposal that such a
thing as metropolitan France exists. The "metropolitan memory" in which
the war is taboo does not include the memories of "certain groups" whose
own recollections do not fit into the metropole's vision. Thus those who
participate in the naming of the war as "la guerre sans nom," subscribing to
the French national representation of the war, are properly French, whereas
the marginalized groups with their own stories are not. Rioux's statement
that a collective memory of the war exists (along with the absences associ-
ated with it that represent group memories, silenced by the national memory)
implies that France is a country still united by a common historical experi-
ence and memory, even though segments of its citizenry lived that experi-
ence in very different ways. The nineteenth-century French historian Ernest
Renan also considered the issue of memory:
L'oubli, et je dirai meme rerreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la creation
d'une nation, et c'est ainsi que le progres des eludes historiques est souvent pour la
nationality un danger. L' investigation historique, en effet, remet en lumiere les faits de
violence qui se sont passes a I'origine de toutes les formations politiques . . . L' unite se
fait toujours brutalement. (Renan 891)
So, rewritten in Rioux's words, investigating, representing, and remem-
bering the Algerian War would be detrimental to maintaining a "memoire
metropolitaine." The "events" in Algeria, resulting in the origin of two new
65
66 PAROLES GELEES
political formations, a France sans empire and an independent Algeria, were
certainly violent.' Yet in this case, brutality brought not unity, but a terrible
rupture. In forgetting, or seeming to forget the war, French hegemonic
powers (the government ministries responsible for museums and memorials
and schools in particular) are able to preserve a semblance of national unity.
But from the very beginning of the post-war period, with the "return" of
pied noir families to France, and throughout years of immigration from
Algeria, the war memories of these disparate groups have been far from
forgotten. Their representations of the war are problematic, for they com-
promise the idea of France as a unified nation. Rioux is sure that it is quite
logical for metropolitan France to lack a coherent national memory or com-
memoration of the events in Algeria. But is it any more reasonable to insist
on the existence of a collective memory of France's previous wars? In creat-
ing or identifying a national memory of a war (or any other central histori-
cal event) the creators and participants in this memorializing process are
also engaging in the creation of the nation itself by using the war as a means
to define what it means to be a member of the nation. In briefly examining
these "national memories" of the two World Wars, it should become clear
that the representations of the events center upon establishing France as a
nation with certain core values. In the case of the Algerian war, the lack of
such a culture would suggest that the guardians of French culture, be they
textbook authors or museum curators, did not deem it appropriate to defin-
ing France's character or status as a nation. The individual group memories
to which Rioux refers in his above statement effectively tear at the fabric of
the tricolore and all it is meant to represent.
Pierre Nora, in his influential Les lieux de memoire, discusses the dif-
ference between history and memory. This clarification is helpful in at-
tempting to establish what exactly is present or absent in France from 1962
onwards in relation to the Algerian war. If we accept his definition, which
follows, what seems to be absent in French national discourse is not a memory
(or memories) of the war but a history, or coherent narrative, of the events in
question. Taking Nora's analysis farther, this absent history, if it did exist,
would in some ways function as a meta-narrative, or as the commemorative
culture that is said to have existed after each of the world wars and which
was instrumental in defining the French nation.
Memory, according to Nora's definition, is "par nature, multiple et
d^multipliee, collective, plurielle, et individualis^e." History, on the other
hand, "appartient k tous et k personne, ce qui lui donne vocation ^ I'universel"
(Nora xix). For Nora, history and memory are not only quite different beasts,
NAMING LA GUERRE SANS NOM 67
they are also engaged in a power struggle over the past. History, "se
decouvrant victime de la memoire [fait] effort pour s'en delivrer." History's
raison-d'etre is to critique memory, its avowed enemy; "la mission vraie [de
I'histoire] est de detruire [la memoire] et de la refouler. L'histoire est
delegitimisation du passe vecu . . . [elle n'est] pas I'exaltation de ce qui s'est
veritablement passe, mais sa neantisation" (Nora xx).
Thus when Rioux claims absence of memory, when he describes what
seems to be missing from official French discourse, he is actually talking
about an entirely different thing, a lack of a national history of the Algerian
War. What exists in France, from 1963 to 1992 (the 30th anniversary of the
signing of the Evian Accords, which ended the Algerian War), is a collec-
tion of memories that historians have sought to delegitimize, relying rather
on military or political analyses of the war that do not necessitate the inter-
rogation of France as a nation. Pieds noirs, French veterans and harkis
(Algerians who fought for the French army during the w£ir), anti-war activ-
ists, and French citizens of Maghrebian descent who arrived in France be-
fore and after the war, are some of the groups that "fervently maintain" their
memories of the war, not to mention the different memories experienced by
men and women, and members of different social classes. These memories
are maintained through autobiographies, films, novels, yearly celebrations
and reunions of pied noir or veterans' organizations, and oral histories.^
These sets of representations of lived pasts have not coalesced into a "na-
tional" memory; there is no official commemorative culture surrounding la
guerre d'Algerie, nor is there an accepted, government-sponsored version
of the war.^ However, this begs the question of why there is such resistance
to writing histories or creating commemorative cultures which would en-
large the frameworks that define the boundaries of Frenchness.
Like other wars, the Algerian War has served the guardians of French
culture as a tool for identifying what is and is not French. The insistence on
a lack of discourse about the war and the devaluation of memories which do
exist have begun to give way towards official inclusionary gestures intro-
ducing new paradigms of Frenchness, such as a 1992 museum exhibit about
the war. But the exhibit is a brilliant representation of history which con-
ceals "France" as subject, a phenomenon explained by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak: "[a]lthough the history of Europe as subject is narrativized by the
law, political economy and ideology of the West, this concealed subject pre-
tends it has 'no geo-political determinations'" (Spivak 271-72). The gov-
ernment-sponsored paradigms of Frenchness constructed as a response to
the Algerian War are still based firmly in a hegemonic conception of the
68 PAROLES GELEES
nation, one which incorporates its diverse citizens into a new but still rig-
idly defined community that reproduces and re-authorizes the center-pe-
riphery relationship of the colonial period.
I: Imagining France after World Wars I and II, or Constructing a
Nation
Collective cultures and national memories which surround wars exist
because someone creates them, and they represent a selection from among
the memories of an event and an erasing of those not valued in the
commemorator's context. In the cases of the two World Wars, there are
lovingly constructed national images and fictions to be found in "official"
French discourse, that which is propagated by museums, school curricula,
memorial commemorations, and statues. La Grande Guerre, the first World
War, "malgre toutes ses horreurs, est trop belle, trop consensuelle, trop
glorieuse. EUe evoque certes avant tout le deuil, le sacrifice des poilus,'*
mais elle rappelle aussi la victoire incontestable d'une nation en armes,
unie pour defendre le sol de la patrie, elle fait revivre les demiers jours
d'une splendeur passee" (Frank 604). Although we might question many of
the assertions about the first World War made in this statement, it is never-
theless this representation of the war that continues to serve in official ca-
pacity; certainly the "splendid past" of pre-World War I France was not
quite so splendid for all sectors of French society.^
As Daniel Sherman suggests, during
the interwar period in France the urgency of injunctions to remember the experience of
the Great War produced what amounted to an entire culture of commemoration. Just
as experience itself is far from an unproblematic concept, commemoration privileges
certain kinds of experience and excludes others: it deploys and organizes not only
memory but forgetting. ("Monuments" 84)
Sherman views the culture that grew up around WW II as being prima-
rily concerned with preserving the masculine cast of the French nation; thus
the role of women during the war was recorded as that of passive supporters
and their entry into male domains was effectively erased from the official
memory of the war In lived experience, Sherman explains, the war meant
an entry for women into the workplace which had been closed to them be-
fore, while for men, the war signified separation from home and comfort.
When injured veterans returned to civilian life to find newly independent
women, they felt emasculated (ibid.). It is clear, in part from the opening of
two museums celebrating the version of WW I as recorded by Frank in the
NAMING LA GUERRE SANS MOM 69
last thirty years, that this image of la Grande Guerre continues to be culti-
vated (Sherman "Objects" 50-52). The image of France as a united and
patriotic nation is the one that is inscribed for posterity even though that
requires the forgetting of the lived experience and memories of, for example,
women. The Second World War provides an even more complicated study
of remembering and forgetting in creating a commemorative culture.
Representations of the Second World War have gone through several
metamorphoses since its end in 1945, but each wave has been concerned
with images of France as a nation. The Gaullist version of World War II
was one in which every French man, woman, and child was a courageous
resistance fighter who fought against the Nazis to protect Free France. The
mode retro of the 1970s, however, consisted of a "wave of nostalgia for the
1940s and the Occupation." Michel Foucault and others accused adherents
of the mode retro idea of history of trying to bring about "a sinister rewrit-
ing of history ... to undermine the image of heroic and widespread resis-
tance against Nazism, an image nurtured by the recently defeated Gaullists."
They also saw it as "the bourgeoisie's effort to rid itself and the nation of a
heroic image of resistance with which it felt uncomfortable and that failed
to coincide with its own role during the Occupation" (Golsan 139-41). The
difference, of course, is that the Gaullist image of Free French parachutists
is the one embraced by Gaullist textbooks, politicians' speeches, and memo-
rial statues, such as the one I saw near the bunker associated with the Battle
of the Atlantic (in Carnaret, Brittany) which, like many others, consists of a
huge granite Croix de Lorraine,^ an image of Marianne (the female visual
representation of France), and an inscription honoring the dead who fought
for La France Libre (Free France). The mode retro, on the other hand, was
propagated by the anti-Gaullist bourgeoisie (in Foucault's eyes) and was
accepted as a valid representation of France's wartime experience by politi-
cal opponents of de Gaulle. The Second World War introduces another set
of problems for those considering commemorative cultures of wars as com-
pared to their memories: cultures and representations are always intrinsi-
cally tied to the current political bent of the government, and do not neces-
sarily have anything to do with the lived experiences and memories of those
who participated in the war. In each of these collective representations of
the war, one set of memories was privileged above another set, and the op-
posing images and representations are visible only when the more recent
layers of memory are peeled back.
French historian Henry Rousso has labeled the intersection of history
and memory of the Second World War "the Vichy syndrome": the pattern of
mourning, repression, explosion of discourse, and obsession that dominates
70 PAROLES GELEES
French memory since the end of the war. Many French intellectuals con-
sider the Algerian war to be closely related to WW II in terms of the dis-
course produced about it and the problems of representing the French na-
tion, problems that do not seem quite so glaring in the case of WW I.^ His-
torian Isabelle Lambert writes that "On a 1' impression que, vingt ans apr^s,
la guerre d'Algerie n'est exprimable que par comparaison avec la Seconde
Guerre mondiale . . . Le parall^le entre maquisards fran9ais et maquisards
algeriens est facilement fait" (Lambert 557). ** Rousso makes this connec-
tion explicit when he writes that:
It is no accident that these events were all associated with times of deep crisis for France's
national unity and identity. These are the times that have left the most lasting, most
controversial, and most vivid memories — all the more so in that each new crisis has fed
upon its predecessors: the Dreyfus Affair on the French Revolution, Vichy on the Dreyfus
Affair, the Algerian War on Vichy, and so on. Memories of the past have themselves
become components of the crisis . . . (Rousso 34)
Yet, as Frank writes, "[m]eme si dans les souvenirs de 1939-1945 le
chagrin et la pitie I'emportent sur la gloire, il reste des evenements et des
heros a celebrer . . . Mais de la guerre d'Algerie que reste-t-il, sinon des
morts, faciles a honorer mais presque impossibles k commemorer?" (Frank
605).
II: Lacunae: Interrogating the "Absence" of Discourse about the
Algerian War
What, indeed, is left? French historians are hard-pressed to find rea-
sons for the French to commemorate and discuss the Algerian War, but they
are quite capable of explaining why it is not discussed. These accounts for
an absence of discourse are based either in the specific nature of the war
which does not lend itself to discussion, or to the political circumstances of
post- 1962 France which did not encourage commemorations of the events
in Algeria. The most obvious reason for discomfort in talking about the war
is related to WW II:
L'image du S.S. de la Seconde Guerre mondiale vient se superposer, consciemment ou
non, avec celle du soldat fran^ais . . . ces analogies sont nombreuses. Elles sont
incontestablement I'une des causes de ramn6sie collective et volontaire qui entoure la
guerre d' Algdric. (Lambert 557)
NAMING lA GUERRE SANS NOM 71
Lambert also suggests that the viewing of the war as a civil war has
contributed to the lack of discourse: "Ce n'est pas tant dans la guerre franco-
algerienne qu'il faut rechercher les causes du silence . . . mais plutot dans la
guerre franco-fran^aise qui oppose les partisans de I'AIgerie fran^aise a la
France" (559). Related to this issue of a civil war is the fact that the war was
never declared, and was referred to variously as a peace-keeping mission,
an insurrection, or simply "events" (Stora 13-14). Rioux proposes that the
Algerian War does not have a national memory surrounding it because "la
France . . . n' a jamais fait de la colonisation un projet collectif a large sur-
face sociale, ideologique et morale" (Rioux 500). He adds a concern of a
more physical nature when he points out that the war, unlike WW II, did not
take place in France, but in another country: "Comment . . . ne pas constater
que, pour la masse des Frangais du metropole, cette guerre n'a ni investi ni
circonscrit de lieux auxquels on puisse . . . commemorer et construire quelque
effet de memoire?" (Rioux 501). In enumerating reasons for the lack of a
collective memory of the war, none of the historians who offer them ever
interrogates the category of national or collective memory itself. Nor do
they historicize notions of "French national character," such as opposition
to torture. Their explanations for the silences are also problematic; the lack
of an official declaration of war did not seem to create any confusion over its
goal; the war's opponents and proponents both saw it as a struggle to main-
tain French imperial territory. Rioux uses the Mediterranean effectively to
separate metropolitan France and Algeria. His definition of a sense of na-
tional territory ignores pied-noir and Algerian families. These women and
men who would arrive by boatloads in 1962 had certainly experienced the
war physically as well as politically; the absence of the war's physical pres-
ence in their new territory does not seem as though it would hinder them
from talking about it. Secondly, this argument ignores the fact that the war
did take place on French soil; that Paris' own streets were as bloody as
battlefields across the Mediterranean in 1961 during a massacre of Algerian
immigrants peacefully demonstrating in support of the F.L.N., and that south-
western France housed several prison camps for Algerian revolutionaries.'
These explanations for the lack of discourse on the Algerian war are
not satisfying, but the most difficult to accept is Rioux's statement that Al-
geria is not discussed because it simply did not matter, or perhaps did not-
even exist, for metropolitan France. Before examining how integral Alge-
ria was to France's idea of nation by looking at schoolbooks, the colonial
exhibits in Paris of the early twentieth century, and other sources to deter-
mine how Algeria was represented in "French national memory" before the
war, one must first acknowledge that such a statement was written after the
72 PAROLES GELEES
loss of the war, after Algeria's independence, when it would have been much
easier to suggest that colonialism was never extremely important to France.
There is a difference between looking at what textbooks, politicians' speeches,
and posters said vis a vis Algeria's importance for French citizens and what
French citizens actually thought about Algeria and the colonial project. But
even if one cannot gauge the relative importance of Algeria in the imagina-
tion of the French masses, the emphasis placed on colonial projects by the
government leaves no doubt that Algeria was indeed important to the ruling
elite in France, if to no one else. The government, however, was not to
produce official discourse about the war after its loss, while writers, artists,
and filmmakers were left to represent the different ways the war affected
them (and the many different viewpoints of class, political orientation and
consciousness, gender, and other factors led to many different views of the
colony).'"
