Truismes and truths

Forum for Modern Language Studies

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 58-70

  Swarbrick, Katharine ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Darrieussecq; Feminism; Freud; Jacques; Lacan; Marie; Postmodernism; Psychoanalysis; Sigmund

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951650337     PISSN: 00158518     EISSN: 14716860     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/fmls/cqp123     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. M. Darrieussecq, Truismes (Paris: POL, 1996). Further references to Truismes will be given in the text as T. For an English translation
2. see M. Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, trans. L. Coverdale (London: Faber and Faber, 1997).
3. See for example Catherine Rodgers, "Aucune évidence: les truismes de Marie Darrieussecq", Romance Studies 18:1 (2000), pp. 69-81.
4. See also the following: Isabelle Favre, "Marie Darrieussecq ou lard de la calorie vide", WIF Studies 8 (2000), pp. 164-76
5. Lorie Sauble-Otto, "Writing to Exist: Humanity and Survival in Two fin de siècle Novels in French (Harpman, Darrieussecq", L'esprit créateur 45:1 (2005)
6. Shirley Jordan, " Saying the Unsayable: Identities in Crisis in the Early Novels of Marie Darrieussecq" , in: Women's Writing, ed. Michael Worton & Gill Rye (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 142-56.
7. Darrieussecq paints a picture of the police executing crowds at the doors of the SAMU-SDF (T, p.100); of fanatics chained to the operating tables of abortion clinics (p. 30); of dubious chemicals manufactured to whiten dark skin (p. 114); and finally of war, epidemics and famine (p. 121).
8. Currently the backdrop against which Darrieussecq is writing her fiction is marked by a vigorous debate in France between schools of different persuasions as to how to theorise the way the mind functions and how to treat mental disorders. Competing perspectives between psychoanalytic theory and the cognitive sciences are at the forefront of these discussions, which have been comprehensively reviewed by Simon Kemp in " Darrieussecq's Mind" , in French Studies 62:4 (2008), pp. 429-41.
9. Kemp's presentation indicates that these debates tend to focus on the novels of Darrieussecq written after Truismes. Readers interested in critical works which embrace related issues may wish to consult Shirley Jordan, " 'Un grand coup de pied dans le château des cubes': Formal Experimentation in Marie Darrieussecq's Bref séjour chez les vivants" , Modern Language Review 100 (2005), pp. 51-67.
10. For a Freudian treatment of Darrieussecq's Naissance des fantômes, see Kathryn Robson, "Virtual Reality: The Subject of Loss in Marie Darrieussecq's Naissance des fantômes and Régine Detambel's La Chambre d'écho", Australian Journal of French Studies 61 (2004), pp. 3-15.
11. J. Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 93-100.
12. This mode of catastrophic experience is charted by Freud in his 1911 work Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), Standard Edition, Vol. 12, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press / Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1958), pp. 9-82.
13. It is elucidated in later works by psychoanalysts such as W. R. Bion in Cogitations (London: Karnac Books, 1992).
14. See, for example, Janet Wirth-Cauchon's feminist sociological readings of borderline cases in " A Dangerous Symbolic Mobility" , in: Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience, ed. Dwight Fee (London: Sage, 2000), pp. 141-62, to which I am indebted for my summary of this type of approach here. Julia Kristeva's theory of the "abject" body is also relevant to this discussion on bodies and gender identities.
15. See J. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur: essai sur l'abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980). My contribution is an attempt to focus rather on the way cultural influences and psychical structures might be understood separately, so I have not discussed Kristeva here.
16. We must bear in mind, however, that the masculine subject of Kafka's " Verwandlung" displays similar abject qualities in his transformation into a beetle, and themes regarding lack of self-esteem and misuse by others in his text would make an interesting comparison with those in Truismes.
17. See F. Kafka, "Die Verwandlung", in: Das Urteil (Berlin: Fischer Tauschenbuch Verlag / Schoken Verlag, 1935), pp. 19-73.
18. A central Lacanian illustration of this presence of the Real can in found in J. Lacan, Le séminaire, Book X: L'angoisse (Paris: Seuil, 2004). See in particular pp. 185-97.
19. For a recent comprehensive survey of the psychoanalytic body, see Hypochondria: The Experience of the Body in Contemporary Culture, ed. Vivien Burgoyne, conference issue: Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research 14 (2004).
20. S. Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction", Standard Edition, Vol. 14, pp.67-102.
21. Lacan, Écrits, pp.93-100.
22. Witness, for example, the scene in which, coerced into prostituting herself during a " working weekend" away, the narrator attempts to placate the fury of Honoré on her return with fellatio, whilst trying to hide the signs of her emerging physical disfigurement out of fear of displeasing him still further (T, pp.44-5).
23. Freud evokes the symbolic function of the parents using these terms in " On Narcissism: An Introduction" , Standard Edition, Vol. 14 (1957), ed. James Strachey, pp. 73-102
24. the description is taken up by Richard Klein, who presents Freud's terms as a way of understanding how the Imaginary comes to be embedded in the Symbolic in " The Origins of the Imaginary" , Syngrafia 1 (Journal of the Cultural Centre for Freudian Studies and Research) (1985-86), pp. 6-25 (p. 17). I am indebted to this article for my understanding of the Schema of the two mirrors.
25. Lacan defines this term in Le séminaire, Book X: L'angoisse, p.136, as a precipitous act, perpetrated by a subject when anxiety is at its height.