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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 

Paroles  Gelees  was  established  in  1983  by  its  founding  editor,  Kathryn  Bailey.  The  journal  is 
managed  and  edited  by  the  French  Graduate  Students'  Association  and  published  annually  under 
the  auspices  of  the  Department  of  French  at  UCLA. 

Information  regarding  the  submission  of  articles  and  subscriptions  is  available  from  the  journal 
office: 

Paroles  Gelees 

UCLA  Department  of  French 

212  Royce  Hall 

Box  951550 

Los  Angeles,  CA  90095-1550 

(310)825-1145 

gelees@humnet.ucla.edu 

Subscription  price  (per  issue):        $10  for  individuals 

$12  for  institutions 
$14  for  international  orders 

Back  issues  available.  For  a  listing,  see  our  home  page  at 

http://www.humnct.ucla.edu/humnet/paroIesgelees/ 

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. 
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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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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 


ORDERING  INFORMATION 


Back  copies  of  Paroles  Gelees  are  available. 

The  prices  are: 

Vol.  1  $  7.00     Individuals  and  Institutions 

Vol.  2-3  $  7.00     Individuals  and  Institutions 

(combined  issue) 

Vols.  3-13  $  7.00     Individuals  and  Institutions 

$12.00    International  subscribers 

Vols.  14.1-15.1  $10.00  Individuals 
$12.00  Institutions 
$14.00    International  subscribers 

Current  Issues 

Vol.  16.1  Body  Doubling:  Technology  and  the  Body  in  French 

Literature 

Vol.  16.2  Sites  of  Memory:  Tracing  France's  Cultural  Self- 

Consciousness,  Selected  Proceedings  from  the 
UCLA  French  Graduate  Students'  Third  Annual 
Interdisciplinary  Conference,  April  17-18,  1998 
(Quantities  limited) 

$10.00  Individuals 
$12.00  Institutions 
$14.00    International  subscribers 

Invoice  will  be  sent  with  volume(s)  and  is  payable  upon  receipt. 
Please  address  all  requests  and  payments  to: 

Paroles  Gelees 

UCLA  Department  of  French 

212  Royce  Hall 

Box  951550 

Los  Angeles,  CA  90095-1550 


122 


Anthropoetics 


The  Journal  of  Generative  Anthropology 

www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/anlhropoetics/home.html 

In  contrast  to  fashionable  methodologies  that  dissolve  the  human  in  the  fractal 
complexity  of  cultural  differences,  generative  anthropology  (GA)  is  founded 
on  the  "originary  hypothesis"  that  all  cultural  phenomena  derive  from  the  hy- 
pothetical scene  in  which  humans  first  became  human  by  using  language. 
The  originary  purpose  of  human  language  is  to  defer  mimetic  violence  by 
permitting  each  to  possess  the  sign  of  the  unpossessable  desire-object — the 
deferral  of  violence  through  representation. 

GA  seeks  to  transcend  the  impasse  between  the  humanities  Imprisoned  In 
the  "always  already"  of  cultural  systems  and  the  empirical  social  sciences 
that  cannot  model  the  paradoxical  generativity  of  these  systems. 

Anthropoetics  is  open  to  any  work  of  quality  in  the  humanities  or  human 
sciences  that  involves  fundamental  reflection  on  the  human.  Past  issues  in- 
clude special  numbers  on  Rene  Girard  (Spring  1 996);  Religion  (Spring  1 997); 
Wolfgang  Iser  (Fall  1997);  and  Deconstruction  (Spring  1998). 

Anthropoetics 

UCLA  Department  of  French 

Los  Angeles  CA  90095-1550 

anthro@huninet.ucla.edu 


123 


Paroles  Gelees 

UCLA 

Department  of  French 

212  Royce  Hall 

Box  951550 

Los  Angeles,  CA  90095-1550 

(310)  825-1145