Algeria was, technically, a part of France in the same way as the Savoie:
Algeria was divided into three departements, which was the unit of territory
used to divide metropolitan France administratively. Thus Algeria's inde-
pendence "would . . . profoundly damage the integrity of the nation itself
in an official sense at the least (Loughlin 153)." As Elizabeth Ezra points
out in an article describing the Miss France D'Outre-mer contest of 1937, in
which the competitors were "nees de 1' alliance d'un Fran^ais avec une
Indigene de nos colonies," the interwar French government was extremely
concerned with the country's declining birthrate (which was seen as leaving
France vulnerable to Germany) (Ezra 50). The contest, whose official name
was Concours du Meilleur Mariage Colonial, was designed to encourage
Frenchmen to marry suitable indigenous women to raise the birthrate through
"I'amalgame de ces races prolifiques avec la notre" (Ezra 52). As Ezra
points out, this "was not the first time that France had appealed to its colo-
nial empire for a solution to its manpower problem: the use of colonial sub-
jects ... as cannon fodder in World War I has been well documented" (Ibid.).
The year 1930, of course, was also the centennial of Algeria's status as a
French colony, which was celebrated with great fanfare (Ageron 561,
Guilhaume 187). Colonialism, especially the French presence in the
Maghreb, created a situation where populations shifted back and forth be-
tween metropolc and colony; Algerian men often emigrated to France to
work in factories, and brought their families along after a few years. The
population of Algerians in France grew from 22,000 in 1946 to 805,000 in
1992 (Hargreaves 12-15). Like France's other territorites, Algeria provided
important material benefits to residents of metropolitan France — whether
or not they were aware of it. Posters at the Exposition Coloniale of 1931
NAMING LA GUERRE SANS NOM 73
exhorted the French to understand the intrinsic link between France and its
colonies; one reads: "FRAN(^AIS, tes colonies t'achetent, chaque annee,
des produits valant 14,000,000,000 frs. et mettent a votre disposition en
matieres premieres 8,000,000,000 frs" (Ageron 582).'-
Algeria was also essential for less material reasons. As official dis-
course in the form of textbooks and colonial exhibitions makes clear, colo-
nialism was an essential part of France's moral development. A 1933 geog-
raphy textbook for first year high school students explains, "L' expansion
coloniale de la France lui etait imperieusement commandee pour des raisons
geographiques, politiques, sociales, economiques et morales" (Fallex and
Gibert 447). Among these moral reasons cited are the need for men to
escape the suffocation of old European states and the fact that it is the role of
"civilisations dites superieures d'elever jusqu'a elles les peoples inferieures"
(Fallex and Gibert 451).
Stora injects another element into the discussion of the memory of the
Algerian war when he traces the twists and turns French political and eco-
nomic life took after 1962; representations of the war were always related to
the changing fortunes of France's leaders. He writes that the "wind of mo-
dernity" blew out the "last glimmers" of the war, that "lorsque le soldat
fran^ais rentre des Aures ou de Kabylie et la famille 'pied noir' d'Oran
debarque a Marseille, ils decouvrent une societe frangaise lancee a grande
Vitesse dans le changement" (Stora 211). Structural changes in agriculture
ended the existence of a French peasantry and the population in cities ex-
ploded (Stora 212). In addition, the war also marked Charles de Gaulle's
return to power, and the Gaullist program emphasized the "unified charac-
ter" of the French nation. During the 1960s and 70s, forty-three military
museums opened their doors all over the country; they were dedicated to
WW I, the D-Day invasion, and WW II's Resistance movement (Stora 221).
De Gaulle, because of his own Resistance experience, relied heavily on the
imagery of WW II during and after the Algerian War and thus silenced
representations of the more recent conflict (Stora 222). Propaganda posters
from 1954 to 1962 reflect the Gaullist tendency to emphasize the past and
the personal achievements of de Gaulle; one announcing his tour of France's
overseas territories in August 1956 proclaims:
De Gaulle arrive! Le General de Gaulle rHomme qui sauva la France de la defaite
et du deshonneur, De Gaulle, le Chef de la RESISTANCE et le Liberateur de la
PATRIE, arrivera . . . venez en grand nombre, sans consideration de race ni de parti
venez temoigner votre Reconnaissance a celui qui nous sauva de I'esclavage
Allemand. (Lefranc and Guichard 19)
74 PAROLES GELEES
Later posters often echo the same images from the 1940s, but those
surrounding the student revolts of 1968 reflect what can be read as repre-
sentations of the Algerian War: both are in lurid red and black, and both are
supporting de Gaulle in the June 1968 elections. One shows a barricade, a
burning car, and waving flags and reads "PAS ^A! Mais la reforme avec de
Gaulle," while the other shows a bust of Marianne on a pedestal, as a black
hand drops a bomb underneath it. "Ne vous endormez pas!" the poster
screams, "La republique est toujours en danger" (Lefranc and Guichard 32).'^
Those who participated in the 1968 revolts used the slogan "CRS-SS" (the
CRS is the French security pohce) which evoked for them memories of Al-
geria; but which others saw as an excessive comparison with the actual SS
and the events of WW II (Stora 224). In the 1980s, the rise of Jean-Marie
Le Pen's Front National gave rise to another series of representations of the
Algerian War, this time much more directly. In a 1987 speech addressed to
"jeunes beurs" (young second-generation Maghrebians), he remarked, as
the audience shouted "Algerie franqiaise" and "F.L.N, terroriste":
Si vous pretendez vivre dans vos lois, vos moeurs a vous, avec voire culture, alors il
vaut mieux que vous rentriez chez vous, sans cela tout se terminera tres mal . . . Je
voudrais dire a un certain nombre de beurs arrogants que certains des leurs sent morts
pour leur donner une pathe, et non pas pour qu'ils viennent dans la n6tre. (Stora 289-
90)
For the extreme right in the 1980s the war was an event that served to
fundamentally divide French and Arab, Algeria and France. The war, for
Le Pen, should have stopped immigration into France and preserved "French"
culture. One sees that political life and events in France have continued to
influence the layering of official, or political, representations of the Alge-
rian War.'"*
Ill: Representing the Algerian War from the "Margins," Unofficially
The infinite number of representations of the Algerian Wju- are the prod-
ucts of both the "certain groups" who produce them as well as members of
"metropolitan," that is, "mainstream," society. Among the sectors of French
society remembering and representing the war are French veterans and former
anti-war activists or opponents of the war,'' the "rapatri^s" — harkis and
pieds noirs — as well as Algerian immigrants to France. Over two million
soldiers were sent to fight in Algeria from 1954 to 1962; in 1988 the asso-
ciation for veterans of the war (the FNACA) listed 3 1 0,000 members, which
included soldiers who had fought in Morocco and Tunisia (Stora 7, Rouyard
NAMING lA GUERRE SANS NOM 75
545). There were 70,000 harki troops during the war, 50,000 of these were
sent to France in 1962. A 1989 survey places the current harki community
(the original harkis and their French-bom descendants) at 450,000 (De
Wenden 191-93).'^ As for the pied noir population, 930,000 people were
"repatriated" from Algeria in 1962 (Stora 256).'^ The statistics on Algerian
immigrants to France have been given above. All three of these populations
faced hostility upon arriving in France. Algerian immigrants faced and
continue to face racism in their movement to the metropole; soldiers were
seen as torturers, and saw themselves as having been "des chiffres insignifiants
dans I'enonce truque d'un probleme sans solution" (Stora 220). Harkis
were similarly rejected, as Andre Wormser, an administrator in the repatri-
ating of the harkis, writes. "L' ensemble de nos compatriotes, I'ensemble de
la population metropolitaine, a considere . . . tous ces harkis comme etant
des traitres" (Stora 207).'* Pied noir families were greeted upon
disembarkment by disgruntled bureaucrats forced to return from vacation to
process their papers and by metropolitan French who called them "petits
blancs," "artisans de leur propre malheur," and "blousons noirs" (Hureau
287-88). Each of these populations, as well as the different sectors of met-
ropolitan society who spent the war within the hexagon's boundaries, car-
ries its own set of representations of the war.
The voices of soldiers, pieds noirs. women, and immigrants are those
heard most often in the literature and films about the Algerian War. The
works examined in this paper range in date from 1963 to 1992, though they
are concentrated in the 1980s.'^ They are not always the products of mem-
bers of the group whose experience they seek to represent, but in that respect
they reflect the extent to which those who are not members of Rioux's mar-
ginal groups have access to a system of representations to describe the expe-
riences of a soldier, a harki, and others. The texts have little in common
save their reference to the Algerian War; some are set during or immedi-
ately following the war itself regardless of when they were written, others
are set in the 1980s and discuss the war in retrospect. Occasionally, the
works address (often implicitly) the issue of silence surrounding the war; in
doing so they respond to the reasons produced by historians to explain the
lack of discourse about it. These films and books often represent the war in
ways official discourse could not, and push at the boundaries of "Frenchness."
These texts are valuable not only because they produce sound where there is
said to be silence, but also because they testify to the existence of memories
of the Algerian War that challenge the notion that there can be one "na-
tional" experience of history. Some works go so far as to implicitly chal-
76 PAROLES GELEES
lenge the primacy of the nation itself; they do not locate the nation at the
center of the narrative, as the official cultures surrounding the two World
Wars invariably do.
The issue of discourse and silence, and the reasons for each, is most
explicitly addressed in works that focus on the experiences of soldiers, such
as Muriel ou le temps d'un retour, Alain Resnais's 1963 film, Quel petit
vela a guidon chrome aufond de la cour?, Georges Perec's 1 966 novel, Guy
Vidal and Alain Bignon's 1982 comic book Vne education algerienne, and
Mehdi Charef's 1989 novel Le harki de Meriem?^ Quel petit velo, while
the second work in chronological order, focuses on the earliest stage of be-
ing a soldier: conscription in France. In a deeply ironic critique of the
military's discourse about the army and the Algerian war, Perec, with a
manic gift for untranslatable word-play, tells the story of Karatruc (literally,
Kara-thing; Perec continually changes the second half of his character's
name) and his attempts to evade being sent to Algeria.^' Karatruc announces
one day to Henri Pollak (another foreign name!), a friend who serves as a
marshal in the army, that
le Haul, le Tres Haul (beni soit-il) Commandement aurait ddcide. Ton ne sail avec
precision si c'est sur le coup d'une implosion subite ou apr^s mainte et mures reflexions,
aurait decide done, le Haul Commandement, de confier a M le Capitaine Comman-
dant . . . I'ext^nuante tache de preparer la liste de ceux-la d'entre nous qui, a la prochaine
occasion, iront nourrir de leur sang ces nobles collines d' Afrique dont notre histoire
glorieuse a fait des terres fran9aises. II ne serait pas impossible, il serait meme prob-
able que le nom que ma famille porte avec honneur et dignite depuis cinq generations,
et qu'elle m'a livre sans tache, figurat sur cette liste. (Perec 20)
The god-like army clearly has no interest in the lives of the men it sends
to Algeria, according to Perec, nor does it respect the multicultural nature of
its population sent to defend "French lands": the name Karatruc wears so
proudly is ridiculed throughout the book. His friends, nevertheless, resolve
to help him fake an injury which will keep him from being sent off at least
for a while, during which time "peut-etre que les Alg^riens, ils finiraient
bien par la gagner leur sale guerre et que le cessez-le-feu il sera conclu et
que la paix elle est signde" (Perec 70). Although the "dirty war" is de-
scribed as belonging to the Algerians, the young men in this book see an
Algerian victory as inevitable and do not subscribe to the military's doctrine
that "la France et Dieu comptaient sur eux . . . et qu'ils tenaient bien haut le
flambeau sacr6 de la civilisation occidentale en p^ril (jaune)" (Perec 35). In
the end, the plan fails, and Karatruc is indeed sent off to Algeria rather than
being allowed to stay in Paris. His friends, remaining at home, moum his
fate: "nous pensames a la guerre, 1^-bas, sous le soleil: Ic sable, les pierres et
NAMING lA GUERRE SANS NOM 77
les mines, les froids reveils sous la tente, les marches forcees, les batailles a
dix centre un, la guerre, quoi. C'est pas joli joli la guerre, 9a non" (Perec
94). For them, the discourse of colonial pride foisted on them by the mili-
tary is meaningless; these young men know the truth about the war.
Albert, the protagonist of Vidal and Bignon's comic book Une education
algerienne, knows too. Although neither the text nor the illustrations are
particularly well done, this 1982 work still creates a representation of a
young soldier's life that echoes the testimonies of veterans in a popular
format more likely to be consumed by the public than the gymnastic writing
of Perec. Vidal and Bignon's depiction of military life leaves little to the
imagination: they recreate a brochure given to soldiers in the 1960s called
"Un ancien te parle," which assures the new soldiers that they'll soon find
friends, that they will become men whom women will adore, that their health
and spirits will improve and that they are doing their duty, unlike the intel-
lectuals. Then the authors set about showing what military life was really
like. The men spend all day grumbling about what they will do after the war
is over, bemoaning their lack of sexual contact ("Toute I'Algerie fran9aise
pour un seul cul!") or turning to each other for sex (to the chagrin of Albert,
who is aroused by dancing with "ce pede de Jean-Claude") (Vidal and Bignon
9-11). The soldiers spend their nights listening to the screams of Algerians
being tortured, which prompts Albert to curse himself for not having de-
serted (Vidal and Bignon 12). When he questions his commander about the
use of torture as a military technique, he is told "Ne faites pas trop de
reproches a I'armee. Si nous avions vraiment voulu nous transformer en
S.S., nous pouvions le faire" (Vidal and Bignon 12). At the end of the book,
after eight of his fellow soldiers are killed by friendly fire, Albert is jailed
for insubordination (he refers to Indochina and Algeria as big wastes) and
eventually returns to France physically unharmed. This text speaks to many
of the reasons given for the lack of discourse about the war, or, more specifi-
cally, about the role of the French army. It shows the soldiers wondering
why they are defending rich pieds noirs and a land they don't care to domi-
nate, why their army practices torture, and why their comrades are killed by
their own army rather than by the Arabs they are taught to fear or the O. A.S.
that they truly fear." Vidal and Bignon make use of many free-floating
representations of the Algerian experience in their story: the army of tortur-
ers, the O.A.S. terrorists waging war against the French state, and the de-
testable p/et/^ noirs, among others. The utilization of these symbols, which
immediately conjure up "Algerian War" in the French imagination, indi-
78 PAROLES GELEES
cates that there is a common frame of reference to discuss the war, even
though people from different backgrounds might not interpret these repre-
sentations in the same way.
Muriel oule temps d'un re/oMr addresses explicitly the question of memory
and reasons not to remember: more than once, characters protest, "Let's not
dig up the past," or explain "It will be a long time before I can talk about it,"
or laugh sadly, "Excuse me, I have no memory, I forget everything." Muriel
is a ghost story; its main characters are all haunted by someone or some-
thing. Helene struggles to stay afloat in a city whose street names and
bombed-out buildings keep the Second World War firmly imprinted in its
citizens' lives. Her stepson Bernard lives in his own world of war memories
and constantly replays an old film of his company while reliving the torture
and death of "Muriel," an Algerian woman. Bernard's tape never shows
Muriel, but he recounts in spectacular verbal detail her torture and death. "I
felt nothing," he says calmly as he watches the film, "I went to bed, slept
well." Yet he watches it incessantly and becomes enraged when anyone
touches the tape or his equipment. When Bernard's comrade Robert, the
leader in Muriel's torture, returns to town, Bernard nearly goes mad, and in
fact kills him by the film's end. The fight between them was sparked by
Robert's mocking of Bernard's obsession. "You want to discuss Muriel,"
Robert accuses, "Well, Muriel, that's not talked about." Muriel addresses
the question of how to represent and talk about torture, but all of the charac-
ters struggle with memories they do not necessarily want to keep with them.
The soldier in this movie is unable to reinsert himself into mainstream soci-
ety mostly because he cannot possibly express his experiences to his ac-
quaintances. All of the characters in Resnais's film, which is in fact a rep-
resentation of the effects of the Algerian War, say that it is impossible to talk
about the war. But Resnais talks about it by emphasizing its silences and
absences, and presents this as an equally vahd representation of the experi-
ence of the war.
