Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist: French Without Borders 1802074856, 9781802074857

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: French, without Borders
1 Portraying Japan
2 Scatter and Resist: Ferrier Writing Fukushima
3 Challenging Space and Time
4 Bringing Back the Dead
Coda: Scrabble as Photobiography
Conclusion: Writing without Borders
Interview with Michaël Ferrier
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist French without Borders

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 94

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DEREK SCHILLING Johns Hopkins University

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 80 Antonia Wimbush, Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

87 Oana Panaïté, Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memory

81 Jacqueline Couti, Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses, 1924–1948

88 Sonja Stojanovic, Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French

82 Debra Kelly, Fishes with Funny French Names: The French Restaurant in London from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

89 Lucy Swanson, The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

83 Nikolaj Lübecker, Twenty-FirstCentury Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé

90 Christopher T. Bonner, Cold War Negritude: Form and Alignment in French Caribbean Writing

84 Ari J. Blatt, The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography

91 Sophie Fuggle, France’s Memorial Landscape: Views from Camp des Milles

85 Martin Munro and Eliana Văgălău, Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader’s Guide

92 Clíona Hensey, Reconstructive Memory Work: Trauma, Witnessing and the Imagination in Writing by Female Descendants of Harkis

86 Jiewon Baek, Fictional Labor: Ethics and Cultural Production in the Digital Economy

A K A N E K AWA K A M I

Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist French without Borders

Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2023 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2023 Akane Kawakami Akane Kawakami has asserted the right to be identified as the author of this book in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-80207-485-7 eISBN 978-1-80207-576-2 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction: French, without Borders

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1 Portraying Japan

17

2 Scatter and Resist: Ferrier Writing Fukushima

51

3 Challenging Space and Time 81 4 Bringing Back the Dead

113

Coda: Scrabble as Photobiography

139

Conclusion: Writing without Borders

147

Interview with Michaël Ferrier 155 Bibliography 169 Index

183

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank Michaël Ferrier, not only for being the subject of my book, but for his generosity and patience throughout the writing process; for answering my numerous (and often somewhat random) questions, for participating in the interview, for his good humour and admirable modesty with regard to his wonderful work. I would also like to thank the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee for their generous travel grant which made possible a research trip to Tokyo. Many thanks also to the participants at the three conferences to date which have been held on Ferrier’s work – in London, Edinburgh and Florida – from whose ideas and suggestions I have benefited. I am very grateful to Fabien Arribert-Narce, Elizabeth Emery, Charles Forsdick, Martin Munro, Nathalie Wourm and many other colleagues who have supported me in a variety of ways during this project. My thanks are also due to Chloe Johnson of Liverpool University Press and Rebecca Spence of Carnegie Book Production for their efficiency, reassurance and support. This book is dedicated to Paul, Ryu and my mother.

Introduction French, without Borders Introduction Alors, votre grand-père s’appelait Maxime Ferrier, il était britannique … —Mauricien. —Pardon? —Mauricien. Ce n’est pas la même chose. L’île Maurice a été française de 1715 à 1810, britannique de 1810 à 1968, indépendante depuis cette date. —Bon grand-père mauricien. Votre grand-mère, Pauline, était indienne … —Non, pas tout à fait. Née à Madagascar, d’une famille indo-portugaise de Goa […] Pauline d’ailleurs était catholique. Elle y tenait beaucoup. Cela veut dire, vous le savez: universelle. —Bon, grand-père mauricien, britannique et malgache. Grand-mère indienne, portugaise et universelle […] Et du côté de votre mère? —Alsace toujours. Je raconterai ça aussi un jour. Mère, grand-mère, grand-père, tous alsaciens, depuis longtemps. —Vous voulez dire: français? —Ou allemands, ça dépend des époques. On pourrait dire aussi: européens. Relisez vos manuels d’histoire […] —C’est compliqué chez vous la famille, dites donc. Et tout ça fait quoi? —Vous connaissez la chanson. —Pardon? —D’excellents Français. Épilogue, Mémoires d’outre-mer

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist

Ferrier is a difficult novelist to categorize; he is truly ‘without borders’ in all senses, from national and linguistic ones to borders belonging to particular disciplines or systems of thought. As a Frenchman with Alsatian, Mauritian and Goan roots living in Japan who has written about notions of French nationhood, Japanese views of France, French views of Japan, his grandfather’s life in Madagascar and his own childhood in Chad, he embodies Frenchness without borders – ‘without’ in the sense of not having borders, but also being outside of them – and so does his writing. He eschews binary thinking, and the categories and boundaries that issue from it: Les machines binaires empêchent la pensée de prendre son essor; je dirais même plus, elles la sclérosent. La tradition et la modernité, la grande littérature et la littérature populaire, l’universel et le particulier, nous et les autres … Quelle signification donner à ces couples? […] Toutes ces frontières tremblent d’ailleurs, aujourd’hui, quand elles ne se dissolvent pas.1

Categories and boundaries, however, can be useful even when they are being called into question, or perhaps especially then; attempts to categorize can give rise to productive (re)definitions, even when the framework from which the categories are derived may not be espoused in its entirety. In this book, I will be making use of a number of historical contexts and theoretical frameworks in my attempts to read Ferrier’s work, without wishing or intending to force it into any artificial categories with borders; my methodology will be eclectic, given that I choose to apply whatever frameworks I believe are useful to the appropriate work in a given analysis. The different lenses belonging to categories such as the transnational, francophone or ‘French global’ can be employed in this flexible way. Similarly, Ferrier’s work can be fruitfully considered in the history of French travel writing about Japan, and more broadly in the context of japoniste imaginings of the country. The stereotype of Japan as the country of cherry blossom and geisha, or at least of Madame Chrysanthème, may seem to be a thing of the past; but the literary historical heritage of japonisme persists, in interesting and creative forms as well as reductive ones, and Ferrier’s awareness of them as both writer and critic adds another layer to his own relationship with Japan. Finally, there is much to be gained from analysing Ferrier’s 1 Michaël Ferrier and Aurélie Julia, ‘Entretien: l’écrivain sismographe’, Revue des Deux Mondes (2013), pp. 93–104 (p. 96).

Introduction

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novels through the theoretical frameworks of two relatively new areas of study: Memory Studies and Environmental Humanities. The fresh perspectives offered by these disciplines show us how his work is pertinent to contemporary debates about the environment and the rewriting of history, outside the borders of French literary studies; or rather, we might say that his work questions such interdisciplinary borders. In this introduction, I will give brief accounts of these various theoretical contexts in preparation for the analyses to follow, as well as introducing Ferrier’s own framework – unpublished, to date – for his œuvre. Ferrier has now been publishing since 2004, that is to say for almost 20 years, but critical writings on his work have only recently begun to come out in journals and edited volumes, the latter usually the product of a conference. They have been increasing in volume, however, especially since Ferrier’s work on Fukushima, as have conferences dedicated to his work. To date, three such international conferences have been organized, in London, Edinburgh and Florida;2 the latter two have produced conference proceedings containing important pioneering analyses by a range of authors on all of Ferrier’s works, right up to the present. The conference in Edinburgh gave rise to a volume called Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail, the title applying the author’s coinage of ‘coral writers’ to himself, edited by Fabien Arribert-Narce and including perceptive essays by Christian Doumet, Bernadette Cailler, Hervé Couchot and Anne Roche (amongst others);3 the Florida conference resulted in a special issue of Sites, due out in 2024, boasting a similarly broad range of critics and interests.4 There have also been a number of significant studies in peer-reviewed journals by Martin Munro, Hannah Holtzman, Catherine Coquio and myself.5 As his works and honours – he has won an astonishing number 2 International colloquium ‘Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail’, 14 September 2017, University of Edinburgh, Scotland; ‘Michaël Ferrier: Mémoires d’outre-mer/ Over Seas of Memory’, 18 September 2019, Birkbeck, University of London, UK; ‘Tokyo Stories: Writing the World with Michaël Ferrier’, 21 March 2022, Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA. 3 Fabien Arribert-Narce (ed.), Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021). 4 Sites, special edition on Michaël Ferrier (edited by Arribert-Narce, Forsdick, Kawakami and Munro). Forthcoming in 2024. 5 Martin Munro, ‘The Elsewhere and the Overseas in Michaël Ferrier’s

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist

of coveted literary prizes for his seven books to date – accumulate, there will no doubt be many more conferences and studies of Ferrier’s œuvre, abundant and proliferating as it is itself.6 Postcolonial? Transnational? Multilingual, Global? Does the fact that the subject matter of Ferrier’s writing includes some of France’s former colonies – and the nationality of his paternal grandfather – make him a ‘francophone’ or ‘postcolonial’ writer? Both of these terms may, to some ears, sound outdated; ‘francophone’, in particular, is analogous to ‘commonwealth’ inasmuch as both arise from the context of colonialism, and it might be argued that both have been superseded – although less completely, in the case of ‘francophone’ – by the term ‘postcolonial’.7 But both ‘postcolonial’ and ‘francophone’ are still very much in use, and not entirely replaceable by terms such as ‘littérature-monde’ or ‘transnational’ precisely because of the historical contexts they evoke. From the perspective of blood alone, it seems Mémoires d’outre-mer’, Critical Review of French Contemporary Fixxion, 16 (2018), http://www.revue-critique-de-fixxion-francaise-contemporaine.org/rcffc/ article/view/fx16.11/1242; Hannah Holtzman, ‘“Les Français ne savent pas où me mettre”: Placing Michaël Ferrier’s petits portraits from Japan’, French Studies 73.4 (2019), 561–77; Catherine Coquio, ‘D’un ton apocalyptique: Après la fin du monde de Michaël Foessel et Fukushima, Récit d’un désastre de Michaël Ferrier’, Écrire l’histoire, 15 (2015), 119–28; Akane Kawakami, ‘Calligraphy or Photography? Representations of the City in Michaël Ferrier’s Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube’, The Australian Journal of French Studies, 57.2 (2020), 190–203, and ‘Scatter and Resist: Ferrier Writing Fukushima’, Journal of Romance Studies, 22.1 (2022), 49–71. 6 Ferrier has won six prizes for his work to date: Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube won the Prix littéraire de l’Asie in 2005; Sympathie pour le fantôme, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée in 2010; Mémoires d’outre-mer won the Prix francoallemand de littérature contemporaine Franz-Hessel and the Prix Athéna de l’Île de la Réunion (and its translation won the French Voices Award in 2018); François, portrait d’un absent won the Prix Décembre in 2018; and Scrabble won the Prix Jacques Lacarrière in 2020. 7 Jacqueline Dutton, ‘World Literature in French, littérature-monde, and the Translingual Turn’, French Studies, 70 (2016), 404–18 (pp. 405–06). I am greatly indebted to this article for its excellent overview of both the development of and relationships between the various categories, such as ‘francophone’ and ‘postcolonial’ literature, that will be examined in this section of my Introduction.

Introduction

5

slightly tenuous to claim that Ferrier should be considered ‘francophone’, as he is not one but two generations removed from Mauritius, and has never lived there. A more literary connection is his great admiration for a number of the classic ‘francophone’/postcolonial writers, particularly Césaire, as well as Patrick Chamoiseau, an admiration reciprocated in the latter case and embodied in the foreword written by the older author for Mémoires d’outre-mer.8 Chamoiseau himself does not link Ferrier directly to a colonial past; most of the foreword is about the younger writer’s ‘sumptuous style’, and the interconnectedness of everything in the world – the ‘Tout-monde’ – which is an effect of colonialism, but one with which we must all now live and which Ferrier himself, according to Chamoiseau, embraces. Chamoiseau does point out that Ferrier’s novel ‘highlights an unexpected effect of colonization’: the strange richness of those who have been condemned to be outsiders, the freedom which allows them to ‘live in the full splendor of Relation’.9 Ferrier has indicated that he thinks of himself not as a francophone but a French writer, but his notion of Frenchness – extensively analysed in Sympathie pour le fantôme and Mémoires d’outre-mer – is far broader and stretches well beyond the Hexagon, spanning all of the former French colonies which, as he argues passionately, are as much a part of French history as Joan of Arc or the French Revolution. Ferrier’s attempts to recreate a France that includes the former colonies as equal partners in a rewriting of French history that still needs to be carried out, set out in some detail in the chapter entitled ‘Français de branche’ of Mémoires d’outre-mer, could be considered a literary version of Charles Forsdick’s suggestion, made from a critical standpoint, that ‘the development of a francophone postcolonial studies may permit the elaboration of a genuinely postcolonial French studies’.10 Forsdick goes on to emphasize ‘the intellectual merits of reconsidering France itself in a postcolonial frame’,11 which would embed a balanced historical awareness into approaches to literature written in French. 8 Chamoiseau agreed to write this foreword for the English translation at Ferrier’s personal request; he wrote it in French, and this was sent directly to Martin Munro, the book’s translator, to render into English. 9 Patrick Chamoiseau, ‘Foreword’, in Michaël Ferrier, Over Seas of Memory, trans. Martin Munro (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2015), p. x. 10 Charles Forsdick, ‘Between “French” and “Francophone”: French Studies and the Postcolonial Turn’, French Studies, 59 (2005), 523–30 (p. 528). 11 Dutton, p. 407.

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist

It can thus be useful to link Ferrier to the notions of ‘francophone’ and even ‘postcolonial’ literature, but perhaps only in the same way that the identity of French Studies – or France – is most fruitfully considered in a fully postcolonial context. Closer to the nature of his writing are terms such as transnational and transcultural literature, descriptors which have gradually become more prominent in literary studies. Before we move on to these, however, we must consider the other notion that has enjoyed a certain notoriety, especially in France, arising from the manifesto signed by 45 writers and critics and entitled ‘Manifeste pour une littérature-monde en français’.12 For its proponents, the crucial fact about literature that had previously been described as francophone or postcolonial is the language of its expression; ‘the act of writing in French, rather than any rigid literary norms or shared national or cultural baggage’.13 At first sight this is a tantalisingly refreshing point of view, seeming to simplify and define the corpus in one stroke. What better way to unify the corpus, and equalize the individual writers and writings? But in fact it is not possible to define a writer purely as someone who writes in French, although the universalist model, as opposed to a binary – French/francophone – approach, seems to have much to recommend it. ‘French’ has never been a single characteristic, for all writers in French have their separate relationships with the language and culture. But by the same token, French – or any language – is both public and private; Maryse Condé’s famous ‘j’écris en Maryse Condé’ – suggesting that we all have a purely personal relationship with our languages – does not hold water.14 For the literary and cultural ‘baggage’ that comes with language can never be shed; although each writer’s particular collection of such baggage will be unique, as is clearer from the notion of ‘littérature-monde en français’ as opposed to ‘francophonie’, the baggage will always be present and visible. Ferrier certainly does not claim to write ‘en Ferrier’; on the contrary, he is a great acknowledger of sources, allusions, influences and even what he has referred to as the ‘plagiarism’

12 ‘Pour une littérature-monde en français’, Le Monde des livres, 16 March 2007, p. 2: https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2007/03/15/des-ecrivains-plaident-pourun-roman-en-francais-ouvert-sur-le-monde _883572 _3260.html (accessed 15 September 2020). 13 Dutton, p. 411. 14 Dutton, p. 412.

Introduction

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that he practises.15 Given that he is a critic as well as a creative writer, Ferrier is particularly sensitive to the debt that his writing and style owe to his predecessors writing in French, or indeed in other languages. Associated with the idea of littérature-monde, but perhaps less rigidly structured around a unity of monolingualism, is the notion of ‘French Global’ as developed by Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman in their edited collection of the same name. This idea was designed to ‘move beyond the binaries of national literatures and world literature by focusing on spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities expressed in literatures in French’.16 Hannah Holtzman, in her article on Ferrier’s ‘Japanese’ writings, argues that ‘the facility with which Ferrier moves in his work between linguistic and literary traditions’ signals that he embraces ‘a kind of global culture, within and beyond the Francosphere. This is […] like a global library to which subscription requires neither proof of residence nor access code other than that of linguistic competence’.17 A linguistic competence in several languages means that such a work can evoke a ‘multilingual consciousness’,18 even if it is mostly written in French, thereby becoming part of a ‘global French’ literature, which is certainly the case for Ferrier and his borderless works. Related to ‘global’ in this context is ‘transnational’, another term that seems apposite to a description of Ferrier’s œuvre, certainly more so than ‘francophone’ or ‘littérature-monde’. This is another much-discussed notion, and I will be using it only in its application to literature, and contemporary literature at that; although all literature could potentially be called transnational, I believe the historical context and practical considerations make the term most useful when applied to post-1945 writings.19 The term forms part of attempts by scholars – mostly of 15 This is something that Ferrier said of his own work in his talk at the colloquium ‘Michaël Ferrier: Mémoires d’outre-mer/Over Seas of Memory’ held at Birkbeck, University of London on 18 September 2019. 16 Dutton, p. 414. 17 Holtzman, p. 575. 18 Charles Forsdick, ‘Global France, Global French: Beyond the Monolingual’, in Leslie Barnes and Dominic Thomas (eds), Global France, Global French (special issue of Contemporary French Civilization, 42.1 (2017)), 13–29 (p. 17). 19 Paul Jay’s entry in the online Oxford Research Encyclopedia gives an excellent and thorough summary of the various definitions and discussions, starting with a historical overview from Goethe to contemporary transnational literature, although he concentrates on the anglophone corpus: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefo re/9780190201098.013.1134.

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anglophone literature – to recontextualize contemporary literature outside of the traditional national groupings, and within various frameworks that engage with minority and subaltern groups,20 or migrant and cosmopolitan populations.21 Thinking about transnational literature in this way leads to focusing on mobility and hybridization, and Ferrier is clearly one of ‘a new generation of culturally mobile writers’ who, ‘by choice or by life circumstances, experience cultural dislocation, live transnational experiences, cultivate bilingual-pluri-lingual proficiency, physically immerse themselves in multiple cultures/geographies/territories, expose themselves to diversity and nurture plural, flexible identities’.22 Such writers do often turn out to be ‘middle-class progressive creative intellectuals’ who can afford to move and make the experience materially bearable, but they are important nonetheless, especially because their work can act against a ‘pure assimilationist or realist logic’ and the ‘renewed virulence of nationalist stances and ethnic/religious revanchisms’.23 The advantage of such writing is that it can focus on the experiences of mobility and hybridity rather than the binarisms of the postcolonial or francophone state, and Ferrier’s focus is certainly – in my view – on the ‘in-between’ spaces and experiences created by his physical and linguistic displacements, rather than contrasts or comparisons between different geographical and cultural places. Interestingly, Ferrier has described writing itself as a form of displacement, of migration: ‘écrire, c’est toujours se mettre un peu à l’écart. La littérature offre des points de vue multiples, elle invite à un déplacement perpétuel. Écrire aussi est une migration’.24 Another, often related term that I will be using to describe Ferrier’s writing is ‘translingual’. Translingualism is easier to define, thanks to Stephen G. Kellman’s seminal 2000 study, although its borders can also be interestingly porous. One of Kellman’s definitions of translingual literature is ‘texts by authors using more than one language or a language other than their primary one’.25 Ferrier writes in French most 20 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (eds), Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 21 See Walter Mignolo, ‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, 12.3 (2000), 721–48. 22 Ariana Dagnino, ‘Transcultural Writers and Transcultural Literature in the Age of Global Modernity’, Transnational Literature, 4.2 (2012), n. pag. [1]. 23 Dagnino, n. pag. [3]. 24 Ferrier and Julia, ‘Entretien’, p. 103. 25 Stephen G. Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 12.

Introduction

9

of the time, but he makes frequent use of Japanese words, both transliterated and in Japanese script. He also borrows Japanese genres and structures and recasts them in the French language, which can be described as a translingual act inasmuch as it is a movement between forms in two languages; I will show how Ferrier creates hybrid texts of this kind, which I believe makes him a structurally translingual author.26 Translingualism is often characterized by hybridity; the binary and hierarchical relationship embodied in much postcolonial, or even francophone, writing is very different from that of translingual writers, who create ‘a hybrid “in-between” language’.27 As transnational literature transcends the dichotomies of francophone literature, so hybridity blurs the borders set up by a view of writing in French that runs along national and linguistic lines. I hope to show how Ferrier’s language can be described as culturally, linguistically and generically hybrid in an analogous way to that of more clearly translingual writers. In conclusion, I believe Ferrier is best described as a transnational writer, whose writing is characterized by various forms of hybridity. In the last analysis, it is important to note that he thinks of himself as French – but in the broadest sense possible, perhaps as ‘global French’, a notion of Frenchness explained and developed in his Mémoires d’outre-mer and based on a vision of France that is not yet acceptable, that he himself says is ‘même pas une possibilité, à l’heure où je vous parle, à peine une hypothèse’.28 Writing about Japan Given how dramatically the image of Japan has evolved in recent years, from the pre-bubble picture of prosperity of the eighties, the ‘Cool Japan’ of the nineties and the consistently alluring one based on anime 26 This kind of structural translingualism has also been defined as ‘aesthetic translation’ by Pamela A. Genova in her book, Writing Japonisme (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016). It will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 1. 27 Michelle Keown, ‘Littérature-monde ou littérature océanienne? Internationalism versus Regionalism in Francophone Pacific Writing’, in Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (eds), Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and littérature-monde (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), pp. 240–57 (p. 253). 28 Michaël Ferrier, Mémoires d’outre-mer (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), p. 69.

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and fashion that continues to attract the West – particularly the young West – to Japan today, it may seem otiose or at least backward-looking to evoke memories of Loti and Madame Chrysanthème. But the historical effects of japonisme are still very much present, albeit in modified forms, and in a literary context are particularly relevant to all authors writing in French about Japan today.29 Ferrier himself is keenly aware that his writing can be read in this context, by other writers and critics, as well as by general readers whose perception of Japan will almost certainly still be based on the bedrock of japonisme. Indeed, the fact that Ferrier is both a creative writer and a critic – and this dual perspective, although he himself thinks of them as intertwined,30 is extremely important – is crucial to a contextualization of his work in the history of French writings on Japan. The West has been writing about Japan for centuries, at least since Marco Polo famously wrote about Jipangu without having set foot in the country, although most recent studies of European – and French – writings on Japan date from the opening of the country to the rest of the world in 1853, from the period which witnessed the cultural phenomenon of japonisme. There have been many such studies in recent years, two by Ferrier himself, of this body of writing which ranges from the Orientalist, ‘japoniste’ works of Loti through the ‘Yellow Peril’ period and into the post-war travellers who have been both ‘néo-japoniste’ and ‘post-japoniste’; they mainly fit into the category of travel writing.31 (The status of ‘traveller’ is one characteristic that Ferrier does not share with his predecessors and contemporaries in this category; he has lived 29 For a discussion of the legacy of japonisme on French writing, see Fabien Arribert-Narce, Kohei Kuwada and Lucy O’Meara, ‘Avant-propos’, in Réceptions de la culture japonaise en France depuis 1945. Paris-Tokyo-Paris: détours par le Japon (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2016). 30 ‘La création et la réflexion ne sont pas chez moi séparées, la première porte la seconde, tout est relié’. Email from Ferrier to the author, 26 September 2020. 31 Michaël Ferrier (ed.), La tentation de la France, la tentation du Japon: regards croisés (Arles: Philippe Picquier, 2003); Japon: la barrière des rencontres (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2009); Jan Walsh Hokenson, Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2004); Akane Kawakami, Travellers’ Visions: French Literary Encounters with Japan, 1881–2004 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005); Chris Reyns-Chikuma, Images du Japon en France et ailleurs: entre japonisme et multiculturalisme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005); Catherine Mayaux (ed.), France-Japon: regards croisés. Échanges littéraires et mutations culturelles (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).

Introduction

11

continuously in Japan since 1992, and he writes very consciously as a writer based in, and committed as a resident to, the country.)32 Ferrier’s œuvre has been put into the category of ‘post-japoniste’ writings, a term coined by Philippe Forest and defined as ‘les œuvres présentant une prise de distance critique ou ludique par rapport au phénomène du japonisme – quitte à ne pas échapper complètement à la problématique de l’exotisme et à prendre le risque de soulever de nouveaux mythes’.33 Clearly Ferrier fits into this ‘post-japoniste’ category, but given his activities as a critic and literary historian we will need to describe his relationship with his predecessors in more detail, within the context of both the creative and critical history of French writings on Japan. In 2013, Ferrier took part in a colloquium entitled ‘Paris-Tokyo-Paris: la réception de la culture japonaise en France depuis 1945’, held at the Maison franco-japonaise in Tokyo. The proceedings, edited by the organizers, were published in a volume of the same title, and Ferrier’s paper was recast as the introductory chapter. I will refer to it here because it gives a useful account of Ferrier’s own position vis-à-vis the japoniste writers, as well as of his own critical contributions to the japoniste debate. It also offers potential solutions to the binary, self-other approach of the japonistes, and néo-japonistes, which give a clear indication of Ferrier’s own approach to the problem of representing Japan. In this essay, entitled ‘Les écrivains du corail ou d’une nouvelle arborescence – possible et souhaitable – dans la réception de la culture japonaise’,34 Ferrier starts by telling us about the classic, binary view of Japan as the other to France’s self, ‘un monde à l’envers’ where everything happens in the opposite way to France, as well as being an ahistorical space ‘flottant à la lisière de la modernité’ (‘Les écrivains’, 33); this last is a tendency to refuse to accept that Japan is no longer the home of samurai warriors, but a modernized and industrialized country. The binary vision that japonisme advocates is, of course, simply a particular 32 The one exception to this occurs in François, portrait d’un absent, in which Ferrier, newly arrived in Japan, and his friend François discover parts of the country together; see Chapter 4. 33 Arribert-Narce, Kuwada and O’Meara, ‘Avant-propos’, p. 11. 34 Michaël Ferrier, ‘Les écrivains du corail – ou d’une nouvelle arborescence – possible et souhaitable – dans la réception de la culture japonaise contemporaine’, in Fabien Arribert-Narce, Kohei Kuwada and Lucy O’Meara (eds), Réceptions de la culture japonaise en France depuis 1945 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2016), pp. 27–47. Henceforth, this essay will be cited as ‘Les écrivains’ in the main text.

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version of the age-old reductive, ‘Orientalist’ view of the other.35 Ferrier shows how Loti, Yourcenar, but also the distinguished anthropologist Lévi-Strauss were all guilty of this predilection for the ‘older’ Japan, for Edo over Tokyo, and how this tendency has persisted well into contemporary times. Ferrier offers three antidotes to this dichotomous and ahistorical approach to Japan. One of them is the ‘poétique de la relation’ advocated by Chamoiseau amongst others, mentioned earlier; all three are methods based on adopting multiple and mobile viewpoints from which to ‘look at’ Japan, rather than the single viewpoint based in the ‘home’ location of France or Europe. He then goes on to name a number of writers who he thinks put this multiplication of viewpoints into action: the ‘écrivains du corail’ of the title, transnational authors such as Tawada Yoko, Hideo Levy, David Zoppetti and Mizumura Minae who all left their own countries and their mother tongues to write elsewhere, in new languages and forms.36 This multiplication and scattering of perspectives allows their readers to think of Japan as ‘un espace insulaire pluriel, traversé comme tant d’autres pays par des phénomènes d’hybridité et de métissage’ (‘Les écrivains’, 46). Ferrier concludes his essay with the hope that the activity of such writers will result in the move from ‘un Japon-stéréotype’ to ‘un Japon-prototype’, a new way of thinking about Japan that will lead the way out of the japoniste stereotype and towards the hybrid reality of the actual country. In this essay Ferrier does not refer to himself as a creative writer, but it is clear that he too aspires to be an ‘écrivain du corail’, a writer who mixes up viewpoints, moves between countries and questions every kind of border that he encounters. As we will see in the chapter on 35 As has been shown and discussed clearly by Edward Said in Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 36 Tawada Yoko (1960–) grew up in Japan and studied German at university; she moved to Germany at the age of 22 and since then has been writing novels and short stories, in Japanese and German, that have been crowned by numerous prizes in both countries. Mizumura Minae’s family moved to the United States when she was 12; although she claims that she never felt comfortable in English, one of her most interesting works is a bilingual novel, 私小説 (Shishousetsu) from left to right (2009), written in Japanese and English. Hideo Levy is American, brought up in the US, Taiwan and Japan, but writes exclusively in Japanese. David Zoppetti grew up in Switzerland and studied Japanese at the University of Geneva, but only began to write creatively, in Japanese, after he moved to Japan. Both Levy and Zoppetti have received prestigious Japanese literary prizes.

Introduction

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his Japanese writings, the country he describes is a place of hybridity; the food, the music, the TV programmes and the company he keeps are postmodern mixtures of trends and tendencies hailing from a multiplicity of backgrounds. For Japan, Ferrier imagines ‘une nouvelle cartographie conceptuelle, plus juste et plus variée’, which ‘contribuerait ainsi à redéfinir l’espace dans lequel devrait ou pourrait se déployer, du Japon mais surtout avec le Japon, la pensée contemporaine’ (‘Les écrivains’, 47). Uniformity is what governments and markets want in the image of their country, the better to sell the product that is ‘France’ or ‘Japan’; hybridity is what artists, writers and critics should champion. Ferrier thus concludes by aligning the japoniste (and néo-japoniste) vision of Japan with capitalism and commodification, and the coral writers’ approach with plurality, creativity and hybridization. And indeed this makes sense, given that japonisme sold Japan, quite literally, to nineteenth-century Parisians – ‘japonaiseries’ made a lot of money for Bing, and Loti’s books were bestsellers – much in the way that the ‘Cool Japan’ brand, for instance, was marketed to sell the same country, decades later, to modern Europeans. This political and economic context given to the discourse of japonisme and more contemporary versions of it adds a further dimension to the question of where Ferrier’s œuvre sits in the history of French writings on Japan today. Memory, Genre, Nature Last but not least, I will show how Ferrier’s work can be fruitfully read through the frameworks of Memory Studies, Genre Studies and Environmental Humanities; these disciplines not only offer new perspectives on Ferrier’s work, but also show how it is relevant outside the scope of French Studies and literature. The coexistence of human beings and their environment, particularly in an earthquake-prone environment such as Japan, is one of Ferrier’s key interests which can be explored using the methods of Environmental Humanities and ecocriticism. Disasters have often been analysed as events in which both human and non-human forces were involved, and their interaction is particularly important for Ferrier’s understanding of the tripartite event, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, of 3.11. But on a smaller scale, too, ecocritical ways of thinking help us to map out Ferrier’s peculiarly ‘scattered’ notion of identity – what I call ‘inter-identity’ in Chapter 3 – as presented in Mémoires d’outre-mer and

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Scrabble. The main characters in these two works are in possession of identities which do not have watertight borders defining their perimeters, so to speak; physically, psychologically and even ‘officially’, officially in the sense of passports and identity cards, their borders are porous and melt into the surrounding environment, in defiance of an older, more rigid view of human individuality. Notions from Memory Studies are also highly illuminating for a reading of Ferrier, especially the notion of multidirectional memory, in studying his subtle but penetrating views of colonial and postcolonial spaces, as well as of Japan. In Japan, the Fukushima earthquake evokes memories of earthquakes across the ages and writings about them, ranging from Claudel on the Great Kanto earthquake to medieval documents offering a daily account of earthquakes in the seventh century. In Madagascar the colonial context stretches forward to the particular form of colonialism exerted by the Vichy government; the civil war in Chad, following its independence, is darkly presaged by its colonial past. In all of these cases, the connectedness of historical memory and its tendency to reach out in both directions as well as across different geographical configurations can be described through the framework of Memory Studies, as we will see. One final framework to consider is that of Genre Studies, which I will be using to elucidate the hybridity of Ferrier’s generic choices. Ferrier himself has declared that ‘je n’ai jamais trop cru à la distinction entre genres’, and has confessed, I believe for the first time in my interview with him, that he prefers to categorize his work – written and still to come – in ‘trilogies’. This is a fascinating mode of organization that I will be discussing in detail in the conclusion to this study. I still believe, however, that genre is a valid and useful way of analysing, if not classifying, works of literature, if only because different genres set up expectations in the reader which will influence his or her relationship with a particular work. This is of course true of digital media as much as of printed books. To anticipate, genre in Ferrier is always problematized as he transgresses the boundaries they set up; all of his works hybridize genre, as well as other categories, in a joyful ‘hymne à la vie sous toutes ses formes, dans une délectation et un dérèglement rimbaldien de tous les sens’.37 My chapters follow a roughly chronological order to analyse Ferrier’s works to date. Chapter 1, ‘Portraying Japan’, discusses the author’s 37 Arribert-Narce, Michaël Ferrier, p. 8.

Introduction

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first three novels; these are all set in Japan and deal with ‘Japanese’ themes. The chapter also gives an account of his critical essays, which are mainly about French writings – including his own – on Japan, and which are roughly contemporaneous with the novels. Chapter 2, ‘Scatter and Resist: Ferrier Writing Fukushima’, is concerned with Ferrier’s next book, a non-fiction account of his trip to Fukushima following the tripartite disaster of 11 March 2011. The chapter also examines the numerous essays, film scripts, interviews and edited volumes on Fukushima that Ferrier has created over the ten-year period since. Chapter 3, ‘Challenging Space and Time: Mémoires d’outre-mer (2015) and Scrabble (2019)’, looks at two works, a biographical novel and an autobiographical book; the two share various themes and are therefore susceptible to being analysed together in a single chapter. Ferrier published another book in between these two, and this is the subject of Chapter 4, ‘Bringing Back the Dead: François, portrait d’un absent (2017)’. François, a work of non-fiction, is concerned with Ferrier’s childhood friend François Christophe, who died unexpectedly in December 2013, drowned at sea with his 11-year-old daughter Bahia. The chapter also deals more generally with Ferrier’s growing desire to ‘bring back the dead’ through writing which is not restricted to this particular work. The final sections of my book, perhaps influenced by Ferrier’s predilection for multiple conclusions in the form of epilogues and codas, consist of both a coda and a conclusion. The coda analyses Scrabble as a photo-text, and focuses on his most radically – or visibly – hybrid work. The conclusion will discuss Ferrier’s own categorization, mentioned above, of his œuvre into trilogies. Ferrier’s vision for his œuvre, which is both retrospective and proleptic, refuses the notion of serial publication, the orderly progression of works by date. I will argue that the trilogies into which he regroups his books – both written and not yet written – into something resembling Venn diagrams is his way of mapping out the creative locus of his own self. The book ends with an interview conducted with Ferrier via email over a number of months, put together by me and approved by Ferrier before being included in this volume.

chapter one

Portraying Japan Portraying Japan

Je n’écris pas vraiment sur le Japon, mais bien plutôt à partir de lui. ‘Je suis un écrivain japonais’, in Japon, la barrière des rencontres

Ferrier’s first three novels, Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube, Kizu, à travers les fissures de la ville and Sympathie pour le fantôme, are all set in Japan, feature Japanese characters and are more or less concerned with relationships between Japan and France. In between their publications – the first two were published in 2004, and the third in 2010 – Ferrier also engaged repeatedly with the issue of Franco-Japanese relations in an academic context. La tentation de la France, la tentation du Japon: regards croisés (2003) is a collection of essays originating from a colloquium held at the Maison franco-japonaise in 2001, with a preface and introductory essay by Ferrier; Le gout de Tokyo, anthologie (2008) is a volume of extracts, chosen and introduced by Ferrier, by a selection of French and Japanese writers on Tokyo. Le texte Japon, introuvables et inédits (2009) brings together the writings of a neglected writer on Japan, Maurice Pinguet, prefaced by Ferrier, and Japon: la barrière de rencontres (2009) is a compilation of Ferrier’s own academic essays, written between 1999 and 2009, on the literary relationships between France and Japan. It is clear from these dates of publication that throughout this period Ferrier was thinking and writing, as both a writer and an academic, about his own position vis-à-vis Japan. Whilst keeping these roles – and their corresponding outputs – independent of each other, he has also, as I will show, undermined their separation in his analyses of the Japanese genre of zuihitsu, a kind of personal essay which might be described

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as straddling the divide between creative writing and criticism. In this chapter I will analyse all of Ferrier’s ‘Japanese’ writings in the context of his attempts to establish his relationship with Japan as both subject matter and stylistic model, and to find his own voice as a novelist, given that these are also his first works. I contend that, through his work as critical novelist and creative critic, Ferrier carries out an exploration of both the representation of Japan in francophone writing and of himself as a writer. To start, I propose to analyse Ferrier’s first two novels, which are very different from each other although published in the same year. I will then discuss his essays in Japon, la barrière des rencontres, which give a critical context to the preceding Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube and Kizu, à travers les fissures de la ville as well as to Sympathie pour le fantôme, published a year later. This work, his last ‘Japanese’ novel (2010) to date, brings together his various thematic and structural preoccupations in a complex work that embodies, to my mind, the way in which Ferrier’s critical and creative talents are inextricably interwoven.1 Lastly, I will examine the contents and structure of Ferrier’s Tokyo Time Table, a website dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge and information about Japanese culture for a francophone audience. Before embarking on these analyses, however, I will briefly contextualize – following the more general account given in the Introduction – Ferrier’s work with reference to his japoniste predecessors. Ferrier is acutely aware of the heritage of japonisme, and the responsibility that comes with it for an informed, post-japoniste French writer.2 As a critic he analyses his predecessors’ writings with sensitivity and intelligence, as we will see later in this chapter. Ferrier’s knowledge of Japanese literature, too, is thorough and wide-ranging, and this gives him a balanced and nuanced view of Franco-Japanese literary exchanges which benefits his readings. As a creative writer, he is thus armed with both knowledge and hindsight, and perhaps this is one of 1 ‘La création et la réflexion ne sont pas chez moi séparées, la première porte la seconde, tout est relié’. From an email from the author, 26 September 2020. 2 This term was coined by Philippe Forest to describe ‘les œuvres présentant une prise de distance critique ou ludique par rapport au phénomène du japonisme – quitte à ne pas échapper complètement à la problématique de l’exotisme et à prendre le risque de soulever de nouveaux mythes’ (Fabien Arribert-Narce, Kohei Kuwada and Lucy O’Meara (eds), ‘Avant-propos’, in Réceptions de la culture japonaise en France depuis 1945. Paris-Tokyo-Paris: détours par le Japon (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2016), p. 11).

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the reasons why he is unafraid – in Tokyo, petits portraits, for instance – to make use of an adventurous young first-person narrator whose curiosity and joie de vivre – which extends to a predilection for the darkest drinking dens of Tokyo – might appear to align him with the romantic young male travellers so numerous in countless Orientalist travelogues. But Ferrier’s narrator turns out to be as well-informed as he is eager to learn, has no preconceptions that blind him to the reality of what he sees, and although he is attracted to a number of beautiful Japanese women, his relationships with them are not based on any historical patterns or colonialist memories. Exquisite and slender, with the requisite long, straight black hair and porcelain skin, the Japanese women who are the narrator’s objects of desire and inspiration may seem at first to embody the stereotype of ‘la figure érotico-exotique de la femme japonaise’;3 indeed, their appearance almost invites the reader to question the narrator’s Orientalist credentials. However, as we will see, they subsequently develop into complex, real human characters with nothing of Madame Butterfly or Madame Chrysanthème about them;4 they function as both an acknowledgement of his and our awareness of the stereotype, and a refutation of it.5 Furthermore, the ‘Japanese’ novels – in particular Petits portraits, but also Sympathie pour le fantôme, to a certain extent – contain much that is exciting and unexpected about Japan, but succeed in presenting these without conjuring up the spectre of exoticism. The narrator achieves this, as we will see, through the adoption of a narrative stance that is very firmly based in Japan; that is, he writes as a long-term inhabitant of the country, not a traveller. He may, for instance, describe interesting dishes – often culturally hybrid ones – which will be new to the reader, but would also be surprising to the average Japanese reader. Descriptions of crowds are always followed by those of the individuals who constitute them, and ‘the Japanese’ are never presented as a separate group, but as the people with whom the narrator lives on a day-to-day basis. This 3 Arribert-Narce, Kuwada and O’Meara, ‘Avant-propos’, p. 17. 4 The narrator’s ‘muse’ in Mémoires d’outre-mer is also a slender, beautiful woman with dark hair and porcelain skin, but – perhaps to confound the reader’s expectations – turns out to be Chinese, and an Olympic fencer to boot. 5 For a nuanced and persuasive discussion of Ferrier’s relationship to the stereotypes of japonisme, see Fabien Arribert-Narce’s introduction to his edited volume, Michaël Ferrier: un écrivan du corail (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021), pp. 25–27.

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist

stance is absolutely vital when we come to Ferrier’s book on Fukushima, and differentiates it from the many other, excellent accounts of the disaster by non-Japanese writers, simply because it is written from the perspective of an inhabitant of the country. Voices and Rhythms: Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube (2004) and Kizu, à travers les fissures de la ville (2004) Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube is a novel made up of five stories of unequal length, and narrated by a ‘Michaël’ whose circumstances seem to be similar to those of Ferrier himself. The narrator’s name may immediately suggest an autofictional reading for this work, as indeed for a number of Ferrier’s novels.6 Hannah Holtzman takes a more genre-based approach, describing the ‘petit portrait’ as a ‘hybrid Franco-Japanese form [that] might serve as a model for relating crosscultural encounters’.7 The hybridity mentioned by Holtzman refers to the influence, amongst other genres, of the Japanese zuihitsu on the ‘petit portrait’. Ferrier himself makes this connection – and analyses it in some detail, as we will see – in one of the critical essays published in Japon, la barrière des rencontres. In ‘Je suis un écrivain japonais. De l’importance du zuihitsu chez un écrivain contemporain’, Ferrier offers us a simple definition in English for this genre: ‘loosely connected personal essays’.8 Petits portraits certainly fits this description, and the five tales add up to a rich and enticing evocation of Tokyo, with a fresh focus on sound rather than vision, and dialogue rather than depictions of the much-photographed and filmed capital. The tone is set by the epigraph, a quotation from Tôrin: ‘Toutes ces voix d’hommes qui au large s’interpellent, que disent-elles?’ This is a book that seeks to bring the voices of Tokyo, both human and non-human, to the reader’s ear. 6 Arribert-Narce describes all of Ferrier’s ‘Japanese’ novels as ‘marqués par une veine autofictionnelle’ (Fabien Arribert-Narce, ‘Écrits du 11 mars en France et au Japon: écrire la catastrophe, entre fiction et témoignage’, in Christian Doumet and Michaël Ferrier (eds), Penser avec Fukushima (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2016), pp. 57–96 (p. 87). 7 Hannah Holtzman, ‘“Les Français ne savent pas où me mettre”: Placing Michaël Ferrier’s petits portraits from Japan’, French Studies, 73.4 (2019), 561–77 (p. 566). 8 Michaël Ferrier, Japon, la barrière des rencontres (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2009), p. 240.

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The first of the longer stories, ‘Ces tribus qui nous habitent’, is about precisely that; the voices of Tokyo which inhabit and slowly take over an unnamed French woman in Tokyo, loosely associated with the university department in which ‘Michaël’ works. Tokyo and its inhabitants, dead, alive, real and fictional, take hold of this woman; she claims to feel all the ‘fissures, les fêlures, les failles, les frissonnements’ of the city, her identity is scattered and dispersed by their presence inside her, and when she becomes too obviously disturbed to work she is quietly sent home to France.9 This is the only story in which Tokyo’s voices and powers are shown to have a harmful effect, and it is also the tale which is most closely linked to the themes explored in Kizu, as I will show later in this section. The next story, ‘Syntaxe de Tokyo’, is also about the voices and rhythms of Tokyo, but they are introduced to the readers by a ‘specialist’ of the city. ‘Yo’, another of Michaël’s colleagues, is a world-famous linguist by day and a drinker of mythical proportions by night, as well as an incomparable connoisseur of the mysteries of underground Tokyo. One evening, after meeting in their usual drinking hole, Yo and Michaël set off on a complicated journey across Tokyo which brings them to a quiet suburban station with several disused platforms: Nous étions arrivés sur une plate-forme entourée d’herbes, l’obscurité était presque totale, seule une loupiote jaune indiquait l’entrée d’une trappe, surmontée d’un verrou que Yo tira sans hésitation. La planche se souleva en grinçant, dévoilant l’entrée d’une cavité de terre. C’était un trou dans le sol d’environ trois mètres de profondeur: en penchant bien la tête, on pouvait voir une série d’arbustes étranges plantés bien régulièrement en contrebas. (Tokyo, 46)

The plants turn out to be nanpaku-udo, a species of asparagus and a much-prized delicacy that grows best in the dark. Yo informs Michaël that certain farmers have identified these abandoned passages of the Tokyo train network as ideal places for cultivating the plants. Satisfied with their find, the two connoisseurs of the city depart empty-handed; it obviously does not occur to these flâneurs to profit in any material way from their discovery.10 9 Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube (Paris: Arléa, 2004), p. 23. Henceforth, this book will be cited as Tokyo in the main text. 10 For a more detailed analysis of this section of the novel and of the two friends as flâneurs, see my ‘Walking Underground: Two Francophone Flâneurs in 21st-Century Tokyo’, L’Esprit Créateur, 56.3 (Fall 2016), 120–33 (pp. 127–30).

