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ABSTRACT
The bande dessinée artist Jacques Ferrandez was born in Algiers in late 1955, but his family moved to France in 1956. His illustrated travel-writing project, Retours à Alger [Return journeys to Algiers], closely tied to his bande dessinée series Carnets d’Orient [notebooks/sketchbooks of the Orient], attempts to produce disillusioned representations of the “reality” of his birthplace but ultimately delivers a commixture of myth and reality. Drawing on theorists such as Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek, this article argues that Ferrandez’s reality is inevitably a construct of the psyche that depends on the intermediaries of fantasy and ideology. Thus, though Ferrandez in both Carnets d’Orient (2008) and Retours à Alger (2006) attempts to produce forms of disillusionment through multi-modal representation, his work is coloured by a particular ideological fantasy of what will be termed a “multiple Mediterranean”, a fantasy that is paradoxically subtended by his critical representations of the ideological interpellation of others and of himself. Focusing on the formal and conceptual peculiarities of the two projects, this article demonstrates how Ferrandez’s disillusionment — staged in fictional and non-fictional travel — is in fact shown, through his manipulation of text and image, to be constituted through the institution of “a primordial form of narrative, which serves to occult some original deadlock” (Žižek 2008, 11) and that this structural deadlock is disruptive of the core of his Pied-Noir post-memory identification.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 All images from Carnets d’Orient and Retours à Alger by J. Ferrandez © Casterman are reproduced with the kind authorisation of the author and of Editions Casterman. The fantasia is a north African ritualised display of horse-riding and shooting that has been the subject of important orientalist paintings like Delacroix’s Fantasia Arabe (1833). The term “fantasia” itself is imported, alluding to its status as an important signifier for the representation of the exoticised Maghreb of Western fantasy.
2 The comics that make up the two published “cycles” were themselves published individually between 1987 and 1995 and between 2002 and 2009.
3 The title Carnets d’Orient is evocative of the sketchbooks that played an integral role in the artistic processes of Frenchmen like Eugène Delacroix and Eugène Fromentin during their stays in North Africa. With regards to the Carnets being understood as semi-fictional, the texts, in particular the books Les Fils du Sud and le Centenaire, draw considerably from Ferrandez’s own family history as related to him by pied-noir relatives.
4 See McKinney (Citation2008, xiv) and Howell (Citation2015, 154) for more on the ligne claire style and its proximity to Ferrandez’s work. This style is associated foremost with Hergé’s Tintin.
5 Translations of French citations and titles in this article are my own.
6 See Retours à Alger, 2.
7 Here, one should understand “real” in the sense employed by Jacques Lacan to refer to a traumatic kernel that cannot be represented, as this article will later articulate more fully.
8 See Said (Citation1993).
9 The others being Le Centenaire (1994), Le Cimetière des princesses (1995) in the Premier cycle and La Guerre fantôme (2002), Rue de la bombe (2004), La Fille du Djebel Amour (2005), Dernière demeure (2007), and Terre fatale (2009) in the Second cycle.
10 Of course, the content of any imaginary identification exists in relation to a call from the Other and is thus is always partly extrinsic to the subject.
11 One might also like to interpret this as a metaphor for the impossible resolution of anxiety first produced by Symbolic castration, the entry into language and desire in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
12 “Une Nouvelle vie” is the title of the final section of the book, to which this passage belongs.
14 Here one notes an intertextual relationship with the title of Mouloud Mammeri’s (Citation1952) novel La Colline oubliée.
15 This citation is taken from Berque’s Andalousies (Citation1981, 42–43), his final lesson at the Collège de France in which he articulated a retrospective utopic vision of potential though stymied cultural interaction between and within East and West whose status as past possibility will be seen to have direct resonances with Ferrandez’s pied-noir vision of a “multiple Mediterranean”.
16 In the Carnets’ 1994 Le Centenaire, as in the sections of the Retours written in 1993 Momo is quoted as stating that “Le soleil est féminine, le matin, c’est le moment de visiter le Casbah.” (Carnets d’Orient, Citation2008, 309.)
17 See Tisseron (Citation1987).
18 Fromentin, born 1820 in La Rochelle, was an artist most famous for his Orientalist paintings and writings produced in the middle of the nineteenth century.
19 See Zarobell (Citation2010) on Fromentin’s incompleteness.
20 Here, once more, one can argue that the affect of the yielding of control over the image performs the function of an ideological disavowal that in fact supports interpellation.
21 See Ibn Khaldun (Citation2015) for Khaldun’s concept of social cohesion or “Asabiyyah” which, according to him, contains within it the seeds of future discord.
22 See Retours à Alger, 38–39.
23 See Roberts (Citation2003) for further information on the devastation of the period.
24 See Hubbell (Citation2015, 10).