Mehdi Charef's Azzedine, the protagonist of his 1989 novel Le Harki
de Menem, is also a veteran who "returns" to France after the war 1962.
His children are ridiculed in school by other Arab children and cannot un-
derstand how their father could possibly have fought with the French against
his own people. Most of the novel consists of Azzedine's painful remem--
brances of his experiences in the French army, which he joined because of
economic necessity, including several scenes of rape and torture. As he tells
his wife after returning from his service, "C'esteuxou nous . . . voilapourquoi
j'ai tue . . . J'ai tortur^ aussi, pour savoir ou nous attendaient ceux qui
voulaient notre mort, je leur ai fait peur pour pouvoir dormir en paix" (Charcf
NAMING LA GUERRE SANS NOM 79
128-29). Though it is clearly a shameful thing to have served in the French
army, as all Azzedine's neighbors remind him daily, he cannot help but
speak of his experiences and try to explain them to his wife. Charef 's novel
raises uncomfortable questions about Algerian identity as it relates to class;
as he experiences the war and its aftermath, Azzedine has forfeited his Al-
gerian identity because he could literally not afford to keep it. For him, the
war was a nightmare adventure that had much in common with the experi-
ences of the cartoon soldier in Une education algerienne.
Other texts are more concerned with representing the war and people's
memories of it in ways that do not make the war itself, or France and Alge-
ria themselves, the central focus of the work. These novels and films show-
case the many different ways that the people who now Uve in France may
have experienced the Algerian War, and often comment on the way people's
identities color their representations of it. One of the most evocative pre-
sentations of the world of the wealthy pied noir elite is Brigitte Rouan's
1991 film Outremer. The story is told in three parts, by the three sisters of
a rich family (one of the sisters is Rouan's mother), a device which makes
clear that even those who share the same background still experience and
therefore remember and represent the war in different ways. Each sister
recounts the same events from her perspective; thus by the end of the film,
all the gaps have been filled in our understanding of the family's life. The
oldest sister, Zon (the filmmaker's mother) begins the story in 1949, com-
plaining about the interference of the rebels in the lives of the pieds noirs;
the music for the wedding that opens the film has to compete with the Mus-
lim call to prayer. Zon's facade of a perfect marriage and beautiful children
fades quickly as the audience learns that her husband, a naval officer, is
rarely around and has just been sent away for an extended tour of duty. She
keeps up a strong Algerie frangaise front in her household, singing "Les
Africains" at Christmas with her sisters ("C'est nous les Africains . . . loyaux
a la patrie, nous serons 1^ pour mourir ^ ses pieds, le pays, la patrie, les
Gaulois") instead of Christmas songs and correcfing a daughter who re-
marks that the Arabs must be our brothers too as she learns her catechism.
Malene, the second sister, is also involved in a less-than-perfect marriage in
which her husband, the owner of a large winery, does little work and leaves
it all to her. She, unlike her husband, is cordial with the Arab workers and
knows some of them by name; but Malene is a firm believer in French Alge-
ria. As the war intensifies, her husband is threatened several times, and
they begin to suspect that their workers are planning to kill them. Gritte,
the youngest sister, is a nurse in an Arab neighborhood who begins an affair
with an F.L.N, fighter she meets there. For every comment or reference to
80 PAROLES GELEES
the war, however, Rouan shows her viewers a shot of the family's beautiful
villa, a panoramic view of the ocean and beautiful people sunbathing, the
sisters playing tennis together. She is engaged in representing the world
her mother knew, of which the war was just one part.
Outremer is also one of the few major works to focus exclusively on the
stories of women in the war; almost all of the other works examined here
leave women on the sidelines and do not address the fact that they may have
experienced the war very differently from the men in their own social groups.
For Zon, the war meant the loss of her husband, who was reported dead after
having been missing at sea for two years. She herself became ill after his
death was reported and finally died wearing his uniform. Malenc, who was
forced into the male role in her family, was killed by someone trying to
shoot her husband because it was she in the driver's seat rather than he.
Gritte survived, but her lover was one of the men killed in an ambush on her
sister Malene's land. She flees to France at the end, and the movie closes
with her seeing and hearing her sisters as she stands at the wedding altar.
Rouan tried to capture the lives of her mother and aunts as women and pieds
noirs, and succeeded in introducing another set of experiences of the war,
those of women. Their version of the war, or at least Rouan's representation
of it, related much more to their personal lives (marriages, children, lovers)
than did male versions of the war.
Etcherelli's Elise ou la vraie vie tells the story of Elise's Algerian War,
which is essentially the story of her relationship with her Algerian lover
Arezki and her politically-oriented brother Lucien. Elise, unlike her brother,
had very little consciousness of the Indochinese war; she referred to it as
"une guerre lointaine, discrete, aux causes imprecises, presque rassurante,
une preuve de bonne sante, de vitalite" (Etcherelli 23). Older, she moves to
Paris and wonders at her surroundings: the newspapers devote large amounts
of space to the deeds of the F.L.N, and Elise wonders if the Algerians on the
bus next to her are members of the group (Etcherelli 92). The first anti-war
meeting she attends is with Lucien and his lover; it is sponsored by the
workers' union to protest the death of one of its members in service in Alge-
ria. As Elise begins to get involved in the union, the overseers warn her:
"N'allez pas vous mettre dans les pattes d'un syndicat. Et nc parlez pas trop
avec les Algeriens!" (Etcherelli 118). The first time she goes out in public
with Arezki, she reaUzes the unusual nature of her situation: "J'etais avec
un Algerien" (Etcherelli 134). Elise slowly enters Arezki's world, in which
people have no fixed address, live in fear of the police, and attend secret
meetings. Though she becomes quite well-versed in the daily events of the
war and develops a strong anti-war consciousness, Elise expresses the war
NAMING L\ GUERRE SANS NOM 8 1
in relation to the man she loves: "II n'etait pas souhaitable, en ce debut de
1958, d'etre un Algerien a Paris . . . Arrestation, chomage . . . Arezki ne
s'indignait de rien . . . Et il riait de mes revoltes" (Etcherelli 226). But
while she attends a demonstration organized by the unions (which Arezki
had mocked as meaningless), he is arrested in the metro. Having recently
been fired, he has no papers and is thus at the mercy of the police. The book
ends with Elise's hopeless, frantic search through Paris streets for Arezki.
"Je pourrai bien crier," she says, "qui m'ecoutera? S'il vit, oil est-il? S'il
est mort, ou est son corps? Qui me le dira?" She finally admits that she will
never see Arezki again (Etcherelli 271-72). For Elise, the memory of the
Algerian War is certainly the memory of her union meetings and demon-
strations, but it is also the memory of her lover. Her representation of the
war could well be one of absence, the absence of Arezki's grave. It is also a
representation of the war based in the metropole, which challenges Rioux's
assertion that because the war was a distant event, there was no memory of
it.
Many Beur" novels also focus on the Algerian War specifically and
France's colonial history in general as experienced in France; they concern
themselves with the way the war has become part of the identity of anyone
living in post-colonial France. Nacer Kettane's Le sourire de Brahim ( 1 985)
and Leila Sebbar's Sherazade 17 ans, brune, frisee, les yeux verts (1982)
both address this issue in radically different styles. Kettane's earnest, awk-
wardly written, mostly autobiographical novel reads more like a speech than
fiction but nevertheless provides readers with an idea of the kinds of experi-
ences an Algerian family living in Paris during the war could expect to
have. Its most affecting sequence is the opening one, a description of the
F.L.N.'s March 17, 1961 demonstration. Brahim, Kettane's then eight-year
old narrator, remembers that
Tous semblaient k la fete, pourtant ce n'etait ni Noel ni 1' Aid. C'etait ou plutot ce
devait etre beaucoup mieux: le debut d'une nouvelle vie. Cette manifestation devait
dire non une bonne fois pour toutes a la situation de sous-hommes faite aux Algeriens
de Paris: apres vingt heures, impossible d'acheter des victuailles, de prendre I'air ou
d'aller rendre visite a des amis. Une idee geniale de Maurice Papon, prefet de
police . . . (Kettane 16)
But the idyllic chanting of Arabic slogans is disrupted by the invasion
of CRS forces, and Brahim's little brother Kader is killed. The papers the
next day made little mention of the event even though, Brahim says, the
quays of the Seine were littered with corpses and blood had flowed under
the bridges (Kettane 23). The rest of the novel is a collection of anecdotes
82 PAROLES GELEES
that each keenly demonstrate the fact that Kettane's alter ego and his family
do not hate the French; one of Brahim's best friends is Patrick, the son of
pieds noirs who were forced to leave Algeria by the O.A.S. (Kettane 36).
His father, who fought for France during WW II and spent time in prison for
it, later joined the F.L.N, and went to prison again: but he never learned to
hate (Kettane 46). The war in Le sourire de Brahim is an epic, heroic event,
a proud point of reference for Beurs. Its memory is inscribed in the immi-
grant community in France not only because of events like the 1961 demon-
stration, but because it offers them an identity other than that imposed on
them by the native-bom French.
Sebbar's Sherazade concerns itself with trying to account for every pos-
sible representation of the Algerian War in the identities of her creations.
Its cast of characters includes Beur and African teenagers, their families,
the marginalized white French teenagers who round out their group, and
the middle-aged white Frenchman who has an open-ended relationship with
the seventeen-year-old Sherazade of the title, the daughter of Algerian im-
migrants. Each chapter is a brief two or three page vignette narrated by a
different character; it is not infrequent to find a reference to the Algerian
War in many different contexts. Julien, Sherazade s would-be lover, re-
members his mother's activity as a nurse-midwife before and during the war
and his parents' lives in France after 1962, and uses the war as a marker for
his own life (he was bom one year before it) (Sebbar 20, 111 ). Farid, one of
Sherazade's crowd, reads "avec passion tout ce qui concemait la guerre
d'Algerie qu'il n'avait ni v6cue ni connue . . . il avait retrouve 1' exaltation,
la determination de ceux qui preparaient la guerre de liberation algerienne"
(Sebbar 56). Krim, another friend, calls Sherazade "harki" when she an-
swers him in French rather than Arabic (Sebbar 139). Rachid laments the
fact that his Jewish ex-girlfriend was so aware of Jewish history, whereas he
knows nothing of the Algerian war "parce que personne ne lui en avait
jamais parle" (Sebbar 164). The war is never at the foreground of the lives
of these characters — dmgs, sex, music and money are — but it is often a
point of reference or an attempt to create a proud, positive ethnic identity in
the 1980s mixture of ethnic groups that populate Paris' immigrant neigh-
borhoods.
IV Representing the War from the "Center," Officially
"La France en guerre d' Alg6rie: 1 954- 1 962," created by historians Rioux
and Benjamin Stora in collaboration with curator Laurent Gervereau, ran
from 4 April to 28 June 1992 at the Mus6e d'histoire contemporaine. Hotel
NAMING lA GUERRE SANS NOM 83
des Invalides in Paris. The exhibit signals the beginning of an attempt by
France's officialdom to begin synthesizing representations of the war from
numerous sources to create what could be called a commemorative culture
of the war, then thirty years past. The exhibit, according to Gervereau, "bien
qu'etant sur un sujet extremement controverse, n'a pas, bizarrement, re^u
d'attaque, ni du cote de I'armee, ni du cote des differentes associations ou
interlocuteurs presents en France" (Gervereau). While the exhibit may not
have been attacked, Le Monde, one of France's major newspapers, devoted
only a short column to reviewing it and dismissed its creators as having "les
yeux plus gros que le ventre" in trying to create such a synthesis (Guerrin
"Regards"). Perhaps the reviewer from Le Monde was not merely being
dismissive when he wrote that the creators of the 1992 exhibit "La France
en guerre d'Algerie" had eyes bigger than their stomachs: he wonders how
their attempt to synthesize every possible representation of the Algerian
War could be consumed by a public trying to understand or come to terms
with it. "La France en guerre d'Algerie," with contributions from male and
female Algerian and French historians, may be seen as the first step in the
creation of a "national French memory" of the Algerian war that reflects
what it means to be French after colonialism, anti-colonial struggles, and
the emergence of newly independent nations. Unlike the war museums
opened under de Gaulle, this exhibit is designed not only to expose its audi-
ence to uncomfortable topics (the use of torture by the French army, the
terrorism of the O.A.S., the treatment of pieds noirs and harkis by metro-
politan France) but to make the emphatic statement that all these subjects
must be represented to create the fullest picture of what the war signified.
The contribution to pushing back the boundaries of "Frenchness" by the
authors of the texts discussed earlier in the realm of fiction is appreciated in
the exhibit, which addresses the multiplicity of voices talking, writing, and
painting about the war. Gervereau, Rioux and Stora framed their project as
a way to talk about national identity and the Algerian War: Hureau's sec-
tion on the pieds noirs concludes by explaining that the reason the memory
of the Algerian war is so important is because it is an essential part of their
identity and must "etre, sinon partage, au moins connu de la communaute
nationale a laquelle ils appartiennent" (Hureau 288-30).^'* Stora also dis-
cusses harkis' representations of the war in terms of struggling with their
identities as French, Muslim, and Algerian (Stora "Harkis" 292). The ex-
hibit, say its makers in their conclusion to the catalogue, was necessary
because, thirty years after the war, a large part of the French population
persists in believing that "ce drame de huit ans n'a pas pose en metropole
une reelle question d'identite" (Gervereau, Rioux and Stora 304). The ere-
84 PAROLES GELEES
ators also focus on the ways in which the personal and political spheres
interacted to create specific representations of the war. The inclusion of
tabloid magazines and top-40 records next to war photographs is the best
way to recreate the war as it may have been experienced by a "typical" French
citizen. Their finished product documents both the official history of the
war (battles, statistics, treaties, parties) and the experience of la guerre
d'Algerie by the different groups in France, and suggests that it might be
possible to create a national memory of the Algerian war that is more reflec-
tive of the experiences of the entire population than are the collective cul-
tures surrounding the two World Wars.
It is hard to object to an exhibit that its creators describe as an attempt
to introduce questions about French identity. But "La France en Guerre
d'Algerie" is nonetheless a project that shares its origins with what Daniel
Sherman has identified as the cult of masculinity that arose after the first
World War and with the cult of Resistance France cultivated by dc Gaulle
after the Second World War. This 1992 cultural production must be seen as
yet another elaboration on the "national project," the attempt to create and
recreate new visions of the French nation, with "nation" being the operative
word. In many ways, the exhibit's inclusionary tactics mask its participa-
tion in the historically constituted process of nation building. Dipesh
Chakrabarty reminds us that it is difficult to, as he puts it, "liberate history
from the metanarrative of the nation state." He explains that "the reason for
this lies in what European imperialism and third-world nationalisms have
achieved together: the universalization of the nation state as the most desir-
able form of political community" (Chakrabarty 19). Chakrabarty's con-
cern lies with histories which claim to incorporate the experiences of non-
Europeans into "world" histories which ultimately subsume these other nar-
ratives under the meta-narrative of the nation, which is a European con-
struct, without ever questioning how the nation came to be paramount. I
borrow his point about Indian historiography here to argue that while
Gervereau, Stora, and Rioux were among the first to incorporate the diverse
voices and memories of the peoples who experienced the Algerian war in an
officially-sanctioned commemorative production, their final product is still
concerned with la France. They recreate France as a multicultural commu-
nity, but this representation uUimately acts as a re-authorization of certain
hegemonic discourses about nation. The exhibit's creators have added lower-
class soldiers, harkis, anti-war activists, pre- 1962 Algerian immigrants, and
pieds noirs to the "traditional" mix (Brigitte Bardot movie posters, debates
between Camus and Sartre) and stirred; the colonized and those carrying
post-colonial baggage have been brought into the fold. The boundaries of
NAMING lA GUERRE SANS NOM 85
the French nation have only been enlarged; but the historical contexts in
which they have been inscribed have not been interrogated, nor have the
frontiers simply been abolished. When official culture represents the nation
as all-inclusive, it does not really need to question the nation and its con-
struction, its right to primacy, and its universal desirability.