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Another adventure with Yo takes Michaël to a minuscule bar in central Tokyo with a very peculiar cellar where the conditions are ideal for fermenting amazaké, a particular type of saké. Yo assures Michaël that this is not a lone occurrence, but one of many such active underground sites in Tokyo. High-tech scientific experiments, telecommunication circuits, huge pipelines and fibre-optic cables; intense activity and developments are constantly taking place under the surface of the city, unbeknownst to the human beings leading their lives on and above ground level. These activities are also not exclusively human, as Michaël confirms when he expands metaphorically on Yo’s comments: Tokyo était à l’image de cet alcool mûri dans la douceur des caves: la douceur et la fluidité de la surface cachaient une intense activité des profondeurs, un travail collectif, obscur et térébrant, où les siècles se confondaient, où agriculture ancestrale et science des particules se faisaient écho, où la nature et l’homme se rejoignaient. Recherche, rumination, macération, fermentation, la vie surgissait de ces mystérieux tressaillements, de cette intense réflexion sous-jacente: il ne fallait pas rompre les liens avec cette étrange aventure souterraine. (Tokyo, 52)

Life underground is different from life on the surface; time passes more slowly, and perhaps not in a linear fashion (‘les siècles se confondaient’), nature and man are no longer at odds, and activity of both a conscious and unconscious kind – ‘recherche, rumination, macération, fermentation […] réflexion’ is rife. This manifestation of ‘life’ down below seems to be more basic, ceaseless and collective; it is the activity which connects all living beings, animal and vegetable. Yo feels that it is essential for human beings to stay in contact with underground Tokyo, because he believes in the basic interdependence of all human activity: Yo croyait encore aux relations qui existent entre les unités élémentaires, il allait vers le fond indifférencié des phénomènes, ce qui nous était commun. Dans l’indifférence formidable des grandes villes modernes, il continuait à affirmer la place nécessaire des uns et des autres, leur irrémédiable enlacement. (Tokyo, 53)

Yo seeks the elements common to all human beings; as a Chomskian linguist, he believes in a universal basis for all language, and analogously he sees Tokyo as a giant organism in which everything is linked and interdependent. What is described here as ‘un travail collectif, obscur et térébrant’ and ‘le fond indifférencié des phénomènes’ from whose ‘mystérieux tressaillements […] la vie surgissait’, is that invisible, wordless

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movement that emanates from the rhythm of life itself. The rare species of asparagus, the hi-tech experiments and the drinkers in the amazaké bar all partake of the sheer rhythm of life, observed on the scale of the city as a single entity. At the end of the evening, just before dawn, Michaël – now alone in the bar – tells us that he can hear this ‘life’: Là-bas, loin sous la surface, j’entends cette régulation première, une immense reptation souterraine, […] quelque chose comme une respiration. C’est cette rumeur profonde, cette vie au revers de l’existence, la petite musique du fond des êtres dont je n’ai jamais cessé de vouloir m’approcher. (Tokyo, 54)

The third story, ‘La chambre du fond: quatre essais de kanjis malgré la nuit’, offers an instance of what has been described as aesthetic translation; that is, the process whereby writers transform ‘the principles and praxis of one art form into another’.11 I have shown elsewhere that in this story Ferrier translates the principles and praxis of kanji and its calligraphic manifestations into his prose style, and thus succeeds in creating a representation of Japanese culture that has Japanese writing woven into its narrative structure.12 I will not reproduce my arguments in detail here, but will give a brief summary of the centrality of calligraphy and kanji to this story. The overarching story is about Michaël’s visit to his friend Murakami’s house and his eventual meeting with his father, a calligrapher who has been granted the title of ningen kokuho (living national treasure); but the narrative is organized around four individual kanji, and in each case the structure and meanings of the kanji govern the shape of the narrative. For instance, the first section starts with a definition of a kanji, 交 or ‘rencontre’, both of its meaning and the manner of its writing: Pour le tracer, commencez par le haut, une brève touche aussitôt contrecarrée. Ce trait vertical est immédiatement dévoré par une ligne horizontale, fermement déployée. Les quatre derniers tracés se déploient alors à une vitesse vertigineuse: à gauche, à droite, puis encore à gauche, à droite, une série de balafres décochées. L’échange naît ainsi, d’une suite de regards et de gestes contradictoires, de paroles données, reprises, déplacées. (Tokyo, 61–62)

11 Pamela A. Genova, Writing Japonisme (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), p. xiv. 12 Akane Kawakami, ‘Calligraphy or Photography? Representations of the City in Michaël Ferrier’s Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 57.2 (2020), 190–203.

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What follows is a description of the narrator’s arrival in Ebisu on the Sky Walker, the famously long ‘moving sidewalk’ that leads in and out of Ebisu station. Its description echoes the preceding definition of the kanji for ‘rencontre’: ‘Quatre cents mètres, ça n’a l’air de rien mais c’est long. On a tout loisir d’observer ceux qui arrivent en face: les gens se croisent sans se toucher, les regards se trouvent, s’évitent, se frôlent, le long de cette ligne horizontale’ (Tokyo, 65–66). The movements of the passengers’ eyes reflect the gestures of the calligrapher tracing the kanji in question; along the parallel lines of the trottoir roulant, reminiscent of the lines on a piece of paper (‘cette ligne horizontale’), we see how their glances ‘se trouvent, s’évitent, se frôlent’. It is not only the theme of ‘rencontre’, but perhaps more importantly the reality of the calligrapher’s movements and the traces that they leave on the paper that is reproduced in the city; thus Tokyo is represented through a reading of the writing of a kanji. There is mimesis here, but it is not visual; it is a gestural mimesis which superimposes a series of gestures on the district of Ebisu that both forms the sign and represents the city. The second kanji is saké, which is – like all alcohol-related words – a culturally overdetermined term. Ferrier defuses the potential for unwanted mythologizing with humour, but then gives the word a new mythology based on specific aspects of the kanji itself, namely its liquid and circulatory nature. These observations are then suddenly and humorously dramatized – or mobilized – as the kanji becomes a moving object: Tout à coup, une multitude de visions s’ouvre, clapote, gicle, jaillit, ruisselle, s’écoule goutte à goutte. Vous avez peut-être trouvé le secret du saké et celui de la calligraphie: fluide, liquide, immédiatement disponible, l’alcool de riz ouvre à des rêveries infinies. (Tokyo, 70)

Like a photograph that begins to move and turn into a film, the kanji is ‘mobilized’, the liquidity of the ink that was used to create it giving rise to further developments and possibilities. It is like Michaux’s Mouvements, in which the strange but wonderfully ‘live’ signs seem to leap up into the white spaces of the page around them, embodying Michaux’s own gestures as he created his characters.13

13 Akane Kawakami, ‘Illegible Writing: Michaux, Masson and Dotremont’, Modern Language Review, 106 (2011), 388–406.

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The third kanji is that of ‘femme’, and the section introduces us to the attractive Ryoko, as well as to radicals, a peculiarity of the kanji system. Radicals are kanji that become parts of other kanji, functioning like a prefix or suffix, and creating ‘families’ of related kanji that have that particular radical, and usually its meaning, in common. This is certainly the case for the kanji for ‘femme’: La femme tient une place importante dans le monde kanji. Associée au signe de l’enfant, elle donne l’amour. Tour à tour épouse, sœur, princesse, vieille femme ou demoiselle, elle entre aussi dans le verrou du mariage, mais qu’on la place à côté de la table de travail et c’est elle qui fournit le verbe commencer. (Tokyo, 78)

The radical for ‘femme’ occurs in a large number of kanji; some obviously related to womanhood, but others not so. Thus another semiotic system which could give rise to a mode of representation is opened up to the reader; not that of the individual kanji or of its writing by the calligrapher, but a system of interrelated kanji constituting a sort of map, made up of kanji sporting the ‘femme’ radical, or indeed that of ‘eau’, or ‘rencontre’. Seeing the patterns created by such groupings of kanji is another, alternative way of ‘reading’ Japanese culture, or the city of Tokyo; another offshoot of the non-visual semiotic systems rooted in the system of calligraphy, an instance of aesthetic translation. The fourth section begins with the kanji for ‘silence’. In this section where the narrator finally meets the calligrapher, the contrast between photography and calligraphy seems to be set out most starkly; most of the section, and all of the section dealing with the encounter, takes place in the dark. To a certain extent the preceding ones did, too, as the party is held in the evening, but electricity has illuminated the various events. Here, however, the narrator slowly makes his way towards the calligrapher down an almost unlit corridor: Plus on avance vers la chambre et plus le couloir s’assombrit. Quelques lampes en papier posées sur le sol tamisent le passage, et, dans les airs, une senteur d’encens. J’ai tellement marché pour arriver jusqu’ici que j’ai l’impression d’avancer sur un tapis de lévitation. (Tokyo, 88)

Instead of the ‘tapis roulant’, the Sky Walker on which we entered Ebisu and the story, we now find ourselves on a ‘tapis de lévitation’ – moving us into a fantastical space, another dimension (which is what flying carpets do) – towards the ‘chambre du fond’, a dark room which

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may also reminds us of the dark room – la chambre noire – where photographs are developed. The ‘trésor national’ turns out to be a man of silence and darkness, like his surroundings. Indeed, he is almost like a sign himself, a kanji: ‘Pour le peu que j’en discerne, son visage et ses avant-bras sont ridés, sa peau parcheminée, traversée de lignes comme s’il se transformait lui-même peu à peu en une calligraphie’ (Tokyo, 89). The calligrapher says nothing, although he is very courteous. The narrator, once his eyes have adjusted to the darkness, is able to examine his work, which is displayed all over the walls of the room. What follows is a rigorously empirical analysis of the nature of calligraphy, and it turns out to be a mode of both representation and creation: Chacun des rouleaux ne dit pas grand-chose (un poème, un sceau familial, un sutra), mais tous racontent fugacement leur histoire, le bref et décisif tracé de leur émergence, la beauté fragile de leur déploiement. Je n’ai jamais vu ça: l’histoire, comme une trajectoire. Le style, comme un projectile. (Tokyo, 90)

An artwork which tells the story of its own creation as well as of what it signifies, calligraphy is described here as the adventure of a fluid medium that travels through space and time; the traces left in its wake opens up a new space, different dimensions, to create a three-dimensional narrative on a two-dimensional surface. The result is something which is neither flat nor visual, because it incorporates time into both what it tells and what it signifies. These qualities make it superior to the photographic image, because it is a kind of doorway to different dimensions, and also because it offers different semiotic systems through which to read reality and create meaning. This last section, and the whole of ‘La chambre du fond’, ends with the narrator and Ryoko walking back towards Ebisu station in the dawn light; and now that they have left the darkness of the calligrapher’s world behind, visual elements come back into play. The narrator notes how beautiful Ryoko is, and captures her beauty in the way he has learned to over the course of the evening: ‘J’esquisse mentalement un petit portrait rapide, à la manière dont on trace un kanji: regard vif cerné de noir, traits tirés, superbe – une joaillerie’ (Tokyo, 94). This is a clear choice of one mode of representation over another,14 and a fascinating 14 The writing of a face is the central theme of one of the stories in Michel Tournier’s La goutte d’or; the tale of ‘la reine blonde’, the devastatingly beautiful

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moment set in the dominantly visual world of Tokyo where alternative modes of representation – or alternative kinds of aesthetic translation – are opened up as possibilities to those who wish to represent reality in as many different ways as possible. But photography is not rejected outright anywhere in this story, and particularly not at its end, when the neon lights of Tokyo turn Ryoko and Michaël into what seem to be pixelated images: ‘nous sommes nous-mêmes maintenant ces minuscules points de lumière qui vibrent dans la rumeur du monde’. The ‘rumeur du monde’ connects the end of this story to the end of ‘Syntaxe de Tokyo’, which concluded with Michaël on his own in a bar, listening to ‘quelque chose comme une respiration. C’est cette rumeur profonde, cette vie au revers de l’existence, la petite musique du fond des êtres dont je n’ai jamais cessé de vouloir m’approcher’ (Tokyo, 54). This sound is the source of movement, and movement is life. As individuals but also as parts of the huge ‘life of the city’ of Tokyo, it is movement – rather than the visual or the non-visual – that is important in the representation of the city. The important thing is to keep the representations dynamic, animate; like Ferrier’s prose, which consistently values movement over fixity, narrative over scene, the city is constantly being viewed, reviewed, read and reread through multiple semiotic modes. The final story of the book, ‘Cent ans de solitude (saké)’ is a brief coda which reminds us of Tokyo’s distinct rhythm, and tells us also that the city is ‘un livre d’images’ (Tokyo, 102). Kizu, à travers les fissures de la ville was published in the same year as Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube, but it is a very different kind of work. On first reading, it is reminiscent of certain ‘minuit’ novels; an anonymous Japanese narrator, single, alone and trapped in a monotonous salary-man job, attempts to discover the source of ‘le mal’ in his life. It is not entirely clear what this ‘mal’ is, although it is clearly something more like a ‘malaise’, something that seems to be not quite right, which causes him to become overly sensitive to kizu. The definition of the word is positioned immediately after the epigraph to the novel: Kizu est le nom que l’on donne au Japon à la blessure, lésion légère ou plaie tranchante. Griffure, fêlure, coupure, il désigne aussi bien un queen who bewitches all who see her or even her portrait, until a young boy breaks down her perfect features into intelligible signs and learns to read her beauty: the ‘traits’ of her face can, to a practised eye, become the ‘traits’ of a text. Michel Tournier, La goutte d’or (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 206–16.

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist trouble profond de l’âme que la trace d’un canif sur la table, une entaille à la surface d’un fruit.15

The novel tells the story of how the narrator’s life slowly disintegrates; not as dramatically as that of the unnamed French woman in ‘Ces tribus qui nous habitent’, certainly not because he hears voices, but because he becomes increasingly aware of and obsessed with the kizu he sees all around – and inside – him. The walls of his flat, inner and outer, are covered in cracks; the life of his friend Taro, happily married though he seems to be, is in fact deeply fissured; Japanese society itself has a massive crevasse running through it, resulting in widespread if unarticulated unhappiness, the periodic eruption of child murders, and only held together by an unspoken agreement that in spite of everything things should carry on as always. His brief acquaintance with the beautiful Yuko only serves to remind him that she, too, is involved in a deadly ‘combat quotidien’, armed with beauty products, make-up and the props that are her clothes and accessories, against all forms of kizu, or imperfection: tellingly, she is described as being so beautiful that ‘on aurait presque pu croire qu’elle ne mourrait jamais’ (Kizu, 28). The nature of the ‘mal’ is never discussed, an omission in keeping with the first-person voice, as the narrator is himself not entirely sure what it is, or where it comes from (four out of the first six chapters start with a metanarrative wondering about the source of the problem). It may be an existential malaise, and indeed probably is partly so, which would explain the ‘minuit’ flavour of the novel. It is also, however, clearly related in some way to the city, inasmuch as the cracks manifest themselves on walls and pavements, as well as in human beings who develop different forms of ‘cracks’. The epigraph is from F. S. Fitzgerald’s The Crack-up (translated as La fêlure in French): ‘J’en vins à l’idée que ceux qui avaient survécu avaient accompli une vraie rupture’, suggesting that the most sensitive and human amongst us are vanquished through failing to break away, failing to create a rupture. 15 Michaël Ferrier, Kizu, à travers les fissures de la ville (Paris: Arléa, 2004), p. 11. Henceforth, this book will be cited as Kizu in the main text. For a detailed discussion of kizu as an aesthetic in Ferrier, see Hervé Couchot, ‘L’esthétique de la fêlure dans les romans de Michaël Ferrier’, in Fabien Arribert-Narce (ed.), Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021), pp. 197–213. See also Bernadette Cailler, ‘Figures du sujet poétique entre “Michaël”, “Ferrier” et un narrateur qui dit je’, in Fabien Arribert-Narce (ed.), Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021), pp. 109–23 (pp. 113–16).

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The narrator of Kizu is clear-sighted enough to see the cracks, thus distinguishing himself from the multitude who are not even aware of them, but not strong enough to embrace them, to escape through them to a different way of life. The narrator’s only interest, apart from the cracks which constantly remind him of the frailty of life and mortality in general, is in the lizards who begin to appear in his flat, no doubt through the cracks themselves but antithetical to them because of their sinuous movements and their sheer aliveness (‘lézarde’, crack, is not commonly used as the feminine form of ‘lézard’, lizard; however, the similarity of the two words in French – and their almost opposite meanings in the context of the novel – is worthy of note). Their variety, trajectories and rapid movements fascinate him: he observes how they never move in a straight line, how impossible it is to predict where they will go, and feels that their ‘surgissement’ holds the key to life: ‘si j’arrivais à capter la logique étrange de cette mécanique, le secret de cet élan, je tiendrais au bout de ma langue le ressort même de nos existences’ (Kizu, 55). To his mind, they signify freedom and the irrepressible quality of life, not least because chopping off their tails does not daunt them: ‘vous lui coupez la queue, elle repousse aussitôt, tandis que le morceau mutilé s’agite à son tour d’une vie propre, nouvelle’ (Kizu, 56). As against the multiple cracks through which he constantly feels that he is falling, every day, he is buoyed up by the ‘danse enivrante’ of the lizards, which constitutes ‘quelque chose qui était le mouvement de la vie et qui n’obéissait à rien’ (Kizu, 58). They offer an escape route – ‘une ligne de fuite’ – from the slowly but surely disintegrating world in which he is imprisoned. Everything is undone at the end of the novel, however, by a massive fissure that affects the whole of Japan. One day the narrator decides to pull himself together and have done with his kizu and his worries; he calls a construction firm to repair all the cracks in his flat. During his conversation with the contractor, however, a crack on a different scale appears beneath the sea, causing an enormous earthquake that affects the whole city: Au large de la côte orientale de Honshu, à une profondeur d’environ soixante-dix kilomètres, deux plaques viennent de glisser l’une contre l’autre. À 16h24 très précisément, la plaque Pacifique a plongé sous la plaque Eurasie, activant une faille de plusieurs dizaines de kilomètres de long, qui se déplace droit vers la capitale japonaise […] Tokyo est une bête, une bête blessée, agitée de soubresauts nerveux. Certains de ses membres sont peut-être déjà brisés. C’est à ce moment seulement que l’on s’aperçoit que des hommes et des femmes crient, crient à perdre la raison depuis le début. (Kizu, 66, 67–68)

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These are the final sentences of the novel, and the world that they paint is very dark; Tokyo in minor, not to say apocalyptic mode, the polar opposite of the festival of colour, life and movement that is presented in Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube. But it is vital to have both points of view, and the fact that the two novels were published in the same year makes it even clearer that they should be read as complementary works. The smoothly operating capital city of Tokyo is run by massive, non-human systems and compliant human participants; one of the victims thereof is the anonymous narrator of Kizu, à travers les fissures de la ville, who nevertheless succeeds in discovering the cracks in the system. But such cracks can also function as escape routes for those who wish to rebel against the system without destroying the whole city. The likes of Yo the linguist can slip through the cracks into underground Tokyo, where life teems and time is experienced differently; paradoxically, it is in the depths of the city that growth runs riot and overrides organized systems. In the last essay of Japon, la barrière des rencontres, Ferrier refers to ‘fissures’ in dominant discourses: ‘Il y a un point sous tous les discours proliférants, un point de faille, une fissure, une lézarde, une brisure. Tout mon travail d’écriture vise à la découverte de ce point, ce moment infiniment fragile, ténu, incertain’.16 The fissure is both a weak point and a creative point; like the button that activates an aperture, it both undermines the closedness of the system and offers something beyond it. Ferrier’s two 2004 novels dramatize these two different ways of approaching fissures, and show how they are to be found in everything – systems, cities, seemingly impervious walls and earthquake-proof buildings. It is the combination of life’s abundance and its fragility that is at the centre of Ferrier’s portrait of Tokyo; the overwhelming activity poised on the knife edge that is the Japan Median Tectonic line, achingly alive because of the ever-present danger that is a symbol of the precariousness of all life, everywhere.

16 Michaël Ferrier, Japon, la barrière des rencontres (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2009), p. 249. Henceforth, this book will be cited as La barrière in the main text.

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Creative Criticism and Sympathy The themes dramatized and illustrated in both Kizu and Petits portraits are explained, discussed and put into historical context in Ferrier’s critical essays. Ferrier wrote the ‘Avant-propos’ to La tentation de la France, la tentation du Japon (2003) and contributed an essay to the volume, the proceedings of a conference he organized in 2001; there are 11 essays in the single-authored collection that is Japon, la barrière des rencontres (2009). These essays show us where Ferrier situates himself within the context of Franco-Japanese cultural interactions, and also confirm that this subject is one of his academic specialisms. Ferrier is acutely aware of his place as a French writer living in Japan, an expert, for instance, in the field of translingual borrowings – he writes on the subject of French haikus by Éluard and the unjustly neglected Julien Vocance (La barrière, 38–39) – and on the fruitful post-war developments in Franco-Japanese literary relations, many of which occurred, in Ferrier’s view, in 1967 (La barrière, 41–45). What follows is an account of the essays and themes from Ferrier’s critical writings that are most relevant to a reading of his fiction. In ‘La tentation du Japon chez les écrivains français’, his main contribution to the 2003 volume, Ferrier gives a historical account of the meetings of the two cultures in Western and French literature. He traces the development of Japan in the French imagination from being a purely imaginary space into which any combination of characteristics could be inserted, back in the eighteenth century when Europeans were prohibited from entering Japan, to a more specifically poetic space, an ‘ailleurs poétique’, which inspired writers as diverse as Yourcenar, Levi-Strauss, Claudel and Proust. Ferrier points out the atemporal quality that is attributed to Japan by these French writers, possibly a consequence of the lack of evolution in European knowledge about Japan enforced by the long period of sakoku or isolationism, but also due to the fact that Japanese culture subscribes, in certain ritualistic contexts, to very different ways of thinking about time.17 This historically created image of Japan as a place where time works in a fashion diametrically opposed to the West is summed up thus by Ferrier: 17 The famous example is that of Ise Jingu, a temple that is reconstructed in exactly the same way every 20 years, which seems to go against generally accepted notions (in Japan also) of the meaning of time, memory and authenticity.

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist Le Japon, ou du moins l’image qu’on peut s’en faire sous la forme mystérieuse d’un envers où les coordonnées natives de l’espace et du temps se trouvent tout à coup niées ou décalées au profit d’une résonance brusque, instantanée – présence pure et précaire – , a sans doute une affinité profonde avec l’acte d’écrire et celui d’exister, et c’est aussi pour cela qu’il ne cesse de hanter les pages de nos écrivains, et qu’il occupe dans notre littérature cette place si singulière.18

Such a notion of Japan as a place where time and space can be made to function differently is of course fictional, albeit based on some ‘real’ aspects of Japanese culture. So when Ferrier writes in Japon, la barrière des rencontres that he, too, has found a new configuration of time and space in Japan, one might be forgiven for worrying briefly if this is not a hangover from the historical image he described so eloquently in the earlier book. But it quickly becomes clear that this new configuration is to do with Ferrier’s understanding of space in art and literature; the realization that the whole universe can be contained in a small space such as that of a Japanese garden, as Gérard Macé discovered as a child,19 a realization which, according to Ferrier, allows him to reconcile ‘une physique à petite échelle et la gravitation universelle dans un vaste paysage de solutions possibles’ (La barrière, 235). This is hardly a discovery particular to Japanese aesthetics, but it is one that Ferrier himself makes in Japan, as part of his formation during his early years as a writer. This analysis of what he owes Japan as a writer occurs in the last essay of Japon, la barrière des rencontres, a collection of Ferrier’s academic essays, written between 1999 and 2009 and published in various journals, all on the subject of Franco-Japanese literary encounters. Dealing with a wide range of writers, from Hugo, Claudel and Lacan to contemporary writers such as Philippe Forest and Nakagawa Hisayasu, it is an intelligent and engaging set of analyses, some of which work towards explaining the structure and themes of Tokyo and Kizu, and also contain the germ of many of his later novels. There are important studies of Perec’s relationship to Japan, mainly through his fascination with the game of Go but also his interest in Japanese genres that aim to portray the everyday; a guide to Butor’s relationship with Japan, which includes a discussion 18 Michaël Ferrier and Miura Nobutaka (eds), La tentation de la France, la tentation du Japon: regards croisés (Arles: Éditions Philippe Picquier, 2003), p. 55. 19 ‘C’est encore cet objet [his mother’s miniature ‘Japanese garden’] qui m’a donné à mon insu la conviction qu’un espace immense peut tenir dans le creux de la main’. Gérard Macé, Un monde qui ressemble au monde (Paris: Marval, 2000), p. 9.

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of how the image of the fan – an object whose essence consists in unfolding and folding – provided Butor with a crucial model for his work. Robert Antelme and Ôe Kenzaburo are examined together as ‘écrivains de l’irréparable’, and Ôe’s Hiroshima Nôto is described as being made up of ‘l’observation rigoureuse, la modestie affichée du propos, la prise de notes permanente, l’écriture sèche et rapide, sans fioritures, nourri d’une sorte de statistique du quotidien’ which results in an admirable ‘écriture humaniste et élémentaire’20 (La barrière, 133). There are also shorter essays on the creolization of Japanese literature, with reference to translingual novelists such as Tawada Yoko, manga versions of Les Misérables and Claudel pictured as a ‘lutteur japonais’. The ensemble is an important contribution to the study of Franco-Japanese literary studies that provides ample evidence of Ferrier’s significant stature as a literary critic. I will examine below, in detail, the final essay of the collection, which is the most important with regard to Ferrier’s own writing: ‘Je suis un écrivain japonais: de l’importance du zuihitsu chez un romancier contemporain’, which discusses how both the ideas behind and structures of zuihitsu have played an essential part in his writerly education. In this essay, Ferrier starts by telling us about the place of Japan in his work: ‘il s’est installé dans ma vie et dans mon écriture avec une douceur, mais aussi avec une force qui, aujourd’hui encore, m’étonne’ (La barrière, 234). It is particularly in the area of style that Japan has affected his writing. First and foremost, it has taught him that less is more, so to speak, and acquainted him with the ‘esthétique du peu’, which he summarizes as follows: Au lieu de l’entassement, le résidu. Au lieu de la compilation, la sélection. Au lieu de l’expansion, la sérialisation. (La barrière, 237)

He goes on to show how these principles play out in Petits portraits; they also, to a certain extent, govern the content and structure of the later Sympathie pour le fantôme, as we will see. Ferrier then goes on to define zuihitsu, the Japanese genre he claims has been most instructive for his œuvre. A French definition describes the genre as an ‘écriture éclatée, semi-improvisée et ancrée dans le présent […] censée reproduire au plus près les mécanismes de la pensée de l’auteur, procédant avec une grande liberté de ton et de forme’ 20 I quote this in full because the description matches exactly what Ferrier himself aimed for when he came to write Fukushima, récit d’un désastre.

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(quoted in La barrière, 240). This definition is extremely similar to the one he will give, in Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, of Ôe Kenzaburo’s Hiroshima Nôto: ‘une écriture éclatée, semi-improvisée, ancré dans le réel […] le mélange des genres qu’elles permettent […] fait que l’on pourrait presque y discerner, par éclats, le mouvement même de la vie’ (305). The key characteristics of both Hiroshima Nôto and the genre of zuihitsu, which Ferrier wishes to emulate in his own writing, thus consist of a loose, generically hybrid structure which can incorporate flashes of reality, both spatial and temporal, and a resolutely personal point of view. He names three classics of the genre as his models: Sei Shônagon’s Makurano soushi, whose French translation is entitled Les notes de chevet, an eleventh-century masterpiece of gossip and everyday life at the Imperial Court, and the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century works Hojoki and Tsurezuregusa by Kamo no Chomei and Yoshida Kenko, respectively. Tsurezuregusa, translated by Ferrier as Propos des moments perdus, is made up of 243 ‘passages’, ‘où se mêlent à la fois des notes de lectures, de voyages, des souvenirs, le tout sous le paravent d’une certaine nonchalance et persillé d’humour’, allowing for a ‘mélange des genres’ which in turn makes possible the depiction of ‘le mouvement même de la vie’ (La barrière, 242).21 In Ferrier’s view, all of these works might be called novels; inspired by them, he hopes to have created, in Petits portraits for instance, a ‘composition fragmentaire et musicale’, whose aim is to get as close as possible to ‘la présence même du réel’ from the individual, singular point of view of the author. These characteristics and aims are to be found in all of Ferrier’s work, to a greater or lesser extent; albeit less so in the later works, when what I will be calling his proliferating style overrides the precepts of the ‘esthétique du peu’, constituting another stage in his development as a novelist. But the unique, singular viewpoint – and the commitment to capturing the ‘real’ – remain constant throughout. It is also present, of course, in ‘Je suis un écrivain japonais’ itself. A critical essay, but with a clear nod to the style of zuihitsu; the argument meanders, although coherently, through the various influences that Japanese culture have exerted on his writing. The essay might be described an amalgam of a French-style essai and the Japanese genre, another instance of aesthetic translation, this time in the genre of creative criticism.

21 Again, this is exactly – word for word, in fact – what Ferrier says about Oe’s work, in Fukushima.

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Japon, la barrière des rencontres was published in 2009; Ferrier’s next work was Sympathie pour le fantôme, a novel which came out in 2010. It is the last, to date, of his novels set in Japan, and broadly follows the precepts outlined in ‘Je suis un écrivain japonais’; but it also looks forward to the later works in terms of scope and theme. It is a demanding and complex novel, with a number of ambitious aims: to discuss the nature of Frenchness, depict Tokyo’s ever-changing and growing identity, and explore the nature of writing – and the writer’s lot – in the contemporary world. It also seems to me to be something of a ‘transitional’ novel, poised between the interests of his earlier works and the later ones, which gives it a peculiarly restless quality that chimes with its characterization of Tokyo. Sympathie pour le fantôme is made up of six parts, with a brief introductory section as well as an epilogue. Preceding the introduction is an epigraph explaining the title: ‘fantôme’ est aussi un terme de technique musicale: quand on frappe une touche de piano, un harmonique de la note émise peut correspondre exactement à la fréquence selon laquelle une autre corde a été réglée. Cette corde se met alors à vibrer à son tour, par ‘sympathie’ en quelque sorte, de façon audible. Ce phénomène est appelé: ‘fantôme’. Je suis cette corde qui vibre: Sympathie pour le fantôme.22

The introductory section is an untitled, metanarrative preamble which opens up the writer’s consciousness to his readers. His main preoccupations are the challenges of writing, in French, at the start of the twenty-first century, when ‘plus personne ne sait comment être français’ (Fantôme, 16); the richness and entanglement of the various historical time zones which the writer must inhabit, but out of which he will need to ‘reconstituer une mémoire’; and his choice of the novel form, best suited for capturing all the different voices, motifs and melodies of a past that is ‘métissé de différents passés, de différentes cultures’ (Fantôme, 19). It is made clear that the novel will focus on interactions between cultures, the spaces in between, both in the past and present, and so it turns out, although the narrative present is entirely set in Japan. Part I introduces us to the narrator, a French academic living and teaching in Tokyo, who also does some regular TV work presenting the highlights of French culture to a Japanese audience. Following one of his 22 Michaël Ferrier, Sympathie pour le fantôme (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), p. 13. Henceforth, this book will be cited as Fantôme in the main text.

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recording sessions he is approached by Yuko, ‘la belle Yuko’, who is in charge of the broadcaster’s top programme, Tokyo Time Table; she asks him to write a script for a new ‘history of France’ for her programme, and he accepts, partly because of her beauty but also because he is interested in presenting a plural, alternative vision of France which does not feature the obvious names or dates. We are then introduced to the university milieu where he teaches, L’Université du Centre or Chuo Daigaku, peopled by characters who are clearly satirical figures: he is asked by one of them to participate in the ‘Diaspora’ conference, and forced to accept. Back at home he works on the ‘history of France’ script and is rewarded by Yuko with an evening out in Tokyo; she takes him to an extremely recherché restaurant and bar, reminiscent of those frequented by Yo in Petits portraits, and he returns to his writing invigorated by the food and the approaching typhoons. Part II is the first of his three stories that make up the alternative history of France: the tale of Ambroise Vollard, the art dealer who championed Picasso, Gaughin, Van Gogh and many others, a native of La Réunion who changed the course of French and world art. His life was a fascinating series of extremes: a colossus of a man, dark-skinned and prone to hypersomnia, Vollard was the first person to hold exhibitions of the Impressionists and to publish reproductions of their work in spite of the Academy’s protestations. He also encouraged his artists to produce vases, plates and other artisanal objects, in defiance of generic hierarchies. Part III, ‘Dead travel fast’, brings us back to the narrator’s life in Tokyo, at the university where we are reacquainted briefly with Yo from Petits Portraits, then offered some more campus satire. Yuko gets in touch to say that she likes the Ambroise Vollard piece; she proposes that they go to the Hakone Museum near Kamakura to look for some appropriate images to accompany it. They travel to Hakone, eat and work together, and the narrator discovers that Yuko’s cultural tastes are highly eclectic. Their love-making that night is very delicately presented through images from Western fairy tales, Japanese ghost stories and poetry. Part IV is the second of the alternative stories of France: the life of Jeanne Duval, ‘la “belle d’abandon”’. The narrator chronicles the tale of her beauty, her nobility and her influence; as a black woman in nineteenth-century France, she was mistreated by both her contemporaries and by posterity. Ferrier’s account seeks to validate both her being and her influence: ‘que la France sache tout ce qu’elle te doit’. Part V, entitled ‘Diasporic Encounters’, brings us back to the present and to

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Tokyo, an entity that is ceaselessly reinventing itself. It is too big to be a city, and is better described as ‘une ville fantôme, tout en apparitions, en disparitions, en rencontres diasporiques’ (Fantôme, 201). The tone then turns satirical again as the Diaspora conference claims the narrator’s attention, with its ridiculously named participants and meaningless papers; he returns home exhausted. The section ends with another tour of Tokyo bars in the company of Yuko, with whom he discusses his third text, as well as an encounter with some Tokyo ghosts, attracted by his writing (Fantôme, 235). Section VI, the last, tells the story of ‘Edmond Albius, le marieur de fleurs’, a botanist who discovers how to artificially inseminate vanilla. He is another black man, a freed slave who does not, naturally, benefit from his discovery; little is known about him, except that he was once incarcerated – after becoming a free man – for theft, and died a pauper’s death in 1880. His discovery changed the world, but few know today who made it possible for vanilla to be as ubiquitous as it is now, in food, drinks, perfumes and toiletries. Another unknown French hero, a part of French history that has been forgotten and buried under the white histories of the realm. The epilogue shows the three stories being considered by the TV editorial team; without waiting for their decision the narrator steps out into the Tokyo spring, and notices the resilience of the cherry tree outside his window, still there after all the typhoons and storms. Much longer than his first two novels, coming in at 257 pages, Sympathie pour le fantôme is also structurally more inventive, even experimental. It could certainly be seen as a set of loosely connected essays in the style of zuihitsu, unified by the voice of the authorial consciousness. This structure of an alternating narrative and metanarrative – if the ‘alternative tales’ constituting French history can be described as a narrative – follows the precept of ‘sérialisation’ advocated in ‘Je suis un écrivain japonais’. The alternative stories themselves are an instance of ‘sélection’ over ‘compilation’, from the same list of precepts. A compiling approach to history would result, if the compiler were conscientious and unbiased, in an impossible ‘entassement’ (La barrière, 237) of facts; selection is necessary as well as aesthetically desirable. The novel can thus be seen as embodying a number of principles taken from the ‘esthétique du peu’ and the genre of zuihitsu, both Japanese influences on Ferrier, and therefore as further instances of aesthetic translation – or structural translingualism – in his work.

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These Japanese influences are central to the style of Sympathie pour le fantôme, but so too is Japan as a place – or space – in the overall structure of the novel, thanks to its freedom from the black/white binarism of French history. Not that Ferrier’s ‘alternative’ history of France, told through three black figures, is set up to enforce the binary opposition. The alternative stories are new ways of seeing French history, different openings onto the same historical periods which demonstrate how French history is neither purely white or black, but mixed. And this is why Japan is arguably an ideal place in which to conduct this exercise, as it too is neither black nor white, and has no historical link to this particular binarism. Although consumerist and Westernized, Japan embodies a historically very different culture; although it too has a regrettable history of mistreating immigrants and minorities, the colonization of Black communities, specifically, does not figure in that history; and, last but not least, contemporary Tokyo is burgeoning with postmodern métissage of all kinds, represented most strikingly by the high-flying TV executive, Yuko, listening to a reggae version of Baudelaire’s ‘Paysage’ as she works. These are the reasons why Japan can act as a potentially neutral space in which the métissage of French history can be safely attempted. Thinking of modern Japan as ahistorical in this sense is of course a Eurocentric point of view, but viable with regard to black/white history, and is a different vision of Japan from the classic image in the French imagination of Japan as an empty space which can be filled with whatever the French mind wishes, described by Ferrier in his essays of criticism discussed earlier. For this Japan, although ‘neutral’ with regard to the black/white binary opposition, is not empty; it is full of fascinating figures, places and events which are ceaselessly growing, reinventing it and changing. If Japan is the ideal space for the narrator’s rewriting of French history, what are the consequences of this for the representation of Japan in the novel Sympathie pour le fantôme? Modern Japan is portrayed, as it was in Tokyo, as an ideally ‘mixed’ environment where eclectic elements from Western culture, taken from different historical periods, are combined with Japanese elements to create hip, cool and fascinating hybrids. Yuko’s predilection for the reggae version of ‘Paysage’ is one example; there is also the Spanish restaurant in Kamakura where the narrator and Yuko enjoy a paella, ‘cuisine fine, catalane – le chef japonais a vécu dix ans à Barcelone – mais avec des pointes françaises et chinoises, extraordinairement inventive: mélange de mangue et de carotte, cochon iberico, grains de sésame …’ (Fantôme, 149). They have just been to the Hakone

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Museum at the foot of Mount Fuji, where Rodin sculptures stand in the park alongside others by Dubuffet and a New Zealand artist; on the way to the ‘Pavillon Picasso’ is a Chinese-style building full of calligraphic art. Such intercultural spaces are reminiscent of the essays in Japon, la barrière des rencontres on contemporary manga versions of Les Misérables, or on the creolization of Japanese culture, reinforcing the characterization of Japan as a mecca of métissage and destroyer of binary oppositions. This kind of act – of musical composition, fusion cooking or museum curation – that moves between diverse historical periods is also what happens, for the narrator, when engaged in the act of writing: ‘écrire est cette migration même’, moving within different levels of the past which is ‘métissé de différents passés, de différentes cultures’ (Fantôme, 19). In the untitled prologue to the novel, the narrator has already tried to describe the dizzying sense of living in several time zones at once, his desire to make music from the rushing past of the different centuries, and to capture all the motifs and melodies that he can hear: Nous sommes à Tokyo, au début du XXIe siècle, et pourtant vous êtes déjà ailleurs, vous remontez les siècles, vous escaladez le temps. Vous voici à Paris, à la fin du siècle précédent […] Désormais les temps sont ouverts, ils sont des volcans, débondés, débordants, furie du temps rouvert, musique. Oui, voilà, il faut musiquer tout ça. (Fantôme, 17, 18)

Tokyo and the narrator are both engaged in temporal and cultural métissage. This is the only place in his work where Ferrier attempts to foreground and describe the writer’s inter-temporal activity in such detail; in his later novels, such as Mémoires d’outre-mer, he will content himself with practising it. As a metanarrative opening to this novel, followed by several others during the course of the narration, these writerly musings may not be to everyone’s taste, but they are a useful description of the key aspects of several kinds of privileged activity which involve travelling through different time zones and cultures. The last of these is sex, and involves the beautiful Yuko, effectively his muse (as it is she who commissions the alternative history of France), as well as his guide in his discovery of the most exclusive spaces of nocturnal Tokyo. Yuko bears the same name as the young woman in Kizu, who was also extremely beautiful, took great care of her appearance and had a keen interest in fine dining. Yuko in Sympathie pour le fantôme is older, extremely competent and intelligent, and her self-presentation is much more sophisticated inasmuch as whatever

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effort is put into its achievement is invisible; she is a mature professional who takes the narrator out to dinner, rather than the other way round. Her beauty is introduced in rather stark and potentially stereotypical terms at the start of their relationship: Peau très blanche, cheveux très noirs: la blancheur de la peau vous saisit, l’ondulé de la chevelure vous enlace et son sourire vous tranche la gorge d’un fil soyeux. Le visage est lisse, ovale, parfaitement dessiné: il n’offre aucune prise au regard, sauf les deux pupilles d’encre – deux trous noirs dans un mur blanc. (Fantôme, 34)

The lack of expression implicit in the description of her eyes as ‘deux trous noirs’ is faintly worrying, although it is perhaps in keeping with the murderous effect of her smile which ‘vous tranche la gorge d’un fil soyeux’. His appreciation of her beauty, however, is developed and amplified in more detail as the two spend more time together over the project, taking her well beyond any stereotypical description of a ‘Japanese beauty’. She is a feared and respected producer, but also a connoisseur of recherché dining and saké, jazz and fine art, with eclectic tastes in music and film. In spite of her job in a high-pressure industry, ‘elle vit dans un temps bien à elle, d’une lenteur absolue – avec de brusques accélérations qui laissent tout le monde sur place’ (Fantôme, 147). It is when the two of them make love, however, that time travel, of the kind initiated by writing and whose effects are visible in Tokyo, takes place. The love-making sequence in Yuko’s flat in Kamakura covers roughly six pages. It is a strange succession of dream-like images, combining flashes of physical description, Japanese ghost stories, French poetry and time travel. Starting with a suggestion that Yuko might be a terrifying spirit or monster (‘Dans les histoires de fantômes japonais, les longs cheveux noirs cachent souvent un visage atrocement défiguré … : je relève doucement une mèche de ses cheveux … mais non, pas de cicatrices, juste son sourire, caressant et léger’, Fantôme, 161), they kiss, after which she moves to another part of the room and the narrator catches a glimpse of her skin. The physical description does not continue, however: ‘apercevoir le tendu d’une peau sous les jours d’une dentelle: c’est un fugace dérèglement du temps, où des millions d’histoires s’ouvrent dans la nuit’ (Fantôme, 162). This is the first reference to the distorting effect that erotic experience has on time, which will become more significant later in the passage. The room is then invaded by the giant shadows of the cherry trees outside, and the light changes: ‘Des ombres vertes se glissent sur sa

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peau: l’obscurité voudrait la reprendre, mon fantôme’. But she resists, and stays with him, after which a series of synaesthetic effects follow, and suddenly a brief paragraph describing a vase, whose creation in the extreme heat of the kiln – ‘la violence du four, la pluie ardente des braises’ (Fantôme, 163) – appears to function as a metaphorical description of making love. Time then begins to pass at a frenzied pace, and with it a bewildering array of Japanese, French and other entities (‘tout autour de nous, les villes et les villages s’envolent … les morts vont vite …’ Fantôme, 163); Baudelaire’s ‘les tuyaux, les clochers, les mâts de la cité’ are invoked, ogres and demons appear, interspersed with the words for ‘rain’ in Japanese, of which there are many, although none for ‘la pluie fine de ses caresses, pour l’averse de son sourire’ (Fantôme, 164). Yuko then turns into two classic Japanese monsters:23 ‘Elle vient, elle est partout sur moi comme les Roku-roku-bi, les têtes volantes au cou élastique […] Son visage se déplace comme une torche. C’est la femme à deux bouches, elle se déplace sous la forme d’une roue enflammée’ (Fantôme, 164). This evocation of both erotic and demonic images continues as other ghosts and monsters arrive, followed by the dead from various periods of history. The narrator reminds us that in Japanese ghost stories, the dead are particularly prone to seeking redress or vengeance, driven by ‘tout l’éventail des paroles non respectées, des dettes non honorées, des créances non recouvrées’ (Fantôme, 166). They are particularly attracted to the narrator, however, because of his rewriting of the past: ‘j’ai mis le temps à l’envers, je l’ai retourné dans tous les sens. Maintenant, ils viennent à moi, tous les fantômes de l’Histoire. Je converse avec les morts … mi-souvenir, mi-délirant … Ah, les “chères voix qui se sont tues”’ (Fantôme, 165). The ghosts and references then become international, medieval and gothic as the passage nears its end: Je traverse la forêt des fantômes, le plateau aux sept citadelles, je remonte la plaine du temps […] Soudain, nous sommes en 1953, Mizoguchi tourne Ugetsu Monogatari, les Contes de la lune et de la pluie, Yuko s’évanouit, les lignes de son corps se dissolvent dans le monde flottant […] Nous 23 Rokuro-kubi (ろくろ首) and Futakuchi-onna (二口女) are two classic Japanese female monsters from traditional folk tales; the first has a neck that grows and grows (and in some stories, detaches from the body and flies around), and the second has a mouth at the back of her head (as punishment for letting one of her daughters starve to death).

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist entrons dans les siècles obscurs, les Slavons et les Huns, des dragons, des empaleurs, […] C’est un paysage sauvage, un mélange de latin et de slave, de salive et de satin. Là-bas, de l’autre côté de la Terre, des idéogrammes chinois dansent dans la pénombre. Maintenant, nous sommes au Moyen Âge tardif, Gutenberg vient d’inventer l’imprimerie, ses cheveux se transforment en quatre chevaux splendides, couleur de charbon, les loups s’enfuient sur leur passage … Alors, je passe la Barrière des Rencontres. (Fantôme, 166–67)

Making love with Yuko turns out to be a voyage through multiple ages and places, taking in the Slavs and the Huns, Mizoguchi’s ghostly masterpiece, the invention of the printing press, Verlaine and dancing calligraphic characters. The experience certainly qualifies as a visit to a ‘passé métissé’, like writing itself; sometimes it seems that language is taking the lead, for instance when the landscape is described as ‘un mélange de latin et de slave, de salive et de satin’. The passing of the ‘barrière des rencontres’ harks back to the Japanese classic Ise Monogatari, a work made up of 125 sections; the sixty-ninth tells the story of two lovers – who do not seem ever to come together, except perhaps in a dream, but promise each other to meet one day at ‘la barrière des rencontres’, seki no ausaka in Japanese.24 Do these present-day lovers actually make love? Is the ‘passing of the barrier’ a euphemistic expression for sex or is it a metaphysical crossing into a different time zone, or both? The reference to Ugetsu Monogatari reminds us of the possibility for love-making across different time zones, between the living and the dead.25 It is certainly another activity that, like writing and living in Tokyo, allows the narrator to travel back and forth in time and space. Sympathie pour le fantôme is a tour de force in that it succeeds in embodying – literally – the singular viewpoint of the author that befits a structure inspired by the Japanese genre of zuihitsu, as described in Ferrier’s essays. The narrative’s unusual references and its wide-ranging journeys across time zones, resulting from a commitment to capturing the ‘real’, do exactly that; the reality of the narrator’s experience, 24 Ferrier tells the story in the ‘Avant-propos’ of Japon: la barrière des rencontres, to explain his choice of title. 25 Ugetsu Monogatari is a 1953 film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, set in the samurai period and featuring encounters and relationships between the living and the dead, brought together through the survival of strong emotions across the life-death divide.

