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Abstract
This article looks at the role of windows in Jean Rolin's Zones (CitationParis: Gallimard, 1995) and François Bon's Paysage fer (Lagrasse: Verdier, Citation2000). In these works, and other contemporary works like them, French authors go to windows in chain hotel rooms and trains in order to find surprising vantage points onto fringe, problematic urban spaces. Rolin's chaotic streetbound descriptions in Zones are punctuated and complemented by his high-perched window views that provide momentary framings of everyday life—perishing panoramas in which we glimpse the way things like the free market and globalization are affecting life in and around the city. Bon's train window in Paysage fer is in constant movement as he attempts to catalogue all he can see. He adapts his prose to the speed of perception, producing an image that is less a coherent mapping than an impressionistic landscape composed of intensities of affect and rhythm. In both works, literary invention springs from attention. Rolin and Bon allow the window's framing and fleeting qualities to poetically guide their style, as they carve out islands of cohesiveness in some of the urban spaces most recalcitrant to viewing and to meaning.
Notes
1 In “Les Fenêtres,” because “the separation is too great” (Starobinski 558), and because Baudelaire's genius was an allegorical one (Benjamin 170), the poet looks beyond the flesh-and-bone person he glimpses, preferring instead to see an infinite space in which the otherness of the “femme mûre, ridée” disappears behind the word-wielding alchemy of the lyric poet, for whom it could just as well have been “un pauvre vieux [sic] homme” (155). The poet is free to invent and re-invent the story of this glimpsed person, and it is the frame of the window that suggests this infinity, this “energy made boundless by the boundaries that surround it” (Godfrey 92).
2 Rolin is always drawn to the periphery: “je suis plus doué pour décrire la périphérie des choses ou des détails apparemment insignifiants que ce qui est vraiment en plein milieu” (personal interview).
3 It should be noted that Marc Augé's term non lieu was never meant to designate the kinds of places Rolin and Bon observe, but rather the kinds of places from which they observe (the chain hotel room, the train). Nonetheless, the media and the intellectual establishment often use the term to describe marginal urban zones and communities. This is why, for François Bon, non lieu has become a “concept vide” (“Jean-Christophe Bailly”), and certainly works like Zones and Paysage fer demonstrate that these marginal communities and landscapes are anything but empty.
4 In Zones, on Friday, June 10, 1994, “je me présentai à l’Ouest-Hôtel où, sur ma demande expresse d’être haute perché, on m’attribua la chambre 605, au sixième étage, sous les combles” (37); on Monday June 20, 1994, at a Hôtel Ibis: “j’insistai pour obtenir une chambre donnant—et donnant le plus possible—sur l’échangeur” (80).
5 Rolin incidentally does his final writing in front of a window that is “haute perché” in a residence overlooking the port of Saint Nazaire, whose view is that depicted in the opening pages of Terminal frigo (Personal Interview).
6 Faseyer: “Battre au vent, en parlant d’une voile que le vent n’enfle pas” (Petit Robert).
7 For Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire looked upon his world with the very “gaze of alienated man” (Benjamin 170).
8 In Paysage fer, the window of his commuter train perpetually separates him from the world he attempts to describe. In L’incendie du Hilton (2009), he spends much time in his skyscraper, looking out on Montreal, marveling at the enigma of his perspective, and even mentions an idea for a writing project—that no doubt many readers would like to see realized—in which he would place himself in a similar room high above New York City and spend ten days, never leaving the apartment, typing away all day, describing the window view.
9 Marie-Albane Rioux-Watine's sees this as a quality of Rabelais that Bon admires and emulates (218).
10 Michael Sheringham's apt translation of the expression “paysage fer” (393).
11 Filippo Zanghi speaks of Bon's “blocs de langage” (18) while Marie-Albane Rioux-Watine evokes “une langue-bloc” (229), and Zanghi describes Bon's style as characterized by “clôture, prééminence des volumes, du ‘perpendiculaire’ et du ‘symétrique,’ des ‘horizontales’ et des ‘verticales’” (21).