Conclusion: The National Project and the Dangling Conversation
In a 1992 survey of 17 to 30 year olds conducted by Paris' Institut du
Monde Arabe, 66% responded that it would be very useful for the future of
French society to talk seriously about the Algerian war (Bernard). The util-
ity of such a discussion cannot be overemphasized, especially when people
like Jean-Marie Le Pen mobilize certain representations of the Algerian
War to make explicitly xenophobic comments about North African immi-
gration. Considerations of the significance of the war are also essential in a
climate in which it is possible to argue that colonialism was never really an
integral part of the French past. But such conversations have been held
since 1954, some of them led by the artists whose work was discussed ear-
lier. The existence of memories and representations of experiences of the
Algerian War has never been in question, though it has never had an official
commemorative culture surrounding it. The problem with these representa-
tions of the war is that they often involve realigning or aboHshing "French"
borders, in terms of both geography and identity. The commemorative cul-
tures surrounding the two World Wars also revolved around difficult at-
tempts to define what it meant to be French; Vichy's scars have still not
faded from the French political and moral landscape. Yet in both those
cases, French hegemonic powers have identified national memories of the
wars, which continue to serve as representations of those periods through
the media of textbooks, museums, and statues. The lack of a commemora-
tive culture surrounding the Algerian War is not something to be lamented,
but rather an occasion to reject such a nation-building enterprise which tries
to disguise its own aims and ambitions. The unofficial artistic representa-
tions of memories of the Algerian War, as depicted by people originating
from many different places (gender, religion, class, country) in the larger
francophone world, sometimes escape Cheikrabarty's prison of the nation-
state and focus on other locations as the central points of their narratives.
These fragments should continue to serve as the commemorations of the
Algerian War. Rioux is justified in saying that there is no "metropolitan
86 PAROLES GELEES
memory" or official culture of commemoration of the war, but there should
not be as long as the colonial genealogy of nation and metropole is left
unquestioned.
Naomi Davidson is a recent graduate of Bryn Mawr College.
The author would like to thank the following people for their help in the
writing of this paper: fellow student Ansu Kuruvilla, and professors
Madhavi Kale and Azade Seyhan, all of Bryn Mawr College.
Notes
' As Anne Donadey points out, "This stable regime [the Fifth RepubUc] of which the French
are so proud, was bom out of the Algerian-French conflict, a source the French prefer not to
remember" (223).
^ 1 cannot explore these other representations and memories of Algeria and the war in this
paper, but a brief perusal oiLe Monde on significant dates relating to war anniversaries reveals
several meetings or rallies being held across France. For a discussion of oral testimonies of pieds
noirs and of veteran organizations' attempts at commemorations, see Anne Roche, "La Perte et la
parole: Temoignages oraux de pieds-noirs" and Frederic Rouyard, "La Bataille du 19 mars," in
La Guerre d'Algerie et les Franqais.
^ In fact, until 1983, history classes taught to students in their last year of school before
university ended with the Second World War (Donadey 216).
'' Poilus is a term used to describe French soldiers in WW I
' Eugen Weber titles the first chapter oi Peasants into Frenchmen "A Country of Savages,"
and cites countless characterizations of 19th century peasant life as uncivilized, sinful and miser-
able; peasants were said to live "two or three centuries behind their fellows" in terms of morality,
intelligence and physical health. The latter half of the 19th century was dedicated to civilizing the
peasant (4-5). Perhaps this would have brought them into the splendid 1 9th century mentioned in
reference to WW \.
* The type of cross associated with Jeanne d' Arc; it was appropriated by de Gaulle and his
RPR party.
^ Rousso points out that the relationship between WW II and the Algerian War is not only
evident in post- 1962 historiography, but was perceived by French citizens during the Algerian
War itself:
The war in Algeria, observed from the metropolis, was indeed a reprise of the guerre
franco- fran^aise, but only insofar as old cleavages reproduced themselves in people's
minds. What they saw, then, was not an image of the past but a transformation of that
image to suit contemporary conditions. (82)
' On the connection between la Seconde Guerre mondiale and la guerre d'Algerie, Frank
echoes Lambert in describing the French inability to recognize the torture practiced by their own
army on Algerians, given their recent history with Nazism, as a major factor in the lack of dis-
course (604).
' The events of March 17, 1961, which could very well serve as a possible date for a com-
memoration, are also linked to WW II. Maurice Papon, the police official responsible for the
orders to fire on the marchers, was convicted in April 1998 for his role in the deportation of Jews
during the Vichy regime.
NAMING LA GUERRE SANS NOM 87
'"Claire Etcherelli's 1967 novel Elise oula vraiev/e contains an interesting analysis of this
question. Elise's lover's co-revolutionary, disdainful of her participation in communist and union-
sponsored anti-war rallies, tells her that the French proletariat cares about Algeria only because
the war has driven up prices, and suggests that the only reason any French citizens ever concerned
themselves with or thought about Algeria was in its economic relation to them (2 1 2).
" Loughlin continues his analysis by saying that the successful war for Algerian indepen-
dence led regional separatists in metropolitan France to conclude that they too could break away
from Parisian hegemony; the idea of "France" as a unified nation was thus attacked from within as
well as without (160).
'^ The poster continues.
Par contre, tu dois assurer a ces
60,000.000 de travailleurs repartis sur 15,500,000 Kil. carres
LA PAIX. LA LIBERIE DE TA CIVILISATION;
pour cette oeuvre que donnes-tu?
165,000 soldats coloniaux
2,000,000.000 frs.
22,000,000,000 frs. d'affaires
assures seulement par
2,000,000,000 frs. de depenses,
Trouves-tu souvent un tel placement pour
tes capitaux?
" The refrain on the metro warning passengers to be ceaselessly vigilant shows that this
1 968 poster still finds resonance for the French government and police forces.
''• "Political" in the sense of representations made by political figures.
" These two groups were not mutually exclusive; the men called to fight in Algeria some-
times resisted the war. The years 1955 and 1956 saw many anti-war demonstrations on the part of
soldiers, up to 400 protested the war through desertion, and 25 texts produced by soldiers during
the war for public consumption detailed the methods employed by the French army in waging war
against the F.L.N. (Liauzu 276-77).
'* In 1991, Prime Minister Edith Cresson responded to the demands of the /jar^/ community
for "reconnaissance de dignite et d'identite" as well as a rehabilitation of their role in the war "dans
la memoire nationale" in the form of a statue honoring fallen Muslim soldiers by devising a plan
which dedicated 100 million francs for the families of former harkis (Rollat 6).
" They, like the harkis, demanded reparations and acknowledgment from the French gov-
ernment. In 1970, President D'Estaing provided 1 9 million francs for this purpose (Stora 260).
'* Wormser continues to say that the label "traitor" was bestowed on the harkis by the media,
teachers and politicians (especially on the left). He judges the French harshly, explaining that the
Algerians may have the right to call the harkis traitors, but that the French cannot possibly con-
sider traitorous men who, believing themselves to be part of the French empire, wore the French
uniform and fought against their countrymen. While this paper does not allow for a detailed
discussion of the motives Algerians had for joining the French army, Wormser's remarks raise
important questions about the boundaries of identity in a colonial setting: the issue of how harkis
chose to identify themselves (and how others identified them) is important in looking at fictional
representations of the war.
" This is only partially a reflection of the increased production of literature and film about
the war in the late 1970s and 1980s; it owes more to the resources available to me in the fall of
1997 when this paper was written. I should also point out that I do not intend to provide a thor-
ough literary analysis of these novels, for such a critique; see Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian
88 PAROLES GELEES
War: French Fiction and Film, 1954-1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), which was helpful
in locating appropriate novels and films. See also Alec G. Hargreaves, La Litterature Beur: line
Guide Bio-Bibliographique (New Orleans: CEFLAN Edition Monographs, 1992), which was
also useful.
^" These are fictional works; there is also a growing body of literary and cinematic testimony
from veterans of the Algerian War. One of the most recent is La guerre sans nom, Bernard Tavemier
and Patrick Rotman's 1992 documentary featuring a group of veterans relating their experiences in
the war.
^' The hapless Karatruc's mercurial name is described as "peu banal, un nom qui vous disait
quelque chose, qu'on n'oubliait pas facilement," though of course the narrator continually "for-
gets" Karatruc's real name, as he is an Armenian, a Bulgarian, "une grosse legume de Macedoine,
enfin un type de ces coins-la, un Balkanique, un Yoghourtophage, un Slavophile, un Turc" (Perec
13). Karatruc, who is being asked to die for France, is not "French," and many of the names of his
fellow soldiers also originate from other parts of the world. Perec alludes to the fact that the
glorious country whose interests the military spoke of defending was not the "purely French" state
they praised.
" L' Organisation arm^e secrfete was the army of pieds noirs who felt betrayed by de Gaulle's
acceptance of Algeria's eventual independence and attacked Algerians and French "collabora-
tors" alike.
" Beur, slang for Arab, has been claimed as a name by many second-generation Maghrebian
immigrants. Or, as Azouz Begag and Abdellatif Chaouite define it in their "Lexique des idces
arretees sur des gens qui bougent...(dans le desordre)":
Beur: mot designant une substance alimentaire, grasse et onctueuse (voir Petit Rob-
ert). De plus en plus ^crit de cette fa^on par Ics joumalistes (grosse faute
d'orthographe!...) Voudrait maintenant designer une population issue de immigration
maghrebine ... on a eu Pain et Chocolat... manquait le Beur. Decidement,
I'immigration 9a se mange bien au petit dejeuner! (Begag and Chaouite 9-10)
" Hureau's analysis of the /j/et/Ho/r community's desire to make the French nation under-
stand their past is supported by the 1 992 observances around the 30th anniversary of their "exode
d' Algerie." They and the /iarit/.y organized a weekend-long program to "celebrer la memoire mais
aussi de mettre en valeur des traditions d'hospitalite, des exemples d' integration reussie, et d'inscrire
la communauie dans 'le futur paysage cullurel europeen'" ("Plusieurs rasscmblements").
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Bernard, Philippe. "Guerre d' Algerie; la mdmoire apaisee." Le Monde 27 February 1992.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ' Indian' Pasts?"
Representations 37 (1992) 1-26.
Charef, Mehdi. Le Harki de Meriem. Paris: Mercure de France, 1989.
De Wcnden, Catherine Wihtol. "The Harkis: A Community in the Making? French and Alge-
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189-201.
Donadey, Anne. "'Une Certaine Id6e de la France': The Algeria Syndrome and Struggles over
'French' Identity." Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth Century France.
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Etcherelli, Claire. Elise on la vraie vie. Paris: Editions Denoel, 1967.
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Frank, Robert. "Les troubles de la memoire fran9aise." La Guerre d'Algerie et les Frangais:
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Guerrin, Michel. "Regards surTAlgerie." Le Monde 14 April 1992.
Guilhaume, Jean-Fran9ois. Les Mythes fondateurs de I'Algerie frangaise. Paris: L'Harmattan,
1992.
Hargreaves, Alec G. Immigration, 'race' and ethnicity in contemporary France. London: Routledge,
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tation intemationale contemporaine, 1992.
Kettane, Nacer. Le Sourire de Brahim. Paris: Denoel, 1985.
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d'histoire du temps present. Ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux. Paris: Fayard, 1990. 553-59.
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Institut Charles de Gaulle, 1980.
Liauzu, Claude. "Le Contingent: Du silence au discours ancien combattant." La France en
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Publications de la Bibliotheque de documentation intemationale contemporaine, 1992.
Loughlin, John P. "The Algerian War and the One and Indivisible French Republic." French and
Algerian Identities from Colonial Times to the Present: A Century of Interaction. Ed.
Alec G. Hargreaves and Michael J. Heffeman. Lewiston, Maine: The Edwin Mellen Press,
1993. 149-60.
Muriel ou le temps d'un retour. Dir. Alain Resnais. 1966.
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Gallimard, 1984.
Outremer Dir. Brigitte Rouan. 1991.
Perec, Georges. Quel petit velo a guidon chrome au fond de la cour? Paris: Denoel, 1966.
"Plusieurs rassemblements marquant le trentieme anniversaire du depart des Franfais d'Algerie."
Le Monde 13 June 1992.
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Henriette Psichari. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1947.
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508.
Rollat, Alain. "Plan d'urgence pour les harkis." Le Monde 1 July 1991.
Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Trans. Arthur
Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.
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I' Institut d'histoire du temps present. Ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux. Paris: Fayard, 1990.
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Sebbar, Leila. Sherazade 17 arts, brune, frisee, lesyeux verts. Paris: Roman Stock, 1982.
Sherman, Daniel. "Monuments, Mourning and Masculinity in France." Gender and History 8
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— . "Objects of Memory: History and Narrative in French War Museums." French Historical
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson, and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988.
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Decouverte, 1992.
— . "Les Harkis" La France en guerre d'Algerie. Ed Laurent Gervereau, Jean-Pierre Rioux and
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Stanford: Stanford UP, 1976.
Swann, Vinteuil et Marcel, et la memoire
involontaire
Joseph S. Jenkins
"La petite phrase" from Vinteuil's Sonata in F Sharp follows the move-
ments of Swann's love for Odette in Un Amour de Swann. The Phrase is also
a figure through which A la Recherche du temps perdu performs both the
movements of involuntary memory and the powerful images this memory can
unveil. Swann's revelations regarding Odette's love, occasioned by a perfor-
mance of the Sonata at the Sainte-Euverte (Guermantes) reception, parallel
the narrator's (Marcel's) ecstatic realization, recounted in the work's final
volume, of the nature of artistic creation and his own vocation as a writer.
Marcel there "finds" that episodes of involuntary memory liberate the
essence of things and thus make possible the work of artistic creation. A
subject accidentally experiences a sensation similar to one experienced by
that subject in its past; not only is the memory of that past sensation involun-
tarily stimulated, but so are the memories of sensations contiguous at that
prior point in time. Because the subject's perspective on all these prior sensa-
tions is one of extra- or a-temporality (it experiences them vividly — as present,
but not in the present) the "reality" of prior impressions may be perceived.
Unlike the moi of the temporal present, this essential, atemporal mot per-
ceives "reality" (including its own) free of concerns for utilitarian means and
ends (III, 872), the vicissitudes of the future, and death (873).
For this Marcel of the final volume, "reality" and the aesthetic ideal are
practically identical: both are antidotes for the ennui mondain that is chronic
in this text:
[J]'avais pu trouverle monde et la vie ennuyeux parce que je les jugeais d'apres des
souvenirs sans verite, alorsquej'avais un tel appetitde vivremaintenantque venait de
renaitre en moi, a trois reprises [de memoires involontaires], un veritable moment du
passe. (872)
This moment of truth unleashes so strong a desire that its superlative
importance cannot be denied. Marcel expresses no doubt that uncovering
subjective "first impressions" may perhaps be less important than engaging in
acts of direct political significance. For Marcel, pohtical engagement is just
an excuse to avoid more difficult work — that of plumbing the depths of the
atemporal moi (878). It is those who plumb these depths who are rewarded.
When impressions of the atemporal moi are discovered, intense (but ephem-
91
92 PAROLES GELEES
eral) joy, pleasure, felicity, beauty arc achieved; the work of the artist then is to
give expression to these impressions, to convert them to their spiritual equiva-
lents (878).
Marcel speaks of an internal book of hieroglyphic characters, of unknown
signs. Reading this book is an act of creation. But the book is relevant beyond
the individual subject into which it is incised. The very fact that impressions
leave their trace in the stuff of a subjectivity is the guarantee of their authen-
ticity (878-79). Authentic traces mark a broader truth, a shared type of emo-
tional experience, that is common to a segment of humanity, yet is beyond the
power of logic to convey (880).
