Georgia on his Mind

Abstract

A taste for lands far from Metropolitan France marks Jean Rolin’s writing. He indulges that taste in Savannah (2015), an account of a trip he took to that American city in remembrance of a previous trip in the company of his friend, the photographer Kate Barry. An elegiac tone echoes throughout the book, for between those two trips, Kate Barry died. As Rolin charts his new itinerary, the films that Kate took during their first trip provide Rolin with a map that he follows very closely in this second trip. Or as closely as he can, for it shortly becomes apparent to him that many things have changed between then and now. The rule of the game insofar as place is concerned is a fairly simple one: if the remembered place has disappeared, one will choose to visit the place that seems to be the closest to it, both spatially and affectively. Thus, throughout Rolin’s account of his new visit, he notes a series of displacements, clinamens of a sort which serve to remind us that change is inevitable, however fervently one might wish it were not so.

Keywords:

• Mourning
• elegy
• mapping
• travel
• game
• remembrance

Notes

1 See, respectively, L’Explosion de la durite (Paris, P.O.L., 2007), Un chien mort après lui (Paris, P.O.L., 2009), Ormuz (Paris, P.O.L., 2013), Peleliu (Paris, P.O.L., 2016), and Le Traquet kurde (Paris, P.O.L., 2018).

2 In The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion remarks: “This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself” (8).

3 See Raphaëlle Guidée: “Incapable d’oublier, le mnémoniste éprouve la présence du passé comme un fardeau, mais ne cesse, dans le même temps, de se confronter douloureusement à la perspective de sa disparition” (162).

4 Rolin opines that Kate filmed “moins par plaisir, ou avec le projet d’en faire quelque chose par la suite, que pour obéir à une injonction à laquelle elle ne pouvait se soustraire” (103).

5 See, most notably, Zones (Paris, Gallimard, 1995) and La Clôture (Paris, P.O.L., 2002). Critics who have commented upon that aspect of Rolin’s work include Joshua Armstrong (“Writer, Window, World: Jean Rolin’s Perishing Panoramas and François Bon’s Fleeting Frame.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, vol. 17 no. 4 (2013), pp. 462–471), Aline Bergé (“L’Homme oiseau de la zone frontière.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, vol. 16, no. 5 (2012), pp. 635–643), Warren Motte (“Jean Rolin’s Explosion.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 28, no.3 (2008), pp. 123–141), Catherine Poisson (“Terrain vague: Zones de Jean Rolin.” Nottingham French Studies, vol. 39, no. 1 (2000), pp. 17–24), and Bruno Thibault (“Rives et dérives chez Jean Rolin, J. M. G. Le Clézio et Pascal Quignard.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 51, no. 2 (2011), pp. 69–80).

6 On melancholy in Rolin’s work, see Mélanie Lamarre (“Ivresse et militantisme: Olivier Rolin, Jean Rolin, Jean-Pierre Le Dantec.” Contextes: Revue de Sociologie de la Littérature 6 (2009). http://journals.openedition.org/contextes/4450) and Sarah Sindaco (“La Clôture de Jean Rolin: Le territoire parisien: Entre ironie et mélancolie.” Études Littéraires, vol. 45, no. 2 (2014), pp. 83–95.).

7 See for example: “Il me semblait qu’en évitant Dublin—dans la mesure où les bus Greyhound qui desservent Macon n’y marquent pas d’arrêt—, je ne m’acquittais pas complètement du programme que je m’étais fixé, qui devait consister à retrouver tous les lieux, sans considération de leur intérêt ou de leur accessibilité, par lesquels nous étions passés en 2007 et que Kate avait filmés” (82); “Bien qu’en règle générale mon projet impliquât de ne pas en faire plus que ce que nous avions fait ensemble, je m’enfonçai un peu plus dans les bois entourant la maison, mû par le désir, qui ne devait pas être exaucé, d’apercevoir au moins l’un de ces oiseaux” (92); “Et de même ai-je échoué, pour l’essentiel, à démêler ce qui l’attachait si particulièrement à la figure de Flannery O’Connor, écrivaine catholique affligée d’une maladie incurable et éleveuse de paons” (132–133).

8 See Freud: “So by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction” (257).

9 On the notion of substitution in mourning, see Otto Fenichel: “The illusion that the lost person still lives and the identification with him are closely related. Every mourner tends to simplify his task by building up a kind of substitute object within himself after the real object has departed” (394).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Warren Motte

Warren Motte is Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. His most recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008), Mirror Gazing (2014), and French Fiction Today (2017).