Territoriality disputes, pollution and abjection in Nathalie Sarraute and Hélène Lenoir

Romanic Review

Volumn 98, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 387-411

  Duffy, Jean H ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61149407987     PISSN: 00358118     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/26885220-98.4.387     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. For instance: Fieke Schoots, Passer en douce à la douane (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997);
2. Olivier Bessard-Banquy, Le Roman ludique (Paris: Septentrion, 2003);
3. Laurent Flieder, Le Roman contemporain (Paris: Seuil, 1998, 28-29);
4. Claude Prévost and Jean-Claude Lebrun, Nouveaux territoires romanesques (Paris: Massidor and Editions Sociales, 1990), 235-55;
5. e siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1999), 120-22, 136-38;
6. Colin Davis and Elizabeth Fallaize, French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
7. Paris, Editions Minard.
8. See: Margaret-Anne Hutton (ed. ), French Fiction in the 1990s, Nottingham French Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 2002;
9. Michèle Ammouche-Kremers and Henk Hillenaar (ed. ), Jeunes auteurs de Minuit, C. R. I. N. , no. 27, 1994 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994);
10. Michel Braudeau, Lakis Proguidis, Jean-Pierre Salgas and Dominique Viart, Le Roman français contemporain (Paris: Ministère des Affaires étrangères, 2002).
11. Sarah Barbour, Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press and London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993);
12. John Philips, Nathalie Sarraute: Metaphor, Fairy-Tale and the Feminine of the Text (New York: Peter Lang, 1994).
13. See Ann Jefferson, Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96-115.
14. Céline Geoffroy, "Morte lente," Les Inrockuptibles, 19 février 2003;
15. Pierre Lepape, "Lieux communs et singuliers," Le Monde, 21 Avril 1995.
16. "Ecrire avec le soupçon: enjeux du roman contemporain," in Michel Braudeau, Lakis Proguidis, Jean-Pierre Salgas and Dominique Viart, Le Roman français contemporain, 131-162, 142.
17. http://www. mukkula. org/mukkula_vanha/kirjailijat/alustuksia-ranska. htm
18. Originally published by Editions Gallimard, 1972. This article will refer to the Pléiade edition: Vous les entendez?, edited by Valerie Minogue in Nathalie Sarraute, Œuvres complètes, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié, Paris, Gallimard, 1996, 735-834.
19. Paris, Minuit, 1995.
20. Jefferson, Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory, 60.
21. As Arnold Van Gennep points out, receiving a gift binds one to the giver (Les Rites de passage, Paris: Emile Nourry, 1908, 29).
22. See also pages 766, 791, 802.
23. 1919, Private Collection.
24. Cf. Sheila M. Bell, Nathalie Sarraute: Portrait d'un inconnu" and "Vous les entendez?" (London: Grant and Cutler, 1988), 80-81.
25. As Arnold Van Gennep points out, the threshold or door marks the point of entry into and exit from the liminal zone; it indicates the border between, for example, the familial and the external, the domestic and the foreign, between the familiar and the unknown, profane and sacred areas (Les Rites de passage, 26-27, 32-33, 39-40).
26. Note the number of references to doors and corridors (47, 62, 73, 74, 77, 80, 82, 112, 126). Lina's departure via the window is, of course, a transgression of normal exit rituals.
27. Algirdas Julien Greimas, Sémantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966).
28. As Bell points out, "l'ami" is also "l'invité, " "l'autre," "l'intrus" or even "l'é tranger" (Nathalie Sarraute: "Portrait d'un inconnu" and "Vous les entendez?", 74).
29. Commensality, or the shared meal, is one of the most fundamental and the most commonly observed rites of aggregation. See Van Gennep, Les Rites de Passage, 39-40;
30. Roy C. Wood, The Sociology of the Meal (Edinburgh: EUP, 1995);
31. Claude Rivière, Les Rites profanes (Paris: PUF, 1995).
32. See also Mary Douglas, 'Deciphering a Meal' in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: RKP, 1975), 249-75.
33. Bell, Nathalie Sarraute: Portrait d'un inconnu and Vous les entendez?, 67-71.
34. Cf. The "prière d'insérer" that accompanied the book: "Alors que se passe-t-il ? Rien qui puisse être transmis autrement que par le texte même. Rien aux yeux des lecteurs pour qui ce texte restera lettre morte" (Nathalie Sarraute, Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1996, 1886).
35. Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 2002, first published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 44, 45. Hereafter, references will figure in the body of the text as PD.
36. Purity and Danger, 51-71, 205-13, 152-57, 162-63.
37. Purity and Danger, 150-51.
38. See also Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), 9-10.
39. Pouvoirs de l'horreur (Paris: Seuil, Collection "Points," 2001, originally published 1980). Hereafter, references will figure in the text as PH.
40. Angela Marie Smith, "The Abject Female Body: the Photography of Cindy Sherman" http://english. cla. umn. edu/alumni/asmith/Sherm1. htm.