These revelations are occasioned in Marcel by an unprecedented multiple
episode of involuntary memory that occurs in the final volume {Le temps
retrouve). We are invited there to consider Marcel's conclusions regarding
involuntary memory in conjunction with the story of Swann's love recounted
earlier in Un Amour de Swann:
Je sentais bien que la deception du voyage, la deception de Tamour n'^taient pas des
deceptions diff6rentes, mais I'aspect varie que prend, selon le fait auquel il s'applique,
I'impuissance que nous avons a nous realiser dans la jouissance materielle, dans Taction
effective. Et, repensant a cette joie extra-temporelle causde, soil par le bruit de la cuiller,
soit par le goflt de la madeleine, je me disais: "Etait-ce cela, ce bonheur propose par la
petite phrase de la senate a Swann qui s'^tait tromp^ en I'assimilant au plaisir de ramour
et n'avait pas su le trouver dans la creation artistique . . . ? (877)
The happiness missed by Swann is that of artistic creation. Marcel will
not repeat this mistake. Since Swann's story constitutes the past in the uni-
verse of this work, a retracing of this textual regression/deferral allows us to
follow not only Swann's various experiences of subjective impression (includ-
ing the actions of temporality on their significance) but also the text's perfor-
mance of such impressions (its simulation of them in the reader). Both for
Swann and the reader, the impressions of certain moments may be re-read
through the perspective of others.
The reader's first exposure to the Phrase is in a scene at the Verdurin
arriviste salon. Swann has been seated next to Odette, the pianist has been
introduced, yet somehow between paragraphs we have missed the concert
entirely (I, 207-08). We are told instead that Swann, after the music has been
played, is extremely pleasant with the pianist because of an experience he has
had with this music at a previous party. The bulk of the text's treatment of the
Sonata in this scene concerns the impressions it made on Swann on that prior
occasion. We shall see that it is those impressions that allow the Vinteuil
Sonata to become the "hymn national" of Swann's love for Odette. As Marcel
SWANN, VINTEUIL, ET MARCEL 93
states in the final volume, "les choses . . . deviennent en nous quelque chose
d'immateriel, de meme nature que toutes nos preoccupations ou nos sensa-
tions de ce temps-la, et se melent indissolublement h. elles" (III, 885).
At this prior party, Swann begins by appreciating only the material
qualities of the Sonata's sound (I, 208), but he then experiences the Phrase
as something other than this:
Mais a un moment donn^, sans pouvoir nettement distinguer un contour, donner un
nom a ce qui lui plaisait, charme tout d'un coup, il avail cherche a recueillir la phrase
ou I'harmonie — il ne savait lui-meme — qui passait et qui lui avait ouvert plus largement
I'ame, comme certaines odeurs de roses circulant dans Pair humide du soir ont la
propri^te de dilater nos narines. (208-09)
This opening of Swann's soul upon hearing the Phrase is similar to the
making accessible of truths by involuntary memory (as described in the final
volume). Just as the Phrase is separate from the material quaUties of the music,
so are these emotional truths ideal, inaccessible to the earthly, utterly non-
transcendental mechanics of logic.
The impression of the music on Swann is confused, irreducible to any
other. Sensations formed by a part of the Phrase are quickly submerged in the
tones following. The text marks Swann's attempts to remember the Phrase,
which consists no longer of music itself but is rather an architecture of thought
designed to contain it (209). The music itself, however, prior to these at-
tempts (such priority established by the use of the past perfect verb tense),
proposes to Swann certain manners of voluptuousness that he has never be-
fore considered, that he feels can be made known to him only through the
Phrase. Swann feels for the Phrase a profound new love (211).
The text here gives a description of the Phrase's rhythm that can be read
retrospectively (once the remainder of Un Amour de Swann has been internal-
ized) as a musical metaphor for Swann's love for Odette:
D'un rythme lent elle le [Swann] dirigeait ici d'abord, puis la, puis ailleurs, vers un
bonheur noble, inintelligible et precis. Et tout d'un coup, au point ou elle ^tait arrivee et
d'oij il se preparait a la suivre, apres une pause d'un instant, brusquement elle changeait
de direction, et d'un mouvement nouveau, plus rapide, menu, melancolique, incessant et
doux, elle I'entrainait avec elle vers des perspectives inconnues. (210)
So too does Swann's love for Odette (in the pages that follow) begin at a
slow rhythm. The happiness toward which this love first moves is noble,
unintelligible, and precise, but the reader cannot yet know this. Only retro-
spectively, cifter the episode of the Sainte-Euverte reception, will the Phrase
have performed (for Swann, for three hundred bystanders indifferent to Swann's
94 PAROLES GELEES
particular case, and for the reader as well) the importance, the dignity, the
"charmes d'une tristesse intime" (349), like Swann's love for Odette, regard-
less of its seeming lack of logic. Likewise will the change in direction of
Swann's love, adumbrated here in this musical metaphor, later be clear: the
adjectives "rapide, menu, mdlancolique, incessant et doux" will £ill find their
justification in the story of Swann's jealousy. And the remarks in the final
volume on Swann's mistaken impressions concerning the Phrase will have all
the more force because the reader, like Swann himself, once deprived of a
perspective gained through time, will him(her-)self not have been able to read
the first time all the signs contained in the Phrase.
At the prior party, the Phrase raises in Swann new hopes of rejeuvenation,
of his setting and striving for ideal goals long forgotten. Swann has previ-
ously taken to the habit "de se refugier dans des pens6es sans importance qui
lui permettaient de laisser de cote le fond des choses" (210). This habit is not
unhke those of the realist novelists and political activists of whom Marcel
complains in the last volume. Neither they nor Swann have engaged in the
artistic work of exploring this "fond." Even Swann's vision of rejeuvenation
is only an insufficient, momentary glance. Unable to identify the author of
the Sonata (until later at the Verdurin get-together), Swann soon forgets his
new-found desire to consecrate his life to the "fond des choses" (211). The
ghmpse of "reality" occasioned by the Phrase has been wasted by Swann. He
is soon to make the mistake of relating its profundity to the woman sitting
next to him at his second hearing.
Following this lengthy regression concerning the prior party, the narrator
returns to a moment within the "little pianist's" Sonata performance at the
Verdurin gathering:
[T]out d'un coup, apres une note haute longuement tenue pendant deux mesures, il
[Swann] vit approcher, s'echappant de sous cette sonorit6 prolongee et tendue comme un
rideau sonorc pour cacher le myst^re de son incubation, il reconnut, secrete, bruissante et
divisde, la phrase aerienne et odorante qu'il aimait. (211)
Introduced here is the imagery of the veil: a curtain of sound that works to
conceal the mysterious origins of the Phrase. The new imagery speaks to the
mystification of the subject on which the Phrase has already left an impres-
sion.
With respect to Swann's hearing at the prior party, the essential, non-
material aspects of the Phrase were expressed in terms of liquid: the mass of
the piano part, which rises to overtake the lead line of the violin, is the
"clapotement liquide" (208) of a gently rolling sea surface in the clair de
lune. The Phrase provides its effects in a cluster of imagery involving sub-
SWANN, VINTEUIL, ET MARCEL 95
mersion in water: "Et cette impression continuerait a envelopper de sa liquidite
et de son 'fondu' les motifs qui par instants en emergent, a peine discemables,
pour plonger aussitot et disparaitre" (209). Water, rolling, and submersion
are figures of the ineffable, immaterial wave-like quality of the Phrase. But
while this (prior) Phrase may be indescribable, the translucent imagery none-
theless represents the Phrase itself. This is not true of the imagery provided
with respect to Swann's second (Verdurin) hearing of the Phrase. The "rideau"
represents not the Phrase but the veil that obscures it. This new imagery
(representing a subtle shift from water submersion to veil — so subtle that the
reader too, along with Swann, may fail to notice the change) figures as well
Swann's failure to hold onto the Phrase's meaning after the prior party. Swann
now recognizes aspects of the Phrase that make it "secrete, bruissante et
divisee," whereas the Phrase he "aimait" (a reference to his reaction at the
prior party) was "aerienne et odorante" when he first encountered it. But
Swann remains enchanted, as if the Phrase were a reintroduction to "une
personne qu'il avait admiree dans la rue et d^sesperait de jamais retrouver"
(212). The Phrase continues to seduce Swann, even while providing him
with reflections of his own missed impressions (he has indeed "admired" the
phrase, in the superficial sense of the word, despite the intensity of his emo-
tions) and pointers toward the sufferings (secrete, bruissante et divisee) to
which it is leading him.
The Phrase's exit from chez les Verdurin is narrated as follows: "A la fin,
elle s'eloigna, indicatrice, diligente, parmi les ramifications de son parfum,
laissant sur le visage de Swann le reflet de son sourire" (212). Whereas once
before "la petite ligne du violon" was "directrice" (208), the Phrase chez les
Verdurin has become less assuring — indicatrice. The parfum, which has pre-
viously dilated the confines and opened the possibilities of Swann's soul, now
is the site of mystifying and ambiguous "ramifications." Even Swann's sourire
(one of the traces that the last volume will tell us mark the authenticity of the
subjective impression) is immediately surrounded by the banal commentary
of the Verdurin arrivistes. Their quick contiguity marks Swann's smile as the
idiot's grin. It is Madame Verdurin, the quintessentially superficial bourgeoise,
whose remark shifts the object of Swann's words of love from the Sonata to
Odette. Swann is delighted at the simplicity of Odette's response; he is thus
not only surrounded by platitudes, but taken in by them as well.
With textual hindsight it will be evident that Swann's impressions are
leading him into a state of mystification. Less clear is whether we, the
readers, should be led (through our regression here) to refine our idea (from
the final volume) of the subjective impression as mark of its own authentic-
ity. Is the authentic impression then not necessarily a guidepost to a recom-
96 PAROLES GELEES
mended path, but rather the sign of a truly and intensely lived emotion, even
one that may lead to pain and loss? Or are Swann's impressions here not
authentic?
The subsequent (and climactic) appearance of the Phrase at the Sainte-
Euverte reception is germane to consideration of these questions. This ap-
pearance follows, both textually and plot-chronologically, several other epi-
sodes in which Swann reads the Phrase as directly relevant to his love for
Odette. He is agonized by aspects of the Phrase's meaning extrinsic to Odette
and himself (218); the Phrase liberates blank pages of Swann's soul, onto
which he is at liberty to inscribe the name of Odette (237); Swann turns to
the Phrase as a confidante who can convince Odette not to take up with
Forcheville (264). It is chez les Sainte-Euverte, however, that Swann for
the first time feels his pity and tenderness for Vinteuil, for the suffering that
brought that man to such heights of musical creation (348). This change in
Swann's impression can be linked to the manner in which the Phrase here
appears.
Swann has been absent from society for a time as a result of his infatu-
ation with Odette. When he finally attends the Sainte-Euverte reception, he
does so free of desire. This party means nothing to him because it is uncon-
nected to his love. But the same lack of desire that frees Swann's perspec-
tive from temporal, practical constraints (that allows him, for example, to
see the specifically ridiculous in the manner of each monocled luminary
there assembled) also renders him susceptible to atemporal effects when the
Phrase unexpectedly arises:
[T]ous ses souvenirs du temps ou Odette 6tait Uprise de lui, et qu'il avait r^ussi jusqu'a
ce jour a maintenir invisibles dans les profondeurs de son etre, trompes par ce brusque
rayon du temps d'amourqu'ils crurent revenu, s'dtaient reveilles et. a tire-d'aile, ^taient
remonles lui chanter eperdument, sans pitie pour son infortune presente, les refrains oublids
du bonheur. (345)
Whereas in previous scenes the Phrase impressed Swann regarding the
object of his then-current desire (at the prior party, the abandoned ideal quest;
in subsequent appearances, Odette), only here does Swann experience im-
pressions "a la fois dans le moment actuel et dans un moment eloigne, jusqu'^
faire empieter le passe sur le present" (III, 871). While the Phrase has deeply
moved Swann before, only here has it triggered la memoire involontaire. The
lengthy regression from the Verdurin scene to the prior party, which seemed
to insert Swann's former hearing of the Phrase in the place of its actual perfor-
mance by the Verdurins' "little pianist," was in fact a structural trap for the
reader similar to the "siren's song" (I, 347) the Phrase has been for Swann.
SWANN, VINTEUIL, ET MARCEL 97
The gap in the Verdurin scene (present) was indeed filled by impressions from
the prior party (past), but Swann brought forward to the Verdurin gathering a
voluntary architecture of memory that contained (and veiled) the Phrase he
had heard. Only by a close rereading, following one of Le Temps retrouve,
can the reader see the lack of the "empietement," of overlapping extra-tempo-
rality, between these two scenes. After reading the final volume, the reader
can deduce that the impressions Swann experiences are the effects of a previ-
ously created work. Approaching it with only his voluntary (architectural)
memory, at each moment unable to see beyond (extra-temporally) his then-
present desires, Swann falls prey to mystifications that seem profound, but are
in fact self-absorbed. It is not until the Sainte-Euverte reception that Swann's
own episode of involuntary memory occurs. Only here does the "reality"
become clear:
'Qu'est-cecela? toutcelan'estrien.' . . .C'est que la petite phrase, aucontraire.quelque
opinion qu'elle put avoir sur la breve duree de ces etats de I'ame, y voyait quelque chose,
non pas comme faisaient tous ces gens, de moins serieux que la vie positive, mais au
contraire de si superieur a elle que seul il valait la peine d'etre exprime. Ces charmes
d'une tristesse intime, c'etait eux qu'elle essayait d'imiter, de recreer, et jusqu'a leur
essence qui est pourtant d'etre incommunicables et de sembler frivoles a tout autre qu'a
celui qui les eprouve, la petite phrase I'avait captee, rendue visible. (348-49)
These "charmes d'une tristesse intime" that the Phrase renders visible,
even to those who don't happen to be hopelessly in love, are a shared type of
emotional experience, a broader truth, of which the Marcel of the last volume
will speak. There he will tell us that authentic trace impressions of involun-
tary memory will mark such broader truths, but he will do no more than posit
this. Despite the relatively discursive style of the surrounding narrative, there
will be no analysis of the distinction between subjective impressions of broader
applicability and impressions interesting only to the subject into which they
happen to be incised.
The earlier episodes of Swann and the Phrase serve as an illustrative
parable that seems to address these issues. However, as Paul de Man remarks,
a rhetorical mode (such as parable) may both assert and simultaneously deny
its own authority (17). De Man's point applies here, as Swann has been
wrong on so many occasions, but here seems to be right. We too, in reading
the novel linearly, at each moment trapped in the temporal present of its nar-
rative flow, have probably been taken in along with Swann. The narrator's
lyric song is as enchanting and seductive as the Phrase's siren call. And the
novel's structural decoys, such as the flashback to the prior party that seemed
to be an episode of involuntary memory but was not, draw the reader further
98 PAROLES GELEES
into sharing Swann's mystification. The Sainte-Euverte scene seductively
adds a series of apparently positive resolutions: Swann's new insights into the
courtesan life that Odette has led all along; his sense of resignation that her
love for him will never be again as he once experienced it; a direct interven-
tion by a seemingly omniscient narrator claiming that Swann was right about
the Phrase's existence; a description of Swann's aesthetic theory concerning
the "clavier incommensurable" (349). But despite the aesthetic lure of this
agglomeration of positive elements, it cannot be determined whether the over-
coming of a prior mystification (by Swann and the reader) marks a true reso-
lution or rather a gesture toward a continuing process of seeming comprehen-
sion and later demystification. And even if that indeterminacy were removed,
there still has been no elucidation of the broader apphcability issue left open
in the final volume.