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idiosyncratic though it may be, comes through with sincerity and conviction. This experience includes an impression of what we may call the elasticity of space – and time – in Japan; not in the Orientalist, or japoniste, sense noted by Ferrier himself in his essays, but in the freedom from a certain kind of history that Japan enjoys, namely the binary one that defines most colonial histories, and in the hybridity of contemporary Tokyo which allows for strange and quirky combinations of cultures to flourish. Ferrier Online: Tokyo Time Table In 2004, Ferrier launched Tokyo Time Table, a website designed to introduce a wide range of Japanese cultural phenomena to a Frenchspeaking audience. He designed it entirely on his own, in accordance with his own tastes and preferred models: ‘à l’aide d’un template Wix […] Cela m’a pris deux ans, entre 2012 et 2014: j’ai choisi les couleurs dominantes (le rouge et le noir, sur une trame blanche), le graphisme (très géométrique: “Bâtons, chiffres et lettres” comme disait Queneau, auxquels s’ajoutent des figures circulaires), la police de caractères, etc.’.26 It is now maintained collectively by Ferrier and three volunteers, Shirane N., Abderrahmane Martin and Oshima Taku. Over the years it has become an intriguingly multiple space that seems to me to embody, in different ways, both Ferrier’s work and his relationship with Japan, the latter in all its diversity of focus. The website shares its name with the TV programme run by Yuko in Sympathie pour le fantôme, the one designed to present France to a Japanese audience,27 but the website works in the opposite direction to introduce Japan to a francophone audience through the work of writers, artists, photographers and film-makers of both (and other) nationalities. The home page of the site is immediately both arresting and moving, featuring nine sliding images of traditional and modern Japan under a small banner reading ‘ようこそ’ (welcome): a Noh mask, the detail of a temple roof, an architectural drawing of a Tokyo skyscraper, 26 See ‘Interview with Michaël Ferrier’ below, p. 157. 27 The fact that the fictional TV programme and the real website are called the same thing is of course intentional, and an instance of the exchanges between the real and fictional worlds dear to Ferrier’s heart. See ‘Interview with Michaël Ferrier’ below, p. 156.

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Dali on a Japanese poster, a group of Tokyo buildings plastered with advertisements, the reflection of a woman’s face in the window of a skyscraper, red lanterns hanging along the roof of a street izakaya, and a self-reflexive one of a group of maneki-neko (‘welcoming’ cats), traditionally placed at the entrance of restaurants and bars to attract customers.28 The red, black and white colours, the geometrical characters and the particular fonts – all chosen by Ferrier, as mentioned above – immediately create a certain ‘look and feel’ which to my mind denote a strong sensitivity to the visual, and an aura of formality that nevertheless does not preclude a sense of fun or transgression.29 Above the images are six headings which offer drop-down menus of different lengths. The visitor can either browse through these headings and their drop-down menus, or scroll down below the images to two areas, ‘Actualités et Archives’ and ‘Japon’. ‘Actualités et Archives’ opens into a long page of Ferrier’s most recent publications (book covers) and appearances at conferences (the posters). ‘Japon’, on the other hand, is not a link but the starting point for a long sequence of links, each one made up of an image and a title, to essays by various contributors ranging from ‘Ozu et les cerisiers’ by Marc Pautrel and ‘Butor Japonais’ by Ferrier himself to Urs App’s ‘La découverte occidentale du bouddhisme’ and Paul Morand’s ‘Le langage des fleurs’, which can be reached by scrolling down the page, but which are also accessible under the categories of the drop-down menus. The headings and their drop-down menus are mostly in French: ‘sommaire’, ‘livres/著書’, ‘écrivains de langue française’, ‘du Japon et d’autres lieux’, ‘invités’ and ‘contact/連絡先’. They are of unequal length: the ‘sommaire’ menu, for instance, contains 15 headings, whilst the ‘écrivains de langue française’ menu contains 24. Under ‘sommaire’, there is a ‘news/アーカイヴ’ link which leads to the ‘Actualités et Archives’ page described earlier; an ‘about/プロフィール’ link gives information about the creators of the site; ‘entretiens’ are interviews given or organized by Ferrier on topics of Japanese interest; ‘écrits sur l’art’ is a bibliography 28 This description is based on a visit to the site on 10 April 2023. 29 ‘Look and feel’ is one of the aspects of the ‘first impressions and reactions’ that the researcher of a website should record at the start of his/her analysis, according to Luc Pauwels, ‘A Multimodal Framework for Analyzing Websites as Cultural Expressions’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17 (2012), 247–65 (p. 253). This article offers a step-by-step guide to analysing the cultural capital of websites, and although not all of its precepts are applicable to an analysis of Ferrier’s site, I found it very useful and am grateful to Dr Jackie Lou and Professor Marjorie Lorch for suggesting it to me.

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of Ferrier’s writings on a wide variety of artworks. ‘Artistes africains au Japon’, which used to be under ‘sommaire’, has moved to the ‘contact’ link; it introduces the five African artists who exhibited at the Setagaya Museum of Art in 2018, and there are essays by Ferrier on two of them, Ablade Glover and El Anatsui, with the others billed as ‘forthcoming’. Back under ‘sommaire’, ‘Fukushima, visualiser l’impossible’ and ‘catastrophes – beaux-arts’ take the visitor to the two articles of the same titles by Ferrier, and ‘japonismes 1 – littérature’, ‘japonismes 2 – Habsbourg’ and ‘japonismes 3 – amour de l’estampe’ are articles by Ferrier, Gilles Mastalski and Viviane Le Berre, respectively, on three different aspects of japonisme. As such the headings are clearly not all on the same level of generality or detail, but do give an intriguing sample of the abundance and variety of what is on offer. I will not describe in detail the other drop-down menus, but they are similarly gateways to profusion; ‘livres’ gives, predictably, a list of links to Ferrier’s books, but ‘écrivains de langue française’ links to brief accounts of and quotations from 24 writers and their works, chosen for their focus on Japan, while ‘du Japon et d’autres lieux’ is a delightfully chaotic list of 17 names of writers and places associated with either Japan or Ferrier; ‘invités’ offers 28 articles by writers and academics on a diverse selection of (mostly) Japan-related topics. ‘Contact’, which used to contain an email address, a contact form and a map which playfully pinpointed (literally) the Imperial Palace in Tokyo as the address of the website, now lists 16 ‘dossiers’ on writers and artists who appear elsewhere in the website. There are numerous methodological frameworks for analysing websites, depending on the kind of website under discussion; but there are so many different kinds of website, depending on the designer, the purposes and external factors such as funding, that it is not possible or desirable to identify a single approach. Having considered various possibilities within the Digital Humanities context, I have concluded that the most fruitful approach is to make use of the methods that respond best to Ferrier’s particular creation, and which allow me to analyse Tokyo Time Table as one instance in a group of Ferrier’s works, namely his works on Japan. This hybrid approach will combine the multimodal framework mentioned above, as well as the very different framework created by Benjamin Hoffmann specifically to analyse authors’ websites.30 I also want to situate Tokyo Time Table within the 30 Benjamin Hoffmann, ‘Le site d’auteur: un nouvel espace d’investigation critique’, French Studies, 70 (2016), 565–80.

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context of ‘web literature’ as described by Erika Fülöp; although Ferrier does not publish ‘electronic literature’ in the narrow sense, he does publish material on Tokyo Time Table that is not available in print, and I therefore think it is legitimate to see his website as an instance within a continuum of his works. Ferrier is not a professional creator of websites and does not aspire to be one, and this website is very clearly the creation of such a person; he is, by contrast, a writer who is extremely committed to the representation of Japan, the subject of this chapter, and I see the website as an expression of this commitment; it is a uniquely unfinished and continuously developing site of Ferrier’s writings on Japan. Hoffmann investigates the phenomenon of the site d’auteur, and his analysis is based on primary materials obtained from a questionnaire he sent to a number of writers who have personal websites; 12 responded, one of whom was Michaël Ferrier. From this admittedly small sample, four different types of ‘author’s website’ are identified: ‘site d’auteur à dominante promotionnelle; à dominante artistique; à dominante paratextuelle; à composante communautaire’.31 In all of these cases, the website is a space where the author can be creator, critic and promoter at the same time, and fosters the illusion of immediate access, for the reader, into the writer’s ‘workshop’. Speaking of immediate access, another point of interest is that on most authors’ websites the whole œuvre to date is made available, abolishing at a stroke the (admittedly increasingly minimal) work the reader needs to do in order to obtain a copy of any item in the bibliography. Having considered Hoffmann’s primary materials and classifications, I would not classify Tokyo Time Table as a pure ‘author’s website’. There are too many texts in it by authors who are not Ferrier, and the overall impression is that of a meeting place for those who are interested in Japanese art and culture.32 It may be helpful to compare it to a museum website, given its selection of artefacts and the commonality of interest; the difference is that a museum website is much more of a ‘public space’, without the intensely personal nature of Ferrier’s, although a curator may well wish to stamp his/her personality onto his/her electronic version of the museum.33 31 Hoffmann, p. 571. 32 Hoffmann comes to a similar conclusion (p. 571). 33 Natalia Grincheva has analysed how the ‘public space’ of a museum website works in ‘Researching Online Museums: Digital Methods to Study Virtual Visitors’, in Lewis Levenberg, Tai Neilson and David Rheams (eds), Research Methods for the Digital Humanities (London: Macmillan, 2018), pp. 103–28.

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Another useful way to think about Tokyo Time Table’s particularly hybrid nature is to put it in the context of ‘web literature’. There are, of course, varying degrees of electronic input in the range of online artefacts that might be called ‘web literature’. There are the purely electronic publications which are not available in print, and which are often interactive in the fullest sense, inviting readers to contribute, change and rewrite the original. There are the highly multimodal projects on social media that make full use of the opportunities only possible on the web, such as embedded games and multimedia narrative. The works that are more relevant to my thinking here are not these highly interactive projects, but those which are usually created by authors who already have a strong presence in print: ‘blog-and websitebased writing that builds on the web environment as a flexible, fluid space of construction and communication but places less emphasis on technological and formal experimentation with hyperlinks and more on crossovers and combinations between the digital and the print medium’.34 Established novelists such as François Bon, Éric Chevillard, Renaud Camus and Chloé Delaume write – and edit – prolifically online. All of the named authors write blogs, or fragments, of an autofictional nature which are then turned into books by their print publishers; the complementarity of the print and digital spaces allows for different modes and directions of reading, and result in a strong, real sense that ‘forms and works no longer need to be fixed and definitive, and any closure might only be temporary’.35 Ferrier’s website is not quite as fluid, or as personal, as the online works mentioned above, but it shares with them the openness that is crucial to this form of writing, their willed incompleteness. Tokyo Time Table can thus be seen as an exemplary instance of Umberto Eco’s ‘opera aperta’; a version thereof that Eco would not have been aware was possible when he published the eponymous book in 1967.36 This of course partly comes from the nature of the medium; a website is neverending, ceaselessly changeable and gives access – at least potentially – to all kinds of information and knowledge. In some senses all of 34 Erika Fülöp, ‘The Novel in French and the Internet’, in Adam Watt (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Novel in French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 724–43 (p. 734). 35 Fülöp, p. 736. 36 A type of work that has been described by Umberto Eco in his classic Opera aperta.

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Ferrier’s books can be seen as prequels to the website, as they too are potentially ‘open’ works, not intensely focused and completed products but invitations to continue thinking along the various lines and passing through the many doors flung open by the inconclusive endings.37 And because websites can be updated, Ferrier’s books and articles can be incorporated into the map whenever published, and therefore become timeless pieces of the puzzle, of the structure that does progress through time but whose development leaves no traces. Only a visitor who has prior knowledge of Ferrier’s bibliography, for instance, would be able to date the direction of his thinking about japonisme, or his interest in Araki’s photography. A website is always in the present; even with dated pages or sections, the overall impression is that it has always been what it is now. Perhaps the best way to think about Tokyo Time Table is that it embodies not so much Ferrier’s identity (as might be said of an ‘author’s website’) as his relationship with Japan, given that it contains his various interests in Japanese art, photography, literature, theatre and so on, and teases out the ways in which he has connected with the culture directly but also through other writers and artists, francophone and Japanese, both living and long dead. All of Ferrier’s ‘Japanese’ interests, long-term and fleeting, historic and immediate, are present on this website; the whole of his relationship with Japanese culture is mapped out on it. The overall impression of it is that of a web, with one interest linking to another in associative fashion, creating a diffuse and intricate net that is cast over a much wider area than any of his previous works. If a website is the embodiment of a relationship, in this case between a mind and its objects of scrutiny, then we can extend the metaphor to think about entering the website as being analogous to entering Ferrier’s mind; his associations become ours, and we are ‘only a click away’ from each new step in the development of his thoughts. As Walter Benjamin claimed, at the end of the nineteenth century, that the camera had the power to alter the ways in which we perceive the world, so we, at the start of the twenty-first, can consider how the Internet might alter the ways in which we perceive ours.38 The idea that everything is interconnected, which is visualized on the screen and seemingly even actualized 37 The end of ‘La chambre du fond: quatre essais de kanjis malgré la nuit’, as mentioned earlier, is left open in this way. 38 I discuss the effects of technology – photography, in the main – on human perceptual and imaginative experience at an earlier stage in the history of

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by the ability to click endlessly onto every link that offers itself, is one with which most of us living in the Internet age are familiar; no doubt it has already long displaced formerly popular models of the mind, such as that of a series of drawers, a library or (more recently) of a basic computer. But what seems to be missing from this particular model of the mind is time, and memory; as mentioned earlier, there is no way of tracking development through time within the website.39 Like all other sites on the Internet, everything in Tokyo Time Table is immediately present and accessible, with no past or future. Or, put more positively, it is a place where ‘le transitoire et l’éternel se rencontrent dans cet espace numérique’.40 But on the other hand, the vast quantities of information available on Tokyo Time Table take time to go through, and engage our faculty of memory. The website gives us a configuration of Ferrier’s thoughts on Japan which is very different from the one we get from the books and articles examined earlier in this chapter; it is a more wide-reaching and highly visual introduction to Japan, suitable for a wide French and francophone Internet audience. And it is definitely one of his works, collective though it may be: as Ferrier himself wrote in response to one of Hoffmann’s questions in the questionnaire, ‘dans mon esprit, un site internet est comme un immense et nouveau livre en gestation’. A book, then, that is always developing, but also exists outside of time: ‘un mausolée hors du temps et de l’espace’?41 Perhaps it is more of a ‘maison d’écrivain’, a virtual one in which the writer still lives, and into which we are invited, alongside other writers and critics, a ‘plateforme collaborative autour d’un thème ou d’une problématique’.42 Ferrier’s ‘Japanese’ works, both critical and creative, embody the thematic and structural impact that living in Japan has had on his writing; multiple instances of aesthetic translation involving zuihitsu but also other sources of formal inspiration such as calligraphy are central to his work. There is also Ferrier’s focus on the concept of kizu, which technology, in Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé (Oxford: Legenda, 2013). 39 This is in fact possible to do, although it takes time; see Pauwels, ‘Mulitmodal Framework’. My point is that the passage of time is not visible in a website unless the visitor undertakes to discover it. 40 Hoffmann, p. 569. 41 Hoffmann, p. 568. 42 Ferrier, quoted in Hoffmann, p. 577.

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may predate his time in Japan but grows into a full-blown fascination in a culture which is itself fascinated with all kinds of kizu, in a country which is perennially at the mercy of earthquakes thanks to its position on the largest kizu of all, the Japan Median Tectonic line. This fascination might be seen as ironically prophetic, as his next book was to be Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, an account of the devastation caused by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophe in 2011; that work would bring together, through its focus on a completely unexpected and external subject, Ferrier’s interest in cracks, zuihitsu and the achievement of an ‘écriture humaniste et élémentaire’ to confront such disasters. In the next chapter we will see how he rises to this challenge; typically, he does not do it through one work, but takes a scattergun approach which involves creative, critical and digital production on an impressive scale.

chapter two

Scatter and Resist Ferrier Writing Fukushima Scatter and Resist

Ferrier was in Tokyo on 11 March 2011 when the three disasters, now often referred to collectively as ‘Fukushima’ in the West, struck the Tohoku region in quick succession: the earthquake, registered at 9 on the Richter scale, the fourth most powerful in the world since modern measuring instruments began to keep records; the tsunami it unleashed, devastating the Tohoku coastal area and killing almost 18,500;1 and the nuclear disaster with its appalling and still incalculable consequences, placed at level 7, the highest point on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES). Ferrier decided to travel to the Tohoku region a few months later, and upon his return published Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, a first-person account including interviews with survivors, his own experiences, extracts from other disaster narratives and a highly critical assessment of the Japanese authorities’ response to the nuclear catastrophe. He did not stop there, however. During the past ten years, Ferrier has spent extraordinary amounts of time and energy on memorializing the disaster through a series of varied and numerous writing and editing projects. His 2012 book was the first of these; he also wrote the scenario of Kenichi Watanabe’s documentary film Le monde après Fukushima, which came out the same year. In 2013 and 2014, he published two essays, on the landscape of Fukushima and on the art that has been produced in response to the disaster.2 Art Press’s June 2015 1 Ferrier quotes the Japanese National Police Agency’s figure of 18,460 missing and dead on 9 October 2015. See Christian Doumet and Michaël Ferrier (eds), Penser avec Fukushima (Nantes: Éditions nouvelles Cécile Defaut, 2016), p. 9. 2 Michaël Ferrier, ‘Fukushima: la cicatrice impossible’, Cahiers de l’Ecole de Blois, 11, ‘Les cicatrices du paysage’ (2013), 72–79; ‘Fukushima ou la traversée du temps: une catastrophe sans fin’, Esprit, 405 (June 2014), 33–45.

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edition contained Ferrier’s ‘Visualiser l’impossible: l’art de Fukushima’, another piece on artists who have attempted to respond in their unique ways to the events of 11 March 2011. Also in 2015, Watanabe brought out Terres nucléaires: une histoire du plutonium, for which Ferrier wrote the script; 2020 saw another Watanabe-Ferrier collaboration, Notre ami l’atome: un siècle de radioactivité. In between these two films Penser avec Fukushima (2016) was published, a collection of academic essays edited and prefaced by Ferrier; in the same year, he wrote the ‘Fukushima’ entry in the Dictionnaire sauvage Pascal Quignard.3 Five years later, 2021 saw the publication, timed to coincide with the anniversary of 3.11, of Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, a collection of writings, interviews and artworks by and with photographers, artists, film-makers and dramatists, edited and prefaced by Ferrier, who also took part in most of the interviews. This enormously prolific effort has resulted in the significant dissemination in French4 of important information and awareness-raising, especially as many of these essays are available online on Ferrier’s website, Tokyo Time Table;5 it has also been accompanied throughout by a sustained meditation on how to write about such a catastrophe, what genres might be the most appropriate and how different individuals have responded to the need to bear witness. In this chapter I explore the different ways Ferrier finds to write about ‘Fukushima’, in more or less chronological order: in the 2012 book Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, but also in his essays, articles, film scripts and interviews. In each case, I will analyse the stylistic and generic hybridity which results from Ferrier responding generously to the demands of the reality he seeks to represent. I will show how, in Fukushima, the style and genre can be linked to both zuihitsu and to Ôe Kenzaburo’s writings on Hiroshima; but another way to analyse it is through what I call an ‘aesthetic of scatteredness’, based on a non-human model of resistance and survival that Ferrier encounters 3 Mireille Calle-Gruber (ed.), Dictionnaire sauvage Pascal Quignard (Paris: Hermann, 2016). 4 There has been an unusually large amount of writing in French on the Fukushima disaster, in comparison with outputs in other languages such as Spanish, German and even English; perhaps partly due, according to Fabien Arribert-Narce, to the great prevalence of nuclear reactors in France. See Fabien Arribert-Narce, ‘Écrits du 11 mars en France et au Japon: écrier la catastrophe, entre fiction et témoignage’, in Christian Doumet and Michaël Ferrier (eds), Penser avec Fukushima (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2016), pp. 57–96 (p. 57). 5 This website is discussed in detail in the previous chapter.

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on his travels. And this aesthetic also aptly describes, as I will show, the collective identity and impact of his writings about the events of 3.11.6 First Impressions: Fukushima, récit d’un désastre In the introduction to Penser avec Fukushima, the multi-authored collection of essays on Fukushima published in 2016, Ferrier considers the question of whether or not ‘Fukushima’ is an accurate appellation for the triple disaster of 11 March 2011. Quoting the sociologist Mori Chikako, he points out that the disaster has come to be known as ‘Fukushima’ all over the world except in Japan, where it is referred to as ‘3.11’ – read in Japanese as san ichi ichi, meaning ‘three one one’, not ‘three eleven’. Mori discusses how, in contrast with the universal scope of ‘9/11’, calling the disaster ‘Fukushima’ has had the exoticizing effect of placing the disaster ‘elsewhere’ for most of the world.7 Ferrier’s essay goes on to work through the implications of choosing to describe the event as an ‘accident’ as opposed to a ‘catastrophe’, as well as how neologisms and subtle alterations to the meanings of everyday words have colluded to minimize and distance the impact of the disaster in the minds of readers and listeners. One of his examples is the choice of the term ‘fuite d’eau’, reminiscent of minor domestic mishaps, but used nevertheless in an article in Le Monde to describe the millions of tons of radioactive water escaping from the reactors.8 Ferrier’s preface to the collection ends with the importance of ‘penser avec Fukushima’, rather than ‘après’; the choice of the latter preposition would dismiss the event, relegating it to the past, and lead readers to ignore the fact that Japan and the whole world will, at least in some form, be living with the effects of the disaster for many years to come. The essay concludes that in order to maintain a mental and philosophical awareness of the event, it is essential to ‘nous encourager à la déviance, à la déviation ou à la désobéissance […] pour que Fukushima ne soit pas cet immense gâchis auquel 6 The notion of ‘scatteredness’ can clearly be related to the genre of zuihitsu, which has been described as ‘loosely connected personal essays’ (Michaël Ferrier, Japon, la barrière des rencontres (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2009), p. 240). 7 Michaël Ferrier, ‘Introduction: avec Fukushima’, in Christian Doumet and Michaël Ferrier (eds), Penser avec Fukushima (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2016), pp. 9–36 (pp. 18–20). 8 Ferrier, ‘Introduction: avec Fukushima’, pp. 23–25.

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nous assistons aujourd’hui, mais une formidable invitation, individuelle et collective, à la recherche et à l’invention’.9 Although this introduction to Penser avec Fukushima postdates Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, Ferrier certainly followed his own, as yet unwritten advice when composing the earlier work. Fukushima, récit d’un désastre embodies deviance inasmuch as it is generically extremely hybrid; its three parts, of unequal length, are made up of different genres as well as being hybrid within themselves.10 There are also frequent if brief metanarrative asides about how best to represent what the narrator – who appears to be the author, ‘Michaël’11 – sees and hears, specifically within the context of ‘disaster literature’; ‘que peut-on écrire devant […] une catastrophe hors norme?’12 The sections are chronologically ordered, taking us from the day of the earthquake, 11 March 2011, to roughly eight months later, when the narrative is completed. In an interview with Ballast, Ferrier said he wrote the book in exactly eight months, starting on 11 March and sending the manuscript to Gallimard on 11 November of the same year. It is also in this interview that he discusses how his choice of structuring the book in three sections might be viewed: Ici, j’ai choisi une division très simple, en trois parties. Ces trois parties correspondent bien entendu aux trois phases de la catastrophe: ‘Le Manche de l’éventail’ (le séisme), ‘Récits sauvés des eaux’ (le tsunami), ‘La demi-vie, mode d’emploi’ (la catastrophe nucléaire). Mais elles peuvent tout aussi bien s’entendre comme les trois actes d’une tragédie ou les trois vers d’un haïku, chacun mettant l’accent sur un des aspects du désastre et correspondant à un élément naturel: terre (qui tremble), mer (qui déferle), air (qui circule, propageant la contamination radioactive).13 9 Ferrier, ‘Introduction: avec Fukushima’, p. 35. 10 I learned much from two excellent essays on Fukushima, récit d’un désastre: the first by Fabien Arribert-Narce, ‘Écrits du 11 mars 2011’, and the second by Aurélie Briquet, ‘L’efficacité de l’écriture dans Fukushima, récit d’un désastre (2012) de Michaël Ferrier: contre la résignation face à la catastrophe’, Alternative Francophone, 4.2 (2019), 77–91. 11 Arribert-Narce suggests in his essay that this book, like many other Fukushima witness accounts, is an autofictional work (‘Écrits du 11 mars 2011’, p. 96). Autofiction shares, of course, the personal point of view with the genre of zuihitsu. 12 Michaël Ferrier, Fukushima, récit d’un désastre (Paris: Gallimard folio, 2012), p. 166. Henceforth, this book will be cited as Fukushima in the main text. 13 ‘Fukushima, c’est une situation de guerre’, interview with Michaël Ferrier,

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The sections, be they acts in a tragedy or representative of three elements of nature, are very different. The first, ‘Le manche de l’éventail’, starts on 11 March 2011 – in the very hour, in fact, when the narrator’s apartment begins to tremble – and consists of what might be called a phenomenological representation:14 a detailed and personal description of the experience of living through an earthquake, in a style which reflects and at times mimics the content, both of the periods when the earth is moving and those of apprehensive waiting. The earthquake starts with a noise like that of insects, but grows into louder sounds and of course movement, random yet somehow seeming to work together, moving through the house in a gradual crescendo: Maintenant, c’est une foule de bruits qui arrivent, qui trépignent et s’entrechoquent. Des bruits mats, des bruits clinquants, des bruits sourds ou aveugles, des bruits qui se lèvent et d’autres qui vont rampant […] Toute une palette de bruits comme je n’en ai jamais entendu, un opéra nouveau genre, la cavalcade des sons … Dans la cuisine, les tiroirs s’ouvrent les uns après les autres, du bas vers le haut, déversant sur le sol un orchestre de fourchettes et de baguettes, de couteaux et de petites cuillers. Les verres à pied font des claquettes, les assiettes des castagnettes. (Fukushima, 27)

Ferrier’s syntax and diction reproduce the actual sounds and movements which make the invisible quake manifest, multiplying the verbs, the clauses and the rhymes; his words record the non-human event as much as his human reactions to it. Some of the sounds reflect the earthquake precisely by being described as movements: ‘des bruits qui se lèvent et d’autres qui vont rampant’. The metaphors of the ‘opéra nouveau genre’ and ‘un orchestre’ give a unity to the random collection of noises, although there is of course already a unity of place, the kitchen, reinforced by the rhyming names of the objects that belong there: ‘fourchettes et [de] baguettes […] les verres à pied font des claquettes, les assiettes des castagnettes’. As the sounds come together they seem to form a living entity, a writhing, roiling creature which reminds the narrator that Japanese culture has traditionally imagined earthquakes as catfish:

27 October 2017, www. revue-ballast.fr/mickael-ferrier-fukushima-cest-situationde-guerre/. Last accessed 9/2/21. 14 Briquet (p. 79) describes it as ‘une véritable phénoménologie du tremblement de terre […], dans une écriture qui engage tous les sens’.

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist Le vacarme est immense. Rien de nécessaire ne semble pouvoir grouper ces sons, les assembler ou les réduire au chiffre d’un événement comptable. Les vibrations saturent chaque point de l’espace et le rendent incompréhensible. Oscillation, éparpillement. Tout se ramifie et se désagrège. On dirait une bête qui rampe, un serpent de sons, la queue vivante d’un dragon. Je comprends tout d’un coup pourquoi les Japonais représentent le tremblement de terre sous la forme d’un poisson-chat, mi-félin, mi-mollusque. Quelque chose comme un corps agile, somptueux, caverneux, qui se défait et se reforme quasi instantanément. (Fukushima, 27)

The metaphor of the fish, like the earthquake being made visible and audible through its effect on the household objects, is slowly ‘made real’ through the description of the movements trembling through the house. Trying to make sense of the random and incomprehensible vibrations, the narrator imagines a series of motivated movements, ‘une bête qui rampe, un serpent de sons, la queue vivante d’un dragon’. And these movements gradually add up to the catfish, the entity that he had only known of as a metaphor, but which now embodies all aspects of the terrifying experience he is encountering in the flesh. The passage shows a rare instance of a metaphor coming to life through an empirical rendition of the phenomenon which originally gave birth to it. The experiential and phenomenological remain centre stage as the earthquake ends, the Tokyoites take stock of the damage, begin to find out about the horrors that have befallen Tohoku and learn to live with the incessant aftershocks. The phenomenological perspective extends to the whole population of Tokyo, as the earthquake has made everyone newly conscious of the real, physical nature of their bodies: ‘on se retrouve seul, les sens aiguisés, dans un univers multiforme de sons et d’objets, d’odeurs, de goûts et de corps, tous soudain retrouvés dans l’immédiateté du réel, sa précision absolue’ (Fukushima, 63–64). The narrator’s body develops a new, animal ability to evaluate the aftershocks, which are almost incessant for several weeks afterwards. He comes to know, instinctively, their degree of danger: ‘C’est un savoir de grotte, de caverne, toute une érudition archaïque qui remonte par les veines, les fibres, les terminaisons nerveuses. Je n’ai jamais mieux ressenti tout ce qui nous rattache aux plantes, aux fleurs, au biologique comme au végétal, au vivant’ (Fukushima, 69). As his perspective on his day-to-day existence shifts away from the anthropocentric norm,15 following the shock of the earthquake, and his 15 Ecocritics are exploring the implications of a radical critique of anthropocentrism,

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body becomes an instrument, a sensor which registers and reacts automatically to the ‘prosodie frissonnante’ (Fukushima, 61) of the quaking earth, his writing, too, changes. His style responds to the daily barrage of aftershocks by inclining to short paragraphs capturing scattered impressions, brief quotations from a variety of writers and a typography which mirrors the narrator’s continually jolting mind (and body): La vie s’arrête et reprend en permanence, on vit le monde en discontinu. Étrangement, les mots à trait d’union se mettent à fulminer sous mon stylo, ma prose se charge de tirets et d’incises comme un curieux équivalent typographique de la saccade des jours: on est toujours sur le qui-vive, on oscille entre le remue-ménage, le tohu-bohu et le sauve-quipeut. (Fukushima, 73–74)

This body-based knowledge of the earthquake is also a salutary counterpoint to the images that have completely taken over the representation of the disaster, especially abroad, ‘un véritable tsunami médiatique, hypnotique, qui n’explique rien, qui submerge et engloutit lui aussi’ (Fukushima, 44). The narrator has in fact discovered, in the ninth-century chronicles Nihon sandai jitsuroku, much earlier examples of how writing can act as a seismographic instrument, a recording device: Le huit juillet 868: ‘La terre trembla, faisant crouler, ça et là, des maisonsclôtures à l’extérieur et à l’intérieur de l’enceinte du palais’. Le neuf. Nawi-furi-ki. ‘La terre trembla’. Le douze. Nawi-furi-ki. ‘La terre trembla’. Le treize. Nawi-furi-ki. ‘La terre trembla’. (Fukushima, 69)

These records – essentially, a simple list – closely resemble the lists that the narrator himself has been making of the aftershocks and their magnitudes on the Richter scale (Fukushima, 64). As Briquet writes, Ferrier’s is ‘une écriture singulière, assez souple pour s’adapter aux frémissements intérieurs et extérieurs’;16 but its suppleness also, importantly, allows it to include other writers and writings – such as those of Claudel, who was ambassador in Japan at the time of the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 – which give both historical and literary led by philosophers who engage in ‘deep ecology’, on literary study. See Cheryl Glotfelty’s essay, ‘Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis’, in Ken Hiltner (ed.), Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 120–33, for further discussion of this movement. 16 Briquet, p. 78.

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context to an experience which, thanks to its immediacy and intensity, would otherwise be completely immersive and all-consuming. This section ends on a meditation of sorts on the literal and metaphorical significance of ôgi no kaname: the pivot of a fan, the still point around which everything opens and closes, and without which the whole structure would cease to function. The ôgi no kaname plays a crucial (pivotal) part in one of the classic scenes of Japanese history and literature, immortalized in the pages of Heike Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike).17 The Heike and Genji clans are facing each other one still evening, the Heike on ships and the Genji on the shore. At the start of what will become the Battle of Yashima, the Heike, in their arrogance, challenge the Genji archers to pierce the pivot of a beautiful fan on which a golden sun is depicted on a red background, attached to the end of a long stick held up by a lady-in-waiting on one of their ships. A young archer takes up the challenge: Une prière du fond du cœur, et la flèche part. Elle touche en plein cœur de la cible et brise l’éventail à un pouce du rivet. Ôgi no kaname … Le manche de l’éventail se brise et le beau soleil d’or sur fond rouge chute dans les flots. (Fukushima, 90)

The battle is lost before it begins by the destruction of the fan, and the Heike capitulate several days later, ceding the control of the Imperial Court, and therefore Japan, to the Genji dynasty. Ôgi no kaname is a term often used in Japanese to designate people or positions which hold together a situation, enterprise or community, and Ferrier suggests – in the context of the three disasters – that there are some people, many, in fact, who will be essential to their immediate communities and to Japan overall in the immediate future. One such person is Aki, a personal friend who has demonstrated an unprecedented resolve in recent days (Fukushima, 86); others, we suspect, we will meet in Fukushima and its environs in the pages to come. The second section, ‘Récits sauvés des eaux’, starts with an interlude describing the narrator’s brief sojourn in Kyoto with his girlfriend, Jun; they decide, like many in Tokyo, to spend some time recuperating in the ancient capital untouched by the earthquake. The evocation of Kyoto 17 The Tale of the Heike is one of the masterpieces of medieval Japanese literature, an epic poem that recounts the struggle between the Taira and Minamoto clans for the control of Japan at the end of the twelfth century.

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is poetic, starting with a Verlainian quasi-alexandrine: ‘À Kyoto, tout redevient forme et mélodie’ (Fukushima, 97). But the calm and harmony of this city, ‘bâtie sur le modèle des anciennes capitales chinoises’, is not to be enjoyed for long in the circumstances, when ‘pendant ce temps, plus au nord, les gens meurent’ (Fukushima, 103). Jun and the narrator return to Tokyo to prepare for a journey to the north; they load a camper van with provisions and drive up towards Tohoku. From this point onwards, this section becomes a witness narrative, consisting of the narrator’s own impressions interspersed with the stories he and Jun hear from the survivors, their ‘récits sauvés des eaux’ about those people and things that were not saved. The narrator retains his phenomenological perspective, describing his experience of the things that cannot be photographed, for instance the appalling stench of the mud (Fukushima, 159–60), the strangely perpetual sound of the wind that encounters no resistance in the devastated landscape (Fukushima, 122), and the terrifying view of the void – in some places there is simply nothing to be seen, nothing for the eye to rest on, no colours apart from a uniform brown – that assails the human being accustomed to views that make sense (Fukushima, 119). The perspective shifts constantly as it moves from the narrator’s to those of the survivors and the rescue teams, who are often quoted but mostly remain anonymous. There is also an important metanarrative aside in this section, although contained within and alibied by the narrator’s actual itinerary, in which he ponders whether or not it is possible to write about ‘une beauté – ou une catastrophe – hors norme’ (Fukushima, 166). The thoughts come to him as he and Jun approach Matsushima, one of the three most celebrated views of Japan, known since the start of the Edo period as ‘Nihon sankei’. The seventeenth-century haiku poet Matsuo Basho was allegedly dumbstruck, albeit temporarily, by the outstanding beauty of Matsushima during the journey that would result in his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The famous view of Matsushima is made up of two hundred and sixty-odd small islands (shima), covered by pine trees (matsu), scattered all over the bay; the narrator is terrified of seeing what havoc the tsunami has wreaked on them. When he gets there, however, he discovers that the little islands are still there, more or less intact. What is more, they have protected the bay, and the mainland behind them, from the worst of the tsunami: ‘elles ont pour ainsi dire découpé le tsunami en tranches en l’empêchant de frapper frontalement’ (Fukushima, 167). This marvellous natural solution to the tsunami gives the narrator his own solution to his writer’s dilemma:

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist Ainsi, ce que n’ont pas pu accomplir les brise-lames ni les murs, les digues et les enceintes, […] une flottille de petites îles dispersées a réussi à le faire par la seule finesse de son tracé et la bénédiction de ses rivages dentelés. Du coup, j’ai la réponse à ma question. Écrire donc, par îlots ou par estuaires, par petites notes déferlantes, pointues, blanches ou noires, tout à la fois sauvages et soignées … Ah, Matsushima! (Fukushima, 167–68)

This is one of the few moments of joy in what is, naturally, a section filled with tragic stories, tales of villages that have been completely destroyed, such as Kesennuma and Rikuzentakata, split-second decisions which led to the difference between life and death, survivors who stood for days on their roofs in the snow and rain, waiting to be rescued, and the state of the villages closest to the nuclear reactors which have become ghost towns, deserted, except for the animals abandoned by their erstwhile owners.18 There are also, however, some life-affirming encounters; with Rieko, a young woman who is collecting and cleaning photographs retrieved from the mountains of debris, a professional who normally works at the Tokyo Metropolitan Library but who has pitched up to help (Fukushima, 209–11); an old man who has lost his house and his possessions but not the energy and good humour to discuss Hokusai, Hiroshige, Van Gogh and Cézanne with the narrator in the middle of a devastated cityscape (Fukushima, 212–13); news that an ancient plum tree in Yamada-machi in Iwate prefecture, which was hit by the tsunami but survived, has flowered as it has done for the past 300 years (Fukushima, 178). Having got as far north as they are allowed, to the edge of the contaminated and prohibited zone, Jun and the narrator start back towards Tokyo, and when they pass through Hiraizumi the narrator is reminded of the famous natsukusa haiku composed there by Basho which, although mistakenly read by some as an elegiac poem, actually celebrates the eternal rebirth of nature and of life. Thinking again about the photo-collecting librarian and the laughing art lover, the narrator 18 Many Japanese writers and artists have created works dealing with the plight of the animals left behind in the contaminated areas, for instance, Takayama Akira’s video installation entitled Happy Island: The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous (2015), or books such as Kimura Yusuke’s short novel, Seichi Cs (The Holy Land of Cesium) (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2015) and Shinnami Kyosuke’s non-fictional Ushi to tsuchi (The Cattle and The Soil) (Tokyo: Shueisha, 2015). For a discussion of these and other works, see Keijiro Suga, ‘Invisible Waves: On Some Japanese Artists after March 11, 2011’, in Hisaaki Wake, Keijiro Suga and Yuki Masami (eds), Ecocriticism in Japan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. 173–87.

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realizes that their acts are inscriptions, like Basho’s, imposing their ways of making sense of the madness of the landscape: Dans cette géographie égarée, au milieu de ce temps bouleversé et des vies importées, chacun inscrit à sa manière une syntaxe patiente et décalée, la sienne – et cette inscription prend pour chacun d’entre nous une importance décisive. Dans chacun de leurs gestes, la vie transparaît de façon mystérieuse et émouvante. (Fukushima, 218)

The third section, which starts with the narrator’s return to Tokyo, is entitled ‘La demi-vie, mode d’emploi’. As the first section dealt with the earthquake and the second with the devastation caused by the tsunami, this section focuses on the nuclear disaster. Characterized more by irony than anger, it describes in detail the ways in which the Japanese government and TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, collude to give out excessive amounts of information, impossible to understand and evaluate: Mais le plus sûr moyen d’escamoter l’information n’est pas de la taire: c’est de la rendre publique en même temps qu’un millier d’autres. Dans la pluie désordonnée des bulletins et des communiqués, au milieu d’un jargon technique jamais explicité, les plus savants se perdent et les plus patients renoncent […] Ou alors, la vérité, c’est qu’ils ne savent rien. (Fukushima, 237)

Ferrier ferrets out individuals who are prepared to talk to him as long as they can remain anonymous, and interviews someone who was working in one of the reactors at the time, as well as a ‘Mr K’ who worked as a ‘liquidator’ in Fukushima. The accounts are horrific, clearly true and spell out the same, depressing truth that the authorities – the government – and the specialists – TEPCO – have failed to come up with any solutions to the state of affairs in the nuclear reactors and the sea immediately beyond the coastline, in the air above the reactors and the soil of the surrounding area. In the meantime the ‘Fukushima refugees’ are ostracized, particularly children who have had to move home and school; blatant disinformation is issuing from certain quarters; the population is fearful without being fully cognizant of what exactly needs to be feared, reduced to washing their hands excessively, avoiding the rain, giving up shaving and eschewing vegetables from the north on their visits to the supermarket. All of this results in an attenuated form of everyday existence for those who are lucky enough not to be from Fukushima or its environs but are nevertheless affected by the fallout. It is this ‘quotidien’, shared by Ferrier

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with the inhabitants of Tokyo, that no doubt inspired the reference to Perec in the title of this section; the ‘mode d’emploi’ for those who must live with the everyday consequences of this new kind of life, dubbed ‘la demi-vie’. Ferrier is of course aware that this is the scientific term used to describe the length of time it takes for a given amount of a radioactive substance to decompose by half, but he has decided – perhaps in a gesture against the Newspeak employed by official announcements or even broadsheet newspapers that he would write about in the preface to Penser avec Fukushima, four years later19 – to claim the term for his own use. In Ferrier’s usage, ‘la demi-vie’ is the new kind of life that the Japanese are now forced to lead, in which the abnormal becomes normalized, TEPCO scandals are ignored, half-measures (such as the removal of the topsoil in contaminated areas) are applauded and people are scared of the rain and of salads: L’eau, le vent, les feuilles. L’herbe, les champignons, les baies. Se rouler dans l’herbe. Sentir la pluie sur son visage, au petit matin – odeur de vin et d’algue – dans une rue de Tokyo. Voici quelques échantillons de ce qui, petit à petit, nous devient de jour en jour un peu plus interdit. (Fukushima, 289)

This evocation of the ‘demi-vie’ is almost a haiku: the first three lines have a syllabic count of 5/7/5, if the final ‘e’ of ‘l’herbe’ is not pronounced, and the fourth line can also be broken down into lines of roughly the requisite lengths (8/5/5/7). The elegiac tone, the reference to grass and the haiku form itself are reminiscent of the earlier discussion of the haiku Basho composed in Hiraizumi; perhaps the narrator is suggesting that this too will pass – in future generations, the ‘demi-vie’ of 2011 will be remembered as a thing of the past – although the scientific meaning of a ‘demi-vie’, hovering still in the background, suggests that such a future is a very long way away. The section, and the book, ends with a discussion of how Ôe Kenzaburo, the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist, chose to write about the victims of Hiroshima and the doctors caring for them, against the backdrop of the local anti-nuclear protests held every August, in Hiroshima Nôto (1965). Ôe wrote a series of works in the sixties and 19 Ferrier calls it ‘la novlangue de Fukushima’ in ‘Introduction: avec Fukushima’, p. 18.

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seventies, of which the Hiroshima text was the first, with titles comprised of a place name followed by nôto, or ‘notes’.20 Ferrier describes this as a new, hybrid genre: Écriture vive, précise, documentée, pour répondre au mensonge et à l’omission […] Petits portraits rapides et transversaux, anecdotes suggestives, extraits d’interviews et de lettres insérés au fil du texte – remontées du réel au cœur de la prose – […] pour redonner la parole aux victimes ordinaires […] Le mot nôto, par lequel Ôe choisit d’intituler son livre, a en japonais deux significations presque contradictoires: il désigne d’une part une notation prise sur le vif, fragmentaire et rapide, et d’autre part le cahier qui les contient et les regroupe, leur donnant au bout du compte une cohérence énigmatique. Comme un carnet donc: quelque chose s’ouvre, se déploie, se replie. Au lecteur maintenant de savoir ce qu’il veut en faire. (Fukushima, 305–06)

This description contains many of the characteristics to be found in Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, and even in some earlier works by Ferrier.21 There are clearly some similarities between Hiroshima Nôto and Fukushima, in particular the mixture of elements ‘remontées du réel au cœur de la prose’; although the identity of the elements may differ, they are all linked to reality, which is perhaps the ôgi no kaname that holds them together. This image of the pivot is echoed in the description of the nôto or ‘carnet’, which ‘s’ouvre, se déploie, se replie’. A work which contains disparate elements, then, but narrated by a first-person voice that bestows a single perspective and an editorial unity on the whole; such a description would fit Ôe’s book as well as Ferrier’s. It also fits various definitions of the Japanese genre of zuihitsu, discussed in the previous chapter, a generically hybrid structure held together by a single and singular point of view. As Philippe Forest writes, ‘Tout témoignage, 20 Hiroshima Nôto (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1965). Ôe also published a book on the Fukushima disaster, entitled Ban-nen yoshiki shu: In Late Style (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2013). This is a very different kind of book, however, from the ‘notes’ genre, although it does comprise a variety of voices; it is more clearly an autofictional novel, narrated by Ôe’s alter ego Nagae Cogito and telling the story of the influence of the earthquake and aftershocks on his family relationships and his writing style. For an interesting analysis of this work, see Koichi Haga, ‘Literary Ground Opened in Fissures: The Great East Japan Earthquake and Ôe Kenzaburo’s In Late Style’, in Hisaaki Wake, Keijiro Suga and Yuki Masami (eds), Ecocriticism in Japan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. 103–20. 21 ‘Petits portraits’, for instance, harks back to one of his earliest books, Tokyo: petits portraits de l’aube.

