The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.
–Yves Tanguy
It's often challenging, sometimes infuriating, but always rewarding for us to try to gather the different contributions of our Open Issue into a seemingly seamless “theme,” similar to our four other issues, already (and mercifully) gathered under such a banner.
The essays and the excerpt in this Open Issue were no exception, but we've arrived at a system of classification we believe achieves that objective: all of the pieces—but one—gathered here fall under the mutually reflecting categories of instability, multiplicity, and unpredictability, words—concepts, indeed—that certainly reflect what more than one article refer to as our post-modernity. In a rather paradoxical way, in their effort at gathering, at making the disparate “fit” into a whole, this introduction, and those of previous “Open Issues” go against the grain of the very core of our contemporary condition. But, here goes anyway…
Because it addresses head on the opposition between the massive and the uniform on the one hand, the fragmented and the discontinuous on the other, the best place to start may well be Morgane Cadieu's essay, which she begins by quoting Patrick Modiano's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, a speech in which Modiano “compares nineteenth- to twentieth-century novelists by contrasting their relationship to temporality, and its consequence on the structure of literary fictions: ‘[…] time has accelerated and jolts, which explains the difference between the great fictional massifs of the past with architectures of cathedrals, and today's discontinuous and fragmented works.’” Cadieu then proceeds with her analysis of Modiano and Philippe Vasset's “common vision of Paris as a gigantic data center that stores memory in layers [where] the past manifests itself as a magnetic field of waves.” The fictional cathedrals of the past have been replaced by the… instability, multiplicity, and unpredictability of a kind of pagan polyvalence, albeit now referred to as “a magnetic field of waves.”
Indeed, the mass migratory movements of the mid- to late-twentieth century have contributed to the creation of a planetary condition (often referred to as “global”) that we could very well define as “a magnetic field of waves,” a field where the Lebanese-born French-Canadian author, playwright, and actor, Wajdi Mouawad, has a place one could qualify as “natural” (if such an attribute still has any meaning). In her study of Mouawad's novel, Anima, a picaresque search for a “man who is in fact a monster,” Aubry describes what she calls Mouawad's “dizzying use of narrative codes and multilingualism,” a multiplicity absolutely fitting for a story “in which connections come to light between a settlement of Native Americans, slights borne by French Canadians, and the slaughter of Palestinians.”
The same sort of global juxtapositions and discontinuities are at work in Antoine Coppola's essay on the representation of North Korea in French cinema from the late 1950s and the first decades of the third millennium, an essay in which he asks the question of why, in spite of its experimental concept, Gilles Demaistre's Voir le pays du Matin Calme, a film made in 2012 without authorization by hidden camera in North Korea nevertheless “stumbles on North Korean reality.” Coppola's analysis, and his answer, rest on a comparison of Demaistre's film with Moranbong, the first French film allowed to be made in North Korea (1958) and prepared by the photos of Chris Marker; the objective is, ultimately, to deconstruct what Coppola refers to as “scopic regimes inherited from naturalism and Western positivism.”
Lily Robert-Foley's contribution partakes of the same attempt to subvert established codes as it seeks to “intervene in and disrupt discourse surrounding a canonical author (Samuel Beckett), using the tools offered by reflections on (self-)translation and writing in a foreign language.” Robert-Foley proposes to construct “a new third text (in echo to Homi Bhabba's ‘third space’)” and “emerging from the in-between space of Beckett's self-translations of The Unnamable/L'Innommable.”
Marie-Françoise Berthu-Courtivron also addresses the “so-called legitimacy of Western norms” in relation to “the East,” in this case Japan, as it is represented in Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel Faire l'amour. For Berthu-Courtivron, Toussaint makes use of the intercultural context to destabilize (Western) gender norms, conferring an “aggressive virility” to the female heroine while stripping the male protagonist of the traditional markers of masculinity. In the end, Berthu-Courtivron proposes, “Toussaint succeeds in transforming this tragedy of coexistence into the humorous saga of a world in transition, freed from ancient stereotypes but still powerless to reinvent itself.” Back to uncertainty and fluidity, this time through the un-decidability of gender in a world in transition.
Global juxtapositions and discontinuities also inform Anneka Haddix's “Speaking from the Grave: Deadly Echoes in Le Village de l'Allemand ou le journal des frères Schiller.” The novel by Boualem Sansal, which addresses the difficulty of memorial transmission in the context of the Holocaust and of confronting a Nazi past, also confronts the issue of why members of the second generation of Algerians and Algerian immigrants in France have often been haunted by a lack of transmission from their parents, and Haddix's essay focuses on “parallels” through the layering and doubling of temporalities, characters, and experiences in the novel.
The “layering and doubling of characters” is also in evidence in Laurence Enjolras's essay, “Passeurs de douleur chez Sylvie Germain,” an exploration's of Germain's ability to depict “the ease with which man forgets and repeats the abominable evils of History,” in this particular instance through the allegory of the immense figure of the crying woman of Prague carrying in the folds of her garments “every tear, every lament, every torment born of human suffering.” As such, the will to bear witness through literature occupies center stage in Germain's work and what connects this work to the “fluidity” we have referred to as a means of gathering the essays in this volume is that the “autonomous forms and figures [that emerge from Germain's initial “visions and dreams” and constitute the point of departure for her novels] impose themselves and inhabit her works, shape-shifting into free-floating characters.”
In his essay “Amour Fou and the Informe: Jacques Prévert, the Popular Front, and the Forestalling of a People to Come,” Colin Gardner also goes back to the World War II era—both immediately before and during. Focusing specifically on Jacques Prévert's screenplays for Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné, Gardner explores the “legacy of the Surrealist Movement—particularly Georges Bataille's advocacy of amour fou and the informe—on the French political left's difficulties in generating a viable politics of collective resistance during the period of the Popular Front and the immediate aftermath of Vichy defeatism.”
Asia, writ large, is the subject of the last essay of this collection, this time the history of French publishing houses in Asia as explored in Mathilde Kang's “Les Réseaux d’édition française en Asie 1840–1940” in which she highlights the role played by these institutions in the emergence of Francophone communities among cultures classified as non-Francophone. Of all the essays in this issue, this is probably the only one that resists our attempt at a paradoxical gathering under the headings of instability, multiplicity, and unpredictability.
This issue concludes with an excerpt of Anne Wiazemsky's novel Jeune Fille, given here in bilingual form, with a translation by Dawn Cornelio. In this piece, instability and unpredictability come in the shape of the encounter between an iconic master of French cinema, Robert Bresson, and an eighteen-year-old playing the lead in one of his films. We discover in this excerpt, at least as told by the young woman, that the most venerable and iconic figures often have what, in order to keep the (traditional) narrative contract intact, we will call “quirks,” that all is certainly not what it seems to be.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Roger Célestin
Roger Célestin is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).
Eliane DalMolin
Eliane DalMolin is a Professor of French and co-chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).