The parallel between Swann's conclusions chez les Sainte-Euverte and
those of Marcel in the final volume is not one of resolution; it is a parallel of
the impossibihty of answer. De Man has described this novel's "rhetoricization
of grammar" (17), in which thematic strategies are deconstructed by the gram-
mar through which they are spoken, in which the announced priority (the
pronounced necessity) of the metaphor is undermined by the subversive power
of (merely contingent) syntactical metonymy. As de Man puts it, "persuasion
is achieved by a figural play in which contingent figures of chance masquer-
ade deceptively as figures of necessity" (67).
The structural decoy of Swann's prior-party flashback may too be viewed
as such a figural play. But it is a juxtaposition of whole scenes rather than of
figures within the syntax of a sentence or paragraph — a "rhetoricization" of
structure rather than grammar. These two types of rhetoricization may be
viewed as concentric elements of the novel's elaborate form. It may be that
the coherence of that form, its strict adherence to its own necessities, is a surer
guide to aesthetic practice than Marcel's theory of involuntary memory. For
while Marcel's theory is both asserted and denied by the rhetorical strategies
of the novel, this same novel performs a model of art more difficult to disown:
a creative will that hfts form to a level of necessity within the universe of the
work that is sufficient to challenge the paradigmatic necessity of the meta-
phors contained therein.
De Man's model points to similarities between Proustian and Valeryan
aesthetics. Formal necessities are paramount to both: necessities dictated not
by the conventions of culture at large, but by a particular poetic universe which
affirms itself as emerging from an accident of sensory perception. Both writ-
ers attempt to transform the intimacy of the subject into a work of art. These
SWANN, VINfTEUIL, ET MARCEL 99
aesthetic views project the field of formal innovation in our own century:
negotiating the relevance of a poetic universe to the world outside in terms not
of boundary but coincidence.
Joseph Jenkins is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at UCLA.
Works Cited
De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and
Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, Editions de la Pleiade,
1954.
French Folic: Memory and Madness in BunueFs
Belle de Jour
Mary M. Wiles
Historian Henry Rousso has proposed that the Liberation functioned as
a "screen memory" (15) for the postwar French populace. It masked loss
and internal conflict while effectively preventing the nation from mourning
its traumas. During the postwar Gaullist period, collective amnesia fore-
closed resolution and rendered meaningful commemoration impossible. As
Rousso notes, "Memory of the war would therefore develop largely outside
this official framework [of Gaullist resistancialism], which had gained ac-
ceptance only at the cost of distorting the realities" (26). As historian Lynn
Higgins points out, literature and film provided arenas where conflicting
memories could be worked through, but usually under a self-imposed (when
not official) censorship (182). Rousso's description of the Liberation and its
attendant mythologies corresponds closely to the Bunuehan fantasmatic. In
Belle de Jour, Buriuel captures the fictional character Severine just as her
traumatic memories are beginning to resurface, and we can begin to witness
the spectacle of violence and degradation behind the screen of glacial tran-
quillity.
Belle de Jour opens with a long shot of a carriage approaching, accom-
panied by the unsourced sounds of bells. A well-dressed French couple
transported by carriage through the Bois de Bologne provides a compelling
portrait of the professional jeune cadre of the Gaullist regime. Yet the im-
age simultaneously recalls a past moment, providing an historical allusion
to the landscape of prerevolutionary France, where the decadent nobility
traveled by carriage to remote country chateaux. The scene that follows
displays the beating and rape of the character Severine, presided over by her
husband Pierre and the coachmen. The coachmen pull Severine from the
carriage and proceed to drag her body across the ground. As Pierre tears the
dress from her body, he threatens her, "Don't scream or I'll kill you." The
coachmen whip her violently. The final shot of the scene frames Severine in
close-up as she is kissed by the coachman who intends to rape her. On the
soundtrack in voice-off narration, a man asks, "What are you thinking about,
Severine?"
101
102 PAROLES GELEES
The scene then cuts abruptly to a medium close-up of Pierre in a spar-
kling clean bathroom looking into the mirror. Severine is visible as a mere
reflection in the mirror, lying on the bed. As the young doctor buttons his
pajamas, he turns towards her to again pose the question, "What are you
thinking about?"
Severine's response mirrors his expectation, "I was thinking about you...
about us... we were driving in a landau..." Her reply is accompanied by a
rapid zoom-in that accents her perplexed facial expression. As Paul Sandro
points out in Diversions of Pleasure, this zoom-in serves as a visual marker
within this film, signaling that subsequent shots will portray Severine's in-
ner thoughts (132). Within this scene, the signified of the zoom-in is in-
verted, for here it indicates a return from a fantasy. The code of glances
between Pierre and Severine renders the initial segment of the film intelli-
gible as an aberrant moment outside of the normal flow of events, recog-
nized as such from Pierre's dominant point-of-view in the scene. Pierre's
glance "cuts off Severine from the unconscious space of violent sexual con-
tact to reposition her within a space designated as fictional reality. Severine's
partial response to Pierre's query exposes her duplicitous persona, serving
simultaneously as the expression of her conscious will to conform to the
conventional role prescribed by her bourgeois marriage as well as the denial
of the dream content to which the spectator has been privy. As Sandro
points out, this aberrant moment of fantasy that opens the film inaugurates
the opposition between separate diegetic spaces: the interior space of
Severine's unconscious activity and the stable exterior space that is the nor-
mal flow of narrative events (Sandro 131).
I. Psychoanalysis: The Inviolate Body
Within the opening sequence, the narrative connection between rape
and chastity determines a division that structures the film text. I will sug-
gest that this sequence and the film itself can simultaneously be read against
the intertextual frame that feminist film theorist Mary Ann Doane describes
as the representation of psychoanalysis and its incorporation into classic
Hollywood cinema (39). Others have read the film from a psychoanalytic
perspective on feminine desire, notably Paul Sandro in Diversions of Plea-
sure: Luis Bunuel and the Crises of Desire.^ I will suggest that while Holly-
wood psychoanalysis is not the subject of the film, the grammar and codifi-
cation that the psychoanalytic intertext presupposes inform the film's narra-
tive structure. Doane points to psychoanalysis as the source of a system of
symbols and themes that are typically compatible with Hollywood classical
FRENCH FOLIE: MEMORY AND MADNESS 1 03
narrative (47). Film theorist Marc Vernet has affirmed that Hollywood films
rely on the theme of the "talking cure" as Freud practiced it between 1 880
and 1895 (qtd. in Doane 47). In American films such as Lady in the Dark
(1944) and The Snake Pit (1948), the problem of the "talking cure" is trans-
lated into visual terms (Doane 47). Mental illness becomes codified as the
problem of vision within the Hollywood psychoanalytic film, so optical meta-
phors abound: the out-of-focus shot, superimpositions, zoom-in, and zoom-
out. Within the opening sequence of Belle de Jour, the rapid zoom-in that
signals Severine's return from the interior space of fantasy invites the spec-
tator to speculate, "What is wrong with Severine? What event caused her to
be like this?" The solution to this central enigma becomes, in conformance
with the grammar determined by the psychoanalytic intertext, synonymous
with the cure to her "complex," which is defined within the opening bed-
room scene as her frigidity with her husband.
Within the film's opening sequence, the spectator is initiated to the
grammar of the psychoanalytic intertext of Hollywood cinema that provides
a justification for the classical device of repetition (the compulsion to reen-
act the trauma, the recurrence of symptoms) and a final solution (the cure)
(Doane 47). The spectator is invited to read Severine's frigidity as the symp-
tom of a psychoanalytic complex and, consequently, to accord a linear deter-
minism to the recurrent dreams associated with this complex (the dream of
the child being kissed by a plumber, the dream of the child being offered a
communion wafer by a priest, the dream of Severine in a coffin overseen by
the father). Dreams invite the spectator to speculate on the nature of her
complex (which event caused her to become like this?) and provide clarifi-
cation of her actions within the space of fictional reahty (her work at the
brothel). It is highly probable that Buiiuel was familiar with the codes and
grammar that generated Hollywood psychoanalysis, for, as Sandro points out,
Buiiuel realized how highly codified American cinema was in terms of genre
(Diversions 12). When Bunuel visited Hollywood in 1930 to observe pro-
duction techniques, he constructed his own "synoptic table of American
cinema," which he describes here:
The principle was the following: at the time American cinema obeyed such a precise
and mechanical codification that it was possible, thanks to my system of sliding col-
umns, by aligning a given setting with a given era and a given character, to know
infallibly the main storyline of the film. (qtd. in Sandro 12)
While it is likely that Bunuel was familiar with the codes that generated
the Hollywood psychoanalytic film. Belle de Jour's recirculation of this
intertext is coincident with the emergence of pop psychoanalysis during the
104 PAROLES GELEES
early to mid-1960s within articles published in periodicals such as Marie-
Claire and Etle, which were devoted to an investigation of women's sexual
lives. As feminist historian Claire Duchen points out, "Sexual pleasure was
discussed in articles medicalised to give them legitimacy" (196). In No-
vember 1960, Marie-Claire would ask the question, "Doctor, why are there
unsatisfied wives?" while the magazine's resident medical adviser was asked
"Are there really women who are frigid?" (qtd. in Duchen 196). In Decem-
ber 1967, Elle would disclose to its readership, "The medical truth about
frigidity," offering its reflections on the medical fact that frigid women were
often blocked by inhibitions that were acquired in childhood (89). In the
terms of popular psychology, Elle would provide a profile of the frigid woman,
"Let's not forget that the frigid woman is often an incredible romantic. She
dreams. The sexually active woman accepts herself and accepts her partner
as he is" (91). In 1960, a research study conducted by the French Institute
of Public Opinion entitled Patterns of Sex and Love: A Study of the French
Woman and Her Morals was published that was considered the French equiva-
lent of the American Kinsey report. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,
published in 1953. In the section of the psychosocial study entitled "Mar-
riage," many of the participants interviewed by "psychological investiga-
tors" point to the problem of frigidity:
Many women are frigid, but it's because they've never developed their potentialities. I
believe that there are no more than three or four women out often who normally expe-
rience sexual pleasure. Maitre M., attorney
In most cases, not having seen marriage as a gift of the body, the wife was shocked and
disgusted by sexual relations from the beginning. It wasn't until I became a confessor
that I realized thai there are many frigid women. Abbe R.
I'mappalledby the number offrigid women there are in the world . . . There are many
women who have always been frigid, who have never known anything else. More than
a third of all my women patients are frigid, and most of the others do fairly well ... Dr.
C, Physician
Within this landmark research study, women's sexual pleasure is dis-
cussed in most interviews as the locus of a psychosocial and/or medical
problem. This discursive rash of interest in the problem of frigidity docu-
mented within this research study and reflected within the articles of the
popular French press resurfaces in Belie de Jour. The medicalized discourse
on sexual pleasure that was circulating through the French press from the
early to the mid-1960s overlaps with and serves as a supplement to the
ready-made grammar of Hollywood psychoanalysis. Thus, the film's cen-
FRENCH FOLIE: MEMORY AND MADNESS 1 05
tral enigma, "What is wrong with Severine? What event caused her to be-
come like this?" does not only indicate the film's conformance to the psy-
choanalytic intertext of classical Hollywood cinema but also mirrors the
medicalized discourse surfacing in the popular press and psychosocial stud-
ies published in France during the 1960s
II. Surrealism: The Contaminated Body
In Belle de Jour, the pop psychoanalysis of both classical Hollywood
cinema and the French press converge at the overdetermined moment of
Severine's gaze, which serves as the metonymical signifier of madness. Her
gaze is situated within the filmic fiction at the nexus of a discursive con-
struction designed to perpetuate the ideology of the inviolate bourgeois fam-
ily. This codification of her vision that conforms to the conventional gram-
mar of classical Hollywood cinema appeals systematically to the spectator's
desire for a certain type of conventional narrative, if only to block and redi-
rect this desire. Within the opening bedroom scene, certain oppositions
common to the psychoanalytic intertext are established. The divided space
of the diegesis determines the representation of the relationship between the
couple Pierre and Severine, which is negotiated across oppositional lines of
masculine/feminine, health/illness, order/disorder, cleanliness/filth, real/
imaginary. The negative connotations of illness that Severine carries are
conventionally codified in conformance with the Hollywood psychoanalytic
film as a problem of vision. Within the initial scene of the film, Severine's
inability to frame fictional reality is generated from the grammar of the
Hollywood psychoanalytic intertext, and thus, her glance is read as the met-
onymic signifier of her sickness. Yet, the spectator is simultaneously in-
vited to read this problem of vision that opens the filmic narrative as the
emblematic signifier of the surrealists' stance, blindness indexing the inter-
nal nature of their quest. Historian C.W. Bigsby has described the surrealist
fascination with the problem of vision: "the surrealists deliberately closed
their eyes to a reality so empty of imaginative insight. The famous photo-
graph of the surrealists with their eyes shut is only partly a joke" (60). Within
the initial scene, the conventional signification determined by Hollywood
psychoanalysis intersects with the surrealist subtext at an overdetermined
point of fusion — the glance of Severine.
Throughout the film, Severine's glance, its inability to frame the reality
of the fiction, serves as the surrealist code that signals the opening up of the
interior space of her imagination. Louis Aragon had claimed to see a sur-
realist glow in the eyes of all women (Bigsby 73). Andre Breton had remarked,
106 PAROLES GELEES
"the act of love, just like the picture or the poem, is disqualified on the part
of the person giving himself to it, if it does not presuppose entering into a
trance" (qtd. in Bigsby 73). For the surrealists, the recollections of dreams
or hallucinations provide the means to an end, for they saw in the dream not
evidence of undesirable neurosis or a neural memory of trauma but proof of
the power of the erotic imagination (Bigsby 74). "Madness" is the key to
perception within the surrealist doxa. While the surrealists' fascination
with the erotic and the unconscious was the product of Freudian influence,
unlike Freud, they were not interested in restoring individuals to sanity.
Within the surrealist doxa, "madness" is the key to a revolution in con-
sciousness in which the mundane is transformed into the marvellous (Bigsby
74). In Bufiuel's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1928) {the emblematic
surrealist film to many historians), the opening segment graphically depicts
the deliberate slitting of the female protagonist's eye. I will propose that in
the film Belle de Jour, the psychoanalytic intertext of classic Hollywood
cinema fuses with the surrealist subtext at the overdetermined moment of
the glance. Severine's glance is the site of a semantic reversal insofar as it
signifies separate and contradictory readings of the intertextual frame of
Freud. Thus, the blindness that serves as the metonymic signifier of
Severine's unchaste mind can simultaneously be viewed from within a sur-
realist perspective as the badge of rebellion brandished against the conven-
tional values of the bourgeoisie.
III. French National Identity: The Inviolate Body
I will suggest that the fictional filmic narrative of Belle de Jour that is
structured around the story of a character who experiences difficulty recon-
ciling herself to her personal history provides an allegory of postwar France,
a nation that had experienced similar trauma. The film invites us to read
the "complex" of Belle de Jour, her chaste body entombed within a bour-
geois marriage and severed from memories of a contaminated past, as the
dramatic metaphor for the neurotic evolution of the French nation. Film
historian Maureen Turim discusses flashbacks in film narratives such as
those that appear in Belle de Jour, pointing to the possibility that there "is
an implicit analogy between the project of writing history and a phenom-
enological view of the functioning of personal memory" (105). As Turim
notes, the historian imagines the past as the actual experience of individuals
or groups and treats archival documents as pieces of a hypothetical memory
to be reconstructed (105). Additionally, Turim suggests that attitudes and
images from the past do not simply awaken by themselves in the present but
FRENCH FOLIE: MEMORY AND MADNESS 107
"are framed by mythologies operative in the present" (105). In Belle de Jour,
the reinvention of the trope of chastity through the discursive frame of pop
psychoanalysis that was surfacing in the popular press of the 1960s is his-
torically overdetermined for, as Rousso has pointed out, the year 1964 marked
"a turning point and a culmination" in the evolution of a national neurosis
that had its source in Vichy (82).^ Rousso traces the contours of the neurosis
that he has termed "the Vichy syndrome" from its commencement in 1944
to its culmination in the media events of 1964.