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alors même qu’il est témoignage pour autrui, est à la première personne du singulier […] Chacun ne peut légitimement parler que depuis le point où il a été placé, faisant de la catastrophe un récit qui soit conforme à la vision qu’il en eut’.22 Ferrier’s evocation of Ôe as one of his predecessors in the context of disaster writing is both a homage to the older novelist and perhaps also an attempt to set up intergenerational echoes between the memories of Fukushima and Hiroshima, as he did earlier in the book between Fukushima and the Great Kanto earthquake through references to Claudel.23 But in my view, a more significant model for Fukushima than Ôe’s work is Matsushima, the natural phenomenon which so unexpectedly and successfully resisted the onslaught of the tsunami. As mentioned earlier, it was the multitude of little islands – their collective strength – that broke down the brute force of the tidal wave, and this inspired Ferrier to write ‘par îlots ou par estuaires, par petites notes déferlantes, pointues, blanches ou noires, tout à la fois sauvages et soignées’. In Japanese, nouns do not have plural forms; ‘shima’, meaning island, is the same word however many islands are involved, which makes the name ‘Matsushima’ – the place name that designates the collection of islands – both a multiple and a single identity, grammatically and physically, whose strength turned out to reside in its scatteredness. Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, made up of brief notes, a collection of voices, seemingly improvised thoughts and a scattering of anecdotes, clearly resembles the multiple singularity that is Matsushima. It is also a model we can apply to the ensemble of Ferrier’s writings on the disaster; the prefaces, the essays, the scripts and the book can be seen as small islands, each one a separate entity but set in collective resistance against the tsunami of official euphemisms and rewritings, against the silence and sheer forgetfulness that have been building up since the 22 Philippe Forest, ‘La cendre des cerisiers’, in Corinne Quentin and Cécile Sakai (eds), L’archipel des séismes: Écrits du Japon après le 11 mars 2011 (Arles: Picquier, 2012), p. 33. 23 The Memory Studies scholar Michael Rothberg discusses the interplay between different historical memories in works of literature and art and dubs it ‘multidirectional memory’, taking as examples films such as Michael Haneke’s Caché, or novels such as Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire, in which the memory of les années noires is activated by those of the Algerian War – and vice versa. See Michael Rothberg, ‘Introduction: Theorizing Multidirectional Memory in a Transational Age’, in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

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actual tsunami occurred ten years ago. The Japanese word for ‘prose’ is sanbun (散文), which literally means ‘scattered writing’, in opposition to the organized forms of poetry; it is the perfect description for a text which consists of scattered elements collected from the debris left by the tsunami, ‘remontée du réel au cœur de la prose’. Adopting a natural phenomenon as a model for his writing can be seen as an acknowledgement by Ferrier of the need to de-anthropocentralize our ways of seeing, thinking and writing. In debates within the discipline of Environmental Humanities, the ‘new materialists’ have called for the abolition of the distinction between the animate and inanimate, in order to view the world as being made up of systems that involve both, so that objects can be seen as actants, with some attributes of agency.24 Ferrier points out that the official Japanese term created for the triple disaster – genpatsu-shinsai (原発震災) – is a neologism combining an abbreviation of ‘nuclear power station’, and shinsai, meaning ‘disaster caused by an earthquake’, thus acknowledging both the natural and human aspects of the disaster: ‘le nouveau vocable japonais donne donc à la fois à lire la cause naturelle du désastre, mais aussi l’inextricable responsabilité qui est celle de l’homme dans cet événement’.25 In fact, it has been noted that disasters can act as triggers galvanizing people into acknowledging their environment as a complex mixture of the human and non-human.26 In Japan, where Shintoism has established a tradition of seeing nature as animate, it is perhaps even more appropriate to take our cues from natural phenomena – in this instance, from a group of scattered rocks in a picturesque bay – when attempting to respond to a disaster that was both natural and man-made, something that could only have happened within the ‘mesh’ of human and non-human elements that constitutes our environment.27

24 Robert S. Emmett and David E. Nye, The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017), pp. 141–42. 25 Ferrier, Penser avec Fukushima, p. 23. 26 Jane Bennett develops a ‘notion of publics as human-non-human collectives that are provoked into existence by a shared experience of harm’: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. xix. 27 See Emmett and Nye, p. 141.

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‘Des voix, nombreuses comme les pétales de mars, se lèvent pour se faire entendre’ Many witnesses testify to their experiences in Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, given a voice by Ferrier through the medium of his book. Ferrier’s own voice is multiplied in the numerous works that follow it, representing different genres and aimed at different audiences. Three academic articles, published in 2013, 2014 and 2015; three film scripts, for films released in 2013, 2015 and 2020; the introductory essay to Penser avec Fukushima, and the preface to and participation in the table rondes and interviews of Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima – all of these feature his voice, scattered amongst the various publication outlets but collectively defying the tsunami of oblivion that threatened to engulf the facts and testimonies almost as soon as the event had occurred. I will go through each group of the enumerated writings in turn. Of the three articles, two analyse the work of artists who responded to the Fukushima disaster, and the third is about the landscape of the stricken area. This last was published first, in 2013. ‘Fukushima: la cicatrice impossible’ makes use of the physical and metaphorical meanings of the term ‘wound’,28 as well as its Janus-like nature given that it is a sign both of hurt and healing, to discuss what can be done with and for the devastated landscape of Fukushima. In more ways than one, Fukushima seems too badly wounded to harbour a wound: Une cicatrice est un signe ténu, mais visible et palpable, une marque dans la chair qui fonctionne comme un rappel de la blessure mais aussi comme un signe de guérison […] une écriture qui marque la fin d’une meurtrissure et le début d’une nouvelle vie. À Fukushima, où le mal ronge de manière à la foi invisible, inodore et parfois même insoupçonnable, cette cicatrice est à la fois indispensable et impossible.

Yet, faced by this indescribably devastated landscape – as in Fukushima, Ferrier emphasizes the fact of its utter annihilation, which means that there is simply nothing there, no landmarks, no features, nothing but mud – urban planners, architects and builders have begun to create things afresh; some in direct response to the needs of the refugees who lost everything, others attempting to combine the refugees’ needs with a broader vision for the future of the landscape. Indeed in all three of the articles, Ferrier focuses on the creation, 28 Reminiscent of his interest in the term kizu; see Chapter 1.

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by architects, builders and artists, of something new and unexpected out of what would seem to be an unmitigated disaster. In ‘Visualiser l’impossible: l’art de Fukushima’, he focuses on artists who produce militant, but also inventive and interactive art, in an attempt to sensitize the audience to the horrors of the disaster but also to the need for political and social awareness and vigilance. The life-size outline of the nuclear reactor by Katsuhiro Miyamoto in which visitors to the Nagoya Art Centre found themselves simply by walking into the museum; Nobuaki Takekawa’s We Are the Pirates of an Unexplored History, an installation which embodies the contemporary world’s conundrum of simultaneously knowing everything and understanding nothing, specifically in the context of nuclear science; the works of the Dutch artist Aernout Mik, the Japanese Fumiaki Aono and the Chinese Song Dong, which use materials directly taken from Fukushima. All of these take up the challenge of reacting to and representing events that have been theorized as unrepresentable. In the wake of Adorno’s well-known comment on the unrepresentability of Auschwitz, Günther Anders invented a term – ‘supraliminality’ – to describe ‘tout événement dépassant la limite de nos sens ou de notre compréhension’,29 but these artists defy this notion. Similar champions of creativity are also enumerated in ‘Fukushima ou la traversée du temps: une catastrophe sans fin’, in which Ferrier discusses the work of the artist group Chim↑Pom, but also Arai Takashi, whose unexpected use of daguerreotypes to portray the devastated landscape of Fukushima and its inhabitants opens up, in Ferrier’s view, new temporalities. He does this by bringing a strong sense of history to the present, creating a continuity between this and other, comparable disasters and reactivating collective memories. Harnessing the ‘multidirectional memory’ described by Michael Rothberg,30 Arai’s works free – according to Ferrier – our present from its imprisonment and succeed in reinscribing it in a broader timeframe, a more general perspective of human history.31 In contrast with these three articles, published in academic journals, the film scripts that Ferrier wrote for Kenichi Watanabe’s three films were destined for a much wider audience. They were published in 2021 by Gallimard in text form, with both Ferrier and Watanabe named as the authors. In what follows below I will examine the films and the 29 Ferrier, ‘Fukushima ou la traversée du temps’, p. 34. 30 See n. 23. 31 Ferrier, ‘Fukushima ou la traversée du temps’, pp. 42–43.

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narrative texts as separate works. The relationship between the two forms is clarified at the end of the book: Les trois textes présentés dans ce livre correspondent aux trois films réalisés par Kenichi Watanabe […] Ils constituent cependant une version remaniée et beaucoup plus complète des commentaires utilisés dans les films, augmentés de nombreux passages inédits […] Sauf mention contraire, toutes les images sont tirées des films ou des archives personnelles des auteurs.32

The texts for the films were written by Ferrier after he had viewed the images, but the levels of co-operation between him and Watanabe were different for each film.33 For Le monde après Fukushima, for instance, the two men worked together for many hours – with Christine Watanabe and Paul Saadoun, the producers – and Ferrier made a number of interventions to do with the film rather than the text. Ferrier was less involved with Terres nucléaires, although the tripartite structure was one of his suggestions. The considerations associated with ‘showing’ a disaster – and/or its aftermath – through film, in particular that of Fukushima, is discussed at length and with great insight by Élise Domenach in a study of ‘Fukushima films’ produced between 2011 and 2013.34 The ethical question of the ‘point de vue juste à partir duquel filmer la catastrophe’ is a difficult one, emerging as it does from the universal agreement that ‘disaster porn’ must be avoided, but also the practical fact that in most cases, it is not possible for a documentary film to ‘show’ the disaster, as it has already happened: ‘Le cinéma de Fukushima est un cinéma de l’après-coup, de la saisie rétroactive de ce qui n’est plus comme l’est le medium cinématographique dans son ensemble. Mais dans une situation post-catastrophe, l’après est irréversiblement différent’ (66). How, then, can a documentary maker represent the disaster, given that it is in the past and the present is irrevocably different, without falling into the traps of ‘disaster porn’ or indeed that of nostalgia for the pre-catastrophic world?35 Basing her approach on the work of 32 Michaël Ferrier (with Kenichi Watanabe), Notre ami l’atome (Paris: Gallimard, 2021), p. 217. Henceforth, this book will be cited as Notre ami in the main text. 33 See ‘Interview with Michaël Ferrier’ below, pp. 165–67. 34 Élise Domenach, Le paradigme Fukushima au cinéma: ce que voir veut dire (2011–2013) (Seste S. Giovanni: Éditions Mimésis, 2022). 35 Stanley Cavell writes that both photography and film are centred on nostalgia: The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 56.

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sociologists such as Joan Tronto and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz,36 Domenach proposes a new ethics of the gaze. It condemns the ‘ethics of risk’ based on an ‘aesthetics of shock’, which allows the viewer to contemplate the sublimity of the catastrophe that takes him/her beyond the human scale and thence into a state of moral paralysis. The better alternative is an ‘ethics of care’ – based on an ‘aesthetics of the ordinary’ – which acknowledges the interdependence of human beings with other living things and the environment, in the context of the disaster.37 By showing how the ordinary people of Fukushima continue to live their everyday lives in the irrevocably changed present, a film made in accordance with the ‘ethics of the ordinary’ can do what films do best, that is to express human actions and passions, whilst also offering the viewer expressions of what Domenach calls a ‘rapport au monde renouvelé’ practised by inhabitants of Fukushima.38 The commitment of this approach to the local and to detail comes from her ontological belief that ‘en entrant dans l’antropocène nous avons perdu la position extérieure au monde fondatrice de l’esthétique moderne’; in other words, we can no longer adopt an ‘external’, or objective, viewpoint on any event that occurs in the world. Domenach’s study does not analyse the Watanabe/Ferrier films, but all three of them are structured absolutely in line with an ‘ethics of care’ and an ‘aesthetics of the ordinary’. Le monde après Fukushima came out in 2013, and is mainly focused on showing the world the state of affairs in the stricken area, although there is also some black-and-white footage to accompany a brief but shocking account of the history of nuclear power in Japan. The film’s visual impact is immense, but avoids the possibility of a ‘tourisme du désastre’ by not including images of the disaster; although there is one sequence which shows the tsunami engulfing a village, the most arresting images belong very much to the period after the disaster. These range from the farcical to the mundane, at times both. The fishermen of the area, for instance, still go out to fish every day, but after measuring their radioactivity levels – which are always too high – they weigh their catch and then release it back into the 36 See Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (London: Routledge, 1993) and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘The Anthropocenic Sublime: A Critique’, in Michael Boyden (ed.), Climate and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 288–99. 37 Domenach, pp. 50–52. 38 Domenach, p. 57.

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sea; they do this because TEPCO compensates them in accordance with the weight of what they would have sold to earn their livelihoods. These fishermen, but also many other people – the ordinary inhabitants of the villages, scientists, sociologists, doctors – are interviewed, and these acts of witness are the most memorable sequences of the film. They are all the more remarkable because in most cases the threat they continue to face, and have to live with, is invisible. The Ota family, who have calculated the risks and decided to stay in one of the less contaminated areas of the region with their four small children, explain their reasoning to the interviewer against a peaceful backdrop of rice fields and green hills. Only the dosimeters hanging from their children’s necks remind the viewer of the actual situation, as well as the rows of transparent water tanks that line the school playground, a measure designed to reduce the amount of radiation entering the children’s playing space. These are striking instances that demonstrate how focusing so closely on ordinary life in a post-catastrophic location is the best way to show how the catastrophe is still present, how its ‘violence lente’39 continues to unfurl; the dosimeters worn by the children every day is an almost too perfect example of the eruption of the uncanny within the context of the familiar.40 The film’s structure is reflected in that of the published text, although the latter of course requires a narrative voice, which is that of the visiting film crew, a nous whose first encounter with the area evokes a sense of pure desolation: ‘nous traversons des villes où plus personne ne vit, en suivant une route qui ne mène nulle part’ (Notre ami, 7). Thereafter, however, we encounter a wide variety of people as mentioned above, individuals who have first-hand experience of the situation, and we hear – in faithfully transcribed detail – their various reactions and attempts to deal with it. The text is made up of 16 short sections, which correspond to scenes in the film; they constitute a collective of voices, covering a wide range of topics from the day-to-day struggle to ‘live with’ radioactivity, the impact on fishing and the sea, the sheer quantity of the toxic waste that no one knows how to dispose of, a brief history of how the ‘peaceful’ use of nuclear power quickly gained a foothold in post-war Japan under covert direction from the US, and the corrupt collusion between politicians, scientists and the media that made this 39 Domenach, p. 55. 40 Cavell (p. 231) argues that the Freudian uncanny is ‘the normal experience’ of cinema.

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possible. There are differences of content between the film and the text; for instance, the fact that Matsutarô Shôriki, the public face of the ‘Atoms for Peace’ exhibition in 1955 set up by the Americans, was not only a convicted war criminal but also a CIA agent is stated explicitly in the text, but passed over in the film. On the other hand, the readings of poems about ‘post-Fukushima’ life by Ryôichi Wagô that are scattered throughout the film are not included in the book, no doubt for reasons of copyright. Both forms focus most strongly, of course, on how those who still live in the contaminated areas – no one is quite sure how contaminated they are – spend their days measuring, assessing and making decisions about every aspect of life in relation to the radioactivity. The film, an unflinching but also very human depiction of the reality of life ‘after Fukushima’, won the Prix Lucien-Kimitete of the Groix international film festival in 2013. The second film, Terres nucléaires: une histoire du plutonium (2015), has a different remit, as is evident from the title. It starts with a quotation from the physicist who discovered the element, Glenn Seaborg, and then introduces us to the three largest sites in the world, in the United States, Japan and France, where plutonium waste is currently being stored; Hanford in the state of Washington, Rokkasho in Aomori prefecture and La Hague in the Cotentin peninsula. All three are struggling with the weight of their impossible responsibility, and the inhabitants of each are suffering from generations of contamination. The story is told in short sections, as in Le monde après Fukushima, and many voices come into play; French, American and Japanese victims, reporting similar cancers, abnormally high infant mortality rates and unexplained deaths attest to the international nature of the disaster. The story is a sobering one, and the audience is only saved from being overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the facts by the resilience of those who have to live nearby, the ‘sentinelles’ (in La Hague) who keep watch, measuring, recording and attempting to hold the authorities to account, the Japanese farmers who refuse to leave their homes and former employees of Hanford who blame their government for their manifold health problems, handed down from generation to generation. The text more or less mirrors the film in terms of structure and narrative, but adds commentary to some of the facts and interviews. For instance, after quoting the interviews with two Japanese inhabitants of Rokkasho – Atsuko Ogasawara, the owner of a small plot of land in the area who refuses to sell it to the nuclear energy company, and Keiji Yonekura, a local farmer who has lost his farm and now works for

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Atsuko on her property (which she has named Asako House after her mother), the narrative comments on their different emotional attitudes. They are on the same side of resistance, but their reactions to the situation are markedly different: ‘Ne pas lâcher le terrain’: les paroles énergiques d’Atsuko Ogasawara restent longtemps dans la mémoire, accompagnées de son regard noir. Mais résonnent aussi celles du paysan un peu las qui rêve d’un horizon plus vert: ‘Je ne veux pas finir ma vie dans ce pays’ […] les injonctions sont contradictoires et montrent le dilemme devant lequel l’industrie nucléaire, ici comme ailleurs, place les habitants de notre Terre. (Notre ami, 141)

These farmers should simply not have been put in this position in the first place, of course, and it is suggested by extension that nobody else should have been either (‘les habitants de notre Terre’). We were reminded at the start of both the film and the text that plutonium is an artificial substance which does not occur naturally; human beings have created this monster. At its very end, however, both the text and film link plutonium to Pluto, god of the underworld, suggesting that nuclear waste can be seen as a symbol of death: Le plutonium tient son nom de Pluton, le dieu des Enfers dans la mythologie occidentale […] On le représentait muni d’un trousseau de clés noires, pour signifier que son royaume était si bien gardé que nul jamais ne pourrait en sortir. Mais les Japonais pensent que la péninsule de Shimokita, où se trouve l’entrée des Enfers, est l’endroit sur la Terre où on peut communiquer avec les morts […] Peut-on revenir du royaume de Pluton? C’est la question à laquelle, un jour ou l’autre, nous aurons tous à répondre. (Notre ami, 156)

Perhaps the point is simply that we have created our own, specific and horrendous version of death, from which we must find a way out; although none of us will cheat death itself, death by plutonium is a fate we can all strive to avoid through collective action and international solidarity. The third film and text, Notre ami l’atome: un siècle de radioactivité, is like Terres nucléaires in that it moves between countries and historical periods, rather than focusing on the most recent disaster like the first work.41 Both film and text begin with a particular person, but also describe what is to follow:

41 Notre ami l’atome won the Prix du meilleur documentaire at the International

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La ferme de Masami Yoshizawa est située à 14 kilomètres de la centrale de Fukushima, dans la zone interdite. Depuis huit ans, il refuse de la quitter […] Ce petit homme sur son tracteur jaune est un paysan et un résistant: sous l’œil de ses vaches, il continue son travail … […] La tâche semble absurde et pourtant, ce combat s’inscrit dans une longue histoire: celle des irradiés du nucléaire, des essais de Bikini au désastre de Fukushima, en passant par les Radium Girls. Ce film est l’histoire de ces combats. (Notre ami, 161)

Both film and text are exercises in ‘multidirectional memory’: isolated nuclear disasters in different times and places are connected by narrative memory and thence acquire a powerful collective resonance. The victims of radiation hail from a variety of locations, nationalities and circumstances: the Japanese fishermen who were working in the vicinity of Bikini Island; US soldiers watching the explosions in the Nevada desert; those who survived the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the ‘Radium Girls’, painting radium powder on alarm clocks in New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut; the inhabitants of Chernobyl, then Fukushima. The images from the historical footage are often breathtaking, sometimes simply because of the sheer dramatic irony: seeing US soldiers running towards the explosions, or the ‘Radium Girls’ putting their radioactive brushes in their mouths before applying the poison to the alarm clocks. The story of the Daigo Fukuryumaru, the fishing trawler whose crew members were irradiated because the US military had failed to notice their presence before they went ahead with their Bikini Island experiments, triggers – 30 years later – an even more monstrous discovery which is quietly and effectively told by a high school teacher. In the 1980s Mr Masatoshi Yamashita heard, by chance, about a local fisherman who committed suicide because of health problems due to having been irradiated, but who had not been on the Daigo Fukuryumaru. Surprised and intrigued, the teacher set his students some fieldwork: ‘avec ses lycéens, munis de simples carnets de notes et de stylos, il part à la recherche des pêcheurs présent autour de l’atoll de Bikini en 1954’ (Notre ami, 181–82). The interviews and questionnaires quickly reveal the astounding fact that the US military had missed not just the Daigo Fukuryumaru but several hundred other fishing boats and trawlers which had all been in the vicinity of Bikini Island, and that

Uranium Film Festival, held in Rio de Janeiro in May 2022 (https://uraniumfilm�festival.org/en/the-winners-of-rio-2022).

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therefore thousands of Japanese fishermen – not just the 23 who had been on the Daigo Fukuryumaru – had been irradiated that day. Although the stories are appalling and justice either absent or extremely slow in coming, their overall effect is salutary, partly because it dilutes the myth of what might be called ‘radiation exceptionalism’, which comes from the erroneous belief held by many Japanese that Japan is the only nation to have been irradiated. It also counteracts the problematic naming of the 3.11 disaster as ‘Fukushima’ by the West, pointed out by Ferrier in his preface to Penser avec Fukushima as mentioned earlier, which consigns it to a specific, and ‘foreign’, geographical area. The timescale is also an eye opener for readers who are inclined to date nuclear disasters from 1945 – the Radium Girls’ trial was in 1928 – and makes sense of the subtitle of the film, ‘un siècle de radioactivité’. We even discover that multidirectional memory gets results in the real world: the example of Fukushima’s victims inspired a number of Bikini Island victims to go to court and demand compensation (Notre ami, 208). In both film and text multiple voices, scattered all over the world, are activated in the same textual space to become a collective force. One small detail that is visible in the film, although neither translated nor commented on and completely absent from the text, illustrates – to my mind – the different natures of the two media and their relation to reality. The farmer with whose story the film opens, who continues to feed and take care of his irradiated cows, has a small white van bearing anti-nuclear slogans and attached to a trailer bearing a life-size wire sculpture of a cow. He uses this both for his everyday commute and when he travels to Tokyo, from time to time, to demonstrate in front of the Diet building (Notre ami, 213). In the film, all of the slogans are visible on the van, as is the trailer and the cow; the subtitles translate one of the slogans, which also occurs in the text (‘Prêt à mourir pour sauver les vivants’; Notre ami, 163). The other slogans call for the government to assume responsibility for the disaster, and to pay out compensation; Watanabe and Ferrier clearly took the sensible decision not to translate them all, or indeed everything written on the sign that marks out the farm, which is named ‘kibou no bokujou (Ferme de l’espoir)’.42 Personally I would have liked just one more translation, however, as a subtitle in the 42 The sign is designed to resemble a typical Japanese train station sign, with the name (Kibou no Bokujyou, Ferme de l’espoir) in the centre, and the names of the preceding and following stations in the lower left-hand and right-hand corners, respectively; on this sign the preceding station is ‘the past’, the following station is

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film or in the text; that of the name of the van, ‘cow-Godzilla’ (‘cow’ is in English, but written in Japanese letters, as is ‘Godzilla’). This is a quirky, almost funny but also astonishingly evocative appellation which sets off a chain reaction of cultural and historical references. Godzilla, a character first created for the eponymous film of 1954, was originally an embodiment of the Bikini Island experiment; in one of the first scenes, a cargo ship is obliterated by the monster in a flash of blinding light, an obvious reference to the unfortunate Daigo Fukuryumaru.43 Godzilla was subsequently transformed into a human-friendly monster in the seventies in a TV series that was discontinued in 1975, then brought back to the big screen in a film made in 1984, also called Godzilla. Conceived as a sequel to the 1954 production, this monster was both a source of radiation and a neutralizer of it; in the final scenes, Godzilla embraces a malfunctioning reactor and absorbs all of the radiation, thus saving the area and its inhabitants from contamination. Given Masami Yoshizawa’s age – he looks to be in his fifties – he could well have seen the 1984 film as a teenager, but his decision to name his van ‘cow-Godzilla’ is more likely to have been based on the widespread cultural perception of Godzilla as a symbol of radioactivity, and also as an animal that is not responsible for its radioactive status. Like his radioactive cows, Godzilla is a victim and a symbol of human folly, which is presumably why Yoshizawa takes ‘cow-Godzilla’ down to Tokyo for his demonstrations. The fact that the farmer’s van is named ‘cow-Godzilla’ is not noted in Ferrier’s text, and although clearly visible in the film will only be noticed by viewers who read Japanese. I do not see this as a shortcoming in either work, but as an instance of how contingent detail can contribute to works of art. ‘Cow-Godzilla’ does not make it into the text version of Notre ami l’atome, simply as a result of choice and elimination, but appears in the film version as part of the overflow of signifiers which may or may not be picked up by a particular viewer. If it is not, ‘cow-Godzilla’ will not be part of the overall meaning for that viewer, but if it is, it will add both temporality and new dimensions to his/her ‘the future’, with the date of the disaster – ‘3.11.2011’ – positioned exactly in the middle. 43 For a detailed account of how Godzilla evolved within the Japanese imaginary, see Yamamoto Akihiro, Kaku to Nihonjin: Hiroshima, Gojira, Fukushima (The Japanese and Nuclear Energy: Hiroshima, Godzilla, Fukushima) (Tokyo: Chûkôshinsho, 2015), an account of how popular culture has affected the Japanese view of nuclear power from 1945 to the present day.

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experience. The documentary film is a medium in which the film-maker cannot be in complete control; it allows – indeed welcomes – incursions of unscripted contingency into the work. Ferrier’s most recent writings on Fukushima consist of his preface to Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, and his interventions in the interviews and roundtables collected in the volume. Several recurrent preoccupations become evident from the questions Ferrier asks of the artists, although as a scrupulous and self-effacing interviewer, he never attempts to control the direction of the discussions or put words into the interviewees’ mouths. One question that he asks all of them, artists, photographers, film-makers and playwrights, is an obvious but interesting one. This is the form it takes in his interview with artist Kota Takeuchi: ‘Votre travail a manifestement été considérablement impacté par le 11 mars et ses conséquences: si vous deviez décrire en quelques mots ce que le 11 mars a changé pour vous, que diriez-vous?’44 The answers are various, and often involve the adoption of new techniques chosen in order to respond to the challenge of representing the unrepresentable; the notion that certain events are ‘supraliminal’, discussed earlier, is repeated in this volume, but also repeatedly rejected. The ‘invisibility’ of radioactivity is defeated by new techniques such as chronoradiography,45 the intolerable immediacy of the disaster is alleviated through the use of old methods such as daguerreotyping46 and the essence of the huge impact of the tsunami is brilliantly encapsulated – literally – on stage, in a stage version of Ferrier’s 2013 book, by the image of a woman drowning in a water tank.47 The artists agree that there has been a general movement, in terms of technique, from high-level technology to something closer to bricolage, an attitude of ‘making use’ of what is available, which echoes the attitudes evinced by the survivors of the disasters at Fukushima who are ‘making do’ in the circumstances, doing their best with whatever is on offer, 44 Michaël Ferrier, Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima (Paris: Éditions Thierry Marchaisse, 2021), p. 117. 45 Chronoradiograms, or x-ray images created over time, have been made by a number of photographers in Fukushima; Ferrier interviews photographers Hélène Lucien and Marc Pallain about the practice in Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, pp. 158–62. 46 The daguerreotypes of Arai Takashi, about which more will be said later in this chapter. 47 Brigitte Mounier’s stage version represents the tsunami by putting her in a water tank; see Ferrier, Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, pp. 199–201.

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trialling solutions ‘entre le subterfuge et le bricolage’.48 A gradual awareness develops, in the course of these discussions, that these artists are also cooperating – in a strangely exhilarating, purely creative sense – with the appalling disaster, which has stimulated their creativity and taken them into areas of experience, both mental and physical, that they had hitherto not known. The techniques with which they have responded to the challenge of representing it allow different realities to become perceptible, as Ferrier summarizes in his roundtable with the photographers: the result has been ‘l’élargissement des possibilités de perception visuelle’.49 This cooperation – shocking, but also intriguing – between the artists and the tragedy is acknowledged as being analogous to a similarity between art and radioactivity in Ferrier’s preface to the volume: Cette interrogation sur les valeurs et les usages de l’art, et sa place dans un monde de plus en plus ‘catastrophé’, fait écho à des questions qui travaillent le contemporain bien au-delà des frontières de l’art, et que vient de poser à nouveau la pandémie de Covid-19: celles de l’expertise scientifique, du diagnostic médical ou de la représentation politique par exemple […] elles nous invitent à penser l’art au niveau de sa création mais aussi de sa diffusion et de son exposition, étranges termes polysémiques, pouvant renvoyer aussi bien à l’art qu’à la radioactivité, et à repenser à la fois ses modalités de présentation, de circulation et de participation.50

The nature of the artist is further explored in the following paragraph of the preface, which is the last, and which also explains the title of the collection, ‘dans l’œil du désastre’. This phrase requires some contextualization within Ferrier’s work on Fukushima to date. In Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, it was courageous individuals, human and non-human – librarians, ‘liquidators’, 300-year-old plum trees or laughing men with a love of art – who contributed to the overall survival of the community and of the nation, by acting as the ôgi no kaname, the pivot of the fan, of the structure of which they are a part. The image of the ôgi no kaname, however, clearly evolved in Ferrier’s mind over the ten years during which he continued to write about 3.11. To return to the preface to Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima: Il existe, au cœur des pires cyclones, une zone de vents calmes et de temps éclatant, […] où il n’y a pas de précipitations et où le ciel bleu est visible 48 Ferrier, Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, p. 58. 49 Ferrier, Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, p. 162. 50 Ferrier, Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, pp. 11–12.

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist à travers le voile radieux des nuages. Phénomène singulier: on l’appelle l’œil du cyclone. Les artistes sont l’œil du cyclone. Vents violents, pluies torrentielles, vagues dévastatrices se déchaînent tout autour: ils restent calmes dans la tourmente et font apparaître, au centre de la circulation cyclonique, une zone provisoire de discernement et d’émerveillement.51

The eye of the storm is similar to the ôgi no kaname, a privileged point of calm and tranquillity amidst the fury, but there is the bonus of an added perspective: it can show us things beyond the storm like the blue sky, ‘une zone provisoire de discernement et d’émerveillement’. Even more significantly, the artist here is not a human being standing in the eye of the storm, but the eye of the storm itself. The human artist has become a non-human phenomenon, the actual viewpoint at the centre of the storm. Ferrier, the artist, had already fulfilled this role in Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, the suppleness of his writing allowing for other vistas, other perspectives in time and in space to be included beyond the immediate devastation. In Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, he offers instead a collection of interviews and discussions involving numerous ‘eyes’ of the storm, eyes that see: showing how art and artists are an integral part of the world that contains the disaster, although this last might seem like an anomaly, an unnatural and scandalous event which should never have happened. By taking up the challenge of creating with Fukushima, these artists do what linking Pluto with plutonium did at the end of Ferrier’s second film script; that is, they embrace the horror as part of a human creation, thereby making it possible to continue participating in a world that contains such atrocity. For such atrocities are not new, as artists have known through the ages: works of art evoke multiple temporalities, and contextualize what may seem like an unprecedented, singular disaster within the history of forgotten similar disasters. Ferrier’s interview with Arai Takashi is particularly interesting because they share an interest in multiple temporalities. Ferrier wrote about Arai in one of his articles, mentioned earlier, and in his interview summarizes his view of the artist’s work as a preface to the discussion: [Dans l’article] j’évoque votre art en en suggérant l’hypothèse qu’il nous permet de ‘rouvrir’ le temps. Vous ne vous resignez pas en effet au seul sujet de Fukushima: vous évoquez aussi bien l’essai Trinity que le bateau de pêche contaminé Daigo Fukuryu Maru ou les sinistrés de la région de

51 Ferrier, Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, p. 12.

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Fukushima. J’écrivais que votre travail ‘permet non seulement de saisir chaque désastre et de lui redonner une texture propre, mais dessine de surcroît une sorte de solidarité dans le temps lui-même. Chacun de ces moments peut alors être vu – être lu – comme en relation avec d’autres moments de violence radicale […]’. Voyez-vous votre œuvre d’abord et avant tout comme une œuvre de mémoire?52

Arai responds in some detail, saying that ‘la mémoire n’est pas toujours la voix du passé. La mémoire est une trame temporaire créée, éditée et même forgée de manière assez fluide pour répondre à nos perceptions’, and concluding that he wants his art to be ‘une interface pour accéder à la mémoire des autres’.53 This is of course one of Ferrier’s main objectives in his own work, especially in Mémoires d’outre-mer, and in Scrabble: the evocation of multiple time frames with a view to making the memories of others, including his own, available to his readers. In the next chapter we will see how Ferrier creates biographical and autobiographical narratives in which time is multilayered, and the textual space is the place where different eras can be activated and come alive. In his Fukushima-related works, which as we have seen include an eyewitness account, collections of interviews both contemporary and historical, academic articles and film scripts, we see how the scattered elements – like the islands of Matsushima – stay separate but bring their collective efforts to achieve a single objective, the activation of communal memory, effected by the eye of the storm.

52 Ferrier, Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, p. 93. 53 Ferrier, Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, p. 98.

chapter three

Challenging Space and Time Mémoires d’outre-mer (2015) and Scrabble (2019) Challenging Space and Time

This chapter will be a joint analysis of two works: Mémoires d’outre-mer (2015) and Scrabble (2019). A biography of his paternal grandfather and an autobiographical account of Ferrier’s childhood, respectively, the two books are structured quite differently, set in different countries and focused on two very different characters. But I want to analyse them together because they deal with some of Ferrier’s most important themes, and together constitute something of a culmination in his literary trajectory. The two works share a certain attitude towards the natural world, a non-standard view of space and time as well as of human identity and memory, and a deep-seated belief in the power of language, all tied to the personalities of the main characters in each case. Their distance, both thematic and geographical, from his œuvre up until the publication of the earlier of these two works, Mémoires d’outre-mer, is striking; and signals the start, in my view, of the mature phase of Ferrier as a novelist, a writer who has found and settled into his voice and material. Mémoires d’outre-mer is a biography – albeit an unconventional one – of Maxime Ferrier, the author’s paternal grandfather, who was born in Mauritius but decided one day to sail to Madagascar, never to return.1 The book is structured as a quest undertaken by Ferrier in the present, and the narrative of Maxime’s story is interspersed with metanarrative asides 1 Christian Doumet writes that this work brings together three classic narrative models: ‘un modèle qu’on pourrait dire généalogique, correspondant à l’enquête familiale; un modèle chateaubrianesque auquel se réfère explicitement la parodie du titre, et qui combine des réflexions personnelles et des éléments autobiographiques; enfin un modèle ethnographique, où se déploie le champ de l’érudition’. Christian Doumet, ‘Mémoire, singulier et pluriel’, in Fabien Arribert-Narce (ed.), Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021), pp. 87–95 (p. 87).

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which detail the developments of Ferrier’s investigations. In these he is accompanied, if not assisted, by Li-An2 – a beautiful Chinese Olympic fencer, reminiscent of the muse-like Japanese women of Ferrier’s earlier novels – and the overall tone is that of an adventure story, the one in the past featuring the extremely adventurous Maxime, and the other in the present with the less adventurous but widely travelled Ferrier taking the lead role. Maxime’s career in Madagascar starts in a circus where he stars as an acrobat; he becomes a trader and businessman when the circus is disbanded, as well as a diver and draughtsman. He is imprisoned several times during the war by the Malagasy branch of the Vichy regime, but survives to live out his days peacefully in Antananarivo. His grandson travels to Madagascar to research and write about his life, interviewing old friends and going through his grandparents’ papers and official records; his metanarrative also contains his musings on ‘French’ identity and history from the perspective of the former colonies. Scrabble was written for a particular series, ‘Traits et portraits’, created by Mercure de France and to which numerous contemporary authors have contributed. The remit is for an autobiographical text with accompanying photographs; Marie NDiaye’s offering was Autoportrait en vert, in which the images famously have nothing to do with her childhood, having been taken from a collection of photographs that she found in a suitcase left in her house by its previous owner. More conventionally, Ferrier’s images in Scrabble are all relevant to his story, which is that of his childhood in Chad.3 The narrative is born out of an ‘originary’ scene that shows Michaël – or Toumaï, as he is called in the book – and his brother playing Scrabble in the courtyard of their house, with their mother, attired as for a journey, watching nearby. The Scrabble board serves something of a Proustian madeleine function, with the squares turning into the rooms of the house, or the various permutations of the letters being likened to the different routes taken by Toumaï to explore the area around his house.4 The overall account is broadly chronological, 2 This name is irresistibly reminiscent of the French word for creeper or liana, liane, which in turn evokes Michaux’s description of Chinese women as ‘d’un corps admirable, d’un jet comme un végétal’. See Henri Michaux, Un barbare en Asie (Paris: Gallimard, 1933), p. 148. 3 I will discuss the relationship between the text and images in Scrabble not in this chapter but in the Coda section at the end of this study. 4 It is also reminiscent of the puzzles in Perec’s La vie mode l’emploi, although the Scrabble board does not feature as prominently in the plot as the puzzles do in

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told from a child’s-eye point of view in painstaking and colourful detail, with occasional connections made to the adult Ferrier’s tendencies and predilections. This Chadian childhood ends in the horror of war, when the family are forced to leave the country because of the conflict; the Scrabble scene of the start returns at the end to be identified as their last day in the house, a scene of peace on the periphery of war but preserved intact in Toumaï’s memory.5 The Natural World Both Mémoires d’outre-mer and Scrabble are largely set outside; the protagonists are usually to be found outdoors, in the sea or going on long walks, watching animals or – in Toumaï’s case – scrabbling around on the ground. They also share a markedly equal relationship to the natural world which places the human being on the same level as both fauna and flora. Toumaï spends almost all of his childhood outside, learning, as he puts it, at his ‘école du dehors’; from an early age he approaches the ground as a legible text, revelling in ‘toute la ponctuation fantastique de la terre’.6 He observes the pebbles, the dirt, the grass, the ferns: ‘c’est toute un gravier de graphies, une euphorie de signes infiniment recommencé’ that he learns to read, together with the moving life on, around and under it, ants, frogs, scorpions, crabs, and other creatures (Scrabble, 30). He feels attached to the natural world and an integral part of it – ‘je me sens relié à tous les souffles du monde’7 – and also Perec’s work. Perec is one of Ferrier’s favourite authors, and there are many echoes of him in Ferrier’s œuvre, as we have already seen in previous chapters. 5 Fabien Arribert-Narce has correctly identified this scene as the ‘image fantôme’ from which the whole text issues, an untaken, absent image exactly like Barthes’s ‘Photo du Jardin d’Hiver’ in La chambre claire, or Guibert’s ‘image fantôme’ in his book of the same title. I will discuss this further in the Coda. 6 Michaël Ferrier, Scrabble (Paris: Mercure de France, 2019), p. 29. Henceforth, this book will be cited as Scrabble in the main text. 7 I asked Ferrier if this line was a reference to Éluard, and received the following response: ‘Ce n’est pas une référence à Éluard (même si j’aime beaucoup Éluard), mais à … Césaire (que j’aime encore plus qu’Éluard et qui est vraiment un de mes auteurs de prédilection). “pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien exploré

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sees it as an inexhaustible source of knowledge. Indeed it made the adult Ferrier someone who prefers concrete to abstract knowledge: ‘Je ne pars jamais d’un principe, je ne sais même pas ce que c’est. Je pars toujours de ce que j’ai sous la main ou sous les yeux à un moment donné: une herbe qui pousse, une racine qui s’arrache au sol, un filet d’eau qui serpente’ (Scrabble, 42). In this the young Toumaï is ahead of Adorno, who wrestled with the existence of ‘nonidentity’, the presence of things beyond concepts because they are heterogeneous to all concepts, and therefore beyond our epistemological reach. In Toumaï’s world there are no concepts or principles: everything is essentially heterogeneous, singular and unique (‘Pour vraiment connaître le monde, je m’aperçois qu’il faut tout apprendre, tout retenir: la forme, les couleurs, les odeurs, la texture, les dimensions, le relief, les distances …’, Scrabble, 31). This means there is a lot to learn, and in his education Toumaï is guided by Baba Saleh, the man who cooks, cleans and cares for both the house and the children. Saleh introduces Toumaï to ‘l’arbre aux bêtes’, a strange and prodigious tree that houses all sorts of beasts and insects, standing in a corner of the courtyard. It is inhabited by small tortoises and mammals, ants of all shapes and sizes, snakes, lizards, birds and toads. Saleh uses the tree to give Toumaï a practical and empirical education about the plant and animal kingdoms: Savoir repérer la cachette d’un animal, deviner son âge et son espèce (rat, serpent, mangouste, lapin …) rien qu’à la quantité de terre qu’il fait sortir en creusant son trou. Différencier le trou percé pour se cacher, celui foré pour se nourrir, celui creusé pour se reposer. (Scrabble, 58)

Like a pagan version of the Edenic tree, the ‘arbre aux bêtes’ is the fount of all knowledge, but it is each creature’s particularity that impresses Toumaï, and the practical information he gains from learning to catch them, observing them and letting them go. This kind of knowledge is the complete opposite to that of the human being put in charge of pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompté mais ils s’abandonnent, saisis, à l’essence de toute chose ignorants des surfaces mais saisis par le mouvement de toute chose insoucieux de dompter, mais jouant le jeu du monde véritablement les fils aînés du monde poreux à tous les souffles du monde aire fraternelle de tous les souffles du monde”’. (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal) (Email to the author, 7 January 2022).

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naming, and thus rendering abstract and ideational, all the creatures of the earth;8 the biblical Adam’s position is hierarchical and generalizing, whereas Toumaï’s is hands-on and singularizing. But later in Ferrier’s life, this practical knowledge will extend into the abstract; when the child Toumaï grows up, he finds that his memories of the tree provide him with principles and laws to guide his behaviour: ‘L’arbre aux bêtes fut mon premier guide et un puissant tuteur. Je le consulte encore, de mémoire, pour toute décision un peu difficile à prendre aujourd’hui. Il me rappelle les règles essentielles, les lois infiniment variées de l’universel, les ressources primordiales et les principes fondamentaux’ (Scrabble, 60). But these are the principles and laws of the natural world, not of the human one, and Ferrier’s reliance on them positions him firmly as a denizen of the former. The young Toumaï certainly thinks of animals as an essential part of his community and society: C’est d’abord avec les animaux que j’ai fait l’expérience de l’amour, de la cruauté et de la liberté […] Avant les êtres humains, instituteurs, éducateurs, professeurs, avant même les parents ou la famille, ce sont les animaux qui m’ont formé. Une rude fraternité nous unit depuis l’enfance, une immense complicité mêlée d’une certaine rivalité. (Scrabble, 59)

Toumaï has a profound admiration for all animals, especially dogs – the lords of the courtyard – and never forgets a life lesson given to him by a much-loved older sister figure, Amaboua, one of Baba Saleh’s daughters, who tells him: ‘Toumaï, vis comme le chien!’ He certainly thinks of himself as non-human at various points in the narrative: ‘Je suis poisson, oiseau, pétale’ (Scrabble, 118). He is quite convinced, in spite of what the adults say, that all animals can speak. His view of language, in any case, is one that sees it not as a grammatical system but as an ‘expression of the world – it “speaks the world”’.9 Or, as he puts it, he acquired a ‘reserve’ of sounds for his whole life during his childhood in Chad: 8 ‘As Hegel observed in the Jena System Programme (1803/04), the biblical prerogative bestowed upon the mythical first man of imposing names of his own choosing on the rest of creation “annihilated” his Edenic earth others by substituting for the particularity of their embodied being something ideational that could henceforth exist, virtually, in their absence.’ Kate Rigby, ‘Writing after Nature’, in Ken Hiltner (ed.), Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 357–67 (p. 360). 9 Jim Cheney, ‘Truth, Knowledge, and the Wild World’, Ethics and the Environment, 10.2 (2005), p. 108.

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Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist C’est un pactole sonore, une réserve de bruits pour toute la vie. Je les entends toujours aujourd’hui. Le fredonnement des insectes (nuages de mouches le jour, bancs de moustique la nuit). Le premier cri des sarcelles, un peu aigre et grinçant, qui monte dans le matin blanc […] dans les arbres qui bordent le fleuve, les oies de Gambie au visage rouge se réveillent et commencent à chuinter. Tout alentour, le monde pousse son cri. (Scrabble, 28)

Toumaï thus considers himself to be closer to animals and plants than to human beings, an individual member of the natural world. When he contracts malaria, however, his human singularity disintegrates as he describes how his body merges with the non-human world. Jane Bennett, in her new materialist study Vibrant Matter, repeatedly emphasizes how our bodies are not fully human; ‘my “own” body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human […] The crook of my elbow, for example, is “a special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria” […] We are, rather, an array of bodies’.10 When he falls ill with malaria, Toumaï’s body, which has consumed so much from the world, is in turn colonized by some of its microscopic inhabitants: ‘l’enfant engouffre le monde, l’avale et l’engloutit […] Mais quelquefois, le monde ne se laisse pas faire. Il envoie dans le corps de l’enfant une tribu de parasites’ (Scrabble, 149). And when he is taken over by hallucinations caused by his fever, his experiences go completely beyond the human: D’abord, je suis une étendue plane, faite uniquement d’eau. Couché dans mon lit, ma personne m’apparaît comme un étang, puis comme un lac, puis comme un lagon […] Je suis un hippopotame ou un caïman. Je suis un enfant yedina, venu du ‘peuple des herbes’, un amphibien tapi dans les marais et respirant à l’aide de roseaux. (Scrabble, 151)

His cohabitation, so to speak, with the malarial parasites gives him a totally different perception of himself: as a body of water, a hippopotamus, a caiman and then as a human child but one who can live amphibiously. The underwater world is an important environment for both Toumaï and Maxime; in Toumaï’s case, it is a conduit to different time frames, as we will see later in this chapter, but it is also more prosaically an environment in which perception is distorted and changed, where Toumaï learns that there are different ways of viewing 10 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 112.