41. In addition to the animal imagery used to convey tropistic activity in Sarraute, both texts attribute animal features to individual characters at certain points. The ferocity of the father's reaction to the children's laughter turns him into a snapping cur (781); the cultured friend has a bear-like clumsiness ("tend vers lui sa grosse patte d'ours," 786); in Bourrasque, Paule emits "miaulements" (105); Fred has "grosses paluches de vieux singe," a "grosse patte hideuse," (66, 105) ; the "father" describes himself as a frightened and a frightening creature: "fouetté, détalant comme un animal épouvanté" (121); "Enfilant alors, sans même s'en rendre compte, la vieille grosse peau d'ours toute mitée et, tambourins, grelots, il lève une patte, fifres, il grimace, claquements de fouet, il prend son air terrible. " (140).
42. Rachel Boué, Nathalie Sarraute: la sensation en quête de parole (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), 249-50;
43. Jean H. Duffy, "Le Sens de la visite: Meaning and the Museum in the Nouveau Roman," Word & Image, 2002, vol. 18, no. 1, 31-44, 33-34.
44. Note, too, the opposition in Bourrasque between Lina's "horribles cassettes" (12) and "il's" appreciation of Brahms (14) and Schumann (117).
45. See also page 162.
46. Cf. "Il aurait suffi . . . que ce Gautrand . . . pour qu'il nous rejette avec mépris" (773).
47. See also page 741: "et ils vont s'arrêter, se blottir dans les coins, tout effrayés, des nymphes effarouchées qu'un satyre surprend. "
48. For further analysis of the role of the fairy-tale in Sarraute, see Nathalie Sarraute, Metaphor, Fairy-Tale and the Feminine of the text.
49. Cf. "The abject continues to haunt the subject's consciousness, remaining on the periphery of awareness. The subject finds the abject both repellant and seductive and thus his or her borders of self are, paradoxically, continuously threatened and maintained" (Noelle McAfee, Julia Kristeva, London, Routledge, 2004, 49-50).
50. The father's childlike qualities and behaviour are also highlighted on pages 777, 818.
51. Hal Foster, "Obscene, Abject, Traumatic," October, vol. 78, 1996, 106-24, 114.
52. Note too the way in which the cahiers and Sütterlin script are associated in "il's" mind with the stereograms that Lina brings home and that, he assumes, the Mansards have given to her. Here too, the father is confronted with matter which resists classification: unlike the other members of the household who are able to identify the various attractive images embedded in the stereograms, all he can see are "des dégoulinades [. . . ] turquoise, jaune, orange, ou alors boueuses, comme si un enfant avait crayonné n'importe comment puis barbouillé en mettant ses doigts sales dans la couche de peinture fraîche" (64). If, in Lina's writing, he is occasionally able to make out something that resembles an identifiable form, he evokes that "something" in terms of an image that, for many people, might be regarded as an emblematic symbol of the unclean and the abject, i. e. The rat: "Je regarde et tout d'un coup c'est là, comme une espèce de gros rat vautré dans les panses grasses, les jambes épaisses ou les rondeurs exagérées de certaines lettres. Je le sens bouger et me guetter sous les enchevê trements de ces grosses nouilles bleues qui flageolent, et j'enlève mes lunettes mais ça me pénètre" (65-66). The description of the stereograms, like the pendant passage devoted to Mitz's scrutiny of the German stamp, are both mises en abyme whose function is to highlight the ambiguity that characterises pollution and abjection: "Et elle voit maintenant le détail de l'image qui la suprend, lui fait horreur: des visages grimaçants, déformés, orange, citron, violacés, se détachant sur la masse foncée de dos de gens marchant peut-être dans une rue de nuit . . . Quelque chose de déplaisant qui de loin avait pourtant l'air charmant" (129).
53. See, for example, the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Mel Ramos, Richard Pettibone, Jess Collins, Larry Rivers, Hervé Télémaque, and Bernard Rancillac. Cf. Vous les entendez?, 62.
54. Encyclopédie des symboles (Paris: Livre de poche, 1996, translated from German by Françoise Périgaut, Gisèle Marie and Alexandra Tondat, first published by Droemersche Verlangenstalt Th. Knaur Nachf. , Munich, 1989), 161-62.
55. See, for example, Chopin's Waterloo, 1961, Paris, Centre Pompidou;
56. Colère de violons, 1962, Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique;
57. To Hell With Paganini, 1966, Washinton, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden;
58. Accord Final, 1982, Fairmount, Wichita State University, Martin H Bush Outdoor Sculpture Collection.
59. 1955, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
60. See, for example, the Palissades of Raymond Hains;
61. Hains, Panneau d'affichage, 1960, Paris, Centre Pompidou;
62. Hains, Les Nymphéas, 1961, Paris, Centre Pompidou;
63. Jacques Villeglé, Tapis Maillot, 1959, Paris, Centre Pompidou;
64. Villeglé, Métro Jourdain, 15 février 1990, Private Collection;
65. Alberto Burri, Sackcloth, 1953;
66. Burri, Combustione Plastica, 1958;
67. Daniel Spoerri, Prose Poems 1959-60, London, Tate;
68. Spoerri, Le Repas hongrois, 1963, Paris, Centre Pompidou;
69. Spoerri, Eaten partly by: Visitors of the Biennale of Sydney, 1979, Canberra National Gallery of Australia.
70. Cf. Bell, Nathalie Sarraute: Portrait d'un inconnu and Vous les entendez?, p. 88.
71. Cf. "Within a biblical context, the corpse is also utterly abject. It signifies one of the most basic forms of pollution- the body without a soul. As a form of waste it represents the opposite of the spiritual, the religious symbolic" (Creed, The MonstrousFeminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, 10).