In a pivotal speech at the Hotel de Ville on August 25, 1944, Charles de
Gaulle established the founding myth of the post- Vichy period:
Paris! Paris humiliated! Paris broken! Paris martyrized! But Paris liberated! Liber-
ated by itself, by its own people with the help of the armies of France, with the support
and aid of France as a whole, of fighting France, of the only France, of the true France,
of eternal France, (qtd. in Rousso 16)
De Gaulle's statement to the French people marked the first attempt to ef-
fectively rewrite the history of the war years through the invention of the
myth of an inviolate and eternal "France," which would render the memory
of the collaborationist Vichy regime null and void (Rousso 17). In this
manner, the Liberation would serve Gaullist France as a "screen memory,"
which would mask loss and internal conflict, thereby preventing the nation
from mourning its traumas. In the year of 1964, Gaullism would consecrate
its own legitimacy through a sublimated version of history and seek to con-
fer on France an "invented honor" (Nourissier qtd. in Rousso 82). During
the postw£u- years, the Resistance had become the subject of films, novels,
and historical treatises, while Vichy and collaboration were rarely discussed
(Rousso 83). By 1964, this nostalgia for the war years had given way to the
optimism of a future planned and promoted by the cheerful technocrats known
as the jeune cadre. Gaullism would thus seek to definitively orient all fu-
ture memory and to forge an official version of the past suited to the nation's
grandiose self-image (Rousso 82). It was in 1964, as Rousso points out, that
the new version of the Occupation achieved its definitive form in which
France was cast as a nation that "forever and always resists the invader"
(Rousso 82). This "invented honor" called for ceremonial consecration and
an auspicious occasion was found: the ashes of martyred Resistance hero
Jean Moulin were to be transferred to the Pantheon. The nationally tele-
vised spectacle focused on the connection between the martyr Moulin and
the General, consolidating the fundamental axiom of GaulUst resistancialism
in a series of equations in which, as Rousso points out, "the Resistance
equals de Gaulle; de Gaulle equals France; hence, the Resistance equals
108 PAROLES GELEES
France (90). The commemoration was designed to produce a diversion of
memory, recasting the martyr Moulin's role in the Resistance within the
Gaullist mission to restore France's "grandeur." This retroactive reimaging
of French history as an inviolate, commemorated national body provides the
reference point to which the film Belle de Jour refers for, as we have seen,
the trope of chastity resurfaces across the profilmic body of its heroine sev-
eral years later.
Midway through the decade of the 1960s, French national identity that
had been constructed under Gaullism and that had culminated in the tele-
vised ceremony would gradually begin to crack. This crack would be re-
flected in the realm of representation following the cultural revolution of
May '68, but it is already evident in 1967 in the film Belle de Jour. The
severed diegesis of the film, in which the codes of the conventional psycho-
analytic intertext coexist beside the revolutionary codes of the surrealist
subtext, crystallizes across the oppositional lines of health/illness, order/
disorder, cleanliness/filth, real/imaginary. While film historian Susan Hay-
ward has claimed that the political and national schizophrenia created by
"the unreal reality" of Vichy has "little to no record in film" (140), the
schizoid split evidenced within the fictional narrative oi Belle de Jour does,
indeed, provide a record several decades after the fact of the co-presence of
two Frances, which were destined to clash in May '68: right against left, a
party of order versus libertine and libertarian tendencies, a culture attached
to tradition versus a culture that promoted reform, if not revolution (Rousso
98). The film Belle de Jour would provide an arena where conflicting memo-
ries could be worked through, for as Rousso points out, "the battle over the
past was waged below the surface. Memory resembled not a paving stone
hurled in anger but a 'cultural time bomb'" (99).
IV. The Dream: The Psychoanalytic Symptom or Sign of Subversion
The co-presence of intertextual frames in Belle de Jour, which refer to
the codes of both conventional Hollywood psychoanalysis and revolutionary
surrealist cinema, points to the coextensive presence of two Frances that
would precipitate the guerre franco-fran^aisc of May '68. In this manner,
the division in diegetic space that structures the split identity of Belle de
Jour provides an allegorical metaphor of the "broken mirror" of French na-
tional identity (Rousso 98). The severed diegetic space of the film, which
self-consciously signifies not only the traumatized identity of Belle de Jour
FRENCH FOLIE: MEMORY AND MADNESS 109
but of France as well, is most evident in dream events that can be read by the
spectator simultaneously as psychoanalytic symptoms or as signs of subver-
sion.
Let's look at Severine's daydream that follows her first visit to Madame
Anais's brothel. Severine retires to her bedroom with the excuse of a head-
ache and then, suddenly, hears the sounds of cowbells and hooves. We are
then shown, in the following tracking shot, bulls galloping through an open
field. Our reading of the dream beneath the code of the psychoanalytic
intertext is determined by the discourse of the men, Pierre and Husson, which
anchors the visual images of the dream, bringing together the distant reali-
ties of the exterior space of the narrative and the interior space of the dream.
Husson asks, "Is the soup ready?" to which Pierre responds, "It's cold and I
can't warm it up again." Within this brief exchange, the image of the soup
is anchored and given a metaphoric signified, for both the soup and Severine
share the property of coldness. Husson continues, "What's the time?" to
which Pierre responds, "Between two and five, not later than five." Thus
the phrase that, within the space of the real, denotes Severine's working
hours in the brothel anchors the image of the men shoveling cow shit, and
we must conclude that Severine and the manure share the common property
of "dirtiness." The men's discourse forces us to read Severine's dream as
providing retroactive clarification of her actions in the exterior space of the
real (her actions at the brothel were the re-enactment of an interior event).
Severine's lack of vision in the real indexes her lack of desire, delin-
eated within exterior space as the "complex" of her frigidity. Her interiorized
vision is the space of her unconscious desire that culminates radically in the
final image of the dream. This image shows her face progressively black-
ened and covered in the cow shit being thrown by the men who chant the
invectives, "Bitch! Slut! Whore! Maggot! Pig! Scum! Garbage! Tramp!"
to which Severine can only murmur, "Pierre, Pierre, please stop. I love
you." The image of Severine that opens the dream and the image of her that
marks closure share a pictorial sameness, as both represent her illness as
"blindness." The conceptual antecedent renders the difference. Severine's
lack of vision, her metaphorical blindness within the space of fictional real-
ity denoted her lack of desire. Her blackened face, her literal blindness,
within the interior space of the dream was precisely the mark of her per-
verse masochism, the mirage of her sickness.
The codification determined by the psychoanalytic intertext would de-
mand that we read Severine's lack of desire as denoted by her lack of vision
as an illness, a sickness, the locus of her complex. Our reading of the dream
that fixes its signified as "the return of the unconscious repressed" is pinned
no PAROLES GELEES
down by the men's invectives that are uttered like a magical incantation.
Yet in this film, the shock aesthetic that characterized surrealist erotica is
recirculated and narrativized within the dream event. While the surrealist
code of blindness that informs Severine's dream recalls the opening images
of Un Chien Andalou, the surrealist intertext can also be located in the
iconography, the representation of the interior space of the dream. The
representation of Severine's unconscious desire that shows bulls galloping
across the plains accompanied by the sound of hooves and cowbells is a
citation of the surrealist film L'Age d'or, which contains the image of a
Jersey cow lying on a bed accompanied by the sound-off of cowbells. The
codification of erotica within the surrealist films Un Chien Andalou and
L'Age d'or was intended to defamiliarize conventional representations of
erotica and to revolutionize conventional morality. Severine's unconscious
desire was precisely to "shock" and to "be shocked" by men, and it is in this
manner that the surrealist aesthetic is recodified within the interior space of
dreams, where it serves to index her "subversive" and "transgressivc" char-
acter. The final image of her blackened face can be read as an overdetermined
moment of surrealist erotica, her blindness the emblem of the shock aes-
thetic. In Belle de Jour, "the return of the unconscious repressed" becomes
synonymous with the sexual revolution.
The surrealist shock aesthetic that informs our reading of the dream is
interlaced with traces of Sadian eroticism.^ This intertextual layering is
unsurprising, for as Arnold Heumakers has noted in "De Sade, a Pessimistic
Libertine," the surrealists held the Marquis de Sade in high esteem pre-
cisely for his moral and sexual candor (119). Sadian eroficism is derived
from the philosophical dimension of libertinism, which sees the universe as
dichotomized into victims and libertines. From a Sadian perspective, the
sincere belief of virtuous people in their own morality and religion marks
them as victims, while the libertine has relinquished all prejudice and su-
perstition (Heumakers 117). The Sadian libertine is without scruples and so
is free to satisfy all lusts and to find the highest satisfaction possible in
criminal acts (Heumakers 117). The dream in which Severine encounters
her father "the Duke" recalls the remote estates, inaccessible castles, and
subterranean vaults where the decadent aristocracy of de Sade's novels in-
dulged in uninhibited orgies. In de Sade's cosmology, destruction becomes
the universal force of nature and consequently, the natural imperative of the
libertine (Heumakers 116). The spectacle of Severine's annihilation that
closes on the emblematic image of her blindness seems essential to the film's
FRENCH FOLIE: MEMORY AND MADNESS 1 1 1
rhetoric of destruction and revolt in which the intertextual invocation of the
surrealist shock aesthetic is interlaced with a Sadian erotics of annihilation,
prefiguring sexual and cultural revolution.
The film's invocation of Sadian libertinism recreates the ethos of the
ancien regime as historically associated with the moral depravity and dis-
ease peculiar to pre-revolutionary France. Indeed, Severine's nightmarish
phantasm — her blindness, her blackness, and her madness that surface within
the interior space of the dream — invokes the mythic specter of the syphi-
litic, which had continued to haunt the collective unconscious of the French
nation since the infamous orgies of the aristocracy. Syphilis, often called
"the French sickness" (Quetel 10), had already enjoyed five centuries of
colorful history. The disease had served as the status symbol of the philan-
dering nobility during the ancien regime and was described by one writer as
"the exclusive property of gentlewomen and gentlemen" (qtd. in Quetel 71).
The virus, conveyed by the blood, would spread throughout the body, and
patients would, "lose an eye, and often both, or large portions of their eye-
lids, and . . . remained hideous to behold, on account of their scarred eyes"
(Pare qtd. in Quetel 57). The libertines of Louis XIV's reign, the generation
of nobility that had precipitated the French revolution through excessive
self-indulgence, had been notorious pox victims. It was within prerevolutionary
France that an anti-pox propaganda campaign was waged by the bourgeoi-
sie, who would attempt to define itself strategically as the only viable alter-
native to the debauchery of the aristocracy. The insurgent bourgeoisie pro-
moted the notion that the disease was the cause of the "decHne of the French
temperament," capable of destroying not only "the present race" but also
"that yet to be bom" (qtd. in Quetel 103).
Contemporaneous with the inter-war surrealist film movement and the
popularization of Freudian psychoanalysis, there appeared in France a mythic
archetype called the "heredo," an abbreviation of "hereditary syphihs" (Quetel
170). Historian Claude Quetel's observation that the whole inter- war gen-
eration was literally obsessed with the fear of syphilis seems pertinent to our
discussion of the film, which was adapted from Joseph Kessel's novel Belle
de yowr originally published in 1929 (192). During the 1920s and 1930s, a
wave of anti-syphilitic propaganda suddenly surfaced in France, surfeiting
the media with thousands of posters, tracts, press articles, and pamphlets,
not to mention lectures, radio programs, the theatre, and the cinema (Quetel
180). This obsessive fear of contagion culminated during the Occupation,
when syphilis served the Vichy regime as a scapegoat. The disease was seen
by the supporters of Marechal Petain as symptomatic of the moral degen-
eracy responsible for France's defeat. As Quetel points out, the three con-
112 PAROLES GELEES
straining watchwords of the time "Travail, Famille, Patrie," "signaled a
concern with the idea of mens sana in corpore sano that was far from the
former attachment to "liberties," which had had such disastrous conse-
quences" (206). The remarks of Dr. J. Payenneville published in Que sais-
je? (1942), dedicated to Le peril venerien, provide insight into the role syphi-
lis played during the Occupation:
We are conscious of the fact,that, having supported to the utmost the organization of
the anti-venereal struggle in this country, we have made a substantial contribution to
the work of rebuilding and regeneration of France, to which Marshal Petain has dedi-
cated himself with so much courage and self-denial, (qtd. in Quetel 207)
In this manner, the moral degeneracy of the French state was displaced to a
"medicalized" degeneracy. The "Ligue fran^aise pour le rel6vement de la
moralite publique," a product of Vichy dedicated to the improvement of the
moral standards of the country and the defense of family spirit, made an
appeal to Marechal Petain to close all brothels. According to their plan of
campaign, soliciting would be firmly suppressed; "male demand" would be
reduced thanks to a "climate of moral cleanliness"; "the female invitation"
would be reduced by moral surveillance (including the monitoring of women's
magazines, such as Confidences, which "distort the minds of hundreds of
thousands of young women") (qtd. in Quetel 246).
While syphilis no longer posed an immediate threat following World
War II, the phantom disease would continue to haunt the collective uncon-
scious of the mass public, becoming what Nicole Valleur calls "the living
symbol of a past transgression (a curse on two generations)" (qtd. in Quetel
168). French author Louise Hervieu's description of the mythic heredo in
her feverish novel Le Crime (1937) discloses the mythic resonance of the
contaminated race:
How can we escape the heredity of our Species? We are hiredos ... In the white races
the disease concentrates on the most vulnerable parts, the overworked and enfeebled
nerve centres. It produces people who are mad, half-mad, quarter-mad, unbalanced,
obsessed, (qtd. in Qu6tel 171)
The mythic archetype of the hiredo reappears in Belle de Jour, where it
serves once again as the symbol of a past national transgression. The in-
ability of S6verine's glance to frame the real thus becomes not simply the
code of her psychoanalytic "complex" but simultaneously the symptom of
the contaminated race that had been historically linked to blindness, mad-
ness, degeneracy, and death. Indeed, the discourses of hereditary syphilis
and psychoanalysis intersect, for Freud acknowledged hereditary syphilis as
FRENCH FOLIE: MEMORY AND MADNESS 1 13
a possible factor in the Dora case, speculating that the descendants of syphi-
litics seemed especially susceptible to grave neuropsychosis. In Three Es-
says on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud further speculates that hysteria and
obsessional neurosis could be attributable to hereditary syphilis:
In more than half of the severe cases of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, etc., which I
have treated psychotherapeutically, I have been able to prove with certainty that the
patient's father suffered from syphilis before marriage ... I should like to make it
perfectly plain that the children who later became neurotic bore no physical signs of
hereditary syphilis, so that it was their abnormal sexual constitution that was to be
regarded as alast echoof the syphilitic heritage. (102)
As Alain Corbin points out in an article devoted to hereditary syphilis,
"it was as if doctors were translating the bourgeois fantasies of their time
into scientific language" (qtd. in Quetel 169). The myth of the heredo,
which had been generated in the scientific language of the psychoanalytic
and medical communities as well as in the fictions that appealed to the
popular imagination, was a discursive construction that perpetuated the ide-
ology of the chaste bourgeois family by serving as its scapegoat.
Severine's unchaste unconscious thus serves as the emblematic return
of a repressed national memory that the film intentionally invokes in order
to exorcise. Her unconscious mind not only serves as the symptom of a
psychoanalytic complex that requires self-abasement as the prelude to sexual
ecstasy but also as the invocation of the mythic specter of hereditary syphi-
lis, the emblematic French disease that had historically served as the scape-
goat and the scourge of the Vichy regime. The return of Severine's uncon-
scious repressed in aberrant dream events thus simultaneously serves as the
return of repressed national memory, symbolizing the moral stain of Vichyism
and collaboration, which in this film is displaced from the female sexual
organ onto the female gaze, the metonymical signifier for the female mind.