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the world. Fever-induced hallucinations have a similar effect, as the juxtapositions indicate, and the presence of the parasites in his liver ensure that the adult Ferrier continues to experience malarial relapses: ‘avec le temps, les crises s’espacent, mais le monstre est là, en veille […] de temps en temps, où que je sois, la fièvre revient. Maux de tête, douleurs musculaires, malaises, vomissements … Et d’immenses hallucinations’ (Scrabble, 156). As with all other human beings, a part of Ferrier is now forever non-human, and ‘they’ have irrevocably changed his perception of himself and of the world. Maxime Ferrier, the author’s grandfather in Mémoires d’outre-mer, might be described as a grown-up version of Toumaï; born and bred in Mauritius, he has an easy affinity with nature, particularly with the sea. Like Toumaï, Maxime is often compared to individual animals and even vegetation (birds, monkey, fish, plant); the different stages of his career are likened to ‘mues successives’, conjuring up the image of a snake casting off its skin as it grows and flourishes. But it is his relationship with the sea that is key to his identity; he is described as an ‘être aquatique’, not only because he – like his good friend, Arthur Dai Zong – loves diving and swimming, but because of their nature and way of life, which seems to be modelled on the sea: Leur vie se déploie par affluents, courants de coraux, roseaux […] Toujours, ils gardent intact un étonnant pouvoir d’ouverture et de bifurcation. Ils sont comme la mer qui sans cesse revient sur ses traces et, du même mouvement infini, vous emporte au loin […] En les accompagnant ainsi tout au long de leurs déambulations, je découvre une chose: la condition frontalière de tout être humain. Même lorsqu’il reste toute sa vie dans un seul et même pays, l’homme est frontière et passage, travaillé par la limite.11

This description of Maxime’s and his friend’s way of being contains much that indicates a way of thinking about the human being as an integral, embedded and active part of the natural world. (The fact that two people, Maxime and Arthur, are the joint subject of his musings is important; the singularity of Maxime is thus diluted by the presence of his friend, another individual whose life is part of a larger system.) The sea is, of course, not a single creature but a whole ecosystem in which millions 11 Michaël Ferrier, Mémoires d’outre-mer (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), pp. 162–63. Henceforth, this book will be cited as Mémoires in the main text.

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of creatures make their lives, separate but united by its movements; so the lives of Maxime and Arthur are, like the sea, multiform and unfold in tributaries, determined not by their individual wills but by patterns preordained by currents and other natural forces. Bennett is interesting on the role of will in the context of events and agency; she reminds us that Augustine and Kant both thought that human will was not a clear-cut power that chose its path freely and successfully, and argues for replacing ‘the discrete agent […] with a “spectrum” of “agentic capacities” housed sometimes in individual persons, sometimes in human physiological processes or motor intentionality, and sometimes in human social structures of the “interworld”’.12 Ferrier seems to be suggesting a similar model for his grandfather and his friend, in which human agency is just one amongst many other forces combining to shape their lives. What does seem to belong to the men themselves is ‘la condition frontalière’, ascribed to ‘tout être humain’; in the image of the sea as a system within which human beings move back and forth, they exist as the frontier, like the crest of a wave that is distinguishable from the body of the water but obviously part of it, not a free agent with intentions as such but a distinct section of the overall movement. Similarly, when Toumaï is battling his malarial fever in Scrabble, in one of his hallucinations he becomes a frontier: ‘Le sang froid, la peau nue, je suis la frontière elle-même, toujours entre deux ordres, entre deux règnes’ (Scrabble, 151). Here he, too, is presented as an individual inextricably connected to the sea of fever and illusion, but a conscious part of the whole. Ferrier’s use of the sea in the passage quoted above from Mémoires d’outre-mer starts as a simile for Maxime’s life (‘comme la mer’), but it gradually merges into the reality of a life spent on the sea or very close to it, the journeys taken across the waters and the returns to Madagascar’s shores. The aquatic world is thus both a metaphor and the reality, the ‘assemblage’13 of which Maxime is a flourishing part and from which he acquires both energy and purpose; such a view is crucial to what we think about Maxime’s actions, both on land and at sea, and which will be discussed later in this chapter. Following his depiction of human life as being like the sea and frontiers, Ferrier offers another comparison: ‘Comme le corail, la vie des hommes est hérissée de crêtes et de bosses, déchiquetée de creux mystérieux, traversée de corps soyeux, de formes vives, de retours en arrière et de translations 12 Bennett, p. 30. 13 Bennett, ch. 2.

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délicates. Et, comme le corail, la parole des hommes est traversée de courants’ (Mémoires, 163). Coral itself is an animal, but contains colonies of algae which photosynthesize and support the life of the coral reef; so it can be described as a kind of collective being, multiple, multiform, both fauna and flora. Like the ‘arbre aux bêtes’ in Scrabble, it has thousands of creatures living in and on it, an ‘array of bodies’ which is both stable and ever-moving. Fish, crabs, prawns and thousands of other creatures interact with it, swim through it, feed on it and together create what I would like to call an inter-identity – an identity that is also a crossroads, an intersection, a place where many bodies meet and whose borders are unclear. Ferrier’s comparison of human life to that of coral is thus highly provocative, suggesting that we are all junctions rather than monads, creatures of fluidity and ill-defined frontiers who interact fully with the animate and inanimate beings that surround us. And the seemingly throwaway sentence at the end – ‘et, comme le corail, la parole des hommes est traversée de courants’ – links the notion of inter-identity to that of intertextuality: we share our language with other humans and non-humans, and never fully own our speech.14 Space and Time In Madagascar space and time work a little differently from elsewhere, according to the adult Ferrier’s experience of Antananarivo. Bursting with flowers, it is a city made up of architectural styles from a variety of periods, where the particular mix of history and nature means that ‘le temps se met à vibrer différemment’ (Mémoires, 82). Its inhabitants move differently, too: Leur démarche est célèbre dans le monde entier: on la dit nonchalante, lente, parfois même avachie. Un mot circule, […] qui résume ce rythme du corps léger, fluide, épanoui: 14 As I mentioned in the Introduction, Ferrier has referred to himself as a ‘plagiarist’ in this context (in his talk at the colloquium ‘Michaël Ferrier: Mémoires d’outre-mer/Over Seas of Memory’, held at Birkbeck, University of London on 18 September 2019); he claimed that his writing was not at all original, being packed full of quotations from his favourite authors. He is clearly no plagiarist, but his statement certainly chimes with his conviction that originality and identity are not viable concepts in a world where everything interacts with everything else, and in which borders of all kinds are and should be transgressed.

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The combination of the exuberance of its nature and the distinctive manners of its people makes Madagascar a multi-temporal place where time and space can interact differently from elsewhere. Calendar time is observed, but not exclusively; there is a Malagasy horoscope, for instance, consulted by the narrator every morning when he wakes up, which offers him an alternative method for measuring and ordering his life. Time in Madagascar can move strangely in particular places; standing next to three mysterious tombstones at the beginning of his quest, Ferrier experiences how ‘le temps s’accelère et remonte à sa source’ (Mémoires, 18). This kind of phenomenon seems to occur most readily when there is an abundance of nature in the vicinity, which is certainly the case in the cemetery of Mahajanga, full of teeming animal and vegetal life that carries on around the calm stillness of the tombs. In the context of this special environment, acrobats – the three acrobats of the Cirque rouge, of whom Maxime is the star – are particularly adept at escaping the confines of time and space as most of us experience them. Acrobats in general are superhuman beings who can accede to times and spaces beyond our reach: Ce sont des artistes aériens, on les appelle les icariens. Comme Icare, ils montent aussi haut qu’ils le peuvent, à l’étoile, à l’infini. Même s’ils ne s’en souviennent pas, ils savent – d’un savoir presque aussi ancien que le corps et plus ancien que le savoir lui-même – que le mot ‘cirque’ vient de ‘circulus’, terme de l’Antiquité qui renvoie aux orbites des planètes … Là-haut donc, en orbite, ils prennent la lumière en tournant, vaste révélation giratoire. Ils diminuent et ils s’allongent, ils se réinventent en permanence. Ils crèvent l’espace, ils enjambent le temps …. (Mémoires, 97)

Maxime himself is an extreme case where the bending of spatiotemporal rules is concerned, at least whenever he executes his celebrated triple jump; the astonishing feat allows him not only to transcend his species – ‘oiseau, singe, poisson, plante, il est devenu inclassable’ – but to fly free of the limits set on normal beings by the dimensions of time

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and space. Ferrier describes the only existing photograph of Maxime’s triple jump: Malgré la médiocrité du cliché – ou peut-être précisément grâce à elle –, on comprend vite l’extraordinaire puissance légère de ce fou volant. Il est debout dans le noir, les bras ouverts, les mains cherchant le ciel. Là, il rompt le cercle de l’espèce, il s’extrait du cycle, il s’éclipse – et c’est comme si chaque roue lui faisait franchir un nombre infini de degrés de liberté. C’est un nouvel espace-temps, tissé par la lumière, gravé par la matière, un temps élastique et qui n’obéit plus. (Mémoires, 127)

Other writers have described acrobats as non-human beings, creatures whose exploits place them beyond human limitations; as a result, the normal rules of morality and possibility do not apply to them.15 Maxime’s conduct – in his domestic life, for instance – does not take account of the standard rules of society, but as an acrobat he transcends the human experience of space and time and is catapulted into a different dimension. What, or where, is this dimension? One possibility is that it is the future, or rather the textual future; it may be that he has escaped into the pages of the book that we are reading, into the world of the writer’s imagination where the shackles of time do not apply. That this is at least one possible destination for Maxime when he transcends normal time and space is suggested at the end of the novel, when the narrator discovers that his grandfather, before he died, had written the epigraph of his book – the book which he has not quite finished writing – on his gravestone in the cemetery of Mahajanga, as we will see in a later section of this chapter. In Scrabble, Toumaï also learns alternative ways of experiencing time and space, although he does not engage in acrobatic feats. For instance, Saleh teaches him that in his culture human age is measured in cycles of seven years, corresponding to degrees of maturity, independence and responsibility; at ten years of age, ‘je suis dans le deuxième septénaire’ 15 Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, for instance, admires a trapeze artist in similar terms: ‘Was Andromache really human? […] To imagine her as a wife and mother was simply stupid […] She was not a woman; but she was not a man either and therefore not a human being. A solemn angel of daring with parted lips and dilated nostrils, that is what she was, an unapproachable Amazon of the realms of space beneath the canvas, high above the crowd, whose lust for her was transformed into awe’. Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull, trans. Denver Lindley (London: Vintage, 2019), p. 204.

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(Scrabble, 74). This method for measuring a life carries a moral weight and responsibility; after six ‘septénaires’, at 42, education ends and teaching begins, the adult is fully formed and must begin to give something back to his community. This he will do for another 21 years, and at 63 he can retire. This alternative measurement of a man’s life is one that the adult Ferrier has never forgotten, and as he grows older, he says that he understands Saleh’s words better and better (Scrabble, 76). In everyday life, however, the young Toumaï’s experience of time is based on that of animals; that is to say, he learns to live fully in the present. But this present is not a formless stretch of time; animals ‘sont les garants d’un certain rythme, d’une pulsation, répétitive et pourtant infiniment variée, une percussion musicale dont je sens dans ma propre poitrine battre la mesure’ (Scrabble, 60). He thinks that ‘les animaux sont comme nous’, in possession of ‘une vie intérieure’, a sense of humour and a capacity to mourn, inasmuch as they can grasp that the end of time has come for one of them, ‘parce qu’ils ont compris que quelque chose vient de s’interrompre dans la grande vibration du monde’ (Scrabble, 67). Animals also influence his spatial awareness, as in imitating them and living at ground level he discovers that ‘la position à ras de terre – celle du tireur couché – […] apporte aussi une rupture verticale dans la sensation’ (Scrabble, 29), so much so that he still has a habit of ‘vivre penché’, looking down at the ground: ‘il arrive fréquemment que mon corps soit anormalement penché sur les photographies que l’on prend de moi’ (Scrabble, 29). A very different influence is that of the game Scrabble, which continues to order his spatial awareness. As mentioned earlier, he remembers his childhood home by likening the squares to its various rooms, or the permutations of the words to the different routes he takes to explore the area around it, a method that he has retained into adulthood: Au Scrabble, dès que le premier mot est trouvé, les mots suivants sont placés à la parallèle ou à la perpendiculaire d’un mot déjà positionné. De même, je me déplace dans la ville par rapport à un centre fixe, la maison, dont je m’éloigne par rotations progressives […] par cercles progressifs, jusqu’à m’éloigner parfois considérablement du point initial. J’aime aussi à me représenter la vie comme une spirale, qui m’entraîne à chaque pas de nouveaux lieux, de nouvelles découvertes. Un vortex. (Scrabble, 118)

The back-and-forth movement suggested both by the development of the words on the Scrabble board (although these are of course rectangular

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forms) and Toumaï’s method for exploring his neighbourhood, made up of discoveries of the unknown and returns to the familiar, creates – on paper – a pattern of gradually increasing concentric circles, or – in a three-dimensional space – a spiral. Toumaï, as he says, thinks of his life as a spiral, or a vortex; it is not clear where this thought has originated, but it is something of a leitmotiv in the book. The spiral movement is, of course, the one which allows Maxime to escape the limits set on the human experience of time; the triple jump is a series of circles moving upwards, a perfectly executed spiral. I will continue my discussion of this movement and pattern when I focus more fully on identity in Scrabble and Mémoires d’outre-mer, but here note that it is crucial to both Maxime’s and Toumaï’s unusual experiences of space and time. Memory and Identity For both Maxime and Toumaï, these alternative experiences of time and space develop into an unusual and not straightforwardly chronological view of memory and identity: they come to hold strongly spatial views of time, and of human existence through time, as I will now show. Maxime’s identity, as we have already seen, is fluid, interactive and ceaselessly moving; like the sea, it is what I have called an inter-identity, where many elements – human and non-human, animate and inanimate – meet to create an entity recognizable as Maxime. His name, as a matter of fact, also goes through a number of variations over the course of his life. The first change was the alteration of just one crucial letter, made when he left Mauritius for a new life in Madagascar, never to return: Le changement de Février en Ferrier est aussi une belle manière de se désinscrire du calendrier des hommes, de leur temps contracté. En forgeant ainsi son propre nom et en le chargeant d’une certaine densité (le fer y est), Maxime change d’âge et d’époque, il brise la chaîne biologique et se retrouve, seul porteur de son nom, joyeux, vivant, rempli d’une fertilité neuve et d’une nouvelle science du temps. (Mémoires, 52–53)

As he becomes established in Madagascar, he periodically adds to his family name in a playful, almost whimsical manner: Maxime Février … Maxime Ferrier … Maxime de la Ferrière …

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But subsequently, as he grows older, he removes the additions: Le livre est en train de se refermer dans l’autre sens, le trombone à coulisse de son nom se replie progressivement en fonction de sa mélodie interne: Maxime Saint Jean le Roi de la Ferrière Maxime Le Roy de la Ferrière Maxime de la Ferrière16 C’est le lundi 14 août 1967, à 11 heures du matin, que l’état civil de Mahajanga enregistre son dernier changement de nom: Maxime Ferrier Comme une molécule d’hydrogène qui se contracte et en revient à une nudité essentielle, Maxime met ainsi un terme – provisoire, puisque je les relance ici – aux aventures de son nom. Pourtant, il refusera toujours de reprendre le nom de Février, comme pour marquer que la partie n’a pas été jouée pour rien, que quelque chose a été gagné. (Mémoires, 323)

Following the first change which frees him, according to his grandson, from conventional human time as symbolized by the calendar, Maxime continues to alter his name as the mood takes him, but then returns to ‘Maxime Ferrier’ just under five years before his death. The numerous changes have the effect of undermining the importance of a name, which would seem to entail a correspondingly cavalier attitude towards the fact of an identity. Indeed, Maxime’s identifying characteristics are difficult to pin down; his skin colour, for instance, is a subject for debate, with various witnesses making contradictory claims (Mémoires, 210), 16 This parabolic development of names is echoed in Scrabble, when Toumaï delights in the ‘possibilité qu’a chaque joueur, à partir d’un mot déjà posé, de bifurquer vers une nouvelle signification qui […] lui offre tout à coup une sorte de potentiel inouï et une salve d’ouvertures supplémentaires: ‘VER VERT OUVERT COUVERT DÉCOUVERTE’ (Scrabble, 125)

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as is his nationality; no one knows if he is Mauritian, French, British or something else, the only official document being a ‘visa de séjour “étranger” qu’il faut payer et renouveler chaque année’ (Mémoires, 211). Like the fish that he begins to draw professionally at a certain point in his career, Maxime is slippery, ceaselessly moving and almost impossible to define. His drawings of marine animals were much in demand for their skill and accuracy, and he sold them to biologists and museum curators. The following description of his favourite subjects applies equally to himself, and to his way of life: Il a une prédilection pour les poissons au fuselage vif-argent – plats, vifs, élancés, leur corps même le dit, ce sont des poisson-voyageurs […] Il se régale aussi de la danse des anémones de mer, ces vahinés sous-marines emportées dans le flux et le reflux des marées, et croque à plusieurs reprises le dragon-fish, une sorte de poisson-algue dont on ne sait pas très bien s’il est minéral, végétal ou aqueux: Maxime dit de lui que c’est la mer en personne, qui flotte, ondule, ondoie …. (Mémoires, 158)

Ferrier describes how Maxime’s drawing techniques are designed to make the fish look alive, reproducing as much of its movement as possible, even as an immobile image. Both in painting and in calligraphy, the brush is a tool designed to transcribe the movements of the hand that holds it. In calligraphy, it has been argued that the strokes on the sheet, as well as forming the letters on the paper, trace the movements of the calligrapher’s emotions;17 in a painting, especially that of a living creature, the brushstrokes presumably attempt to reproduce the actual movements, the dynamic life, of the specimen at stake. In the context of scientific illustrations, what is important is to capture ‘l’animal pris sur le vif’, especially in the case of marine fauna whose colours will usually fade or change after death, or even as soon as they are taken out of the water. Maxime, an observant diver, excels at preserving the dynamic being of his subjects; his grandson, as I will discuss in further detail later, follows in his stylistic footsteps, depicting Maxime’s constantly moving existence in a fluid, dynamic prose that mimics its subject. French identity is much discussed in the metanarrative sections of Mémoires d’outre-mer, as is French history, which we might think of as

17 In China, it was believed that ‘to a calligrapher, the single brushstroke offers limitless ways to bring his emotions to life’. Léon Long-Yien Chang and Peter Miller, 4000 Years of Chinese Calligraphy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), p. 33.

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‘communal’ or even ‘public’ memory. In the chapter entitled ‘Français de branche’, the narrator leafs through a copy of the nineteenthcentury bestseller, Le tour de la France par deux enfants (1877), and wonders about the view of France that it wished to give its readers; he then imagines another view of France, today and through the ages, which would include all the overseas territories, the different peoples and races who have been, or still are, French: ‘une France multiterritoriale, aux temporalités qui s’ignorent, se répondent, s’enlacent, se superposent’ (Mémoires, 69). It is an ideal way of seeing France which he does not think is viable in contemporary France, not yet, but he sketches out in some detail what such a France might look like, what kind of geographical and temporal characteristics it might reveal: Ce déplacement du point de vue […] révélerait bien d’autres tournures de la France, fugaces et résistantes, fragiles, indubitables – bien vivantes et bien françaises. Toute une géographie parallèle aussi, terrestre et maritime, sensuelle et intelligente, mouvante et émouvante. Alors, on arriverait peut-être à montrer que la variété a constamment accompagné la création historique de la France, à l’intérieur comme à l’extérieur, en Europe comme aux Antilles, en Afrique ou dans l’océan Indien. Alors le pluriel reviendrait, dans les noms, les lieux et les mémoires. La France redeviendrait ce qu’elle n’a jamais cessé d’être, un terrain hétérogène et pourtant cohérent …. (Mémoires, 69–70)

A multicultural, multi-territorial France – not with the Hexagon dominating the other areas, but all equally if differently important to its identity – a sort of maximal France, if I may be forgiven the pun, is sketched out in this chapter. For such is the identity of Maxime, and also – differently, but comparably – that of his grandson; it is French, but incorporates a variety of Frenchnesses, the non-French Frenchnesses that are possible given the nation’s history, all the diverse movements which have gone to create it. In his French school in Chad, Toumaï is taught history in the classic tradition; given that the classroom is a mixture of black and white children from diverse backgrounds, however, discussions of medieval knights, Charlemagne and ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ lack substance and appear hopelessly detached from the reality around them: ‘Et pourquoi pas “Nos ancêtres les cobras” tant qu’on y est? Youssouf et Abdel rient aux larmes […] Cette étrange particularité qu’ont les Français de toujours se croire plus universels que les autres les amuse’ (Scrabble, 97). It is from

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these first experiences of the gap between different histories and different realities that Toumaï, helped by his friends Youssouf and Abdel, learns to ‘toujours voir le monde à plusieurs niveaux’ (Scrabble, 92). On a more philosophical level, as mentioned earlier, Toumaï thinks of his life as a spiral: ‘J’aime aussi à me représenter la vie comme une spirale, qui m’entraîne à chaque pas vers de nouveaux lieux, de nouvelles découvertes. Un vortex’ (Scrabble, 118). Now, the spiral is a key concept, since the time of Lucretius, for thinking about the structure of the world and its organization: Michel Serres, for example, suggests that the process of collaboration and contestation between bodies is not random or unstructured, but conforms to the strange logic of vortices, spirals and eddies […] Serres, here following Lucretius, posits but one isomorphic process […] The vortical logic holds across different scales of size, time and complexity, and the sequences of stages repeats, but each time with slight differences: ‘This is the stroke of genius in [Lucretian] physics: there is no circle, there are only vortices […] spirals that shift, that erode.’18

Later, in the epilogue, the narrator – now an adult – brings up the spiral again, but this time declares quite simply that ‘nous sommes des spirales’. This describes his vision of our continued existence through time, which allows us, according to him, to access various levels of our past at will: Je ne suis jamais sorti de mon enfance […] Nous sommes des lignes. Et plus exactement: nous sommes des spirales. Comme la spirale, nous ne laissons rien en arrière au fur et à mesure que nous croissons, que nous grandissons. Je n’ai rien oublié, ou presque. Comme dans la spirale, tout est toujours là, en soi, à l’intérieur, à portée de main. Il faut savoir rester – ou redevenir – enfant pour être adulte, passer ainsi entre les mondes. (Scrabble, 216)

This vision of the narrator’s self through time as a spiral, who can access all his time zones whenever he likes, is an attractive one; it is also quite unusual in the context of our contemporary literature of self-doubt, forgetfulness and loss of self. Although the opening, ‘Je ne suis jamais sorti de mon enfance’ seems to echo the traumatized Perec of W ou le souvenir d’enfance,19 it is in fact the photograph of the Perecqian 18 Quoted in Bennett, pp. 118–19. 19 ‘Je n’ai pas de souvenirs d’enfance’. This is the first sentence of chapter 2 of W ou le souvenir d’enfance, the first of the autobiographical chapters. Perec works

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negative, the triumph of memory – or rather, identity, as Ferrier claims he has never left his childhood – over trauma and oblivion. Ferrier’s view of the self through time has more in common with Proust’s, as becomes evident through a comparison of this passage with the very last lines of Le temps retrouvé: Aussi, si elle m’était laissée assez longtemps pour accomplir mon œuvre, ne manquerais-je pas d’abord d’y décrire les hommes, cela dût-il les faire ressembler à des êtres monstrueux, comme occupant une place si considérable, à côté de celle si restreinte qui leur est réservée dans l’espace, une place au contraire prolongée sans mesure puisqu’ils touchent simultanément, comme des géants plongés dans les années à des époques, vécues par eux si distantes, entre lesquelles tant de jours sont venus se placer – dans le Temps.20

Proust’s grotesquely elongated, ‘monstrous’ human bodies, representing their existence through time, connect – like Ferrier’s spirals – the beginning to the end of a human life; and through the miracles of involuntary memory and art, he too thinks it possible for us to accede to all the stages of our past. The image in Scrabble of human life as a spiral which allows constant access to the past is supported by two other images, or patterns, of remembering. The first is the Scrabble board, which as mentioned earlier fulfils a role akin to that of Proust’s madeleine; it triggers the memory of spatial configurations which correspond to those of his childhood home, and from there to those of the whole of the city of N’Djamena and his childhood: En moi-même, dans ce grand palais de ma mémoire, le ciel, la terre, la savane et le désert, la brousse, les villes et les rues et tout ce que j’ai pu y remarquer, les hommes, les bêtes et les hurlements se dévoilent à moi aussitôt que je le veux, hormis les choses que j’ai oubliées. Mais toutes les pièces sont rouvertes dans l’immense palais de ma mémoire, et je n’ai rien oublié. (Scrabble, 35)

This unfolding of the scenes and spaces of his childhood is reminiscent of Proust’s image within an image, that of the Japanese paper flowers which unfold when put into water: through his trauma-induced forgetfulness, of course, in this book, and in other works – such as Je me souviens – he is much more optimistic regarding memory and the self. 20 Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 353.

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Et comme dans ce jeu où les Japonais s’amusent à tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli d’eau, de petits morceaux de papier jusque-là indistincts qui, à peine y sont-ils plongés s’étirent, se contournent, se colorent, se différencient, deviennent des fleurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnaissables, de même maintenant toutes les fleurs de notre jardin et celles du parc de M. Swann, et les nymphéas de la Vivonne, et les bonnes gens du village et leurs petits logis et l’église et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé.21

The aqueous environment, be it a cup of tea or the Vivonne, is a propitious one for memory in Proust, and so it is also in Ferrier’s book. The second image in Scrabble that is key to his act of remembering is that of the river Chari, where he used to swim and in whose waters he enjoyed low-level hallucinations, so to speak, through the mild perceptual distortions created by the element of water. The river accompanies Ferrier’s mental return to the past: Mais moi, quand je ferme les yeux, je descends d’abord comme un noyé dans les eaux limoneuses du fleuve Chari, qui trace la frontière entre le Tchad et le Cameroun […] et j’entre dans le temps de l’enfance qui précisément ne connaît pas le temps. Alors, j’entends le tumulte des années se ruant sous mon crâne comme des troupeaux de bœufs kouris, le mufle haut, les oreilles longues et larges […] leur pas à la fois lent et assuré, à la lisière de la terre et de l’eau, défriche en moi des paysages anciens: tous mes souvenirs s’envolent dans le vent des sables, le passé coule dans le fleuve, se joue dans les branchages, explose dans les feuillages. Le passé est tout autour de moi désormais – et je ris quand je dis ‘le passé’, car rien de tout cela n’est passé. Alors, l’enfance s’ouvre comme une mangue. (Scrabble, 17–19)

This image of the mango – in contrast with Proust’s lilies – is particularly appropriate in this African setting, but ‘l’enfance s’ouvre comme une mangue’ also sounds to me like a tropical version of Éluard’s ‘La terre est bleue comme une orange’; or perhaps it is another, edible reference to the Scrabble board, if Baba Saleh was in the habit of cutting a slice of mango into a criss-cross pattern and then opening it to expose the flesh in rows of little orange squares.22 In any case, the past is all around him like the

21 Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p. 47. 22 Ferrier confirmed to me that this is how mangoes were cut, and eaten, in his childhood.

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waters of the river, and coexists with the present in an atemporal state, ‘le temps de l’enfance qui précisément ne connaît pas le temps’. War and the Word War is a defining part of the lives of both Maxime and Toumaï, and it is evoked as an unspeakable evil, especially in Scrabble: for Toumaï, ‘la guerre est le contraire de l’enfance’ (211). In this section I will analyse the significance of war in both Scrabble and Mémoires d’outre-mer and show how language is set up as a powerful agent against it as well as against death, one of war’s most obvious consequences. The Second World War is brought into Mémoires d’outre-mer in a chapter entitled ‘Le Projet Madagascar’, a little-known historical fact: ‘Projekt Madgaskar’ was a scheme proposed by the Nazis to send all European Jews to the tropical island. It went as far as Eichmann producing a dossier, and was much debated but never carried out. The chapter describes how the war begins for the Malagasy population with a British blockade of the island, leading to food shortages and the banning of all things English – including the language – by the newly arrived Vichy authorities. Pétain’s portrait is put up in all the offices, the ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’ slogan means that everyone is made to work longer hours, and the indigenous people suffer increased discrimination. Maxime’s reaction to the change in regime is to put up a low-key but irritating resistance, so quirkily personal that the authorities cannot react heavy-handedly, but clearly indicative of contempt for the Vichy administrators. He is vague about his nationality, starts building a random wall in the sea which is suspected of being a construction for British spies and walks around ‘wearing’ two bamboo sticks, one on each shoulder, in symbolic homage – although never spelled out as such – to ‘général deux gaules’. He is imprisoned three times, for his insolence as much as for anything else, although the infringements are so minor that he does not stay inside for any length of time. One ‘crime’ he does commit on a regular basis with his family is to listen to illegal stations, such as Radio Mauritius, the BBC or La voix de la France. He also enjoys the poetry of coded messages which come through certain radio stations, and amuses himself during the day by inventing similar phrases and saying them out loud in public spaces:

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À toute heure du jour, Maxime joue ainsi avec les nerfs des autorités, fredonnant des phrases terribles et des mots dont on ne sait bientôt plus s’ils sont autorisés ou interdits, chargés de poudre ou inoffensifs. Au nez et à la barbe des délateurs installés à la terrasse du Nouvel Hôtel, il multiplie les fausses pistes et les vraies informations. Qu’il lise les nouvelles en sirotant une liqueur d’orange et de cannelle, le voici qui entonne d’une voix ralentie: ‘La Bénédictine est une liqueur douce …’ On l’entend aussi, à plusieurs reprises, réciter d’une façon très distincte: ‘Le vin est dans la bibliothèque …’ On dit que cette phrase rend fou le chef de la Sûreté de Mahajanga, qui cherche désespérément à en percer le sens. (Mémoires, 289)

Childish, perhaps, but not without consequence, these small acts of rebellion earn him the enmity of the authorities and the admiration of the post-war French regime. He and his friend Arthur may have been involved in more serious acts of sabotage and heroism, but as the narrator accepts, we will never know the details: ‘c’est précisément parce qu’ils furent efficaces et discrets que nous ne le saurons jamais. Il est vrai aussi qu’à une ou deux exceptions près, aucun historien sérieux ne s’est jamais penché sur le sujet, comme si cette Résistance d’outre-mer n’avait jamais existé’ (Mémoires, 290). It is interesting to note that many of Maxime’s acts of rebellion are verbal; although not a writer like his grandson, he clearly had a facility with words and was aware of their power. Earlier in the book, the narrator describes his grandfather’s acrobatic acts as a kind of writing, ‘les mains parlent et les pieds tracent sur le sol une étrange calligraphie, comme si l’on posait physiquement la question du langage’ (Mémoires, 119). He also, as mentioned above, sends a message to the narrator across the ages, by leaving an inscription on one of the three tombstones he had built in the cemetery of Mahajanga. There is one for himself, another for his friend Arthur, but the third does not indicate who lies beneath it. On his own tombstone there is an intriguing inscription in Malagasy: ‘Ho velona fa tsy ho levona’, which means ‘pourvu qu’elle soit vivante et non anéantie’ (Mémoires, 336). It is this phrase, as well as the mystery of the third tombstone, that brings the narrator to Madagascar, and at the end of his stay he finally realizes, with the help of an old friend of Maxime, that it was a message for him from his grandfather: — Ce n’est pas seulement une épitaphe, c’est une épigraphe. — Une épigraphe? — Celle du livre que vous allez écrire.

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—… — Entre le monde des vivants et le royaume des morts, il y a plusieurs moyens de communiquer … Ces mots sont la seule manière dont votre grand-père peut encore vous parler aujourd’hui. Il voulait croire qu’un jour quelqu’un viendrait, qu’il poserait des questions, qu’il découvre toute cette histoire, le cirque, les acrobates, et surtout le Projet Madagascar, les Juifs, les indigènes, tous ces gens chassés et pourchassés comme des nègres … La mémoire, c’est la seule chose capable de lutter contre la mort. Pourvu qu’elle soit vivante et non anéantie … Et contre cette seconde mort qui est l’oubli. Vous voyez, vous êtes là, il ne s’était pas trompé. (Mémoires, 336–37)

So Maxime had written the epigraph for his grandson’s book; it was an act based on his belief in the power of language to transcend both time and space, and therefore its power to defeat death and forgetfulness. Or rather, he knows that memory – the ‘elle’ of ‘pourvu qu’elle soit vivante et non anéantie’ – is the only thing capable of fighting death; and language, when it fully recreates the past, collapses time in the text, making it possible for the dead to speak to the living, and reviving them within its pages. This extraordinary faith in the power of language to bring the dead back to life is also present, albeit in a slightly attenuated form, in Scrabble; there, too, it is set against the horrors of war, and offered as a restorative, reconstructive tool. The war in question in Scrabble is Chad’s civil war, which began in February 1979. Scrabble also begins in February 1979, in the courtyard of the Ferrier house where Toumaï and his brother are playing Scrabble under the watchful eye of their mother. This opening scene will also be the closing scene, at the end of the book when the narrator realizes the significance of certain details: ‘lentement, progressivement inexorablement, tous les détails anodins du début trouvent leur place et l’ensemble du tableau redevient lisible’ (Scrabble, 219). His mother was dressed for a journey because it was the day of their departure, their last day in N’Djamena; the boys were calm because they had been given an indigenous drug, used to calm children and pregnant women; the vultures were lined up on the trees outside because of the dead bodies piling up in the neighbouring areas (Scrabble, 218). Several pages before this realization, the narrator has described how Toumaï experienced at first-hand the horrors of bloodshed and death. The ground-level fighting in N’Djamena had not yet reached Toumaï’s neighbourhood, but the children were well aware that it was happening, and one night Toumaï slips out of the house into the Bololo district, the most dangerous area of town where he has never been before. Under cover of darkness he witnesses horrible

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acts of violence, amateur soldiers killing unarmed civilians, dead bodies in the streets. His horror reaches its peak when he comes across one of his best school friends, Youssouf, who has been shot; in his last moments he tells Toumaï that it was Abdel, Toumaï’s other best friend, who shot him. Toumaï’s conclusion is clear: ‘La guerre est le contraire de l’enfance: elle est ce moment où nous nous rendons compte que nous n’avons absolument aucune chance d’obtenir les réponses aux questions que nous nous posons’ (Scrabble, 211).23 The very next day, the family leaves Chad, soon after the boys’ last game of Scrabble in the courtyard. As mentioned earlier, the Scrabble scene comes after those of death and horror in the Bololo. The contrast between the two, death and horror as against the creation of words in the artificially induced calm of the courtyard, clearly had a powerful effect on the adult Ferrier; it instilled in him a faith in language, in the power of human beings to create when things and people have been destroyed: Mais l’homme que j’étais déjà et l’enfant que je suis resté ont ceci en commun: au plus fort de la guerre, quand la violence de l’humain ou celle de la nature se déchaînent, ils voient toujours bouger les mots dans la cour. Les mots, seuls les mots sont en mesure de donner une figure précise à nos angoisses […] et de leur apporter un début de réponse, toujours précaire et provisoire. Alors, les mots recommencent sans arrêt un combat qui s’est tenu il y a longtemps déjà. N’y a-t-il plus de mot pour dire maison? Nous en trouverons un autre […] Le mot amour a-t-il succombé sous la mitraille? Nous le ressusciterons, le recréerons, sous d’autres formes, un peu plus loin. Et tout ceci est possible d’un seul mouvement de la pensée, aussi simple qu’un geste de la main. Ce geste étrange, précieux autant que dérisoire, c’est celui de l’art. De la même manière, depuis toutes ces années, un sourd combat a lieu – étrange querelle, alliance paradoxale – entre la mort et les lettres que je trace sur la page. Calmement, tout doucement, je descends dans les mots, jusqu’à l’ultime noirceur où chaque lettre est un silence et où la mort nous parle. Maintenant je vois derrière la mort. (Scrabble, 220–21)

Against the senselessness of violence, destruction and war, Ferrier opposes language and art. But this is not just an abstract gesture, the 23 In an interview, Ferrier has said that ‘la guerre est au fondement de tout ce que j’écris’. Michaël Ferrier and Fabien Arribert-Narce, ‘Entretien avec Michaël Ferrier’, Revue des sciences humaines, 345: ‘Le quotidien au Japon et en Occident’ (2022), 153–74 (p. 159).

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standard intellectual – if valid and courageous – response to death and destruction; it is a physical response, based on the fragile and childlike game of Scrabble. The game is a simple one, but its existence in space – and the fact that the letters can be moved, one by one, to create words – physicalizes language in a way that domesticates and demystifies the grand ideas and events that the words represent. Thinking about the words as combinations of letters on a Scrabble board cuts them down to size, and makes them into endlessly proliferating possibilities – ‘vert’ becoming ‘ouvert’, for instance – rather than senseless tragedies; what seems like the profoundly unequal battle between death and words becomes the one-letter difference between ‘mort’ and ‘mots’. ‘Mort’ can be transformed into ‘mot’ by a quick gesture of the hand; ‘amour’ may have died, but it can be recreated – or reformed – somewhere else on the board, ‘sous d’autres formes, un peu plus loin’. I think that is what Ferrier is suggesting when he says ‘je vois derrière la mort’; by thinking of the words as physical objects situated on the board or the page, it becomes possible to imagine going round and beyond them. Children, he tells us in the same paragraph, do this in real life. They find a dead bird on the beach, look at it, poke at it, then lose interest and walk off in search of something alive: ‘les enfants savent contourner la mort: ils ne l’évitent pas mais ils la dépassent et vont toujours un peu plus loin’ (Scrabble, 221). The repetition of ‘un peu plus loin’ here, echoing the description of how ‘amour’ can be recreated on the Scrabble board, bring together love and death and make them both recuperable. Death cannot be defeated by language, but language can move it around, remove a crucial letter, turn it into something else, then progress beyond it. As Maxime was able to speak to his grandson from beyond the grave, so Toumaï – the child who is also the man – can recreate his destroyed childhood home, revive Baba Saleh, Youssouf and Abdel, by going ‘behind’ death on the Scrabble board of his memory. A Style of Profusion Patrick Chamoiseau, in his foreword to the excellent English translation of Mémoires d’outre-mer by Martin Munro, refers to the novel’s ‘sumptuous writing’. Sumptuous is a good word to characterize Ferrier’s style; profuse, proliferating, generous and luxuriant are others that spring to mind. Ferrier’s prose in Mémoires d’outre-mer is abundant and fluid, with movement succeeding movement as verb succeeds verb, and

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particularly well suited to deal with the adventures of the endlessly mobile and self-reinventing Maxime as well as of his marine environment. The following description of the Indian Ocean gives a good sense of the style: L’océan Indien est le plus ancien espace marin constitué par les hommes en espace d’échanges, depuis plus de cinq mille ans […] Depuis la nuit des temps, les langues et les regards s’y croisent, les monnaies circulent, les ambitions s’affrontent, les règles et les rites s’importent et s’exportent – contrats, retours, contreparties. Les traditions permutent et les croyances communiquent. Hommes à la grammaire espagnole, voyageurs toqués, Hottentots, Cafres, Malgaches, Sénégalais, tout un monde de visages et de voix, venus d’Inde, d’Afrique, d’Europe, d’Asie, de l’Empire du Milieu et du Soleil levant, tout cela se déplace sur le plissé de la mer, dans les roulis des courants et sous les glissements du vent. (Mémoires, 27)

All this moving in different directions, crossing, moving forward, backtracking, circulating, might be said to re-enact a historical reality, as it reflects – in miniature, of course – the actual movements made across the waters. One could argue that the proliferation of verbs, names and places constitute a kind of gestural mimesis, miming the exchanges that occurred between the different people and cultures on the Indian Ocean. Now although this effect might seem to belong perfectly in the context of the particular subject matter, it is strongly reminiscent of Ferrier’s style in other, earlier works. I discussed earlier how, in a section of Tokyo: petits portraits de l’aube, the narrator describes the gestures of the calligrapher who writes the Japanese kanji for ‘exchange’. There, too, Ferrier traces – in his prose style – the actual movements made by the hand which writes the character 交: Pour le tracer, commencez par le haut, une brève touche aussitôt contrecarrée. Ce trait vertical est immédiatement dévoré par une ligne horizontale, fermement déployée. Les quatre derniers tracés se déploient alors à une vitesse vertigineuse: à gauche, à droite, puis encore à gauche, à droite, une série de balafres décochées. L’échange naît ainsi, d’une suite de regards et de gestes contradictoires, de paroles données, reprises, déplacées. (Tokyo, 61–62)

These two descriptions of exchange on two very different scales – one takes as its stage the whole of the Indian Ocean, and the other occurs on a piece of paper – are nevertheless strikingly similar in the way in which they trace real gestures, the movements of peoples across the ocean or those of the calligrapher’s hand, through accumulating verbs and adverbs indicating movements and crossings. In the description of the Indian

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Ocean the movements which created the diverse cultures are reflected in the prose; in the description of the kanji, the brushstrokes which both literally and semiotically create a sign for ‘exchange’ are traced in Ferrier’s writing. In Petits portraits the movements of ‘exchange’ go on to be enacted on a larger scale in a description of the narrator’s experience of the Sky Walker, the 400-metre long trottoir roulant that leads in and out of Ebisu station in Tokyo: the passengers steal glances at each other, their looks crossing and observing, avoiding and meeting across the space separating the two moving sidewalks going in opposite directions.24 Even after he gets off the Sky Walker, the narrator continues to observe the mechanism of the rencontre at work as he walks through the streets of Ebisu: ‘Les gens marchent, traversent, ils entrent, ils sortent, ils font leurs courses ou partent au travail, ils rentrent à la maison: de l’ensemble se dégage une impression à la fois festive et feutrée, nonchalante et agitée’ (Tokyo, 66–67). This proliferation of verbs, the relentless moving and endless possibilities, characterizes the style of Petits portraits; it is also prevalent in Mémoires d’outre-mer, although in the later book the restlessness grows into a triumphant profusion. In the description of the Indian Ocean quoted above there is also a more conventionally visual mimesis; the list of faces and races is almost like a list copied from reality (‘Hottentots, Cafres, Malgaches, Sénégalais, tout un monde de visages et de voix, venus d’Inde, d’Afrique, d’Europe, d’Asie, de l’Empire du Milieu et du Soleil levant’). But Ferrier’s is emphatically not a photographic style, nothing like the kind of writing that some other recent French writers have practised and referred to as an ‘écriture photographique’;25 his style is too dynamic, too impatient of stillness, to be characterized in this way, as I have argued elsewhere.26 Ferrier is interested in photography, but his writing never 24 See Chapter 1, p. 25. 25 The phrase was coined by Hervé Guibert in an essay of the same title, to be found in L’image fantôme (Paris: Minuit, 1981). He describes it as writing with a photography-like immediacy, and links it to that of diaries. Annie Ernaux is interested in writing in the way that Paul Strand photographs (Annie Ernaux, Journal du dehors (1985–1992) (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 9). I discuss both authors and their ‘photographic’ writing in Akane Kawakami, Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux and Macé (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), chs. 2 and 3. 26 See Akane Kawakami, ‘Calligraphy or Photography? Representations of the City in Michaël Ferrier’s Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube’, The Australian Journal of French Studies, 57.2 (2020), 190–203.

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tries to emulate that which some writers have seen as an ideal mode of representation. Mémoires d’outre-mer is full of colourful images, of the sea, the fish and flora of Madagascar, but their depictions are always in movement, rendered in restless prose, like the character of Maxime himself, ceaselessly developing, growing and moving. Mémoires d’outre-mer is the book in which Ferrier’s proliferating and dynamic style comes into its own, although as I have just shown, there is a clear continuity between it and his earlier works. From this work onwards, Ferrier’s style matures and stabilizes, although naturally the nuances change from book to book in response to the subject matter. In Scrabble, for instance, the sentences are shorter and at times less lyrical, in accordance with the subject under discussion. But even in the drier and less opulent nature – compared to Madagascar – of Chad, there are still plenty of opportunities for stylistic profusion; descriptions of the markets overflowing with different foods, the never-ending variety of the animal kingdom, the hordes of buffalo, the river Chari teeming with life. The following extract on the Chari is in fact an excellent example of the mix of retrospective, reflective rallentando, the toing and froing between the child’s and the adult’s point of view and the joyous evocation – reminiscent of Mémoires d’outre-mer – of lovingly enumerated details: Le Chari … J’ai vu des fleuves plus larges que la mer. J’ai vu le Niger, qui est le rival du Nil. J’ai vu le Mississippi, avec sa guirlande de voyelles et de consonnes et la mémoire de ses nègres pourchassés jusqu’au sang. J’ai vu l’Amazone, qui est tellement puissant qu’aucun barrage ne peut le retenir, aucun pont le franchir, et tellement profond qu’il couvre presque la moitié d’un continent. Le Chari n’est pas un fleuve aussi terrible ni influent. Mais je n’en connais pas de plus joueur, de plus capricieux ni de plus charmeur, de plus envoûtant. On dit souvent que ce large ruban d’eau limoneuse qui ondule dans la savane entre le Cameroun et le Tchad, accrochant au passage tous les feux du soleil, est un serpent d’argent qui parcourt la brousse. On le voit de loin, mais sitôt qu’on s’approche et prétend le saisir, il détale et s’éparpille en une infinité de petites îles vertes qui rompent le courant du fleuve et flambent au soleil comme des diamants. Quelquefois, il gronde et déborde, emportant tout sur son passage, noyant les cultures, le bétail, les enfants. D’autres fois au contraire, il offre à tous ses bandes de sable jaune, la fraîcheur de ses bassins, le chuintement de ses eaux, placide, accueillant […] Territoires nomades, zones fantômes, îles splendides et mouvantes de mon enfance. Entre les souvenirs et les couleurs qui s’enchevêtrent comme des lianes, je vois, exactement comme quand j’y étais plongé, les arbustes immergés et les herbes florissantes, les

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tiges rampantes et les fleurs grimpantes, toutes les plantes du bord de l’eau. J’entends les parlements de mollusques et de crustacés, j’écoute les pourparlers des insectes de l’eau, des poissons et des oiseaux. J’ai appris leur langue et je peux la comprendre. Je peux la parler et l’écrire désormais. Rien de cela ne s’oublie. (Scrabble, 175, 177)

The first paragraph is clearly told from the point of view of the adult narrator, situating the Chari in the context of other rivers, but singling it out as ‘joueur, capricieux, charmeur, envoûtant’. The second paragraph is a richly lyrical characterization of his favourite river, focusing on the quality of its light (‘ruban d’eau limoneuse’, ‘tous les feux du soleil’, un serpent d’argent’) and its slippery, ungraspable quality: when approached, it multiplies and scatters into a flock of little islands which ‘flambent au soleil comme des diamants’.27 Then, in the third paragraph of the quotation, which in fact occurs about a page later, the prose slows down as the river becomes a space of memory. In the first pages of the book, the river was offered to the narrator as a conduit to his childhood: ‘Mais moi, quand je ferme les yeux, je descends d’abord comme un noyé dans les eaux limoneuses du fleuve Chari, qui trace la frontière entre le Tchad et le Cameroun’ (Scrabble, 17–18). Descending into the past is a common metaphorical movement, but at the end of the book, the narrator finds himself in the watery space again, where past and present intermingle and become one. The entangling of ‘les souvenirs et les couleurs’ is proof of this; memories are mental evocations of the past, but the colours in this case are also, presumably, memories, except that they are so vivid as to seem to be present. Or is he coexisting in the past and present, experiencing the colours of the past in the past, his memories of them so closely entangled with them that he cannot distinguish between memory and reality?28 The element of water, which distorts human perception of both time and space, its mobility and the slipperiness of this particular river – a body of water which sometimes breaks up into a thousand rivulets – all contribute to the creation of an ontologically enhanced state, a kind of maximal space/time in which the narrator is both boy and adult, in Chad and in France. What makes this possible is language, both the language that the narrator is writing in the present and the language that he learned from the molluscs and crustaceans of the river Chari: ‘J’ai appris leur 27 Clearly Ferrier has an affinity with flocks of little islands, although these are much smaller than the ones he encounters in Matsushima. 28 Such an experience would seem to be akin to Proust’s involuntary memory, which allows him to exist simultaneously in the past and present, albeit only briefly.

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langue et je peux la comprendre. Je peux la parler et l’écrire désormais. Rien de cela ne s’oublie’. The richly evocative style which Ferrier has made his own creates the environment in which a full, visceral return to the past becomes possible. I will quote and analyse just one more instance of a focused description that offers a stark contrast with some of the more lyrical passages of both Mémoires d’outre-mer and Scrabble, of an animal much admired by the young Toumaï for its pugnacious and indomitable spirit, the ratel, or honey badger: Le ratel est littéralement un dur à cuire. Il ne recule jamais. Sa peau est si épaisse qu’il n’a peur ni des sagaies ni des lances, me dit Saleh, qui les craint comme la peste et ne s’en approche jamais. En brousse, il faut au moins six lions pour en venir à bout, avec des dégâts collatéraux considérables (oreille en sang, flancs lacérés, œil arraché). En ville, il faut s’y mettre à plusieurs et le tabasser pendant des heures comme des malades pour qu’il rende son dernier souffle. Quand les hommes l’attaquent, le ratel vise les testicules ou le tendon d’Achille. C’est un farceur féroce et, littéralement, un coupe-jarret. Sa stratégie, c’est l’attaque. Il attaque tout le temps. Il n’est pas plus gros qu’un jambonneau, il a une allure rocambolesque – l’élégance improbable d’un croisement entre la hyène et le koala – mais il attaquera jusqu’à la fin, jusqu’à ce que vous lui fichiez la paix ou jusqu’à ce que mort s’ensuive. (Scrabble, 64)

Like the ratel itself, the rhythm is punchy and combative: the sentences quite short, except when the animal’s tenacity is being documented, for instance when it is battling with six lions or a similar number of human beings. The humour is evident on several levels, starting with the linguistic level with metaphorical terms such as ‘un dur à cuire’ and ‘un coupe-jarret’ being coaxed – or forced back – into taking on their literal meanings by the antics of this small but terrifying creature. The exaggeration – surely not six lions? – adds to the humour, as does the animal’s instinctive knowledge of the men’s weak points; again, their ‘Achilles’ heel’ becomes literal, not metaphorical. Toumaï’s fearful admiration of the beast is also evident, and another life lesson is dispensed: ‘à moi qui ne suis encore qu’un enfant, il me montre que même les petits peuvent se faire respecter’ (Scrabble, 66). The eloquent, almost garrulous adult narrator, source of the profuse and proliferating style that we have been analysing, is a good if contrasting match for the silent, watchful Toumaï whose childhood he describes. Toumaï is a child who listens:

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Je ne dis presque rien mais j’écoute toujours attentivement. Je saisis au vol les informations, je m’essaie à décrypter les allusions, je garde précieusement celles que je ne comprends pas. Je suis sensible surtout au son des voix, à leur tonalité terne ou orangée, à leur puissance ou leur maigreur, à la façon dont elles laissent entrer ou font passer en elles le souffle de la vie. (Scrabble, 137)

This heightened sensitivity to and interest in the human voice indicate the writer within the child, shows us the qualities which will become useful to him when he begins to write. And in Scrabble the adult narrator, after many years of writing about other people and places, focuses his undimmed sensitivity on his own childhood self, and harnesses his adult eloquence to the task of describing it; it is as if he were giving voice, at last, to the silent young boy who he was. The autobiographical act as one that gives a voice to its subject is not new, but the fact that Toumaï did not say much gives a literal, substantive reason for the adult narrator’s undertaking that succeeds in naturalizing a scriptural relationship that can, in some autobiographies, seem a little artificial. Mémoires d’outre-mer and Scrabble – a biography and an autobiography – are two very different works in Ferrier’s œuvre which nonetheless have in common key themes and stylistic tendencies which I have analysed in this chapter. The two subjects, Maxime and Toumaï, share a strong affinity with the natural world, and an unusual understanding of space and time which leads them to adopt models from nature, such as the sea, coral reefs and spirals, when thinking about memory and identity. These tendencies suggest that the bedrock of Ferrier’s creative universe contains an instinctive and deeply embedded closeness with non-Christian cultures which are finely attuned to the ‘vibrant materiality’29 of the world around them, be it in Madagascar, Mauritius or Chad – not a rejection of spirituality, or even of Christian spirituality, but of a Eurocentric Christianity which puts human beings above other creatures.30 29 I have borrowed this phrase from Jane Bennett’s book. 30 Ferrier insists that Christianity is very much part of his ways of thinking; he reminds us that his Goan grandmother was a devout Catholic, and that he himself, like his Mauritian grandfather, is a great reader of the Bible. But he acknowledges that the Christianity he subscribes to as a system of thought is ‘un christianisme vivant, chamarré, bigarré, qui peut s’éloigner parfois considérablement des dogmes institués ou des traditions trop eurocentrées’. (See the section of the interview ‘Sur Mémoires d’outre-mer et Scrabble’ below, pp. 158–59.)

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Maxime and Toumaï also share a hatred of war, and a belief in the power of words to transcend time and defeat death. The textual ‘revival’ of Maxime is testament to an extraordinarily optimistic view of the power of language, as is the recovery of Ferrier’s childhood – perhaps recovery is the wrong word, as it was never lost, but nonetheless – in Scrabble. In the next chapter we will see how this struggle against death and oblivion becomes the focal point in the book that Ferrier wrote in between Mémoires d’outre-mer and Scrabble – François, portrait d’un absent.

chapter four

Bringing Back the Dead Bringing Back the Dead

François Christophe, a childhood friend of Ferrier, died unexpectedly in December 2013, drowned at sea with his 11-year-old daughter Bahia. François, portrait d’un absent (2018) is a profoundly moving attempt by Ferrier to save his friend from ‘cette seconde mort qu’est l’oubli’.1 This wish firmly links the work to Mémoires d’outre-mer, in which the same phrase is used to explain the epitaph on Maxime’s gravestone. François, portrait d’un absent is also like Fukushima, récit d’un désastre inasmuch as it is not a novel but a récit; both are non-fictional texts written in the first person. Also like Fukushima, François, portrait d’un absent is generically hybrid; it is ostensibly an (auto)biographical text which tells the story of François’s life, narrated by a first-person voice, but its focus on the movements of both the narrator’s own mind and external stimuli is reminiscent of the Montaignian essay; it also contains extracts from real and imagined film scripts, quotations from and discussions of classical treatises on friendship, personal letters and a beguiling passage towards the end that reads like an incantation or a prayer. Ferrier has written ‘portraits’ declared as such before, albeit of a city: Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube was made up of sketches of the city characterized by aliveness and potential, capturing the ceaseless movement of the megapolis in the small hours of the morning. The portrait of his paternal grandfather in Mémoires d’outre-mer is similarly that of a man ceaselessly on the move, which succeeds in capturing a person known for his dynamism without immobilizing his textual image. Ferrier’s efforts in François, portrait d’un absent are even more urgently focused on creating a ‘living’ portrait which resurrects the

1 François, portrait d’un absent (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), p. 37. Henceforth, this book will be cited as François in the main text.

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dead François through the power of words. In this chapter, I will show how Ferrier’s method for bringing his friend back to life, albeit within the confines of a book, are based on creating alternative textual – and intertextual – spaces in which the dead can be reimagined not as static images but as living, breathing entities with a future ahead of them. Defeating death – or at least cheating its finality – through language is an ideal that I believe has come to preoccupy Ferrier increasingly since around 2011, possibly triggered by his intimate experience of disaster in Fukushima but clearly given further impetus by the personal tragedy of his friend’s death in 2013. At the same time, Ferrier has always been interested in ghosts, dreams and halfway states of consciousness which seem to straddle the border between life and death, and the exploration of these elements in François, portrait d’un absent links it to Sympathie pour le fantôme and Scrabble, as well as to Fukushima and Mémoires d’outre-mer. In this chapter I will show how transgressing borders, doing ‘without’ them, is one way in which Ferrier creates generically and ontologically hybrid spaces where the power of language can be harnessed to bring the dead back to a significant kind of life. A ‘Declaration of Intent’ François, portrait d’un absent is divided into three parts, each of which is subdivided into four or five chapters: there are also a ‘Préambule’ and a ‘Coda’. The ‘Préambule’ is set in the present of the writing, and starts with the narrator receiving the news of François’s death. Following this introductory section, the three main parts of the book tell the story of their friendship more or less chronologically, from their adolescence right up to the year and day of the tragic accident. The third part ends with Ferrier’s intentions for his book and is followed by the brief coda. The ‘Préambule’ is a complex section, generically hybrid in itself; written in the present tense, it is a metanarrative presentation of why the book came to be. The first-person narrator is clearly Ferrier himself, the voice instantly recognisable from both his fictional and non-fictional works: a lyrical, restless and proliferating voice which moves effortlessly between the personal and the historical, dream and reality, and between different time zones. The description and discussion of Jérôme’s ‘voix blanche’ when he telephones the narrator from France to pass on the terrible news is a good example of both the profusion and the lyricism:

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‘François est mort’, dit-il, et la voix de Jérôme est morte avec lui. C’est maintenant une voix sans timbre, sans qualité, une voix hantée par l’absence. Sans hauteur, sans durée, sans intensité. Une voix d’où toute musique se serait absentée. Plus rien en elle qui sonne ou qui résonne, plus rien qui s’élève, qui retentit. Toute la richesse de la matière sonore semble s’être dissoute, ou diluée, comme s’il pouvait y avoir une articulation sans voix, et une voix sans articulation, une voix absolument neutre, terrassée. (François, 15)

Jérôme’s ‘voix blanche’ is subsequently linked with various other kinds of whiteness which pervade the space around Ferrier, against which he feels impelled to react with the black of ink and writing: ‘toute cette blancheur, il faut la fureur de l’encre pour l’éteindre ou pour l’apaiser’ (François, 18). In accordance with this reaction, the next page begins with a title, ‘Ouverture au noir’. What follows seems to be a screenplay for the opening of a film about François, with the twenty-fifth variation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations playing in the background, and visual effects made up of white pages and black letters, a scene in a snow-covered cemetery, dark silhouettes and a black bird. A homage to François’s love of and career in cinema, this brief foray into a different genre effects an ‘opening’, as the title suggests, into a different dimension, the first of several such departures from the day-to-day world inhabited by the narrator. When we return to the narrator in the ‘real’ world, he has travelled from Tokyo to Paris; settled temporarily in Montmartre, he describes his wanderings in the cemetery and tells us the story of the Avenue Rachel which leads to it. The cemetery is cold and covered in snow, a northern, wintry version of the cemetery with which Mémoires d’outre-mer opens, and the narrator is unable to find his friend’s tomb. This symbolic failure to locate his friend is followed by several other indications that point him towards what he needs to do. He comes across an online obituary of François, which leaves him wanting more to be said (François, 28–29). He then has a long dream, almost like a hallucination or an alternative reality, from which he awakens determined to rescue François from ‘cette seconde mort qu’est l’oubli’ (François, 37). Thus the ‘Préambule’ describes the triggers and reasons for the writing of the book, and also contains all the elements which we will continue to find, in a more diluted form, in the rest of the work: the accumulation of alternative realities, the generic hybridity that makes them possible and

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the ‘openings’ which are occasionally inserted, like vertical slashes, into the continuous fabric of both the text and chronological time. Although the reasons for his project are set out in the ‘Préambule’, it does not contain the metanarrative ‘declaration’ by the narrator of what he hopes to accomplish by writing this book; that comes in the first paragraph of the first of the three sections that follow. Carolyn Miller, in an article that has become one of the key texts of rhetorical Genre Studies, writes that a ‘definition of genre must be centred not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish’.2 This particular area of Genre Studies does not usually take literature into its remit, as literature is not known for accomplishing actions, but I quote it here because several of Ferrier’s books, including this one, do declare that they plan to accomplish something beyond their own creation. If we read the following metanarrative declaration of intent in the context of Miller’s definition of genre, it is clear that Ferrier is aiming to create something with his memories of François that goes beyond writing, beyond film: Les images se succèdent, comme un film. Quelquefois, le film déraille et finit par se bloquer sur une des images. C’est à ce moment que l’écriture entre en jeu. Ce n’est pas l’image que je cherche mais l’effet persistant d’une présence. Ainsi, le texte ne forme pas le cadre d’un souvenir, mais l’ouverture d’un espace: c’est une sorte de brèche où le temps circule, où la mémoire se réveille et bondit. (François, 41)

Here – at the start of the first section – Ferrier spells out clearly his aim to create a present, living version of François, through making of the text an opening into a space where memory and time can be freed to recreate his friend’s presence. What exactly does this mean? The notion of such a space, free of the constraints of determinism and time, is very similar to what the historian Paul Ricœur advocates in relation to historical figures. In La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Ricœur writes that the historian should not think about people in the past as dead and static but as ‘ayant-étés’,3 living in a universe where they are still mobile and possess ‘d’expectations, de prévisions, des désirs, des craintes et des projets’, in order to ‘fracturer le déterminisme historique

2 Carolyn R. Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70 (1984), 151–67 (p. 151). 3 Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000), p. 475.

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en réintroduisant rétrospectivement de la contingence dans l’histoire’.4 Ferrier seems to be aiming for a similar effect through creating spaces which are not governed by the determinism of the past but still full of potential and possibility, in which the reader can encounter not a static image of his departed friend but something closer to a living presence, a moving, active entity. And this requires not a specific genre but a number of them, a generically hybrid text which helps Ferrier to attain his goal. Inside this text, there seems to be a special kind of space (‘une sorte de brèche’) within which time is able to ‘circulate’, and memory to ‘leap’. These two verbs are subsequently repeated (in nominal form, in one case) in his continued musings about the movement of language: Les mots n’ont pas de lieu final, ils n’existent que dans leur bondissement, dans la relation qu’ils entretiennent avec les autres mots et les autres textes, dans l’intervalle qu’ils creusent ou qu’ils comblent avec les siècles passés et les livres à venir … Ils partent à la rencontre d’un œil vif, d’une oreille affûtée, d’une bouche vivante, qui pourra leur redonner le bonheur du souffle: ce qu’on appelle une âme. Les phrases, les phrases sont le bruit du sang, qui circule joyeusement, avant que la mer les boive, avant que la mort les prenne, avant que le silence les broie. (François, 41–42, my emphasis)

There is a willed confusion here, it seems, between words and his friend’s life; or perhaps it is not a confusion but an acknowledgement of the fact that his portrait of François, in the final instance, can only be made up of words. But these are words that are extraordinarily mobile, and which seem to be in search of living bodies – live readers – who can ‘activate’ them and give them life. I am not suggesting Ferrier believes that words constitute some kind of vampiric entity designed to take over the reader’s body, but there is something more here than the wish for a metaphorical or purely intellectual reconstruction of his friend within the pages of a book. This is evident in his desire that his verbal reconstructions of François and Bahia ‘circulate’ like blood within his readers, and bestow upon them a temporary life, ‘avant que le silence les broie’. The readers’ minds and bodies might be seen as example of the kind of spaces in which Ferrier aims to give his subjects a further lease of life.5 There are other such spaces evoked in this work, created by Ferrier 4 Ricœur, p. 597. 5 Annie Ernaux claims her readers’ minds and bodies for the same ‘use’, that is to say a reproduction and prolongation of her reality, in L’usage de la photo (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 13. For a discussion of this desire to prolong a life in a book,

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in addition to the kind imagined by Ricœur and described above, as we will see. The book is full of ‘ouvertures’ of various kinds, structural, syntactical, thematic and stylistic features which open up new, alternative spaces in which François and his daughter Bahia can continue to exist. These spaces – which can be different time zones or different worlds – are created by Ferrier through experiments with genre, and through what might be called a vertical approach to the typically horizontal, because chronological, development of a life story. I too will refrain from discussing the book chronologically, and will be guided instead by three ‘themes’ that run throughout the work: film, borders and ghosts. Hybridizing Film François was fascinated with film and began his career as a film-maker. The book pays homage to this aspect of him by using the genre of film as a structural, stylistic and thematic constant in its narrative of both their friendship and his life.6 The three main sections of the book are given film titles matching the three phases of their 30-year friendship. The first section, ‘Les quatre cents coups’, is about the two extremely formative years spent by Ferrier and François as boarders at the Lycée Lakanal; the second, ‘Libera me’, is named after François’s first film, and tells the story of how his career develops as a film director, as well as that of François’s ‘liberating’ visit to Japan.7 The third, ‘Breaking the Waves’, recounts the formation of François’s young family, the quarrel between the friends which results in a two-year silence, François’s move from film into radio, and finally the tragedy in the Canaries. Just before the section entitled ‘Les quatre cents coups’ begins, there is one that resembles an introduction, briefly described earlier, entitled ‘Ouverture au noir’. To recapitulate in detail, this starts in the genre of a film script, with instructions in italics on how the word ‘François’, then see Akane Kawakami, ‘Proof of Life: Annie Ernaux’s Plural Self-Portrait in L’usage de la photo’, French Studies, 64 (2010), 451–62. 6 Fabien Arribert-Narce lists the different modes of expression privileged in each of Ferrier’s works and assigns film to François, portrait d’un absent: ‘Introduction. Franchir la barrière des rencontres’, in Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021), pp. 7–65 (p. 8). 7 The title of the film of course also evokes the words of the Catholic Requiem Mass: libera me, Domine, de morte eterna.

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‘portrait d’un absent’, will appear on an intensely white, almost invisible backdrop, with the twenty-fifth variation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations –known as the ‘Black Pearl’ – as a soundtrack. A black bird appears; a car begins its journey through what now looks like a snowscape; a homeless person is seen smoking in the distance; two unidentified figures appear, then the bird flies off and the whole scene is extinguished. The whiteness is prolonged within the text, however, as the film script ends and the narrative resumes in the snowy Montmartre cemetery where the narrator is looking for François and Bahia’s grave. Having failed to find it he returns to his Paris flat, has a nightmare featuring François with ‘tous ses membres poudrés de blanc’. The book thus opens like a film, although this film script section is very short (François, 19–21). The only other occurrence of a film script in the book, this one much longer, is a quotation from the existing script of François’s documentary, Thierry, portrait d’un absent (François, 125–30). It too is followed by a return to narrative, in this case a description and analysis of both the documentary and its subject matter, and the stark realization that ‘le film de François, Thierry, portrait d’un absent, est tout ce qui reste sur terre de son passage’ (François, 135). Indeed, although film is clearly the prevalent art form in the book, almost all the references to it – even the quotations from film scripts described above – are constantly and consistently hybridized, generically speaking, by the introduction of aural and textual elements: narrative, radio or music.8 François himself is presented as a character bursting with interests in all directions. In the Lycée Lakanal, although characterized as a precocious connoisseur of Pasolini, music seems to be more important to him and his tight-knit group of friends; they are obsessed with Thelonious Monk, and Gustav Leonhardt’s performance of the Goldberg Variations, as well as with Afghan hashish and alcohol. He is an accomplished pianist, a lover of Baroque (‘Bach, Couperin, Haendel, et puis Scarlatti et encore Bach’; François, 48). When they leave the lycée Ferrier and François embark on a programme of ‘un film par jour, sept livres par semaine’, the former usually watched at the Studio Bertrand of the seventh arrondissement. François goes on to study at FEMIS, makes the documentary on Thierry and works with a number of quirky, 8 Yann Mével argues in his essay on this work that ‘dans son architecture, le récit mêle modèle musical et modèle cinématographique’; ‘François, portrait d’un absent: livre de deuil, livre solaire’, in Fabien Arribert-Narce (ed.), Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021), pp. 215–25 (p. 221).

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talented directors. One of them, Alain Cavalier, chooses him as his assistant director for Libera me, a controversial work ‘sans paroles et sans musique, et quasiment sans fiction’ (François, 161). Later, François’s career as a film-maker is itself hybridized when he chooses to move to Radio France; he becomes a brilliant adapter of literary texts into radio performances, diversifying his work from making films to making ‘films sonores’. One evocative image that brings together a diversity of materials, perspectives and genres in Ferrier’s attempt to capture François’s life is that of the scroll, introduced in the ‘Ouverture’: Au fond, chaque personne est comme un de ces rouleaux qui, depuis l’invention du papier en Chine au Ier siècle, se sont répandus dans tout l’Extrême-Orient et que François aimait tant […] Fleuve bleu de l’encre, dessins brochés d’or et d’argent, salve des idéogrammes: le rouleau François. Il faudrait prendre son temps, l’étendre sur une natte, puis patiemment le dérouler, section par section, comme si on commençait un voyage, comme si on se promenait dans un paysage. Alors, le vrai film de sa vie pourrait s’ouvrir et se diffuser sur cet écran de papier, avec ses zones d’ombre et sa lumière fauve, entre un liseré de jade et une baguette de bois, sur un revers tissé de soie.

The scroll is a complex physical object made up of a variety of materials; thick paper, ink, pieces of wood and silk, containing both writing and drawings, in black and white and in colour. When unrolled, it is mostly a flat surface, but the physical effort necessitated by its unrolling means that time is built into its structure, and the reading/viewing experience follows the unrolling movement like a voyage, or a walk through a landscape, according to Ferrier. In his imagined scenario, the ‘real film’ of François’s life will be projected onto the thick paper; it is not clear where the projection originates, although the suggestion is that it emanates from the writer’s memories. This image is clearly an ideal to which Ferrier’s work aspires, and it is the hybridity of the rare materials and generic perspectives (the story seems to be both on the surface and projected onto it) involved in this image of a film about François that remains in the reader’s mind as she continues to read the book in her hands. Ferrier’s prose style in François, portrait d’un absent is an interesting mix of what might be termed ‘cinematic’ or ‘visual’ and the more aural, language-led lyricism that we have come to expect since Mémoires d’outre-mer. The visual does seem to be more privileged in this book than in Ferrier’s previous works; there are a number of introductions to

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people and places which read, at first sight, like the description of a film sequence. This, for instance, is our first view of the Lycée Lakanal: Le grand portail vert d’eau, appuyé sur deux murets de pierre, est entouré d’une grille en fer forgé et surmonté d’une frise de branches métalliques: une série de tiges enlacées se déploie en une suite de découpures, de lobes ou de dentellures […] Le portail s’ouvre sur un vaste parc auquel on accède par un sentier pentu et pavé. Un cèdre est sur la gauche, un chêne sur la droite. Ainsi, entre l’emblème de la splendeur orientale et le symbole de l’hémisphère nord, on entre dans le lycée Lakanal comme si l’on se faufilait au cœur des mondes. (François, 42–43)

The scene certainly starts off being primarily visual, and also, because it begins to move, cinematic; yet as the passage continues, aural, linguistic and metaphorical tendencies start to dominate. In the same way that Ferrier’s writing is never purely visual or ‘photographic’ for long,9 the ‘cinematic’ sections are swiftly taken over by aural play (the rhyming and alliteration of ‘découpures’ and ‘dentellures’, or ‘pentu et pavé’) and the metaphorical significance of the entrance to the institution (the two trees, symbolizing east and west, thus constituting an entry into the ‘cœur des mondes’).10 Even the almost entirely ‘visual’ description of the narrator’s first residence in Japan, in Kyoto, is at the same time profoundly lyrical and aurally constructed: ‘Shimogamo est un joyau rouge […] Les bâtiments sont lie-de-vin, le pont a des teintes carmin, le portique une tonalité orangée […] J’habite ici, le refuge rubis au confluent des deux rivières, au cœur de la cachette boisée’ (François, 137). The jewel of Shimogamo boasts a series of shades of red which rhyme and alliterate, ‘lie-de-vin’ and ‘carmin’, a ‘refuge rubis’ which delights with its incongruousness (a refuge in a startling colour) as well as its repeated r’s and u’s. In fact, red is one of the few colours – the only 9 See my article, Kawakami, ‘Calligraphy or Photography? Representations of the City in Michaël Ferrier’s Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube’, The Australian Journal of French Studies, 57.2 (2020), 190–203 (pp. 198–99). 10 A number of critics have noted the clear influence of Céline, one of Ferrier’s favourite authors and the subject of his doctoral thesis, in his language-led and inventive style; Arribert-Narce speaks of ‘l’oralité et l’inventivité sans brides’ that is to be found in all of Ferrier’s works, and Doumet notes ‘la petite musique célinienne [qui] hante Mémoires d’outre-mer’. See Arribert-Narce, ‘Introduction’, p. 12; Christian Doumet, ‘Mémoire, singulier et pluriel’, in Fabien Arribert-Narce (ed.), Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021), pp. 87–95 (p. 92).

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one, in fact – that stands out in François, portrait d’un absent, as the other two are black and white; red, black and white, the same colours that make up Ferrier’s website, predominate in this book. François is one of the first to visit Ferrier in Japan, when the latter relocates there for his military service (‘Je dois y rester seize mois […] un quart de siècle après, j’y suis encore’; François, 136), and the country offers them both a panoply of delights for all the senses. The visual lessons which the film-maker in François takes particularly to heart, in addition to all of the Japanese films they devour, are to do with angles, perspectives and visions: he claims that in Japanese landscapes, ‘on n’en voit qu’une partie. C’est la ruse du paravent qui se plie, se déplie, se replie …’ (François, 146). François likens this effect to a Bach fugue. He is also fascinated by the angles of Mount Fuji, endlessly depicted and filmed throughout the ages, but never entirely correctly, according to his calculations. ‘Le mont Fuji est photogénique, mais quelque chose en lui résiste à toutes les images’. These encounters in Japan lead him to a profoundly different way of seeing, and a life-changing discovery, for the film-maker: ‘quelque chose peut quitter le domaine du visible, il y a de l’incalculable’ (François, 149). Thus another experience that relativizes and hybridizes the reign of the visual is learned by François in the country stereotyped, since at least the time of japonisme, as the land of the image. The treatment of whiteness is exemplary in the context of the interplay between visual, linguistic and metaphorical elements in François, portrait d’un absent. It starts at the very beginning of the book, with the evocation of the ‘voix blanche’ which announces François’s death to the narrator: ‘Cette nuit-là, j’ai compris ce qu’était une voix blanche. La voix de Jérôme était blanche […] La voix est blanche et la chambre est noire’ (François, 13). The dead metaphor of the ‘voix blanche’ is quickly made visual by the juxtaposition with ‘la chambre est noire’, an effect reinforced by the reader’s awareness that ‘la chambre noire’ is another dead metaphor. The quality of the ‘voix blanche’ is described in detail, the whiteness continuing to be made visible (‘chaque mot est nimbé d’une pâleur étrange’). We are then told that ‘Au cinéma, on appelle “scènes blanches” celles où “la caméra semble atteinte d’une émotion extrême affectant la pellicule même”. Alors, plus rien n’existe que le blanc’ (François, 16). Is the ‘blanc’ in ‘scènes blanches’ a purely metaphorical use of ‘blanc’, or is there a suggestion in the term that the photosensitive surface is physically affected by the presence of extreme emotion? While such thoughts are still swirling in the text, whiteness

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continues to dominate; a lilac-and-marble dawn replaces the night, and the word ‘blanc’ is repeated endlessly: Blanc, blanc comme la cire des cierges, blanc comme un poignet sanglé, comme la face du noyé, blanc comme un lit d’hôpital, blanc comme le masque et les gants. Blanc, blanc comme des vers blancs, ceux qui ne riment pas, les vers désaccordés qui rongent la chair du cadavre. Blanc, blanc comme la plume, la neige ou la perle, comme la page blanche où je dois écrire ces mots maintenant. Toute cette blancheur, il faut la fureur de l’encre pour l’éteindre ou pour l’apaiser, pour l’éloigner ou la défaire, pour la distiller ou pour la sublimer. (François, 17–18)

We are then told that white was, for many centuries, the colour of mourning in Japan; and with that, François’s story begins. At the other end of the book, in the ‘Coda’, we have another accumulation of shades of white which brings us back to the cinema but also to the colour’s links with life: Il y a toutes sortes de blancs. Il y a un blanc ignoble, un blanc immonde, le blanc terrible du cadavre […] Mais le blanc n’est pas une couleur unie, homogène. Le blanc n’est même pas une couleur, c’est la condition de toute couleur, la lumière personnifiée. Il y a toutes sortes de blancs. Il y a le blanc légèrement bleuté qui monte le matin des arbres du parc de Sceaux. Il y a le blanc rose de l’aube sur les murs du Lycée Lakanal ou sur les pentes du cimetière de Montmartre […] Il y a le blanc diffus des salles obscures, le blanc d’argent du grand écran, quand Hitchcock l’envahit et le transperce en même temps […] Le blanc champagne de Bahia, crème de lys, parfum lilas, et le blanc de la page blanche où vient s’inscrire votre histoire désormais, tandis que sur une branche de l’arbre tout proche, attirée par les graines et les fruits, deux mésanges bleues sont venues se poser. (François, 234)

After the ‘fureur de l’encre’ which has occupied the preceding 233 pages, Ferrier seems to be redefining whiteness in all its hybridity: ‘le blanc n’est pas une couleur unie, homogène’. The multiplicity of its shades comes not just from visual effects but from embedded emotions, memories, the genius of film directors, the silver screen and even evocative scents (‘parfum lilas’). And this is what whiteness in life will always be, the author seems to be saying; never pure but a hybrid entity, with contrasting colours – two blue tits, in this instance – always around to remind us of the diversity of life. And on a page of that sort of white is the story of François and Bahia to be inscribed.

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Borders and Spaces When he is first introduced to the reader, François is described as ‘un drôle de corps’, thin, not at all muscular yet bursting with energy: L’ensemble de sa silhouette dégage une grande impression de fraîcheur et d’énergie […] La longueur, l’étirement, telles sont ses forces, paradoxales et renversées. Il est allongé, échelonné, élancé: on dirait un crayon, une ébauche projetée à la plume, une silhouette esquissée au roseau. (François, 47)

The list of things to which François is compared, a pencil, then a sketch and a silhouette, goes on to include an octopus and a window. Why a window? Partly because he was often to be found next to one, and partly because, ‘comme une fenêtre, il fabrique une certaine forme de lumière’ (François, 61). And now that he is gone, all the windows in the world remind Ferrier of François: ‘C’est ce qu’il était pour moi, et pour chacun de nous: un rayonnement, un souffle d’oxygène et de lumière, une ouverture qui laisse entrer à pleins poumons la musique et le vent’ (François, 62). Once more we encounter the word ouverture: François was always opening up new vistas for his friends, metaphorically speaking, but now that he is gone, he himself has become an opening into another dimension. A window is both a border and a space, and so too is François; a border to be crossed, into different time zones and perspectives, into spaces where the usual rules do not always apply. One such space is that of the boarding school: ‘l’Internat est notre domaine, notre royaume. Il traverse l’espace et il transperce le temps’ (François, 65). Time is lived differently by the boarders who do not respect borders, an élite corps within the school of which Ferrier and François are a part: ‘Les internes ont un rapport au temps très particulier: ils vivent dans leur temps propre, insoumis et mal régulé, un temps qui défie le temps, une machine de guerre contre le calendrier’ (François, 68). Because they exist in a separate, independent world of their own, unlike the day boys who go back to their families after school, the boarders create their own time and rhythm, and elect to live in a state of ‘urgence permanente’ (François, 70). They also know the building inside out, its dark corners and its flaws. This gives them insight into the private face of a public building and thence into the ‘other side’ of things: Ils [les internats] ont une vision organique de la constitution des bâtiments, de leur activité, de leur fonctionnement. Toute la nuit, ils parcourent le

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Lycée comme des voyageurs de l’ombre invités par un dieu invisible. Ils se promènent même sur les toits […] Les internes savent de l’intérieur la vérité des êtres et des lieux. En un instant, ils passent comme ils le veulent de l’autre côté de la vie, sur l’autre versant. Ils voient au revers des choses. Ils savent le vrai travail du temps. C’est une connaissance interne, celle du cœur, celle des souffles. (François, 69)

In the special space of the boarding school, the boarders come to know ‘the other side’ – of life, of experience – and are readied to continue to look for it in their adult lives. After they finish lycée, both François and Ferrier continue to cross borders into spaces where different rules operate. François learns to ‘zoner’ (François, 122), which is the film and documentary maker’s version of flâner: undirected walking with a camera in hand, preferably in the banlieues, ‘aux alentours du périphérique ou dans les couloirs du métro’ (François, 122). Zoner in general is a way of stretching or crossing the borders of cinematic Paris, or of the Paris that is visible to tourists, the wealthy, the official and socially accepted. On one such walk François meets a group of homeless people, one of whom becomes the subject of his documentary, Thierry, portrait d’un absent. The other place in which borders are loosened and new spaces are introduced to both François and Ferrier is Japan. As mentioned earlier, Japan opens a new chapter in both of their lives: ‘une saison s’ouvre’ (François, 136). François explores the joys of ‘flottement’ (François, 140) in Japan, a state which cures him of the effects of the punishing rules and borders that he suffered when working on the Thierry documentary. This is not the flottement of ukiyo-é prints or the floating, unreal world of the pleasure districts: what François discovers in Japan, according to his friend, are actions such as ‘humer les vapeurs qui s’échappent de ce bol de thé, regarder les volutes qui s’enroulent dans l’air et se glissent par la fenêtre un soir d’été’ (François, 140). He begins to enjoy life and beauty again, becomes serene (‘il s’ouvre à nouveau, il devient plus léger’, François, 141). The practice of flottement allows the two friends to cross borders, or rather to enjoy their absence, in a Japan which Ferrier describes as ‘un étrange mélange de contours très nets, de gestes tranchants (faire glisser d’un poignet ferme la paroi coulissante, verser sans trembler l’eau brûlante dans la théière) et d’attitudes flottantes, de formes diluées’ (François, 140). More borders are transgressed and new spaces and worlds brought into being at the start of the third section, ‘Breaking the Waves’: three miracles take place in François’s life, on the eve of the twenty-first

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century. First, the solar eclipse of August 1999, which Ferrier witnesses with François; the latter prepares everything meticulously for an ideal viewing, working towards the grand astronomical moment and miraculously everything works out as he planned: Soudain c’est l’éclipse: elle arrive dans un étrange mélange de vélocité et de densité, on dirait une boule noire qui roule et qui progresse au moment même où elle disparaît, c’est l’éclipse. Dans l’instant, c’est une grande paix sur la Terre. La luminosité décroît, les animaux croient que c’est le soir, ils se couchent sur la prairie […] Disparition totale du disque. Silence parfait. Nous ne respirons plus. Le Soleil se couvre d’un noir d’encre et devient une perle noire. Alors, une par une, les étoiles apparaissent. (François, 180–81)

The eclipse is a moment out of time, an unexpected breach in the everyday routine of the universe: night falls suddenly in the middle of the day, its benevolence symbolized by the peaceful reaction of the animals. It is an event which shows the friends that diurnal and nocturnal rhythms, and with them the daily march of time, are not completely inexorable; as when Maxime Février became Maxime Ferrier, escaping the tyranny of the calendar, the day-night-day-night rhythm can be disturbed. The sun is described as ‘une perle noire’, the third time this epithet has been used in the book: it was first applied to one of the Goldberg Variations, then to a particularly potent kind of marijuana, both mind-altering stimulants that transport human beings into another world. The black sun has the same effect, offering Ferrier and François a vision of an alternative time and space, a wrinkle in the fabric of time. The second and third miracles are equally momentous, although on a different scale, for François: they are his meeting and marriage to Sylvia, his soulmate, and the birth of their daughter, Bahia. Both events are couched, like the solar eclipse, in cosmic, astronomical terms. The match between François and Sylvia is described thus: ‘Concordance des temps, des humeurs, des envies, du désir: les deux astres convergent, leur union est comme une évidence, qui s’impose très simplement. Ils se marient rapidement’ (François, 181). Similarly, Bahia is ‘une nouvelle étoile’ (François, 182). In both cases, love enters life like a light, a vertical piercing of horizontal time. Love stops time, exists outside of it. Significantly, Ferrier describes the horizontal, linear understanding of a love story as a film, and claims that the medium cannot capture its true nature: On pourrait décrire l’amour, le vrai, comme un arrêt sur image. C’est-à-dire, à la lettre, que le film s’arrête […] L’amour: tout à coup

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une clairière, une percée, une échappée. Le système fuit par les bords, se vide en son centre, s’effondre sur les côtés […] L’histoire d’amour est inclassable dans le grand catalogue des relations sentimentales parce que justement elle n’est pas un film. C’est un roman. Elle ne rentre pas dans le cadre, il lui faut l’infini des pages pour se déployer. (François, 182–83)

Here film is being used metaphorically as an example of a horizontal, chronological and image-centred way of thinking about a love story. The novel is set up as an alternative, thicker way of understanding love; one where the subject does not need to stay within a frame, where vertical, unexpected and one-off events occur to disturb and even destroy the day-to-day continuation of time. The rivalry between images and words, with words the definite winner, is one which is alluded to several times in this book; I will be looking at it in more detail later in this chapter. The freedom from time (‘une échappée’), and therefore from death, made possible by love, is emphasized by the use of the present tense to describe Bahia in the following pages (‘Bahia peut être patiente et impatiente, elle est toujours bienveillante’; François, 184–85), although it starts and ends with a statement of the scandalous fact of her death at the age of 11. But the section concludes by telling us how Jérôme, another childhood friend of François, has planted a liquidambar tree with his wife in their garden to commemorate the little girl: Chaque fois que je vois un de ces arbres lors de mes voyages dans le Sichuan ou à Taïwan, je pense tout de suite à Bahia, puis à Sylvia, la survivante, et j’adresse une prière muette au grand liquidambar. J’ai confiance. C’est un arbre très résistant. Un ami chinois m’a dit que c’est une des premières espèces à réapparaître après les feux de forêt. (François, 188)

Although it is not exactly an upbeat ending to the section, there is an awareness of a solidarity amongst the survivors, the bereaved friends and spouse and mother, in the image of the resurrection of trees after a forest fire, which looks cautiously but steadfastly towards life beyond disaster and devastation. Another border that François and Ferrier share, and experience, is that between friends. Several sections of the book discuss friendship, using Plutarch’s and Montaigne’s thoughts on the subject as well as examples of friendships from the classical, medieval and early modern periods: ‘Achille et Patrocle, Castor et Pollux, Oreste et Pylade’, but also ‘Dante et Cavalcanti, Ronsard et Du Bellay, Goethe et Schiller […] Montaigne et La Boétie’ (François, 100). Ferrier cites Isidore Ducasse, who wrote that ‘Tant que mes amis ne mourront pas, / je ne parlerai pas

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de la mort’, and agrees: ‘ce sont nos amis qui nos préservent de la mort’ (François, 102). Indeed it seems that death, the ultimate border, can be defeated – in a certain sense – by friendship. Ferrier ends one of his discussions of friendship with the tale of two Chinese poet friends from the eighth century, Li Bai and Du Fu. Du Fu dreamed of his friend one night and wrote some verses which Ferrier wishes he had been able to write for his own friend: François est mort noyé comme Li Bai. Je le vois en rêve souvent, et j’ai le cœur brisé de n’avoir pu le lui dire: Les eaux sont profondes, les vagues sauvages Prends garde aux dragons du fond de l’eau. (François, 103)

These lines have crossed continents and centuries, like the leaping words described earlier which ‘partent à la rencontre d’un œil vif, d’une oreille affûtée, d’une bouche vivante, qui pourra leur redonner le bonheur du souffle: ce qu’on appelle une âme’ (François, 42), and have met one: Ferrier’s. The eighth-century poet’s words are activated in the twenty-first-century novelist’s soul and revive both friends and friendships, within a space that is both textual and fictional, but housed within the living body of the reader. The border between friends does not always have such a magical effect, however; at times it can lead to hostility. The ‘querelle’ (François, 189) that results in a two-year estrangement between François and Ferrier is caused by a failed collaboration on a film project, and Ferrier, in retrospect, blames both the notoriously impossible negotiation between writing and the image, and the difficulty of working with a close friend: Le cinéma se nourrit des mots, il les dévore. Le scénario d’un film n’existe pas. Ou plutôt il n’existe que pour être impitoyablement mis en images et englouti […] François et moi nous étions mis d’accord sur le fait que nous en serions tous deux les réalisateurs, mais il avait trop d’expérience en matière de cinéma et moi-même trop d’amour pour la littérature pour que nos rôles à un moment ne se figent et ne rejouent […] le vieil antagonisme des films et des livres. Nous rêvions d’une chose impossible, peut-être. Un livre-film, dans le temps limité d’un été, une floraison […] L’amitié ne se nourrit pas de fusion: elle s’élabore dans la distance […] l’amitié est une certaine relation réglée et fragile. Même si elle peut parfois en revêtir les atours, l’amitié n’est ni une association, ni une coopération. (François, 199–200)

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In other words, the two friends came up against one of the oldest rivalries of the world of representation, image versus word, and were unable to create a hybrid, the almost certainly impossible ‘livre-film’, certainly not within the limited time they were given at their artists’ residence. And, more importantly, the collaboration did not give their friendship the space it needed to flourish. ‘Les êtres humains sont des lieux’ (François, 63), as Ferrier writes at the start of the section on the friends’ time at the Lycée Lakanal; being places, they are also spaces, spaces separated by a border. Perhaps there is a link here to the description of ‘condition frontalière de toute être humain’ discussed in Mémoires d’outre-mer; human beings are all part of a larger whole, like the sea, but each individual represents a frontier within it, like the crest of a wave.11 Fusion is not friendship, and working together on a project in which each of the two individuals has a huge stake turns out, not surprisingly, to lead to an impasse. However, their bond is too strong for the estrangement to carry on forever, and the renewal of their friendship two years later is triggered by a letter, quoted in full, from François to Ferrier. Death, Dreams and Ghosts The section in which Ferrier recounts the deaths of François and Bahia is entitled ‘La Graciosa’, the name of the island where they drowned. The island is briefly described as a beautiful place much loved by François, but then the narrative quickly turns to the science of waves. Ferrier tells us about his research (‘j’ai cherché, je me suis documenté, j’ai essayé de comprendre’), and at one point addresses François directly: ‘je songe, ironie cruelle, à quel point cela t’aurait intéressé, toi qui passais ton temps dans les livres d’histoire et de sciences’ (François, 219). Ferrier then attempts to describe what happened on the day of the tragedy, or what he understands happened, a mix of facts and imaginings: Ce matin-là, il y a des nuages, il ne fait pas très chaud mais il n’y a pas beaucoup de vent. Tout va très vite: une seule vague, brutale, inexplicable, suffira […] La mer, cette prodigieuse masse d’eau … Mais où est la ligne clignotante du rivage, le détroit tout à coup a changé de face. Que peux-tu faire contre la mer? Il faudrait que la houle s’apaise, il faudrait qu’un bateau vienne […] Bientôt, tout prend une densité de 11 See the discussion of identity and coral in Chapter 3.