The eruption of the dream event thus poses an implicit political threat not
simply to the chaste construct of Severine's personal identity but to the chaste
and homogeneous version of national identity invented and consecrated by
the Gaullist state. The trope of female madness, codified as blindness in
this film, invokes the memory of a national contagion that would provide
the point of comparison between two distinct historical epochs: the French,
malady not only symbolized the moral scourge of Vichy but simultaneously
served as the emblem of the infectious aristocratic libertinism that had origi-
nally flowered in prerevolutionary France. Indeed, it is Madame Anais who
describes Belle de Jour to her prospective client as a "true aristocrat."
114 PAROLES GELEES
The sexual depravity associated with Severine's aristocratic character
is thus seen as the sign of rebellion against the values of the "moral" bour-
geoisie. As Rousso points out, the generation of May '68 repudiated the
Gaullist vision of France and, therefore, implicitly, the inviolate version of
its history (98). The students of May '68 were contesting the Gaullist state
that conceived of itself as the heir to the Resistance (Rousso 99). Their
challenge was directed not only at its present identity but at its history as
well for, as Rousso remarks, "it was because the students sensed something
invented in de Gaulle's attempt to substitute himself for the Resistance that
it left them unmoved" (99). Unlike their parents, they refused such pana-
ceas, choosing instead to expose the moral contamination at stake in the
history of the Occupation. The generation of May '68 would denounce the
sublimated revision of history represented in the commemorative ceremony
of 1964 and thus would precipitate France's reconceptualization of the Oc-
cupation (Rousso 98). Reflecting the mood of pre-revolutionary France, the
severed diegesis of Belle de Jour reveals the crack in the mirror of French
national identity that would create a revolution in memory and thereby mark
a fundamental break with what had gone before.
V. Dual Closure: The Broken Mirror of National Identity
Belle de Jour provides dual closure according to the dual hermetic logic
of the pop psychoanalysis of classical Hollywood cinema and the revolu-
tionary intertext of surrealist cinema. While each reading is valid accord-
ing to the internal logic of the given intertext, each reading invalidates the
other. As Sandro points out in Diversions of Pleasure, the solidarity of the
entire narrative system is shattered retroactively, for the dichotomy upon
which its logic has been based has been discredited (134).''
At this point, I will briefly review the final events of the film that cul-
minate in the confrontation scene between Pierre and Severine in their Paris
apartment. Pierre, who has been shot by Severine's lover, the young hood-
lum Marcel, is seated in a wheelchair wearing dark glasses, completely para-
lyzed, speechless, and blind. S6verine remarks to Pierre that since "his
accident" she no longer dreams. At this moment, the scene is interrupted by
the entrance of Husson. When Severine meets him at the door, Husson
insists on revealing to Pierre the truth of the situation, the identity of the
assassin, and the secret of Severine's activities at AnaVs's brothel. While
Husson meets with Pierre in private, we must assume that he exposes the
whole story of Severine's clandestine life. When Husson leaves, S6verine
reenters the room. A close-up reveals Pierre's expressionless countenance
FRENCH FOLIE: MEMORY AND MADNESS 1 15
from behind his dark glasses. Severine picks up her embroidery and starts
to work, but she no longer has the strength. A close-up shows Pierre's
hands unclenching in his lap, suggesting that he has died. Startled, Severine
leans forward to look, while the sound of cowbells and the thunder of hooves
accompany her glance. We remember that these same sounds had served
earlier in the film to signal the shift to an interior vision, the space of
Severine's unconscious. Suddenly, Pierre takes off his dark glasses, sits up
in his wheelchair, smiles at Severine and asks her, "What are you thinking
about, Severine?" She responds simply, "I was thinking of you, Pierre."
His question and her response are identical to those at the opening of the
film that had signaled Severine's return to consciousness. Let's not forget
that in the opening scene it was Pierre's dominant glance that had reframed
Severine's rape as a dream.
If precedence is accorded to the dominant intertext of psychoanalysis
within the final scene, Severine's vision is reframed beneath Pierre's domi-
nant glance within the exterior space of the real. The internal logic of the
Hollywood psychoanalytic intertext provides perfect closure to the fictional
filmic narrative, providing a miraculous cure to Severine's complex — through
the ehmination of dreams seen as symptoms. This cure to Severine's com-
plex of frigidity within the exterior space of the real leads us directly back in
circular fashion to bourgeois marriage where the story began. The harmo-
nious reunion of the husband and wife is the guarantor of her cure, the cure
provided within the code of glances. As the marriage couple raise their
glances as if to propose a toast, Severine comes forward and kisses Pierre on
the forehead. They stand momentarily holding one another in their arms.
The final shot of the film, the landau that passes below, framed within
Severine's glance, is the final iconic signifier of the cure, for Severine no
longer projects herself into the scene.
Yet, as we had pointed out, the film provides dual closure according to
the dual hermetic logic determined not only by the grammar of Hollywood
psychoanalysis but by the revolutionary surrealist cinema as well. Within
the final scene, the audio cue of cowbells and hooves accompanying the
question and answer exchange between Pierre and Severine had been estab-
lished as a surrealist code that signified a shift from the exterior space of the
diegetic real to the interior space of dream. If precedence is accorded to the
surrealist code of sound, then Pierre's return to life and the couple's reunion
occurs within the space of Severine's dream. Yet such a reading of the scene
would contradict not only the significance of the code of glances but the
couple's question and answer exchange upon which the division of diegetic
space has been based.
116 PAROLES GELEES
The surrealist code of blindness had informed the dream events and
was localized at the overdetermined moment of the glance. If precedence is
accorded to the surrealist intertext, we must read the final scene as the in-
version of the reading predetermined by the psychoanalytic grammar. Seen
from this perspective, Severine literally and metaphorically opens her eyes
to reframe and fix the scene within the interior space of her vision as her
dream. Consequently, Pierre's blindness is literally and metaphorically vali-
dated within S^verine's interiorized vision: his shooting, his convalescence,
consequent blindness, and death. Severine's vision determined by the sur-
realist intertext provides magical closure in which the reunion of the couple
occurs with the interior space of her dream.
Within the final scene, the intersection and rupture of the counter-code
systems defamiliarizes the codes and the ideologies that the codes presup-
pose. If the final scene occurs within the space of the diegetic real, it be-
comes clear that our definition of fictional reality must be radically altered
to accommodate a reading in which the sanctity of bourgeois marriage is
celebrated. If, on the other hand, the final scene occurs in the space of a
surrealist dream, then we must distrust the narrative codes that suggest the
contrary. This crystallized moment of dual narrative closure offered to the
spectator immediately implodes from the force of the film's logic to offer,
instead, a dramatic metaphor for the interrogation of personal and national
identity that occurs when memory is cut loose, dispersed — like the dreams
of Belle de Jour that allegorically invoke the nightmarish phantasms of the
national past. We are invited to read this moment of dual closure as alle-
gorically pointing to the co-presence of two Frances — to see the film's shat-
tered diegetic space as the broken mirror of French national identity (Rousso
98).
The film, similar to the surrealist text, calls for the murder of conven-
tional vision and, in this way, aligns itself with a surrealist notion of the
radical disorientation of the self. Blindness, which is the condition of true
vision, and which is metaphorical in the film's imagery, is extended within
the final scene of the film Belle de Jour to the profilmic spectator's percep-
tual process (Sandro, "Assault" 7). The pre-revolutionary body of May '68
constructed itself beneath the banner of perceptual and sexual liberation,
promising its apocalyptic vision as the only viable alternative to the invio-
late version of national history consecrated under Gaullism. Blindness that
serves as the code of perceptual revolution paradoxically predicts the out-
come of the May '68 revolution, which would not affect the realm of power
but the realm of representation. After the death of de Gaulle in 1 970, France
suddenly found itself "unable to find the thread of its history and anxious
FRENCH FOLIE: MEMORY AND MADNESS 1 17
about not living up to its heroic dream" (Thibaud qtd. in Rousso 100). New
images of the past, new representations of Vichy such as Marcel Ophuls's
The Sorrow and the Pity (1971) marked a definitive break with what had
gone before. Ophuls's documentary that focuses on daily life in Clermont-
Ferrand, a city regarded as typical of France under the Occupation, shows a
diversity of characters, actors in the narrative of history. The film records
the eye-witness accounts of Petainists, collaborators, along with the testi-
monials of nameless resistance fighters, while it elides the great figures of
la grande histoire, such as General de Gaulle, who is virtually erased from
the film (Rousso 101). The year 1968 marked a turning point in France's
conceptualization of the Occupafion, the year in which repressed national
memory returned in full force, precipitating what Rousso has termed the
"broken mirror" of French identity consecrated under de Gaulle (99). In the
pre-revolutionary year of 1967, Belle de Jour represents the first crack in
the mirror, if not a first symptom of the national neurosis that had origi-
nated in Vichy.
Mary M. Wiles is a doctoral candidate in Film Studies at the University of
Florida, Gainsville.
Notes
' Paul Sandra's compelling discussion oi Belle de Jour as "an erotic machine" (138) in
Diversions of Pleasure: Luis Bunuel and the Crises of Desire underlies much of my thinking
about the film throughout this essay. The chapter on Belle de Jour to which I refer first appeared
as "Textuality of the Subject in Belle de Jour" Sub-Stance 26, 1980: 43-56. See also "Assault
and Disruption in the Cinema: Four Films by Luis Buiiuel" Diss. Cornell U, 1974, in which Sandro
analyzes in detail Un ChienAndalou {192S), L'Aged'or (1930), The Exterminating Angel (1962),
and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie {\9H). This valuable study provides an elaboration
of the figural discourse of surrealism, using A.J. Greimas's functional classification of roles in
narrative fiction. See also Linda Williams, Figures of Desire (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981) and
Marvin D'Lugo, "Glances of Desire in Belle de Jour" Film Criticism 2.2-3 (1978): 84-89.
^ See also Stephanie Jed's Chaste Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), in which she
traces "the logic of chaste thinking" to its origins in the legend of the rape of Lucretia, which was
reproduced in Coluccio Salutati's Declamatio Lucreliae in the second half of the fifteenth century
in northeastern Italy. Jed offers her perspective on this legend that serves as a master narrative:
"The humanistic tradition that has transmitted the legend of the rape of Lucretia has performed a
similar function of isolating the meaning of Lucretia's rape from the material circumstances in
which interpretation takes place each time this rape is reproduced. In this way, the rape of Lucretia
has acquired a universal meaning divorced from historical conditions; in every age and place, it
always serves the same function, as a prologue to liberty" (12). Jed points out that the rape of
Lucretia has come to serve as the necessary prologue to the act of political liberation, and that
consequently, it is essential to identify the tropes of chaste thinking, which persistently reappear in
contemporary narratives. Jed's insights seem pertinent to our discussion of Belle de Jour, which
was released in France at such a pre-revolutionary moment.
118 PAROLES GELEES
' Paul Sandro in Diversions of Pleasure points out that the final segment of L'Age d'or
represents the last episode of de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, depicting a band of men who
successfully perpetuate anarchy within the enclosed space of the castle of Selligny. The title reads:
"Four well-known and utter scoundrels had locked themselves up in an impregnable castle for one
hundred and twenty days to celebrate the most brutal of orgies. These fiends had no law but their
depravity. They were libertines who had no god, no principles, and no religion. The least criminal
among them was defiled by more evil than you can name. In his eyes, the life of a woman — what
am I saying, of one woman, of all the women in the world — counts for as little as a fly's" (66-67).
■' In Diversions of Pleasure Sandro argues that the film functions like Barthes's text of bliss,
insofar as this final scene serves as "an interrogation, one that leads cross-referentially to any and
all segments of the film, questioning, indeed canceling, the very possibility of narrative causality"
(133).
Works Cited
Belle de Jour. Dir. Luis Bufiuel. Perf. Catherine Deneuve. 1967.
Bigsby, C.W.E. Dada and Surrealism. Lx)ndon: Mcthuen & Co. Ltd., 1972.
Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire. Bloominglon: Indiana UP, 1987.
Duchen, Claire. Feminism in France. London: Routledge, 1986.
French Institute of Public Opinion. Patterns of Sex and Love: A Study of the French Woman and
Her Morals. Trans. Lowell Bair. London: Gibbs and Phillips, 1960.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1962.
Hayward, Susan. French National Cinema. London: Routledge 1993.
Heumakers, Arnold. "De Sade, a Pessimistic Libertine." From Sappho to De Sade. Ed. Jan
Bremmer. London: Routledge, 1989. 108-22.
Higgins, Lynn A. New Novel, New Wave. New Politics. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996.
Quetel, Claude. History of Syphilis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944. Cambridge:
Harvard up 1991.
Sandro, Paul. "Assault and Disruption in the Cinema: Four Films by Luis Bufiuel." Diss. Cornell
U, 1974.
. Diversions of Pleasure: Luis Bufiuel and the Crises of Desire. Columbus: Ohio State UP,
1987.
Toumiec, Fran^oise. "La v^rite medicale surlafrigidite." Elle2\ (1967): 86-91.
Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Sites of Memory
Tracing France's Cultural Self-Consciousness
Friday, April 17,1998
4:30 pm Welcome
Stacey Meeker, Conference Chair
Vanessa Herold, Assistant Chair
Juliette Saizmann, Attachee Culturelle
Introduction of Professor Fourny
Jean-Claude Carron.UCIA
5:00 pm Jean-Fran9ois Fourny
The Ohio State University,
French and European Studies
Oublier V avant-garde
P"
Introduction of Professor Weber
Patrick Coleman, Chair
6:00 pm Eugen Weber
Emeritus, UCLA Department of History
"Sites, Sights, and Silences of Memory"
7:00 pm Reception
119
Saturday, April 18, 1998
8:30 am Breakfast for participants and guests
9:00 am Francite et memoire sur "la Toile"
Open breakfast discussion on French web sites and memory. Partici-
pants, students, and faculty are invited to join in an informal discussion
about the Internet and its role in the creation or deconstruction of
"Frenchness."
10:00 am Language of Memory
Moderator: Vanessa Herold
1 . "Details & Reproducing Domination: The Birth of the
Ballet School, the Prison, and Other Correctional Facilities,"
ReginaSadono(L/CM, Theatre Arts)
2. "Memory as Construction in Viollet-le-Duc's
Architectural Imagination,"
Aron Vinegar
{Northwestern University, Art History)
3. "The neo-polarK%2inSi Historical Amnesia,"
Josiane Peltier (University of Iowa, English)
12:00 pm Luncheon at Sunset Village West
120
Saturday, April 18, 1998
1:30 pm Geography of Memory
Moderator: Heather Howard
1. "Le Paradis ou la memoire retrouvee,"
Sophie ¥{er\ou\X(University of Arizona, French)
2. "Culture Swapping: Chateaubriand in Native America,"
Peggy J. Ackerberg {Harvard University, French)
3. "Cliches of Unity: History and Memory in Postwar
French Film,"
Marc Siegel (UCI-A, Critical Studies in Film)
4. "Naming J!a Guerre sans nom Memory, Nation and
Identity in French Representations of the Algerian
War, 1963-1992,"
Naomi Davidson {Bryn Mawr College)
3:30 pm Subject as Memory / Memory as Subject
Moderator: Lena Udall
1. "Swann, Vinteuil et Marcel, et la memoire involontaire,"
Joseph Jenkins (UCLA, Comparative Literature)
2. "French Folie: Memory and Madness in Buhuel's
Mary M. Wiles (University of Florida, Film Studies)
3. "Le temps perdu retrouve: Les charred 'honneur<^e^ Jean
Rouaud,"
Sandrine Coilomb Pilchowski
( University of Cincinnati, French)
5:00 pm Closing remarks
121
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