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pierre. La mer est hostile […] C’est le bout du rouleau, la revanche de la voie liquide: la fenêtre se referme. Maintenant, il n’y a plus ni enfance ni mémoire. Maintenant, il n’y a plus de pêcheurs sur la mer. Maintenant, c’en est fait même du silence. (François, 221)

After setting the scene for the tragedy that is about to occur, Ferrier attempts to put himself into his friend’s place, occasionally adopting his point of view (‘mais où est la ligne clignotante du rivage’) as well as thinking with him, in retrospect (‘que peux-tu faire contre la mer?’). Death follows soon afterwards, described metaphorically through the ‘rouleau’, a reference to his earlier comparison of each person’s life to a Chinese scroll (François, 29), whose ‘bout’ therefore is death; and the shutting of the window, clearly signifying the death of a man who was so often seen by his friends as a window out onto new worlds and sources of light. Childhood, memory and vision all disappear as death descends. At this point, however, Ferrier finds himself unable to carry on imagining their experience: ‘je suis à la limite, le moment approche où moi non plus je ne pourrai pas aller plus loin’. Thereafter, he can only stay with them through writing: Maintenant, je ne peux que me tenir avec eux à cet instant précis de la narration et la maintenir la plus douce, la plus aimante possible, coûte que coûte, pour les envelopper d’une phrase, la plus tendre possible, […] pour leur redonner un peu de cet air libre et de cette chaleur qui à cet instant leur ont tant manqué. (François, 222)

The difference between imagining – and recreating in language – his friend’s last minutes before his death, and staying with them (‘me tenir avec eux’) moment from moment in his narration may seem to be minimal, but it represents the narrator’s crucial move from what might be described as a psychological experiment – an empathetic imagining of his friend’s sufferings – into a fictional space. This is a space which closely resembles the one where Ricœur’s ‘ayant-étés’ exist; it is the space in which language has the power to change things, to give François and his daughter ‘un peu de cet air libre et de cette chaleur qui à cet instant leur ont tant manqué’, to create a temporary vision of potential and possibility within an alternative world. The section ends with a dream in which Ferrier is walking with François in a wintry landscape characterized by limits and limitations (‘le paysage semble […] être situé dans un éloignement qui ne saurait ni s’élargir ni s’estomper, ni s’étendre ni se dénouer’, François, 224). In the

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dream he sees a painter painting a bad likeness of François, but then the two faces slowly begin to resemble each other: On dirait qu’entre les deux François il n’y a plus que la finesse d’une feuille de papier à cigarettes et que plus le temps passe, plus le François du portrait rattrape l’autre, comme un peloton rattrape un cycliste dans une échappée. Le visage réel de François ne disparaît pas tout à fait, il devient autre chose, tout en restant un visage. À l’instant, désormais, imminent, où ils coïncideront pour n’en former plus qu’un, le temps brusquement s’immobilisera, François sera seul au sommet de sa trajectoire et le livre sera terminé. (François, 225)

Is Ferrier saying that he is a bad painter, and his portrait of François simply an inferior version of the original? The elements of the dream suggest a more complicated picture. The image of the peloton is a strange one; perhaps its members represent the many instances of François that Ferrier has created in his book, which together begin to approach the density and complexity of the real person, cycling ahead of the pack. And when they do all reach the leader, François’s face ‘devient autre chose’, purely because he is no longer alive; and in the moment when painting and model become one, time is immobilized – immobilized for François, because he is dead – and the book, Ferrier’s portrait of his friend, is completed. At least that would be one reading of this dream, which may well be a ‘real’ dream experienced by Ferrier, truthfully described in all its strangeness.12 Dreams are also the place where ghosts, or the dead, often come to meet the living. Ghosts and the dead are almost a staple presence in Ferrier’s work; we find them in Mémoires d’outre-mer, we encounter them in Scrabble and of course many feature in the ‘Japanese’ works. Japan is where François and Ferrier learn to ‘disappear’, following Tanizaki’s instructions; François’s apprenticeship in the art of ‘disparition’, enjoyed by the two friends during François’s first visit to Japan, might at this point seem premonitory: ‘Il est en train de disparaître et de ressusciter, de l’autre côté. Il expérimente cette liberté suprême: la disparition’

12 In response to my question on this subject in the interview, Ferrier wrote: ‘C’est une question étrange: un rêve est-il réel ou bien n’est-il pas réel? Il me semble qu’il est précisément entre les deux. Mais je suppose que la question veut dire: est-ce que j’ai vraiment rêvé ces rêves? Ou bien est-ce que je les invente pour le besoin du roman? Eh bien, là aussi, un peu des deux’. See the section of the interview ‘Sur le rêve’ below, pp. 161–62.

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(François, 142).13 Thierry is another ghost of sorts, the sole proof of whose passage through this world exists only in François’s documentary film. In Sympathie pour le fantôme, we saw how the narrator, whilst making love with Ryoko, enters a dreamlike state and encounters dozens of dead and demonic creatures from various periods of history. Writers like Ferrier, according to him, attract ghosts and the dead because they are interested in the past: ‘je converse avec les morts … mi-souvenir, mi-délirant’ (Fantôme, 165). Dreaming, of course, offers another semi-conscious, ontologically indeterminate state where ghosts and the dead can seem to contact the living. In François, portrait d’un absent Ferrier dreams frequently about his friend, with whom he has conversations or exchanges; in a very straightforward sense, dreams are a space in which the dead can exist again, communicate with the other side and – according to Ferrier – affect the writing process: ‘rien de plus proche de l’écriture que le rêve, le rêve est un marqueur et le rêve est un pays, un marqueur de l’état poétique et tout un continent en soi’ (François, 161). The continent of dreams is not exactly a parallel universe to ours, but it is clearly related to our world and more precisely to the world of creativity. It can also function as an explanatory tool, a language, that tells the truth about our world: Les rêves sont à peu près le seul langage de la vérité dans notre monde. Ils ne disent pas forcément l’exactitude de notre monde (car qui demanderait à un rêve d’être logique, cohérent?), mais oui, ils en disent la vérité. On ne peut pas tricher dans un rêve. Et l’écriture, qui a chez moi comme chez tant d’autres une relation directe avec le rêve, en est pour ainsi dire une expression privilégiée. C’est la part nocturne de l’écriture, ce qui nous la rend si précieuse, car c’est ce qui la relie au monde du désir et de la vérité.14

It seems to me that in this particular book, dreams constitute a space used to offer an alternative approach to the reality of François’s death; not an alternative reality, but a way of thinking about it which, although not logical, responds to our need to think about the dead person as being alive – as an ‘ayant-été’. Dreams offer an opportunity to retain the person of François in Ferrier’s mind for a while, outside of the fact of his death. Writing, we were told earlier, can take us to ‘l’autre côté du temps’

13 Arribert-Narce discusses ‘cet art et cette pratique de la spectralité au Japon’, prevalent in both this work and others but especially in Sympathie pour le fantôme, in his introductory essay to Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail. 14 See the interview section ‘Sur le rêve’, p. 163.

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(François, 135), which presumably means that it can cross the border between life and death; so can dreams, and their combination re-enacts the living François within the pages of the book. The last time that a window was mentioned in this section was at the moment of François’s drowning, when it was one of the metaphors for his death: ‘la fenêtre se referme’ (François, 221). The pressure of closure is relieved when we find one being opened, at the start of the fifth and final part of the ‘troisième partie’, in Ferrier’s Paris flat. The physical window in question opens onto a view of Montmartre. The narrator explains how the whole of this part of Paris is built on what are known as ‘les galeries chaotiques’, a maze of disused quarries, which means the ground underfoot is thoroughly hollow. He tells us how our lives, too, can be seen as based on similarly empty, abandoned constructions. Ferrier then takes us back to the cemetery; the visit is a mirror image of the one with which the book opened, when Ferrier was unable to find the tomb in the snow. Created by a sculptor friend, the tomb is a life-affirming sculpture which seems to be thrusting upwards, crowned by hundreds of marbles which belonged to Bahia and François: ‘La tombe conçue par Mozart Guerra n’est pas une tombe: c’est une fusée, un prototype. Une catapulte polychrome, prête à dégainer […] Elle ne tombe pas, elle s’élève’ (François, 229). This upwards movement sets the tone for the end of the book and section, where we find Ferrier’s ambition for his book set out in a strikingly different genre: he lists a series of actions which seem to suggest that language has a power that goes well beyond communication. The short section starts with Ferrier putting his book on the gravestone (‘Quant à moi, plus humblement, je pose ici ce livre, pour qu’un autre l’emporte et le porte plus loin: une façon de vous garder vivants, de vous faire exister encore dans les vagues du temps’; François, 230–31), but then his ambitions grow, as he addresses François and Bahia directly, in the present tense as in the rest of the book:15 Maintenant, je vous sors du gouffre du temps. Je vous évoque, vous invoque, vous expose. Je vous fixe, c’est-à-dire qu’à la fois je vous regarde et je vous fige, pour toujours, sur le papier. Pourtant, je suis tranquille: si j’ai bien fait les choses, vous saurez vous échapper. Je vous tire et je vous trace. Je vous tracte, vous extrais. Je vous retire de ce fond noir où vous vous êtes abîmés. 15 The link between the use of the present tense and Ferrier’s desire to resurrect his friend in the pages of the book is noted by Mével, p. 216.

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Je réponds muettement à votre appel silencieux. Je tire un trait sur tout ce qui nous a séparés. Je vous trais, vous portrais. Un livre finalement n’est rien d’autre qu’une manière de dire: où que vous soyez, je serai. Tant que je le pourrai, je vous porterai. (François, 231)

These ‘actions’ hark back to the first ‘declaration of intent’ in the book, mentioned at the start of this chapter, when I suggested that Ferrier’s motive for writing about his friend – what he ‘hopes to accomplish’ – is to bring him back to life, to effect a kind of resurrection that is not entirely metaphorical. Like a priest or a magician, Ferrier declaims his ‘actions’: ‘maintenant, je vous sors du gouffre du temps’ sounds like the start of a spell, generically speaking, and certainly suggests that he will do more than simply conjure up an image of his dead friend. It is not as eccentric as claiming that he will bring François back to a physical life of flesh and blood, but still more, it seems, than creating a mere image in the reader’s mind. Ferrier is careful not to push things too far, as his choices of verbs show: the dramatic ‘je vous sors du gouffre du temps’ is followed by the purely verbal ‘je vous évoque, vous invoque, vous expose’ (although one does ‘invoke’ spirits). Fixing people on paper is also an acceptably writerly thing to do. But the next paragraph uses a series of much more physical verbs, ‘je vous tire […] Je vous tracte, vous extrais. Je vous retire de ce fond noir’, of which ‘je vous trace’ is the only action that might reasonably be attributed to a writer. The third paragraph repeats ‘je tire’, but makes it into a writerly act by following it with ‘un trait sur tout ce qui nous a séparés’. The final paragraph is more ambiguous. ‘Je vous trais, vous portrais’ is a strange pairing, seemingly linked only by the rhyme, both writerly (to portray) and not (‘to milk’). Indeed, the section is clearly structured as much on sound as on meaning: the repetition of ‘tr’, in ‘je vous trace. Je vous tracte, vous extrais […] je tire un trait […] je vous trais, vous portrais’ creates a strong sense that language is taking charge, pulling us – like some of those verbs – across various kinds of borders into a linguistic, yet physically existing space where we can meet the living François and Bahia. The end of this section, which describes the book as a promise to be with and to carry/hold (porter) his friend henceforth, can also be understood in terms of the power of language to bring back the dead. Or, to put it less dramatically, that language can defeat death – on one level – simply through moving a few words, even a few letters. As we will discover in Scrabble, the Scrabble board is a space on which mort is just a letter away from mot; in Mémoires d’outre-mer

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‘Maxime Février’ is liberated from calendrical time by changing just one letter in his name, a freedom he has passed on to his descendants. The change from mort to mot is not trivial, not merely a move in a board game or the tap of a key; within certain spaces, it is all-important. If Ferrier’s attempt to raise François from the dead through writing is based on his belief in that special kind of fictional space discussed earlier, a space in which the dead can be given more time, possibilities and potential, that space is not exactly the same as that of the imagination: it the space that exists within the pages of a book. This is the space where a lost presence can be made tangible in the manner of Ricœur’s ‘ayantétés’,16 ‘une sorte de brèche où le temps circule, où la mémoire se réveille et bondit’ (François, 41). And within that space, which – although small – is a physically existent space that can be carried, held, opened and closed, the movement of letters and words is absolutely crucial: it can create or destroy, kill or bring back to life. The special nature of this space makes the book, his book – in the same way as all the spaces evoked throughout this work, all the openings which allow access to different dimensions, worlds and time zones – into both a physical object and a portal. Like the eclipse which confounds the normal run of day and night, or starting life in a new country, or taking intoxicants or even just opening a window, opening this book gives the reader access to a space in which François and Bahia live and breathe, where – like Ricœur’s ‘ayant-étés’ – they are portrayed as people with futures ahead of them. In the preceding chapter, I showed how language is seen to defeat death in both Mémoires d’outre-mer and Scrabble. In Mémoires, it is the inscription on Maxime’s tomb that sparks his grandson’s interest in his story, and ultimately leads him to write the book that recreates Maxime’s life within its pages, collapses time within the text and resurrects him for the reader. In Scrabble, it is the physical creation of words on the Scrabble board that allows us to imagine finding love – or defeating death – by a simple gesture of the hand; although death cannot actually be avoided, the novelist can go around and beyond it on the Scrabble board of his memory in order to recreate his long-dead 16 Of course Ricœur’s ‘ayant-étés’ are not fictional characters, but GrenaudierKlijn certainly uses the concept to describe fictional characters, as have I. See France Grenaudier Klijn, La part du féminin dans l’œuvre de Patrick Modiano (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017), pp. 24–25.

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childhood. These are not merely narrative sleights of hand. In Mémoires d’outre-mer, Maxime is brought back into the space of the present of the writing when he turns out to be the author of the epigraph of Michaël’s book; in Scrabble, the narrator insists that his past is fully present in his adult self, ‘nous sommes des spirales […] tout est toujours là, en soi, à l’intérieur, à portée de main. Il faut savoir rester – ou redevenir – enfant pour être adulte, passer ainsi entre les mondes’ (Scrabble, 216). There is also the example of the courageous survivors and volunteers in Fukushima, récit d’un désastre who refuse to despair, and concentrate – in their different, personal ways – on imposing their methods of making sense, of bestowing order, onto the devastated landscape: ‘dans cette géographie égarée, au milieu de ce temps bouleversé et des vies importées, chacun inscrit à sa manière une syntaxe patiente et décalée’ (Fukushima, 218). The narrator here is referring to a haiku poet, a librarian who specializes in photographic restoration and a laughing old art lover; he considers all of their actions to be forms of writing, with a syntax particular to them, through which they revive small but important parts of the lives lost to the earthquake and tsunami. The narrator’s own writing, which he styles following the example of the little islands of Matsushima that resisted the tsunami through their scatteredness, is another kind of syntactical patterning designed to restore, to the victims of the disaster, some small part of their former lives. This faith in language and the expectations placed on it are at their strongest, amongst all of these works, in François, portrait d’un absent. The reason is clear: François starts as a cry of anguish, a howl of despair at the sudden disappearance of a much-loved friend in a freak accident, and the work is evidently an attempt to resurrect the lost person in writing. Much more recent than his grandfather or his childhood friends, and much closer to him than any of the Fukushima victims, the loss of François is the strongest reason Ferrier has had yet to hope that language can defeat the finality of death. He does not, needless to say, believe that a flesh-and-blood François can be recreated through his book; but, as we have seen, he is aiming to reconstruct something more than a purely textual image of his friend. I have tried to show how a more three-dimensional kind of resurrection is achieved in François, portrait d’un absent through the creation of narrative spaces in which François is portrayed as a living presence. One of these is the space of fiction, physically present within a book, where the ‘ayant-étés’ of Paul Ricœur – although he is not a novelist – are freed from deterministic views of the past. But there are also other ‘openings’ evoked in the book

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which breach the continuous unfolding of narrative time and give access to alternative spaces in which parallel worlds can exist. François, portrait d’un absent contains quite a few different kinds of such openings: non-narrative genres which appear within the chronologically ordered narrative, solar eclipses, life-changing meetings with kindred spirits, mind-altering substances (both drugs and music), intense encounters with foreign cultures and forays into the world of the subconscious through dreams. All of these ‘openings’ open out onto alternative spaces free from the constraints of time, and allow us to imagine the dead François and Bahia as still existing, evolving human beings, within the pages of Ferrier’s book.

Coda Scrabble as Photobiography Coda

Scrabble, Ferrier’s latest full-length work to date, is also his only photo-text to date. The following discussion of Scrabble’s hybrid genre is designed to put it back in its correct place in the order of Ferrier’s works; my joint analysis of Scrabble with Mémoires d’outre-mer in Chapter 3 disrupted this order, albeit for a good cause. (It is worth noting that the approach to an œuvre as a serial production is one that Ferrier himself dislikes, as we will see in the Conclusion.) After discussing Scrabble in this coda as a photo-text, I will proceed to a conclusion which will show how Ferrier’s work, intermedial and hybrid, encompassing a wide range of disciplines, genres and cultures, is genuinely one without borders. Photobiography – sometimes spelled ‘phautobiography’ – is a genre that has become more and more prominent in recent French literature,1 a combination of autobiographical writing and photographs that has been practised by many writers and even has an imprint dedicated to it: as mentioned in Chapter 3, the ‘Traits et Portraits’ series published by Mercure de France, in which Scrabble occurs, is a series created for photobiographies. There are of course various ways in which photographs and text can be combined in such a work; the older, more classic versions place all the photographic images at the start or in the centre of the book, while more recent publications tend to intersperse text with photographs. The nature, placement and length of the captions can also vary. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, for instance, has brief captions under each image, as well as a list of where they were 1 See my Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), which introduces the (sub)genre and contains four case studies of authors who have written in this genre.

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sourced at the back of the book, whereas in Annie Ernaux’s L’usage de la photo, the ‘captions’ are much longer and constitute the text, written alternately by her and Jean Marie, the co-creator of the work, underneath each image. In Scrabble, the captions are grouped together in a ‘Table des Illustrations’ at the back of the book, presented in very small font, but they make for extremely interesting reading and offer a vital perspective on the interaction between text and image. In Scrabble, there are 22 images of which 16 are photographs, three are drawings and the other two maps; they appear throughout the book, close to if not always directly opposite the relevant text, which suggests that their purpose is illustrative. For instance, there is a photograph of Toumaï sitting on his bed, above which is suspended a mosquito net, on the page opposite the start of the chapter that deals with his malaria (Scrabble, 148). These are what one might think of as standard family photographs, usually included in autobiographies to build ‘a sense of immediacy and familiarity with the author’, which in Scrabble is strengthened by the extensive use of the present tense.2 There is only one photograph of a family member, his father with a monkey (Scrabble, 32); this is echoed by a photo of Toumaï himself with a monkey (Scrabble, 110), prompting the reader to look for family resemblances between father and son, to relate the father’s image to the identity of the autobiographer. It slowly becomes clear to the reader, as s/he continues his/her journey through the book, that the other photographs – not just those of the author himself – are also an integral part of his identity. They are of course presented as illustrative of his childhood inasmuch as they show us the setting – photographs of N’Djaména, musicians playing local instruments, a drawing representing the ‘arbre aux bêtes’, a map of Chad – but they are also images of key elements in the autobiographer’s memory, and thus directly constitutive of his hybrid identity. We are told, for instance, that the city of N’Djaména is central to his self: ‘Je suis un fils de N’Djaména’ (Scrabble, 122), ‘N’Djaména, ma ville au cœur vibrant […] Peu à peu, je commence à comprendre la ville, je commence à comprendre la vie’ (Scrabble, 123), ‘N’Djaména, ma ville, mon enfance’ (Scrabble, 125). These statements are clustered around the 2 Fabien Arribert-Narce, ‘Michaël Ferrier Inter-Media: Writing the World between Image, Music and Text’, in Sites, special edition on Michaël Ferrier (edited by Fabien Arribert-Narce, Charles Forsdick, Akane Kawakami and Martin Munro). Forthcoming in 2024.

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two images of the city in the text, on pages 126 and 130–31. In François, portrait d’un absent, Ferrier wrote that places were people; both the images and the text suggest strongly that certainly a part of his identity is made of the Chadian capital. Similarly, we are familiar, from the ways in which identities are constructed in both Mémoires d’outre-mer and Scrabble, with the notion of animals – even bacteria – being an indissociable part of a human identity. The malarial parasites are as much an element of Toumaï’s self, his character and his being as the cockerel he ended up beheading by mistake. Indeed the photo of the cockerel, placed at the end of the story about the involuntary beheading, is in the style of a portrait, a close-up of the head rather than the whole bird, teasingly reminiscent of a funeral portrait. As such it commands the same status as any of the human portraits, and is proudly presented as a part of Toumaï, the agent of fate that taught the boy a significant lesson: ‘pour la premiere fois, j’ai ôté la vie’ (Scrabble, 164). In this way, both the text and the images present Toumaï as a hybrid entity, created from the genes of his parents and the city of N’Djaména, but also from parasites, a dead cockerel, the longhorn cattle of the region and his friends. The presentation of the photographs as illustrative of Ferrier’s childhood memories that are always present to him is crucial to our acceptance of them as a part of him; their narration in the present tense reinforces the sense that these memories constitute his self: Nous sommes des lignes. Et plus exactement: nous sommes des spirales. Comme la spirale, nous ne laissons rien en arrière au fur et à mesure que nous croissons, que nous grandissons. Je n’ai rien oublié, ou presque. Comme dans la spirale, tout est toujours là, en soi, à l’intérieur, à portée de main. Il faut savoir rester – ou redevenir – enfant pour être adulte, passer ainsi entre les mondes. (Scrabble, 216)

As discussed in Chapter 3, Scrabble argues eloquently for the continued existence of the self through time, and the model of the spiral allows Ferrier to access all parts of it at any point in his existence. But the self also exists in time, which means that all acts – for instance, that of turning the pages of a book – must take place in sequence, consecutively. The placement of the images, text and captions is thus crucial to effect the gradual discovery of the self in Scrabble. In the same way that the ‘originary’ scene of the brothers playing Scrabble in the courtyard returns as the final scene and is revealed to be the day of their departure from Chad – the scene that Fabien Arribert-Narce identifies as the

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‘ghost image’, the untaken photograph from which the whole book is born – a number of the actual photographs are positioned in the text in such a way as to gain retrospective meaning many pages after they first appear in the book.3 This meaning is always to do with the finality and horror of war. The striking image of the scarified boy, which appears on p. 89 as an ‘illustration’ of Youssouf, Toumaï’s friend, is given tragic significance when Toumaï meets him just before he dies – many pages later – in Bololo, having been shot by Abdel: ‘Ses belles scarifications lui font maintenant comme des grumeaux de sang caillé’ (Scrabble, 208). Similarly, the two images of a boy with a dog – one is of Toumaï hugging one of the family’s own dogs (Scrabble, 62), the other of a boy and his dog sitting on a barrel-like object (Scrabble, 65) – gain in sombre meaning when the reader discovers, looking at the caption, that the second photo is one of ‘enfant et chien sur une bombe non explosée, Tigray, Ethiopie 1991’ (Scrabble, 225). Both boys and dogs will be changed forever by war, no doubt differently but irrevocably. The date of the second photo, 1991, adds a further dimension to the relationship between the two images and the text; because the later photo is also in black and white, the reader may naturally assume that the two ‘boy and dog’ photos are contemporaneous; his/her realization that this is not so, upon noting the date and place in the ‘Table d’Illustrations’, is one of shock, and highlights the omnipresence of war, in terms of both place and time. The final image of the book leaves nothing to the imagination; it is that of a child soldier casually holding a machine gun and sitting on a chair placed on the ground. He looks tired, or fed up, wearing clothes that are too big for him, as well as a pair of rubber flip-flops that jars disconcertingly with the lethal weapon. The caption for this photograph creates a complex relationship with the text. As with several of the other photos, it is an edited quotation from the main text of Scrabble. Now these caption-quotations are sometimes shortened without the requisite notation of ellipses; for instance, the caption for the cockerel omits – without noting the omission – three sentences that exist in the text, between the first and second sentences. In most of these cases, no great loss of meaning seems to result from the omissions. But the caption for the photograph of the child soldier has been edited more radically. Here is the caption in full: ‘N’y a-t-il plus de mot pour dire maison? Le mot pour dire patience a-t-il déjà brûlé? Le mot amour a-t-il succombé sous la 3 Arribert-Narce, ‘Michaël Ferrier’ (forthcoming 2024).

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mitraille? Parce que là, c’était bien clair et bien net: j’étais arrivé tout au bout de mon enfance’ (Scrabble, 227). These four sentences are all taken from the text, but in the wrong order. The first three sentences – the questions – come from page 220, and form part of Ferrier’s attempt to defeat death through language and writing – dramatized on the Scrabble board – that was discussed at the end of Chapter 3. They come from the very last pages of the book, and together with the explanation of ‘Toumaï’, which we discover means ‘espoir de vie’, gives hope and life to the ending of the work. But the final sentence of the caption, signalling the end of Toumaï’s childhood, comes from page 210; it is the conclusion of the scenes that take place in Bololo, where Toumaï has just witnessed the death of his friend Youssouf. Why has Ferrier rearranged the order of the sentences so that the tragedy comes after the hopefulness, unlike in his text? The short answer may be that the statements, ordered in this way, match the image better; the photograph of the child soldier, which bears the taciturn title of ‘Tchad’ and turns out to have been taken by Raymond Depardon, is precisely a sobering image of the end of childhood (amongst other things). More generally, the edited caption may be a small indication that order, or sequence, matters – a truth that has already been learned in the context of the game of Scrabble. War gets the last word in the caption, but not in the book; we must take note of how we arrange the sequence of things, in language and in life. Many of the photographs in Scrabble, excepting those that are clearly from his family album, are by famous photographers such as Malik Sidibé or Raymond Depardon. There is even a photograph taken from the ‘Voyage au Congo’ series by Marc Allegret and Gide, dating from 1926. We only discover this when we go back to the captions, of course; as with the photograph of the boy and his dog sitting on an unexploded bomb in 1991, it is only by referring to the captions at the back of the book that the reader experiences a moment of intergenerational identity, between the cattle of the 1920s and those of the 1970s. The effect is more or less the same, I would argue, as when Montaigne or a Chinese poet from the eighth century is quoted in a discussion of friendship in François, portrait d’un absent, or any of the numerous quotations that occur in Ferrier’s works; intermediality goes hand in hand with intertextuality, and multidirectional memory is triggered at the same time as an awareness of the hybridity of identities. It is important to note, however, that even this large selection of photographs – there are enough of them to justify calling Scrabble a

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photo-text – is hybridized by the inclusion of other kinds of image. There are the maps and the newspaper clipping, both of which are extremely effective as historical documents ‘proving’ the reality of the period and places in question. Also fascinating are the drawings, of which there are three, one by Raffi Kaiser and the other two by Christian Seignobos. Raffi Kaiser was an Israeli artist who lived in Paris, and a friend of Ferrier; known for both his paintings and drawings, he took much inspiration from his travels in China and Japan. Ferrier interviewed Kaiser and wrote an article arguing that his vision was non-anthropocentric;4 his choice to illustrate the ‘arbre aux bêtes’ with a drawing by Kaiser is therefore extremely fitting in the context of my own arguments in Chapter 3. Christian Seignobos is a geographer and academic, and also an accomplished draughtsman, who has published books on Chad, Cameroon and very recently on the activities of Boko Haram in the area surrounding Lake Chad.5 His studies are often accompanied by his own drawings; of these, Ferrier chose for Scrabble ‘Le Tchad, pêche aux zemi’ and ‘Griots des Gaws’, both from Des mondes oubliés.6 The first, depicting three graceful pirogues with outstretched sails and manned by fishermen, is the only image in the book that is not closely linked to Ferrier’s text; although the river is mentioned many times in Scrabble, pirogues – laden with fish – are only mentioned once (Scrabble, 121). The caption is in fact taken from Seignobos’s book, and the drawing itself is an almost humorous, manga-like depiction in that it is a cross-section of the body of water, showing the pirogues on the surface but also the riverbed and the fish going about their business underwater. The second drawing is similarly humorous in tone, showing two men – ‘griots de gaws’, professional storytellers and also hunters – with their mandolins (garaya).7 The humour arises partly from the 4 Michael Ferrier, ‘Le voyageur du dessin (interview with Raffi Kaiser)’, in Raffi Kaiser – Le voyage des voyages, Freiburg i. Br., Morat Institute for Art and Art Studies, 2012. 5 Christian Seignobos, ‘Boko Haram et le lac Tchad: extension ou sanctuarisation?’, Afrique Contemporaine, 255 (2015), 93–120. 6 The zemi is a kind of net used by the Kotoko people in their traditional fishing practices. See Christian Seignobos, Des mondes oubliés (Paris: IRD Éditions, 2017), ch. 5, ‘Peuples et métiers de l’eau’ (pp. 159–83). 7 ‘Gaw’ are traditional hunters of the Kanuri culture, specializing in hunting in the brush. Seignobos, Des mondes oubliés, ch. 6, ‘Les derniers ritualistes montagnards’ (pp. 185–221).

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contrast between the drawing and the photograph of a man playing the balafon, placed in exactly the same position on the opposite page; the balafon is the instrument that Toumaï learns to play alongside the recorder. The photograph exudes the power and the vitality of the player – he is powerfully built, and his chest is bare – as he sings and plays. The two musicians in Seignobos’s drawing are posed much more casually; somewhat thin and unimpressive physical specimens, they do not seem to be playing their mandolins at all, seated in relaxed poses on the floor of a dwelling. These are two completely different genres of visual representation offered to us as illustrations of Toumaï’s musical education, and the effect on the reader is a realization that, although the textual is so often contrasted with the visual, neither category is a monolith; both the textual and the visual in this work are clearly plural, hybrid categories. Scrabble is thus shown to be yet another example of the hybridity, intermediality and intertextuality that characterizes all of Ferrier’s writings.

Conclusion Writing without Borders Conclusion C’est aussi à ce moment qu’il [Maxime Ferrier] entreprend la construction d’un étrange édifice, qui sera surnommé le ‘Mur des fous’. En quelques mois, avec quelques pierres et du ciment, il fait avancer dans la mer une sorte de muret longiligne et bas, profilé, qui semble couper à la perpendiculaire la ligne d’horizon. Arthur est à ses côtés, qui surnomme ce promontoire ‘notre Grande muraille’. Cette-ci n’a pourtant rien d’une fortification ou d’un rempart: juste une passerelle de pierre posée sur la mer […] On peut se demander quelle mouche a piqué les deux amis et quel était leur plan exactement […] à quoi aurait bien pu servir, dans cette perspective, un mur de trente mètres tiré comme une flèche dans l’océan? À rien. De fait, le mur restera là, dans sa nudité de pierre traversant la mer, refuge des promeneurs égarés, promontoire de l’inutile.

Maxime’s wall in the sea – seemingly without purpose, at least not the kind of purpose usually served by a wall – is a useful image to keep in mind when considering the place of borders in his grandson’s work. What are borders for? Borders between disciplines, genres, countries and cultures; it is not possible, of course, to have no borders, but it is important to question their purpose, their solidity and whether or not they have outlived their usefulness. Every one of Ferrier’s books does just that; under his pen borders of all kinds are questioned, become porous, possibly pointless or at times just interesting in themselves, like Maxime’s wall in the sea. In each of the preceding chapters, Ferrier’s work has been shown crossing and questioning different kinds of borders, in a variety of ways. In Chapter 1, ‘Portraying Japan’, Ferrier is inspired by the genre of zuihitsu, which sits astride the critical/creative border, and thinks of his work as a continuum between the two. His first two ‘Japanese’ novels also seem to be on either side of a dividing line; they capture two opposing aspects of life in Tokyo, the overwhelmingly active and the

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deeply solitary, brought together by the image of the lézarde, or kizu. The city itself is of course poised precariously on a geological fault line, a ‘border’ buried miles under the ground but whose infinitesimal movements are hugely consequential for tens of millions of people. Sympathie pour le fantôme celebrates the multiple crossings of borders in Japanese literature and French history, in the culturally hybrid space that is twenty-first-century Japan; the result is a collection of ‘mixed’ phenomena, ranging from artworks and music to food and conferences, which both highlight borders and dissolve them. Ferrier’s website, Tokyo Time Table, contains a multifarious range of articles that also cross borders, both French and Japanese, and offers visitors a multigeneric and multidisciplinary space designed for meetings across a range of divides. In Chapter 2, ‘Scatter and Resist: Ferrier Writing Fukushima’, we saw how Ferrier’s work on disseminating knowledge about the disaster takes various different forms, making use of hybrid genres and references to events from histories across the world. From singleauthored books and essays to collaborative works, Ferrier adopts a scattergun approach to his mission that seems to ignore all kinds of borders. The fact and subject of Fukushima is arguably the one which inspires Ferrier to throw himself into collaborations with other writers, artists, film-makers and playwrights, and also gives him the opportunity to do so, as is evident from the contents of L’œil du désastre – the borders of the different media are crossed multiple times in this volume as the artists co-operate to respond positively to the dreadful catastrophe. In Chapter 3, we saw how Ferrier places human beings within the natural environment, and in so doing redraws – or, rather, blurs – the borders between the human and the non-human; in both Mémoires d’outre-mer and Scrabble, the main characters are conceived as integral parts of the natural world from a completely egalitarian perspective, where trees and ratels are as interesting and important as human beings. The normal boundaries of time and space are also transgressed as Maxime performs incredible gravity-defying acts, seeming to enter into different ontological zones with his triple jump; Toumaï sees his life as a spiral in which all the levels of time, from his earliest childhood to his adult stages, are immediately accessible and never ‘du temps perdu’. This non-chronological approach to time is also present in François, portrait d’un absent, discussed in Chapter 4, where the dead are resurrected – or at least, given an extra lease of life; and dreams allow for ontologically

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alternative spaces where reality can exist out of time, and the border between life and death can be blurred, at least for a while. One rapidly developing area of Ferrier’s current creative output which involves the crossing of borders is his collaborative work. This is an aspect of his activity which is increasing visibly, ever since the publication of Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, which has led to large numbers of requests for collaboration. In my interview with him, Ferrier was enthusiastic about how his interest in other art forms has recently found an outlet in collaborative enterprises: Enfin, je compose aussi des chansons. Là aussi, en plus du travail solitaire de l’écriture, qui forme pour ainsi dire ma basse rythmique continue, c’est une certaine forme d’interaction ou de création avec d’autres artistes (musiciens, peintres, théâtre, danseurs …) qui m’intéresse de plus en plus.1

Collaborations between artists have been occurring since time immemorial, and the borders crossed by both sides – between music and text, art and music, film and novels, and so on – have led to fascinating creations which call into question the very notion of single authors, and indeed single works; the crossing of borders between individual creators and different media results in something which requires the critic to activate at least two sets of critical frameworks to properly analyse the work in question. I would like to end my conclusion with some thoughts about an unexpected and generous response from Ferrier to one of my interview questions concerning genre, which offers a fitting and fruitful way to close my study. Asked about the difference between roman and récit, Ferrier proposed a completely different taxonomy for his books, a thematic one based on trilogies which he applies to all of his work, past, present and future: Pour ce qui me concerne, plutôt que de se demander la différence entre récit et roman dans mon travail, on pourrait, de manière peut-être plus fertile, s’interroger sur son organisation et son déploiement internes, selon plusieurs logiques, dont celle-ci, que je livre à l’universitaire curieux et même un peu aventurier: l’ensemble de mon travail peut en fait se décomposer, plutôt qu’en une série de récits ou de romans, en une série

1 See the interview below, p. 167.

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de trilogies, qui entretiennent entre elles des rapports à la fois évidents et opaques: – Trilogie japonaise: Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube, Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, et un livre sur Kyoto (en chantier) – Trilogie ultra-marine: Sympathie pour le fantôme (La Réunion), Mémoires d’outre-mer (Madagascar), Le demi-frère de Balzac (Mayotte, en chantier) – Trilogie du dépassement du XIXe siècle: Mémoires d’outre-mer (Chateaubriand), Prix Goncourt (Goncourt, en chantier), Le demi-frère de Balzac (Balzac, en chantier) – Trilogie Fukushima: Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, Penser avec Fukushima, Créer avec Fukushima. Trilogie achevée. – Trilogie de l’atome (et trilogie cinématographique): les 3 textes et films de Notre ami l’atome. Trilogie achevée. C’est une piste pour l’instant jamais explorée, mais je pense qu’un critique qui se pencherait sur mes livres dans cette perspective y ferait au moins autant de trouvailles qu’en rédupliquant la vieille réflexion sur la différence entre récit et roman. Comme tu le vois, je compose mes livres de manière plutôt ample, sur plusieurs géographies et plusieurs temporalités, de manière cosmographique pour ainsi dire, ce qui explique que la délimitation par genres m’importe finalement peu.

The trilogy is a favourite figure of Ferrier; he has pointed out more than once, for instance, that Fukushima, récit d’un désastre is a trilogy from several points of view.2 Perhaps there is also a link here with Baba Saleh’s teaching, mentioned in Scrabble: he taught the young Michaël that ‘la vie de l’homme est subdivisée en neuf degrés […] Et puis ces neuf degrés sont encore subdivisés en trois étages, et chaque étage a trois degrés’.3 The Fulani system for organizing a human life is thus made up of tripartite sections. It also extends, of necessity, to the future, and so does Ferrier’s taxonomy of his œuvre; rather than creating classifications 2 ‘Ici, j’ai choisi une division très simple, en trois parties. Ces trois parties correspondent bien entendu aux trois phases de la catastrophe: “Le Manche de l’éventail” (le séisme), “Récits sauvés des eaux” (le tsunami), “La demi-vie, mode d’emploi” (la catastrophe nucléaire). Mais elles peuvent tout aussi bien s’entendre comme les trois actes d’une tragédie ou les trois vers d’un haïku, chacun mettant l’accent sur un des aspects du désastre et correspondant à un élément naturel: terre (qui tremble), mer (qui déferle), air (qui circule, propageant la contamination radioactive)’. ‘Fukushima, c’est une situation de guerre’, interview with Michaël Ferrier, 27 October 2017, www. revue-ballast.fr/mickael-ferrier-fukushima-cestsituation-de-guerre/. Last accessed 9/2/21. 3 Michaël Ferrier, Scrabble (Paris: Mercure de France, 2019), p. 74.

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based solely on existing works, it takes the future into account in a way reminiscent of structuralist schemas.4 Both the Fulani and the Structuralists adopt a global, holistic conception of time in order to set up their systems. It is an approach that, like Toumaï’s spirals, resists a purely chronological, relentlessly forward-looking way of thinking about time: whilst acknowledging that we live in a teleologically ordered universe, it encourages us to take a step back from the resulting sense – natural but not necessary – of urgency, and to look at the whole potential period from what might be described, following Proust, as an extra-temporal point of view, a perspective positioned out of time. The fact that some of Ferrier’s works are not included in the trilogies – Kizu, for instance, and François, portrait d’un absent – is also surprising but salutary, making this new system a non-totalizing one, bricolage rather than classification. From the critic’s point of view, Ferrier’s tripartite scheme is an exciting taxonomy because it gives us clues to his plans for future works, and also to the thinking behind them. He had told me about his project on the Goncourt brothers, but we now know that he is working on – or thinking about – a book on Kyoto, as well as one on Balzac’s half-brother; I am not sure if he is working on all three simultaneously, or whether there is an order in which the Goncourt book is not the first in line. The non-chronological/non-teleological ways of thinking mentioned above applies here also, and encourages a way of thinking about writing as a more holistic, less end-directed activity. Writing does not need to result, in a linear fashion, in publication, and books do not need to be produced serially. This should not be news, of course, but it is a fact that writers’ bibliographies are chronologically ordered, and critics and students think of them as a series of achievements (and discuss the gaps between publication dates, and analyse how works develop). Given that this is the case, the publication in 2004 of Kizu and Petits portraits by the same publisher is a small but significant act of defiance. I asked Ferrier about this precisely because, as a scholar, the publication of these two works in the same year caught my attention. His response was illuminating: Kizu a été écrit avant Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube. Mais le premier livre publié est bien Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube. Il a même été question à un moment de publier les deux textes ensemble chez Gallimard,

4 Genette’s tables of narratorial possibilities, for instance, or Vladimir Propp’s ‘morphology’ of folk tales.

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mais j’ai finalement abandonné cette idée, parce que ce sont deux textes assez différents. Finalement, les deux livres ont été publiés la même année, en même temps qu’un 3e livre, au même moment: mon essai sur Louis-Ferdinand Céline et la chanson. Trois livres en même temps! On peut dire que ce sont des débuts éditoriaux étonnants … J’en suis heureux: cela permettait de sortir du mythe du ‘premier roman’ et, par la même occasion, d’une certaine figure de l’écrivain à l’occidentale: l’écrivain qui a un premier roman, puis un 2e, un 3e … qui monte en puissance au fil du temps, selon une certaine mythologie du progrès qui est très ancrée dans le monde des lettres autant que dans celui des sciences. Cela me permettait aussi de publier en même temps un essai, texte d’élaboration intellectuelle et théorique, et deux textes de création: la création et la réflexion ne sont pas chez moi séparées, la première porte la seconde, tout est relié.5

Ferrier homes in precisely on the issue at stake in my argument; the ‘myth’, as he calls it, of the serial writer/publisher, which is based on the ‘myth’ – or, at least, the generally accepted view – of human time as unidirectional, teleological and serial. The publication of these two novels in the same year (even if not exactly simultaneously), as well as a book of criticism, subverts the division between the creative and critical as well as the borders between publication dates. The latter border is actually completely undermined by the fact that Kizu was written before Petits portraits, but Petits portraits was published first; the month of publication contradicts the order of writing. In this quiet but practical way, then, Ferrier’s books also challenge our linear ways of thinking about time. To return to the ‘trilogies’, the titles that Ferrier gives them are intriguing, individually and collectively. ‘Trilogie japonaise’, ‘Trilogie Fukushima’ and ‘Trilogie de l’atome’ seem fairly simple and descriptive, but what does ‘Trilogie du dépassement du XIXe siècle’ mean exactly? Does ‘Trilogie ultra-marine’ simply mean that a lot of the action in these novels take place overseas? The fact that certain works occur in more than one of the trilogies (as he points out) undermines the borders of the trilogies themselves; they are clearly not exclusive categories but more like Venn diagrams, positionings of the works that map out the creative person of Ferrier himself. Last but not least, the fact that there are five trilogies seems significant; are they the five acts 5 From an email from the author, 26 September 2020.

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of a tragedy (or comedy, or a Shakespearean tragi-comedy), and will Ferrier stop writing when he has completed his five? I wondered about that briefly, then remembered – with some relief – that Ferrier’s most recent project as a writer in residence, at the University of Ohio in the winter semester of 2022, was on something that is not mentioned in these trilogies. This book, too, was conceived, according to Ferrier’s application for the residence, as one of a trilogy: The book I plan to write is a portrait of the American architect Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983). It is part of a trilogy about three major scientists, but whose work is hardly known to the public (the two others are the Japanese physicist Nakaya Ukichirô, 1900–1962, and the Hungarian biologist Tibor Gánti, 1933–2009). The aim of this trilogy is, through these three characters from three continents and three very different cultures, to describe the evolution of the relationships between science and progress in the modern era, in order to ask some of the most crucial questions facing us today, in these times of global warming, nuclear proliferation and environmental degradation on a planetary level.6

Nakaya Ukichirô was the inventor of, amongst other things, artificial snow; Ferrier told me about his extraordinary life when we met in March 2022. Thus there is at least one more trilogy, and the acts will not end at five; Michaël Ferrier’s œuvre will extend beyond the borders he has set himself.

6 From the bio-bibliography Ferrier submitted as part of his application.

Interview with Michaël Ferrier Interview with Michaël Ferrier

(This interview was originally to be conducted over dinner, somewhere in Tokyo, accompanied by an excellent meal and a certain amount to drink. Then Covid intervened, and as with everything else, the interview went online; and as with everything else, the rhythm of online work forced Michaël to answer my questions in stages. Notwithstanding these difficulties, Michaël has been extremely generous with his time and his responses, for which I am profoundly grateful.) Sur le site Tokyo Time Table AK: Est-ce que tu peux me parler un peu de Tokyo Time Table (le site web)? (Le titre vient de Sympathie pour le fantôme, j’imagine … quel en est la source originelle?) Combien de temps t’a-t-il pris pour créer ce site, et l’as-tu fait tout seul? Quel est le ‘but’ du site, selon toi? MF: Le nom du site vient en effet de Sympathie pour le fantôme: dans ce roman, Tokyo Time Table est le nom de l’émission de télévision, dirigée par la belle Yuko, qui demande au narrateur de lui préparer une émission spéciale sur ‘l’Histoire de France’. (Tokyo Time Table est d’ailleurs le titre de la première partie du livre). La description de cette émission est assez férocement ironique: ‘Tokyo Time Table. T T T pour les intimes … On prononce Ti Ti Ti, à l’américaine: “Ti ti ti, the triple T!” … Tabernacle de Toutes les Taxes! Une émission de reportages en prime time comme ils disent: 21 heures, trois heures d’antenne non-stop, des écrans publicitaires toutes les vingt minutes, à 300 000 yens les 20 secondes, 1 000 euros la seconde, c’est là qu’on voit l’importance de Tokyo Time Table, tous les spécialistes vous le diront …’.

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Au départ, Tokyo Time Table est donc une reprise ironique d’une émission qui est apparue dans un livre: c’est important. Je crois – jusqu’à un certain point du moins – en la puissance de la littérature et rien ne me réjouit plus que le passage de l’univers dit ‘fictif’ (ou ‘virtuel’) à l’univers dit ‘réel’, comme la ville d’Illiers, qui est devenue la ville d’IlliersCombray par la grâce et la puissance d’un jeune homme nommé Marcel (Proust). Cela me réconforte et, je crois, est porteur d’une grande vertu. La circulation entre les deux univers me semble un point essentiel. Le site a été conçu à la fois comme un espace personnel assez classique (où peuvent être annoncés des livres, des conférences, etc.), mais aussi comme un espace collectif où peuvent venir s’exprimer d’autres auteurs, morts ou vivants (sympathie pour le fantôme), la plupart du temps pour des textes inédits. C’est ainsi qu’il a accueilli des textes de Maryse Condé, Jean-Luc Nancy, etc., spécialement écrits pour lui. J’y ai aussi publié – et continuerai de le faire – des inédits, comme le texte de Paul Morand sur l’ikebana, ou des textes oubliés ou introuvables, comme ceux de Kazantzaki sur la Grèce et le Japon. (‘Introuvables et inédits’: c’est, souvenez-vous, le sous-titre du recueil de Maurice Pinguet que j’ai publié au Seuil en 2009, et une des constantes de mon travail). Le site a donc aussi une fonction d’‘amitié’. Tout cela demande du temps, beaucoup de temps, une grande tenacité et une énergie quasi-inépuisable. J’ai conçu le site absolument tout seul, à l’aide d’un template Wix, que j’ai par la suite essayé d’améliorer en permanence. Depuis un an, devant la masse de travail et le nombre d’abonnements en constante hausse, je me suis entouré d’une petite équipe de bénévoles qui m’aident beaucoup et auxquels je suis très reconnaissant: Shirane N., Abderrahmane Martin et Oshima Taku. Enfin, quant à ce qui est le ‘but’ du site, je renvoie à l’analyse qu’en a menée Benjamin Hoffmann, lui-même écrivain et professeur à Ohio State University, dans une belle étude qui est une des premières menées sur le sujet et esquisse quelques pistes intéressantes: ‘Le site d’auteur: un nouvel espace d’investigation critique’, French Studies, 2016. Ce texte souligne notamment que, dans certains sites, ‘la fonction d’échange intellectuel s’ajoute […] aux fonctions commerciales et artistiques. Le site de Michaël Ferrier (http://www.Tokyo Time Table. com [consulté le 27 mai 2016]) réunit par exemple des textes rédigés par d’autres auteurs sur la culture japonaise. De même, le site officiel de Christine Angot comprend une extension où d’autres personnes (écrivains, universitaires et artistes) “peuvent tenir un blog ou montrer leur travail dans un espace qui se définit en fonction des invités, et

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dans lequel le site d’auteur perdra par endroits sa définition stricte pour devenir quelque chose comme une salle de répétition, d’enregistrement, de bureau commun, de lieu ni public ni privé, mais de rendez-vous entre les deux”; http:// www.christineangot.com [consulté le 27 mai 2016]. L’avenir verra peut-être le fleurissement de types complémentaires, en fonction de l’usage réservé à l’outil numérique par les écrivains de demain: des sites d’auteur que l’on dira ‘à dominante génétique’ (parce qu’ils partageront une variété d’avant-textes et de documents préparatoires) ou “à dominante rectificatrice” (parce qu’ils apporteront des modifications ou des compléments à une œuvre imprimée) verront peut-être le jour’. Benjamin Hoffmann m’avait interrogé, avec plusieurs autres écrivains, pour conduire son étude. Voilà ce que je lui disais à l’époque, et sur quoi je n’ai pas changé d’avis: ‘Dans mon esprit, un site internet est comme un immense et nouveau livre en gestation’. C’est dire si je considère que, dans mon esprit, Tokyo Time Table fait partie intégrante de mon œuvre. AK: Je m’imaginais que tu avais employé un web designer pour la création du site. C’était un(e) ami(e)? As-tu travaillé avec lui/elle, ou lui as-tu simplement donné des instructions et des idées sur ce que tu voulais? MF: Non, je suis le seul web designer de Tokyo Time Table. Cela m’a pris deux ans, entre 2012 et 2014: j’ai choisi les couleurs dominantes (le rouge et le noir, sur une trame blanche), le graphisme (très géométrique: ‘Bâtons, chiffres et lettres’ comme disait Queneau, auxquels s’ajoutent des figures circulaires), la police de caractères, etc. Oshima Taku s’occupe depuis 2021 de la gestion graphique du site, mais n’a rien changé à cette disposition initiale: il a d’ailleurs pour consigne de ne pas le faire. En revanche, il travaille sur une refonte complète du site pour permettre une table des matières moins linéaire (c’est-à-dire qui suive un tracé moins vertical – comme le font aujourd’hui les ‘tiroirs’ des différentes rubriques qui s’ouvrent tous de haut en bas – et s’apparente davantage à un poudroiement en étoile, où chaque clic ouvrirait sur un univers différent et pourtant relié aux autres), mais c’est un travail de longue haleine … AK: C’est toi qui maintiens le site, n’est-ce pas? Une fois par semaine, par mois, ou juste quand tu as qq chose à dire/ajouter? MF: J’ai longtemps fait la maintenance du site, mais c’est l’équipe que j’ai

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citée plus haut qui va désormais prendre le relais, progressivement. La fréquence de publication pose problème: Tokyo Time Table s’apparente à une base de données (qui prendra dans les années qui viennent une dimension gigantesque … mais c’est prévu) et, en même temps, à une véritable revue en ligne. Au début, je pensais à une publication une fois par mois, mais comme les abonnés le savent, cette fréquence peut varier à la fois en vitesse (une fois par semaine/une fois par trimestre) et en débit (un article, deux articles, trois et même quatre). Nous espérons, durant l’année 2022, en arriver à un rythme un peu plus régulier, mais là encore c’est une question de temps: entretenir un tel site, avec un haut niveau d’exigence, tant pour le contenu que pour le graphisme, est très chronophage. Pour l’instant, Tokyo Time Table est une jeune pirogue fougueuse: j’espère qu’elle se transformera au fil des ans en une belle frégate filant fièrement sur les eaux tumultueuses d’Internet! Sur Mémoires d’outre-mer et Scrabble AK: Dans mon chapitre sur Mémoires d’outre-mer et Scrabble, j’arrive à la conclusion qu’à la base de ta pensée/tes façons de penser, le christianisme n’a pas de place … serais-tu d’accord? Tu as, bien sûr, absorbé une culture chrétienne à travers ton éducation formelle, mais il me semble que ta culture ‘de base’ n’est pas chrétienne … plutôt païenne (chadienne?!)? Qu’en penses-tu? MF: Je vois ce que tu veux dire, mais je ne suis pas tout à fait d’accord. Je m’explique: j’ai été élevé dans une culture chrétienne. Du côté maternel d’abord: ma mère était croyante, je suis allé au catéchisme (au Tchad, je suivais des cours de catéchisme: la guerre a coupé court à cela aussi). Du côté paternel aussi: ma grand-mère indienne (la mère de mon père) était catholique, de Goa. Je renvoie à cette citation de Mémoires d’outre-mer: ‘Comme Goa, Pauline est catholique, obstinément. Il faudrait faire un jour l’histoire de cette branche de la chrétienté, bronzée, aventurière et métaphysique, de son sublime élan architectural (Goa, ce festival d’églises), de son héros Xavier, cet illuminé né en Europe, vadrouillant jusqu’au Japon et venant mourir au large de la Chine, de tous ces voyageurs explosés entre l’Est et l’Ouest, saisis dans le poudroiement du monde’. Du côté grand-paternel aussi, même si c’est de manière moins orthodoxe: mon grand-père était profondément croyant et, comme je l’explique dans Mémoires d’outre-mer, dialoguait avec

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Dieu lui-même. Là aussi, citation: ‘En guise de littérature, il ne connaît pratiquement que la Bible, qu’il lit et relira sans cesse au cours de sa vie’. Tout cela laisse des traces: j’étais très croyant quand j’étais enfant. J’ai lu la Bible, plusieurs fois, en plusieurs versions, notamment celle réalisée en France sous le règne de Louis XIV, à laquelle collaborèrent de prestigieuses personnalités de Port-Royal (Pascal, Arnauld, Nicole …) et dont le maître d’œuvre fut Lemaître de Sacy. Si j’insiste sur cette version, c’est non seulement à cause de sa beauté formelle, mais aussi parce qu’elle fut la Bible que consultèrent de nombreux écrivains du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, de Pascal à Victor Hugo: j’ai tout à fait conscience – et même je m’en enorgueillis – de m’inscrire dans cette tradition. La Bible est un texte avec lequel j’ai une grande familiarité. J’ai d’ailleurs beaucoup de mal à trouver avec qui en parler, d’un point de vue littéraire aussi bien que théologique, parmi les écrivains de ma génération: les seuls avec lesquels je peux m’en entretenir aujourd’hui (mais peut-être que je cherche mal: c’est un sujet peu courant aujourd’hui!) sont ceux que j’appelle les Anciens, comme Sollers, qui la connaît parfaitement, et Guyotat, qui en savait des passages par cœur. Maintenant, là où tu as raison, c’est que cette influence du christianisme a été dès l’origine plurielle: d’abord, il y a un côté catholique alsacien et un côté catholique indien, ce qui forme un étrange – et magnifique – christianisme créole (comme on peut le trouver encore aujourd’hui à la Réunion par exemple). Ensuite, il y a eu, sur cette base elle-même complexe et colorée, féconde, la découverte très précoce d’autres religions, l’Islam notamment, que j’ai connu d’abord de manière non livresque mais, de manière tout aussi déterminante, par une imprégnation quotidienne au Tchad, à Madagascar aussi (Mahajanga est une ville très musulmane). J’ai été l’enfant des mosquées autant que des églises. Je m’y promenais pieds nus et j’aimais passionnément l’appel du muezzin. Par le pied sur le sol autant que par l’oreille donc. Enfin, la découverte du bouddhisme, à mon arrivée au Japon, a posé une nouvelle strate sur ces expériences d’enfant. (Le début de Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube y fait d’ailleurs allusion de manière très nette, avec la référence à l’Éveil (jeu de mots entre le réveil du narrateur et l’Éveil bouddhique): ‘C’est l’Éveil, on est arrivé tout au bout du Temps’). On ne peut donc pas dire que le christianisme n’a ‘pas de place’ dans ma façon de penser, bien au contraire. Mais c’est un christianisme vivant, chamarré, bigarré, qui peut s’éloigner parfois considérablement des dogmes institués ou des traditions trop eurocentrées. Dois-je le dire: c’est le christianisme que connaissent encore de nombreuses parties du

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globe aujourd’hui! Et souvent beaucoup plus vivace et décoiffant que le christianisme européen – ou ce qu’il en reste … AK: Toujours dans Mémoires d’outre-mer et Scrabble, il y a beaucoup de spirales … Toumaï pense que sa vie est une spirale, qu’il est, lui-même, une spirale. As-tu lu Michel Serres? Lucrèce? Ils pensent que la spirale est une des figures fondamentales dans la vie/le monde externe (voir dessous). Parle-moi de spirales … Michel Serres, for example, suggests that the process of collaboration and contestation between bodies is not random or unstructured, but conforms to the strange logic of vortices, spirals, and eddies, [which] encompasses politics as much as physics, economics as much as biology, psychology as much as meteorology […] The vortical logic holds across different scales of size, time and complexity, and the sequences of stages repeats, but each time with slight differences: ‘This is the stroke of genius in [Lucretian] … physics: there is no circle, there are only vortices …, spirals that shift, that erode’. (Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: The Ecology of Things, 2010)

MF: Pour chacun de mes livres, je cherche une forme propre. Ce n’est pas par coquetterie: c’est parce que je pense que, comme tout être humain possède sa forme et son développement spécifiques, chaque livre est un organisme vivant, qui a sa propre structure, unique, inimitable. Comme je l’ai déjà expliqué ailleurs, Fukushima, récit d’un désastre se construit ainsi en trois parties, correspondant bien entendu à la fois aux trois éléments de la triple catastrophe (séisme, tsunami et catastrophe nucléaire), mais aussi à deux genres littéraires bien distincts: la tragédie antique (en trois actes donc), qui dit assez le caractère tragique de l’événement, son côté lourd et inéluctable, et le haïku (en trois vers donc, avec pour chaque partie son kigo, son mot de saison), qui dit au contraire sa vitesse, et pour ainsi dire sa volatilité. Chacun de mes récits est ainsi construit de manière différente. Scrabble, c’est la spirale. L’idée m’est venue en me rappelant la fascination que j’éprouvais enfant – et qui ne m’a pas quitté – pour la forme si particulière des fougères. Les crosses des fougères, lorsqu’elles sont très jeunes, ont cette forme remarquable, si belle, presque musicale (on les appelle ‘têtes de violon’): c’est la croissance des cellules elle-même qui génère cette forme de spirale, c’est-à-dire le mouvement même de la vie. Cela m’a semblé particulièrement adapté pour un récit d’enfance! De fait, le

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petit narrateur de Scrabble grandit au fur et à mesure en spirale, c’està-dire en s’éloignant progressivement de la maison (Le lit – La chambre – La maison – La terrasse – La cour – Le fleuve – Le quartier – La ville – Le monde – L’univers), par un effet rotatif qui sert à la fois la progression du récit et son propre développement. Mais ce que me permet de faire la construction en spirale du récit, c’est de rappeler que même si l’on ‘grandit’, on peut garder toute son enfance à portée de la main. C’est la différence entre le mouvement des cercles concentriques (qui éloigne un centre et des périphéries, qui les sépare) et le mouvement de la spirale, qui peut tout aussi bien s’arrêter, repartir en arrière, sans jamais cesser de croître cependant. De ce point de vue, la citation que tu fais de Michel Serres est très belle. J’ai connu Michel Serres à Kyoto, en 1992. Il a tout à fait raison de parler de ‘l’étrange logique’ des vortex, des tourbillons et des spirales, et de dire que cette énergie implique à la fois des perspectives politiques, physiques, économiques, psychologiques et même météorologiques, autant que biologiques. Une initiation à la vie, dans sa diversité et dans sa complexité donc. Sais-tu que l’observation d’une simple vapeur au-dessus d’une tasse de thé peut permettre d’expliquer aussi bien les petites tornades dans les jardins (les feuilles mortes et les morceaux de papier qui voltigent au-dessus du sol dans les squares de Londres) que les puissants orages qui submergent les montagnes, en plein été? L’enfant de Scrabble voit l’univers entier dans un seul arbre, une poussière, une brindille, la truffe d’un chien, tout comme les lois de l’univers entier peuvent être trouvées dans une tasse d’eau chaude, ou dans le simple tracé en spirale d’une buée sur ta tasse de thé. Sur François, portrait d’un absent (et autre chose) AK: Les rêves dans François, portrait d’un absent sont-ils réels/véritables? Ils ont l’air de l’être … je pense en particulier au rêve du peloton … MF: C’est une question étrange: un rêve est-il réel ou bien n’est-il pas réel? Il me semble qu’il est précisément entre les deux. Mais je suppose que la question veut dire: est-ce que j’ai vraiment rêvé ces rêves? Ou bien est-ce que je les invente pour le besoin du roman? Eh bien, là aussi, un peu des deux. Je les ai rêvés, mais tout le monde sait comme on reconstitue les rêves dès qu’on s’avise de les faire passer dans le monde du récit par le langage, que ce soit à l’oral ou à l’écrit. À ce sujet, je dois

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dire quelque chose: je rêve peu ou, plus exactement, je me souviens très peu de mes rêves en général. Je m’endors, je me réveille, j’ai rêvé sans doute – tout le monde rêve, là-dessus les scientifiques sont formels – mais dans l’immense majorité des cas, je ne m’en souviens pas. C’est exactement comme si je n’avais pas rêvé. Il faut croire que, dans mon cas, l’inconscient fait magnifiquement son travail! En revanche, et c’est là où je veux en venir, il y a trois cas où je rêve beaucoup plus souvent, ou beaucoup plus intensément. Premier cas: c’est quand je suis dans un état émotionnel perturbé, par exemple quand je suis inquiet pour un proche ou bien lors d’une rupture amoureuse par exemple: mais c’est très banal, tout le monde connaît ce genre de situation. Le deuxième cas, c’est quand je dors dans un endroit nouveau ou insolite, inattendu. En voyage donc par exemple. Certains scientifiques disent que c’est une survivance de notre condition préhistorique, ou même, de notre part animale: on passe une nuit dans un endroit différent de d’habitude, alors on est plus aux aguets, même pendant la nuit, au cas où une agression surviendrait … Troisième cas, et c’est là où ça devient très intéressant: c’est quand j’écris. Quand j’entre dans la phase de rédaction ‘profonde’ d’un roman (pas pendant la période préparatoire, où j’accumule les notes par exemple, mais quand je me mets vraiment, concrètement à l’écriture), je suis littéralement submergé par les rêves, à une fréquence et avec une force qui vont croissant jusqu’à ce que je finisse le livre. Cela commence généralement doucement, puis plus j’entre dans le pays de l’écriture et plus les rêves accourent, nombreux, déferlants, insolents, incontrôlables. Au début, je vais de ma table d’écriture à la table où je mange et à mon lit: la vie commence à se restreindre à ces trois endroits-là (avec, de temps en temps, une promenade, une grande bouffée d’air … avant de replonger sous la surface: ‘Le travail de tout bon écrivain est de nager sous l’eau en retenant son souffle’, disait Francis Scott Fitzgerald dans une phrase profondément juste). Puis, je mange de moins en moins, j’écris de plus en plus, de plus en plus vite et de plus en plus fort, et je quitte le triangle initial pour passer de la table à écrire au lit et du lit à la table d’écriture. Enfin, la troisième et dernière phase, c’est quand j’écris tout le temps: même quand je me mets au lit, même quand j’endors, les phrases ne s’arrêtent pas, vous entendez ce que je suis en train de vous dire? Même quand je dors, j’écris, et je ne plaisante pas. Il y a des fois où je rencontre une difficulté pour écrire une scène, je vais au lit, je dors car je sais que le ‘sommeil’ va trouver la solution pour moi: en fait, mon cerveau n’arrête plus d’écrire, il résout les problèmes durant la nuit, dans une espèce d’état fantôme à la lisière du sommeil et de la veille, qui est

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l’état même de l’écriture. Vous avez compris où je veux en venir: rien de plus proche que l’écriture que le rêve, le rêve est un marqueur et le rêve est un pays, un marqueur de l’état poétique et tout un continent en soi. Quand j’écrivais Scrabble par exemple, je revivais littéralement les pages blanches ou noires de mon enfance, les pages blanches des promenades sous le soleil de N’Djaména, les pages noires de la guerre avec les faits insoutenables que j’y relate et qui me remontaient pendant la nuit, en pleine face. C’est pourquoi j’ai toujours prêté une attention particulière aux rêves, les miens comme ceux des autres: on sait depuis longtemps que les rêves nous préviennent, nous aiguillent, mais c’est encore mieux: les rêves sont à peu près le seul langage de la vérité dans notre monde. Ils ne disent pas forcément l’exactitude de notre monde (car qui demanderait à un rêve d’être logique, cohérent?), mais oui, ils en disent la vérité. On ne peut pas tricher dans un rêve. Et l’écriture, qui a chez moi comme chez tant d’autres une relation directe avec le rêve, en est pour ainsi dire une expression privilégiée. C’est la part nocturne de l’écriture, ce qui nous la rend si précieuse, car c’est ce qui la relie au monde du désir et de la vérité. AK: Parle-moi un peu de la différence entre tes romans et tes non-romans (Fukushima récit d’un désastre; François, portrait d’un absent), de ton point de vue. MF: C’est une question difficile. Je n’ai jamais trop cru à la distinction entre genres. Je vois bien son utilité pour les libraires et pour les bibliothécaires, pour les critiques et pour les enseignants: il m’arrive de l’utiliser, car je suis moi-même professeur, et j’ai conscience qu’elle est commode. Mais elle ne dit pas grand-chose au fond du vrai travail de l’écriture. Et aucun grand texte ne se laisse réduire à son genre, qu’il soit autoproclamé ou imposé de l’extérieur. Cette situation est encore plus confuse (ou efflorescente) lorsqu’il s’agit du ‘roman’, genre protéiforme, ductile, pluriel, et pour tout dire peut-être insaisissable. À la recherche du temps perdu est-il un roman? Et si oui, qu’est-ce que cela dit du roman, qui n’est en ce cas aucunement réductible à la vulgate réaliste sous laquelle on range à peu près n’importe quel livre aujourd’hui? Quel rapport entre Nedjima de Kateb Yacine et Don Quichotte de Cervantès par exemple, si tous deux sont appelés ‘romans’? Entre les romans de Faulkner et ceux de Modiano? Entre le Roman de Renart et Le dit du Genji? Que dire des ‘romans’ de Sollers, qui côtoient à la fois l’essai et la poésie? Et de ceux de Glissant?

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Le genre romanesque semble donc un tiroir très extensible, dans lequel il ne faut pas oublier de mentionner les considérations commerciales: tous les éditeurs le savent, il vaut mieux mentionner ‘roman’ sur la couverture d’un livre que ‘Nouvelles’, par exemple … Mais c’est aussi sa force: dès les années 1930, le chercheur russe Mikhail Bakhtine avait d’ailleurs forgé un concept précieux pour penser le roman moderne: la polyphonie. Kundera a lui aussi tiré parti de cette extraordinaire diversité pour en tirer une caractéristique essentielle, selon lui, du genre romanesque: ‘la multiplicité des points de vue qui, seule, peut faire écho à la complexité du réel’ (dans L’art du roman). Pour en venir à mon cas personnel, je ne désespère pas d’apporter encore un peu plus de confusion – c’est-à-dire, dans le cas présent: de joie – à ce bordel théorique ambiant. Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube est-il un roman ou une suite de nouvelles? Ou un roman-nouvelles? Kizu (la lézarde), un roman ou un récit? Ou un roman-lézarde? Mémoires d’outre-mer (qui porte explicitement l’appellation générique ‘roman’ sur la couverture), un roman-mémoires? Quant à François, portrait d’un absent (qui ne porte pas l’appellation générique ‘roman’ sur la couverture) ne serait-il pourtant pas lui aussi un roman? Ou un roman-portrait (comme on dit un roman-photo)? Et, en ce cas, avec quelles caractéristiques spécifiques? Pour Fukushima, cela semble plus clair, puisque c’est écrit dans le titre lui-même: il s’agit d’un ‘récit’. Mais le premier titre de Fukushima, récit d’un désastre était Notes de Fukushima, en référence à la fois aux Notes de Hiroshima d’Ôe et à la réflexion que je mène en filigrane dans tous mes livres: comment faire naître une écriture à la croisée des notes de l’historien (ou du scientifique), des notes du journaliste et des notes du musicien? Les vrais textes artistiques ne se laissent que très grossièrement définir par les appellations génériques: ils sont porteurs d’une telle densité d’énergie qu’ils passent très vite la limite au-delà de laquelle ces étiquettes théories ne fonctionnent plus. Cela ne doit pourtant pas nous inciter à laisser de côté ces réflexions théoriques: outre qu’elles ont une utilité, je l’ai dit, notamment institutionnelle, pour les journaux, les bibliothèques, les librairies ou les universités … (tout ce qui concerne la transmission ou la diffusion du savoir: ce n’est pas rien), elles peuvent aussi permettre d’ouvrir, s’il se trouve encore quelques critiques littéraires point trop paresseux, à d’autres catégorisations, notamment par rapport à un point de vue interne sur l’œuvre (et non en y accolant une étiquette de l’extérieur). Voyez Volodine par exemple, qui se forge ses propres genres, ses propres appellations, son propre lexique critique du ‘post-exotisme’!

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Ou, dans un genre très différent, la manière dont s’organise aujourd’hui l’œuvre de Patrick Deville. Pour ce qui me concerne, plutôt que de se demander la différence entre récit et roman dans mon travail, on pourrait, de manière peut-être plus fertile, s’interroger sur son organisation et son déploiement internes, selon plusieurs logiques, dont celle-ci, que je livre à l’universitaire curieux et même un peu aventurier: l’ensemble de mon travail peut en fait se décomposer, plutôt qu’en une série de récits ou de romans, en une série de trilogies, qui entretiennent entre elles des rapports à la fois évidents et opaques: – Trilogie japonaise: Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube, Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, et un livre sur Kyoto (en chantier) – Trilogie ultra-marine: Sympathie pour le fantôme (La Réunion), Mémoires d’outre-mer (Madagascar), Le demi-frère de Balzac (Mayotte, en chantier) – Trilogie du dépassement du XIXe siècle: Mémoires d’outre-mer (Chateaubriand), Prix Goncourt (Goncourt, en chantier), Le demi-frère de Balzac (Balzac, en chantier) – Trilogie Fukushima: Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, Penser avec Fukushima, Créer avec Fukushima. Trilogie achevée. – Trilogie de l’atome (et trilogie cinématographique): les 3 textes et films de Notre ami l’atome. Trilogie achevée. C’est une piste pour l’instant jamais explorée, mais je pense qu’un critique qui se pencherait sur mes livres dans cette perspective y ferait au moins autant de trouvailles qu’en rédupliquant la vieille réflexion sur la différence entre récit et roman. Comme tu le vois, je compose mes livres de manière plutôt ample, sur plusieurs géographies et plusieurs temporalités, de manière cosmographique pour ainsi dire, ce qui explique que la délimitation par genres m’importe finalement peu. Sur les collaborations avec d’autres artistes AK: Les trois films pour lesquels tu as écrit les scénarios sont merveilleux. As-tu vu les films avant d’écrire le texte, ou est-ce qu’il a lu tes textes avant de filmer? Ou était-ce un travail simultané? MF: Il est assez difficile de parler très rapidement de mon travail avec Kenichi, car il varie – en intensité et en étendue – selon les films. Pour faire vite, en règle générale, Kenichi filme et je pose mes mots sur ses

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images. Mais, si c’est possible, j’interviens au montage (qui est pour moi le moment le plus important d’un film). Ce fut le cas notamment sur Le monde après Fukushima, où nous avons débrouillé le film ensemble pendant de très longues heures! – pour lui donner sa forme définitive (en compagnie également de Christine Watanabe, sa femme et productrice, de Paul Saadoun, l’autre producteur, et du monteur du film évidemment). J’interviens aussi parfois ponctuellement en amont ou en aval des projets, je fais beaucoup de remarques sur tel ou tel aspect: suggérer une voix féminine pour la voix off de Terres nucléaires par exemple, ou bien rectifier de petites inexactitudes historiques dans Notre ami l’atome. Mais c’est bel et bien Kenichi le réalisateur, et la décision finale lui revient toujours. Sur Terres nucléaires, mon apport a été plus restreint (je n’ai pas pu assister au montage), mais je me souviens avoir suggéré la structure ternaire (France/Japon/États-Unis) lors d’une longue discussion dans un restaurant tokyoïte où nous parlions de ce projet. Au même moment, je travaillais en effet sur la nécessité de faire ‘exploser’ le comparatisme binaire (France/Japon par exemple), en rajoutant un 3e terme, pour mettre en place une ‘triangulation des cultures’ qui permette de sortir de l’effet de miroir du comparatisme traditionnel (où un pays se trouve toujours plus ou moins le double inversé ou le complément fantasmé de l’autre). On trouve des traces de cette triangulation des cultures dès Sympathie pour le fantôme en 2010 dans mes textes romanesques, ainsi que dans mes textes théoriques: voir notamment le texte ‘Les écrivains du corail’, que j’avais prononcé en 2013 en ouverture du colloque Paris-Tokyo-Paris à la Maison Franco-Japonaise et qui a été ensuite traduit en anglais: ‘France-Japan: The Coral Writers (From Stereotype to Prototype, in Favor of Rethinking a Critical Approach to Japan)’, Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, 21.1, 2017, 8–27. Bref, il y a sans aucun doute des passerelles entre mon travail pour Kenichi et mon travail personnel, mais c’est toujours le film qui est en ligne de mire. C’est un travail d’écriture bien spécifique: il faut être prêt à réduire son texte, à le couper, à le modifier pour le rendre moins poétique, ce sont les images qui ont la priorité et c’est normal. Ainsi, quand j’ai repris les 3 textes écrits pour les films afin de les réunir en volume pour Notre ami l’atome chez Gallimard, j’ai bien vu qu’ils ne tenaient pas à la page: il ne suffisait pas de reprendre les 3 textes et de les réunir pour faire un livre, un vrai livre, il fallait les réécrire complètement! Si tu écoutes les textes utilisés pour les films et si tu lis la

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version publiée pour le livre Notre ami l’atome, tu verras d’ailleurs qu’il y a beaucoup de différences! Il y aurait encore beaucoup à dire sur mon rapport au cinéma, mais je m’arrête là pour le moment. AK: Tu te passionnes, il me semble, pour les arts visuels … je sais que tu es musicien (tu m’as dit que tu aimes beaucoup le piano); es-tu artiste aussi? Tu fais de la calligraphie – fais-tu de la peinture? (Comme ton grand-père?) MF: Je dessine depuis l’enfance. Certains de ces dessins (érotiques) sont parus récemment dans la revue Mettray de Didier Morin (n°14, septembre 2021). Je fais de la photographie depuis l’âge de 20 ans environ. À l’École Normale Supérieure, j’avais négocié avec la Directrice, Jacqueline Bonnamour, pour faire rouvrir le labo photo, qui venait de fermer. Cette passion ne m’a jamais quitté et j’ai beaucoup appris au contact de photographes comme Araki, Minato Chihiro, Thierry Girard ou Dominique Laugé (merveilleux photographe avec qui je prépare un livre pour la Fondation des Treilles). Sans prétendre en rien me hisser à leur hauteur, j’espère pouvoir un jour proposer un livre textes-photos, sur la ville de Tokyo par exemple. Enfin, je compose aussi des chansons. Là aussi, en plus du travail solitaire de l’écriture, qui forme pour ainsi dire ma basse rythmique continue, c’est une certaine forme d’interaction ou de création avec d’autres artistes (musiciens, peintres, théâtre, danseurs …) qui m’intéresse de plus en plus. Voici deux exemples: – la lecture musicale qui a eu lieu à la Maison de la Culture du Japon à Paris en novembre 2021, avec la compagnie de théâtre Le Grand Balan, dont tu trouveras une présentation ici: https://www.mcjp.fr/fr/agenda/pitt-a-pawol-de-michael-ferrier. – la création d’un opéra à partir de Fukushima, récit d’un désastre (ce texte n’en finira donc jamais d’intéresser les metteurs en scène les plus variés!). Ce sera pour mars 2022, tu peux en voir ici une présentation: https://www.theatre-hexagone.eu/project/fukushima/. November 2021 – July 2022

Bibliography Bibliography

1 Works by Ferrier a) Novels and Non-Fiction Texts (by date) (with Kenichi Watanabe) Notre ami l’atome, Paris, Gallimard, 2021. Scrabble, Paris, Mercure de France, 2019, English translation by Martin Munro, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2022. François, portrait d’un absent, Paris, Gallimard, 2018. Mémoires d’outre-mer, Paris, Gallimard, 2015. Over Seas of Memory, English translation by Martin Munro, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, Paris, Gallimard, 2012. Sympathie pour le fantôme, Paris, Gallimard, 2010. Japon, la barrière des rencontres, Nantes, Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2009. Céline et la chanson, Du Grand Opéra à la chanson populaire, en passant par l’opérette, l’opéra-comique, l’opéra bouffe, la féerie et autres fredaines … de quelques oreilles que la poétique célinienne prête aux formes chantées, Tusson, Éditions du Lérot, 2004. Kizu, Paris, Arlea, 2004. Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube, Paris, Gallimard, 2004. b) Edited Works (by date) Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, Paris, Éditions Thierry Marchaisse, 2021. (with Christian Doumet) Penser avec Fukushima, Nantes, Éditions nouvelles Cécile Defaut, 2016. Maurice Pinguet, Le texte Japon: introuvables et inédits, Paris, Le Seuil, 2009. Le goût de Tokyo, Paris, Mercure de France, 2008. La tentation de la France, la tentation du Japon: regards croisés, Arles, Philippe Picquier, 2003. Japanese translation: Miura Nobutaka, Furansu no yûwaku, Nihon no yûwaku, Tokyo, Chuo Shuppansha, 2003.

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c) Interviews given by Ferrier (by date) Ferrier, Michaël and Aliocha Wald Lasowski, ‘Saisir la vibration du monde’, in Imaginaire et politique de la créolisation: Édouard Glissant et nous, Éditions de l’Aube, 2023, pp. 249–56. Ferrier, Michaël and Fabien Arribert-Narce, ‘Entretien avec Michaël Ferrier’, Revue des sciences humaines 345: ‘Le quotidien au Japon et en Occident’, 2022, 153–74. Ferrier, Michaël, Oota Miwa, Tomita Takuro and Yamashina Mitsuru, ‘Kokoro, bungaku to shinrigaku’, in Japanese, Tokyo, Kinohanasha, 2018. Ferrier, Michaël and Ballast, ‘Fukushima, c’est une situation de guerre’, 27 October 2017, www.revue-ballast.fr/mickael-ferrier-fukushima-cestsituation-de-guerre/. Ferrier, Michaël and Aurélie Julia, ‘Entretien: l’écrivain sismographe’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 2013, pp. 93–104. d) Articles/Essays (by date) ‘Impressions de Pékin’, Revue des Deux Mondes, October 2023, pp. 100–04. ‘Fukushima, dix ans après: entretiens avec Asako Muraishi et Corentin Le Corre’, Bulletin d’études françaises de l’université Chuo, 53, 2022, 127–56. ‘L’insurrection des molécules’, in Ce qui nous arrive, with Camille Ammoun, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Fawzi Zebian, Makenzy Orcel. Preface by Charif Majdalani, Paris, Éditions Inculte, 2022. ‘Jean-Claude Charles: “One Man Band: Music and Writing in the Work of Jean-Claude Charles”’, in Martin Munro and Eliana Văgălău, eds, Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader’s Guide, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2022, pp. 143–52. ‘Michaël Ferrier’ [Q&A], Revue d’études proustiennes, numéro spécial ‘Proust et les écrivains contemporains’, 16.2, 2022, 55–57. ‘Nancy-Tokyo-Fukushima: une ligne de fuite japonaise’, in Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris, Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2022, pp. 211–16. Naufrage, Paris, Gallimard, Coll. Tracts de crise, 2022. ‘Voyage, c’est un sacré coup de poing quand même’, in Cian Émeric-Grangé, ed., 90 ans de Voyage, Céline et nous, Paris, Éditions La Nouvelle Librairie, 2022, pp. 131–36. ‘Japon, mode d’emploi: Perec et le Japon’, in Raoul Delemazure, Éléonore Hamaide-Jager, Jean-Luc Joly and Emmanuel Zwenger, eds, Perec: l’œuvre-monde, Cahiers Georges Perec 14, Bordeaux, Le Castor Astral/ Les Venterniers, 2021, pp. 129–54. ‘Préface. Les artistes sont l’œil du cyclone’, in Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima, Vincennes, Éditions Thierry Marchaisse, 2021, pp. 7–12. ‘Le vitrail Guyotat: Guyotat et la langue française’, in Michel Surya, ed.,

Bibliography

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Tombeau pour Pierre Guyotat, Paris, Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2021, pp. 149–58. ‘Céline chez les Grecs’, in Bénédicte Gorrillot, ed., L’héritage gréco-latin dans la littérature française contemporaine, Geneva, Droz, 2020, pp. 295–310. ‘L’esprit des lieux: Michel Serres, les Treilles et le Japon’, in Michel Serres, un hommage à 50 voix, Paris, Éditions Le Pommier, 2020, pp. 89–92. ‘Glissant romancier. Notes pour une stylistique des romans d’Edouard Glissant’, in François Noudelmann, Françoise Simasotchi-Bronès and Yann Toma, eds, Archipels Glissant, Valenciennes, Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2020, pp. 51–62. ‘Japon: “l’interlocuteur invisible”: l’absence du Japon dans La Renaissance orientale de Raymond Schwab’, in Claire Gallien and Sarga Moussa, eds, Revue de Littérature comparée, 374, ‘Repenser l’histoire littéraire à partir de Raymond Schwab’, 2020, 215–26. ‘No Man’s Langue: pour une approche transnationale et transdisciplinaire de l’insécurité linguistique’, in Valentin Feussi and Joanna Lorilleux, eds, L’(in)sécurité linguistique aujourd’hui: perspectives in(ter)disciplinaires, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2020, pp. 381–92. ‘Le fléau de la lecture: Nakajima Atsushi’, Mettray, 10, ‘Lecture.s’, 2017. ‘France-Japan: The Coral Writers (From Stereotype to Prototype, in Favor of Rethinking a Critical Approach to Japan)’, Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, 21.1, 2017, 8–27. ‘Jazz: le “son de la surprise” et ses malentendus’, Littera, 2, pp. 48–60. Published in Japanese in 異貌のパリ 1919–1939, シュルレアリスム、黒 人芸術、大衆文化, Paris bigarré, 1919–1939: surréalisme, art nègre et culture populaire, Tokyo, Suiseisha, 2017. ‘Actualité de Fukushima (quatre entretiens venus de trois pays)’, Journal of the Faculty of Letters, 260, 2016, 19–48. ‘Désir/desiderium’, ‘extase’, ‘fascinus’, ‘Fukushima’, ‘Kon-Souen Long, sur le doigt qui montre cela’, ‘Li Yi-Chan’, ‘le Ma’, ‘Sei Shōnagon’, ‘Tchouan-Tseu’, in Mireille Calle-Grüber, ed., Dictionnaire sauvage Pascal Quignard, Paris, Hermann, 2016. ‘Les écrivains du corail – ou d’une nouvelle arborescence – possible et souhaitable – dans la réception de la culture japonaise contemporaine’, in Fabien Arribert-Narce, Kohei Kuwada and Lucy O’Meara, eds, Réceptions de la culture japonaise en France depuis 1945, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2016, pp. 27–47. ‘Une étoile nommée Perec’, in Cahier de l’Herne: Georges Perec, Paris, Éditions de l’Herne, 2016, pp. 101–04. ‘Francophonie, cacophonie, multiphonie’, Revue Japonaise de Didactique du Français, études francophones, 10.1–2, 2016, 229–40. (with Hédi Kaddour and Yves Pagès) ‘L’influence de Céline sur la littérature française contemporaine’, in Philippe Roussin, Alain Schnaffer and Régis

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Index Index

aesthetic translation 9n26, 23, 25, 27, 34, 37, 49 Albius, Edmond 37 Anders, Günther 67 Aono, Fumiaki 67 Arai, Takashi 67, 78, 79 Arribert-Narce, Fabien 3, 10, 20n6, 52n4, 54n11, 83n5, 103n23, 132n13, 141–42 ayant-étés 135 Barthes, Roland 83n5, 139 Benjamin, Walter 48 Bikini Island 73–75 binary 2, 6, 9, 11, 38, 39, 43 borders 2–3, 8, 9, 14, 89, 114, 118, 124–25, 134, 139, 147–53 Cailler, Bernadette 3 calligraphy 23, 25–26, 49, 95 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 121n10, 152 Chad/Tchad 2, 14, 82, 85, 96, 99, 102–03, 107–08, 110, 140, 141, 143, 144, 158–59 Chamoiseau, Patrick 5, 12, 104 Chernobyl 73 Chim↑Pom 67 Claudel, Paul 14, 31, 32, 33, 57, 64 Coquio, Catherine 3 Couchot, Hervé 3, 28n15 Daigo Fukuryumaru 73–75 Dépardon, Raymond 143 digital humanities 45–47

Domenach, Élise 68–70 Dong, Song 67 Doumet, Christian 3, 51n1, 81n1, 121n10 Dutton, Jacqueline 4n7 Duval, Jeanne 36 earthquake 13–14, 29–30, 50, 51, 54–58, 61, 63–64, 65, 136 ecocriticism 13, 56n15, 60n18, 63n20, 85n8 environmental humanities 3, 13, 65 epigraph 20, 27, 28, 35, 91, 101–02, 136 Ferrier, Maxime 1, 81–82, 87–89, 90–91, 93–95, 100–02, 111, 126, 135–36, 147, 148 Ferrier, Michaël. Works of Dans l’œil du désastre: créer avec Fukushima 52, 66, 76–79 François, portrait d’un absent 4n6, 11n32, 15, 111, 113–37, 141, 143, 148–49, 151, 161 ‘Fukushima, c’est une situation de guerre’ 54, 150n2 Fukushima, récit d’un désastre 34, 50, 51, 53–65, 77–78, 113, 136, 149, 150, 160, 164, 165, 167 Japon, la barrière des rencontres 17, 18, 20, 30, 31–34, 39, 53n6 Kizu, à travers les fissures de la ville 17, 18, 27–30, 32, 39, 49–50, 151–52, 164

184

Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist

Mémoires d’outre-mer 1, 5, 9, 13, 15, 39, 79, 81–82, 87–91, 93–96, 100–02, 104–07, 110–11, 113–14, 115, 120, 129, 131, 134, 135, 136, 141, 148, 150, 158, 160, 164, 165 Le Monde après Fukushima 51, 68, 69–71, 166 Notre ami l’atome (book) 68, 72–76, 150, 165, 166–67 Notre ami l’atome: un siècle de radioactivité (film) 52, 72–76, 150, 165, 166 Penser avec Fukushima 52, 53, 62, 65, 66, 74, 150, 165 Scrabble 14, 15, 79, 80, 82–87, 88, 89, 91–93, 96–100, 102–04, 107–11, 114, 131, 134–36, 139–45, 148, 150, 158–61, 163 Sympathie pour le fantôme 5, 17, 18, 19, 33, 35–43, 114, 132, 148, 150, 155, 165, 166 La tentation de la France, la tentation du Japon: regards croisés 17, 32 Terres nucléaires: une histoire du plutonium 52, 68, 71–72, 166 Tokyo, petits portraits de l’aube 17, 18, 19, 20–27, 30, 113, 150, 151, 159, 164, 165 Forest, Philippe 11, 18n2, 32, 63–64 Forsdick, Charles 5 francophone 2, 4–7, 8, 9, 18 Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste 69 Fukushima 3, 14, 15, 20, 51–53, 58, 61, 64, 66–69, 73, 74, 76–79, 114, 136, 148 Fuller, Buckminster 153 Gánti, Tibor 153 genre studies 13, 14, 116 gestural mimesis 24, 105 ghost image/image fantôme 83n5, 142 ghosts 37, 41, 114, 118, 129, 131–32 Godzilla 75

Great Kanto Earthquake 14, 57, 64 Haiku 31, 54, 59, 60, 62, 136, 150n2, 160 Heike Monogatari 58 Hiroshima 62–64, 73, 164 Holtzman, Hannah 3, 7, 20 hybrid/hybridity 8, 9, 12, 13–15, 19, 20, 34, 43, 45, 47, 52, 54, 63, 113, 114, 115, 117, 120, 123, 129, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 148 see also métissage inter-identity 13, 89, 93 interworld 88 Japoniste (post-, neo-) 2, 10, 11–13, 18, 43 Kaiser, Raffi 144 kanji 23–26, 105–06 Levy, Hideo 12 littérature-monde 4, 6–7 Loti 10, 12 Madagascar 1, 2, 14, 81–82, 88, 89–90, 93, 100, 101, 102, 107, 110, 150, 159, 165 malaria 86–87, 140–41 Matsushima 59–60, 64, 79, 136 Mauritius 5, 81, 87, 93, 100, 110 memory studies 3, 13, 14, 64n23 metanarrative 28, 35, 37, 39, 54, 59, 81–82, 95, 114, 116 métissage 12, 38–39 Michaux, Henri 24, 82n2 Mik, Aernout 67 Miller, Carolyn 116 Miyamoto, Katsuhiro 67 Mizumura, Minae 12 Mori, Chikako 53 multidirectional memory 14, 64n23, 67, 73, 74, 143 Munro, Martin 3, 5n8, 104

Index Nakagawa, Hisayasu 32 Nakaya, Ukichirô 153 nuclear disaster 13, 51, 61, 73, 74 Ôe, Kenzaburo 33, 34, 52, 62 ôgi no kaname 58, 63, 77, 78 Orientalist 10, 12, 19, 43 photograph/photography 25, 26, 27, 48, 60, 82, 106, 139–43 postcolonial 4–6, 9, 14 Proust, Marcel 31, 82, 98–99, 108n28, 151, 156 Radium Girls 73–74 Ricœur, Paul 116–18, 130, 135–36 Roche, Anne 3 Rothberg, Michael 64n23, 67 scatteredness 52, 53n6, 64, 136 Seaborg, Glenn 71 Seignobos, Christian 144–45 Shôriki, Matsutarô 71 Sidibé, Malik 143 spiral 92–93, 97–98, 110, 136, 141, 148, 151, 160–61

185

Takekawa, Nobuaki 67 Tawada, Yoko 12, 33 TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) 61–62, 69 translingual 8, 9, 31, 33, 37 transnational 2, 4, 6, 7–9, 12 trilogy 150, 153 tripartite 13, 15, 68, 150–51 Tronto, Joan 69 tsunami 13, 50, 52, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64–66, 69, 76, 136, 160 underground 21–22, 30 Vichy 14, 82, 100 Vollard, Ambroise 36 Wagô, Ryôichi 71 Watanabe, Kenichi 51–52, 67–68, 69, 74, 166 website 18, 43, 45–49, 52, 122, 148 Yourcenar, Marguerite 12, 31 Zoppetti, David 12 zuihitsu 17, 20, 33–34, 37, 42, 49–50, 52, 63, 147